Craig Schuftan

Actually My Name's Marina

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 01:21:46 +1000

"What the audience demands of the artist - really demands, in its unconscious desire - and what the artist thinks it ought to be given... [is] the same thing: the sentiment of being. The sentiment of being is the sentiment of being strong... such energy as contrives that the centre shall hold, that the circumference of the self keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impenetrable, perdurable, and autonomous in being if inot in action."

Lionel Trilling, 'Sincerity and Authenticity', 1970

Once upon a time

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 19:47:58 +1000

"Music was now an object that could be owned by the individual and used at his own convenience... Now the Symphony of a Thousand could play to an audience of one. Now a man could hear nocturnes at breakfast, vespers at noon, and the Easter Oratorio on Channukah. He could do his morning crossword to 'One O'Clock Jump', and make love right through the St Matthew Passion. Anything was possible; nothing was sacred; freedom was absolute. It was the freedom, once the cathedral of culture had been wrecked, to take home the bits you liked and arrange them as you please. Once again, a mechanical invention had met capitalism's need to recreate all of life in its image. The cathedral of culture was now a supermarket."

Evan Eisenberg, 1987

"On Monday night, RZA introduced 13 minutes of the 31-track Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which will be auctioned off to a single person in order ‘to restore the concept of value to music'... The point, says RZA, is to make a statement about the value of artists in an age where everything is available for free, and therefore disposable. "Artists are very rare people," says RZA. "Things have value when they are rare." To emphasise this preciousness, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin comes with lyrics handwritten on parchment and bound in leather, with a special Wu seal. "It’s a rare item," says RZA, "and tonight you’ll have the chance to get a small glimpse."

Alex Needham, 'Wu-Tang Clan unveil sole copy of new album', the Guardian, 2015.

Tomorrow's Harvest

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 21:25:05 +1000

"What if I tell you now that I have often longed even for plays I have seen performed - frequently the very ones which bored me most - or for books I have read in the past and did not like at all? If that is not madness, there's no such thing."

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, letter to Anton Sprickmann, February 1819.

Hold to the Difficult

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 22:08:45 +1000

"And you must not let yourself be misled, in your solitude, by the fact that there is something in you that wants to escape from it. This very wish will, if you use it quietly and pre-eminently and like a tool, help to spread your solitude over wide country. People have (with the help of convention) found the solution of everything in ease, and the easiest side of ease; but it is clear that we must hold to the difficult; everything living holds to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself according to its own character and is an individual in its own right, strives to be so at any cost and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a certainty that will not leave us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it."

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1904

Always music in the air

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 21:18:35 +1100

'Acousmatic, the Larousse dictionary tells us, is the 'name given to the disciples of Pythagoras who for five years, listened to his teachings while he was hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, while observing a strict silence.' Hidden from their eyes, only the voice of their master reached the disciples.... In ancient times, the apparatus was a curtain; today, it is the radio and methods of reproduction, along with the entire set of electro-acoustic transformations, that place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, under similar conditions.'

Pierre Schaeffer, 'Acousmatics', 1966

Music Sounds Better

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 09:09:07 +1100

'Imagine a traveller from a hundred years ago arrives at our doorstep and asks us why the music of the 20th century operates so frequently on the basis of cyclic repetition. Not just the rap and dance genres of popular culture, but also minimalism - perhaps the single most viable strand of the Western art music tradition... why does so much of our music work this way? What kind of needs do these patterns satisfy?'

Susan McClary, 1999

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I Life

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 19:54:59 +1100

"Could it be that we come to the city in order to achieve solitude? Such has been the unspoken premise of the modern city of utopian individualism. By solitude I do not mean isolation. Isolation is a state of nature: solitude is the work of culture. Isolation is an imposition, solitude a choice."

Brian Hatton, 1988

They rush past each other as if they had nothing in common...

Infancy and Progress

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 19:42:39 +1100

"The whole human species, looked at from its origins, appears to the philosopher as an immense whole, which, like an individual, has its infancy and its progress … The totality of humanity, fluctuating between calm and agitation, between good times and bad, moves steadily though slowly towards a greater perfection."

Said nobody, at any time in the last one hundred years. Nowadays, our view of the future is more like the one seen from the middle ages than the Enlightenment. But from where he stood in 1750, or perhaps sat, on a chair a bit like the one pictured above, the French statesman and economist Jacques Turgot could look back on the past five centuries and see a gradual transition from primitive agrarians torturing and killing each other over superstitious nonsense, to the confident era of the Enlightenment, with its stupendous advancements in astronomy, medicine and physics.

People sometimes say that today, we no longer believe in progress. But for someone like Turgot, progress would not have been something he needed to believe in - it was just an observable fact.

Image: Stanley Kubrick, '2001: A Space Odyssey'

Lost Paradise

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 22:17:20 +1100

'Thus it is well known that a child learns to walk, talk and to know his way around the world just by trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of lost paradise. As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examinations. At work, he learns in a similar way, so as to make a living, or for some other utilitarian purpose, and not for the love of the action of learning itself. So his ability to see something new and original gradually dies away. And without it there is evidently no ground from which anything can grow.'

Daniel Bohm, 'On Creativity', 1996

Image: Axl W. Rose, Police Mugshot, 1980

No Satisfaction

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 22:03:23 +1100

'That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence itself is valueless, for boredom is nothing more than the sensation of the emptiness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us. As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something—in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it) ...'

