gordon hon's

無聊

執業懶惰

A Sloth Replies

Watching an interview with Jin Liqun, the president of the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund was a chilling experience. He begins with an utterly disingenuous preamble regarding the political neutrality of the fund before presenting a distillation of the ideology of authoritarian capitalism. He does this in the assured and calm manner of the pure rationalist who is certain of his grasp on reality. This is what people in charge of money once sounded like in the west before their reality was revealed as a massive collective hallucination.

Perhaps Mr. Liqun’s voice is that of the leaner, meaner form of global Capitalism that we can look forward to in the aftermath of the collapse of neolibralism. The Liberal West has been profiting from the illiberality of these new forms of capitalism rising in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres and Mr Liqun is clearly enjoying the irony. What he appears to be saying in as polite a way as possible is: The west has enjoyed the benefits of our cheap, easily exploited workforce & now you come asking us to bail you out with the wealth created by these people. The Chinese workers are not going to be very sympathetic. Mr Liqun wants a favourable return on behalf of the Chinese people but he is also taking advantage of his prerogative to wag his finger at the supplicant. Just as the West has enforced their version of capitalism via the IMF and other Ideological Finance Apparatus so too will the East. China also has not forgotten the ‘trading conditions’ it endured during the British Empire. He makes his picture of modern Europe clear – clever but lazy, complacent and dependent and he also makes clear the kinds of conditions that he would like to impose - cuts to welfare and employment law reform. After the coalition have, in their nihilistic fervor, obligingly dismantled the public sector and the last remnants of the welfare state, Britain will be ready for this next phase of capitalism. It’s going to make Thatcher look like a socialist.

Presumably Mr. Liqun thinks the protesters in Europe and America are just winging Westerners who have had it too easy but he is also worried about democratic movements in China, hence his interest in reducing the gap between the rich and poor. He doesn’t mention the fact that China now spends more money on internal security than it does on all other forms of national security. 

Picture Theory

Here are some pictures from my recent exhibition, ”Picture Theory” at Five Years gallery. Some years ago I found a 1960s exam paper from the philosophy department at Leeds University that included a page of questions on Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory. My daughter, Maisie, who was about 3 at the time drew a rudimentary figure on the facing page & I put it in a frame that I’ld found in a skip & it’s been on my wall ever since. I included this in the show and used some of the exam questions for the exhibition “text”. 

I don’t have any interest in Wittgenstein’s dreary theory and although I teach “theory” in an art school where the unfortunate students are more or less forced to “theorise their practice” it is something I have always tried to avoid. In fact I wouldn’t describe what I occasionally make as a “practice” and certainly not “work” (unless I was paid to produce it, that is). Nor, for that matter would I necessarily call it “art”. It’s closer to a hobby that has developed from my interest in landscape paintings found in charity shops and jumble sales. Not undiscovered masterpieces but unwanted amateur paintings that somebody at sometime thought was worth the trouble and expense of framing. These are pictures that have hung in a room unnoticed for years until the owner redecorates or dies. At that point the picture is once again reappraised and this time found to be not quite worthless enough to throw in the bin. So it ends up on the wall of Cancer Research or The North London Hospice or All Aboard or PDSA.

I have often noticed some of these paintings, which in my periphery vision look quite good but when looked at directly are never good enough to want to hang on a wall. This seemed a pity and it struck me that it might be possible to adjust them to make them as interesting as they first appeared in the corner of my eye. At the same time I didn’t think they could be improved with additional painting and anyway some of them were made with more skill than I have. The isometric cube strikes me as the degree zero of the illusory picture. I don’t think there is a simpler less ‘expressive’ form that gives such a convincing, if rudimentary, impression of depth and volume. Its dumb simplicity is what makes it such a satisfying doodle and popular graphic for logos. It is minimalist in the sense that it involves the minimum of skill and effort to achieve. There is also a simple pleasure in the cutting up and rearranging of a picture that is akin to jigsaw puzzles but the aim is not the restoration of an image but its orderly disintegration. It occurs to me that jigsaw puzzles are also a speciality of charity shops where they are often sold with a label that warns the buyer that the puzzle may not be complete.

