Namings As Portals
Mark Fisher
Speaking of postpunk autodidacticism,
Owen Hatherley picks up on what I too thought was of the most
interesting lines in Mark Sinker's Sight & Sound review of
Grant Gee's Joy Division film:
Sometimes the names condensed more than one reference: 'Colony'
invoked Conrad as much as Kafka's 'Strike Kolony'. Sometimes the
references were unintentional misdirections; 'Atrocity Exhibition'
is surely one of the least Ballardian tracks that Joy Division
produced. In any case, construing these allusions as 'portals' that
led somewhere – rather than as citations in a seamless postmodern
circuit – is highly suggestive. Such portals could take the
listener into formal education, but were also doorways beyond the
school and the university, an alternative curriculum.
(Also well worth looking at on Owen's site:
this essay on Neu!, published in honour of the recently
deceased Klaus Dinger.)
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Satire Is Dead, Again
Mark Fisher
From the team that brought you this:
'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like
hard commerce.'
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Designer Despair
Mark Fisher
Rousing praise for Portishead's latest amidst Simon Reynolds's
latest bumper pack of reflections on Blissblog. I find Simon's
enthusiasm for the LP a little perplexing, although, I must
confess, I've never been that enraptured by Portishead. I became
quickly fatigued wading through the gloopy designer despair of
their debut, and had all but lost interest by the time of the
follow up. The combination of kitchen sink torch singing, vinyl
crepitation, sweeping film samples and brokeback hiphop beats
possessed a certain stylishness, but the appeal quickly palled. It
was the 'stylishness' that was the problem, actually. Even though I
don't doubt the personal sincerity of either Gibbons or Barrow,
formally it all sounded a little pat, a little too
cleverly contrived, a little too comfortably at home in This
Life 90s Style culture. Gibbons's gloom always struck me as
being more like illegible grumbling than the oblique bleakness it
wanted to be. As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas:
devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation
to the 'hauntological now' of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only
hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its
sell-by date.
(Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that
Geoff Barrow and arch smugonaut Mark Ronson are right about
each other.)
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Weird coincidences...
Mark Fisher
Further to Derek's
observations on Villalobos's 'Enfants', below ... Even though
the sample is taken from a Christian Vander track, when I first
heard 'Enfants' it reminded me of nothing so much as the piano on
Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman'. It seems that I'm not the only
one to make the association ... If the similarity between the
tracks is eerie, then this only adds to the strangeness of Simone's
already intensely uncanny song, which acquired even more weirdness
last year when it was used by both David Lynch (in INLAND EMPIRE)
and Timbaland (on the first track of his Shock Value LP).
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Nu-linguistic programming
Mark Fisher
Infinite Thought's diatribe against artspeak raises all kinds
of issues. The soporifically ubiquitous language against which she
rails is part of the reassuring background noise in what passes now
for high culture. It is the institutional artworld's revenge on
Duchamp and Dada's idea that nonsense could be revolutionary. But
the problem with this language is its oversignfication as much as
its lack of content, the excess of meaning with which it freights
objects and shows, fixing them into a pre-defined cultural place
via the use of a laudatory linguistic muzak that combines
portentous gravitas with vapid weightlessness: all those
notions that are negotiated with, those
boundaries that are blurred, and everything, of
course, is radical... This is the soundtrack to the
postmodern conversion of events into exhibits, a process so total,
so relentless, that it has become invisible, presupposed. An old
story: those who sought the destruction of the art space and its
prestige find themselves the objects of the latest retrospective
... And just wait for all those May 68 commemorations next month...
This 'nu-language' is more than a matter of institutional inertia.
It is an expression of an interlock – a synergy – between
art, business and promotion. At the End of History, all language
tends to the condition of PR . And lurking not far behind all this
is the spider bureaucracy, now rebranded as 'administration', since
funding bodies require artists – practitioners - to
themselves internalise and proliferate nu-language. This can't be
attacked at the level of discourse alone – as IT suggests,
nu-language itself puts into practice the occlusion of objects
under referent-free discourse – but, by keeping faith with the
events of the past and anticipating events yet-to-come, criticism
can surely play a part in the attack on nu-linguistic
programming.
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