The first time I wrote about Lana Del Rey, in a column, a few months back, I said I was pleased that when she invoked the name ‘Lolita’, she actually seemed to be talking about something like the character in the novel, and not whatever strange mincing porny thing people use that name to refer to today.
Now, having heard her song ‘Lolita’, I would like to apologize and mostly retract that.
I wrote a review of her album for Vulture, findable here. I suppose the bullet points are as follows: It’s a so-so moody pop record that stumbles around a bit, and there are things about Del Rey’s attempt to pull off a persona that are campily interesting and/or poignant, and a lot of it reminds me of Showgirls. I have many more thoughts and feelings about related topic,* but I’m sure there’s more than enough to read about this artist at the moment, so I’ll save the bulk of them for another time.
Except for one thing. One novel I really adore is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s about two prisoners, in Argentina, sharing a cell: Molina’s there because he’s gay, and accused of corrupting a minor; Valentin’s there because he’s a leftist revolutionary. Through most of the novel, Molina is recounting to Valentin, from memory, the plots of films he loves. He has a keen memory for the sensual, glamorous, swooning side of them.
One of the films he recounts is, essentially, a Nazi propaganda thriller, and he describes the things in it the way the film sees them — at some point, he’s describing all the beautiful, masculine German soldiers marching through Paris. This annoys Valentin, who challenges him on it. And Molina’s answer, as I remember it, is to just let the issue pass for a moment, and appreciate the type of beauty that this film, right or wrong, is trying to offer at that moment.
And that issue, the thing that’s contested between them at that moment, has more to do with ‘camp’ than laughing at things because you think they’re bad — to me, camp is always about seeing some overblown proposition of what beauty is, and knowing that the fundamentals behind it, the belief system it grew out of, is defunct or rotten or collapsed. It’s like a touchingly grand expression of a belief that has no worthwhile purchase on the world.
I see so many Canadians on Tumblr pronouncing how much more forward-thinking Canada is because its history of racism is simply different than that of the United States. Canada has not solved the racism problem nor has it even come close to doing so. We in the United States may be more open about talking about racism but because the discussion is slightly different in Canada does not mean these problems simply do not exist. Get talking, my Canadian friends.
(As a sidenote, I find this interesting, because something like 95% of my Canadian friends are POC, and a good 80% are Aboriginal, and I am always curious to learn of the racial divisions in Canada.)
Canada is a totally fucked up, racist, settler colonial state. However, since Canada’s history is a little different in terms of how we were colonized vs. the USA, our racial discourse reflects that currently. “Canadians” (the very few who are actually ‘allowed’ to identify as such without question, READ: White) seem to be under the romantic notion that slavery didn’t exist here and that they were ‘nicer’ to Indigenous folks. This, of course, is bullshit. “Canadians” enslaved and murdered black folks and performed genocidal acts upon Indigenous populations. I think the difference is that a lot of “Canadians” just want to talk about race in “polite terms” (READ: NO DIALOGUE). So the general thoughts are, “THEY (POC and Indigenous folks) should have THEIR culture” but not if it actually means anything substantial. Gross.
Also, I’m interested to know what other Indigenous folks (not just First Nations) think of term ‘POC’? I’m asking because I know a lot of Indigenous folks that do not identify with the term ‘POC’ for a variety of reasons. Thoughts?
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days.
Over the last year I’ve found myself, as a white guy, talking up the Canadian idea of Multiculturalism. I’ve tried to qualify it a lot—especially regarding Canada’s indigenous people because obviously there are a lot of things wrong.
But it’s because of living in the UK this year. I strongly feel that there are some specific things that Canada does better. Specifically, I think that for all of its flaws I’m drawn to defend multiculturalism because in the press over here, under the current conservative government, the phrase “multiculturalism has failed” is becoming a code-phrase for “there are too many muslims ruining our country”. Which is an idea that I have a strong resistance to.
I think that ultimately there is essentially no solution to the problems of racist colonial nations with lots of recent immigration that isn’t in some way problematic, because there’s so much history that’s already been built up, and so much resistance to change all around. I think Canada has come with some pretty good ideas. But we haven’t managed to get rid of the bad ones, let alone get to dealing with their legacies.
I hope that people should be exposed to all kinds of stuff so that they can’t think of one thing as normal—that’s the ultimate promise of multiculturalism to me. I think the biggest hope for breaking racism is a slow demographic shift that seems to be terrifying the fascists already: the way that every generation makes it harder and harder to imagine white people as the norm, because of growing mixed-heritage populations. But it’s awfully slow.