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), 'Essays and Aphorisms'

Image: Mark Sharrat, 1965

Moral Motifs

Tue, 17 Dec 2013 09:00:29 +1100

'There is a sentimental rhetoric which readily waxes emotional about deserving paupers and unhappy millionaires alike, and which rails against money... These melodramatic and moral motifs are part of the everyday lives of poor people. Verbal propaganda of the rich, they make up the greater part of the average person's ideological baggage. Disguised as an indictment of money, they justify wealth by reducing it to a mere accident of the human condition...'

Henri Lefebvre, 1947

'We'll never be royals...'

Monster

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 21:10:00 +1100

'The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live... Ours is an age which obsessively pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering - rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.'

Susan Sontag, 1963

Passing Discords

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 09:30:16 +1100

'Spinoza thinks that, if you see your misfortunes as they are in reality, you will see that they are only misfortunes to you, not to the universe, to which they are merely passing discords heightening an ultimate harmony. I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.'

Bertrand Russell

Image: Lee Miller, 'Portrait of Space', 1937

Against Nature

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 12:10:24 +1100

'Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is the law, the survival of the fittest. In society, there are protections for the weak, society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of the state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable, and seek new ways to enslave themselves... My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.'

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, 1990

It don't run in our blood

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:22:45 +1100

'In short, this power is exercised rather than posessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions - an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who 'do not have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them.'

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1978)

A chair is a chair

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 17:40:08 +1000

'It is not untrue to say that chairs have seats and that rain falls downward. Many poets write truths of this sort. They are like a painter adorning the walls of a sinking ship with a still life... Those in power cannot corrupt them, but neither are they disturbed by the cries of the opressed.

At the same time, it is not easy to realize that their truths are truths about chairs or rain; they usually sound like truths about important things. For it is in the nature of artistic creation to confer importance. But upon closer examination it is possible to see that they say merely "a chair is a chair, and no one can stop rain from falling down."'

Bertolt Brecht, 1935

An inexorable foe

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 17:47:35 +1000

'Quite certainly the radio is a foe!–and so are the gramophone and sound-film. An inexorable foe, irresistibly on the advance; opposition is a hopeless prospect.

Here are the most damaging things it does:

1. It accustoms the ear to an unspeakable coarse tone…[A]s they become more familiar, one will adopt them as the criterion for beauty of sound, and find inferior the sound of instruments used in art.

2. The boundless surfeit of music. Here, perhaps the frightful expression ‘consumption of music’ really does apply after all. For perhaps this continuous tinkle, regardless of whether anyone wants to hear it or not…will lead to a state where all music has been consumed, worn out. In [Wilhelm] Busch’s time, music was still often (at least, not always!) ‘found disturbing’, but some day it may no longer disturb; people will be as hardened to this noise as any other...'

Arnold Schoenberg, 'Style and Idea', 1930

The broken, the beaten and the damned

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 19:21:03 +1000

'Any disturbing, frightening or exciting event - any kind of revolt or revolution, a summons to a crusade, an interregnum, a plague or a famine, anything in fact which disrupted the routine of social life - acted on these people with peculiar sharpness and called forth reactions of peculiar violence. And one way in which they attempted to deal with their common plight was to form a salvationist group under a messianic leader... On the strength of inspirations and revelations for which he claimed divine origin this leader would decree for his followers a communal mission of vast dimensions and world-shaking importance. The conviction of having such a mission, of being divinely appointed to carry out a prodigious task, provided the disoriented with new bearings and new hope. In the eschatological phantasies which they had inherited from the distant past, the forgotten world of early Christianity, these people found a social myth most perfectly adapted to their needs.'

Norman Cohn, 'The Pursuit of the Millennium', 1957

'Like many life changing stories of the 21st century, it all began on September 11, 2001. On that clear-blue-sky day, Way - who had graduated from New York's School of Visual Arts to a sunlight-free existence drawing in his mom's basement - was coming into Manhattan, unaware of the tragedy. "Something just clicked in my head that morning," he says. "I literally said to myself, 'Fuck art. I've gotta get out of the basement. I've gotta seethe world. I've gotta make a difference!'"

Andy Greenwald, Spin Magazine, 2005

The Smell of Commerce in the Morning

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:56:12 +1000

'Markets are the orgies of the early morning; and as Jean Paul would have said, hunger rings in the day, as love rings it out... But when I dressed and went downstairs, ready to make my entrance on the stage, its entire freshness and glory vanished. I realised that all the gifts of the morning hours are like sunrise: best enjoyed from a distance. And wasn't the light that had been shining on these delicately checkered cobblestones the faint red sunrise of commerce? Now it all laid buried beneath paper and rubbish. Insead of dancing and music, there was now nothing but exchange and trade. Nothing can vanish as irretrievably as a morning.'

Walter Benjamin, 'Weimar', 1928

Image: 'Mallrats', dir: Kevin Smith, 1995

Blurred Lines

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 23:57:00 +1000

"Approving or disapproving morally of what a work of art 'says' is just as extraneous as becoming sexually excited by a work of art. (Both are of course very common). And the reasons urged against the propriety and relevance of one apply as well to the other. Indeed, in this notion of the annihilation of the subject we have perhaps the only serious criterion for distinguishing between erotic literature or films or paintings which are art and those which (for want of a better word) one has to call pornography... However much the reader or listener or spectator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval."

Susan Sontag, 1961