Manifestos and Madness

“Mama always told me not to look into the eye's of the sunBut mama, that's where the fun is” —Blinded by the Light, Bruce Springsteen

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. —F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909)

In the recent issue of Harpers Magazine an article by T. M. Luhrmann focuses on how the Christian Hippie movement of the sixties became the evangelical right of today. It was both mesmerizing and enlightening to read about this recondite subject that so few have researched. We have a strong tendency as Americans to wish for expeditious answers and ignore the deeper meaning and history behind things. To discover the Jesus Christ Superstar of my youth, that even I, a devote atheist, found inspiring, was the underpinning of much of what Democrats today despise, was nothing short of revelatory. It occurred to me, however, that we are wired for such things be it religion, art, science, etc.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvVr2uks0C8]

In 1909 a young radical named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the Futuristic Manifesto. That same year Nicola Tesla had presciently predicted our current wireless network we are so desperately dependent on, Ernest Shackleton had nearly died visiting the south pole and the fragmented sub-cultures of Europe were stirring with resentment toward empire. It is a compelling bookend to the denouement that was the sixties. The flower children, hippies and the Summer of Love actually set the stage for todays right wing radicalism as a bookend to Marinetti’s embrace of Futurism.

Luhrmann eloquently describes his investigation revealed the children of devote Catholics and Protestants who loved God, country and JFK bore the fruit of the evangelical, privileged class of the right-wing today. Hippies drawn to hallucinogens and free love in order to escape the confines of modernity found themselves pulled toward the security of big church love and a need to belong outside of addiction, filth and disillusion lay the open arms of evangelicals and a different, more structured religious belief. In effect this is absolutely the same thing that has happened in art throughout time. The ebb and flow of radical vision gives way to reactionary responses that reinforce accepted forms of creating. The late Thomas Kinkade, the so-called ‘painter of light’ was the most successful and popular artist in America over the past twenty years. Kinkade, just like the Futurists, leveraged a popular mythos to express a dogma, in his case a Christian ethos. Americans sacrificed critical thinking for wealth, which in turn they were denied by the elite. As Robert Hughes said of Jeff Koons,

“If cheap cookie jars could become treasures in the 1980s, then how much more the work of the very egregious Jeff Koons, a former bond trader, whose ambitions took him right through kitsch and out the other side into a vulgarity so syrupy, gross, and numbing, that collectors felt challenged by it.”

It is a parallel reflection of our inability to step back from the edge and accept the uncertainty of not-knowing. We want, damn it, we demand certainty in our society. We hold smart phones that provide instant answers, drive cars connected to satellites hovering in orbit 22,000 miles above our heads yet lubricated by a fluid born from the detritus of millions of years ago. It is no wonder we live in an age of fracture, of a potential universal schizophrenia. Marinetti and his fellow Futurists rang the warning bell of this ideation in 1909! Of course, Marinetti himself avoided the outcomes of his belief but many of his fellow Futurists fell pray to it, dying as a result of horrors of trench warfare.

Whether art, religion or science the key to enlightenment is ones ability to come back from the edge of radical experience. Science is now reaching the same boundaries of truth as all dogmas before it. Cosmologists like Leonard Susskind question the idea that truth is accessible at all. He has walked to the edge of reality and he has stepped back. This is closer to the methodology native cultures of the Amazon basin use to accept the complexities of our world. It is a fair analogy. Although, Amazonian basin tribes do not carry smart phones or access the internet, they are surrounded by a pharmacopeia that to this day is still little understood by modern medicine and science. Shaman acutely understand the relationship between the frontiers of our own imaginings, understanding and reality and the present. They say ‘plants speak to them directly’ but really mean the ingestion of psychotropics allow access to a knowledge that expands our postmodern understanding of reality. Like the best artists, scientists and devout, they approach the sublime with feet firmly planted on the ground. They do not embrace dogma, but rather the uncertainty of our world and in so doing they scrape against a kind of truth.

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.” ― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

For those hippie, Jesus-freaks turned right-wing evangelicals, the psychotropics ingestion of the sixties was a result of psychological loss. They discontent from the mainstream culture was not as it would seem a matter of direct denial of its efficacy, but rather more psychologically bound in its adherence to sociological structures that disrupted acceptance. If you’ve watched the show Mad Men then you understand this reaction. 1950’s America was a reaction to the simultaneous hubris of winning a war that we had little to do with (compared to Europe or Asia) and left America wealthier than it deserved due to its bounty of industrial resources. It was denial of death (as opposed to the Futurists) and an embrace of immortality (realized the in the dogma of corporate culture). Beware the manifesto, the embrace of certainties, liberal, conservative or otherwise as it only leads to a society of judgement, and absolution.

