2283 – Art is Not For Sale (video essay by The Cinema Cartography)

I posted this video here even if I have problems with its uncritical use of ideologically charged concepts such as “authenticity” and “artistic freedom” or how it is whining against cancel culture (all this being currently highly contentious and weaponized by conservatives in the US at the moment) at some point in the narration. Plus this supports the old unchanging romantic view of the misunderstood lonely genius and gives (unwittingly) credence to the outcry by billionaire Elon Musk and other proponents of so-called free speech and the rights of the sovereign individual. It also ignores how recently “the US Far Right has effectively occupied established leftist countercultural territories, deploying the tactics of subversive humor and transgression while moving to replace the traditional conservative Right.”, thus stymying the subversive and transgressive edge.

Mainly I have two grudges with such statements for artistic freedom: 1) they ignore the fact that art and especially modern free art in the ‘free world’ was a heavily subsidized cultural product during the Cold War 2) it also ignores the history of art and art criticism debates inside and outside the Soviet Union about modernism and the role of the artist in the new socialist society, as well as the way modernism was, in turn, weaponized in the liberal West against Socialist Realism deemed unoriginal, homogenizing, kitschy and ideologically subservient. 3) how the issue is not primarily ‘cancel culture’, but support for the arts being redirected by something like platform capitalist ethno-politics.

I appreciate all the examples of outsider artists (Darger, Adolf Wölfli or the efforts of Jean Dubuffet and others to highlight works by psychiatric patients) and independent directors, animators and young cinematographers going against all odds, against the aesthetic canon or against financial (sometimes from their former colonial masters) or formal limitations, or trying to not succumb to general precarious and exploitative conditions of cultural workers. At the same time what is completely lacking in this video is a sort of collective understanding of creativity or open culture and how exactly AIs or algos get trained on such bountiful public supplies put out by millions if not billions of us (not just artists) together.

A lot of the avant-garde abstract and intellectually challenging art or deemed non-commercial actually became not less monetized but more so with artworks, especially Western artworks that like coins tended towards greater and greater realms of abstraction. Instead of eschewing or making a virtue out of impoverishment or abstinence maybe there should have been some room for highlighting works that exemplify the economics of the art market in the 20th century .

I understand that such capitalist appropriation cannot be fought outside of the very copyright regime and IP rights it supposedly protects, but it somehow misses the point of such class or collective action lawsuits. Today there is more and more clear that artificial intelligence is grown fat on a privatizing large chunk of the general intellect, and the result is often neither artificial (being trained by human, or on human-derived materials), fair nor intelligent (because without humans supervision it is liable to make gross mistakes and reinforce systemic racism and red-lining). Even the works from the public domain are being used to train AIs.

Such edgelord exclusive focus on the outsider status or on the few that made it into the art canon (including heavies like Van Gogh) risks misunderstanding both old and new currents and ends up junking all the no-name fluctuations, crazy metamorphoses, and fan-economy phenomena. Everyone tends to lump all platforms together (Meta=FB=Tiktok), but since not only users, celebs and fans start to make distinctions and migrate from one to the other – but also geostrategic interests are involved, it is useless to just point at some vague faceless surveillance capitalism. We see this for example on banning Chinese ownership of the Tik Tok in the US and the intense bad press it got lately in correlation with its very success and popularity boost (not to mention other Chinese platforms that are somehow completely ignored by mainstay social platform analysis). How can you avail yourself of old financing structures while at the same time enthusiastically promoting new ones like crowd-funding or bitcoin (let us create monetization schemes based on fans – yeah, but how original is that I ask)?

Sorry for the rant, but this completely avoids the elephant in the room, what is happening with pop culture at this very moment – and how such paean to authenticity basically trash pop culture two times in a row: 1) by denying differences, attractions (even predatorial ones) or characteristics of the existing video platforms 2) by actually homogenizing, ignoring or pasting over and executing the very mechanisms of cultural homogenization it seeks to combat.

Many thx to Felix Petrescu from Makunouchi Bento for sharing this video and oiling my rusty wheels.

1646 – Bronson (2008)

timespace coordinates: 1970’s – 1980’s Britain

Bronson is a 2008 British biographical crime film directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. The film stars Tom Hardy as Michael Peterson, known from 1987 as Charles Bronson.

Bronson told The Times “I honestly believe nobody on the planet could play me as Tom did. He is more like me than I am”, (wiki)

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1610

The work of Pierre Richard (1802-1879)

The artist book “Grimoires illuminés”, presents a work unknown to this day, of a peasant from Lorraine, France, who, in the middle of the 19th century, conjured his terrors and his illuminations with a masterful creation, partly produced in Moselle in asylum seclusion.

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There are 3 “grimoires”, or magic books, known. These were acquired in the 1990s by a bookstore in Metz, then sold to collectors in 2010. These grimoires, with around 750 plates, are made up of drawings, monograms , decorated circles, scenes of the Passion, alphabets and other cabalistic writings. A publication of Editions Artulis published by Halle Saint Pierre is available in a limited edition in their bookstore.

Anonymous Works

1600 – Alone in Berlin (2016)

timespace coordinates:  World War II-era Berlin (September 1940 – April 1943)

Alone in Berlin is a 2016 war drama film directed by Vincent Pérez, based on the 1947 non-fiction book Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. The novel’s characters Otto and Anna Quangel are based on Otto and Elise Hampel.

When their son dies in France, the couple start writing postcards to urge people to protest against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. The film stars Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Daniel Brühl, and Mikael Persbrandt.

 The Irish Times wrote: “the film offers a fascinating and timely blueprint for political dissent, a methodology that connects with pamphleteering, graffiti, and memes.” (wiki)

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1364 – TempleOS | Down the Rabbit Hole (2018 documentary)

778 – Discworld (1995 video game)

Discworld is a 1995 point-and-click adventure game developed by Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions for MS-DOS, Macintosh, and the Sony PlayStation. A Sega Saturn version was released the following year. The game stars Rincewind the Wizard (voiced by Eric Idle) and is set on Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld. The plot is based roughly around the events in the book Guards! Guards!, but also borrows elements from other Discworld novels. It involves Rincewind attempting to stop a dragon terrorising the inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork.

The game was developed because the designer Gregg Barnett wanted a large adventure for CD-based systems. A licence was difficult to obtain; Pratchett was reluctant to grant one as he wanted a Discworld game to be developed by a company with a reputation and who cared about the property. An original story was created due to Barnett having difficulty basing games on one book. Discworld was praised for its humour, voice-acting and graphics, though some criticised its gameplay and difficult puzzles. Discworld was followed by a sequel, Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!?, in 1996. (wiki)

Ankh-Morpork

Ankh-Morpork lies on the River Ankh (the most polluted waterway on the Discworld and reputedly solid enough to walk on), where the fertile loam of the Sto Plains (similar to Western Europe) meets the Circle Sea (the Discworld’s version of the Mediterranean). This, naturally, puts it in an excellent trading position. Lying approximately equidistant from the cold Hub and tropical Rim, Ankh-Morpork is in the Discworld’s equivalent of the temperate zone. The name “Ankh-Morpork” refers to both the city itself, a walled city about five miles (8 km) across, and the surrounding suburbs and farms of its fiefdom. The central city divides more or less into the more affluent Ankh and the poorer Morpork which includes the slum-like “Shades”, which are separated by the River Ankh. Ankh-Morpork is built on black loam, broadly, but is mostly built on itself; pragmatic citizens simply built on top of the existing buildings when the sediment grew too high as the river flooded, rather than excavate them out. There are many unknown basements, including an entire “cave network” below Ankh-Morpork made up of old streets and abandoned sewers (it has been continuously stated that anyone with a pickaxe and a good sense of direction could reach anywhere in Ankh-Morpork by knocking walls down in a straight line, though in Thud! it is added that they would also need to breathe mud). Recently, the underground regions have been extended by the city’s dwarf population to get around unimpeded. It has recently been made municipal property. Ankh-Morpork is also the city with the most dwarfs on the whole disc outside of Überwald, largely considered the dwarfen homeland, with over 50,000 dwarfs living there.  (wiki)

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Terry Pratchett – Back in Black BBC Documentary 2017 (youtube)

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612 – Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, Alison Dundy – The falling sky – words of a Yanomami shaman

The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest–a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.

In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.

Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest. (amazon)

“When I come back from a trip among the white people, the dizziness leaves my eyes after a while and my thought be-comes clear again. I no longer hear cars, machines, or airplanes. I only lend an ear to the tooro toads and krouma frogs that call the rain in the forest. I only hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind and the rumbling of the thunders in the sky. The ignorant words of the city politicians gradually vanish in the quiet of my sleep. I become calm again by going to hunt and making my spirits dance.

The forest is very beautiful to see. It is cool and aromatic. When you move through it to hunt or travel, you feel joyful and your mind is slow-paced. You listen to the chirping of the cicadas in the distance, or the cries of the curassows and the agami herons, and the clamor of the spider monkeys in the trees. Your worries are eased. Your thoughts can then follow one another without getting obscured.”