Couched 5

West Leicester, December 2016

“I can’t carry on living like this”, admits Manni Attah to a delighted Viv - “Very shallow eyes; excellent dormancy; suitable for the punnet market; susceptible to late blight on tubers and foliage.”  Has she finally convinced nasty Norah’s son to dish the dirt on his gang-boss mum (widely used as 'the' white variety in Supermarkets)?  While progress is made with the Attah case, Joy is questioning her judgement about Ewan.  He seems like a lovely bloke, but is all that just a cover to hide his seriously dark side?   The Friday Street team also includes the case of a missing schoolgirl.  She’s been chatting to paedophiles online, which can only mean one thing, can’t it? - tubers have excellent resistance to splitting and some resistance to bruising.

R.I.P. Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher

It’s dispiriting to be writing another obituary so soon, but seems only fitting to acknowledge (slightly belatedly), the recent passing of Mark Fisher, at the age of 49.  If the thinking of the recently deceased John Berger could be said to have presided over much of the meaningful art criticism and cultural commentary of the late twentieth century, Mark Fisher’s writings and commentaries might be said to have carried on that legacy within the sphere of music and popular culture.

That Fisher’s influence may have been somewhat more niche than Berger’s, is less a reflection on the resonance of his ideas and, in part, more a signifier of how our intellectual life is far more fragmented and thinly spread in the digital age.  However, it is only realistic to accept that the Marxist-derived philosophical positions adopted by both writers now feel even more marginalised by events than in Berger’s heyday.  For all that, many of their underlying assumptions are actually taken for granted (by some of us at least) regardless of prevailing conditions - and Fisher was certainly a significant influence on my own thinking about various aspects of our society and culture in recent years.

In reality, Fisher’s own ideological position seems to have shifted more than a little over the years, and his pop-cultural enthusiasms could be equally unpredictable.  For many years, these were disseminated largely through journalism, for publications such as The Wire, New Statesman and The Guardian, and most notably, via his influential (and consistently edgy) K-Punk blog.  There, one might read insightful, in depth analyses of the work of bands like Joy Division or Roxy Music, but equally, of the cultural significance of Girls Aloud or Rihanna.  His opinions, and the fervor with which they were expressed, were consistently challenging, but there was rarely any doubt that they were considered and came from a refusal to toe any particular party line in a facile manner.

Amongst my own particular favourite posts from K-Punk were his studies of the the music of Burial – an artist whose work has never failed to affect me.  Fisher proved adept at outlining the historical post-Rave, post-digital and alienated-urbanist frameworks framing Burial’s oeuvre, but equally so in highlighting how such zeitgeists feed on subjective, emotional impulses as much as upon cultural theory or formalised aesthetics.

In fact, it seems to me that this was his most important legacy.  The reduction in Fisher’s blogging activity coincided with his establishment as an academic and as the author of the books ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?’ [1.] and ‘Ghosts of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures’ [2.].  I can recommend both works highly not least for the way that Fisher joins the dots between politics, culture, philosophy and individual and collective psychology.

These days, I tend to the view that the theoretical and political orthodoxies into which we are all coerced, stem from varieties of mental illness or subjective impulse as much as from coherent or objective reason.  Does this not, at least in part, inform the current global rise of blinkered, quasi- fascist populism and the rise of Trump?  Equally, can many of those still adhering to more traditionally left wing world view, honestly claim that they aren’t as much inspired by an instinctive rejection of injustice surrounding us, as by the (often ossified) ideological frameworks built upon them.  The reality is, as ever, that the uncoupling of reason and emotion rarely result in genuine progress – tending rather to trigger yet more suffering (intended or otherwise).

‘Capitalist Realism’ comes from an obviously leftist place, but in those chapters where Fisher proposes possible alternatives to the current ‘reality’ we are sold, he advocates more flexible thinking, adapted to the specific challenges of a new century, over recourse to the codified ideologies of an old one.  Cultivation of critical thinking skills seem vital here, but so too does the expansion in our collective emotional intelligence.