Anthropic Landscapes and Memory

Apologies to Simon Schama’s fine book Landscape and Memory, but my title is appropriate for discussing how we observe art. The question that often comes up with friends of mine who are non-visual artists is “how do I look at art?” At a recent open studio, a friend of mine and I were ruminating on the fact his two studio mates received a great deal more attention at these events than he did. His work is an extension of the abstract expressionist vein. His fellow studio artists create much more traditional work that harkens back to the 19^th century traditions — plein air landscape paintings and wire mesh sculptures of beautiful human bodies. One after the other we would watch people enter his studio, garnish a bewildered look and either pause like a deer in the headlights or scurry out unable to form words. I am not, by any means advocating one form over another. They are all accomplished artists in their own right. What is mystifying is the very specific reaction to abstraction (without bogging down in the argument that they are all technically abstract artists). Why are Americans adherent in 2013 to work that is based on ideas 160 years old? It is not as though Abstract Expressionism is young.

Arshile Gorky, the progenitor of Abstract Expressionism began making work pushing in that direction in 1930. In 1942, the New School artists saw a painting at Betty Parsons by Max Ernst made from dripping paint from a can tied to a string. Shortly thereafter Pollock began experimenting with drip painting until he was ‘discovered’ in 1947. The greater American public has been aware of abstract expressionism since Life magazine published its now famous exposé on Jackson Pollock in 1949, 64 years ago. So why the cognitive dissonance or at the very least, misunderstanding and mild approbation to Abstract Expressionism?

Our modern world is fraught with ambiguity and a lack of knowledge-authority. Where painting was once looked upon as the source of some of that knowledge-authority, offering a gateway to our subconscious at the genesis of apocalyptic behavior, it now holds virtually no authority. As J. M. Bernstein says, “So the disenfranchisement of art entails the disenchantment of nature, which disenchantments jointly entail the disenchantment of society.”^[i] A recent American Psychological Association survey^[ii] discovered that Millennials are the most stressed out generation yet due in large part to their hyper-connectivity with smart phones, tablets and computers. To Bernstein’s point, our contemporary world is accessed almost exclusively through the simulacrum and it’s stressing the hell out of us. If we are to believe Bacon’s approach to painting as sensation then how is that possible by looking at Pollock on your iPhone? At its core, viewers feel disassociated from abstraction because it resembles a pixelation of their simulated daily experience. On the other hand, the arcadia of 19^th century painting and sculpture, feels much more secure in its avoidance of anything digital at all. Its simulation provides a gesture toward nature and forgotten landscapes, not the advance of psychotherapy and the digital age. Despite the failings of Denis Dutton and Ellen Dissanayake’s attempts to quantify art-making as anthropological grounded^[iii], the foundations of our residual memories do seem to be made from the collective recollection of our early ancestors arcadian experiences on the great plains of the African subcontinent. Why else would Picasso be more palatable than Pollock to a global audience if not for his theft of the tribal?

Getting back to the question of how one should look at art, I have come to realize its the same as asking how do you taste food. Both are couched in a combination of epigenetics, life experiences and historical knowledge. This is the kind of thinking behind Schama’s book Landscape and Memory. Speaking on the nature of Anselm Keifer’s work in the context of German history, specifically Naziism Schama astutely comments, “For it has attached to countless artists and anthropologists who have parted company with Enlightenment skepticism about the cultural force of myth and magic and who have seen in their complicated symbolic elaboration something more than a hoax perpetrated on the naive by the unscrupulous.” There is a seduction in how we own our observations whether scholar, scientists or barista. All art is selling a seductive observation. How we look at another’s observance is highly dependent on our own seductions, experiences, genetics and memory.

Abstract Expressionism is very self referential, meaning it focuses inwardly on both a psychology of observation as well as art history itself. Pollock was equally enamored with dismantling and reconstructing the conventions of painting technique, approach and practice that came before him as he was in unravelling his on manic depression through the sensation of painting. It is asking a great deal of people in today’s existence of simulacrum and simulation to extend their own observations simultaneously inward and free of irony, as well as metaphorically toward the experience of paints plasticity in service to sensation. It’s not impossible but it is indeed an esoteric exercise that will likely only be coveted by a select few.

