"In a more Freudian idiom, it is a feeling prompted by the return of the repressed. Freud did, however, discuss the uncanniness of the life-like automaton, Olympia, that figures in Hoffmann’s tale, ‘The Sandman.’ The disturbed protagonist, Nathanial, is taken in by the doll and falls in love with her. Freud explained that since children do not strictly distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, they are inclined to think their dolls or stuffed animals are alive. As adults, then, the sight of a life-like automaton or automatic human behavior reactivates the infantile belief that we thought we had surmounted. Nevertheless, Freud argued, it is not Olympia that makes … [Read more...]

"The general public now draws its notion of art from advertising , MTC videos, video games, and Hollywood blockbusters. In the contemporary context of media generated taste, the call to abandon and dismantle the museum as an institution has necessarily taken on an entirely different meaning than when it was voiced during the avant-garde era. When people today speak of "real life" what they usually mean is the global media market. And that means: the current protest against the museum is no longer part of a struggle being waged against normative taste in the name of aesthetic equality but is, inversely, aimed at stabilizing and entrenching currently prevailing tastes." Boris Groys "The … [Read more...]

"Of all the arguments put forward with respect to it {art}, virtually no references are made to music, literature, cinema, dance or photography. Almost all of them bear instead on an object definable as that which succeeds to the place of painting, i.e. the arrangements of objects, the photographs, the video apparatuses, the computers - and sometimes even the performances - that occupy the spaces on whose walls portraits were previously to be seen. It would be wrong, however, to criticize these arrangements for their 'partiality'. Indeed, "art" is not the common concept that unifies the different arts. It is the 'dispositif' which renders them visible. And painting is not merely the name of … [Read more...]

“But you can’t allow a contradiction to stand! — Why not?… Ludwig Wittgenstein "Disneyland is a work of love. We didn't go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money." Walt Disney When Luis Barragan won the Pritzker Prize in architecture, the jury wrote "A stoical acceptance of solitude as man's fate permeates Barragán's work. His solitude is cosmic, with Mexico as the temporal abode he lovingly accepts." I remember when I first became aware of Barragan, I was probably about eighteen. I fell in love with the pink walls, the water, the sun off the blue or yellow facades, and the stables at Cuadra San Cristobal seemed the stage of a modernist play, a sort of tropical … [Read more...]

I find that often, on holiday breaks, my thoughts sort of meander over a lot of what I like. And I find myself thinking about the Bauhaus a good deal this year. The influence of the Bauhaus is probably greater even than the prevailing understanding suggests, and that understanding suggests they were very influential, indeed. From architecture to furniture, to typography, and painting, and theatre, but perhaps most significantly, as the final expression of a very rarified German bourgeois sensibility and intelligence, but also one that encompesed a collective and communal belief in social change. Now, there has also been, predictably, a backlash over the last decade. And that backlash is … [Read more...]

"If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true – if it is to be true today, in any case – it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims." Theodor Adorno "What are we to make of a mainstream media, along with the American public that appears more concerned about Kim Kardashian flaunting her post-baby body than about the Obama administration ordering a drone strike in Yemen that killed 17 innocent civilians who were part … [Read more...]

In clinical pictures of schizophrenia, according to Gabel, "a degradation of the dialectic of the totality (of which dissociation is the extreme form) and a degradation in the dialectic of becoming (of which catatonia is the extreme form) seem to be intimately interwoven." Imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle's screen, the consciousness of the spectactor has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities. The sole mirror of this consciousness is the spectacle in all its breadth, where what is staged is a false way out of a generalized autism. Guy Debord The topic of … [Read more...]

One thing is becoming increasingly clear; the infantilization of society. It is obvious in almost every area of life today. But, there are secondary, or parallel themes attached to this encouragement to stay childish. One is the creation of constant needs. As Jonathan Crary says, the term "24/7" is one without real meaning, except to suggest a "ceaslessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment". What is worth looking at, and Crary makes this point, too, is that today people in the West sleep about, on average, six and a half hours a night. A generation ago it was eight. And at the turn of the 20th century, it was ten. The pre industrial revolution saw … [Read more...]