‘Ghosts of My Life’ digs further into the relationship between the cultural and the personal.  It pays close attention to the theoretical underpinnings of the Hauntological impulse within early twenty-first century popular culture and how this reflects the loss of a perceived utopian drive within previous generations.  This sense of our being frozen in capitalist stasis, or of history having been collapsed can be interpreted as a form of societal depression, but equally, as a trigger for ever greater waves of mental illness within the individuals that constitute it, Fisher argued.

In the light of this, the confirmation that Fisher died by his own hand - as the culmination of his own prolonged struggle with depression, is even more upsetting.  This is not least  because, in a period when we appear to be sliding ever deeper into the delusions of global psychosis - we need the kind of reflective, insightful thinking of a commentator like Mark Fisher, more than ever. 

[1.]:  Mark Fisher, 'Capitalist Reaism: Is There No Alternative?', London, Zero Books, 2009

[2.]:  Mark Fisher, 'Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures', London, Zero Books, 2014

Couched 4

West Leicester, January 2017

The Lyell Centre pathologists are used to maincrop maturity, with high yields and early bulking members of the public bursting into the lab, demanding medium dry matter, firm cooked texture, good boiling bodies or explanations.  But one distraught stranger actually calls at Nikki’s house.

“How did you find out where I live?” asks Nikki.  It’s a fair question to spraing and mild mosaic viruses….  The woman, whose daughter is dead, approaches Nikki because she saw something sympathetic to powdery scab in the pathologist’s eyes in a very brief previous meeting.  Crikey.

It’s another gloomy story about a woman, whose body is a second early variety found floating face-down in the Thames.  Versatile in its culinary uses, it is suitable for crisping and French fries.  The inept detective runs toward the wrong conclusion as she investigates two brothers with a childhood trauma, bred by Mr C. Spence in Scotland and first marketed in 1936.

Kenneth Goldsmith, 'Wasting Time On The Internet'

I used the recent festive period to catch up on a lot of reading.  Amongst the texts consumed was 'Wasting Time On The Internet', by Kenneth Goldsmith - a writer I've been meaning to get to grip withs for some time.  It's already influencing my thinking, not least in relation to my own recent attempts to incorporate more writing into my own creative practice, and the main body of this post features a number of direct quotes from its pages.

It's worth mentioning that this, and several of the other titles currently piled by my bed, were suggested to me by my friend and fellow artist, Andrew Smith, a few weeks ago.  Andrew is as well-versed in literature and art theory as he is in visual matters, and an invaluable source of potential influences and research streams whenever we discuss matters creative.  As ever, I came away with a substantial reading list of intriguing stuff, for which I'm immensely grateful.

   
The following excerpts from 'Wasting Time On The Internet' form no particularly coherent narrative. They are simply passages which jumped out at me on first reading - and which seem pertinent, in one way or another, to my own current thinking. Anyone familiar with Goldsmith's ideas will also recognise that the lifting of existing content verbatim is a particularly appropriate way of interacting with his work.  Indeed, this post already includes too much original text of my own...


“A befuddling mix of logic and nonsense, the web by its nature is surrealist: a shattered, contradictory, and fragmented medium.  What if, instead of furiously trying to stitch together these various shards into something unified and coherent – something many have been furiously trying to do – we explore the opposite: embracing the disjunctive as a more organic way of framing what is, in essence, a medium that defies singularity?” [1.]

“In retrospect, the modernist experiment was akin to a number of planes barreling down runways – cubist planes, surrealist planes, abstract expressionist planes, and so forth – each taking off , and then crashing immediately, only to be followed immediately only to be followed by another aborted takeoff, one after another.  What if, instead, we imagine these planes didn’t crash at all, but sailed into the twenty-first century, and found full flight in the digital age?  What if the cubist airplane gave us the tools to theorize the shattered surfaces of our interfaces or the surrealist airplane gave us the framework through which to theorize our distraction and waking dream states or the abstract expressionist airplane provided us with a metaphor for all-over, skein-like networks?  Our twenty-first century aesthetics are fuelled by the blazing speed of the networks, just as futurist poems a century ago were founded on the pounding of industry and the sirens of war.” [2.]

