03.06.00
from steve dietz guest editor: sarah cook
gallery 9, walker art center, the internet, and digital culture
ART ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK
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issue #14 03.06.00 |
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WebWalker DAILY 02_11_00-04_30_00 from steve dietz guest editor: sarah cook gallery 9, walker art center, the internet, and digital culture ART ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK |
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EAT digest no.3 - vol.1 EAT digest no.3 - vol.2 links |
EAT: ENTERTAINMENT, ART, TECHNOLOGY http://www.walkerart.org/salons/eat/ Dear EAT-COOKED subscribers: There was an awful lot to eat on the RAW list this week, so I've selectively edited it all down into two separate digests. They each follow in separate e-mails, but your menu is below. Take your pick and dig in. Remember, you can choose what you want to engage in, and I won't make you sit there until midnight if you don't eat it all. -Sarah Today's Topics: 1. eat digest no. 3 ENGAGEMENT (vol.1) (Sarah Cook) 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Mark Kingwell on insomnia and "What does it all mean?" - excerpts from a 6 part essay 1.3 Collected Responses to Mark Kingwell from Dike Blair, Louis Mazza, Don Barth, Carl Skelton, and Brad Brace 2. eat digest no. 3 ENGAGEMENT (vol.2) (Sarah Cook) 2.1 Geert Lovink on entertainment and engagement 2.2 Geert Lovink, Mark Kingwell, Dike Blair and Lisa Middag on FUN 2.3 Brian Goldfarb on entertainment and engagement 2.4 Madori Matsui on Let's Entertain, Japanese art, and kitsch ________________________________________ |
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EAT digest no.3, |
*** Date: Sun, 27 Feb 00 21:16:47 -0500 From: Sarah Cook sarah.cook@walkerart.org Subject: [Eat-raw] topic # 2 ENGAGEMENT When we at the Walker came up with the format for this listserv, we decided that rather than break it down into categories of forms of entertainment (i.e. movies, radio, sports, museum-going, hacking, tv-critiquing, etc. etc. ad infinitum) it would be more interesting, and further-reaching, to determine instead some of the phases one goes through in the process of being entertained (or the process of seeking out entertainment). Hence the six topics: first you (1) choose what form of entertainment you want, then you see if it (2) engages you and makes you want to come back for more, along the way you might find your pleasure (if that's what entertainment is about) enhanced by (3) competition or (4) mischief, at some point you may find you've (5) surrendered yourself to the entertainment, and in the end you'll likely discover you've (6) sacrificed something (if only the time spent) in being entertained. In part we were imagining what the experience of visiting Art Entertainment Network would be like. It is quite possible that many of our encounters with technology and websites cause us to run through these same phases. The general question on the table for each of us to answer over the next few weeks is "now that I've chosen my form of entertainment, am I having fun yet?" - or perhaps more elaborately, how do we know when we're having fun; how has entertainment, or art, or technology changed in such a way that it might preclude us from wanting to stop and ask ourselves if we're having fun. From kingwell@scar.utoronto.ca Mon, 28 Feb 2000 06:12:50 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 06:12:50 -0500 (EST) From: M Kingwell kingwell@scar.utoronto.ca Subject: [Eat-raw] insomnia My insomnia is a form of unwilling, and sometimes unpleasant, engagement. It's six a.m. and I've been awake for two hours thinking about (among other things) articles I read in the New Yorker, Nation, New York Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca, and Time last week; two articles I owe two editors; two plane tickets I have to book today; a trip to Banff later in the week; a gallery fundraiser I'm hosting tonight; the woman I'm in love with; my tax return; the weather; Magnolia; Lorrie Moore's Birds of America; a restaurant in New York called Savoy where I saw the supermodel Amber Valetta having dinner; Vince Carter's 360 dunk; cell phones and why I hate them; Portishead's album Dummy; why it bugs me so much that Sarah Michelle Gellar is doing that Maybelline ad. Not necessarily in that order. I become preoccupied with too-muchness. Who doesn't? But when does too-muchness, which we all take for granted, become too much? Insomnia has its benefits. Early this morning (or late last night as you prefer) I decided to inflict on the list an essay/talk I've been working on lately. Its modest title is "What Does It All Mean?" It's a form of engagement with engagement. I guess I should apologize in advance for adding to your reading. But what's a little more when there's always already too much? (subjectively chosen excerpts from "What Does It All Mean?" follow - I highly urge you to visit the eat-raw archives on the EAT website to read the whole thing - ed.) ... So let's pursue the question of what it all means by considering (...) what it means to ask a question, any question at all. (...) There is an old saw that suggests any decent thesis can be stated while standing on one leg. True, but that kind of thing only works if you and I are already talking about the same thing. I don't mean we need to be in agreement about everything, just that fruitful disagreement can only happen against a background of more general agreement. So these post-prandial questions have a certain quality which I've come to think of as the drive-by objection. Drive-by objections are often phrased as questions, which is why I'm talking about them here. But these questions are not meant to elicit information, still less to establish agreement. They are a demand for an answer so that the answer may be found wanting. If, realizing this, one resists the demand for an answer, one is labelled evasive. If one provides a paradoxical answer ("The good life is the life spent seeking the good life," "Virtue is its own reward," "The essence of being is the being of essence," etc.), one is labelled obfuscatory as well as evasive. In all cases the questioner and his audience go away feeling better because none of their deep-seated convictions have been challenged. (...) There is a profound difference, in other words, between the questioner who cares about the answer and the one who cares only to dismiss the answer. (...) One way of putting this is that the drive-by objector lacks the quality the ancient Greek philosophers associated with the beginning of wisdom. I mean wonder, bare astonishment before the world. The close-minded are not moved by the fact of the world; they do not find it amazing. In their rush to place everything within the framework of the already-thought, they have lost their capacity for bafflement, and hence lost their ability to imagine the world as other than it is. They are reluctant