THE t,;~IVERSITY OF ~EW SOUTH WALES COLLEGE OF ~E ARTS Thesis/Project Report Sheet
Surname or Family name: ...... -::'aoby......
00 00 00 00 Fir11 name: ················-·-·--· Davta -··-·•• •• •• ••···········•• ••················· Olher namc,s ...... Julian ...... ····························· ...... _...... _ Abbn:¥,auon for dqrs u 1iven 1n Ille t.'navenny aiendar...... ~.~.:~ ...... ·-···-·····- Sd»ol: ························-·- Schooi of Art ...... Facul~: ...... Coilei:e of Ans ·-········-············ .. ························ Tille: Art anci Kindness ...... -... ···········------·· .. ·········· .. ·······--..... _ ·····························• ...... Abstract 350 words maximum: [PLEASE TYPE)
The thesis. and the elthibited project, is most consistently about langu~e. how it controls perception. action and culture. The title Art and Kindne•• is from a ·poem' bued on the accidental drowning of Ian Burn the conceptual artist and i.natigator, along with Mel Ramsden and Roger Cutforth. of the Art Language Journal (Roger Cutforth wu a tutor of mine between 1969 and 1972). The 'poem' operates on other levels that deal with preteneion. or shallow intellectual practice within western art. also the collision of order (ae artifice. or lie I with wildemesa, or chaos (u reality, or truth).
There are sixteen 'poems' and 'narratives', all about art, elthibited in bra.ille as well as digitally marupuiated imago and tat. through a combination of graphics software.
The point ia to render the work a camouflage of conventional code, Le. 'picture', 'poem', 'lyric', 'art', 'song', 'melody'. 'humour', 'drama' whilst sub'versive'ly dismantling all of those codee, in their commonly known presence, by means of the content (message).
It ie not a quixotic aim of this project to grandiosely 'reinstate' poetry as an art form at this end of the twentieth century. Nonetheless. in a culture that commonly neglects or suppresses the full range of subjective dialogue by depreaaing the intellectual or cultural en.vil'onm.en.t to a tame programming of'iasues' (refer to .url&e Glau .Bead Game• by Herman HeHe) this will be one opportunity to see if works function by infusing an amalgam of apparently popular or conventional form with 'obtuse', 'difficult', 'rare', or 'ephemeral' notions.
>.. a matter of speculation, the following are explored aa a path to understanding the nature of ; language and its control systemics: the nature of language in the formation of order and presence of chaos • the graphic presence of multimedia and particularly recent audio software, as a metaphor for synaesthesia • problem• and challenges for accurate espression through Romaniaed language • some difficulties of ideology in dealing with formalism • deception, illusion.. meaning and kindneH.
O.:larauon rdatin1 IO dispmuon o( pro,ea repon/lhesis
I un fuUy aware o( IJle policy o( the Univenny rela1in1 10 _the re1en1ion and use o( higher de1ree project ref)OIU and t.hese.s, namely dial die Un1ven1&y reuans the c:op,e.s 111bm111u (or eum,nauon and II Cree IO allow them IO be c:onsulled or borrowed. S11bjea 10 !he provisions of lhe Copynpl Aa 1961 111ven11y may 1uue a proJCa rq>OI\ or lhes11 an whole or III pan. 111 phoiostal or microfilm or other copying medium.
ion by Un1ven11y Microfilms of a JS0 word absuaa in Oissen.a1ion Abc1racu lnicrnauonal (applicable to doaora1a
Dale !here may be e11cq,uonal cir s ea ~uiring r conditions oa use. RequelU for 2 yean m1111 be made III wn1111g 10 lhe Reg1s1rar. Requau (or a longer penod o( renncuon may be caisidered in pan1cd by • leucr o( supp,rt Crom lhe Supemsor or Head of School. Such ~ue.su m1111 be submiued w1dl die
O.ic of c:omplellOII ol ~u,remcnu for Award:
Rc1u111r and Oq,uty Principal IBIS SHEET IS TO BE GLUED TO lliE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF lliE lliESIS Art and Kindness Dave Cubby© 1994
1 ... Index
• p. 3 - 1. Introduction Speculation on the apparent truth
• p. 5 - 2. Art and Kindness Speculation on Sixteen 'poems' and 'narratives'
• p. 21 - 3. 31 F Add Noise Speculation on the graphic and metaphoric potency ofdigitised sound
• p. 26 - 4. Harder and softer ware Speculation on the /1,ux of form, content and change
• p. 28 - 5. Irishchiaroscuro Speculation on the nature oflanguage and formation oforder
• p. 37 - 6. Lupercal Speculation on the nature of language and presence ofchaos
• p. 51 - 7. Sabine, honey is that you? Speculation on paradigm shifting across social a gender to the strains of apocalypso
• p. 58 - 8. A Blue Refuse Speculation on the telling oflies
• p. 61 - 9. Selected Bibliography Speculation on references used throughout this project
2 1. Introduction
The title of the work is from a 'poem' based on the accidental drowning of Ian Burn the conceptual artist and instigator, along with Mel Ramsden and Roger Cutforth, of the Art Language Journal (Roger Cutforth was a tutor of mine between 1969 and 1972). The 'poem' operat.es on other levels that deal with pret.ension, or shallow int.ellectual practice within west.em art, also the collision of order (as artifice, or lie) with wilderness, or chaos (as reality, or truth).
