Some notes on art
December 5th 2006 02:48
Why carve off some part of your life and call it "entertainment"? Shouldn't all life be purposeful, enjoyable activity?
"Entertainment" consigns enjoyment and pleasure to the gaps, denies it to the whole.
Why do people need the magical or mysterious, the escape from the mundane?
Do people need the magical or mysterious, the escape from the mundane?
We quickly locate relevant information in photos. We're taught through countless close-ups to read faces. And almost every aspect of 21st century life trains us in adaptation and pattern recognition.
Photos can render their subjects unreal -- for instance, pictures of Swiss buildings that make the place more unbelievable, not less.
Photos can show that they can’t -- for instance, a passport declaring how impenetrable a face is, and that it conceals.
Children and tards make good photography subjects.
The real disappoints. Are wedding days the happiest of your life?
People greeting liberators at Auschwitz. Is this the expression of perfect joy? Is this what perfect joy looks like? Is this what freedom looks like?
Is this what absolute misery looks like?
People long for the real, but they "cannot bear very much reality" (TS Eliot). Real life sex is ugly and boring, real life dialogue is frustrating, real life narrative is diffuse and meaningless.
Aesthetics is always partly the claim of order or purpose or meaning, and the imposition of these.
On the other hand again, aesthetics is backward looking. The aesthetic triggers a pre-existing pathway to pleasure or satisfaction. So only the non-aesthetic, the new, is meaningful. So in art we look for non-art, we look for what isn't yet art, what breaks free of art. We look for this on pain of being mouldables, driftwood.
What Poltergeist has seemingly demonstrated -- consider when a character tears his face off -- is that within the space of... what?… twenty plus years?... our standards of realism have been raised. This sort of image no longer triggers in us the horror (though it's quite possible, of course, that if movies were banned, our standards could revert).
This is something future generations may not be able to get -- this feeling of change. The real is inexhaustible in one sense, and there are always new ways to access it. But within the visually naturalistic, isn't there a plateau point? Can you get more real than real?
Perhaps the way forward is in terms of Brave New World sensoriums.
Or perhaps it is only the hyperreal that can be extended, blood getting bloodier.
Music in films inflates the personal and the non-consequential. What, after all, happens in Monster's Ball? Two people hook up -- big deal -- so what? But at the time of viewing, just as at the time of reading about some trivial hardship in the Bible, the events take on a cosmic significance.
Films in themselves (focusing on something, making it the object of consciousness) turn the personal cosmic.
Shyamalan films have a degree of dryness, objectivity, examining this curious specimen.
Zombies are partly suggestive of the horde vs the individual.
Apocalyptic films, more generally, are about the individual in a world of shit and the forced re-examination of values.
In a film, it is normal to concentrate on a single character. For instance, you never see anything except what's in the range of character A. If character B leaves and goes elsewhere, you don't follow him.
Frequently, you detail character A's reactions. And this gives a sense that what you're seeing, what the camera sees, is the character's consciousness -- even when the camera is clearly on the character, and therefore can't be what the character sees -- even in this case, it's character A imagining or feeling what he looks like.
The word "identification" glosses over, simplifies, and lies -- it should never have been introduced into the explanatory apparatus.
The wishy-washy school of directing actors goes: describe the character to them, then say a prayer.
Sometimes -- often, even -- we look to the actors to tell us how to react, how to read -- just as people need people laughing in order to laugh -- just as the responses of children mirror their parents.
Reversion to childhood...
In the surreal unknown world, we don't know what we should do and are allowed to do. In dreams, all meanings are open.
And all plays are non-naturalistic; their flesh is symbolism.
Dali would set up his easel at the end of his bed, and wake up and start painting before it faded.
Acting and writing both require you to dance like nobody’s watching -- that’s more than half the trick of them.
Reading involves encoding information.
