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• on July 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

  Half-wit, worry about cleanliness, don’t worry about pleasure 

  As an artist, as a writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals truth.

  According to Heidegger in his essay The Origin of the Work of At, art is a form of unconcealment, and beauty ‘is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment’. In being exposed to truth through art, lives are infused with meaning, as he writes, ‘the temple, in its standing there, first gives things their look and to the men their outlook on themselves’. Fitzgerald surely then would have had some impact on the outlook on the lives, and the meaning infused in those lives, of the readers of his work. His novels and short stories might not tell us directly how to live, but by reading his work, our lives are altered in some sense. This is what art does, or at least what I hope it does.

  But what if Fitzgerald cut through all the crap, the metaphor and imagery, and simply put in bullet form a list of directions on how to live, surely that would save some time, help us Get Things Done®. Why should we fluff about with art when we can simply refine our language, be concise and straightforward. Adapt the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of journalism to literature, where we start with all the information that is needed, the who, what, where, when and how, and leave the less valuable dribble to the end, so that it can be quickly cleared up by the editor’s delete key. The question then is what is the valuable dribble and what is the useless dribble? What in life should we value and what should we discard? I believe that judging value is what art gives us the capacity to do, but possibly a straightforward list, written by an esteemed artist, such as Fitzgerald, would suffice.

  In a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald provides us with this straightforward list:

  

  F. Scott Fitzgerald photographed by Carl Van Vechten

  What to worry about:

  Worry about courage
  Worry about cleanliness
  Worry about efficiency
  Worry about horsemanship

  What not to worry about:

  Don’t worry about popular opinion
  Don’t worry about dolls
  Don’t worry about the past
  Don’t worry about the future
  Don’t worry about growing up
  Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
  Don’t worry about triumph
  Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
  Don’t worry about mosquitoes
  Don’t worry about flies
  Don’t worry about insects in general
  Don’t worry about parents
  Don’t worry about boys
  Don’t worry about disappointments
  Don’t worry about pleasures
  Don’t worry about satisfactions

  Fitzgerald writes in the letter that all he believes in in life is “the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties”. These are extraordinarily conservative values for a ‘dreamer’, the role society generally ascribes to most artists, and seems to be more harmonious with the ideology of a Thatcher or Howard. Admittedly Fitzgerald is attempting to discipline his daughter in this letter, but I am sure that the way one raises their child is synchronous with the values one holds about life. The letter therefore provides a somewhat unique insight into the values that Fitzgerald holds, and in turn, highlights the conflicting values in his body of work.

  I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

  In the letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald advises her not to worry about pleasure, and not to worry about disappointment. Happiness and misery might not exist in a ’real life’ where such things are overlooked. A life lived without worry for pleasure or disappointment will surely succumb to some sort of stasis, a state of being without struggle, an easy plateau. Yet Fitzgerald recognises that such a state does not make good fiction. His characters are obsessed by the threat of disappointment, the yearning for pleasure, and the torturous tangle of the two. As Gatsby recognises:

  He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

  

  Daisy and Gatsby in the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby directed by Jack Clayton

  Those unutterable visions. That perishable breath. Gatsby worried about pleasure his whole life, he hoped his successes, his wealth, could restore the moments of pleasure he experienced in his youth while with Daisy. Yet Fitzgerald tells his daughter not to worry about growing up. Perhaps he does this to spare her the disappointment of growing old. He was attributed to saying that “life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others”. The love of what once was. The love of what could have been. Gatsby was fuelled by this love, and he recognised that once he kissed Daisy, attempted to return to what once was, the fuel would burn up. Her breath was perishable. Her body breakable. His dream, his idolatry of her, was not.

  Don’t worry about the past. Don’t worry about the future. Worry about courage. How does Fitzgerald expect his daughter to be courageous? She cannot be courageous in facing the future, as she should not worry about the future. She cannot be courageous in dealing with her past, as she should not worry about her past. She cannot be courageous when confronted with creepy crawlies, because she should not worry about insects. I feel that the courage that Fitzgerald talking about is talking about is the steely resolve required to face a life that does not hold happiness or misery. The courage to embrace a life devoid of drama, the courage to cleanly and efficiently get through life until that last breath. That perishable breath.

