Tuesday, March 26, 2024

the future behind us now

Xenogothic exhumes a panel discussion from 2014 involving Mark Fisher, Lee Gamble, Kode9 aka Steve Goodman, Alex Williams, Lisa Blanning - and bearing the title The Death of Rave - and does a public service by getting the debate transcribed.

Go here for his reasons for digging this up and reflections of how it relates to current glumness, state of clubbing and club music, as well as the transcription itself

Here's one choice exchange: 


Alex Williams: As regards hedonism... What was interesting about things like the early days of rave music, is that it’s fun, but it’s serious fun. It’s seriously fun. But also it has some… There’s a kind of a sense that sort of eliminating yourself collectively through drugs and music is an intense and meaningful experience. … Kids still go out. They still have a good time and people still take lots of drugs and become highly intoxicated....  The lack of the idea that this could be a good time that is also more than a good time, in a certain sense. An intense experience that could be transformational, in some way. Maybe not political. I think in many ways, all of this stuff stands in for politics. The politics we’re not allowed to have.... Within the impulse that you see in rave is a lot of things coming from the failed revolutions which were happening in 1968, which couldn’t happen. They failed. So that impulse, then, sort of reverberates throughout culture, and pops up every now and then. And rave was one of these things.

... To a lot of eyes today [it] seems naïve. We think it’s naïve that you could treat a rave as if it was really serious, as if.... this sort of being together with people and having this collective experience could be transformational. We view it a bit distastefully, as if it’s sort of jejune, or sort of hippy-ish. It’s something to be kind of viewed with contempt. 

Mark Fisher: The key affective figuration of our time is depressed hedonism. Depressive hedonism. Like the way Drake sings, “We had a party, we have a party, we had a party”. [Laughter] It’s like the saddest sound you’ve ever heard....  The best kind of critiques of capitalism coming out of, like, Drake and Kanye West… Even if you’re super rich, you’re totally fucking miserable.... Just the absolute abject misery of on-tap hedonism...

Friday, March 22, 2024

trick of memory


 






















It's funny how an image like this can give you a right hauntological frisson....  

But at the time, it would have just been part of the dreary everydayness of the era (that dingy orange)....  graphic with-it-ness reaching the mainstream and becoming mundane....  unremarkable, unnoticed... 

But there are design scholars and archivists and imagery collectors who love the Sainsbury packaging, see it as an outpost of popular modernism

And they're not wrong






































As pointed out in the comments, there's been a book of this stuff out for over a decade now, the brainchild of one Jonny Trunk








































Some sample pages












Thursday, March 14, 2024

good retro versus bad retro


Last year, on Twitter a designer who identifies himself only as Stuff by Mark put up a bunch of imaginary movie posters that took New Wave songs and imagined each of them as a film from the New Wave of British cinema aka 1960s kitchen-sink realism. 








I  thought these were clever and attractive. 

This kind of thing strikes me as "good retro" . It's work that's fun to look at but it's based in an affinity between the two things being mashed together: British realist cinema of the late '50s / early '60s, the New Wave / 2-Tone school of late 70s / early '80s groups,  Films and songs about ordinary people and ordinary life, equal parts wry and gritty. Social comment, social observation, class-consciousness, deglamorized documentary-like pictures of real life. A tone of undisguised bitterness. These were new things in pop in the late '70s, as they'd been in British film in the early '60s.

The affinity is even clearer in the case of the Squeeze song, which takes its title  - and lyrical ambience - from the Sixties film. 

Stuff by Mark puts out a steady stream of, er, stuff, all based on bygone graphic styles. Prints of the work are for sale from the website.

But just like there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, so there's good retro and bad retro. 

And this recent offering strikes me as the bad kind.

It takes the track list of  the one and only album by The La's and imagines each song as a movie poster in the style of the legendary Saul Bass, famous for his title sequences for films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Preminger  and Billy Wilder, among many others.



 






















Why "bad retro"?

Unlike with the New Wave songs as New Wave film posters, there's no aesthetic affinity between the La's and Saul Bass.
'
The La's were an edge-of-Madchester / proto-Britpop outfit, immortal for "There She Goes", itself totally retro - or perhaps "time travel" is the operative word, the true hopeless desire at work here. (Famous story of Lee Mavers rejecting a vintage studio console because it didn't have "proper Sixties dust" on it). 

But the region of the recent past that the La's were obsessed with reenacting was completely separate from the world that Saul Bass operated in - the Hollywood mainstream. You think Saul Bass and you're instantly in the era of Mancini and Martinis and mid-century modern (the kind of look and feel that suffuses the decor and costumes of Mad Men, say).  

Whereas The La's reference points are Beatles and Merseybeat and perhaps a bit of Crosby Stills and Nash (the Graham Nash bit). The look and feel of this 1960s is a world away from Saul Bass's world.  Rock, then, saw Hollywood as showbiz, as phony, as nothing to do with youth culture (or hopelessly clumsy and out of touch when it tried to deal with it). 



The La's own album artwork is faintly Swinging Sixties / mod / Carnaby Street, or just ugly.







The other big difference is that The La's are throwbacks, while Saul Bass was absolutely modern in his moment. Ridiculously with-it and au courant.

More to the point, whether it was the credits sequences or his film posters or his logos for corporations, Bass did things that had never been done before.  He innovated with typography, with cut-out animation, with methods of production. The very idea that a title sequence could be a miniature work of art in its own right was a new thing.






