Some Thoughts on Art at the Turn of the Century (1999)

Found in the notebook of ten years ago, dated 21 September 1999. Very much a draft, it was nonetheless written with potential publication in mind. I've reproduced some the draft-editing with the cross outs.

I recently watched an NFB film during the Atlantic Film Festival held in Halifax last September. And because it was the NFB, they had a two minute long (five minutes?) montage/ad showing various clips from their archives, to pat themselves on the back with the motto, 'the images of our lives: NFB/ONF 1939-1999. Sixty years ... etc. It reminded me of that the NFB is one of the few cultural products that Canada produces which is more obviously cultural. We are the country that claims to have a culture around shopping merchandise outlets (Eatons, The Bay) and a bunch of grown men chasing a rubber disk around on an artificially frozen slab of ice. (are Canadian examples of Can culture. This is not something to be proud of. It is just pathetic). My point is that what Canada claims to call its culture is really the experience of games and corporations. Anthropologically, there is a case for this, but it's convoluted.

Now the Americans have a culture, there is no denying that. They have important painters and writers and musicians. And they have their Hollywood which claims to produce a cultural product (but in reality seem to produces 2 hour long for commercials they are commercials for the actors and the directors and the toy companies and in the at the turn of the century, the digital effects magicians).

Of course, the technically minded will remind us that the century doesn't start until 2001, which illustrates why the technically minded's reason and logic have never been too popular, because they ignore psychological realities. You have to reason it out, it's not obvious, that the century starts in 2001. And the really stupid will say the same about the millennium, but it's obvious that millennium are periods of a thousand years. I learned that three zeroes males a thousand. We didn't call 999 two years before the millennium. Nineteen will change to twenty, ninety-nine will change to a thousand. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will become two thousand. Roman numerals will be succinctly MM. And that doesn't stand for Much Music - mille mille, a thousand thousand.

The NFB montage reminded me that film has been the dominant art form of this century. I would rather watch a movie based on a book than read the book, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Purists might think I'm lazy, that I'm some aesthetic chump, but why should I be embarrassed or ashamed to prefer a succint version of literature that I can enjoy visually?

Film images are so important to our turn of the century culture the NFB, Canada that they belong to everybody. Sure it says the NFB, it says Canada but it belongs to the world.

[This written as a callout]: Canada is an important source of important films that contribute to the world's culture.

[Then this gets personal/reflective]: It occurred to me and then slipped from my grasp. What art was all about. It's endlessly annoying to hear how art has been categorized, fit into a conceptual framework so that when an educated, supposedly sophisticated art person can give an answer when challenged by the question of certain exhibitions or curious crowd/patrons.

To me, the ability to give an answer to the question of what is art is means you in some ways missed the mark. I don't think art is about questions and answers. I don't think art is about meanings. I've come to appreciate that is which is [sic] dumbfounding, that which is wordless. An experience that is felt and not explained. It is a zen like think for me.

So, it is the information age / the space age / the computer age / etc etc. The multitude of names for a period in which we are living, exemplifies one of the stupidities of our post modern age times. "Agh, its too much! Too much ..." etc etc. I suppose that type of condition, much cliched now, is the appeal of a dumbfounding art. Perhaps there are many of you that wish to understand, to grasp, who have believed that to know s the goal. But why? A painting is just another picture, a sculpture is just another lump to navigate around. I doubt that there have been such a large number of talentless hacks, that we, as audience members, and the witless appreciative hacks.

To make something that is different, to put something which engages the mind and the senses.

The importance of artistic things in our lives is numerous - the importance of being dressed, the TV shows we must watch, the song we must dance too.

The broad view is the existential one, that we will all die, and so who cares about anything. But death is not a reality for the majority of us. Most of us will not die tomorrow. And while we are young we are infused with the impossibility of death. We can afford to be bored. Art for us can be meaningless. Our young women can afford to listen to Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.

Art appears to be the biggest side show of all. Here in colonial North America, haunted by a past that as Canadians we are ignorant of, and haunted by the American history and the American culture, culture is a terrible thing, something to avoid by going shopping at Eaton's, or by watching a hockey game.