to slow down in their relentless ingestion of the passing scene for fear, ironically, that something will pass them by. The U2 lyric from the song "Until the End of the World" captures the feeling neatly: "You miss too much these days if you stop to think." Yes. Meanwhile, of course, everything is passing them by anyway. That's what everything does, if you let it. Perhaps this is a little unfair. Perhaps, more accurately, these people do not know what to make of the vestigial wonder they do feel, and the feelings of unease that come with it. There is no wisdom without that unease, and no chance to do anything but to leave the world of meaning exactly as we find it. The world without wonder is not a world entirely without meaning; on the contrary, everything means exactly what we already thought it did. But this is meaning that never goes beyond the glib certainty of a newspaper column, the depressing sameness of a situation comedy. By contrast, it takes a certain kind of courage -- or just a certain kind of perversity -- not to 'understand' everything, but instead to welcome unease and put it at the centre of one's life. One feature of this unease is realizing that we are equipped to ask questions we may not be equipped to answer. That is, we can give answers of a kind, but they may not do the sorts of thing we have come to expect answers to do. They may lead to more questions, or throw us back upon ourselves, or reveal that we are bound up by linguistic and conceptual confusions -- or all of these. Having written a few books and taught for a while now, I know from experience how dashing this can be to expectations. I get letters and e-mails all the time from people who want to know, in a line or two, what I was on about in one of my books; in a phrase or two, what was I arguing. Now, my books have examined the possibility of justice, cultural anxiety about the end of the world, and the true nature of happiness. They do not reduce readily to bumper stickers or one-leg summaries. And there is, as one of my friends once pointed out, a nice irony in the fact that books on the meaning of cultural anxiety should produce their own kind of anxiety about what, exactly, they mean. (...) Meaning lodges in the community-based structure of our engagements with the world. It resides neither entirely within language, nor entirely within the world, but instead within the complex codependent relationship that exists between them, and in the complex web of speech-acts to which we commit ourselves every day. Seekers after a perfect or universal language see this codependent relationship as also dysfunctional -- which of course it often is -- but then meet that condition with a strategy of maximalist translation: all dialects rendered into one super tongue. They think this move will solve everything; but it solves everything the way any totalitarian regime does, namely by ruthlessly eliminating diversity and possibility. (...) Less grandly but more pervasively, there is a maximalist journalistic worldview that is as reductive as any fundamentalism. I mean the weird combination of total alleged novelty with total alleged sameness that is the hallmark of the columnist's rhetorical strategy. Here the writerly gambits oscillate wildly between extremes of excited announcement and world-weary recapitulation. Today: We've never seen anything like it. And then tomorrow: We've seen all this before. This daily parade of new and old is, in its way, an answer to our question, and indeed the kind of answer most people are content with. What does it all mean? That the world is changing faster than you can understand. Equally, and of course simultaneously, that there is nothing new under the sun. (...) The world of meaning is, in this sense, not unlike a work of art. We can speak of how it came to be, what it is made of, even how it functions. We can talk about its place in our lives and some of the things we try to express when we say it matters to us. What we cannot do is reduce it to propositional content. Which suggests, I think, a different kind of answer altogether to the question we have been pursuing. At the risk of descending into what a drive-by objector would view as evasive paradox, it is this: That the meaning of meaning is meaning itself. What am I getting at by saying something so strange? Well, let's bring it down a notch or two. I sometimes think the combination of empty success and hidden failure in maximalism is not unlike the peculiar conjunction of stimulation and boredom that is endemic to the modern age, when most people finally had enough free time to escape from the drudgery of work -- only to face the drudgery of leisure. The condition is too common to need a detailed description here. Who among us has not felt the creeping ennui of over-stimulation, the dull paralysis of having too much time, too much neural input, too many options? Entertainment, like so many things, contains its own negation. An excess of it is, paradoxically, boring. It's precisely in such a condition, in fact, that we may be most inclined to ask, desperately, What does it all mean? This feeling of too-muchness is not in fact a recent phenomenon, and not even one restricted to the modern era of democratized leisure, though there are more opportunities for its occurrence there. It is more basic than that, linked intimately to our relations of meaning with the world. It is a function of mind itself, of our vast plastic capacity to find things significant. We have evolved as creatures with brains both decentralized and task-generic. That is, while there may be associations of certain actions with certain parts of the brain, the human brain itself is, like modern PCs, generalist in architecture. It isn't built to do one thing, or even a few, but to do a vast number of different, often complex things. And that's why so many things strike us as interesting, from puns to madrigals, from cave paintings to the internal combustion engine, from folk songs to the Doppler effect. Such a brain is both a blessing and a curse. For creatures like us, there is always too much meaning to make sense of: not simply because we have evolved tools of reminder, like books and techniques and institutions; but also because each one of us is every day creating more meaning than we can ourselves understand. Wishes and fantasies, dreams and visions -- here and elsewhere surplus meanings squeeze out of the daily round of trying to make sense. In this way, the question What does it all mean? is, consistent with what I said earlier, a query destined for constant disappointment. For there is no adequate general answer, no maximalist translation, equal to its real scope. We may fool ourselves with such translations, or use them to overpower others, but at heart they are all corrosive of meaning. This is not to grant the field to the minimalists, though, because the question is still a real one -- even if it remains rather odd. Its real import is this: it sounds a cry of frustration, not