  Nick Carraway must then be the hero of The Great Gatsby. He is the character who holds no real desires for his future, no regrets for his past. He does not worry too much about girls. He just carries on with his life. Cleanly and efficiently.

  Fitzgerald himself worried about pleasure and misery. He worried about girls. His tenuous engagement with Zelda depended entirely on his financial viability, on having his first novel published, on triumph. And so he did worry about triumph, he did not regards the book deal as just reward for his virtue (according to his talents). As soon as the book was to be published he whisked himself and Daisy to New York, to revel in the high life, to flaunt his celebrity, to wallow in the pleasure of his celebrity. Do not worry about popular opinion.

  Is the Great Gatsby then some sort of morality tale? Does it illustrate how far you will fall if you worry about the wrong things. Fall face first in the pool. Gatsby perishes. Carraway continues. If you strip the art from the novel you are left with a simple tale: man worries about the past, man worries about the future, man believes in happiness, man is murdered; man does not worry about the past, man does not worry about the future, man doesn’t believe much in happiness, man lives. It is a straightforward equation that complies with the guidelines that Fitzgerald gives to his daughter. It is simple. It is instructional. Why then did Fitzgerald bother with all this art bullshit, why didn’t he simply write up a pamphlet and hand it out on the street to passerbys? Why didn’t Fitzgerald lead by example and live his life according to these guidelines? Why then was Gatsby great, and Nick Carraway not?

  It is because the plain truth is only half the truth, the more complicated and coloured truth, the creative truth, is where truth really happens. As Heidegger writes in the Origin of the Artwork:

  Art is the origin of the artwork and the artist. Origin is the provenance of the essence in which the Being of a being essentially unfolds. What is art? We seek its essence in the actual work. The actuality of the work has been defined by that which is at work in the work, by the happening of truth.

  Truth happens in art. If a novel is a work of fiction, and a letter is a work of non-fiction, then the truth of this non-fiction is nowhere near as revealing as the truth of Fitzgerald’s fiction, his art. Heidegger proposes that although truth may not necessarily be true, art is truth.

  Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-revealed, the un-uncovered.

  

  A Pair of Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh

  Heidegger uses the example of a painting by Van Gogh of some peasants shoes. The shoe is a shoe. That is true. Although the painting of a peasants shoe is not as true as the actual shoe, the artist chooses to show the shoe to you, to reveal the shoe, to present its truth. Heidegger calls this happening of truth unconcealment. Heidegger posits that everything is always concealed.

  Yet as a world opens itself the earth comes to tower. It stands forth as that which bears all, as that which sheltered in its own law and wrapped in itself.

  Art attempts to clear this concealment, and it is in this attempt, what Heidegger calls ‘strife’, that truth is revealed. Yet truth is not what we call true. Those shoes there on your feet are true. Those shoes there in the painting are not true. But those shoes that Van Gogh paints reveal to us the truth, they make us see the fields the peasant has walked, the life the peasant has lived. We cannot know this truth, because this truth does not exist in the world, in the dirty real world. Yet we can feel this truth, experience this truth for a brief moment. It can pass through us. As Heidgger writes:

  Truth does not exist in itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only subsequently to descend elsewhere among beings.

  So we cannot seek out the truth, we can only create the truth. But the truth doesn’t hang around, we can only catch a glimpse of truth before it disappears again. Everything that is, is always concealed. Truth is struggle. Art is strife. It wrestles to keep it open, but it closes up again.

  In the creation of a work, the strife, as rift, must be set back into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth and put to use self-secluding.

  So why bother with art? Why bother with the Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald has written up a simple straight-forward list of values. It is because there is no truth to those simple straight-forward values. There never is. Not to worry about pleasure is not to worry about disappointment. Not to worry about the past is not to worry about the future. Not to worry is not to choose. To think about the past, and the choices you made, hoping for pleasure but fearing disappointment. To think about the future, and to wonder if you ever will be satisfied. Worry about satisfaction and you will never be satisfied. We can worry about cleanliness, clear everything out from our lives, including the choices we make. Keep it simple and straight-forward. Keep it efficient.