Retraction and reactionary behavior is a logical outcome to rapid and disruptive change. Our current obsessions with the magical realms whether religious doctrine or the Twilight movies is just such a reactionary expression. The 70’s dreams of nuclear holocaust have transformed into zombies and vampires. Our addition to tool-making in the age of accelerated progress is causing our minds to fracture and is freezing creative thinking. In just my lifetime we have gone to a firm believe in Einstein’s relativity to the notions of multiverses and anthropic string theory. This severe compression of technological sophistication and philosophical expansion combined with our hyper-connectivity (try answering a trivia question without reaching for your smart phone) will inevitably force us through to another kind of existence, whatever that may be. In the meantime, we are forced to contend with our own dissonance and longing for utopian forms as a weak justification that whatever we do technologically it will lead, contrary to all past indicators, to a richer kind of existence. The new art will have to address Leonard Susskind’s assertion that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding. I’m looking forward to people asking me how to look at that art.

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^[i] Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Print. p. 241

^[ii] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/256133.php

^[iii] I am not disputing an obvious anthropological underpinning to art-making but rather the philosophical or anthropological scientific framework that Dutton and Dissanayake use to make their particular and related arguments related to how art is made.

Well Heeled

“We are each born into paradox: the paradox of the infinite-imagining mind and the finite, cause-and-effect body. So much of our suffering arises from the fact that we can imagine ourselves as gods-immortal, omniscient, impervious to harm-but we cannot be them.”

—Dana Levin, The Kenyon Review

 I was walking home this week along one of my usual routes and happened to glance up when a woman in her thirties and her friend were walking up ahead. There was nothing particularly unique about either woman, a brunette and a blond, the blond pushing a baby stroller. Normally I would dismiss even the most compelling woman pushing a child for the obvious reasons but on this day I happened to notice she was wearing four inch platform shoes. The irony was bewildering to me. I felt celebratory for her command of her sexuality and power post pregnancy but also simultaneously felt she was teasing at loosening her marital bonds. Obviously, I was drawn to the heels and their sexual undertones but it was how they were worn that really got me thinking. I kept walking wondering what it is about heels in particular that illicit such strong reactions in men and why women across a broad spectrum choose to wear them, despite their often painful commitment. Why is it they are such a loaded form of expression? Can high heel ever just be shoes?

Since 2000 I have noticed a marked increase in the height of women’s heels. Even more intriguing is the continued hyper sexualization of younger and younger women with high heels playing a powerful role in that. The photo above was shot this morning through the window of a store called Forever 21. Aside from the idiocy of the store’s name, it is obvious the store is making a clear connection between youthful vigor and high heels. Of course on a very superficial level, heels provide height to women who by pure biology are predominantly shorter than men. Even the term high heels is now a reference to a range of shoes from stacked platforms to stilettos. Karen Kay of The Guardian UK says; "A pair of heels allows me to view the world from a different vantage point. I can look people in the eye, so those who previously looked down their nose at me must view me on their level – a psychological benefit that comes into play socially and in the workplace."

I’m not interested in using this venue for a discussion on the legacy of feminism, the male gaze or a dialogue on ‘taste’. There has been much written on those topics. If you want to read about them a simple Google search will provide a plethora of background. No, my interest is very specifically on the nature of power. The history of high heels goes back to at least the Egyptians 3,000 years ago. The high priests, kings and queens wore ceremonial leather stacks that were arguably the first high heels. In ancient Greece heels were used in plays to provide a clear distinction between character’s social status. In the 18^th century, Louis XIV established an edict that no person in France could wear heels taller than his own. As a show of  belligerence, Marie Antoinette wore 2 inch heels to guillotine in 1783. Power and the high heel are fused at the hip. Clearly, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest it is merely status, power or physical height extension that is at play for women wearing high heels. Sex and titilation are the obvious elephant in the room and where there is power there is sex.

In speaking with a female friend of mine the other evening I mentioned my love of heels on women. It is often said women pay close attention to shoes on men, but the first thing I generally notice about a woman is her shoes. An artful and highly stylized pair of heels will get my attention every time. I’m not talking about what men derogatorily refer to as “stripper shoes,” but noticing the difference between a pair of Christian Louboutin’s or Manolo Blahnik’s. In contrast a pair of Keds or ballet flats causes an immediate dismissal on my part. For the record, I'm single. The anthropologist E. O. Wilson has said,

Based on comparative animal ecology and behavior one would predict that males should be advertising through the display of their assets (physical or otherwise). And while males do advertise in Western society, females also engage in equally conspicuous advertising and sexual signaling. Not only do we have male-male competition and female choice, but we also have female-female competition and make choice acting simultaneously...