There are sixteen exhibit.ed 'poems' and 'narratives', all about art, exhibit.ed in braille and mounted on the walls of the gallery, as well as digitally manipulated images and text, through a combination of graphics software.
The 'poems' have become lyrics and the 'narratives' instrumental. The exhibition opening incorporates the launch of an Audio CD. Each work has been sound sampled through an Ensoniq Sampler and a number of digital programs including Steinberg Cubase, Digidesign ProTools and Sound Designer via a Macintosh comput.er.
Throughout the exhibition the soundwork will be available as an audio CD relayed through speakers in a list.ening room at the rear of the gallery.
The point is to render the work a camouflage of conventional code, i.e. 'picture', 'poem', 'lyric', 'art', 'song', 'melody', 'humour', 'drama' whilst sub'versive'ly dismantling all of those codes, in their commonly known presence, by means of the content (message). The audience will experience the mix of signals of the lyrics in one form or another as t.ext, or imagery or sound as well as in tactile form.
The exhibit is work produced in a unique audio-visual form, fusing traditional with advanced practice across visual art, lit.erature, sound art, drama, typography, and other devices such as braille or digital manipulation, with the aim of disturbing conventions oflanguage and thought.
It is not a quixotic objective of the show to grandiosely 'reinstate' poetry as an art form at this end of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, in a culture that commonly neglects or suppresses the full range of subjective dialogue
3 that commonly neglects or suppresses the full range of subjective dialogue by depressing the intellectual or cultural environment to a tame programming of'issues' (refer to "The Glass Bead Game" by Herman Hesse) this will be one opportunity to see if works function by infusing an amalgam of apparently popular or conventional form with 'obtuse', 'difficult', 'rare', or 'ephemeral' notions.
Each 'verse' is intentionally drenched in meaning as well as elegantly crafted. A great deal of effort is spent on the 'finish' of each 'poem', washed over repeatedly until the best possible outcome is achieved.
All of the work, apart from the audio CD, is saved onto Macintosh files, Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1 or Adobe Illustrator, and can be downloaded, individually or as an exhibition, and scaled from A4 to any appropriate format, complete with recommendations for mounting and display. Consequently, the exhibition is available as a package for publication as a book, CD ROM or digital transmission.
Dave Cubby December 1994
This Master ofFine Art Research thesis is wholly dedicated to Rory Cubby who assisted me greatly in the production ofthe audio CD. We jointly wrote sections 3 and 4, presenting that work as a paper to the 'Multimedia and Design Conference' at the Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney in September 1994. Rory also contributed generously to the development of ideas and my confidence throughout this project. He has a fine mind, patience and a great kindness that comes only with exceptional talent.
Dave Cubby February 1995
4 2. Art and Kindness
Art and Kindness Drowning ofa Caring Conceptual Artist. 3:2Cmina Written by Daw Cubby C Comi:io-f and Arranged by Rory Cubby and Daw Cubby C Vocal1: Dave Cubby
All of you making art that looks like art be warned, there is a lot of it, billowing in and out of lives.
Well, a wave is coming that's nothing oo do with fashion, your leading edge will be shown then forgotten, washed oo the past.
A swell beyond your dabbling creations, roo deep for you t.o sense, has been waiting t.o break and clear the coast.
It is a sudden, serious instant before all of you will be taken in this rip, as I am by a child beckoning this man inoo the drowning conscience.
In there and out here through thunder waters returned oo chaos surging beneath the horiwn of thought and worldly imagining.
My search for shore is ended, a secret perspective sighted, the water is a huge lens directed at the good old land as I am filling up with brine.
Marine riddles of the strange and familiar this unexpected bright from dark view, ironic that absolute confidence does flow from final terror.
Art of appearances echo feebly now across the face of surf, a splashy shallow showing, rolling over and gone until all will be drowned on a notion waving.