  This is what I call lazy fatalism. The clearing out of options. The unworry. Going with the flow. Not questioning the rules. The guidelines. The simple straight-forward values. An obedient life is an easy life. Yet there is no truth to this life. We may pass through it, but we never really live it. The life of the lazy fatalist might be clean and efficient, but it is a half-life that does not seek to unconceal truth.

  Art brings us pleasure. Art brings us disappointment. Art is rarely clean, but in those messy moments where we can’t quite work out what it is, why it is, or sometimes even where it is, we can catch a glimpse of truth. Fitzgerald shows us this through Gatsby. Gatsby’s mind has been romping like the mind of god for most of his adult life because he has made his life into art. He has torn his world up with his desire for Daisy, his dream of happiness. He knows that once he kisses her, brings the dream back to earth, to her lips, to her very real flesh, the dream, the art of his life, will close itself up again. It will conceal itself. He knows he will be disappointed. He kisses her anyway.

  This choice he makes. This worry he has. This is truth. Without the future and the past, without desire and regret, without it there is no tension, no strife, no art. Why worry about art? Why worry about anything at all. Why not simply cease.

  As Fitzgerald said to his daughter.

  I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that? Half-wit.

  Choose to be obedient. Half-wit. Have a half-life. I will however choose to worry about pleasure, and continue not to worry about cleanliness.

  
  Tags: art (3), disappointment, F. Scott Fitzgerald, happiness, heidegger, love (5), pleasure, The Great Gatsby, vincent van gogh   

  Shauna_colnan is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Shauna_colnan on July 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply

    This is really interesting. Reconciling the artist, his work (in this case), his temperament, words from his everyday life…..it's a labyrinth with no centre. But if there is a centre, yes, I'd like to think that it's art. Fitzgerald's letter is intriguing and perplexing, causing dissonance for those of us who find his prose so lyrical and … See Moreso fine. How could the artist who wrote The Great Gatsby write that letter to his 11 yr old daughter? It's strange. For me, ultimately the letter is flat and disappointing. It can't be reconciled with Fitzgerald's beautiful novel. In my experience artists don't tend to explain their work with words that well. And why should they? As Sylvia Plath said, 'I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still'. Did Gatsby spring from Fitzgerald's inner life, his heart, his creative instincts that only revealed themselves when he wrote? Interesting to think also that the 11 yr old girl's mother was Zelda. I'd love to know more and now feel inspired to read some biographies of the Fitzgeralds and to read Heidegger. Thanks for this. A final thought: if Fitzgerald's daughter were to look back on the novel and the letter from her father, I wonder what she would make of it all?

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• on September 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply

  Wetlands by Charlotte Roche 

  Modernism. Existentialism. Atheism. Nihilism. God wasn’t waiting for us. We were just passing time. The beginning of the twentieth century is littered with literary classics like The Trial, Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Waiting for Godot. Classics that are succinctly summarised by Queen’s refrain from Bohemian Rhapsody: “Nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters.” The works became classics because they reflected, or created, a world view that became the epitome of the 20th Century. A world where our body just disappeared into thin air. Our body, ashes into the air.

  But we don’t disappear into thin air. There is something left behind. There is our shit that disappears down the drain. There is our piss soaking into the earth. There are our toenails, fingernails, our pubic hair, our facial hair, our snot, our cum, our smegma, our earwax. There is the sleep that sticks to our eyes, there is our dandruff and all those flakes of skin that dance in the sunlight. Daily our bodies fall apart and touch the earth. Our bodies end in the earth. Discarded. Excreted. Grounded.

  

  I might be standing alone with my bare arse hanging out in the open, when I say that the novel Wetlands by Charlotte Roche has all the markings of a 21st century classic. A novel Sallie Tisdale of the New York Times described as “banal and repetitive” with “all the nuance of Mad Magazine and less wit.” A novel that opens with instructions on treating hemorrhoids:

  For exterior itching, you squeeze a hazelnut-sized dollop from the tube onto your finger with the shortest nail and rub it onto your rosette. The tube’s also got a pointed attachment with lots of holes in it that allows you to shove it up your ass and squeeze salve out to quell the itchiness inside.