with too little meaning but with too much. That is what makes us uneasy, because so little of the meaning in the world seems to mean anything in particular. It doesn't matter, and that lack of mattering troubles us. And so paradoxically a surfeit of meaning (in the world, in ourselves) seems to be matched by a lack of it, or the right kind of it (in the world, in ourselves). Our anxiety about meaning is really an anxiety about ourselves, therefore; or more precisely, about ourselves as we engage with the world. When we ask What does it all mean?, we are really trying to raise another question, namely How should I shape my life? Socrates knew this was so, and laboured under no professional delusions that the projects of metaphysics or epistemology, which concern the nature of reality and knowledge, respectively, could ultimately be separated off from those of ethics. All inquiry, whatever its subject, has as an ultimate object the central matter of how to go about living. Philosophers have lost sight of this idea often enough over the centuries that it's probably no surprise if the claim sounds a trifle bizarre as I make it today. (...) the whole point, and problem, of meaning is that it reveals the complex isomorphic relationship between us (as readers, or maybe slaves, of meaning) and the rest of the socio-cultural world (as the site, or reflection, of meaning). We are always both creating, and created by, the world around us -- and that includes, crucially, other creatures in the same fix. It is the condition of being so stranded, of being both trapped inside our heads and able (sometimes) to fashion meanings that other meaning-creators can parse, which makes the whole question of meaning so uneasy. If we arrive at different answers to the question of what this or that means -- and we will -- that does not mean meaning is whatever each one of us thinks it is. It means merely (merely!) that we've got an even harder task ahead of us than perhaps we thought. (...) Immersed in meaning, awash in content, how best to cope? There are, I think, at least five main responses available. (...) Then there is, third, the option which tries to accept and ingest the vast variety of meaning-engagements. This option is popular in our day, partly because we have so many shiny new toys that make it possible, and partly because we are training successive generations in a greater facility for it. Indeed, the two facts are related. But as a response to the vastness of meaning, this one is also self-defeating. For there is no velocity that can outdistance the limits of mortal life, and the speed-merchants of the current mediascape are no better off in knowing the meaning of meaning than any of us. They are arguably much worse off, for their quick engagements soon begin to lack texture and depth. Expanding intake does not meet the case for meaning, in the end, because there is always more and more volume to accept and ingest, and much of that volume (it follows) is trash: this is the Augean stable of the mind, where there is always too much shit to shovel. As with anything difficult and inspired, great art and philosophy are and have so far always been comparatively rare. Beware the simple growth of volume in meaning; it just makes the gems harder to find. (...) Which leaves a fifth orientation, the only good one, and that is what we might call critical immersion in the world of our meaning-engagements. This may seem obvious after everything I have said, but obvious things are often true; and, after all, the obvious is a philosopher's stock-in-trade. More to the point, its being obvious doesn't make it any less difficult. In fact, if we understand the question of meaning as one that is really about shaping a life so that it is a worthwhile one, it is hard to imagine a task any more severe. Seen properly, it ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the banal to the stunning, because every moment of waking life is a form of engagement with the world of meaning -- a line or two in the story we are telling about ourselves. At that story's centre is the enduring ineffability of human consciousness, the peculiar ability in humans (and maybe in other entities; I'm open-minded on the issue) for existence to be like something: to have a mood and particularity and texture that is experienced directly only by the subject, that is irreducible to anything else. What it is like for me to be me, or for you to be you, is a condition that repels reduction or translation; it cannot be rendered into anything other than itself. And this quality of individual consciousness makes everything else possible, for without it there is nothing we could call meaningful... [note: all bolds are post-author additions] From louis.mazza@walkerart.org Mon, 28 Feb 00 15:48:28 -0600 Date: Mon, 28 Feb 00 15:48:28 -0600 From: louis.mazza louis.mazza@walkerart.org Subject: [Eat-raw] meaning 1 >But when does >too-muchness, which we all take for granted, become too much? too much-ness becomes too much when it stops being a "choice" and infiltrates [or engages] your soul to the extent that it becomes overwhelming rather than enabling. when too-much-ness interferes with such-ness and lures us from our beds in search of all the other stuff-you-don't-have-but-think-you-need. when just the act of being presented with choices becomes the activity and the actual manifestations of a choice never actually happen. the t.v. remote syndrome. watch a little bit of everything but never all of anything. the activity turns from the watching [of a movie or an entire show] into the changing of the channels themselves. the act becomes the activity. talk about esoteric childish ramblings.... i should have been a philosopher... *** From lilyvac@thing.net Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:14:59 -0500 Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:14:59 -0500 From: Dike Blair lilyvac@thing.net Subject: [Eat-raw] "Re: Contents of Eat-raw digest Mark-- 1 Your sleepless mental listing rang bells, albeit a from a loftier belfry (despite your disclaimer about philosophers' wisdom and depth and concerns over Buffy's Mabelline endorsement). When I'm compelled, for one reason or another, to relate the reason for the making, the inspiration, of one of my pieces, that kind of listing seems to be the only accurate response. Do you find this kind of engagement, the things-on-my-mind soup, an important part of your creative process? Am I assuming, incorrectly, that philosophy is a creative process? (...) 