“Lyric writing is an embarrassing thing to do because there’s a kind of exposure in writing lyrics that is really more critical than any other kind of exposure I can think of.
Words have such distinct meanings that they pin you down in a sense. So to start writing lyrics is hard. To start writing lyrics when you don’t know quite what to say is even more difficult.
So I began inventing systems the intention of which was to foil the critic in me and to encourage the child in me. I tend to think that one’s mind is mediated by two characters: one is a critical one and the other is playful and childish one. And we’re inclined to let the critic have a bit too much sway in that balance.
And so quite a lot of the procedures I use are intended to catch him off guard for a little while so that the playful person can come out.”
“D’une Rare Crudité” by Emilien Davaud, Jérémy Mougel, and Marion Szymczak. (2010)
Albert Einstein: Why Socialism? 1949
“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time.
It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil… This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.”
On Painting Machines
Reblogged from ekstasis:
“Anton Perich
Everything has history. Call the above proto-glitch. Here’s Perich describing his artistic process, in this case building a machine to do his painting for him in 1977:
I dreamed of a machine that would paint. No more hand made paintings, but machine made, with sharp electric lines, on and off, like Morse code, short and long. So in 1977/78 I built such a machine, using surplus materials from Canal Street stores. I wired some photocells to the airbrushes on the motorized scanning unit that swept an area of about 10×12 feet, hung a piece of canvas, and made my first digital painting. In his Diaries Warhol said he was terribly jealous. This machine was an early precursor of ink jet printer/scanner. This was the time long before computer and digital art. I had my first show of electric paintings at Tony Shafrazy Gallery in 1979. I am still painting with this machine every day. It keeps breaking and I keep fixing it all the time.
Not “computer generated,” but computer aided. Not mechanistic, but nevertheless mediated by technology, by the digital. “Glitched,” before such a thing was.
The wonderful Joanne McNeil is in charge of Rhizome’s frontpage these days. Compare Perich’s painting from the 70’s to her post, from 2011:
Today’s information and mass media society have brought about a diffused ‘aestheticization’ where artists are mixing political and war images with those proceeding from adds, commercial cinema and entertainment. Be it by hiding images behind layers, making them transparent or pixilated, applying faded colors and thick paint, there is a slowing down of the experience of viewing an image through a hand made, physical rendering. But, besides this ‘slowness’ and physicality that we traditionally associate with painting, the painting medium is also paradoxically going through an ‘acceleration’ process through its newfound relationship with iPhones, scanners, Photoshop, Facebook, satellites, digital cameras, and 3-D programs.
— The Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (MMKA) description of exhibition The End of History…and The Return of History Painting (via Bruce Sterling)
…Not “computer generated,” but mediated. That “slowness” is the same as Perich’s, a layer between theory and practice. Perich built a piece of bleeding-edge technology inspired by century old Morse code, by a dream, that always breaks and needs repair. It could be contemporary and would still seem avant garde.
The tools have changed, of course, which changes the context. A modified inkjet printer is a throwback now, a modern process made real by an allegedly dying technology, but the principle remains the same. That’s “the end of history,” simultaneously hurtling forward and artificially slowing ourselves, if only so we can make sense of things. Reaching into the past only to find what we thought was new, revolutionary and not being entirely surprised.”
(L’oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini)
“Hello, I Like You” by Mixtape Club
The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics edited by Bill Blackbeard
“As an undergraduate student and aspiring cartoonist, the book laid open most often on my drawing table was Blackbeard and Williams’ weighty Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics. For years I’d been led to believe by various comic book aficionados that the zenith of achievement for the medium were the EC comic books of the 1950s, but after discovering the Smithsonian book, it became all too clear to me that the real original geniuses of the medium were the pre-cinema cartoonists of the throwaway Sunday supplements of a half century prior. As a general history, the book evenly balanced a necessary all-inclusivity with an otherwise gently insistent esthetic sophistication, which was something of a virtuosic tightrope act of curation: covering everything while still allowing the greats to shine. Choosing a few representative examples of Krazy Kat and Little Nemo is hard enough, but what about introducing Gasoline Alley and Polly and Her Pals to a brand-new readership, to say nothing of uncovering the obscure efforts of George Luks and Lyonel Feininger? Even better, the strips were presented in a warm, large, full-color format which at the time must have been extraordinarily expensive, but allowed their complicated and intricate compositions to be truly re-appreciated; earlier histories of comics had tended towards text-clotted black-and-white tour schedules, amputating single panels and freeze-drying them in black and white as little more than passing souvenirs of an outmoded 19th and early 20th century naïveté. (As an aside, one of the deciding reasons I agreed to design the “Krazy and Ignatz” series was that Mr. Blackbeard was its acting editor, and I considered it a personal honor to be asked to contribute.) By devoting his life to the preservation and location of these near-extinct supplements and sections, Bill Blackbeard saved an American art from the certain peril of trash men, librarians and ultraviolet light so that we, the generations to come, could appreciate their unprepossessing, unpretentious and uproarious beauty. The comic strip may have been disposable, but Bill Blackbeard’s founding contribution to the understanding of it as an art was, and always will be, timeless.”
– Chris Ware
via Austin Kleon
Paul Greer 