Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

 
There's been quite a bit of comment in a recent talk by Mike Figgis on the subject of whether there's too much culture. The essential argument is that immediate access to digitally stored copies of films, texts and music has had a stultifying and conservative effect on art. As transcribed by Imomus:

"The 1950s was the birth of rock'n'roll. And let's say we can argue that the king of rock'n'roll is Elvis Presley. One of the most famous actors of that period is Marilyn Monroe, but there's also James Dean, there's Marlon Brando, and any number of other figures that we would now call icons. And they were recorded in the 1950s. And I wonder why, fifty years on, 2007, when you go to an event, say popular music, we're still seeing Elvis Presley. We're still seeing someone accompanied by two guitars and a bass and drums, and a chord structure which is pretty much three chords and twelve bars. There's nothing wrong with rock'n'roll in its limited way. But fifty years on they're still wearing the same clothes. They're still singing the same songs. And they're still trying to look like Elvis. Think about it -- it's jeans, it's leather jackets, nothing's changed. Now let's take 1957, say, and go back fifty years. That would be 1907, right? Can you imagine in 1957 the youth wanting to look and sound like someone from 1907? It's unthinkable. Because that seems like the dark ages. That's prehistoric, baby. So why? Why suddenly are we stuck in 1957? And I think the reason why is that we've become the prisoner of this reproductive image of ourselves, and we can't let it go."


Figgis is quite good on the subject of the emotional implications of our access to digital reproduction, with films and programmes instantly available where they would previously have been something ephemeral, that one might see only once, performed and consumed simultaneously. Nonetheless, I find it rather hard to agree with him with for any number of reasons. As several of the commenters at Click Opera acerbically point out, Mod culture was to a large extent predicated on imitating Edwardian styles of dress (in exactly the same way as David Wilkie Wynfield's photographs depict Victorian writers and artists dressed in medieval costume), which would seem to rather vitiate the argument from the outset. Art does after all tend to evolve very gradually with often little change or development over protracted periods of time; modernism's exhortation to make it new is the exception, not the rule. Nor is Figgis entirely consistent on this point; while decrying the conservatism he see digital reproduction as enforcing, he also welcomes its economic implications for film production, seeing it as leading to smaller and less mass market films.

More specifically, these sort of arguments could easily have been debated in relation to earlier forms of reproduction, such as photography or printing. This sort of argument tends to remind me of Gianni Vattimo’s essay The Death or Decline of Art which argues that once art resists tradition and loses its cult value, it loses its status and has to engage in self-referential dissidence and postmodernist pastiche; a kitsch aesthetic played out against a vapid culture. Bt contrast, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argued that modern art had discarded with the ritualistic cult value attached to works characterised by their unreproducability and authenticity. To Benjamin this creates a space for a form of art that is both more political and more democratic (though in practice, Benjamin also decries the commoditisation of art, while his admiration of Kafka is on the basis of the occluded and ritualistic character of a work that had more in common with folklore than with the contemporary novel). Communist aesthetics aside, I tend to agree with Benjamin and it seems to me that novelists like Pynchon or Stephenson could easily be described as producing the sort of work that best suits an age of digital reproduction, by embracing the overload of information rather than by rejecting it.

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posted by Richard 9:56 am