Conceptronica

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Since we can talk about art in here without straying off the point, I happened across a pair of reviews on the Guardian website of a recent exhibition at the National Gallery of the now-critically-unfashionable Spanish painter Sorolla.

https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...anish-master-of-light-review-national-gallery

"His painting is all effects, and concerned with effects. He is interested in the glint of patent leather, the transparency of gauze over cotton, above all the play of light on all sorts of surfaces. Occasionally this results in some real originality, as in his portrait of Clotilde and their newborn daughter as two dark heads adrift in an oceanic white bed, new stars of the sea. But generally it leads to a kind of luxury painting, richly calorific, joyously upbeat and too often glib."

https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...anish-master-of-light-national-gallery-review

"He’s a sensualist, not a thinker. The absence of concept in his paintings makes him the slave of sight. Led by his eyes, he seems incredibly unconscious of what he’s doing."

Under both of these articles are comments from people responding with bemusement and horror to these critical views.

'I think the problem for arts writers, those that are predominantly writers and not painters, is that Sorolla does all the work for them. There's little hidden except the ease with which seems to paint. Saying it's formulaic etc gives the suggestion that it's easy if you're just prepared to sit down and learn how to do it... well it isn't. That's like saying oh - that Laurie Lee... yeah the writing's beautiful but it's just well practiced... it's only using words innit? How difficult can it be? I've got a dictionary and thesauraurus...

I've been painting in oils for 42 years... I've looked at Sorolla's work up close to whip some of his toolbox... like I do with all painters that catch my eye. And all painters do the same thing...
Sorolla makes it look easy; it isn't effin easy. As for a formulaic palette... have you any idea how different paints (some are earth-based, some are chemical dyes, some opaque, some transparent...) behave in different studio temperatures and humidities with other combinations of paint, oils and glazes? It's like bloody alchemy but without the handbook (well there are handbooks but I know damn well they're rarely on any contemporary student's reading list - because they email me and ask me). That's why a lot of painters stick to a set of colours that they trust to behave in a certain manner.'
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Anyway, I mention all this because it seems like in the art world at least there's a disdain for technique. Technique, talent, aesthetic pleasure - these are all nice things, but if there's (allegedly) 'nothing' else, then it's all for naught, or at least all for second-rate.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Notions of world-building haven't been without their controversy. Vancouver artist Sapien's 'Mein Kraft' overlays audio of people talking about detransitioning with chopped and screwed samples from popular fantasy videos games such as World of Warcraft. In the accompanying 5000 word blog post titled 'Final Fantasy, Final Solution', Sapien makes comparisons between the identitarian politics of fantasy games (in which societies are segregated between elves, orks, goblins and the like) with identity politics. "Kids are being taught to pick from an endless list of gender identities much in the same way as they'd be asked to pick if they want their character to be a goblin or a wizard" the blog reads. Sapien's track 'Avatar' was deemed by many to be transphobic in comparing the cosmetic morphology of video game characters (with whom you can endlessly adjust their hair colour, face shape and even skin colour) to those who undergo cosmetic surgery in order to transition. The final sentence of the essay is pointed; "if society continues down this line of identity politics there will be little to differentiate our notions of identity with those of the Nazi's".
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The culture war just consumes everything doesn't it. Even rubbish electronica.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Lul what the fuck they stole that off of me! Everyone knows I've been pushing that RPG line for years! Parasites!
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luka said:
Lul what the fuck they stole that off of me! Everyone knows I've been pushing that RPG line for years! Parasites!
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reading all their quotes from the piece and it really is like me and you wrote them.

dissensus concepts with 555-555 music.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
If a single sonic motif runs through a large proportion of conceptronica, it’s the crashing drum—a dramatic effect that sounds ceremonial and regal, but also vaguely punitive, like the smash of a police baton, or evocative of urban unrest, like the tinkling shards of a shattered riot shield. This imposing but ungroovy approach to percussion—probably first heard on Jam City’s Classical Curves
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innovation vs purification.

