humour: media / politics

G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
swears said:
I haven't read any Zizek, but I would say the "official" position of UK and US culture seems to be a sort of sanctimonious forced seriousness and phoney caring.
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The two (official sanctimony and mediatized irony) act in a symbiotic relationship to create a sort of vortex of apathy and ultimate despair, its a feedbacking loop system isn't it...? Creating on the one hand an official account of unbelievable po-facedness and spincerity, on the other a "zing" based culture of pisstaking which amounts to nihilism, or at least black humour of the darkest stripe.

And phony caring- yes yes yes. A need for public displays of sentimental aggressive empathy- it was seen initially in the McCann case, but there are plenty of other examples, people feel the need to indulge themselves in emotional pornography ("oh- the humanity!") and this almost competitive desire to out emote their friends/colleagues in terms of public piety and pity... The whole thing being whipped up by a media only to happy to run very simplistic stories which basically write themselves. This can also be used to explain the repulsive rash of rape/incest etc etc auto-biogs clearly aimed at the "woman's interest" end of the market.
 
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Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
This kind of stuff makes me think of the old Adorno quotation: "To be pleased means to say yes"

I think that the excessive irony and detachment in art & culture is a product of the lack of any political sway the citizenry has in the west. There's no sense of meaningful attachment to any large political project, no investment in any kind of vision of the future, so why should art reflect/portray it? And this is probably why a lot of self-consciously "political" art seems so silly, because it really IS pointless: the cynical naysayers are usually RIGHT in this case. The American ruling class does not give a shit about die-ins, protests, letters to Congressmen, performance art, conceptual installations, any of it. Even antiwar art I like (who did those grotesque bulging Abu Ghraib comic-style pieces?) reaches few people and essentially changes nothing, and no one even pretends it will. And how could it? There's nothing at stake with most art, no one's going to get in real trouble, no one's going to prison over a painting, so say/draw/create whatever you like, and maybe you'll cause a stir to a portion of NYT readers, but that's about it. Everyone's over dada, we get it on Adult Swim now. Rappers are still considered more dangerous than most artists, and still face police harassment for songs that do nothing more than get white teenagers to dance provocatively.

So in this sense irony is like a defense mechanism, a stilted laugh to expel the pain and ennui of life as a cog in a pointless consumerist machine. It's also a wonderful way for the capitalist avant-garde to expand into new terrains of obscenity. "Wetback" jokes might have been off-limits during the "PC" '90s, but when delivered by a "Hispanic" comic with an "ironic" tone, everyone can laugh -- Carlos Mencia, whose real name is Ned Holness, and is of German-Honduran descent.

I have noticed a lot of politically involved art in my neighborhood that seems to resist the easy cynical laugh... There are dozens of murals done by Mexican/Mexican-American artists all over walls, alleys, buildings... Lots of surrealism, use of Aztec imagery, corn, portraits of revolutionary Mexicans (from Hidalgo to Subcomandante Marcos)... It just resonates more for me, seems more relevant to everyone. I think part of it is that it's real community art, in plain view for thousands of people who pass it every day, and it's done by people who aren't necessarily professional artists. It calls up a long historical memory that many people here share (everyone knows who Ignacio Allende is), complete with a recognition of bloody sacrifice that plays such a huge role in Mexican history -- you know, coming up with their own martyrs and all.
 
Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
I think art needs to get over offending "bourgeois sensibilities"... that horse was beaten to death long ago and doesn't pull any revolutionary weight (if it ever did). Now it's the chief mode of mediated capitalist "humor."
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
gek-opel said:
And phony caring- yes yes yes. A need for public displays of sentimental aggressive empathy- it was seen initially in the McCann case, but there are plenty of other examples, people feel the need to indulge themselves in emotional pornography ("oh- the humanity!") and this almost competitive desire to out emote their friends/colleagues in terms of public piety and pity... The whole thing being whipped up by a media only to happy to run very simplistic stories which basically write themselves. This can also be used to explain the repulsive rash of rape/incest etc etc auto-biogs clearly aimed at the "woman's interest" end of the market.
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It goes back further than Maddie - can I draw your attention to the recent 10th anniversary of the death of a certain ex-member of a little-known European royal family that hardly anyone ever heard of...?

Actually, I've been heartened by the amount of writing just recently about the phoniness and media-led nature of the public outpourings of grief that followed the whole Diana business. Sure, she's still helping the Express shift millions of copies a week (suplimented now by Daina Jr., of course) but it's good to see that not everyone has been taken in by it.