4 So you can't tell me what it all means. Is it, or why is it, sophistic to suggest that the only possible meaning of everything is involved with the process of inquiry? (This would most likely be the premature question.) Dike *** From dbarth@dbnewmedia.com Tue, 29 Feb 2000 15:14:26 -0600 Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 15:14:26 -0600 From: Don Barth dbarth@dbnewmedia.com Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #14 - 6 msgs > Still, we have some time left. And even impossible things have >their pleasures. So let's pursue the question of what it all means by >considering, as a next step, what it means to ask a question, any >question at all. > To me a question that seeks a response, not confirmation or avoidance, is the one to pay attention to. > >quality the ancient Greek philosophers associated with the beginning of >wisdom. I mean wonder, bare astonishment before the world. I think it takes more energy to be aware of the world around you, to embrace the wonders, so people shut down some or most of that. The modern urban world doesn't want it citizen consumers to be so aware, and therefor doesn't support those behaviors. *** From spill@rcn.com Fri, 03 Mar 2000 10:37:38 +0000 Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 10:37:38 +0000 From: carl skelton spill@rcn.com Subject: [Eat-raw] meaning 4 I was driving by the list-serve, and did a double-take. Was M Kingwell figure-skating, or doing doughnuts in the parking lot? "The meaning of meaning is meaning itself" could be taken either way, or as an odd avoidance of an Embarrassment of Entertainments (embarrassments of entertainment? Entertainment and its embarrassments?)... Regardless, there is a basic relation implied by -entertainment-, which is that it's something done to you by people you probably don't know, and they are expecting to be paid either by you or more likely a third party. Now, figure-skating is a spectator sport and a performing art. It makes perfect sense as an entertainment, a stimu-pressant downtime filler for those who value and practice competitive overwork in their uptime, and cherish totally expensive perfectionism. Doing doughnuts in the parking lot, on the other hand, is a different kind of fun. The rules are simpler, and the driver is in the car. Meanwhile, back at MEANING: the meaning of any one thing is simply the sum, or configuration, of its relationships with other things, living or dead, concrete or abstract, etc. Humans are born helpless; at first, their meaning is pure circumstance. The meaning of an adult, on the other hand, is the artifact of processes of maintenance and negotiation. In between, there's an adolescent phase of critique, attributing all agency to mother-blame, father-blame, and history-blame at one end of a spectrum of satisfaction, and mother-milk, father-milk, and history-milk at the other. The upshot of all this is that the Meaning of Meaning being Meaning itself has at least this fatal flaw: it doesn't leave any meaning for the rest of us. Figure-eight, anyone? *** From bbrace@wired.com Sat, 4 Mar 2000 10:07:10 -0700 Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 10:07:10 -0700 From: { brad brace } bbrace@wired.com Subject: [Eat-raw] meaning 6 'And so it is that we do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that non-existence shall take us back from existence and that nameless spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus.' (*Principia Discordia*) ________________________________________ |
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EAT digest no.3, volume 2 
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From geert@xs4all.nl Mon, 28 Feb 2000 07:11:08 -0800 Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 07:11:08 -0800 From: geert lovink geert@xs4all.nl Subject: [Eat-raw] entertainment Predictions of Entertainment and Engagement Good engagement is like good entertainment. Once engaged, you are getting immersed into the action, the protest, the subversive act. The revolutionairy activity is reaching unconcious levels. It is only afterwards that we find ourselves engaged into something. And only from the alien position we can speak of engagement, and reject it, or make fun of it. It is obvious that in the age of infotainment it is hard to make the (necassary) distinction between media enter- tainment and cheque book engagement. They are both data driven, data centered activities. It is an easy and outdated form of postmodern dogma to look down on the moral and financial charity support and to praise the amoral position of pure, joyful pleasure of consumption. Get beyond the cultural studies praisal of the 'critical' consumerist position and into sophisticated forms of viral denial, silent mass boycots, organized doubts. Not the open resistance is killing these days -- rumours of imperfection will do. From geert@xs4all.nl Tue, 29 Feb 2000 17:20:43 -0800 Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 17:20:43 -0800 From: geert lovink geert@xs4all.nl Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #13 - 5 msgs coming from the 1976/77 generation of punk NO FUN is more my paradigm, point of reference than ARE WE HAVING FUN YET? did anyone write the geneology of fun yet? there is tons of literature about jokes, why people laugh. Also about happiness and how to measure that one. but fun... is there a fun meter? a chief sociologist of fun? An internation journal for fun studies? Entertainment for sure... but fun an und fuer sich, in itself, the hermeneutics, the phenomenology... does anyone have an idea? this might be important before we start talking about strategies to crush the fun industry, and how to engage in this worldwide struggle against organized innocence. ciao, geert *** From kingwell@scar.utoronto.ca Wed, 1 Mar 2000 06:17:05 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 06:17:05 -0500 (EST) From: M Kingwell kingwell@scar.utoronto.ca Subject: [Eat-raw] fun At the risk of inflicting too much of my writing on the list, and taking the fun out of it, Geert's comment about fun made me think of this passage, which is from my book called Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac (Viking 1998; Crown 2000). It's taken out of context, but so what? ---------- We all know people who might be described as "fun-loving" and activities -- bowling, square dancing, water-skiing -- whose primary, maybe sole, purpose is the provision of fun: fun activities. (Disagreement about whether a given activity is fun is not to the point at this stage. Besides, we can be wrong about ourselves with respect to fun: lots of people who think they will hate bowling find themselves, after a frame or two, screaming and jumping like characters in an "I Love Lucy" episode.) The idea of fun is hardly ever examined, common though it is. We take for granted that, other things being equal, fun things are preferable to not-fun things. And why not? We even create the idea of leisure time for the sake of fun, going so far, at a particular historical moment, as to erect one of the great cultural constructions of our times, the weekend, to make fun more culturally and institutionally available. Seeking and finding fun is one of the few lifelong projects most of us engage in with assiduity and a keen sense of purpose -- alien observers could be forgiven for thinking that fun-seeking is the main point of our lives, work reduced (as in Aristotle) to a mere prologue, an enabling condition, of leisure. Numerous