My sequential art/comic-form essay for the great new monograph on highly unique sound and visual artist Andy Guhl, Andy Guhl: Ear Lights, Eye Sounds; Expanded Cracked Everyday Electronics. (Organized and edited well by artist Tabea Guhl.)
Click image to see larger.
This is an art blog based in Europe, primarily Switzerland, but with much about the US and elsewhere. With the changes in blogging and social media, it is now a more public storage for articles connected to discussions occurring primarily on facebook and the like.
(Site in English und Deutsch)
25 May 2014
20 May 2014
Shut Up and Paint, the Theme Song Print, Brandl and The Handcuffs
This is a small image of the 70 x 50 cm print for my theme song. The theme song, Shut Up and Paint, is included in the center bottom as a CD or flex-disc. It was written and performed by Brad Elvis and Chloe Orwell, The Handcuffs, and is available here.
11 May 2014
Models are Not Master Narratives
Rather
than ask again: what is a trope?
I prefer to
ask
the pragmatic question: what is it that we want
our
tropes to do for us?
—Harold
Bloom1
If
a new metaphor enters the conceptual system
that
we base our actions on, it will alter that
conceptual
system and the perceptions and actions
that
the system gives rise to. Much of cultural
change
arises from the introduction of new
metaphorical
concepts and the loss of old ones.
—George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson2
Master
Narratives
What are
master narratives? They
are all-enveloping stories, (usually single
strand or monogenic as Christian
Doelker refers to them), which in a rather straight-forward
(appearing) fashion try to relate a series of events which offer a
comprehensive explanation of historical or philosophical events or knowledge. A
master narrative is a grand story that 'masters' (dominates) other stories by
either absorbing them or ignoring them. The basic notion was seemingly first
suggested, as we now use it, by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979.
What
is the problem with them? Explaining all the aspects of the problems and abuses
resulting from master narratives, or dominant discourses as they have also been
termed, has been much of livelihood of postmodern critics. In short, they often
delimit thought, sustain oppressive systems and purport to be the truth,
allowing no exceptions. On the other hand, what has been the problem with the
stringent critique of master narratives? It has sometimes lead the less
inventive to fall into the simple nihilism of "I give up."
In the name of "decentering the discourse" or
the like, some art historians, for example, do nothing innovative, allowing
their fear of potential incorrectness to lead them into a far worse scenario, a
decent into a Consensus-Correct yet unproductive morass of avoidance. Yes,
thank God, the wide acceptance of the Western canon as self-evidently universal
(even in non-Western regions) is over; yet just when it should be significantly
enlarged, it can instead become a shrunken paucity of visual-aids to
solipsistic fear. Heuristically, such a vision of art history is then
clearly useless.
What is
a Model?
Models
are provisional representations of complex circumstances. Conceptual models are
concepts, images of some complexity mocking-up real world states of affairs in
a fashion that helps us analyze those affairs, especially relationships among
them. A model at best is testable, self-questioning, and suggests new insights.
A good model forms the foundation for discussions
of the concepts involved.
It
is vital to stress that a model is not the real world but merely a human
construct to help us better understand real world experiences. The map is not
the landscape, yet it can help us appreciate various aspects of the landscape
as we walk through it. The best models are clearly open to critique and suggest
their own fallibility, while still serving as significant instruments of
thought. We all use models, whether consciously or not. Being conscious of them
and attempting to improve them assists in stopping any slide into master
narrative.
Some
examples of models: imagining electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom as
similar to planets orbiting a sun; flowcharts of boxes and arrows seen as representing
actions in a series; mathematical structures such as groups, fields, graphs, or
even the universes of set theory to visualize mathematical logic; and so on.
Clearly, most models are metaphors or combinations of tropes.
Scientific,
philosophical and theoretical models are all about discussion and include the
expressed aim of improving each model continuously, in a kind of calculus of
thought.
A
Personal Example:
In
my Phd dissertation and many articles on this site, I discuss my theory of
central trope, or metaphor(m). As one aspect of that, I asked myself what a
model of art history itself could look like if I treated the standard timeline
as an artwork of sorts, and attempted to create a new one which would embody a
central trope incorporating a contemporary conception of history while
retaining heuristic use as a learning device. I was not aiming to utterly
dismiss the timeline in dispair, as some have done. In a dialogical fashion I was
answering back to the calls of the models of art history now in use, trying to
improve upon them by shaping a new and better trope for understanding the
discipline. I, along with John Perreault, developed a model of art history as a
frayed, braided rope. More about this in a future article.
Tools
of Thought
What
do we want our tropes to do for us, as Bloom asks? We want our tropes to change
the way we think. Through such alteration, we want them to offer us
understanding, to help us comprehend the world of our experience, and even,
perhaps, to assist us in changing that world. This is a large demand, but we
should face it in all its hubris, self-contradiction, impossibility and wonder,
and not evade it in cloying irony or other self-debasement. All the creative
arts introduce new metaphorical concepts or surprising re-readings of older
ones. This is primarily accomplished by creators through their metaphoric use
of elements of the physical world, their materials, methods and formats: their
metaphor(m)s, their central tropes.
As can
be seen, models are not master narratives. Not in form, use, implication or
application. The almost paranoid fear of expressing any non-pre-approved
analytical conception has made many a weaker contemporary art theorist make
this conceptual error of identification between models and master narratives.
That is merely a logical mistake. Models are tools of and for thought.
1 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a
Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982;
paperback,
1983), p. 31.
2 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors
We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1980; paperback, 1981), p. 145.
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