History

Graffiti and the Site: What’s to be Explained, Anyhow?

Really, the rise and spread of graffiti, largely outside the institutions of the art world. Not completely outside by any means. But the gallery world, the museum world, and the art school world have pretty much been at the periphery of the graffiti scene, and remain there to this day. That’s not mere happenstance. That’s deliberate.

But what are the nature of the deliberations, and by who?

Here’s what I think:

You can’t understand the rise of graffiti culture unless you understand the site. And you can’t understand the site if you think of it as basically a canvas substitute. It’s like canvas in that it has a surface on which paint is applied. Otherwise, it is different and must be conceptualized differently.

What I don’t know, is how to explain that. I can talk around it, but explain it, no. The purpose of this post is simply to think out-loud, to get some thoughts out there where I can step back a look at them and perhaps see something I’m missing. I’m going to talk around it, but in public.

Starting from Basics

Graffiti started as tagging, a way to get recognition from girls (Cornbread in Philly) and one’s peers. You put your name in a public place, so it’s visible. Alas, it’s also vandalism. So, there’s a tension, a conflict. You’ve got to get up while avoiding getting caught.

That’s the founding situation. From that grew . . . a world.

Enter, competition. You’re all competing for recognition. How do you do it? Let us assume, for the moment, that all are equal in technical skill (can control) and aesthetic skill (design). Let’s further assume that all we’re doing is single stroke tags. No throw-ups, no pieces. Given that, what’s the basis for competition?

Basically, visibility. You can be in more places, and in more visible places. The two are not at all the same. Thirty tags in a place where no one goes are collectively less visible than one tag in a spot everyone passes every day. Hitting lots of spots just takes time. Hitting the best spots, that takes luck, skill, and aggression.

And it doesn’t hurt to have some athletic ability and so courage. Visible places can be high up and relatively difficult to get to. Those who can and are willing to reach those spots, they have an advantage over others lack the physical skill, or lack the courage.

Keeping skill levels more or less the same, let’s expand the repertoire from tags to throw-ups. They’re larger and hence more visible than tags; further, they can go over and thus obliterate tags. But they take a bit more time to do; five minutes or perhaps ten, as opposed to a minute or less. How does this change things? It seems to me it favors the quick and the daring.

For Their Own Good

Question of the Day

Network Awesome is, well, awesome

Here's the self-description:

Network Awesome is a platform for entertaining and interesting TV. We spotlight the best from the past to create something new for the future. In a sense it’s TV about TV but our wider intent is to show something about culture as a whole. This can manifest itself in a kids cartoon from 1973, an interview from 1948 or a movie from 1993 – We’re pretty open minded about what Network Awesome is and what it can be. It’s our commitment to provide you what we think is interesting and clever TV - hopefully you agree.

And their archive. A few of their documentaries:

• The Outsider: Harry Partch
• The Secret Life of Chaos
• The Siouxsie & The Banshees Story
• Welcome to the Go Go
• Who Is Poly Styrene?
• The Story Of Jamaican Music Vol 1

From the Esses:

• Salvador Dali - A Soft Self Portrait
• Series - Taxi: On the Job
• Sharpe's Eagle -2
• Sigmund & the Sea Monsters - Mama Redecorates
• Space Giants - 3 - ATTACK of the MOLESAURUS
• Spider-Woman - A Crime In A Time
• Spiderman 1967 4

They're got an online magazine, about their online content, naturally.

H/t Michael Sporn.

Jungle-o-Rama

Spike Lee on the Shakespeare Tip

The following is an excerpt from a working paper on Spike Lee’s Mo’Better Blues. The paper is “Spike Lee’s Blues” and you can download it from my SSRN page.

* * * * *

The depiction of this marriage [between the protagonist, Bleek Gilliam and Indigo] is, unfortunately, the least satisfactory and least plausible section of the film. As a coherent dramatic statement, the film ended with Bleek's failed comeback when he sat-in with Shadow (his former sax player) and Clarke in the Dizzy club — the club's name is an obvious reference to Dizzy Gillespie, jazz's last elder statesman and trumpet-playing counterpart to Bird, who did have a club named after him, Birdland. His subsequent marriage and child are not very plausible. He proposes marriage to Indigo in the very terms which he had rejected and satirized in "Pop Top 40." Now that he cannot be a musician, he changes his mind about one-and-only-forever love. Now he wants/needs a woman to save him. And the woman accepts him. But Bleek hasn't grown and deepened in any obvious way; he has just transferred his dependence from his career to a wife. Which is to say, simply, that Spike Lee hasn't quite figured out how to resolve these problems.