5 The Boring Man as Artist and Educator A man who di.d not move or improve. l:OOmina. Written by Daw Cubby© Com~ and Ammpd by Rory Cubby and Daw Cubby© Vocala and Guitar: Dave Cubby Now that you are an artist, as you claim to be, you may become a famous one, if you work hard and show the way. Since you are a teacher now you'll have the time to play and change your destiny from home-town apathy to popularity. Although you have no talent, that won't impair your day. They needed you to fill out form, on the edge of sympathy. Stand still and 'be an artist' that's the easy part, but students will remember you as a boring little fart.
6 Bloodstone The Laat Annual Dinner ofthe University Art Committee 2:00mins Written by Daw Cubby© Compoeed and Arranpd by Rory Cubby and Dave Cubby © Vocala: DawCubby
End of an ear. Bloodstone and heavy night breathing. Boring men discussing old art colonies, long gone. A pathetic crumbling of politic bodies. Old women with make-ups on older men, sporting strange bald head with hairy patches and heavy eyes and heavy mouths and heavier conversation.
The dying of the old garden, clique go the shears. Blowzy old frowzy full of red sediment. They are fading to the periphery of vision and may return there, momentarily, as ghosts for a surprised waitress one night, at the end. Late middle-aged women with heavy posterior and dry interior. Sheer black windows from floor to ceiling, shielding out the night, waiting on dark wings to entrance and sacrifice the food all purple and jam and chicken and lamb. Pompous and vacuous, senescent yet newly professing stale lies and curdled promises. Dying and fading and gone. Duly forgotten, with no clothes on. Hung over, yet sober. Taking money from the patronising and desperate, commit favour amongst each other. The first fly of spring, resting high on the window, a 7 A Beautiful Grid Suicide ofa forgotten formalist painter. 2:18mill8 Written by Daw Cubby@ Comsx-1, and An,mpd by Rary Cubby and Daw Cubby@ Vocala: Daw Cuhby In that moment, it's a gentle cascading breath of ever-turning magenta tinged cloud softly dispersed against a quiet blue sky that will always prelude hope and escape - an edge, a comer, unexpected and unknown view, avenue to ether regions of secure and infinite travelling to observe for ever, heavenly, diffuse and shifting chroma. Here is the wall of the present, a beautiful grid that gives edge and purchase, a comer to tum. An encounter that hides yet precedes an omnipotent and magnificent future. For escaping is always beautiful, even as a political solution, so America knows in its funny, hard little heart. The palace of glass promise made to travellers, arriving east going west, must never dare to mention the past. All that can exist in this illusory fulcrum of optimism is present and future in two dimensions flattened onto one plane, the comer and the view. First the beautiful grid then diffuse space and light that colours all of time. The frame of the beautiful grid is suspense which in turn is transparent faith that god is in the sky and all's well in an illuminated paradise of space with no hist.ory. Sliding diamonds and rectangles in perspective. The body of the grid is the story that grips you by the wrist and takes you to the precipice of an exquisite vertigo. Ask yourself what would have been, if you had not come to the edge of a minimal world. 8 Art Therapy From the other Bide. 2:03mim. Written by Daw Cubby C Comix-f and Arraupd by Rory Cubby and Da- Cubby Cl Voc:ala: Daw Cuhby Soot eyes lock onto me pitch dark through light filling the room black arc traces me to the door slip from the fiat of evil black-dyed serpents matted hair spit paranoia in the air white fleah spills blood lips lure1 soul and life for fear shut the door shut the door to there a aoul tormented from behind perched inside gliding forward you must hide pure evil feeds on innocence or dies shut the door 1hut the door and break all tie• 9 The American Solution Dead art ofthe smies 2:00miDII. Written by Dave CubbyC Comix-t. and Ammpd by Rary Cuhby and Dave Cubby e Voc:ala: Daw Cubby lwuoo thegruayknoll when pop art ■tarted pop-pop Marilyn Monroe all )'OU know. Cuban heel for a feel of pop art ■ tarted hot-epot Warhol'11 boote Havana roots. Here come a lot catholic president whom pop art ■tarted clo■ e-crop whit.e race half a face. Vietnam for common John now pop art ■tarted open-top cavalcade fuaillade. Braim in a bucket eince pop art ■tarted pot-shot space cadet covwt debt. Harvey Lee banality cope pop art ■tarted pop-up target ■ u■ pect Blood shed all dead tope pop art ■tarted pop-gun head fed Rubyl'8d Johna ftag falle on the box that pop art ■ tarted dot-dot Roy's cartoon shoot balloon. Who pictuJ"8d this Jackie? ■ top pop art ■ tarted flat-top mammy le,endary 10 The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke Richard Dadd (1811 to 1886), little known nineteenth cen.tur-y E1111lish painter. l:19mina. Imtrumental Compoeed and An-anged by Rory Cubby and Da"Ye Cubby@ Guitar: Dave Cubby In 1841 Richard Dadd exhibited 'fanciful pictures of fairyland, minutely and disturbingly detailed'. The following year he travelled through Europe and the East. In 1843, he returned to murder his father, at Cobham, whilst walking with him in the countryside. As they clambered over a stile, he vented his frenzy on the back of his father's