machines of the culture are expressly designed to facilitate fun, from the elaborate apparatus of quasi-aesthetic leisure (television, the movies), through the desperate creation of well-ordered domestic environments where every meal is a holiday feast, to the layered and disheartening social order of bottle parties, dinner parties, cocktail parties, launch parties and after-work parties. Martha Stewart might be considered the patron saint of this aspect of the culture, but only if flanked by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert with their must-see thumbs-up imperatives -- the unholy trinity of taking all the fun out of fun. Yet still we seek it. The party offers a paradigm case of the problem with fun. Jenny Standish, a character in Kingsley Amis's novel Difficulties With Girls, offers an eloquent if bleak assessment of the party paradox. "There was something in her that welcomed the idea [of parties], however faintly or briefly. It might be as she started to get ready, it might not be until they were going in the front door, but always she would have a moment of glad expectation that almost carried her away: perhaps this time . . . This time what? She could think of no answer." Is there an answer? Does that floating sense of expectation ever leave us? Or are we its unwitting slaves forever, long past the time when a party might have meaningfully offered us the prospect of a new love interest, a stimulating conversation, a personal revelation? Jenny's father (the text tells us) had one, concerning the triumph of hope over experience -- a principle so general in its application as to come to explain almost everything. Freud called it infantilism, the cherishing of pleasurable fantasies in defiance of the lessons of life, rather than moderating the pleasure principle into what he called "the more modest reality principle." While at an extreme it leads to self-denial and the attempted elimination of the pleasure-instincts -- a process that led to body-denying delusions, including religion -- Freud thought that such moderation was actually a way to preserve happiness, since the option of pure pleasure-seeking was self-defeating, if not impossible. "An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life," he remarks dryly, "but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment." No one can subsist on a pure diet of reality, however. So still we go on, racking up the party invitations like they were personal honours, plotting the daybooks of our lives with spots of fun that ease the pressures, and often enough the general monotony, of daily life. Where would we be without things to look forward to? James Atlas, writing in The New Yorker not long ago, wondered if we had, as a culture, lost this sense of fun as something essential to hauling us through the banal diurnal rhythms of existence. Atlas describes a Jenny-like moment, only in this case it is the sense of thwarted expectation that envelops him when he has to leave a Manhattan cocktail party filled with agents, writers, publishers and publicists. "A pang of regret comes over me; I want to stay for the party," Atlas writes. "Maybe it's the pleasurable stirring of sexual attraction without risk, that nerve-tingling aura of possibility accompanied by the knowledge that it's going nowhere. Or maybe I just thirst for a fourth drink. To relax and have -- how can I put it? -- fun." There follows a long celebration of the allegedly fun-loving literary culture of 1950s New York, with its long list of passionate, adulterous, drunken and often suicidal denizens: John Berryman a suicide at 58, Delmore Schwartz found dead in a fleabag hotel at 52, Randall Jarrell an apparent suicide at 51, Robert Lowell dead of a heart attack at 60. Harold Ross, Wolcott Gibbs, Robert Benchley, A.J. Liebling, Shirley Jackson -- all of them dead before they reached 60. The contrast drawn here is to domestic obligation (Atlas must leave the party because his wife and kids are expecting him) and the enforced safety of today's "anhedonic" culture. Anhedonia, significantly, is the name given to that symptom of clinical depression in which sufferers find they cannot take pleasure in anything. Sweet smells die in the air, tasty morsels turn to ash in the mouth, and the scene before me fades to drab brown and grey. "If I had to come up with a symbolic representation of the prevailing ethos," Atlas writes, "it would be a series of red circles, each with a line through it: No Smoking, No Drinking, No Sex. No Fun." It would be easy, as subsequent letters to the editor did, to dismiss Atlas's regret as the unseemly longings of an immature 47-year-old who, like so many of his generation, has failed to come to terms with adult responsibilities -- or, possibly worse, the delusional nostalgia of somebody who grew up uncritically ingesting the carefully created myths of the Fifties golden age of literary New York. But that would miss the genuine point that is being raised here. We do not have to go so far as live like a Benchley or Schwartz, but are we in danger of losing our sense of fun? Do those red circles and slashes symbolize a culture that is beginning to pathologize the pursuit of pleasure? If so, the fall of fun is more is more than just the preoccupation of an aging writer with domestic ambivalence. It says something potentially disturbing about our culture of happiness. Now, I have been suggesting what looks to be the contrary conclusion, namely that the dominant culture is dedicated to satisfying pleasure, not denying it. But these two apparently contradictory tendencies, denying and exhorting, are in fact two sides of the same coin. What we see here is actually a familiar cultural pattern of puritanical and hedonistic impulses in close, apparently endless conflict. Both the surrender to pleasure and the denial of pleasure proceed from the same source, rooted in the basic confusion of pleasure with happiness. We are, in other words, a culture suffering from a bipolar disorder, with manic and depressive episodes following each other by hysterical turns, bingeing and purging, sometimes existing in close proximity and annexing cultural forces in what looks like an attempt to destroy the opposite. But pleasure and its denial are, for us, locked in a Manichean battle, inseparable one from the other. That is why it is always one-sided to complain, as Atlas does with an array of smart authorities to back him up, that the culture is against pleasure. True, but only half the story, for the culture is also decidedly, crazily, in favour of pleasure. This can be hard to see, especially if the dominant forms of pleasure take on particular shapes. Christopher Lasch, writing in The Culture of Narcissism, noted the American tendency for "the invasion of play by the rhetoric of achievement" -- a kind of cultural infection in which the virus of the Protestant work ethic steals into the otherwise unself-conscious body of fun. Hence the aggressive, goal-oriented forms of play so much favoured