"In most juvenile classics, they point out, the heroes and heroines tend to be relatively small and powerless; they are mice, rabbits, dogs, cats, hobbits, and of course children. They win through moral rather than physical strength, because they possess the standard folk-tale qualities of intelligence, courage, kindness, and luck." -- Alison Lurie, "The Passion of CS Lewis", New York Review of Books, Thursday 9 February 2006
... somewhat like the disappearance of magic from the world that happens, for instance, in Lord of the Rings, in the Dark is Rising series, in the Chronicles of Prydain. Man is now left to his own devices.
Does literature already count as a tool to describe the phenomenological? Or isn't it a means of capturing -- by way of triggering similar experience?
The problem (it could be said) with literature is that it doesn't formulate in truth-evaluable propositions. Novels are empty of content.
But this leads to an interesting point. Can the phenomenological be formulated in truth-evaluable propositions? Do words refer to experience, or is their meaning mainly a matter of use?
Is it possible to improve on the technology of literature?
Art is fundamentally about psychological portrayal, communication of what it's like, experience. It's not about propositional truth, so the reduction of art to theme is misguided.
After all, any claim made in the course of art is a matter of some character, perhaps the narrator, saying "I believe that x".
The more important propositions are not those about the empirical world, but those of the form, "This is valuable to me; is it valuable to you also?".
Sculpture is made for the specific environment, in which case it is effective but ephemeral. Or it is made for any environment, in which case it never scales the heights.
Much like theatre.
Much like any art?
In Sculpture by the Sea: the effects of coming upon something unexpectedly, or of response to the scenery, or of the scenery having had a story to tell you before you reach the work -- dream positions for sculpture.
Dance is semiotic: good dance is in the combined message of gesture and music.
I love Liszt and Brahms pieces where hysteria emerges from form.
Giving into music, allowing your reactions to be guided by it, is a form of surrender of responsibility and autonomy.
I recently heard my washing machine perform a jazz drum solo. It wasn't bad. It seemed that, as soon as the ear had detected a pattern, the drum beats melded effortlessly into something new. The piece was thus full of continual surprise, at the same time as one looked for an overall logic, and at the same time as one marvelled at the power of concentration and skill to create something this complex this easily.
Anarchy in the UK: the form and the speaker's enjoyment of the form, if not the absurdity of the words, argue against the authenticity of the content.
The Blue Danube is the musical counterpart to Shakespeare, the Bible and London. You don’t realize how well you know it. Hearing it is hearing a series of the already-familiar.
Reservoir Dogs changed our experience of the Steve Miller Band's "Stuck in the middle with you". -- In addition to associated imagery, it's now laughing at the end of the world, whistling in the dark. It's desperate, at the end of one's rope, lost in moral revulsion, but helpless.
What's demonstrated, very generally, is how perspective-based are our musical experiences.
Consider, also, the way The Smiths' "How soon is now?" is coloured by Charmed, or the way The Who's "Who are you?" is coloured by CSI. Such moves apparently take the age off a song, un-date the sound -- cold watering the idea of a progression in audience's tastes, and showing that age can simply be fashion.
A space for interpretation opens up the farther you get from the original context? Fifties songs are peculiarly adaptable now, we can soundtrack them on to violent scenes in Reservoir Dogs, we can soundtrack them onto horror. But why is it that 50s songs are more adaptable (or are they)?
Perhaps contemporary music is just as adaptable? After all, how soon does it take us to forget their original context?
It's easier to appreciate music in extract form. It's possible, for short periods, to hold attention, or a state or a mood or a perspective, or, for short periods, to suppress certain reactions or to ignore flaws. You can look to appreciate. And you can read what's there for maximum suggestiveness, and embroider it with imagination (the minotaur in Euripides' lost play would have been far more frightening off-stage than on). Similarly, when you have only a few words per page, or only a few words per minute, then everything becomes more significant, is read for more possibility.
Crouching Tiger has physics to its flying, but what the hell are the physics of Superman? What makes him move forward? Astro Boy has rockets in his shoes. Does Superman just… push really hard?
... quoth an acting teacher: it takes a while to break into the industry, so you've got to be patient and enjoy the process. If you hit a wall, that means you're on the point of a breakthrough. Hard work is the cure for frustration. You have to love the process, or you won't do it. And if you're afraid to do the work, if it feels like a chore, work out why. Because when you enjoy it, you make time for it...