But he does give some indication of how he wants the matter resolved. To see this we have to examine the final scene of the movie. It parallels the first scene quite closely, so closely that any difference is thereby foregrounded. That difference, we can only assume, is what has been gained by the events of the picture.

Thus, in the final scene, a young boy is practicing his trumpet when his young friends come after him to join them in play. To emphasize the parallel with the opening scene, Lee uses the same child actors. In the final scene, as one would expect, Bleek is the father and his son, Miles (named after Miles Davis?), is the boy. But where young Bleek had been forced to continue practicing, young Miles is allowed out (at Bleek's urging) after a little sermon on the importance of practicing. Bleek, we are to infer, doesn't want to impose the inflexible discipline on his son that his mother had imposed on him. Young Miles will not, we are to presume, grow up in the crippled way that Bleek did.

By staging the final scene in this way Lee is asserting that Bleek has gained a measure of flexibility and insight, that he has grown though his experience. That is, he is asserting something which he hasn't, in fact, shown. Mo' Better Blues happens in two distinct phases. One runs from the beginning up through Bleek's failed come-back at the Dizzy club. The other runs from Bleek's proposal to the end. The only thing which binds these two together is Lee's cinematic assertion that the second is the logical continuation of the first. But, whereas the moves in the first phase are carefully plotted, with plausible causal links between the actions and reactions of the various characters, the moves in the second phase are not carefully plotted, they are only asserted, with a great deal of dramatic weight falling on a montage sequence set to the music of John Coltrane. And the transition between the first and the second phase is similarly implausible. It is clear that what Lee wants to say requires these two phases, otherwise he wouldn't have made the movie this way. It is also clear that Lee hasn't yet been able to establish a coherent framework in which to make this statement.

This situation is not unprecedented in dramatic history. Five-hundred years ago Shakespeare created some plays — Pericles, Cymbaline, and The Winter's Tale — that were similarly broken into two phases. Let's look at one of them and compare it to Mo' Better Blues. Like Mo' Better, The Winter's Tale breaks into two movements. In both cases, the second movement focuses on the offspring of the characters introduced in the first piece.

Big Pink

Beyond Close Reading

Whether it be France or in the United States, the foremost characteristic of contemporary criticism is the tendency to expect a reconciliation from poetry; to see it in a possibility of filling the gap that cleaves Being.

—Paul de Man, The Dead-end of Formalist Criticism

Ever since I was seduced, shall we say, by Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of ethnographic materials, in particular, his analysis of myth, I have been puzzled why what became the critical establishment passed over his structuralism in favor of deconstruction. It could not have been that Lévi-Strauss had, after all, been deconstructed. Because every thinker worth consideration can be deconstructed, mostly certainly the deconstructors themselves, who deconstruct in uneasy and uncanny awareness of this peculiar fact.

In time I settled on a simple explanation for this passing over: Lévi-Strauss sought to objectify the thinking behind the artifacts he analyzed, and that, whether he was successful or not, put his methods beyond reach. It is all fine a good to objectify Other People’s Culture, but we, the exegetes of Western texts, we are not going to do that with our texts. No sir. While I still believe that to be the case, the recent Arcade discussion of close reading has caused me to refocus that thought.

But perhaps refocus is not the concept I need. It’s more like regestalt. Where I was looking at a rabbit, or a young woman, they’re looking at a duck, or an old crone, as the figure may be. In a response to comments Andrew Goldstone remarked: “If I could have figured out how to specify it more accurately, I would have added ‘vaguely theological flavor’ to my list of genre requisites.” Later on Lee Konstantinou remarks “. . . though one could argue that being inducted into literary mysteries is a form of appreciation. We move beyond simple evaluation toward appreciation-as-epiphany or appreciation-as-secular-religious-experience.” It is that theological resonance that had escaped my own thinking.

And that depite the fact that I have often thought of traditional critics as a secular priesthood presiding over the sacred texts of their culture. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on the secular term of that description. Perhaps the operative attitude was never so secular. Perhaps traditional humanist criticism takes place in an unstable liminal zone between secular activity pure and simple and explicit religious exegesis of the standard Judeo-Christian Biblical texts.

In any event, I missed that nuance. But I didn’t miss the nostalgia that persisted even among those who questioned the New Critics. Consider Geoffrey Hartman, one of the so-called Yale School of deconstructive critics, though Hartman did not go so far as Miller, de Man, nor Derrida himself. In the title essay from The Fate of Reading (1975) Hartman is grappling with the fact that, no matter how intensely critics are oriented toward the texts of which they write, that very act of writing requires distance from those texts. One cannot write about the text if and while one is immersed in reading it. Complaining that contemporary theorists—mostly French or under French influence—have come to privilege such writing over reading, Hartman asks (p. 272): "To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?"

