Author: ke$hav

“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes… Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.”
Arshile Gorky

“There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.”  Dave Brubeck

Rock guitar lore renowns Jimi Hendrix as one of the great improvisational soloists in a live context. Although untrained in technique, Hendrix’s love of the instrument led him to develop a consistent and recognizable style, mixing a blues sensibility with an electrified, hard rock sound.

Most notable about Hendrix, perhaps, was his energetic live performance. During his live shows, Hendrix would perform unprecedented feats of spectacle, such as, playing his instrument behind his back, lighting his guitar on fire, or even finishing solos by strumming with his teeth. These antics never interfered with or compromised the distinct psychedelic quality of sound which made him famous.

Hendrix’s live performances are noteworthy not only for their spontaneity, but also for their cultural resonance and legacy. His music re-interpreted classical performance tropes of spoken word poetry, soulful blues, and improvisational jazz, culminating in a psychedelic experience unparalleled by Rock and Roll peers of the time.

Psychedelic Rock re-interprets traditional harmonic melodies with electronic distortion and amp feedback which catapult sound waves to unpredictable frequencies. Much like abstract painting broke apart traditional painterly form into a symposium of color and form, reinterpreting the process by which the medium affected audiences.

Psychedelic music and Abstract painting parallel one another in their desire to transcend the limits of their respective mediums by questioning the basic function of their constituent mechanisms of expression.

Glitch refers to an electronic feedback, sonic or visual, created when a reciever misinterprets a signal. This can happen at three stages – compression of data into message, the reading of data, or a fault in the equipment receiving the data.

A glitch is more than an unwanted digital transmission, it’s a physical artifact of a less-than-perfect system of electronic communication, reminding us that our hardware and software architectures have not transcended the scope of error. Although glitches are generally unwanted or unplanned and therefore precipitous of negativity, movements within contemporary media practices have rallied around the aesthetic of the electronic accidental. What is so compelling about the glitch?

Electronic feedback is a rude awakening for an otherwise hypnotically smooth functioning system of information. Moreover, glitches expose how the machinery we take for granted thinks, and even more interestingly, by defying our expectations, force us to encounter the implicit paradigm of representation we impose upon technological artifice.

This might be considered an artistic impulse with traces of a modernist sensibility, questioning and problematizing the very medium upon which the artist practices. Furthermore, glitch artists question the model of transmitter, message, and receiver by rupturing the flow of communication with ambivalence.

Although seemingly unproductive, this rupture of information can be enlightening. What we consider a productive flow of information is a fetter on our imagination and conception of socioeconomic relationships. Reducing the possibility of electronic communication to a syntactic exchange of orderly commands not only limits the possible implementations of technology, but also possibilities for how humans can interact with each other and think about society.

The glitch smashes the code in order to blaze a trail for something new – meaning, symbolic, and otherwise.

Over the course of the term, as I’ve been writing and animating, I’ve devoted a good amount of time thinking about the creative process – habits and strategies for establishing a good artistic workflow. As the end of the term and imminent deadlines draw closer, however, a new question springs to mind: how do I know when a work of art is complete?

Abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock would famously add new coats of paint to a canvas in progress days after his initial work. Perhaps this was a specific process, or perhaps Pollock simply worked on a painting until he couldn’t stand to anymore.

Growing bored of a piece is the easiest way to know I’m done working on something – but also the least satisfying. As another abstract expressionist, Arshile Gorky, once said, “something that is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while.”

Perhaps the problem is in the assumption that Art is something to be “worked” on. Work implies a task with a specific, tangible goal and rational justification. Art may have goals attached, but motivations for creating Art are often complicated and mutable.

***as a performative element – I’m going to timestamp updates to this post over the next few weeks to demonstrate how I rarely consider an idea complete due to an external deadline **

Check out the Ann Arbor Film Festival this week. The AAFF is one of the premiere experimental film festivals in the Northwest.

Experimental cinema, unlike Narrative or Art film, lacks a consistent set of artistic practices. By nature, experimental film eschews coherent meaning, lengths, times. It is far easier, therefore, to define experimental cinema by what it is not than by what it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YhmrD7J7ZI

In Europe, post world war one, Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel argued used the ability to jump across varying imagery and soundscapes to explore the dreamlike and ephemeral quality of film. Un Chien Andalou is a classic Surrealist film which delves into the Oedipal complex, social anxiety towards violence.