by weekend warriors of various kinds: mountain climbing, triathlon racing, extreme or high-risk sports, but also the slightly crazed Saturday-afternoon attempts to get through all the enjoyable leisure-time activities of gardening, decorating, cooking, eating and socializing before sundown. Even the standard forms of urban dissolution -- drinking and doing drugs, say, or staying up late -- are annexed to the peculiar rhetoric of achievement, creating the odd spectacle of apparently non-conformist or anti-establishment hipsters bragging to each other about how drunk, how stoned, or how tired they are, just like plaid-sporting businessmen comparing golf handicaps. But this rhetoric of achievement does not deny pleasure so much as it merely reinforces the machine imperatives of pleasure: the idea that happiness is, essentially, a problem to be solved, a psychological portfolio to be managed. Ersatz self-denial of the kind on offer in every Bally's gym in North America is nothing more than rampant pleasure-seeking in slightly deflected form. Thus the delicate dance of pleasure and pain. A recent ad for Gatorade gives the gist of the pain-is-pleasure ethos: various slow-motion shots of athletes in pain -- being tackled, being fouled, falling off a balance beam -- are intercut with the song "Love Hurts." The tag line? "I never felt so good." Even what we might think of as genuine self-denial -- selfless submergence in a larger project -- can be, as Lasch well knew, merely one more form of self-obsession. *** From lilyvac@thing.net Wed, 01 Mar 2000 12:28:02 -0500 Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 12:28:02 -0500 From: Dike Blair lilyvac@thing.net Subject: [Eat-raw] Re: Eat-raw digest, Vol 1 #14 - 6 msgs (late) Geert--Your comments yesterday (apologies for logging in late--this belongs to a dated thread and is cartoonish when bumped against Kingswells, "Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac") seemed very much to the point and got me thinking about fun. I thought your "organized innocence" was an incredibly succinct term. The carnival sadness of Let's Entertain (Philippe Vergne's organization of innocence lost) is certainly due to artists referencing former haunts of fun, of innocence lost, and, in some cases, retrieving pleasure from the loser's creative act. But this is creative pleasure and very distinct from the innocence, or innocent cruelty, of "fun". Don't know of any Inst. for the Study of Fun, but as you mention it (initially, I thought you were being ironic) it seems it must exist. And I'd be fascinated by it. I spent that 76/77 time period in a different place but with some cultural cross-over--the Ramones just wanting to have some fun was very different from Euro-punk NO FUN but probably similar in that it was fun. Part of that fun in NYC was the smallness and the apartness from the general culture and of creating one's own fun--of being engaged. In a similar vein (in my case, an earlier time), running from tear gas canisters lobbed by whatever police force or National Guard is fun although that kind of fun is rarely mentioned. Anyway I'd be curious how you, the group, or anybody out there has individual or institutionalized fun and whether there is any point in pursuing it. (...) Do you pursue fun? Are your struggles any kind of fun? Do they help you maintain any NO FUN fun? (...) For me, fun diminishes with age and other pleasures, like pleasure in my work, increases. I know this is a common experience but I'd like to be nosy about the particulars of your and other cases. Is the pursuit of fun something that mature people naturally discard? (I'm mature in body only.) I don't find the marketing of fun, (which may be, but not by definition, false fun) inherently evil. It seems a bigger problem that it isn't terribly efficacious --Dike *** From midda001@gold.tc.umn.edu Fri, 3 Mar 2000 05:37:12 -0600 Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 05:37:12 -0600 From: Tony Nelson and Lisa Middag midda001@gold.tc.umn.edu Subject: [Eat-raw] fun, NO fun fun, play and retrieval "Is the pursuit of fun something that mature people naturally discard?" And I sense something here--and perhaps I have this wrong, you must redirect, if I do--that we are talking about fun in the playful sense. We are talking about play. And I think it does naturally fall away as we get older. Though to say "discard" implies a kind of choice in the departure (I don't want/need/desire this anymore, so I will throw it out/discard it). I think we actually don't have much of a choice--we lose the ability to play. And not to evoke the million self-help books about the inner child--but, okay, why the heck not?--I think it gets harder and harder as we get older to simply BE in our physical bodies. And I think this is an essential component of fun and/or play. Isn't our pursuit of entertainment just a way to voyeuristically try to get these physical sensations back? And, as you said, it's not terribly efficacious, the marketing of fun, so we really never can recover the loss--unless, as you said, we can retrieve it through the creative act. Now, pleasure is all together different. And I can and do have pleasure. And my ability to find pleasure increases rather than decreases as I get older. I'm not sure I even knew what pleasure was when I was young. So is pleasure a substitute for the fun/play we had as children? And, if so, are we content with the substitution? Is "NO FUN fun," simply taking the place of FUN fun of which we--as "mature" adults ;-)--simply are no longer capable? Though this argument falls away, I suppose, when you consider the NO FUN fun of running from tear gas canisters--what an intense physical rush that must have been. We genXers--call me, fellow, similarly-aged diners, if I over-generalize--will never know this kind of fun. Generationally speaking, I think of us as sensorially deprived--no giddiness for us in intoxicating substances or political actions--even if we don't JUST SAY NO, we cannot seem to get off on it. No condescension here. The thought that there is perhaps no point in pursuing fun, institutional or individual, but only pleasure--even if it's terrific pleasure, I always want it all, pleasure AND fun AND everything else--since that's all perhaps that I can achieve, depresses me. But if you artists can retrieve it for me (can you, will you?), I will be terribly, wonderfully grateful. From brigo@rochester.rr.com Tue, 29 Feb 2000 23:11:58 -0500 Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 23:11:58 -0500 From: brigo@rochester.rr.com brigo@rochester.rr.com Subject: [Eat-raw] fun and engagement Brian Goldfarb, here. It's taken me a little while to engage, but I have been lurking, wondering how to get a handle on this amorphous thing called entertainment and how I might begin to relate it to engagement. I've been wondering about the association of entertainment with fun, and it seems incidental to me. Entertainment can be fun, but more essentially it seems to be defined