And I totally agree about the "I was abused as a child, read all about it in lurid detail" auto-biogs - who the hell would want to read all about that? Apart from maybe someone who'd been a victim themselves and thought it might help them - but then if I were in that position, I'd probably be trying as hard as possible to forget all about it...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Gavin said:
I think that the excessive irony and detachment in art & culture is a product of the lack of any political sway the citizenry has in the west.
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Hahaha, yeah, unlike the rest of the world, where everyone has so much democracy they don't know what do with it... :D
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Abolutely Gavin.

We might refer here to Badiou's fifteen these on contemporary art:

1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. On the contrary, it is the production of an infinite subjective series, through the finite means of a material subtraction.

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible qua sensible. This means†: the transformation of the sensible into an happening of the Idea.

4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalising this plurality.

5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.

6. The subjects of an artistic truth are the works which compose it.

7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which in our own contemporary artistic context is a generic totality.

8. The real of art is ideal [Èelle] impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalisation of the advent of a hitherto formless form.

9. The only maxim of contemporary art is: do not be imperial. This also means: do not be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.
10. Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art, in this sense: it abstracts itself from all particularity, and formalises this gesture of abstraction.

11. The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience. Non-imperial art is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic: it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people.

12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.

13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this in-existence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art: the effort to render visible to everyone that which, for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.

14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent
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How subversive is contemporary Art if it is inside the pernicious hyper-capitalist system of the modern commercial art market? Not at all is the simple and obvious answer.
 
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G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Mr. Tea said:
And I totally agree about the "I was abused as a child, read all about it in lurid detail" auto-biogs - who the hell would want to read all about that? Apart from maybe someone who'd been a victim themselves and thought it might help them - but then if I were in that position, I'd probably be trying as hard as possible to forget all about it...
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No-one I've known who has been abused goes near these things. I cannot understand the mechanism which would lead someone to read these kind of accounts asides from a lust for pornographic sadism... (which I have to some degree). However, it is the way this desire to consume lustily the suffering of others is disavowed, converted and sublimated into a moral fig leaf which is the most perverted thing of all. To say: I enjoy the suffering of others, when I read about it, I get a kick is fair enough, but to read it for this reason, then to cover over this immoral/amoral position with the additional position of aggressively competitive piety is just repugnant.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, it's the pious, holier-than-thou aspect that's particularly sickening.

People reading these books strike me as probably the same people who go on tours of Nazi death camps and the like in the belief that it is somehow spiritually 'good for them', as if their own worthy grief is of any use to the people killed there 60-odd years ago - which I guess brings us back to Diana, although that was very much about being seen to grieve.
 
Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Mr. Tea said:
Hahaha, yeah, unlike the rest of the world, where everyone has so much democracy they don't know what do with it... :D
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In places without democracy, you still have the possibility for an outside challenge -- the sense that things can change, this dictator will fall eventually, we can work for it. Our art is dangerous, we can go to prison for it, be beaten for it, die for it. Unlike in "democracies" where, election to election, nothing changes except the faces of the people in power.

No one really believes the U.S. will get out of Iraq after the next election, and the Democrats aren't even pretending any more, even though most of the citizenry, the PEOPLE WHO VOTE, want out. It simply doesn't matter, and those people will just vote for Hillary when the time comes because that's what you're SUPPOSED to do. Your country INVADED when most of the citizenry was against it, and that party continued to win elections -- does this sound like "democracy" in any meaningful sense?

I think by and large we get the culture we deserve.
 
Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Rape/incest/kidfucking has proven to be one taboo difficult for corporate media to render into tasty transgressive entertainment... I fully expect a boom in pedophile humor very soon though... Nathan Barley practically predicts it, that episode that flirts with pedophilia in a very uncomfortable way, practically not funny at all, certainly not ironic.
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Yes precisely. So there are 2 things here, the real desire for sick thrills, which is extremely common (everyone is a little bit sadistic). But the second part about publicly displaying that you are an emotionally sensitive, appropriately compassionate person... to be seen to grieve.