  Wetlands has been described as “shocking”, “explicit” and every publishers dream sales pitch, “controversial,” but this has no bearing on why I consider the book significant. The graphic descriptions are hardly groundbreaking. Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye” broke that ground eighty years ago. Wetlands is significant because it captures a burgeoning 21st Century world view. World view is perhaps the wrong phrase here. Let’s call it a bare body view.

  Wetlands is the story of 18-year-old Helen Memel who lies bare bottomed on a hospital bed in the Department of Internal Medicine at Maria Hilf Hospital after an accident involving shaving her anus. Helen revels in the various discharges of her body. She uses her smegma he way others use perfume:

  I dip my finger into my pussy and dab a little slime behind my earlobes. It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek.

  Wetlands celebrates all the bits and pieces that are generated from the body. The piss. The puke. The menstrual blood. The anal discharges. Wetlands celebrates the abject.

  

  Paul McCarthy, ‘Santa’s Chocolate Shop’ 1997

  I never really understood the abject until I read Wetlands. I remember a couple of years ago standing in a Berlin gallery staring mouth agape at Paul McCarthy’s video installation, Santa’s Chocolate Shop, blankly watching as Santa’s pantless elves were covered in Santa’s chocolate sauce – a substitute for a certain bodily fluid. ‘Oh, so this must have something to do with Kristeva and the abject,’ I thought to myself and quickly followed the thought bubble with a more audible ‘hmmmmmm.’ I decided that the abject didn’t really matter too much to me. I might piss and shit, and I might be disgusted by own my piss and shit, but honestly, that crap stinks. However, while reading Wetlands, and I was often gagging and gulping while reading some scenes, I came to the conclusion that there is a kind of tragic beauty in all of these bodily discharges. It is the beauty of the break-down of the body, a body that lives, even though it is already dead. As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote in Corpus:

  All of its life, the body is also a dead body, the body of a dead person, of this death that I am living.

  I remember accompanying a friend to Emergency after he broke his finger and watching all these bodies that were breaking down. The body of a woman sitting next to me who was gasping and gulping, trying to suppress the sickness that was fighting its way up her throat. The body of a child who was vomiting into a small waste basket. The body of a junkie who was raving obscenities and pacing across the room. The body of a man who was hunched over clutching his stomach, muted screams as tears ran down his face. And the bodies of a solemn elderly couple who were sitting still and holding hands stared vacantly ahead. I saw these bodies and I saw bodies that were living but at the same time dying and I thought that it is often only when the body breaks down that we become aware of it.

  I remember moments when my body has broken down with another. Our sicknesses mix. Our fevers lead us to holiday together in hallucinations. Our bodies broken. We leave them on the bed together. We know they are there. We feel their physical presence. We know them more than ever. But we leave them behind. They don’t work anymore. Maybe it is here, in sickness, that we can transcend the barriers of skin and share this mutual imagining of meaning. Maybe, while living, we can only moan and let our vile fluids stew together.

  After Helen has her arse operated on and stitched up, she decides to tear it open again on the wheels of the hospital bed. She does this in the hope that her separated parents will reunite while visiting her at her bedside. As long as she keeps stewing in her blood and pus, there is a chance that their love can be rekindled. It is a naive yearning for love and meaning in her life. Helen’s mother is the antithesis of the anti-hygeine Helen, her mother was the kind of woman who’s dying thought at the scene of an accident would be: “How long have I been wearing these panties? Are there any wetspots on them?” The mother represents the unliving, those who adverse to the abject, the kempt:

  Everything is clean and carefully styled. Every little body part has been treated with some beauty product. What these women don’t know: the more effort they put into these little details, the more uptight they seem.

  When Helen was younger she caught her mother lying on the kitchen with her younger brother passed out. The oven door was open. It is a clean kind of death. The death that a clean woman would hope for. Helen rescued her mother and never spoke of it again.
  The clean death, the death where we wait for it all to disappear is the death of the classics of twentieth century. The death of Wetlands, is the death we die each day, our body breaks down. As Heidegger writes that being “is always already dying: in its “being-towards-its-end.”