by stimulation and engagement. (I wonder: can an activity be engaging if they are not stimulating? I don't think of sleep as engaging or entertaining, even if it is a great pleasure.) This stimulation might cover a range of experience: pleasure or pain, horror or humor, but not indifference. But if entertainment is defined by engagement, it is equally defined by disengagement or diversion from something else (its other). We seek entertainment so as to divert ourselves from that which disturbs us. Perhaps in the immediate sense we might think of entertainment as a diversion from our job, the pressures of the day, or some form of boredom. But at bottom it might be suggested that this other of entertainment (what we flee) is not just anything, but the very frightening or disturbing experience of our own existence. Further, it seems to me that entertainment is a form of engagement with (perhaps identification with) something at a distance-thus something that is light (or at least light relative to something as weighty as the question of our own existence). In this sense entertainment often takes the form of voyeuristic experiences (such as cinema, theater, literature) or experiences which stand in an allegorical relationship to the struggles of life (games, sports). It is a set of experiences through which we can defer and deflect our attention onto activities, things or people safely bracketed at a distance. Now this idea of engagement at a distance might seem to contradict the feeling of intensity of involvement one feels with some forms of entertainment. But the intensity is always in relation to a contained experience, distant in the sense that it doesn't threaten in an essential manner. This brings me to the part of this forum that triggered the above thoughts. Several postings have discussed eating and sex as key forms of entertainment. While representations of sex and eating (or the rituals that surround them) might be entertainment, I think that both are far too intimate and direct experiences to be described as entertainment. Little brings one in closer proximity with the experience of existence than eating or sex. While I really enjoy a good meal accompanied by stimulating conversation there is always a certain conflict between the formalities of dining and the very intense aesthetic pleasure of eating which I must suppress or contain (to some extent) in order not to offend. Well I just wanted to suggest that in terms of entertainment, engagement is at bottom circumscribed by disengagement from something ultimately more important. So important it is unbearable. From matsui@ta2.so-net.ne.jp Thu, 02 Mar 2000 06:44:29 +0900 Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 06:44:29 +0900 From: MidoriMatsui matsui@ta2.so-net.ne.jp Subject: [Eat-raw] Sorry to be late& some Japanese examples 1. The Meaning of Pop Vocabulary in Japanese Artistic Expression The common feature among those Japanese artists--Takashi Murakami, Mariko Mori, Minako Nishiyama, Cupi Cupi-- who participate in Let's Entertain is their conscious assimilation of kitsch in their work. The assimilation of kitsch in contemporary art itself has been a prevailing trend in the 1990s, with the inclusion in the "contemporary art" canon of the works by Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Matthew Barney, among others. Its significance lies in challenging the elitism of the avant-gard art, and reinforcing the "revolutionary" potential of modern art by capturing the root of popular imagination--as Walter Benjamin claimed in 1927, in his reflection on kitsch ("Dream Kitsch") and fragments in The Arcade Project. ( Benjamin argues that the revolutionary potential of the avant-garde art can be released only when the avant-garde incorporates the radical depth of kitsch as a reservoir of popular dreams and critically distances or transforms it, see The Arcade Project, trans, Howard Eiland et. al. The Belknap Press, 1999: 395-6) Japanese Pop culture formed a major influence on artists who grew up during the 1960s. This was mainly due to the peculiar "poverty" pertaining to the "imported" nature of contemporary art in Japan. For the nearly 40 years since the early 1950s, Japanese contemporary art--at least that taught in art schools--has remained derivative of the Greenbergian theory of modernist painting, while independent groups or innovative individuals occasionally conceived ambitious conceptual movements, including Gutai in the 1950s (of which Atsuko Tanaka's Electric Dress is most famous), High Red Center in the 1960s( a mixture of a neo-Dada happenings and politicized public projects), and Mono-ha in the 1970s (a Japanese counterpart to Arte Povera). Against the lack of the established system of evaluation for "high art," the fast growing mass culture, especially the remarkable realization of wild fantasy in such subgenres as comics, anime and sci-fi monster flicks (like Gozilla), quickly captivated the popular imagination. The late 1980s saw the emergence of a new breed of artists who knew how to turn their apparent disadvantages of not possessing a strong heritage of modernism into fantastic demonstration of Japanese post-modern sensibility, including Yasumasa Morimura, Tatsuo Miyajima, and Dumb Type. The artists included in Let's Entertain emerged in the early to the mid 1990s; Murakami's and Mori's debts to Morimura, and that of Ishibashi to Dumb Type are as obvious as their difference from their predecessors. These historical backgrounds may already be explained in the exhibition catalogue. The important point about them is that their assimilation of glittery pop images is more than a gesture of opposing the academic notion of high culture; it's a demonstration of the Japanese vernacular in contemporary art, which is necessarily a hybrid product, mixing cool irony and wild excess of Pop forms, or "Western" technology and Japanese formalism. The assertion of the Japanese vernacular is most consciously carried out in the work of Takashi Murakami. Known for his mixture of anime styles and the aesthetic of traditional Japanese painting, Murakami claims that the uniquely Japanese artistic characteristic lies in its anti-realism--the tendency of painters, for example, to construct a pictorial space, by not relying on the perspective, but decoratively superimposing color planes. He also indicates how, in traditional Japanese drawing and sculpture, lines grow playful and ornamental, superfluous of the descriptive function. Underlying such decorativeness in traditional Japanese art was the assertion of the playful, the sensuous, and the abstract against the rationalism supporting mimesis or verisimilitude. Murakami points out that since that subversive playfulness of the vernacular Japanese aesthetic had been repressed and marginalized by the blanket acceptance of modern Western scientific and aesthetic principles in the late 19th century and onward, its legacy can be recognized, among contemporary visual presentations, only in distorted and fanciful presentations of Japanese animation. His aim, in short, is to reassert the repressed heritage of the Japanese vernacular by creating a hybrid product assimilating classical Japanese formalism and anime excess. My Lonesome Cowboy is an excellent example of his attempt to transmit the completely two-dimensional proportions of anime characters to a three-dimensional figure. The baroque spreading of the sperm/ lasso pays an homage to the ornamental lines of Tawaraya Sotatsu's God of Wind or Kano Sansetsu's Old Gnarled Plum Blossom. 