In reference to the grieving at death camps thing, it links in somehow to a mediatized position of artificially created situations and the inadequacy of feeble empathy to meet the almost sublime horror of certain inhumanly scaled situations of suffering. The media not only create the imagery, the transmission system by which such inhuman horrors can be perceived, but also appear to define the range of appropriate emotional affects which are to be expected of the individual. In reality these affects are useless, inappropriate, offensive, self-indulgent, and given to creating counter-intuitively bad outcomes.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Fair point, it was just the bit about the "lack of political sway the citizenry has in the west" that got me, as if the people of (for example) Saudi Arabia say "Actually, could you just implement such-and-such a policy?" and the king says "Okely dokely!" and hops to it.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Gavin said:
Rape/incest/kidfucking has proven to be one taboo difficult for corporate media to render into tasty transgressive entertainment... I fully expect a boom in pedophile humor very soon though... Nathan Barley practically predicts it, that episode that flirts with pedophilia in a very uncomfortable way, practically not funny at all, certainly not ironic.
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You've not seen the Brass Eye special on PAEDOGEDDON, then?
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Gavin said:
Rape/incest/kidfucking has proven to be one taboo difficult for corporate media to render into tasty transgressive entertainment... I fully expect a boom in pedophile humor very soon though... Nathan Barley practically predicts it, that episode that flirts with pedophilia in a very uncomfortable way, practically not funny at all, certainly not ironic.
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So it doesn't make it transgressive- it presents it in this pity-porno way, a wholesome and moral from of educative entertainment (but entertainment- and fucking lucrative entertainment- nonetheless).

Paedo jokes are already a mainstay of humour, perhaps not on television yet, but still.
 
Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Mr. Tea said:
Fair point, it was just the bit about the "lack of political sway the citizenry has in the west" that got me, as if the people of (for example) Saudi Arabia say "Actually, could you just implement such-and-such a policy?" and the king says "Okely dokely!" and hops to it.
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I'm actually very interested in the photoshopped revolutionary art coming from the Middle East, stuff like this:

palestiniankidmartyrposter.jpg
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
Gavin said:
In places without democracy, you still have the possibility for an outside challenge -- the sense that things can change, this dictator will fall eventually, we can work for it. Our art is dangerous, we can go to prison for it, be beaten for it, die for it. Unlike in "democracies" where, election to election, nothing changes except the faces of the people in power.
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i think any use of the word "democracy" when applied to today's world should be in quotation marks...

but the art being dangerous thing is important.
 
T

tate

Brown Sugar
gek-opel said:
We might refer here to Badiou's fifteen these on contemporary art:
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Off-topic, but someone needs to point out that Badiou's famous theses are riddled with cliches, as is his essay on the subject and contemporary music, which is even worse - it's like really bad journalism. You can dress up a philosophical system as much as you like, but it's still a system, and we've had enough of that. Badiou is ultimately a very conservative thinker, which is why a lot of folks have been looking at his thought for the last fifteen years and concluding, 'no thanks.' The suggestion that he is some sort of vanguard thinker is naive.
 
G

gek-opel

entered apprentice
@ Tate: Yeah, it is obviously readily apparent that Badiou's overarching systemic construct and thematics (truth etc) are in some senses conservative (I guess in comparison to so-called post-modernist thought, tho classicist or Platonic might be better terms than conservative, providing you don't view them as necessarily synonymous). I have found his writing on Art (along with love, tho that for different reasons) to be a bit disappointing in comparison to his overarching truth-process concept, his importation of his own sometimes dubious personal prejudices resulting in (if not cliched writing) then an overly myopic view at times (and his politics has its own flaws). However his neoclassicism does have advantages in terms of re-orienting the debate perhaps. Also surely every philosopher creates some kind of system however they might choose to, as you say, "dress it up"...

Is his article on contemporary music available online, however cringe-worthy it may be I'd like to read it...?
 
R

redcrescent

Well-known member
Gavin said:
Even antiwar art I like (who did those grotesque bulging Abu Ghraib comic-style pieces?)
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Fernando Botero?

I'm sure you know Diego Rivera too, he's got some awesome (political) murals. I love this one (from the UNAM campus in Mexico City).

Gavin said:
I have noticed a lot of politically involved art in my neighborhood that seems to resist the easy cynical laugh... There are dozens of murals done by Mexican/Mexican-American artists all over walls, alleys, buildings... Lots of surrealism, use of Aztec imagery, corn, portraits of revolutionary Mexicans (from Hidalgo to Subcomandante Marcos)... It just resonates more for me, seems more relevant to everyone. I think part of it is that it's real community art, in plain view for thousands of people who pass it every day, and it's done by people who aren't necessarily professional artists. It calls up a long historical memory that many people here share (everyone knows who Ignacio Allende is), complete with a recognition of bloody sacrifice that plays such a huge role in Mexican history -- you know, coming up with their own martyrs and all.
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Wonderful stuff. Mexico has some really great mythological/political murals, the most impressive I have seen so far was in Tehuacan (Puebla), said to be the first place from which the indigenous people crossbred teosintle to get maize. The city hall has a mural of the figure of a man morphing from an ear of corn (reprising a legend from the Popol Vuh that states that "maize made man", literally), quite crudely done but put together in an amazing way.

Here's another nice one, a Zapata mural on a school building in Chiapas:
ecard085.jpg
 
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