Psychological Realities

If art has value it is in teaching the dominance of psychological reality over the land of logic and reason. I certainly am not advocating stupidity, but to be conscious and balanced historically what has been called "a well rounded person". We must balance the basic stupidity of reason with the knowledge of experience. Art is one of the best, if not the best and the if not the only appropriate medium/vehicle for the communication of experience.

I like my art to be fantastic and fanciful. Full of make believe. Fairy tales. I don't like my art to be political and the pretentious. I don't like people who judge and make enemies based on style.

[The following is dated 22 September. Here I anticipate some of what I've encountered studying Christopher Alexander's ideas about 'centres' and 'wholeness']

⓵ Art is a manifestation of being. Art objects exist, but they are object or concepts that are dependent on other objects and concepts. They are structured from pre-existing structures. Art are a posteriori objects/concepts.

⓶ Art objects contain souls. That is, there is within them an element that excites the subtleties  sense of the subtle. Art objects, because they are fabricated from pre-existing structures, like life forms, carry within them elements of the auras of meaning from their ancestors. A collage is just not a coll glue and fragments, it's a little bit of this magazine and this it's sources.

[More personal/reflective]

What is the need to vocalize, to write this down? If I want an art that is free from conceptual frameworks and labels, why do I find myself penning an essay on art? Won't the readers use this to formulate new soundbites on art?

An attempt to understand using the tools of understanding: that is an effect on language. The constructed object is a creature of being more eloquent and noble than a drop of sweat of a pile of excrement.

The sufferings today caused by a lack of dignity. To create if to dignify objects and surfaces.

Human dreams in concrete form
Wonders of the imagination
Achievements of the imagination
The Image nation

Eddie Bauer, 2151 AD

2001 - "That's the whole idea, you know. 150 years from today is not very far. [Yesterday on the set,] we were talking about what companies are going to be around. We were on location, and LeVar Burton's directing this week. He had on this Eddie Bauer get-up from head to toe, and we were talking, 'You know what? Eddie Bauer will be around in 150 years.' You can get your mind around 150 years from today. And there's some things you can say: 'Oh, no! Definitely will not be here in 150 years.'" - Scott Bakula, August 2001

2009 - "On June 17 2009, Eddie Bauer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection."

Carl Jung's Red Book

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The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
By SARA CORBETT
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

Also: Excerpt PDF

Mad Men with Blackberries

Mad Men debuted in 2007, and corresponds to a fin-de-decade zeitgeist which may in turn provoke the next decade (2010-2020) to look more Modernist. Will Mad Men inspire people to begin dressing in similar ways? Already in the summer of 2009, Banana Republic had partnered with the show to sell similar fashion.

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Correspondingly, when the Drake Hotel opened in Toronto in 2003, they adopted a Modernist design format (to reflect the owner's idea that the Hotel should be a bohemian place that would inspire present day Beatniks), but by 2008, the Hotel was being depicted as if it existed on a lonely New York St during the 1950s and 60s.

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(image by Justin Adam)

Battlestar Galactica ran from 2003-2009, and depicted an essentially contemporary society (albeit one without spaceships and jump-drives). A spin-off series, Caprica, has been developed (it's pilot premiered on DVD in 2009, the series itself in 2010), but set fifty years prior to the 'contemporary' Galactica series, uses costume design and other aspects to depict a retro-society; thus in effect matching the actual zeitgeist of the 2010s: a neomodernist highly technological society: Mad Men with Blackberries.

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(from the Caprica DVD pilot]

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(Caprica being filmed in August 2009 | source)

(A interesting note: one of the first reviews of the Caprica DVD pilot stated, "I love the possibilities of retro/futuristic style and wish it had been more consistently applied across costumes and set dec.  What they achieved is pretty generic, mid-twenty first century Canadian." )

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Generic mid-21st Century Canadian

Subsequently, in twenty years, when both Caprica and Mad Men are downloadable retro shows from the 2010s, will people understand the contrivance of Caprica's Modernism, or see it only as reflection of the times in which it was created? In other words, by 2019, will our fashion and everything-design make it seem like we're living in Caprican society? Does the popularity of Mad Men reflect a yearning for an elegance and style lost during the Postmodern period? Will we see a return to that, and in so doing become Mad Men with Blackberries & iPhones?