In Nabokov’s The Defence, the chess genius Luzhin (pronounced to rhyme with illusion) who, in our current syndrome obsessed culture, would be awarded the diagnoses of ‘Asperger Syndrome’, while recovering from a chess induced breakdown briefly takes up the pastime of painting and drawing. He is completely devoid of talent, skill or any trace of aesthetic visual sensibility - even in chess he prefers the purely abstract, algebraic notation to the look of the board and pieces. He fails utterly at painting:

“The dampness of watercolours made the paper buckle unpleasantly and the wet colours would run together; on occasion it would be impossible to get rid of some extraordinarily tenacious Prussion blue - no sooner would you get a small bit of it on the very tip your brush than it would already be running all over the enamel in the box, devouring the shade you had prepared and turning the water in the glass a poisonous blue. There were thick tubes with india ink and ceruse, but the caps invariably got lost, the necks would dry up, and when he pressed too hard the tube would burst at the bottom and thence would come crawling and writhing a fat worm of goo. His daubings were fruitless and even the simplest things-a vase with flowers or a sunset copied from a travel folder of the Riviera-came out spotty, sickly, horrible.”

He much prefers drawing, taking “great pleasure in sharpening pencils and in measuring things before him” and is “soothed by the thin lines that he drew and redrew a hundred times, achieving a maximum of sharpness, accuracy and purity.” And eventually he arrives at the degree zero of the image:

“Finished,” he said holding the paper away from him and looking at the completed cube through his eyelashes. His father-in-law put on his pince-nez and looked at it for a long time nodding his head. His mother-in-law and wife came from the drawing room and also looked. “It even casts a tiny shadow,” said his wife. “A very, very handsome cube.” “Well done, you’re a real cubist,” said his mother in law.

Nabokov was having a sly dig at cubism, which he also did in Ada where it’s referred to as ‘bric-a-Braque.’ But the square and the cube are also important aesthetic and narrative themes in the book and in particular the cube has a sinister prophetic quality (casting a tiny foreshadow) - a kind of lethal trap made from the squares of a chess board.

It always seemed proper to me to keep the original frames because these are evidence that the paintings were once of some value to somebody. Before this exhibition I would cut up the paintings and put them back into their frames but I had always wanted to extend the tessellation to the frames so that the wall becomes the ground of the ‘picture’. A frame is only a matter of angles - the 8 cuts at 45° that add up to the all encompassing 360°. All I had to do was change the right angles to wrong angles - 4 at 60° and 4 at 30° - and the frames became isometric tiles.

Here are some details:

Capitalist Neo-Nihilism from a Holiday in a Failing Economy.

I write from my lovely bourgeois holiday in Greece but had we been at home during the riots who knows what I could have grabbed from the local Londis. I would at last have been able to express my outrage at their mark up on organic brown tahini by kicking in their windows & scrambling out of the debris hugging cartons of coconut water to my hoodied breast. I never liked the sarcastic sneer on their faces when I handed over almost a fiver for something that in their parents’ country would only be drunk by a dying tramp. More fool them for not realising the mystical rejuvenating properties of this tasteless greasy beverage! Who will be sneering now as they wander the ruins of the business they have dedicated their lives to, glass and Cheerios crunching beneath their feet?

Bizarre images and what passes for ‘analysis’ coming from the fragmented and diversely skewed perspectives of free satellite TV but the BBC has managed to surpass them all with the idiotic pantomimes performed on Newsnight.   Meanwhile according to Cameron the riots are “pure criminality” presumably he means criminality uncontaminated by ideology. What a relief it must have been for him to recognise a politically hygienic zone. Apparently the riots were also “senseless” but from the perspective of the “pure criminal” they made perfect sense. High gain, low risk opportunistic theft - what could be more sensible? Of course this makes sense to Cameron too for he shares with these rioters the same ideological vacuity that could only be called capitalist nihilism or perhaps Capitalist Neo-nihilism. The man believes in precisely the same nothing as his “pure criminals”. I am intrigued by his notion of criminality as pure – I wonder what criminality in its pure form would look like? Opportunistic looting is almost a folk tradition of consumer capitalism and perhaps it is a pure form. The invisible membrane between order and disorder is the same membrane that separates you from what you want. It is merely a sheet of glass. Before the criminals who own and run the banks trashed the economy this membrane did not need to be broken with a brick. It could be magically crossed with a credit card. It was only a few years ago that everybody was being offered everything and it is only now that getting what you can’t afford to buy is a no longer allowed. And it is only now that the beast of capitalist neo-nihilism reveals itself in its pure form. It’s something like the beast in the Forbidden Planet whose form can only be seen when it tries to cross the invisible force field. As ugly as it is I prefer it to Cameron and the bankers he represents who, in their astonishing, boundless nihilism can pass through any barriers they wish.