  
  Tags: abject, body (2), book review (3), charlotte roche, death, heidegger, kristeva, Paul McCarthy, sickness (2), wetlands   

   

• on May 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply

  Kevin Platt’s Invested Objects at Firstdraft 

  One night I climbed into a boat with a girl I loved. It drifted off. Soon the boat was in the middle of the bay. We climbed out and swam back to shore. On the beach we sat. Our clothes wet. And watched the boat drift for a while. Remembering when we were in it.

  

  Kevin Platt 'Nostalgia for the never known' 2008

  The first object Kevin Platt built was a boat. In Nostalgia for the never known (2008), Platt builds a boat, ties himself to it, and swims out to sea, towing the boat behind him. Platt created a vessel but did not enter it. He was building an object that could take him places. Instead he took the object places.

  In the exhibition Invested Objects currently at Firstdraft Gallery, Platt creates more vessels, but unlike the boat in Nostalgia for the never known, these objects suffer no illusion of functionality. They are only ideas of objects. Sketches of objects. Skeletons of objects.

  

  Kevin Platt 'Invested Object' 2009 (Photograph by Alex Reznick)

  The skeleton of a structure is something we build upon. But the skeleton of a body is what is left when the carcass rots away. Something we can remember the body by. The Invested Objects are both kinds of skeletons. They are structures we can stand outside of and build upon. Fulfilling sculptural blueprints, we can create our own vessels. Take them on our own voyages. Yet soon the imaginary disconnects from the object. We are left drifting in the bay. We climb out of the vessel. Stamp feet flat on ground and watch the imaginary vessel deteriorate before our eyes. We see only its skeleton. Then we remember the vessel. Remember when we were in it.

  When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

  Heidegger’s vessels come into being not by their frames, not by their sides and bottoms, but by their void. Their emptiness. Platt did not enter the boat because he did not want to fill the vessel. He desired the void to persist. In Invested Objects, Platt creates skeletal objects so that the vessel cannot be filled. Everything slips through. The void cannot be entered. Platt does this because he does not want to defile the vessel. Once Platt enters the boat and it takes him some place, the potential of the void, the vast emptiness it consists of, dissipates. To paraphrase Fitzgerald, by entering the boat, Platt’s count of enchanted objects would diminish by one.

  The Invested Objects are in essence constructions of Pothos. The desire for the absent being. A longing for something out of reach. Disconnected. Platt manifests this longing in his objects because he wants a permanent Pothos. He wants Pothos, which by its very nature is a transitory state, stuck in time. He wants to stall Pothos. So he creates objects that will always be unfulfilled. Objects that long to be something. Always wavering before the embrace. As Nicolas Rothwell writes:

  For if art is just its own pleasing, weightless thing; if it comes into being by our will and vanishes, like some particle in the cold depths of an experimental chamber, if it is doomed and transient, then nostalgia is all it is – the imprint of its own mortality, the catch in its breath, the false promises that lure us with their siren grace.

  Platt wavers in such anguish because of these siren songs. He knows that to follow those songs, to enter his vessels and fulfill their desires, will surely lead to a sort of death. So Platt creates only glimpses of objects, objects that are both doomed and transient, but objects that are also tangible enough that he can share whispers of that haunting song.

  
  Tags: boats, exhibition (2), firstdraft, heidegger, kevin platt, nostalgia, pothos, sculpture, vessels (2)   

   

• on May 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

  How postmodernism lost its cool 

  Postmodernism is so yesterday.

  That was the response I received on Twitter from ApostrophePong when I tweeted  about writing something on the representation of postmodernism in the media. I quickly typed up a reply insisting that I knew that postmodernism was ’so yesterday’ and that was exactly what I was going to write about. I didn’t want to sound out of touch.

  I didn’t know why it was so yesterday. I wasn’t too sure when today had begun and I wasn’t completely confident that I even knew what postmodernism was. I didn’t mention this of course. That would have been uncool. But how had postmodernism lost its cool?

  I thought I would start on the autopsy table analysing the corpse. Postmodernism, when you cut it apart, literally means ‘after the modernist movement,’ while modernism itself was originally used to refer to things ‘of the present’. In that sense, postmodernism should mean ‘after the present’. Postmodernism should mean tomorrow. Not yesterday. This meaning must be a bit muddled. We didn’t start traveling through time.