head. Richard Dadd's bludgeon to the nape of the neck, killed him. What an end to a beautiful summers day outing. Fleeing to France, he harboured plans for a more systematic programme of extermination. He was soon caught. Richard Dadd spent the remaining forty three years of his life interned at Bedlam, then Broadmoor asylum. He had time to paint and was permitted to do so by the authorities being plentifully supplied with materials. He continued to paint exquisite pictures of fairies in pre-raphaelite style. A number of his works are housed in the Tate Gallery collection. Notably, "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke", painted over nine years between 1855 and 1864. He left it unfinished. Reference• "Victorian Painting" by Graham Reynold• Harper & Row Publiahen NY. 1987 and "English Painting" by Jean Jacques Mayoux and Sir Anthony Blunt. Skira Editions 1972. 11 The Broken White Man A warning from the world ofart. 5:33m.im. Written by Da"" Cubby e Ccmpoaed and An-anpd by Rory Cubby and Dave Cubby@ Vocal8: Jo Cuhby Violin: Natasha Rumiz Span the ashen steps to the blue door above the iron entrance of this and that century, enter the gut of the orange temple beyond the green gardens and the fallen drums. There in a higher window the broken white man speak, between the bars and the window frame, spicks to the wires that twist a signal to the edge of a visible world. Spick the scent of politick, the foul warm air the broken white man breath onto many as we fornicate through our ears to beget a bastard of romantic monsters, called hate. Each gossipy chimney-brick walls up the distance by which we measure passion. The very nature of his presence spick abhorrence and span my eyes. Then, the transmission, the broken white man, has a very improper gander at your life. One speaking too many, at once mellifluous and snappy, a barking worse than barking. Through the air spewing noises everywhere, down the corridors, onto roofs, across the hills and water, around the horizon and into heads and minds, a sinister dust settling from a volcano. Blind you and fills your mouths and ears, covers your body, cast in motion and set for ever, the better for the broken white man to see you still. The better for him to kill you, in droves. 12 The Wax Hat Douanier Ro111111eau plays violin for PicaB•o 1 :14 m.in8. Instrumental Comix-f and Arranpd by Natuha Rumiz, Rory Cubby and Dave CubbyC Vwlin: Natuha Rumiz. In 1908, artist.a of the bateau-lavoir held a dinner in honour of Douanier Rousseau. The ceremony rook place at Picasso's studio in the rue Ravignan. The walls were adorned with several beautiful African masks and one painting by Rousseau, the portrait titled Yadwigha. Streamers bedecked the bateau-lavoir studio and a banner above the portrait acclaimed 'Honneur a Rousseau'. Artists and writers attending the event included Georges Braque, Jacques Vaillant, Agero, Apollinaire, Friez, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon, Maurice Cremnitz, Rene Dalize, Maurice Raynal, Alice Toklas, Gertrude and Leo Stein. Rousseau's throne consisted of a chair placed on an orange-box. and a table was improvised by laying a huge plank from the market across trestles. Glasses and crockery from the restaurant Azon arrived. Food, ordered from Felix Potin did not. Eventually, someone supplied sardines with bread and there was wine. Oh! plenty of wine. Picasso had invited a white bearded, portentous, old art restorer who lived in the same house, introducing him to Rousseau as 'The Minister of Fine Arts'. In warm red t.ones Rousseau confided boisterously in Picasso's ear, "After all, you and I are both great painters: myself in the modem style, and you in the Egyptian." Maurice Cremnitz st.ood up and delivered a song t.o honour Rousseau: C'est le peinture De ce Rousseau Qui dompte le nature Avec sa magnificent pinceau! In reply, Douanier Rousseau produced his violin vigorously playing and prancing t.o tunes of his own composition, including 'The Little Bells', a waltz called 'Clemence' and his version of a strange jig titled 'The Fat Man Dances by the Light of the Moon Alone'. After Rousseau had wearied his repertoire of melodies Apollinaire leapt t.o the table-t.op delivering an improvised monologue in praise of the artist, a long and marvellous poetic concatenation of fact and fiction. Emotionally overwhelmed Rousseau blearily scanned the happy moments, unsteadily perched on his throne at the end of the studio. Frede, the innkeeper and his donkey wandered. amongst the guests, finishing off the food. Cremnitz and Salmon ate soap and foamed at the mouth, feigning madness. Apollinaire caught up on his correspondence seated in a comer Directly above Rousseau, attached t.o the ceiling, was a large candle-lit Chinese lantern. The audience spiralled int.o hysteria at the sight of a blithe artist, unaware of the hot molt dripping ont.o his head, forming a crazed, conical wax hat. 13 Enterrar y callar Francisco Goya - Los Desastres de la Guerra. 