The artist is indifferent to praise and blame.
It may be that to give birth to a new idea, you sometimes need labour pains, need to put the self under stress.
Similarly, for acting rehearsals.
Though not always. Occasionally you birth while dozing or half-asleep: the ideas come as of themselves.
Stonehenge is weird -- all these stones in the middle of bare, unstony fields -- you don’t realize the thousands of years of building, and all the gradual steps, and the transformation of the surrounding landscape itself.
The reality of art is mundane.
It's not possible to see all that you're doing.
The art goes first, the theory follows. After all, the one thing can be theorized in countless ways.
Even the theory-governed artists, even the ironists, don't realize all that they do. Though it's still arguable that they shortchange themselves.
Something is sometimes said to succeed both popularly and critically, or both critically and popularly. (You vary the order depending on which is the more surprising or more valuable.)
But what does it mean to be an audience? Are there really only two? Are they even that distinct? And why should success in terms of one arbitrarily defined demographic matter more than any other arbitrary demographic?
To repeat the cliche: movie critics don’t know the first thing about making movies; novelists can't do literary criticism; and theatre critics don’t know anything about acting -- couldn't tell bad from good, hard from easy, any more than the average member of the population could tell a stutterer from a non-stutterer.
Dogs and goldfish pretty much constantly hunt for food. Most humans, however, are designed to be able to satisfy such wants. So their energies must be turned elsewhere.
Art in this sense is genetic. Religion and story are genetic.
The image of Auschwitz is from this site.
"Entertainment" consigns enjoyment and pleasure to the gaps, denies it to the whole.
***
Why do people need the magical or mysterious, the escape from the mundane?
Do people need the magical or mysterious, the escape from the mundane?
***
We quickly locate relevant information in photos. We're taught through countless close-ups to read faces. And almost every aspect of 21st century life trains us in adaptation and pattern recognition.
***
Photos can render their subjects unreal -- for instance, pictures of Swiss buildings that make the place more unbelievable, not less.
***
Photos can show that they can’t -- for instance, a passport declaring how impenetrable a face is, and that it conceals.
***
Children and tards make good photography subjects.
***
People greeting liberators at Auschwitz. Is this the expression of perfect joy? Is this what perfect joy looks like? Is this what freedom looks like?
Is this what absolute misery looks like?
***
People long for the real, but they "cannot bear very much reality" (TS Eliot). Real life sex is ugly and boring, real life dialogue is frustrating, real life narrative is diffuse and meaningless.
Aesthetics is always partly the claim of order or purpose or meaning, and the imposition of these.
On the other hand again, aesthetics is backward looking. The aesthetic triggers a pre-existing pathway to pleasure or satisfaction. So only the non-aesthetic, the new, is meaningful. So in art we look for non-art, we look for what isn't yet art, what breaks free of art. We look for this on pain of being mouldables, driftwood.
***
What Poltergeist has seemingly demonstrated -- consider when a character tears his face off -- is that within the space of... what?… twenty plus years?... our standards of realism have been raised. This sort of image no longer triggers in us the horror (though it's quite possible, of course, that if movies were banned, our standards could revert).
This is something future generations may not be able to get -- this feeling of change. The real is inexhaustible in one sense, and there are always new ways to access it. But within the visually naturalistic, isn't there a plateau point? Can you get more real than real?
Perhaps the way forward is in terms of Brave New World sensoriums.
Or perhaps it is only the hyperreal that can be extended, blood getting bloodier.
***
Music in films inflates the personal and the non-consequential. What, after all, happens in Monster's Ball? Two people hook up -- big deal -- so what? But at the time of viewing, just as at the time of reading about some trivial hardship in the Bible, the events take on a cosmic significance.
Films in themselves (focusing on something, making it the object of consciousness) turn the personal cosmic.
***
Shyamalan films have a degree of dryness, objectivity, examining this curious specimen.