taking a strand of grime and purifying it.






clattering, abrasive syncopation without any volume dynamics.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Listening to some SOPHIE now, not really done so before

It's texturally delectable

It's sensorily titillating

It's like eating popping candy

It feels futuristic insofar as its using what sounds like the most sophisticated, exquisitely tactile sounds that 2019s machines can generate.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Having had a re-read, I'm not so convinced that world-building ties in neatly to all the theory-led arts-council-funded stuff. World building feels like a recurrence of the same basic impulse that gave you Wu Tang, Underground Resistance, Drexciya, the KLF, arguably even going back to Parliament-Funkadelic. Tight links with the art establishment as a promotional network / funding source feels like a newer thing, and probably more of a malign influence.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Perhaps there's even a Sorolla comparison here, then.

Except Sorolla is downgraded by postmodernist critics for using his technique to make things that only PLEASE.

SOPHIE is trying to be challenging, not pleasing.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I quite like the way that twitter responses seem to divide into
* People who hate it because they don't like theory driven music and they think Simon Reynolds is talking it up.
* People who hate it because they love theory driven music and they think Simon Reynolds talking it down.
* People who hate it because they think the only acceptable way of writing about music is basically "solid tunes but loses it a bit on the second side, will appeal to fans of Bogsnotter and Rancid Wombats" and they don't like words of three or more syllables.
 
M

mvuent

Void Dweller
luka said:
It's as brutal a hit piece as I've ever seen from him. Usually he reserves his venom for other writers, the competition.
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the overtly dorky name he gave it is the best part. "conceptronica" doesn't fit too well with a self image of being extremely cutting edge.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
luka said:
"What we set ourselves the task of doing on this project, was really to interrogate the concept of the concept. Well, what is a concept? How do we conceive of the concept? So that the image of this project became, for us, the mirror which examines itself in the mirror. A doubling and redoubling, and this motif is something you find represented sonically, visually and thematically, again and again throughout."
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rematerialization.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Since we can talk about art in here without straying off the point, I happened across a pair of reviews on the Guardian website of a recent exhibition at the National Gallery of the now-critically-unfashionable Spanish painter Sorolla.

https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...anish-master-of-light-review-national-gallery

"His painting is all effects, and concerned with effects. He is interested in the glint of patent leather, the transparency of gauze over cotton, above all the play of light on all sorts of surfaces. Occasionally this results in some real originality, as in his portrait of Clotilde and their newborn daughter as two dark heads adrift in an oceanic white bed, new stars of the sea. But generally it leads to a kind of luxury painting, richly calorific, joyously upbeat and too often glib."

https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...anish-master-of-light-national-gallery-review

"He’s a sensualist, not a thinker. The absence of concept in his paintings makes him the slave of sight. Led by his eyes, he seems incredibly unconscious of what he’s doing."

Under both of these articles are comments from people responding with bemusement and horror to these critical views.



Anyway, I mention all this because it seems like in the art world at least there's a disdain for technique. Technique, talent, aesthetic pleasure - these are all nice things, but if there's (allegedly) 'nothing' else, then it's all for naught, or at least all for second-rate.
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You would think that for post-modernists, any notion of an essential concept, an intrinsic telos, would be nonsense. You would think that they would think that there's only, say, the painting and what meaning people ascribe to it.

Someone "led by his eyes, incredibly unconscious of what he's doing" sounds fucking great. Don't let that secular cognition distort your sensual impulse.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
mvuent said:
the overtly dorky name he gave it is the best part. "conceptronica" doesn't fit too well with a self image of being extremely cutting edge.
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I love how irrationally annoyed loads of people seem to get by a writer coining a term to describe the stuff that they're talking about. I don't know whether they want people to keep using wordy explanations of the thing every time they need to refer to it, or just never discuss anything that more than one piece of music has in common.

Actually I do know, it's the latter, isn't it? "it's all just music, man why do you have to keep putting things in boxes and labelling them." Fucking cretins.
 
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