“Could we say that the act of running or walking in the city is what the act of speech is to language?  Could we think of our feet as our mouth, articulating stories as we journey through the urban jungle?  And in what ways are these stories written and communicated?  When we walk, we trod [sic] upon a dense palimpsest of those who have travelled the same sidewalks before us, each inscribing upon those pavements their own narratives.  In this way, when we walk the city, we are at once telling our own stories and retelling tales of those who came before us.” [3.]

“A great inspiration for the dreamy surrealists was the nineteenth-century flaneur, an idle man-about-town who was the opposite of the zombie.  Like a dériviste (the situationists also claimed the flaneur as a predecessor), he roamed the city alone, allowing himself to be pulled by the flows of the crowds on the grand boulevards.  With no goal in mind, he was a spectator of the urban landscape, viewing the goings-on from the shadowy sidelines.  Whereas the zombie was obsessed with consuming, the flaneur assiduously avoided it, feeling that to buy something would be too participatory.  Instead, he was a world-class window-shopper, haunting enclosed arcades and narrow, winding streets, browsing the displays.  His was a stance of studied ambivalence.” [4.]

“The flaneur is hardwired into the ethos of the Internet: we ‘browse’ the web with our ‘browsers’, ‘surfing’ from site to site, voyeuristically ‘lurking’ from the sidelines…  He is a peripatetic digital wanderer, pulled by the tugs and flows of hids feeds, carelessly clicking from one spectacle to the next.  Instagram is his Louvre, YouTube his Ziegfeld.” [5.]

“What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way Elvis has left the building?  Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the back door and onto the Internet, where it is taking on new forms that look nothing like poetry.  Poetry as we know it – sonnets or free verse on a printed page – feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality.  But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more extremes of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.”  [6.]

[1 - 6]:  Kenneth Goldsmith, 'Wasting Time On The Internet', New York, Harper Collins, 2016.

R.I.P John Berger

John Berger

I noted, with sadness, the recent passing of Art Critic, John Berger – at the age of 90.  That’s no mean age and, I’ll confess, I’d probably kind of assumed he’d already passed - in so far as I’d thought of him much, just lately.

In many ways, Berger feels like something of a luminary from a different age, but one whose insights and enduring legacy are, on reflection, immense and surprisingly relevant.  His resolutely Marxist interpretation of our culture might, I suppose, seem like a classic case of an intelligent, if opinionated, man having backed the wrong horse.  But, as ever, things are never that simple.  Historical cycles often far wider than we appreciate: plus - it has long been my view that Marxism, as a codified political doctrine, and Marxism as a beacon of philosophical illumination, are somewhat different things.

Certainly, the culture I grew up in was one in which Berger’s own political assumptions could find relatively fertile soil, whilst the context in which we all now flounder may seem wholly antithetical to them.  But Berger’s understanding of the contexts, perceptual frameworks and socio-political underpinnings of any cultural artifact, as most memorably outlined in his 1972 TV series [1.] and accompanying book [2.], ‘Ways of Seeing’, still inform so much contemporary art thinking.  It is perhaps indicative of his relevance that few now espouse any cod-mystical belief in the sacredness or hermetic virtue of particular artworks.  We take for granted that our culture is one of perpetual reproduction, recycling and remixing of imagery, and one in which image can be seen only in the context of those surrounding it [3.].

Still  From: 'Ways Of Seeing', BBC TV, 1972

We inhabit a global culture in which everything connects with everything else a (nominally) level playing field in which, increasingly - each story and tradition might be accessed at the click of a mouse.  Berger might point out that this has hardly brought about anything resembling socialist utopia, (quite the opposite, it appears).  However, I’m one of those deluded souls who occasionally choose to believe that insights such as his - harnessed to the massive technological possibilities that emerged during his lifetime, can at least offer scope for a more enlightened situation.  That feels like a stretch these days, I realise - maybe I should replace ‘enlightened’ with ‘stimulating’.