In the US, Stan Brakhage, a reclusive filmmaker refusing to engage in the dominant narrative practices of Hollywood, worked with film reels by hand – adding ink drawings or even moth wings onto the film strips to explore how abstract imagery could be interpolated over elapsed time – literally decorating time and space with his creative vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGh0D2NXCA

 

The Canadian film board subsidized work for many talented animators. Norman McLaren is a particularly prolific figure in Canadian experimental and animated film, working for over 30 years with hand-drawn film strips.

 

I highly recommend attending the Ann Arbor Film Festival this week to see how these early experimental artists’ legacies have continued to influence a broad-based and versatile form of self-expression!

Dating back in historical record as far as the Catacombs of the Roman Empire, graffiti can be defined as the act of vandalizing another’s property, whether it is public or private.

 

Unlike other forms of art, graffiti is inherently illegal. Due to its illegality, graffiti artists generally operate under anonymous names. So is graffiti truly art, or merely an act a malicious transgression of property? I will consider some tropes of graffiti across history in hopes of demonstrating that it is an amorphic yet legitimate art form.

Due to its transgressive nature, graffiti is must necessarily be quite political and self-conscious – graffiti’s creators are aware they are defying the law – this reflexivity is always a part of their message.

Hence, political caricatures in Roman times

or Banksy’s contemporary work

 

Yet this leads to the question, is all graffiti automatically artistic simply due to its controversial nature? Does an ill-thought out or perverse image

 

constitute street art?

Jean Baudrillard notes graffiti’s transgressive nature marks it as a powerful means of communication because it destabilizes the message of the property it has vandalized. For example, the Catacombs or the wall pictured above no longer command as much attention as the piece that has covered them.

 

In this sense, I would argue that although all works of graffiti serve to destabilize traditional meaning, and is therefore political, only some works of graffiti make an attempt to transpose new meaning in place of what it has destroyed. Banksy’s graffiti

works to destabilize an ordinary wall, distract from typical urban signage, but also through self-aware parody of commercial signage, actively disrupt and dispute the coherence of the commercial logic the city block attempts to fabricate. The above piece makes a powerful statement about commercialization of art – we are commodifying freedom through habits of consumption rather than thinking and acting freely.

Banksy’s work is an attempt to introduce decidedly new ways of thinking, grant the “audience” of his work agency. Ultimately, the physical demonstration of agency – the ability to transgress and defy rules of law – offer the audience the same agency to think outside the bounds of what society tells us to.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

~Jack Kerouac

I have previously discussed the classic Rock star image of Jim Morrison, an artistic career eclipsed early by drug dependence. This contemporary example holds parallels across the artistic canon, from Vincent Van Gough to Edward Allan Poe. These artists not only share an inner despair, but also seem to draw inspiration from this despair. Is it fair to elucidate a correlation between artistic creativity and a self-destruction – or is this a fallacy?

The connection between creativity and self-destruction appears across cultures and times. In ancient Hindu tradition, for example, the God Shiva the Destroyer is also the god of art. Interestingly, Shiva is part of a triumvirate of Gods who epitomize the existential cycle of the universe – it is Shiva the Destroyer and not Brahma the Creator whom the Hindus have bestowed upon the cultural pedestal of artistry.

The Tantric school of Hindu theology regards Shiva and his wive Shakti as the flip side of the primal energy which constitutes life – the dichotomy of potential and kinetic energy, fuel and flame. Hence, in order to create light and energy, something must burn.

From Western Philosophical tradition, Georg Hegel posits a negative vision of imagination as “the night of the world” – a psychological ability to deconstruct the phenomena of reality the spectator perceives into new forms within the mind. Rather than create new forms of reality, the mind deconstructs what it has seen in order to re-constitute, or even lay bare, the reality presented before it.

More recent cultural critic Slavoj Zizek cites Hegel to argue the act of symbolizing an idea holds basis in a death drive, or desire to replace the object and transmute a piece of the author’s own life force into the symbol. The death drive draws from an inner psychological impulse to reject the stagnant cultural traditions which surround the author with new forms of expression heretofore nonexistant – an act so transgressive that it is perhaps necessarily self-destructive.

Moreover, philosophers such as David Hume have long argued not only that the artist is predisposed towards self-destruction, but also that their audiences tend to prefer tragic art – the paradox of tragedy.