Take a look at the blog post my uncle Ryan posted last month. And for a real hoot of a time, be sure to read the comments. Just click on the link below.
It’s straight out of a Don Delillo novel: A few hours after television producers set up a replica of Occupy Wall Street for the filming of a new episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, the real Occupy Wall Street announced plans to occupy the fake one. At 11:30 p.m. the call to occupy the set went out on Twitter. It’s located at nearby Foley Square and includes a replica of the OWS kitchen and library as well as numerous tarps and tents. “They’ve delivered us this perfectly wrapped Christmas present with a bow on top: They rebuilt our camp,” OWS organizer Jake De Groot told me shortly before the announcement went out. “How could we not go and take it?”
It has been a while since the Turner prize really enraged me. Only yesterday I was praising it. This art prize often used to make my blood boil. Then in 2009, I was on the Turner jury: I didn’t annoy myself at all. I worked hard to make sure that every decision the jury made was one I was happy with – especially the winner, Richard Wright. Then, last year, there was a kind of OK, slightly so-so shortlist, no disgrace to the Turner, yet nothing to arouse my passions either way. But this year I fell in love with the art of George Shaw, and to see him shortlisted for the Turner then cast down as an also-ran infuriates and, to be honest, disgusts me. I had forgotten how stupid the Turner prize can be.
It’s nice to know other people are upset about George Shaw being snubbed for the Turner Prize.
Jonathan Jones being on the jury for the 2009 prize also explains my psychic visions. Peas in a pod him and I.
Yo Martin, I’m really happy for you, I’ma let you finish, but George Shaw had one of the best paintings of all time!
With Performa having recently concluded and in the wake of the Marina Abramovic kerfuffle at the MOCA gala, I have been giving a lot of thought to the difference between visual art performance and contemporary performance – more specifically, Time-Based Art with its origins in dance and theater. This is an ongoing obsession of mine and one that I feel needs to be addressed critically. Thanks largely to RoseLee Goldberg, who literally wrote the book on performance art, the visual arts world has “rediscovered” performance in an unprecedented way. Unlike RoseLee, it seems that many of the visual arts curators currently working to promote visual arts performance lack knowledge in contemporary performance, and I think this presents a problem, as well as a challenge.
Although this article is about dance– and theatre-based performance rather than music, this is what my work is about.
I think the writer has a bit of a blind spot that shows here:
From the artistic director I was told, “The visual arts world hates craft, they’re seeking ‘authenticity’,” suggesting that when a visual artist stages a performative event it should not have any degree of artifice, that it be perceived as “real”.
The director I spoke to said that the visual arts world, somewhat understandably, finds theater laughable and as a result rarely studies it. While I share the visual arts world’s distaste for popular theater predicated on “psychological realism”, I lament the fact that there are many, many devoted practitioners of contemporary performance who are as dramaturgically engaged in the construction of their time-based work as visual artists are in creating the intellectual framework around their object-based work, and that this is, apparently, not recognized or valued by the visual arts world. It is as if when visual artists and curators “discover performance” they think that they are the first to ever encounter the aesthetic issues it proposes. It would seem that they are frequently unaware of – or indifferent to – the fact that there is a long history of performance theory; that theater, and especially dance, have for many years explored issues around presence, embodiment, presentational aesthetics, the observed/observer relationship, the visual presentation of the constructed environment, the semiotics of representation, etc., etc.
And yes, thats exactly right—but Horowitz’s focus on craft in relationship to performance is too limited. His model for the two modes of performance is that visual artists are object-based and dramatic performances are experience-based, which is a useful over-simplification, fair enough, but not necessarily accurate, and there’s something strange about the way he talks about narrative forms and psychological drama etc. I think he’s misreading the distrust of craft in visual art—it’s not something confined to performance. In the comments someone suggests that “if I go out and make a painting and claim that it is somehow more authentic and real because, well, I don’t know how to paint—I’ll get laughed out of the room” but that is in fact categorically not true, and you can confirm that by going to any little show with paintings in it here in the UK (not so much back in Edmonton, or maybe elsewhere in Canada, but so much here).
Contemporary visual art has a very complicated relationship to craft, and just as I would say some of the best object work engages with that directly by creating a contradictory experience, the best performance work engages with it by being careful about creating a complicated experience of dramatic quality, and by very directly engaging some of the things Horowitz feels are so unfashionable, like narrative drama.
(I wanted to reblog this article from where I found it but it was a couple of days ago and I don’t remember, and couldn’t track it down. Sorry someone!)
