It’s rare I encounter a term I can neither unpack nor Google.

So does anyone know what a “constitutive blank” is? I assume it’s Theory jargon borrowed from somewhere.

“…when one sees and senses thusly, then one has to work to do something about what one sees. To posess good intuition, goodly power, causes work.”
– Women Who Run With The Wolves p108, Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

The album “Floodland” by The Sisters Of Mercy was released on the 17th of November 1987.

It’s an absolute classic and one of the two major initial drivers of my worldview (the other being Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories).

If you don’t own a copy, buy one. If you do, the re-release has extra tracks on. 😉

I was listening to an episode of the Radio 4 programme “In Our Time” the other week which discussed taste. Here are some notes.

Early C18th Britain had become the leading commercial power in Europe. This brought new wealth and luxury into British society. The fear was that this would make the British soft and lead to their imperial decline, as it had for the Roman Empire before. Britain was a hard-working, Protestant, parliamentary democracy. France was its Papist, absolutist, decadent other across the channel. There was an anxiety that luxury (excessive self-gratification) will subvert virtue.

The modern concept of taste was born in France and became harnessed to the debates around luxury in Britain. After 1688 the authority of the British court declined so unlike Louis XIV’s dictation of taste in France, there was a much more open debate about what taste might be.

Taste has the economic basis of dignifying expense. It also has an intellectual basis; the exercise of taste is brought to the centre of philosophy by Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury’s deism sees aesthetic as the best proof of God. He also argues that taste explains virtue and moral judgement as the sense of beauty in society. The man of sophistication and taste is therefore a moral man as well.

Addison in The Spectator describes how people can be better than just pursuers of pleasure by pursuing the refined arts; taste is the capacity to be recpetive to these arts. It becomes a distinguishing competence of modern citizens.

British taste is opposed to enthusiasm and excess as a result of being opposed to religious enthusiasm and to the excess of the court of King Charles. A way of appropriate virtue rather than dangerous enthusiasm. The design rules of the time are a reaction to excess. Taste is a vocabulary for an ordered religiosity.

Taste covered deportment as well as visual aesthetics. You could have taste without having high birth. Taste is potentially a very socially subversive idea. Taste was mocked as well as embraced from the start. Bad taste was mocked savagely, for example by Pope.

Taste is based on a set of rules. This opens it to the masses. But it is also meant to involve long exposure to the rules, making them intuitive. Poor taste gets much more coverage than good taste. Critics fall back on the classical idea of decorum, that surroundings should reflect status. So commentaries on the tasteless gaudiness of those who dress above their station proliferate, as does hatred of new money.

Sheet music, novels, galleries etc. make culture more public and more publicly accessible, especially to the rising middle classes. Taste is deployed socially against popular fads and economically against imports, often at the same time. Good taste is the ingredient old money has that new money hasn’t. You can only really have taste if you’re born to it.

Taste as both innate and discriminatory and rule-based and emancipatory.

Wedgewood had to get buy-in from tastemakers when launching new works to ensure their success, a triangle of entrepenuers, critics and lords results.

Taste was very much a feature of the Empire. For settlers one of the aims of Empire was often to recreate yourself, which you did through displaying taste.

In Britain people fall back on the language of decorum when in doubt about taste.

Liberty has a similar trajectory to taste, spreading through society from the aristocracy. And now “tasteful” is the ultimate put-down.

Shaftesbury, Addison, George Coleman

Today at 4.15pm French time 100 years ago, Alfred Jarry’s final request was for a toothpick.