2:50min.t Soundacape Composed and Ammged by Rory Cubby and Dave Cubby © Bury them and hush FranciBco Goya - The Disasters ofWar - etchings 1810-1814. "Goya probed the effects of war on nameless individuals ... His interest lay in what it means for a peasant with knife, axe, or homemade lance to attack trained, fully armed troops and what it is like for those who confront such passion; in feelings of women violated by soldiers, of men who rape, and of husbands forced t.o witness such acts; in the ability of the dead when they become countless to so benumb survivors that they no longer remember that each corpse was once a neighbour known t.o them; in the degradation of the human spirit that permits men to commit atrocities; in inexorable famine and death t.ouching the lives of men, women and children... " Reference - "Goya and the Spirit of Enlight.enment" by Alfonso E. Peres Sanchez and Eleanor A. Sayre. Little Brown & Co. NY. 1988. 14 Cultural Studies How a University Works l:38millll. Written by Dave Cubby ~ Compc-1 and Arnmpd by Rory Cuhby and Dave Cuhby@ Vocal.a: Daw Cubby A thick-little local yokel or castrated by a sweet lying lesbian a nervous feeble-minded gymnast, ambitious jealous cockroach and a malicious bendy doll with friends. Paltry goblins squat on shoulder emerge big astride a seven moons mare vaulting crazed toward a darkened plot, their vile inadequacies blot ink against the whitened ground. Froth and gallop mad to kill the teacher they must never kill, but will to wreck all faculties they can, brood on the vacillating chancellery lost and looking for a rein. Underneath the therapist squeals and wails to suck a lawyers mind and seek the pension they all seek, craves to sink professorships for sacrificial end. Lure of blood and excrement doctorate a throat flee to crack and comer cockroach known down the procession of murderers flutter academic cap and gown. 15 Naive Art The little art collection at Jindera Pioneer Mw,eum. l:05miDB. lnltrumental Com~ and Arranged by Rory Cubby and Da-ve Cubby@ Guitar: Daw Cubby This piece is dedicated to a small and surreal collection of anonymous or minor ninet.eenth and early twentieth century works, housed at the Cottage Gallery of the Jindera Pioneer Museum. Paintings exhibited at the gallery "have previously hung in the homes of families in the region and a number have been painted by members of pioneering families." Some works are by noted colonial artists such as Eustace, Mather and McN ally. Many are by women painters who, unable to travel frequently to the major centres to buy prints, made their own pictures or artefacts. Interestingly, the material produced is compelling in ways that neither cont.emporary art history nor fashionable art theory would grasp. It is a memory of the beautiful country around the border of New South Wales and Victoria, Australia. It is a recognition of all naive artists who are never properly credited for their support of, even bogus artists along the borderline, for doing - something more. Refenmc:ee: Catalogue and Guide, .fmdera Pioneer Museum NSW Australia. Museum opened by Sir RU8sell Dryi,dale, 1968. Cottap Gallery opened in 1984 by Lady Dryadale. Patl'ODS Lady Drysdale and Profeesor E. G Moll. Preeident: Peter Moll, Director: Catherine Clark, Secretary: Beryl Stevens, Treasurer: Russel Nation. Thanb to Grace Moll and a special thanks t.o Catherine Clark for ueiatance with reaearch. 16 Cockroach (The Uncorucientio1111 Artist) Requiem for a fa/,Be and troubling arliat 2:54miDI. Written by Dave Cubby@ Compoeed and An'1ml'ICi by Rory Cubby and Dave Cubby © Vocala: Darren Moyle Blackhearted artist, thin brain, nightwatchman, local boy made local your goblin soul, a shadow tracing scrawny messages sketching future into past turning babies over ghosts, dark blood mixed with worried milk like ink. Brown bone, joints thrown in frightened erections along fleshy paper tinted pale purple and gray, reflected in your face. Etched hair, from temple sticks up like a clown vain bleeding gloss charm, weakjokes repeating after me, jalousie. Your art is a banner wing rustling to draw the crowd beneath you to view your tiny pen at work. It's the only way you can unfurl the dreadful humiliation you draw insults from every cause you lost. Oh! they might adore you for a while, leading them into a dismal frame, bearing heraldry shaped like a bad heart, until the lid is closed. 17 Laszl6's Smile Prqjected beam over one lu,,adred light years. 2.02 mim Soo•nd.-.pe (for that estn dimerudon, read the poem in ccqunction with the track> Written by Daw CubbyC Compoeed md Alnnpd by Rory Cubby md Daw Cubby@ Guitar: Dave Cubby Twenty-one light years after the bio-death on a st.ainless-steel trolley in a Chicago hospital, of the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy I was first taught photography in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-seven at the first art school that I attended. Fourteen light years later I was drawn by my studies into closely exemining the work of this modernist wanderer and diviner of machines. In the year nineteen hundred and eighty-one, Laszlo visited me in a peculiar dream. We flew above a miraculous earth-sphere of white luminous glass and diamond towers, shimmering acuminate palaces articulated out of dynamic beaming shafts passing through crystal walls. A zero-world of lux, teeming with gleaming, geometric minarets and translucent traffic streams, shining bright and brave against the black ether. Even now, in nineteen hundred and ninety-four, forty-eight light years since he died, words cannot describe the unforgettably beautiful confidence that a dream of this kind presents. Laszlo turned to smile at me, suspended in a cosmos