  In an effort to cement some kind of definition of postmodernism I scrounged around some postmodern texts about postmodernism that were written by postmodernists. Hal Foster wrote of a postmodernism that ’seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and poltical affiliations’ . Margaret Iversen wrote of a postmodernism borne of a postructuralism that is defined by its ‘resistance to meaning’ . My efforts revealed that the ghost of postmodernism past was having a great big belly laugh at my attempts to corner it into some sort of definition. I was only cornering it so I could discover how it died, but I soon discovered that the weapon I was wielding as I poked and prodded it into its corner, was in fact the weapon that had slayed it. A definition was used to murder postmodernism.

  The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that is produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And ‘doing theory’ therefore consists of looking at ’society’ (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside ‘it’, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result.

  According to Gavin Kitching, the students at the School of Politics at the University of New South Wales have been allowing their Honours essays to be corrupted by postmodernism. The students were treating abstract nouns as ‘hollow objects’ devoid of meaning. By treating these words as such, the students had created a society of people living in hollow spaces where their thoughts and actions were constrained as a result. Generally I myself do not find hollow spaces too constrictive. If I were to enter an empty hollow room I could imagine many things I could do in that room. If I were, however, to enter a room with dictionaries stacked to the ceiling and covering every inch of the floor, I might find myself mildly constrained.

  Kitching’s theory  that there is a distinction between language and the use of language contradicts what Heidegger considers makes something some thing. Heidegger, in his essay The Thing , considered that the way some thing is used defines it as some thing. He continues to write that the void, or ‘hollowness’, that creates space for this use, is in fact what the thing is. He demonstrates this concept through the use of a jug:

  When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

  Abstract nouns, such as postmodernism, are just such jugs. They are hollow empty objects. The question is, though, what is the water that fills the jug? The water is the liquid meaning that flows in and out of these words, piped into our culture via the media. As Raymond Williams writes, our society (another abstract noun) is made by the finding of common meaning that is written into the land.

  Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind.

  The idea of liquid meaning flowing through the media draws parallels to Myra MacDonald’s Foucaldian reading of a media that operates discursively. But instead of the media manifesting versions of reality that can be accessed through ‘the constructivist prism of discourse’  I would consider that the versions are in reality.

  MacDonald writes that the media frames perceptions of reality, a reality that exists, but remains ‘profoundly unknowable’. She writes that by considering how these perceptions are constructed through the analysis of discourse we can still attempt to understand this reality as ‘refusing any attempt… because it is philosophically impossible to set an absolute criterion of truthfulness is… too rigid and extreme a position.’  She differentiates this kind of ‘unknowable truth’ from the ‘postmodern thinking’ of Baudrillard and his simulacrum because postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality,’

  I would disagree with MacDonald’s fundamental concept of reality that causes her to consider that Baudrilards ‘postmodern thinking’ that stresses the self referentiality of signs systems cannot be utilised in uncovering how the media forms ‘frames of understanding we construct in our head about the material world’ . The error in her concept of reality is in her emphasis of the material world. We live in a society and a world that is primarily constructed of abstracts. That is the reality. Media theorist, Vilém Flusser, writes that all forms of communication are constructed systems of signs . There is nothing natural about the words “I love you”. Marshall McLuhan writes that the content of the written word is speech, and that the content of speech is consciousness. We need to consider how the media shapes this reality of language, of abstracts. We do not need to consider how the media shapes the reality of chairs and trees or other objects of the material world. MacDonald is correct in considering that postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality’ , because postmodern thinking does not consider the two mutually exclusive.

  MacDonald writes that ‘words and images, by defining and labeling phenomena, frame the terms in which we think about these,’ but they do not frame the way we think about things, they frame how we think. By changing the way we think, they change our reality. The media does not perpetuate versions of reality, it perpetuates versions in reality. And why did postmodernism lose its cool? How did this reality change? How did it lose its worth in regards to Bordiu’s concept of social capital? It occurred because the hollow empty object was overfilled with meaning by the media.