So it's an arbitrary marriage of contraries, done according to the additive logic of the mash-up:  "Here's two things I like - Bass's designs, Mavers's tunes and voice - so let's combine them". 

AI means the world is going to be choked with this kind of thing. Already is being choked by it.

Like low-density lipoprotein, it clogs up the arteries of the culture.  

Friday, February 16, 2024

You Don't Have to Go to Collage (retro-blogging)

Not sure if I did post this on Retromania, as opposed to Hardly Baked... an oldie riffy-rambler from 2011

This summer we went to see two exhibitions in Los Angeles – one was in nearby Pasadena (Clayton Brothers: Inside Out) and the other was in downtown at the MOCA and called Art in the Streets, a mammoth retrospective of graffiti and street art going back to the very beginnings... Clayton Brothers do life-scale shacks and diorama-type things, lots of stuff based on old illustrative styles, newspaper fonts, etc – readymades either literally or in inspiration, but the overall agglomeration of it tinged towards the surreal-creepy-macabre-twisted... a sort of dayglo American-Gothic... At Art in the Streets, a lot of the more recent work involved very large pieces, real-size reproduction of actual real-world stuff – like a bodega, with cans of vegetables etc – or a shabby taxi hire office in a shady part of town, those band or advertising or prostitute type stickers stuck over every surface – one artist (Neckface, we used to see his graff in our old neighbourhood in the East village) did a thing that was literally street art -- the recreation of a dark, dank alley in a scary, grotty part of NYC, complete with a sleeping bum.

Anyway this got me thinking... about readymades and collage, the tradition that starts with Duchamp... with Schwitters with the merzbau and the merzhaus... then proceeds through Lichenstein, Warhol, Richard Hamilton.... Lari Pitman, whose work draws on decorative and kitschy-retro graphics and fonts... Jeff Koons.... and then into the post-graffiti/hip hop era with people the Alleged Art crew (heavily present at this exhibition)... some of whom were into stuff like the tags left by hobos on the side of railcars, or they were into tattoos... 

The late Margaret Kilgannen of Alleged used a lot of commercial imagery... hand-painted shop front signage, imagery from advertisements in old magazines... in the Alleged crew doc Beautiful Losers she says something about how "all this stuff becomes interesting to me when it's no longer selling anything to me"-- in other words, once it's divorced from commerce in the immediate here-and-now, it becomes capable of being aestheticized, which is a great description of how vintage chic works

But what struck me about all this in connection with Art in the Streets and Clayton Brothers is that underpinning the whole century-long thing was One Idea – a REALLY BIG idea - which is treating the objects of manufactured modernity as if they were nature, as beautiful as a tree or landscape... (c.f. James Ferraro's description of Far Side Virtual as "the still life of now" - the audio and video landscape of our digitized, augmented-reality daily surroundings)

But also it’s a move of taking the non-art, the infra-art, and just moving it across a line... commerce becomes Culture, the mass produced aura-less product becomes the one-off, aura-full handcrafted object ready for the art market.

And as the Ferraro comparison suggests, it's the same move being made by the hauntologists and the hypnagogics (a lot of post-Ferraro music is Pop Art meets psychedelia), you take what is deemed beneath or outside Proper Serious Rock-as-Art, so that would be ancient cheese pop or mainstream AOR or library music (in the case of hauntology) or with Ferraro now it's ringtones and computer start-up jingles and so forth i.e. today's equivalent to library/Muzak... and then you say well actually if you tilt your head this way slightly , it’s sublime – or even (upping the ante) in some cases it’s just better and more weird than self-conscious Arty art-rock.

And then the art work for a lot of those hypnagogic cassettes is chopped-up magazine images (eyes, lips etc) like a more grotesque and cack-handed version of what the British Pop Artists did... like the popcult unconscious throwing up all over the page (and that's no diss, i love all that artwork)

the low > high context-shift

Nick Katranis calls this artistic move "looking at what is right in front of you"

for most people "right in front of you" nowadays means that what they can find on the internet, what’s trawl-able on YouTube etc etc

e.g. Oneohtrix scavenging for alchemy-susceptible materials on YouTube, the stuff that’s beneath consideration, infomercials or ancient clumsy computer graphics, or Chris deBurgh... or with Replica, the new LP, he's sampling from a DVD of 1980s and ‘90s daytime TV commercials

What I'm a-wonderin' is whether the BIG IDEA that i mentioned, whether that is so very very BIG -so fundamental and capacious in scope and potential - that it can just carry on and on and on... or is it a 20th Century idea that has just lingered a bit into the next century and hangs on while we all try to think of somewhere new to go?

Post-script: what do you know, Aaron Rose, the guy who co-curated Art in the Streets and was owner and director of Alleged Art (and also directed the Beautiful Losers doc) has co-written a book called Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century's Identity Crisis that looks to be a rather Retromaniac-al polemic ("why has the 21st century become an era of collage, in which creative works are made by combining elements from the former century?", "THE PAST MUST NO LONGER SERVE AS OUR MASTER") which sorta suggests that even as he was pulling together the exhibition he might have been having similar anxieties as i did looking at it

here's what he says in an interview with Oyster:

"Everything in this world is built on references. I don’t think that’s really such a problem, that’s part of the creative process. Although where the amount of original input is below 5%, that’s when I feel like there’s maybe a problem... I think the contemporary art world is horrible [as an offender]! And in music. Music, I think, is really bad. Music videos, especially — horrible — are like, basically just taking things frame for frame.