above his insertion of another reality, transgressing all of known time and space. Moholy Nagy's illuminated apparition unveiled complete knowledge of his worldly fulfilment. The absolute revelation of constructivism, a 'radiant city' in all it's pellucid detail, in all it's acute sophistry and dazzling complexity at this stuck-lift end of the twentieth century. Some ninety nine light years since his birth he trafficked from pristine hope, overland and sea to miry disappointment on a wagon to Bacsbarsod a machine-wound in a trench at the Russian front, silvery-garlic Weimar to Chicago and a moribund trolley. Laszlo's smile unravels the binary standing still-motion, all at the switch of this one hundred light years, an amalgam of the scientific examination of social condition by means of Marxism, because a peasant must break the feudal bond over technology to avoid annihilation and become a beaming techno-utopia at the Weimar. How pure blood, soil and the machine mix thus advert to stupid shopping England until all iridescent modems migrate to America. Then, wagon the dream west away to Hollywood and Asia. 18 The Death of Photography Pe, feet proportions oft'lae picture frame 2.30m.ina Written by Daw Cuhby e Compoeed and AJTanged by Nataaha Rumia, Rory Cubby and Dave Cubby © Vocala: DawCubby Violin: Natuha Rumis Height and Width and Depth and Truth All pictures exist beyond the frame transport the soul away likelight refract.ed through a prism then restored again. Be photographed and watch the world until the picture fades. All pictures die within the frame shoot the spirit backwards likedark inside a puzzlebox disappear again Be photographed and hide the world until the picture shines. All pictures flash around the frame strobe the body upsidedown likemirror ghosts glide through the glass a spectral smile again. Be photographed and fix the world until the picture breathes. 19 Goodbye Bald Rock An Artist's Hotel 2:39mina. Inatrumental Composed and An-an,ed by Fiona Haass, Rory Cubby and Daw Cubby © Guitar: DaveCubby Suopbane: Fiona Haaaz. 20 3. II F Add Noise The following speculations concern the graphic and metaphoric potency of digital audio software programs, particularly whilst collaborating with Rory Cubby developing the audio CD titled Art and lundness throughout 1994, as well as general work on various video and audio computer-based projects. Rory and I have worked through from very basic analog equipment profiles to a variety of digital audio programs such as Steinberg Cubase, Digidesign Pro Tools, Sound Designer II and Deck II, as well as Ensoniq sampling technology. We initialise from the anthropomorphising process that has ultimately engendered the 'computer interactivity revolution'. Douglas Engelhart, with his ambitiously-named treatise "A Conceptual Framework for Augmenting Man's Intellect"(1963)1 saw computers as a sort of 'Brave New World' solution to the complexities of modem life. These 'high-powered electronic aids'2 would remove the repetitive drudgery of the thinking process, freeing the human mind for more creative pursuits. Computers currently permeate western culture, fulfilling his prophesy. They become houses of memory. They become graphics workstations. They become pathways of communication. They permeate the way we think about production, transforming the workforce into one increasingly used to dealing with objects and ideas through metaphor. 'When Ted Nelson coined the term 'Hypermedia' (another word for multimedia) he was certainly imagining a medium in which we are all users and creators rather than merely consumers.' 3 Such lines of thought tend to conclude that users of this technology would ultimately be in the position to create new languages when 'computers' can enable people to exchange simulations - images, sounds and dynamic models -just as we have exchanged spoken and written words to date. Definitions such as 'design' and 'technology' are transcended and the concept of a 'post-symbolic language', posited by virtual reality researcher Jaron 1 Howard Rheingold "Virtual Reality p. 70 Secker and Warburg 1991 2 Howard Rheingold "Virtual Reality p. 68 Secker and Warburg 1991 3 Oliver/Cotton "Understanding Hypermedia" p. 35 Phaidon Press 1993 21 Lanier, is realised. Our inclination, for better or worse, is to be seduced into a relationship whereby the machine is invested with human attributes, and the machine environment is correspondingly imbued with characteristics of the human environment thereafter regulating our interaction with computers. The increasingly anthropomorphised interface, whilst making the computer more 'user-friendly', blurs the definition between the 'user' and the 'friend', while at the same time the finesse of the machines' ergonomic design reaches almost erotic proportions. Humans are incorporated into the machine lexicon as 'wetware' as a complement to 'hardware' and 'software'. Humans have 'breakdowns', and computers get 'viruses'. Many thinkers flirt with the idea that some kind of transcendence of our enframing language is possible. Such notions are often rendered jargon by voices of the burgeoning new communications industry seeking to validate any and all schema for expansion. However, cross-pollinations also exhibit long established as well as newly formed dreams increasingly realised as technology flows over organic