  According to Sarah Thornton, one of the key criteria’s of ‘cool’ is authenticity. Dominic Strinati argues that authenticity is formed by a particular set of cultural tastes and values and not from any historical truth. I would argue that authenticity is formed through a half empty jug, through ambiguity. By being able to project meaning onto an ambiguous object an individual feels an object is authentic because it adheres to their own individual meaning. Once news media begins to fill the jug up with meaning through referring to the object frequently in stories the jug begins to be filled with outsiders manifestations of meaning. The object loses its authenticity for an individual and in turn loses its cool. But all this would be nought but theory if there wasn’t any empirical data, because with data comes ‘truth’ .

  

  Inspired by this graph depicting the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘other stupid academic fads’ I decided to make my own graph with my own data. I scanned the archives of both JSTOR, the academic journal database, and the Sydney Morning Herald between 1987 and 2002 for articles that mention ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’. Postmodernism’s crisis of cool it seemed occurred in 1997 when the academic journals began to mention Postmodernism a little less, while the Sydney Morning Herald began to mention Postmodernism a significant amount more. The newspaper continued to increase its coverage of postmodernism annually while the journals coverage continued to decrease. The academic trendsetters started to retreat, they had kept postmodernism as cool as possible for as long as possible by embedding the word with ambiguity. Most of the articles couldn’t settle on a definitive definition, and every subsequent article argued against that earlier unsettled definition. The newspaper however, which avoids ambiguity because it compromises appearances of truth’, settled on a definition on January 7, 1997. The very date when postmodernism started being uncool. The ambiguity of postmodernism was keeping it from the honest unacademic folk:

  For the past decade or so, the dinner party circuit has been divided into three distinct groups: those who know about postmodernism, those who don’t know about postmodernism and those who pretend to know about postmodernism in a thinly veiled attempt to gain sexual favours from one or more of their dining companions. Clearly this situation is unacceptable. If you are one of these impressionable types who feel amorously inclined towards those  who confuse you, how are you to pick the real PoMo pundits from the pretenders?

  The article was titled simply Postmodernism. Written by Emma Tom. Its purpose was to define postmodernism and it enlisted an expert source, a professor of art from a sandstone university:

  Postmodernists reacted to styles of thought that were predominant in the ’60s, such as Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis and an approach to anthropology called structuralism. All these were known as master narratives: huge, elaborate stories that were supposed to explain absolutely everything. Other examples of master narratives include Christianity, capitalism and the idea of human progress. The postmodernists decided that these big stories were no longer appropriate, that it was not possible for there to ever be one story that explained everything. Explaining that nothing could explain everything was to take a great deal of explaining.

  The article filled the jug with meaning. Postmodernism was no longer incomprehensible, people could no longer imagine their own meanings of postmodernism. Their meaning was murdered. It had been usurped by the news media’s objective truth. It lost its ambiguity. It lost its authenticity. It lost its cool.

  
  Tags: baudrillard, cool, gavin kitching (2), heidegger, language (3), mainstream media, marshall mcluhan, media discourse, myra macdonals, postmodernism (2), sydney morning herald, twitter, vessels (2), vilem flusser   

   

• on October 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  Comings and Goings: an explanation 

  ‘Future art criticism will be structured by the measuring of the various phases of ugliness as it grows habitual: it will measure exactly how one gets accustomed to ugliness, how the new grows old.’ – Vilem Flusser

  It happened by accident. I moved into a new studio and paranoid about security I set up a motion sensor webcam. Each day I arrived in the studio I would review the photographs that it had taken. There were no images of balaclava clad prowlers, only photographs of myself, entering and exiting the studio. I turned off the camera when I arrived and turned it on again when I left. The repetitive images of me opening and closing the door became bookends to that moment of time in the studio. A moment of time where I made art.

  I began a blog documenting my entrances and exits entitled ‘Comings and Goings’. The repetitive documentation inverted the actual art object in time and space. The photographs of my entrances were titled ‘Andrew Newman enters the studio for purpose of making art’ and my exits were titled ‘Andrew Newman exits his studio having made art.’ The inversion of the artwork through the framing of its production encouraged the imagination of the artwork itself. Drawing parallels with Heidegger’s definition of ‘the thing’
  these photographic bookends of moments of time illustrate that an artwork can exist not through the material in which it is formed but rather by the emptiness that is shaped through the documentation of its production. This imagination of the void is possible through repeats in photography as opposed to the repetitive image of video or film because by its nature photography misses moments of time. These missing moments extend the imaginary space, allowing the viewer to participate in the production of the image. As Godard said, ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end.. but not necessarily in that order.’ The documentation in ‘Coming and Goings’ presents only the beginning and then the end, compelling the viewer to engage with the work and imagine the middle of the story.