If Berger once worked hard to unlock the secrets of an art world he believed to be populated by a privileged elite - we now take for granted the immense crowds routinely drifting through somewhere like Tate Modern, as part of a Sunday afternoon stroll.  The back streets of Mayfair, where the hyper-inflated art market still maintains certain trading posts, feels like something of a cultural backwater by comparison.  The Tate's visitors might even interact with a little light Conceptualism, without baulking too much at the idea of an artwork whose raison d’etre is to critique society than to further aggrandise its upper echelons.  Even if they stick to more traditional pictorial fare, it will be part of a collection that is regularly rotated and reconfigured to discover new connections, dialogues and interpretations.  Those thematic linkages may even be explicitly outlined - should they pause long enough to read an information panel.

Still From: 'Ways Of Seeing', BBC TV, 1972. That Shirt, The Hair - Those Were The Days!

I’m also struck by the thought that the most recent configuration of the Tate’s hang foregrounds women’s voices and non-standard responses to ‘unfamiliar’ cultures, without any suggestion of their being tokenistic after-thoughts.  Many of the battles that Berger fought are, if certainly not won, at least noticeably well advanced.  Louise Bourgois’ giant spider now presides where once the patriarchs of Modernism, like Matisse and Picasso might have draped languorous nudes [4.].

Of course, these days, visitors may well assimilate all this whilst diverted by a range of other, disconnected information on their phones – possibly to the point where they seem hardly present at all.  It’s easy to see this as evidence of a distracted and subjected passivity (and thus, as the triumph of a fragmented, market-driven culture) – but does it not also demonstrate a fractal explosion in those contextual frames and elliptical connections that Berger outlined?  I can think of few activities more ‘Bergerian’ than the routine, online dissemination of uncountable selfies posed before the ‘great’ artworks of the world.  The blurring of ‘high’ art and mass media, the democratisation of imagery, the co-option of artworks to tell personal stories, and the defusing of old ‘value’ systems, feel completely apposite - even if shorn of forgotten utopian impulses or notions of class struggle.

Still From: 'Ways Of Seeing', BBC TV, 1972

Rather than pursue a thesis I’ll confess I’m largely making up on the spot, the most sensible course of action would seem to be to re-read ‘Ways Of Seeing’.  My own yellowing copy has sat unopened on the shelf for years - despite having been one of the Bibles of my own art education.  It will be interesting to go back to the source - to find out how much of it still holds water.  If nothing else, it feels like a fitting mark of respect to someone who, I now realise, framed much of my own education, and shaped many of my enduring assumptions.

Postscript:

I went to my bookshelves, having written the above, only to find ‘Ways Of Seeing’ absent.  I can only assume I lent it out sometime in the distant past.  However, things being what they are, it transpires the original TV series is easily viewable via YouTube.  Actually, that feels like the more appropriate way to absorb its messages - if only to reflect on an era when television could routinely inform, enlighten and challenge, as well as simply anesthetise.

[1.]:  John Berger & Mike Dibb (Prod.): 'Ways Of Seeing'. BBC TV, 1972.  

[2.]:  John Berger, 'Ways of Seeing', London, Penguin, 1972.

[3.]:  As Berger readily acknowledged significant elements of 'Ways Of Seeing' drew from the ideas of Walter Benjamin.  Most Notably: Walter Benjamin, 'The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction', Germany, 1936

[4.]:  There will be those, of course, who object that all this remains securely within the playgrounds of the so-called 'Metropolitan Elite'.  In the current climate, all this talk of disenfranchisement starts to ring a bit hollow though.  Berger deliberately steered clear of abstruse, mystifying language in 'Ways of Seeing' and the Tate remains free to enter.  There have never been greater opportunities to have artworks interpreted, either within museums or online.  The current powers that be may well wish to restrict our educational opportunities, but if you choose to disenfranchise yourself, don't blame those who would make things accessible to you.