paths through cybernetics into bio-technology and self-perpetuating, silicon-based life forms. Beam me up and beam me down, beam me anywhere and anyhow, Scotty. The notion of syna!sthesia culled from traditional psychology of perception has not yet been commonly invoked within any previous dialogue of design. It appears now as an invigorated concept, a term on the rise, interestingly appropriate to multimedia, referring to similarities between cognitive and digital confusion, fusion and manipulation (perhaps 'morphing') of sensory data. Multimedia provides a synergetic state similar to the deep neurological interplay of sense data that supplies the notion of synll!Sthesia - the dynamic point where vision, sound, static and mobile, smell, taste, and touch enhance existing forms or draw on the possibility of new form. Derived from the Greek syn - union and zsthesis - sensation, synzsthesia means the merging of sensory input to occupy the same spot within sensory space. Light and sound coalesce at the same point and allocate the same meaning - as, for example, a specific musical note correlates in the mind as a particular colour. The digital facility to perform simultaneous, or parallel placement of data and dynamically exchange one to the other is an intense metaphor for the mental condition of synzthesia. As with psychedelia, the ramifications provoke a sense of 'raw perception' to a point where consciousness itself collapses into the directly existential, indiscrete or chaotic, thereafter 22 invoking a critique of existing senses and implying the potential for the rapid evolution of new sensory channels • because this is the place where it happens, the wilderness of the mind. Beyond psychedelia, but remaining within this confusion of the senses, there are implications of genius as well as idiot-savant. For example, individuals who are particularly adept at mathematics, though inept in the ordinary concourse of life, transform abstract signs into an eidetic performance of subjective and vital figurative symbols destined to solve complex calculations at dramatic speed. Einstein visualises the theory of relativity initially as a series of swirls in the head. The English artist John Bratby after a career of working through richly chromatic and heavy impasto painting, dismays his spouse by taking an inordinate interest in 'bad' smells and spends many hours avidly seeking the Liverpool docks area for the most awful 'colourful' and 'textured' pongs he can find. Alternately there are well known 'clean' or more earnest examples of image sensed as sound such as those paintings ofWassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee. Although art-historical references t.o the latter kind problematically, and probably mistakenly, imply a disappointing, mere translation of western musical notation and not synaesthesi,a. Thinking about this novel digital emphasis of the notion of raw perception, a deconstruction of consciousness takes place and presents the possibility of healing Cartesian body/mind rifts that plague generally understood views of depiction, such as graphic illustration or put simply, drawing. Given that computers are now no longer computers in the historical sense, but 'graphic' and latterly 'multimedia workstations' also leads to a critique of the projection of the senses, and particularly of the graphic - drawing and the merging of representational or sense data - that 'self-consciousness' supersedes any immediate need t.o enquire into histories of computing. A Cartesian understanding of depiction comprises a classic external and internal view. On the one hand, a bodily, objective or physical knowing - by which we may simply characterise the condition of drawing in terms of a classic 'white sheet of paper and a pencil'. Otherwise, there is a mental, subjective knowing, comprising intuition and thought - a state of measuring the world as we know it and think it may have been or will become, in all complexity. Such 'sizing-up' of worlds is, in the case of drawing, 23 fundamentally spatio-visual and refers to scale and position not only as naturalistic rendering but as much modernist and post-modernist graphic practice identifies, also as expressive and intellectual representations of further dimensions, imagined or real. Incidentally, but importantly (whether intentional or not) the classic 'white sheet ofpaper and pencil' acts as a kind of 'test' through western primary and secondary education - some people perform well in terms of naturalistic rendering and some do not. In other words some people manifest a heightened sensitivity for spatial scaling and placement, within given worlds, compared to others. A corollary being that a 'talent for drawing' must be seen as similar to other discrete talents, for example, marked abilities with music or mathematics that focus mental activity to such a mild or extreme degree as to upset or diminish an individual ability to function in other areas of practice. The genius/idiot-savant condition as a real basis for the dotty scientist/mad-artist mythology of modern times, whereby 'talent' proportionately registers as 'handicap'. It currently appears that the classic 'white sheet of paper and pencil' is superseded by the mouse and keyboard or the Wacom graphics tablet. However, that is not a creative shift, as any practicing designer knows, it