Increased heel height creates an optical illusion of ‘shortening’ the foot, slenderizes the ankle, contributes to the appearance of long legs, adds a sensuous look to the strike, and increases height to generate the sensation of power and status.[¹]

It’s unquestionably unfair and a clear objectification of an otherwise unique and possibly fascinating human being, but there it is. For me this is no different than noticing the difference between a man who knows how to accurately tie a full windsor knot or a cheap Men’s Warehouse suit and a hand tailored one. As Flaubert said, "Le bon Dieu est dans le detail" (the good God is in the detail).

We are keen in America to wave the flag and point out how different we are than our Muslim counterparts but the reality is we are much closer than we care to admit. One of us is trapped by a religion of consumerism and it’s formal constraints and the other by the Islamic tradition of the 600’s. Women of means who wear burkhas in Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. will wear Christian Dior or Yves Saint Laurent underneath. Despite the constraint of their dogma, the individualism is there and the need to assert individual power remains. In America women live by the law of The Gap, LIMITED, H&M or Charlotte Russe. These popular clothing stores produce the same mundane fashions year after year. To see women on the streets or in offices is to see compliance to a consumer sameness. But shoes — shoes can be the one standout in an otherwise bland world. It is a way to compete as E. O.Wilson stated. Even a knock-off pair of Louboutins, with their Catholic-red underbellies is enough to establish a subtlety of power even if the rest of the ensemble is jeans and a tee shirt. This, I argue is the underlying push toward ever higher heels in the U.S., our growing sense of repression in an ever more ironic world that asks women to simultaneously exhibit hyper-sexualized behavior while being good domestic, child-rearing, church-going wives and mothers. Stilettos may be an expression of a collective post 9/11 PTSD.

On a deeper level of semiotics, shoes are a fetish. As Marcel Danesi states in his book Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, “The fetish is a sign that evokes devotion to itself. In some cultures, this devotion is a result of a belief that an object has magical or metaphysical attributes.” Despite heels being painful, causing deformities or several other generally negative health conditions, millions of women in western culture wear them every day. The economic restrictions of the recession coupled with the complexities of daily modern life, likely elevates our need for some kind of magic. As Elizabeth Semmalhack has indicated, heel height in the US and economic depression are a corollary^[2]. High heels are a socially acceptable form of sexual expression, unlike the limited possibilities of tattoos or plunging necklines. Think Sarah Palin in the last presidential election. Indeed women can be the biggest promoters of their own high heel wearing;

Zoe Mayson, a business psychologist, suggests that I am not alone in valuing the heel as a professional asset. "There are a lot of people who think women do themselves a disservice by wearing heels, but I'm not in that camp. They are a psychological asset, and we can use them to our advantage. I work a lot with men in suits around a boardroom table, and I would never lead a session in flats. Heels give me gravitas that I would not have in lower shoes.

"From an evolutionary point of view, natural selection favours traits that increase our individual reproductive success. Heels get you noticed and give you physical stature, which in turn, gives you power, without compromising your femininity. So often, women have to take on male attributes to be successful in the workplace, and this is a great way of digging our heels in and saying no."^[3]

I have no interest in creating more pain or difficulty for women. I can’t imagine the daily complications and difficulties encountered by women from the glass ceiling of workplaces and the inequality of pay to the simple biological issue of menstruation. It is indeed true most men wouldn’t last a week in a woman’s shoes (sorry for the pun.) In fact there’s a hilarious movie by the late Blake Edwards called Switch where Ellen Barkin plays a man trapped in a woman’s body that comedically highlights this very idea. I do think that owning one’s own drives, desires and compulsions leads us all to a healthier outcome. I am looking forward to the day when this madness of derisive punditry that pits one against the other will end. Repression has persisted a lot of bad things in this country beginning with its birth and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans by English Puritans. Perhaps heels will come down in height and I’ll become less emphatic about their distinguishing qualities on women when we grow more open as a society. In the meantime I continue my search for the woman with the perfect pair of Christian Lacroix’s.