  The habitual repetition of the action of entering and leaving the studio also present a persistent passing of time not dissimilar from Beckett’s play ‘Come and Go.” The measuring of moments of time provokes boredom as attention is drawn to the passing of time and the new becomes old. Repetitive photography that records a daily habit invokes a narrative with no end. ‘Coming and Goings’ thus presents an experience that calls for the imagination of a middle while because of its repetitive nature also incites an absurd experience of no end.

  
  Tags: boredom, comings and goings, flusser, habit, heidegger, repetition, space, time   

   

• on October 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply

  A call to arms and the absent other 

  It begins with a call to arms. I dress in my grandfather’s military uniform and address the camera I am being transmitted. I call for a revolution, but language fails me. I speak gibberish. I am calling for the other. I am calling to be touched.

  In 1940, my grandfather, Sidney James Conlon was called to arms. An engineer for the New Zealand army, he had enlisted himself before the war began because serving the state was one of the few sources of employment. But in 1940 he was called to fight for his ‘mother country’, Great Britain, in the very distant and foreign continent of Africa.

  He had never left the shores of New Zealand.

  All he understood of this war and the world it consumed was seen through the flickers of the cinema screen. The world news briefing where everyone in the audience stood up and sung “God Save the Queen” before the screening started.

  The world was transmitted to my grandfather by the machinery of the cinema. He was called to arms via the screen.

  The cinema screen. A large white space. The focus of the funnel of the theatre. An empty space. It is in essence Heidegger’s void. It ceases to exist as some thing  until shadows and light begin to dance on the screen, projected from behind people’s backs. For a moment the void is filled, but only for a moment. The frame, the captured image, hovers in space for a split second before it fades. For my grandfather the war and world appeared briefly in front of him before slipping from his grasp and retracting into the ether. He followed it. He left his lover and followed the call to arms.

  Sixty years later his grandson sits in front of a television awkwardly grasping for the hand of a girl who wants to hear the words ‘I love you’.  Her face basks in the glow of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

  The flicker of the cinema screen or the glimmer of the television. Both fulfill Heidegger’s prophecy of abolishing ‘every possibility of remoteness’ without making anything near. This is the intimacy of the remote. This is the love I uncovered in the love letters. A love borne of absence, or of emptiness, a space without the other.

  Now,  absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I – I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless. At hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense.

  Roland Barthes writes that there are two desires, or two words for two desires,  drawn from two greek gods, the sons of Aphrodite. Pothos, a desire for the absent
  being, and  Himeros, the more burning desire for the present being. I would argue that the two desires cannot be distinguished  simply by proximity. The two desires are to be distinguished by the methods assumed in connecting to the other. I tell the other I love her. I use language to connect. I touch her. I use my body to connect. Pothos; I speak to you. Himeros; I touch you. I reach for her hand. She waits for a word.

  Both Pothos and Himeros are forms of sexual love, this is  the love I am discussing, not familial love or religious love (Singer). This love itself can exist only as Pothos. ‘I love you’. It is language.  Whispered into the others ear, written in a letter, or typed in a text message. It is a call to arms, a call to be touched. The other is always absent when I speak to her. I use language to call her nearer. That is the nature of love.

  Hume writes that all sexual love contains a yearning for continued oneness with the beloved. Plato says that love is a striving for perpetual possession. Neither are feasible. I will strive for you, I will desire you. But you are always the other. We do not join to become one. We connect as two, yet the yearning for oneness persists. We create the abstract to shape the void with language.

  “I love you.”

  I. It is I. And you, the other. In-between, is that void, shaped by language, the word love. Here, outside of ourselves and outside the other do we fulfill that myth of oneness. Here is the intimacy of the remote. I am absent from you. You are absent from I. Yet we are intimate. We both project ourselves onto that word love, like light and shadows projected onto the cinema screen. Here does love become some thing.

  
  Tags: barthes, cinema, heidegger, language (3), love (5), love letter (2), singer, television   

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