Find out more about Jarry at Wikipedia:

Alfred Jarry

‘Pataphysics

Pere Ubu

http://www.dragcity.com/news.html

SIGHS MATTERS

Lately, Mayo Thompson and The Red Krayola have been thrilling us to the extreme. The level of musicianship, surprise, deep thoughts, hot and cold running humor and really, all-round entertainment found in their Introduction LP/CD and “Red Gold” CDEP releases of 2006 might have represented a one-two punch for some – but damn if The Red Krayola don't intend to push their luck with a bit of the old three-four here in 2007. First (and finally!) was the return of Soldier-Talk, their 1979 punk-pop uber-work – a reissue nearly 30 years in the making, a classic slab never before compacted to disc. Now The Red Krayola have re-allied with Art & Language to produce an all-new work. Art & Language, as you may recall, are an arts collective whose lyrics provided The Red Krayola with a springboard to several of their classic songs – “A Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock,” “Black Snakes,” “Born In Flames,” “Future Pilots” and of course, all of the Kangaroo? and Corrected Slogans albums. For many, these recordings represented the epochal The Red Krayola contribution…but for those many, the new album Sighs Trapped By Liars will force extreme revisionism (or as the more stiff-necked may assert, revulsionism!). That's just how good the new album by The Red Krayola with Art & Language is. The cast of Tom Watson, John McEntire, Noel Kupersmith, Jim O'Rourke and Mayo Thompson roll out a deep-pile musical carpet for chanteuses Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang, who share lead vocal duties throughout the entire record. That's right – no signature vocal presence from Mayo, who contents himself in arranging vocal lines for the ladies straight out of his private libretto. They acquit themselves magnificently to the complexities of the Art & Language lyrics, which are as ever caught up in social and aesthetic conflicts – though a new and different wave of issues than the 70s and 80s lyrics addressed. To unravel the Gordian knot for yourself, you'll find great enjoyment in hearing Sighs Trapped By Liars, which will be available everywhere that the world is envisioned as a better place (and sells records) in the waning moments of September!

Technorati Tags: Art & Language, music

Art & Language and The Red Krayola (nee Crayola) have a new album out this month, around the 25th depending on where you are in the world.

Previews indicate that the sound is a very contemporary 1960s retro and as unlistenably brilliant as ever. The Art & Language work the title and cover draw on is a decade old, so I don’t know how long this has been in the works. But I am absolutely stoked that this is coming out now

More details from Drag City here (scroll down to September).

Order from Amazon US or Amazon UK if you must. But it would be better to order it through your local record shop.

Technorati Tags: Art & Language, music

The whole point is that there is no depth, and depth is just another name – treasured by the hermeneuts – for transcendence.

Where does a truth come from then, if its process is strictly immanent and it is not given as the secret depth or intimate essence of the situation? […] it has its origins in a disappearance.

– Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, p122

Badiou is fascinating for his genuinely atheistic philosophy built on the infinities of set theory. He’s a Lacanian but we won’t mention that.

Technorati Tags: philosophy

Art is pretty & expensive. Diamonds are pretty & expensive. Art has form. Diamond dust has no form. Art is aesthetic. Diamond dust is pure aesthetic.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, satire

“Distress Signals V”, 2006, by Art & Language (A&L) is where looking at a photographs of an artwork rather than the work itself breaks down if it hasn’t already. It consists of a paintings mounted inside a shallow wooden box that looks like a bespoke packing crate of the kind that paintings are shipped in. Into the front of this box large holes have been cut, allowing the viewer to see some of the painting’s surface. This frustrates the viewer’s gaze and tantalises them with the prospect of recovering the image.

This scheme refers back to the most deliberately frustrating work in the series “Index: Incident In The Museum”, Incident XIV, the work that A&L exhibited when they were entered for the Turner Prize. The standard painting of a view of a museum was covered with wooden cladding into which random holes were drilled and onto which a simple schematic diagram of a perspective view of a room was drawn. This referred to the literal outside of the museum used as the model for the paintings, the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The holes in the wood of “Distress Signals” are much wider relative to the size of the painting than those of Incident XIV. They give the viewer greater hope of simply recovering the concealed image. Unless they are the (re)viewer of a photograph of the work, in which case they can only guess. Is the painting coloured plaid of the kind that “No Secret Painting” refers to?

This is a work that quite literally reveals the inner workings of the global art market’s distribution networks, and that quite literally penetrates its obfuscations and representations. This is art quite literally as middle-sized dry goods ready for shipping. We can see through this its content, but this is not the view of the audience that such art is made for.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, Art & Language