2. Engagement How can the works of Murakami, Mori, or Ishibashi actually "engage" the audience? The way they relate to the audience is actually not so different from traditional paintings and films. Their sleek visual presentation, although shocking to the conventional "high art" audience, gives the figure or the pictorial surface a certain self-contained poise. The audience can apparently perceive from their kitschy, baroque or even distorted figures, the anguish of the conflict brought about by a violent encounter between "Western" technology and Japanese decorativeness. But as long as they remain impressive spectacles, their effect on the audience is one-sided. In fact, the aspect of Murakami's work unrepresented here is his management of Hiropon Factory, a group of his studio assistants who are also aspiring young artists, for whom Murakami curates group shows several times a year at such non-museum places as art bookshops, T-shirt shops, and other hangouts of a young alternative culture crowd. In the current Japanese art scene, however, there are also attempts to incorporate and reflect on the power of entertainment in contemporary art--organized from a completely different end of the spectrum than Let's Entertain. The most conspicuous at present is an exhibition called Game Over, held between Nov. 13 -2nd April, at a private museum called Watari-um, in Aoyama, Tokyo. In a sense, the exhibition rivals, or complements the attempt of Let's Entertain. While Let's Entertain substantially stages and chronicles the changing relations between art and entertainment from the interventionist attempts of Stan Douglas and Dara Birnbaum through the use of Pop masks and objects to release their libidinal drives by Kelly and McCarthy to the truly border-crossing work of Doug Aitken, the show at Watarium centers on the audience participation, featuringthe ephemerality or temporality of performance as an occasion for the audience to be actively engaged, at the risk of dissipating visual pleasure and disintegrating artistic autonomy. Let me briefly explain. This exhibition frequently changes its outlook during the nearly half a year span of its session. The three floors of the museum's main building function as both installation sites and stages for performances. The exhibition' involves nearly 30 artists, including Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Cupi Cupi (Yoshimasa Ishibashi), Sadaharu Horio, Hiroyuki Oki, Biters, Tatsuo Miyajima and many others. The above stated artists constitute the core installations and projects, while others join in for overnight performances and short projects. The exhibition is an ingenuous attempt of a private museum to turn its limitations into advantages. Elegant but small, the museum building can host relatively small numbers of artists at once; stretching its exhibition period, the show can involve many artists and increase its variety. The most effective device is the return ticket. During the exhibition period, the audience can visit the museum as often as they want. At present, the exhibition is more than half-way through. Its installments and public projects so far, including Cupi Cupi's video installation and the viewing of the underground "Karaoke" film, "I Want to Drive You Mad," the designer Masahiro Nakagawa's reforming of the recycled clothes the audience brought, the surreal film of the Modern Art Group simulating the Poltergeist phenomenon, and the drag performance and sex teach-ins of the performing group the Biters, have been extremely well-attended. During the entire period, Tsuyoshi Ozawa runs a "Consultation Cafe," a cafe whose interiors are changed bi-weekly responding to various instructions and requests of the audience left in the questionnaire, and the waitresses carry out performances. I think that Ozawa's cafe, symbolically situated on the second floor of the exhibition, best embodies the risk and the potentiality of the entire project. More than anyone's work in the exhibition, his performance/ project gives the audience the opportunity to participate or simply find their place in the museum, while entirely shifting the artist's role from a controlling "master" to a coordinating "MC." Although there's a criticism concerning how the visual quality of some presentations don't exactly match the ambitious scheme, the exhibition nevertheless attracts the general culture audience who are neither specialists nor "masses," but who visit museums out of their curiosity, looking for some enlightenment and personal epiphanies. That situation is very relevant to what Thomas Crow mentions in the very beginning of his book, Modern Art in the Common Culture; he remarks how contemporary art exhibitions are now supported by "curious and intrigued visitors" who "evidently find sustenance within the boundaries of fine arts that is available nowhere else" (Yale Up, 1996: vii). And what the show ultimately offers to them is not so much the pleasure of each particular "entertainment" as the experience of seeing the exhibition change and feeling their perceptual awareness growing with it. So, my discussion theme, or question is as follows: which would you prefer, as audience, the exhibition whose substantial visuality can satisfy your aesthetic expectations and intellectual interest in the historical relevance of contemporary art's critically incorporating entertainment elements, or the exhibition that constantly asks you to participate in it, not to just look, but to do something in the museum? This is a dummy question to let the discussion spinning. I'm asking this, since I found it interesting that two exhibitions approaching entertainment from different standpoints are held almost at the same time in the U. S. (where you have a strong system of legitimation) and Japan (where we don't really have that system, and imagination runs wild, linking itself with kitsch or the almost chaotic social process). I also personally think that if the spectacular artists like Murakami and Mori represent one characteristic of contemporary Japanese art that emerged in the early 1990s, Ozawa's fluxus-like performance project represents a counter action to the former's ostentatious visuality. Both are relevant responses to both the Japanese situation that lacks the high cultural system of legitimation in domestic terms and the theme of "(engaging) entertainment in art." ________________________________________ |
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