Bruce Springsteen lyric from The River album
Jackson Cage
Down in Jackson Cage
Well darlin’ can you understand
The way that they will turn a man
Into a stranger to waste away
Down in the Jackson Cage
Well I not exactly this far gone but there some pretty bad side-effects of the always-on internet life. As a lecturer in almost impossible to ‘switch-off’ from the always on environment. Students are online on facebook and twitter and I actually push them into the ‘online’ life. But there are significant downsides. Soon it will so encompassing that I will only move once a day to ingest food (still a requirement) despite everything the web can do….not good healthwise. It a good job I still have to physically meet student body (despite e-learning ventures) or I’d probably lose use of my legs.
The enveloping nature of the internet means that everything we, cialis see, salve do and think is processed through a web lens and recently I have noticed this happening to friends of mine too. Facebook is a dominant force in shaping the local arts groups events and actually channelling local arts debate. Like mobile phones what did we do before facebook…talk…ring…email…make posters…thinking back to my pre-internet art school how on earth did things happen at all? Happen they did though as my Alumni group on facebook for Hornsey College of Art attests..http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=189414558562
In writing this blog entry I will have a fairly constant online ‘audience’ through facebook and virtually everything I currently mulling over is now appearing as links on facebook or twitter or both. This can be useful as a kind of strategic bookmarking but instead of being personal and private it is open and capable of endless revision….in fact holding a fast opinion seems to be becoming ever more difficult. This can have unexpected bonuses but also problems arise. A factual mistake…e.g. did I really imagine a Ceramicist won the Nottingham Open show becomes a hard fact that has to be retracted. Private opinion is spread so quickly that it becomes more than a blog note and a career defining standpoint. Where is the boundary between a provisional and a fixed opinion. Or is that where we now stand in endless revisionism territory?
The price of spectacular connections across continents and time is a fluctuating lack of finality in artworks and strength of opinion. In a web that always on and always in a sate of flux these things become expendable. Springsteen’s album becomes simply a stream of out-takes, alternative album shots, a flood of all the mistakes he made as much as an album. Finality and craftsmanship becomes a negotiable stream. Today through twitter/facebook I became aware of a live performance of songwriter Tom Russell. Did it change the perception of the song because in a new context. The fixity of art-forms is lost. All very post-Derrida the academics would scoff..but it happening. How do young people hold an opinion in such mutable environments?
This is the real price of never-ending revisionism. The real artefact becomes lost in a fog of ‘versions’. I love to touch a vinyl album and remove the actual ‘sculpted’ object. I remember sitting and staring at Matisse’s Red Studio painting when on loan to the ‘old’ Tate. I love this private photo I found on web (there are thousands of version sof this image in a range of hues) as it reminds one that no reproduction can supplant actual viewing.
More than simple cramp I feel that the internet has supplanted all the physical artefacts I once held dear and like the proverbial bathwater what have I and by extending the metaphor ‘we’ lost? I cannot put a finger on it yet but as I see students in our local tea shop flicking through positions and networks on their macbooks I feel a nostalgia for a pre-internet time of certainty and argument away from the shimmering stream. Oliver Reed banging his fist on the wooden table in a mock Parisienne cafe in Tony Hancock’s ‘The Rebel’ was a cliche but it feels more real than current debate. I can talk to everybody at once but really I am addressing no-one but mysefl in a loft space on a cold, dark winter night. Reality exists beyond the screen but somehow I have lost touch with it.
Maybe if the web splinters it may not be a bad thing. Content will start to re-assert itself as ‘definitive’ once again. Maybe people will read the same version, listen to the same song. This endless variety flowing across the screen will start to slow down and we will all have time to concentrate instead of time to be distracted.
To make art at this juncture is to my mind impossible. We are looking at the remnants of art-forms post-internet. We seek out the novelty, the half-finished..the mistake. With no fixity one cannot create anything but a blur? I am simply adding to the blur at present. I seek the fixed stare..a Ruskinian calm maybe and then I can proceed.
Artists at present are like so many sparrows flitting through the halls..which will survive to next summer and which will smash against their own reflections here?
from Kevin Wallace
http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/exemplar_art_kevin_wallace/
The point regarding context (if you hear a song on vinyl or download does it change perception?) was put forth in ‘A conversation with Claude Levi Strauss and Georges Charbonier’ about 1961 or ’69 depending on translation. Levi-Strauss posits the idea of an apple corer on the mantle piece. In the kitchen it’s a functional object in the living room it’s object d’art. You can get the idea because it’s part of the general artist philosophy now eh?
