towards a more ambient art

Hi everybody on the rhizome list,

I'm taking a break from mowing my property. It's an acre and most of
it is pretty hilly. I'm halfway done.

I'm always thinking about craft vis concept, design vis idea,
implementation vis plan. If it was all idea, designers would be out
of a job. What a designer does is implement an idea craftily and
skillfully, so that the way in which the initial idea is encoded
enhances/embodies/enlivens/substantiates the idea.

I've been thinking about this experiment a lot:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/0,8542,981741,00.html

The experiment itself is much more interesting and successful to me
than any of the individual pieces of art used in the experiment.

It's easy to dismiss the homeowners in the experiment as philistine,
but I think that's too convenient.

I think most people expect there to be some
implementation/craft/design involved in art. Indeed, that is the
"art" of art. It's not that people necessarily want a physical
object, although perhaps that's how most people often express their
disappointment in concept-centric art ("there's NO THING to it").

I was watching Pulp Fiction the other night, and it occured to me
that, as with "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (or Hamlet for that
matter), much of the "art" of Pulp Fiction is in the dialogue that
occurs "in between" the "plot" of the film. The plot is just a
vehicle for some quirky dialogue and interesting acting. Indeed, all
of Shakespeare's plots were already well known. His invention was
not in the plots, but in the art/craft of playwriting implementation.
Just as Hitchcock's genius was not in plot construction or even
script writing (neither of which he did), but in the craft of film
directing.

So the Cliff's Notes to "Merchant of Venice" are by no means
"Merchant of Venice" itself. Because the art of that play is not
merely in a summary of it, but in the implementation of it. Yet with
so much object-incidental contemporary conceptual art, all we get are
the Cliff's Notes. Cage's 4'33'' or Sherry Levine's "After Walker
Evans" – those are Cliff's Note pieces. I don't need to experience
those pieces to "get them" entirely. The Cliff's Notes explanation
of the pieces will wholly suffice.

Note that I am NOT dissing pieces like "printer tree" (
http://www.endnode.net/install.html ) or "listening post" (
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html ). Both of
those pieces, although obviously conceptual, are not "merely"
conceptual. I can read about those project and see photographs and
quicktime videos of those installation spaces, but until I experience
the installations in person, I am not getting the full effect of the
art. There is "art" in the implementation of these concepts.

I don't want to impose rules on what is right and what is wrong
concerning the concept <—–> implementation continuum. But I will
say (for the billionth time) that I find art on the extreme "concept"
side of the spectrum particularly flat, pedantic, didactic, and
boring. Like reading Cliff's Notes.

Another disadvantage of Cliff's Notes-type art (and this becomes
evident in the above Guardian experiment) is that it doesn't wear
very well. I'm not going to re-read the Cliff's Notes to "Merchant
of Venice" for pleasure. Once I get it, I get it. Which is why
highly conceptual "Cliff's Notes" art works better in a gallery (or
in the footnotes of an academic essay) than in one's living
environment. In a gallery, you can cruise around, get the punch
line, feel enlightened, and leave. But in your home, you have to sit
and stare at a half sheep in formaldahyde, or an unmade bed, or the
lights switching on and off, or whatever it is.

When thinking of art, I always fall back on audio production
analogies, since that is the art I learned first. Cliff's Notes art
is like bubblegum pop music. It's like the Backstreet Boys. Chew it
up and spit it out. There's no depth to the production. There's no
craft in the production. It's enough to get the voices up front and
out there, and then a tried and true production formula will carry
the rest. And this approach works well in the highly structured,
insular, commercial environment of pop radio. Just as Cliff's Notes
art works well in the highly structured, insular, commercial
environment of the contemporary gallery or the festival installation
space. But such bubblegum/Cliff's Notes products don't wear too well
"in real life." "Stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-only-three-things"
items they ain't.

Not that everything has to be Tolstoy. But when so few things even
attempt to be Tolstoy and so many things are content to be Bazooka
Joe Bubble Gum Cartoons, it gets kind of boring for ye olde art
patron. The Cliff's Notes artist would say, "I'm just echoing the
meaninglessness and frivolity of our post-modern culture." Well why
on earth would you want to do that? If I'm already drowning in
banality, why do I need more of it?

So it's like there are two extremes – either the art is stupid and
frivolous and craftless and pissing into the void, or it's all
overboard political and tactical. The former is a silly punch line;
the latter is a moral object lesson. Neither are currently doing it
for me.


Here are some marginally applicable quotations:

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening
attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as
ignorable as it is interesting." - Brian Eno, 1978

"A lot of people listen to music and they're really just listening to
a voice with music in the background. I've never really listened to
that. I've just listened to everything - the guitars and the whole
lot." - Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, 1992

"Boring Sidney, Boring. Exterminate! Exterminate!"
- John Lydon in "Sid and Nancy"

"I think you're rationalizing this whole thing into something you did
on purpose. I think we're stuck with a very stupid and a very dismal
looking album. This is depressing. This is something you wear around
your arm, you don't put this on your f***ing turntable."

- David St. Hubbins in Spinal Tap re: the album cover to "Smell the Glove"


back to mowing,
curt

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