***
Zombies are partly suggestive of the horde vs the individual.
Apocalyptic films, more generally, are about the individual in a world of shit and the forced re-examination of values.
***
In a film, it is normal to concentrate on a single character. For instance, you never see anything except what's in the range of character A. If character B leaves and goes elsewhere, you don't follow him.
Frequently, you detail character A's reactions. And this gives a sense that what you're seeing, what the camera sees, is the character's consciousness -- even when the camera is clearly on the character, and therefore can't be what the character sees -- even in this case, it's character A imagining or feeling what he looks like.
***
The word "identification" glosses over, simplifies, and lies -- it should never have been introduced into the explanatory apparatus.
***
The wishy-washy school of directing actors goes: describe the character to them, then say a prayer.
***
Sometimes -- often, even -- we look to the actors to tell us how to react, how to read -- just as people need people laughing in order to laugh -- just as the responses of children mirror their parents.
Reversion to childhood...
In the surreal unknown world, we don't know what we should do and are allowed to do. In dreams, all meanings are open.
And all plays are non-naturalistic; their flesh is symbolism.
***
Dali would set up his easel at the end of his bed, and wake up and start painting before it faded.
***
Acting and writing both require you to dance like nobody’s watching -- that’s more than half the trick of them.
***
Reading involves encoding information.
***
"In most juvenile classics, they point out, the heroes and heroines tend to be relatively small and powerless; they are mice, rabbits, dogs, cats, hobbits, and of course children. They win through moral rather than physical strength, because they possess the standard folk-tale qualities of intelligence, courage, kindness, and luck." -- Alison Lurie, "The Passion of CS Lewis", New York Review of Books, Thursday 9 February 2006
***
... somewhat like the disappearance of magic from the world that happens, for instance, in Lord of the Rings, in the Dark is Rising series, in the Chronicles of Prydain. Man is now left to his own devices.
***
Does literature already count as a tool to describe the phenomenological? Or isn't it a means of capturing -- by way of triggering similar experience?
The problem (it could be said) with literature is that it doesn't formulate in truth-evaluable propositions. Novels are empty of content.
But this leads to an interesting point. Can the phenomenological be formulated in truth-evaluable propositions? Do words refer to experience, or is their meaning mainly a matter of use?
Is it possible to improve on the technology of literature?
***
Art is fundamentally about psychological portrayal, communication of what it's like, experience. It's not about propositional truth, so the reduction of art to theme is misguided.
After all, any claim made in the course of art is a matter of some character, perhaps the narrator, saying "I believe that x".
The more important propositions are not those about the empirical world, but those of the form, "This is valuable to me; is it valuable to you also?".
***
Sculpture is made for the specific environment, in which case it is effective but ephemeral. Or it is made for any environment, in which case it never scales the heights.
Much like theatre.
Much like any art?
***
In Sculpture by the Sea: the effects of coming upon something unexpectedly, or of response to the scenery, or of the scenery having had a story to tell you before you reach the work -- dream positions for sculpture.
***
Dance is semiotic: good dance is in the combined message of gesture and music.
***
I love Liszt and Brahms pieces where hysteria emerges from form.
***
Giving into music, allowing your reactions to be guided by it, is a form of surrender of responsibility and autonomy.
***
I recently heard my washing machine perform a jazz drum solo. It wasn't bad. It seemed that, as soon as the ear had detected a pattern, the drum beats melded effortlessly into something new. The piece was thus full of continual surprise, at the same time as one looked for an overall logic, and at the same time as one marvelled at the power of concentration and skill to create something this complex this easily.
***
Anarchy in the UK: the form and the speaker's enjoyment of the form, if not the absurdity of the words, argue against the authenticity of the content.
***
The Blue Danube is the musical counterpart to Shakespeare, the Bible and London. You don’t realize how well you know it. Hearing it is hearing a series of the already-familiar.
***
Reservoir Dogs changed our experience of the Steve Miller Band's "Stuck in the middle with you". -- In addition to associated imagery, it's now laughing at the end of the world, whistling in the dark. It's desperate, at the end of one's rope, lost in moral revulsion, but helpless.