I’d seen dozens of reproductions of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ but when I saw the ‘real thing’ in the Tate Liverpool, I literally wept.
I got in trouble the last time I banged on a table to emphasize a point!… See more
And finally, whether you can continue to make art – other than creativity being the driving force, you might decide whether to make art for the here and now or art that you think will last the test of time .. that’s the real dilemma. Haha?
You mention sitting in your chair eternally connected to the ‘outside world’ almost matrix-style as a dystopian potential. Interestingly, you as a lecturer, and others who can do their job by video and email and blog etc are prime candidates for this type of ‘intern(et)ment’.
There is a very interesting short story on that subject, written about 1909 by E M Forster – usually known for his pastorals but annoyed by what he saw as a promotion of technology as saviour in works by the likes of H G Wells, he delves into a kind of science fiction mode with his short piece called The Machine Stops. A society wherein everyone stays in his or her room on their all purpose couch, interacting on the Internet: “the further one is removed from experience the more one can understand and analyse it,” suggests the attempt to continually write and rewrite history. You can read the entire story here for free:
http://www.emforster.de/hypertext/template.php3?t=tms…
Shaun, you were discussing postmodernism recently, as this debate is a major player amongst some of the same issues. Endless revision is a symptom of a present in which all history is replaced by opinion – whose version of the truth is the factual version and all that goes with that debate.
We might ask whether that sense of immediacy and the … See morespontaneity of change is moving faster and driving us toward a constant present – the existential nightmare, a here and now with no reference to a static and believable past and no vision of the future due to its constantly evolving and fragmenting nature. And the increasing inability to act and counteract from our armchairs as we battle wits with politics and throw barbs at celebrity while consuming every morsel of gossip and downloading tid-bits of data to amuse, educate and entertain ourselves in the rush of information.
Hmm .. upside down and backward .. start at bottom – or, saying that it doesn’t really matter does it?,
I replied
It like being in a constantly expanding hall of mirrors. We are connected but to what extent does this have any bearing on what we actually create? I am listening to an album by Jon Boden called ‘Songs from the floodplain’. It is good. I once hosted a folk club he and Spiers played so I had some connection. How much I enjoy the album is coloured not only by that but by knowledge I have gleaned in seconds from the internet. I bought the album rather than download as it had a booklet which intrigued me. The actual content is accessible the cardboard isn’t. I could make him a friend on here but ‘know’ him no more than i ‘know’ you.
I am ‘expected’ to do ‘research’ as an academic and part of the posting to blog and here part of that. I am interested on how much ‘dialogue’ is provoked by this. It is not the perfect format and facebook has issues (see privacy link above is important) but it does engender discussions that I suspect would not work anywhere else? Almost like writing an old fashioned diary but with other voices commenting……. See more
p.s. the Boden package also available as a vinyl set and frankly it would make more sense like that shelved next to old folk vinyl as he referencing a whole archival feel. It is a actor’s record through and through and stagey like a Rada student’s bedroom but despite that there something ..call it craft..which cannot be accessed digitally. Barthes called it ‘timbre’ in The Grain of the Voice. Authenticity is bandied about but we struggle to catch that grain..that terroir (as in French earth meaning)..I think…then again I not sure..Boden mentions church and preacher many times and assumes a crucifix position….maybe that one route he exploring..not mine particularly…but he trying that for sure…
re:make art for the here and now or art that you think will last the test of time….
I’m not sure this the question exactly that although aspects of quality inflect everything I do and say. I have raised hackles here in nottingham by not perceiving the ‘quality’ proffered in the same way as many would like 🙂 It got to point I mostly say nothing but it does play a part.
No the point is that the pervasiveness of ‘distraction’ actually creating a point of stasis and do nothing. I think teaching ‘multimedia’ a major part of problem it a constant stream of ‘novelty’ and a constant strain to ‘keep up’ which does not occur in teaching History say…or Fine Art (until recently):-)… See more
How does one regain a sense of purpose….in this shower of information or does one simply say it is like this – this is how it is – reflect it and nothing more with some misappropriated objects (altermodernism) and abandon any pretence at achieving something solid? I refuxe to abandon principles and go down that route…..Mr Appleton said it dadaesque…quite rightly I expect and I am not….
I said:
The Forster story ends with talk of Alfred’s Wessex…now that I can identify with..as Raymond Williams said we always returning to a ‘Golden Age’…it always behind..always out of reach….I cannot live in an ever-present present however ‘contemporay’. I am a Victorian at heart..a Jude at the Walls of the new 🙂