A Man Called Russell

I have had a cassette knocking around for more than 25 years of music by a man called Russell. It was recorded in his Birkenhead bedroom on a 4 track. I think he had a clerical job in the tax office. That’s all I know about him. I only met him once and I remember him as a nice chap. He gave copies of his tapes to Alan Gill who copied them for me.

I have always really liked these songs. They have something of Half Man Half Biscuit’s humour but are musically more inventive. Anyway I have finally copied them & here they are in cyber space almost 30 years later.

I wonder what happened to him.

I didn’t have titles for the songs; all that was written on the tape was “Russell for Gordon” so I have invented them based on the lyrics or almost arbitrarily for the couple of instrumentals.

Russell by indivisible

Hell is Green

………………………………

Special Relativity

This is a response to a conversation I had the other day with Dave Balfe (who needs to be congratulated as an ex Teardrop Explodes for winning a Mojo “inspiration” award last Thursday) about the “post-human” in relation to music.

One of the most incredible pieces of music I’ve ever heard was a sequence of sessions on the radio made by a music therapist. She (I think it was a she) was working with a severely disturbed boy who couldn’t speak – only scream & yell incoherently. The therapist was at the piano with the boy who, in the first sessions just screamed while she transcribed, very approximately, the sounds he made on to the piano. Eventually he began to respond to her responses and by the last sessions they were effectively playing a co-composed duets for voice and piano. It is tempting to see this in a romantic humanist light – music soothing the savage beast and effectively ‘humanising’ & ‘civilizing’ it but this wasn’t some colonial Prospero/Caliban thing. You don’t need to be human to sing & nor do you need to be human to communicate be it with your species or with a machine. The boy may have been severely autistic (I don’t know) but he wasn’t communicating directly with the therapist but with or via the machine (the piano). Through the machine, the therapist was imitating, reflecting and elaborating on what the boy was doing– she was skillfully operating the machine and facilitating the communication. The boy’s problem was human to human communication. There was something about the interplay between his body and the sounds it produced and the machine that engaged him – as though he recognized himself in the machine producing these mechanical but familiar noises – I mean mechanical only in the sense of being produced by a machine not in its disparaging, humanist sense. This could be extrapolated to apply more generally to the relationship between the external technology of musical devices and instruments and the internal technology of the human ear and voice. I think music is a primary site of cybernetics. What the piano was doing was helping the boy realise and control his voice as technology.

It could be that the problem for the boy was not what other people were saying or doing with their voices but the fact that the sound they made came out of a hole in their face rather than, say, out of a large wooden cabinet or an earpiece. The major difference is that the sounds made by the non-human boxes do not respond or reciprocate in the way the human voice boxes do. Perhaps it is not just that the instrument-machine provides a mediating object that alleviates the possibly traumatic effects of sound coming directly out of faces and that the boy is better attuned (so to speak) to external forms of sound-based communication. Could it be that the boy’s condition through his difficulty with ‘direct’ communication and facility with external mediated communication draws attention to a relation to technology hidden beneath normalising humanism?

I have seen an example of this in a friend’s child who, as a toddler, was an awkward boy with apparent developmental difficulties with speech. The major breakthrough he had was in learning the violin. I saw him play when he was 5 and, despite the inevitable duff notes, I have never seen such a young child play with such assurance and fluidity. The violin seemed to be an extension of his body, projecting out from the throat and activated by the upper limbs. The sound he produced was utterly coherent and articulate. He did, it seems, have a developmental problem but it was a matter of overdevelopment - as though he was better equipped for this kind of technology. His speaking soon caught up – he arrived at a facility with his internal voice technology through the external route of the musical instrument. The violin is particularly interesting in relation to the body/voice because it is held against the body beneath the mouth while the sound is produced in front of the mouth – it is as though the voice is bi-passing the mouth.

The violin could be thought of as a kind of prosthetic voice but not as a replacement for something missing but as an extension of the body and a realization of its potential. The prosthesis changes the ‘nature’ of the body and what it is capable of doing and saying. Are the style and even the content of the statements made by Steven Hawking produced in part specifically for the iconic prosthetic voice through which they are uttered?

Meanwhile I was sent a link to a 15 minute lecture by David Byrne on an IBM sponsored forum called “TED” It’s a bit like a Starbucks equivalent to a left bank intellectuals’ café full of middle-brow corporate ‘creatives’. The lectures – from the bits I saw, including Byrne’s - are bite-sized ‘cool ideas’. But Byrne, who has claimed to have Asperger’s syndrome, gets into an interesting muddle in his 15 minutes. He is clearly comfortable on the territory of architecture as a part of the technology of music (which he seems to think he discovered)– the entirely un-novel idea that music is made for the spaces/apparatus in/through which it is heard - hey, guess what! Music is now being made to be listened to on an ipod! He then jumps species to birdsong & how it evolves to match particular environments (the poor old birds are always forced to serve as examples in human debates on music – especially when the dreaded ‘evolution’ word is used) & tells us all this runs contrary to romantic myths of individual creative expression. Its like he peeps over the edge of liberal humanism and then retreats back into it – ending with a confused warning about faked passion and false sincerity. The irony is that if there was anything interesting about Talking Heads it was their skill in self-consciously faking passion and sincerity. Psycho Killer? I can’t help thinking of the TV series Dexter, a major strand of which is the psycho killer’s efforts to appear human through faked passion and sincerity. The appeal of the series, for me at least, is its playing with the fact that we are all pretending to be ‘human’. Dexter, however, is not only hiding a ‘monster’ beneath the human façade; he is actually a very efficient piece of technology constructed by his adoptive father to kill ‘bad guys’. It’s an interesting mixture of Frankenstein, Pinnochio and Spiderman. In a way he belongs to this very old tradition of the super-human from Greek myth to Robocop. The super-human is now morphing (a common super-power, after all) into the post-human and we may be witnessing the return of ways of thinking and doing that have remained hidden or marginalized during the era of liberal humanism. It is happening mainly in our relationship to technology, which can no longer be separated from the human organism. If music begins with the human voice then it is not as the primary means of human expression but as a primary technology of communication. This struck home some time ago when I noticed that the singing of some teenage girls on the bus was imitating, very precisely, the effects of autotune. It was completely mesmerizing. It was an ingenious use of the technology of the voice to mirror the ingenuity of digital sound technology. If the post-human subject is anything it is technically ingenious.

Boredomland

A retort to Burton’s Alice in Wonderland travesty by k-punk with the inspired title “Infantilising Children” is spot on. His excellent observation that Wonderland is Alice’s own world in which she has no place is surely one of the reasons the book has such a profound effect on people - the idea that we create a world that is beyond us has a great deal of psychic and historical resonance and the imposition of a messianic trope by Burton utterly destroys it. My 8 year old daughter must have seen every available version/adaptation of the Alice books & so I have seen quite a few too. It really seems to attract luvvies who want to slap on the paint & ham it up, which is understandable but always tedious to watch. There are quite a few in which there is an attempt to stitch together a plot but nothing quite as crass and almost as willfully destructive as Burton’s. It has always been one of those books that is irresistible to film makers (the BFI have just restored the 1903 version) and it never seems to quite work.

The Miller version is interesting and he has tried to bring out the sense of dislocation and ill-temper in the book - although his Alice is too much of a self-portrait & has something of Grayson Perry about her. Hasn’t anybody thought of casting Grayson Perry in the role yet? Also the longeurs and catatonia k-punk refers to in the tea party scene is can be found throughout. Miller seems to be playing on the fact that the narrative originates in boredom and he seems to have wanted to maintain that register - imagine trying to pitch that in hollywood! Also his version has a convincing smell of opium about it - not the designer spectacle of 60s psychedelia but the psychotropic miasma of the 19th century opium den. The best thing about it is that he is not afraid of boredom & uses it as a potential state of dystopic creative suspense. Everywhere we look now we can see the dread of boredom - the intolerable state of not being able to find a diversion. A dread of the spectacle turning off. The horrible visual mania of 3D CGI as a morbid dread of flatness. But of course the irony of 3D is that it draws attention to the frame of the screen and to the film’s denegation of its flatness. The attempt to give it a plot - as though the endlessly rich material in the book just isn’t enough (for whom?)- presumably to make it more entertaining/exciting/suspenseful actually produces another kind of flatness. The messianic plot, apart from being tediously predictable, shuts down everything that is opened up the book. Boredom on the other hand is not tedious or flat - it is a free floating state of restless potentially dangerous energy. Boredom is systematically annihilated by ‘keeping busy’ with tedious tasks or having ‘experiences’ in museums or being ‘entertained’ by enervating 3D risk-free spectacles… Children are infantilised it seems in preparation for adulthood. Despite the surfeit of versions my daughter’s favourite mediated version are the audio-books through which like Alice the reader is liberated from reading.