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^{[1] Smith, E.O. (1999) High Heels and Evolution: 254}

^[2] http://shine.yahoo.com/satc/dangerous-high-heels-womens-shoes-reach-hazardous-heights-during-the-recession-1278751.html

^[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/jul/21/high-heels-stilettos-fashion

Instagram, Nostalgia and Fascism

“There’s a rule of thumb you can count on in each succeeding version of the web 2.0 movement: the more radical and online social experiment is claimed to be, the more conservative, nostalgic, and familiar the result will actually be.” —Jaron Lanier, from You Are Not A Gadget

I’ve been thinking lately why it is I don’t like Instagram (or Hipstamatic). On its face it is a simple photography app that allows you to share the photo’s you take from your smartphone to a larger social network. Recently the founders of the company, Kevin Systrom, 28 and Mike Krieger, 25 sold Instragram to Facebook for $1bn. In two short years the two managed to take the idea from zero to 30 million users.

Rather than delve into the history of photography and its social relevance or our connection to gadgetry I thought I would simply touch upon the overarching issues that I find unsettling with the adoption of an app like Instagram.

1. Second-order expression. In Lanier’s brilliant manifesto quoted above he talks about the two forms of expression. Primary expression is a singular idea (obviously formed through the artist/inventor’s relation to society and culture) producing a unique set of ideas. Secondary expression on the other hand, is a riff on the former. Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwBmPiOmEGQ] is a clear example of first order expression, along with Arthur C. Clark’s book (and whom consulted on the making of the film). Second-order expression is the Apple commercial referencing Kubrick’s original film.  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHJkAYdT7qo] It is an ironic gesture that inverts artificial intelligence as a mechanism that is suggested to be inherent in an Apple computer in the positive. The original film of course, is a conversation on ontology, not reliability. Second order expressions undermine not only their original references but the meaningfulness of expression as a whole, because they cheapen the act and force all first order expressions into ironic loops.
2. Nostalgia. The word has roots in the Greek but was originally coined by the 1688 doctor Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation. Nostalgia was not born of the poetic but the medical and was created to describe an affliction. Patients suffering from nostalgia were said to produce “erroneous representations” and acquired a “lifeless and haggard countenance” and “indifference toward everything.” Today, by some estimates, half of all the bits carried across the internet reference Television. Photography is as Susan Sontage said, memento mori in and of itself. Why is it necessary then to flavor it immediately with the countenance of the past? Is the present so objectionable in its presence that we must immediately stain it with a faux historical tint? Aren’t smartphones supposed to provide us access to greater insight in order to advance ourselves as a culture, as human beings? Instead they’ve become sophisticated toys that serve as tools for further distancing ourselves from the problems and challenges of our present being. What is Hipstamatic adding to the conversation?
3. Fascism. Some will undoubtedly find it extreme that I am bringing politics and especially fascism into play when talking about a simple phone app, but I don’t find it so. Fascism as a socio-political dynamic has a way of creeping up on us. It doesn’t just jump out of the woodwork and assert itself. Our particular brand of soft-fascism lacks allegiance to a particular ideology and instead supports a deeply flawed consumer spending based form of unbalanced capitalism. Instagram is a particular celebration of this as it simultaneously emphasizes the accumulation of wealth (in the founders receiving $1bn) and the reinforcement of an idealized past (various Instagram filters). The multiplying effect comes in its immediate social connectivity and broadcast across a global communications platform, the internet. In Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism, the eleventh is: “Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts...Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.” I don’t think it is a stretch, especially in light of Jared Lanier’s book, to suggest that Instagram undermines free expression and creates an anti-intellectual skew on art production. All you have to do is apply x filter to y photograph, and boom, instant art all of your friends who comment on it as beautiful, lovely and awesome. Instagram in broad strokes reinforces amateurism in art-making. Schlock replaces fine art.

At the end of the day I don’t like Instagram (or Hipstamatic) because it undermines my own life’s work — art making. This is not to say I think those of you who use Instagram are fascists or hate art. Obviously I'm in a minority here and many people I hold dear use the app. On the contrary. What I think is, we’ve all become artistically lazy. The experience of our daily lives is so manufactured it is hard to see beyond that which is prepackaged and neatly delivered to us. The artist Lucas Samaras began ‘breaking’ Polaroid cameras in the 70’s in order to force unexpected results with the photographs those cameras made. The results are often stunning. Someone needs to start ‘breaking’ Facebook, Instagram and other social mechanisms as a way of regaining our creativity and our real sense of identity. We must learn to program so that we can participate in the design of the world in which we currently live rather than remain passive participants in someone else’s design, often in the service of a profit based enterprise. We should not fall victims to "indifference toward everything" and the immediacy of candy-coated pretty photographs.