What's demonstrated, very generally, is how perspective-based are our musical experiences.
Consider, also, the way The Smiths' "How soon is now?" is coloured by Charmed, or the way The Who's "Who are you?" is coloured by CSI. Such moves apparently take the age off a song, un-date the sound -- cold watering the idea of a progression in audience's tastes, and showing that age can simply be fashion.
***
A space for interpretation opens up the farther you get from the original context? Fifties songs are peculiarly adaptable now, we can soundtrack them on to violent scenes in Reservoir Dogs, we can soundtrack them onto horror. But why is it that 50s songs are more adaptable (or are they)?
Perhaps contemporary music is just as adaptable? After all, how soon does it take us to forget their original context?
***
It's easier to appreciate music in extract form. It's possible, for short periods, to hold attention, or a state or a mood or a perspective, or, for short periods, to suppress certain reactions or to ignore flaws. You can look to appreciate. And you can read what's there for maximum suggestiveness, and embroider it with imagination (the minotaur in Euripides' lost play would have been far more frightening off-stage than on). Similarly, when you have only a few words per page, or only a few words per minute, then everything becomes more significant, is read for more possibility.
***
Crouching Tiger has physics to its flying, but what the hell are the physics of Superman? What makes him move forward? Astro Boy has rockets in his shoes. Does Superman just… push really hard?
***
... quoth an acting teacher: it takes a while to break into the industry, so you've got to be patient and enjoy the process. If you hit a wall, that means you're on the point of a breakthrough. Hard work is the cure for frustration. You have to love the process, or you won't do it. And if you're afraid to do the work, if it feels like a chore, work out why. Because when you enjoy it, you make time for it...
***
The artist is indifferent to praise and blame.
***
It may be that to give birth to a new idea, you sometimes need labour pains, need to put the self under stress.
Similarly, for acting rehearsals.
Though not always. Occasionally you birth while dozing or half-asleep: the ideas come as of themselves.
***
Stonehenge is weird -- all these stones in the middle of bare, unstony fields -- you don’t realize the thousands of years of building, and all the gradual steps, and the transformation of the surrounding landscape itself.
The reality of art is mundane.
***
It's not possible to see all that you're doing.
***
The art goes first, the theory follows. After all, the one thing can be theorized in countless ways.
Even the theory-governed artists, even the ironists, don't realize all that they do. Though it's still arguable that they shortchange themselves.
***
Something is sometimes said to succeed both popularly and critically, or both critically and popularly. (You vary the order depending on which is the more surprising or more valuable.)
But what does it mean to be an audience? Are there really only two? Are they even that distinct? And why should success in terms of one arbitrarily defined demographic matter more than any other arbitrary demographic?
***
To repeat the cliche: movie critics don’t know the first thing about making movies; novelists can't do literary criticism; and theatre critics don’t know anything about acting -- couldn't tell bad from good, hard from easy, any more than the average member of the population could tell a stutterer from a non-stutterer.
***
Dogs and goldfish pretty much constantly hunt for food. Most humans, however, are designed to be able to satisfy such wants. So their energies must be turned elsewhere.
Art in this sense is genetic. Religion and story are genetic.
***
The image of Auschwitz is from this site.
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Comment by Adrienne
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Comment by Lisbeth
Comment by Norm
Consumption Malfunction
Equal and Opposite
Arses and Elbows
Footy Power
a well delivered post...ruminating, Norm
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by ag
Eat French Bread
Comment by postmoderncritic
Postmodern Critic
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
I think everyone is simultaneously a performer and a spectator, and it really bugs me when people use film to represent some kind of absolute reality...
There's nothing quite as frightening as yes-people, so I don't see the point of zombies. But then I don't see the point of horror (sorry, Bryn).
I don't think words describe an objective reality as there is no objective reality to be described...
Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop
*reflecting*
Lilla...
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Postmoderncritic -- not going to touch the objective reality question with a barge pole... at least, not yet.
Comment by informio
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog