Momuses New Essay

http://www.demon.co.uk/momus/news.html

...anyways, that's what i got out of it.....

'I like your new essay. Though my own modest talents are verbal rather than visual, I usually prefer the company of artists, designers, and (some) musicians to that of writers or editors, who tend to be a rather dyspeptic, embittered group. Many of them feel very much that the rise of the visual culture you describe has deprived them of the adulation they would undoubtedly be enjoying if there were no television, and develop a hatred for the image which often blinds them to how they could harness its power (as well as to the many delights to be found therein). Hence the superstition displayed in Jonathan Franzen's recent agonizing over the weighty question of whether or not to appear on "Oprah," as if appearing on TV would destroy his aura as a serious writer. Although since now that aura seems to be founded in the popular mind almost exclusively on his having refused to appear on TV, perhaps it would!

Henry Darger, interestingly, seems to have thought that his writing was the most important part of his work. His art is simply illustration of his insane, million-word novel. But the writing gets old quickly; it's clumsy and repetitive. The images, however, are endlessly fascinating. I wonder, however, if he didn't sometimes begin with the painting, and write down what he saw there. Either way, though, he thought it very important to get the visions down in writing, and I'm not sure what to make of that. More mystery!'

So it might be with the humanity in general. Russia sees 'brother Europe' getting ultra-efficient, technocratic, instrumental-logical, so it decides to go the other way and develop its 'slavic soul'. France sees Britain and America taking over the world with anglo-saxon free market capitalism and decides to stress at every opportunity the things never included in any business model: culture, sex, quality of life, and the right of the small cheese maker to keep making brie in a world where only Cheez Whizz factories make economic sense.

It might be the same in today's world of Islam versus McWorld. The terrorism of Al Quaeda might simply be a sort of violent correction to the unbridled capitalism, the unspiritual landscape of ever-more-huge mergers and monopolies we've seen in the last 20 years. Far from being surprised by them, we invited, invented and invoked their 'corrective' blow by our own conflicted feelings about our culture.

The same sibling specialisation divides labour between the visual and the verbal strands of western societies. Art galleries, the secular temples of our world, are currently specialised in visual culture, in colour, in form. This might be a correction to a world in which most people wear a very limited range of blacks, blues and greys, and where the visual is constantly trumped by its more authoritative sibling, the verbal.

Now imagine visual and verbal trading places. You walk into a place with the same cultural status, in that parallel world, that art galleries have in ours. What do you find there? Probably a kind of 'Fahrenheit 451' or '1984'-esque world of furtive literary texts, history books, newspapers, crossword puzzles. A library! Suddenly a huge, expensive, groovy, glossy library is where people go on Sundays, full of that sense of wonder they currently reserve for Tate Modern.

One implication of this scenario is that there's nothing inherently subversive about visual culture, the culture of colour and texture and image. It's subversive because, in our current western culture, it's under-represented. It has been designated by royal appointment (or has designated itself) 'the other'. As such it has the negative charisma of all official oppositions, which may be future powers in waiting.

It's this charisma, I'm suggesting, which artists also share. To be a possible corrective to a world of lemming-like conformity is rich consolation for all the obloquy and mockery the world can throw at you as a 'loser' or a 'weirdo'. Your very uselessness to the world as it now exists is a badge of honour. Your unemployability gets twisted in your mind into a sign of your importance to the future of humanity.

In this sense the 'other green world' into which you claim some kind of insight is located not in space but in our common future on the planet earth.

Okay, I'm going to leave it there before people accuse me of turning into David Icke or the Unabomber.

All of which makes me glad to be here in New York, where I reflect that, although Britain may have launched a thousand copies of the Velvet Underground, it couldn't have launched the original. Because for the original VU you need the Factory and Fluxus, and they're 'artwank'.

I was amused because the 'I like visual people' statement was *your* justification for being interested in a category of sad acolyte and those words cropped up in the essay. You've expended a ton of energy in not actually addressing this, calling people Brutish rather than face the challenge of responding to what I noticed. Not a new tactic. Bluster, bluster.

So I'll simplify what I've said so that you might 'get it'. Words are a kind of picture. And pictures, well, they're also words. They feed (into) one another, don't they? I think the seamlessness of that thought is really rather beautiful.

It might be the same in today's world of Islam versus McWorld.

My problem with the whole construct of this presumed battle is that I think more people like McWorld's offerings than will be admitted to.

The groupies are another matter. I've never liked them and I thought eventually you'd move away from utilising them. Clearly they are a source of comfort and you don't like their inadequacies pointed out, whether they're Japanese or not (where people come from really doesn't matter to me). However you did use the *exact* same phrase to justify having them around when we last had dinner, which was all I was really saying. Uncomfortable for you, maybe, and not conductive to your argument, but true.

Let's look at Nick's idol David Bowie, who emerged from a period of silence and visuals (yo, Lindsay Kemp) to write more interesting words. Going towards the visual, for writers, is a kind of battery recharge. And whatever art you make I believe it comes from somewhere else, someplace else. You can wake up with a lyric in your head or a story there, or be sitting at your desk/computer/notepad/sketchpad and the next time you look up from your work, you've made something using connections and ideas that just sort of bubble up. And it's a long way from the dumb quotidian shit people have to deal with every day, yes including you, artist type.

No recipes on the Momus website because Nick can't cook, won't cook. He once made me the following 'meal':

One can chick peas. One can tinned tomatoes. Heat, eat. Salt, pepper optional, depending on whether or not the last takeaway had these condiments in the bag. But he does make a nice cup of tea ;-).

I get itchy when I hear people talk about 'primitive' areas of our brains. And when I hear about unknowability of art, and the Romantic ideal of the artist-outsider (in the West this is as much about unconventional economic decisions as it is about some kind of primal demigod status).

Art is criticism too.

Now you see, if I'd pointed out the maleness of Nick's constructs I'd have gotten a load of stick for being some kind of harpy. Oh, *wait*.

I like Brutishness, applied with discrimination. All the people Nick tars as Brutes up above can be seen on and off these boards responding to other stuff with intelligence, sensitivity, and delight - Brutishness is a string to their critical bow. As Suzy says, the problem lies in turning it into a binary - most people are Brutes *and* aesthetes.

I think a lot of what the essay says is on-the-money, particularly when talking about academia, where the enforced suppression of the self required of the literary or art critic is certainly harmful. But the mystery/no-mystery dualism is still too simplistic - the two bleed into each other. For one thing mystery is surely mostly accidental: if you think about the mystery you're putting into a picture it becomes more of a rebus. And if it is accidental, the most modest critical post on a web forum can contain mysteries of its own.

Question which isn't much talked about in the essay: what price is paid for adding to mystery, or for taking away from it? In social or mental terms?

Finally, SOLVE THE WORDS-AND-PICTURES BINARY! READ A COMIC!

2. That's as may be, but why are they always half your age and half your IQ? A more emotionally secure man wouldn't seek out that kind of attention, and women with higher self-esteem wouldn't go there. That's what all my friends at the dinner were saying, too. You know, the artists, curators and the like all saying 'what is he so scared of?'

3. Spiteful how? No spite here. That annoyed ex-girlfriend stuff is your cliche which you feed and water when it suits you, whether it's appropriate or not. And it's *so* not.

4. Not THAT dinner, the one at the Korean reataurant where I laid into you for totally taking advantage of your last groupie (where you at least acknowledged your appalling behaviour). I'm good enough at French when I don't have some martinet hanging over me making a meal of mistakes, whereas my French friends try to encourage my efforts to speak their language.

And for what it's worth ILE, sorry for dragging this up here, but I can't allow the twin slurs of racism or Brutishness to be levied at me in front of friends since I'm patently neither of these things. Especially considering Nick tuned me into IL* in the first place! It would be easier for Nick if I didn't contradict him in public (oh, an opinion! The temerity!) but sometimes a good friend has to also be a good critic. Now can we please play nice?

David Ruffin's duophonic screaming (Pharaoh Sanders in all but instrument) speaks much more concisely and conclusively of emotions than the Hitsville production line lyrics he was fed. And the cliches of those lyrics themselves are intentional, masking a horrific despair of their own on the part of the authors.

Welles dismantles and reassembles his genius in F For Fake to call everyone's bluff (mainly Pauline Kael). Yes I'm a liar, I bullshit/shit on people, but I'm so fucking good at doing it, can't you see? It's my art. Look at my finale. Only the Picassos of this world survive - boxing clever and beating the bastards at their own game. But it's not so often that genius and shrewdness are found in the same paintbox. Rothko (for instance) never had the ghost of a chance; he was wide open.

We walk into the unappealing immensity of Tate Modern and we see words. Nil bar words to explicate the rationale of art. Words later please - as an afterthought, in the catalogue. Just like tape compilations - give them to your mate, let them listen for about two weeks and then let them have the track listing.

But no. Art cannot survive without words - is based upon pictures-as- words to begin with. No one should be allowed to look at a Rothko monograph without first spending a week in the Wallace Collection looking at Dutch seascapes. No one should be allowed to enter Tate Modern without a prior compulsory tour of the sugar refinery at Silvertown which bankrolls it. Make your money, be footpad or counsellor, in Threadneedle and go and contemplate in Oxford when the need for "civilisation" arises.

We communicate, we prosper, we learn, we unlearn.

And the cathedral is now the ghost of a sailing ship, and only my words can focus your mind and your eyes upon its significance.

When it fades we will justify more art to screen the void of existence, and justify words to prove that we exist by consequence of its beneficence.

*passes joint*

i've yet to read this essay but i fear it will not live up to the thread!

In my own experience I have found that the more ambiguous a piece of art is, the more discussion it tends to provoke, or to be more accurate, the range of discussion is wider. Thus, by making something (anything: writing, images, music, etc.) "dramatic, hazy, and inconsistent" one tends to wonder more about it then if it was clean- cut and dry. What do you think would bring about the most varied example of views and interperetations, a discussion on Terry Gilliam's "2001: A Space Odyssey" or a discussion of a by-the-books prime time television sit-com?

"On the contrary, Adam, the debates, volleys and follies on this thread have been much more entertaining and a bit more thought- provoking than the original essay."

Hmm..entertaining, yes perhaps. I don't know if I would call a series of inside jokes and personal slander more 'thought provoking' than an essay on the dualism of the known and the unknown, but hey, to each his own....

As for the second question - I've never seen any comment on Brazil which has been much more than windy blather or 'coo I liked it'. Even the most banal prime-time sitcom engages with everyday life more and so tends to produce more interesting conversation. What I will say is that great and mysterious art is much better than by-the-book art at inspiring the production of more art.

Actually, I was talking about the essay, not the replies. Obviously the main objective in those replies is to defend his essay, or at least add to the mystery surrounding it by bringing up further questions. Also, I never said ambiguity made for good debate etiquette, but that it made for good art. ("good" of course, being a completely subjective term...)

I think images are really quite like words. What they're not like is sentences.

actually i have a good story to tell about britishness and brutishness and cynicisim and inspiration but it will have to wait as i was up all night last reading abt captain scott (again) and need some sleep

ARGH.

Of course, the impossibility of disagreeing with images is one reason the powers that be are switching our culture over to them. Some say the Iron Curtain fell because of MTV. You could disagree with Milton Friedman's economic ideas because they were articulated in words, but it was much harder to 'disagree' with images of the good life in a Duran Duran video.

(sorry momus)

2) Protestantism (word) vs Catholicism (image) {conceptual art is the revenge of P-ism on C-ism}

3) I can feel nothing but a vulgar admiration for Momus. Like Taylor Parkes said ages ago on ILM - he is halfway to leading the kind of lifestyle he aspires to (rather than goofing off from a job one dislikes to gossip on the interweb).

4) Tom - Though not a particularly great film, I think Brazil engages with "everyday life" very profoundly, just as much as 1984 does: the limits to individual freedom in bureaucratized society (to phrase it in a very banal way) are something one comes up against everytime one gets on the tube. There's a difference between doing so metaphorically or literally. Furthermore art being inspired by mysterious art is just as much 'conversation' as chat about banal sit- coms in a pub, non? What was shoe-gazing, or symbolism, but cultural conversations about the meaning of MBV or Mallarmé?

You could argue that a film or a pop video is combining single images into a sentence that could also be disagreed with ('the world is not as Tarantino portrays it'), but images are much more specific, full of their own ambiguity and 'thisness'. With language you can always pin someone down to the defintion of a word or the proveable truth or falsehood of a statement like 'rain always falls up' or 'the more the sun shines, the darker it gets'. With images, trying to strip them back to their components takes you into a micro-world of form; a single brush-stroke, a corner of exposed celluloid representing John Travolta's shoe, a red pixel.

Those things, like art students, are 'just themselves'. Not a currency, not interchangeable, not employable like the students up at the varsity.

Oh for heaven's sake. I already explained I was joking. The phrase was chosen to fit the IE gag I was making as a cheap way of describing your interests/style precisely because you so often rail against and enjoy making fun of this British brand of philistine dismissal. It was supposed to be an affectionate 'in joke' because of this. I can't believe you took the opportunity to treat it as 'further evidence', given my clarification.

Excellent essay about that book Alex mentions above, Timothy Clark's 'Theory of Inspiration', here:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/scott.html

As for Brazil - yes of course it engages with real life but the point for me is that art like Brazil which relies on metaphor can often fail to produce interesting discussion because people congratulate themselves on noticing/pointing out the metaphor and then get no further into talking about what the metaphor is actually referring to. That doesn't make it 'worse' or 'better' art, I don't think. But yes art is a kind of conversation.

What a GRATE thread. More interesting than the essay, for sure, though maybe just because of the lack of intellecual obfuscation here.

Anyway, being a bit of a fan of Momus', I found it interesting to apply his ideas (or at least my reading of his ideas) to his records. A record like Timelord (mysterious, spacious, abstract) has far more emotional resonance with me than a record like (pointed, literary, clever) Folktronic. It would seem right by your logic then Nick, that Timelord is my favourite, whereas Folktronic is far down the list? Which strangely enough is quite correct. It also seems that you're actually doing exactly what you say you're "against" (that's not the right word, but you know what I mean) in this essay, you're trying to strip "mystery" of it's mystery, no?

Hummm... Anyway, enough from me for now. Unlike some people, I have to WORK for a living ;)