Abyssinia

Appropriations Battle

How Big is a Thought?

What a strange question: How big is a thought? Can have sizes?

We know that a blue whale is larger than the krill on which it feeds. Does that mean that the blue whale thought must be larger, by 100s of thousands of times, than the krill thought? What about the thought of a star and the thought of a quark? Is the thought of the universe the biggest thought of all? If so, is it contained in that sentence, by mere inclusion of the phrase, “thought of the universe”, for that sentence is a small thing, is it not?

I suppose one might as well ask: How many thoughts can you put on the head of a pin, nicely arranged, by category? Now, if one asked that of books, the answer is simple: None, books are each one alone, typically, much larger than a pin head. Now, if we could miniaturize the books—I’m thinking of Nelson Shrinkafeller (scan down the page), an occasional character from the old Li’l Abner cartoon strip . . . .

The size of a book depends on many things, kind and weight of paper, page size, how the type is set, and so forth. But it depends mostly on the number of words. Words represent thoughts, no? Do lots of words imply a big thought, perhaps standing behind them, like the sun rising through the trees, spreading streams of glory through the forest? But what of a telephone book? Lots of words, but nary a thought among them.

If all those questions are born of category mistakes, you say, then how is it that we talk of big ideas? There’s a website called Big Think, presenting “Blogs, Articles and Videos from the World's Top Thinkers and Leaders.” What is it about those thoughts that makes them big? I suppose its their implications. Perhaps a BIG THOUGHT has implications for many other thoughts, brings a new order to them, whereas small and medium-sized thoughts are not so richly linked to other thoughts.

Perhaps we can represent thoughts by networks, like maps. Each atomic thought is a place on the map. These thoughts are connected to one another across the surface of the map. We could then say that thoughts with more connections, with a larger network, are BIGGER than thoughts with few connections.

Whose Norm?

Apocalypse Now and Thin Red Line

I’ve been enjoying Malick’s The Thin Red Line and thought I’d compare it with Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Nothing elaborate or formal; just some notes.

Both are war films, and both involve the jungle. But they’re quite different. Still, I can’t help wondering whether or not Malick has learned from Coppola’s staging of the jungle. To be sure, Malick’s film is much more IN the jungle than Coppola’s, but I can’t help but think that anyone who’d see Apocalypse Now would be influenced by the Chef & Willard jungle tiger sequence. Not in any direct and deliberate way. It’s just that when you’ve SEEN that sequence in Apocalypse Now you can’t help but see the jungle in that way. On the other hand, all those shots of the sun filtering down through the trees in a misty air, those are Malick’s.

Both films involve a (human) sacrifice, though with different valence. Coppola’s Kurtz is sacrificed to rid the national soul of bad blood while Malick’s Witt is sacrified, well, that others might live, and perhaps to validate THE LIGHT as well. There’s nothing in Coppola’s film doing the work of The Light in Malick’s; nor is there anything in Malick’s film doing the work of a largely invisible directorate of four star general clowns. It’s not obvious to me whether this difference is metaphysical or merely a contingent matter of thematic choice.

Malick treats war as a fact of human life, as a fact, perhaps, of the cosmos at large. Deal with it. Coppola treats war as the product of cumulative human corruption. Deal with it.

And deal with it they have. Superbly, each in his way.

Tossing Paint Binds the World, or, Green Chapel in Jersey City

Yet he saw some way off what seemed like a mound,

A hillock high and broad, hard by the water,

Where the stream fell in foam down the face of the steep

And bubbled as if it boiled on its bed below.

The knight urges his horse, and heads for the knoll;

Leaps lightly to earth; loops well the rein

Of his steed to a stout branch, and stations him there.

He strides straight to the mound, strolls all about,

Much wondering what it was, but no whit the wiser;

It had a hole at one end, and on either side,

And hollow all within, like some old cave,

Or a crevice of an old crag—he could not discern

aright.

—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Urban Design Studio, as I’ve been calling it, isn’t quite so undifferentiated from its surroundings as is the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but it aspires to that condition. Here’s a shot of the North Wall:

The foliage all but disappears into the blue and yellow patterning on the wall, or is it emergence? Taking a closer look, could that be the Green Knight himself we see?

Let’s move around to the West Wall. Here we see a typical undifferentiated palimpsest of multiple interacting asynchronous causal agents, that is, different writers, different times, messin’ ‘round: