Monthly Archives: December 2008

visual rhetorics and its traps

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Fresh water under what old bridge?

I’ve somehow stumbled across a video by the British band “the Prodigy” that gives me the creeps. The song is called “Baby’s got a Temper” and it displays cows crammed into some space where the band themselves sing on a stage and some nude young ladies are “forced” by some older lady with a whip to milk the cows. There is some video-storyline-framing around all this, but the main message is to sexualize an act of speciesism.

I think this video is highly influenced by the current arts discourse, which likes to use a speciesist outlook as a chosen perspective with which the onlooker aesthetically likes to identify.

The band “the Prodigy” acts as if they were just soooo punkish and they pretend to be rebellious thus. Only, against what is their “rebellion” directed? Against nonhuman animals? Especially against cows? It seems that’s exactly what it is, the band conveys the message in this video: it’s rebellious if you are against nonhuman animals.

And why could that be rebellious?

Because the speciesist utopian ideal feels that an “animal principle” is undirectable. Nonhuman animals don’t share anything with “us” that would make “us” want to live with them, because an “animal principle” requires “us” to come to terms with a lived pluralism on the most existential plane. But “we” don’t like pluralism in the first place.

Rebelling against the “animal principle” implies both, a rejection of nonhuman animal diversity as much as a rejection of human diversity, because the only “agent” that can possibly posses “the only one permitted truth”, is he or she who is anti-all.

A truth that directs itself anti-all, that negates everything, seems to be an “only truth”. A pluralist outlook on the other hand, would never draw a line at any border… .

Death, and the Dead?

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Everybody is individual in life or death. This is what I can see in the art of Rudimetary Peni singer Nick Blinko: http://www.deathrock.com/rudimentarypeni/main.html. I don’t fully understand why it’s such a “big deal” if someone has not studied arts, but is an artist. I know quiet a few people who have studied arts, but who make – what a surprise – extremely boring s***ing arts.

A thought-image that I relate with Nick Blinko’s art: The holocaust is the imposed death upon its victims, the totalitarian perpetrators like to use the symbol of the skull [1]. A world ruled with Angst and you are aware of that inner skeleton, that is part of your nativity. Each skeletal being is an individual being too.

To me Nick Blinko’s art seems like a journey into a gap between all kinds of possible definitions of death. Elias Canetti implied the “crowd of the dead” in his thesis about crowds and power.

That what lies like a marker of separation
between an imposed death,
and a form of might built on symbols of murder

produces two worlds of human understanding

The voice a a form of expressing despair, doubt, … Nick Blinko’s singing is impressive. Maybe one can get his arts best when listening to his vocals. See: Nick Blinko at the Henry Boxer Gallery http://www.outsiderart.co.uk/blinko.htm and Nick Blinko at deathrock.com: http://www.deathrock.com/rudimentarypeni/main.html

[1] See in that context an info about a nazi skull symbol of the third reich and how it’s still in use: Info on ADL.org: http://www.adl.org/hate_symbols/neo-nazi_skull.asp

Farangis Yegane: florae Obscurae

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Farangis Yegane: florae Obscurae, visit page

a florae Obscurae, by Farangis Yegane, 1996

The subject of ‘florae Obscurae’ is flowers – though, not in their relation to the culture of ornament or decoration, not as metaphorical entities like for example as vehicles of some unattributable malevolent purposes of fate, like in Baudelaire’s poetical thought-image of the “fleurs du mal”, and they are not taken in terms of their biological botanical classes.

Here instead flowers are visually described as universally and terrestrially contextual-existences, i.e. having own environmental contexts in which we can see them as “floral-sentient” plants.

A new environmental phenomenology is sought to be etched out, the type of natural occurrence that normally gets packed into the complex but one-way idea of “animism” as pantheistic frill. The florae Obsurae are images of a plant world that speaks in a language which is not a floral taxonomy nor a stylist’s taste for a flower bouquet. These flowers are spiky by making up a different habitat (‘nature’).

Plants get categorized in terms of their aesthetics and utility,
animals are defined in terms of cognizance and sense,
and humans, finally, are understood as the civilizatory geniuses of their social and political world which constitutes a beginning and an end in itself.

By a shift in view this cycle is being broken or gains further dimensions.

More than 2 million signatures

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The elitist attitude of the “arts industry” has so far tended to ignore so called public sentiment, unless it fits their interest.

I just learned about the case of the starving dog who was being exhibited, and I just signed the petition linked on this blog:

http://guillermohabacucvargas.blogspot.com/

The nutcase artist who brought the dog into the gallery…

Guillermo Habacuc Vargas http://artehabacuc.blogspot.com “I am 32 years old and an artist. Recently, I have been critisized for my work titled ‘Eres lo que lees’….”

…probably didn’t expect that people would react. He obviously strongly believes in alluding to Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” – the person who came up with the animal-machine model (just do a search on “animal-machine” and Descartes).

In the context the guy set up, the sentence: “you are what you read” implies a ranking made between different cognitive abilities. Implicitly he suggests that reading is better than not reading, because if you don’t “read” (books etc, ever), you can’t be anything at all.

Starving doesn’t matter to that guy, at least not when you are a dog.

And this is basically where the Cartesian link to “I think, therefore I am” is: Descartes excluded any other condition apart from thinking as worthy of being REALLY meaningful in any way.

The selfcenteredness of both a “human system” (the belief in the exclusive importance of cogniscance, because useful for …) and the selfcenteredness of the human herself “as-set-apart-from-nature”, is the connector here.

This type of inhumane activity which runs under the terms of arts can straightforwardly be perceived as an expression of human megalomania.

Vive la Biophilia — They can by no means negate the dignity of life!!

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Arts and Necrophilia:

CATERINA PURDY MOHN, exhibited a (amongst others) by the Transition Gallery, East London and StuArt Gallery, Siantiago Chile, accordning to Saatchi and Saatchi

http://www.transbuddha.com/content/caterina-purdy/

http://www.last.fm/music/Purdy+Rocks

Purdy Rocks (her techono type of music)

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=109868701

http://www.portaldearte.cl/autores/purdy1.htm

It’s pretty easy to impress anybody or maybe especially the mainstream arts scene with anything super necrophile. This chilean artist is yet another successful example to prove this assumption right.

A few things seem to come together: the desire for success, the desire for getting a kick out of vanity, and the hunger for the pain/degradation/devaluation/negation … of the “other” and, not to forget, a warped and faked pseudo political correctness. Also it looks pretty much as if such artists seem to really don’t want to belong to the “weak” side of the world.

Yeah they are just soooooo powerful with their necrophilia! The abyss of the ideological death squad.