is an industrial or technological shift along the surface or external condition of drawing. Indeed, all of that debate is at the surface of the act of depiction and does not alter any in'ternal view of drawing. Recognising, as a matter of common sense, that the 'whitesheetofpaperandpencil' has antecedents and referents to marks in the sand, on the body, the cave wall, bark, the chapel ceiling, the canvas, the screen and the publishing house. A complete inquiry must work across the 'out.side' plane of the Cartesian split, as it really is a moebius strip, to locate the 'internal' condition ofthe 'need to make a mark' and the indiscrete, wild nature of that need, which digital technology (intentionally or not) replicates and triggers a reflection that in tum begins restoration to a whole. It will be seen again that the physical act of drawing amplifies and reflexively conditions the mental act of drawing and, therefore, vice versa. Spatio-visual scaling (a wild modelling) of the world is an inevitable condition of being a synthetic or biological int.elligent life form on this planet. All of this 'measurement', all of this 'drawing', all of this eidetic modelling goes on 'inside' 24 all of us, all of the time. It occurs at a conscious and subconscious level in marks, and noises, words and dreams, strands and clusters of thought and fragments or galaxies of feeling, at times focussed at others quit.e 25 4. Harder and softer ware Descending further into the rich chaos of merged sense data we will encounter exemplary software that directly and innocently fuse representation of defined sensations, such as sound and vision. Amongst such software, sound is usually being digitally transformed into a graphic interface far closer in form and application to graphics programs than conventional musical notation. Like a dark star, sound and vision are collapsed to occupy the same space and the same meaning. An audio device becomes a graphic device, and a graphic device becomes an audio device. The potential for new form and new content exist.a. Briefly, Cuoose functions as a sequencer of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital lnter(all) information. It accepts input from a MIDI keyboard or sound module, as well as direct input via mouse or computer keypad, and triggers the sound module, synthesiser, sampler or whatever to play the sound. This frees up the computer's memory to deal with the MIDI information (when a note is pressed on a keyboard, for example), rather than having to process the actual sound, which is generated by the separate module or modules hooked up to the computer. Other software such as Sound Tools, Pro Tools, Cubase Audio, Sound Edit Pro and so on are designed to process the sound it.self - in this respect they are more like the traditional recording media and are often used in production as a stepping stone between a sequencer and sound module partnership and the final mix down. The essential graphic characteristics of these programs bear remarkable similarity to the Cuoose paradigm, however, and operate according to the same principles. The main window of the Cuoose program, called the arrange window, is mostly taken up with a graphic representation of the sequence data in a vertical series of 'tracks' analogous to a multi track recorder. Transport controls (play, stop, fast forward, rewind) continue the strategy of a graphic structure that mirrors the fundamental configuration of the recording technology it supersedes (the Cubase interface designers even went so far as to put little bolts at the bottom comers of the screen to invoke the studio rack-mounted recording deck). The logic behind this is the same as the rationale behind the nomenclature of the 'wireless' radio - a device employed to make prospective users more at ease with the new medium. This technique is also applied to the interface of such digital video programs as 26 Adobe Premiere, which refers not only to video technology but to the film technology that preceded it or Adobe Photoshop that is basically modelled around the main components of conventional photography. Although, as multimedia practice continues, developments in items such as plug-in filters, masking techniques and program exchanges create very useful pathways between illustration, typography and animation programs. The data within a program such as Cubase can be edited using the standard computer methods of cutting, copying, pasting, dragging and so forth, making sound editing a non-linear and 'intuitive' process, where a whole series of decisions can be made (and reversed if necessary) without muddying the canvas. Whole slabs of sound can be snipped up using a scissors tool and glued back together with perkins paste. Individual notes can be accessed in a variety of editing windows, ranging from the traditional musical score notation t.o a sort of 'piano roll' view of events, and the characteristics of each note, such as length and velocity, can be altered in a visual manner. Notes may be entered using a pencil tool, or painted in bold arpeggios using a brush tool. Thus it is possible, without recourse to traditional musical skills, to literally 'draw' and 'paint' the music or sound piece. The instant 'visualisation' of the modulation, juxtaposition, rhythmic and tonal variety generated from this input is at the heart of the syn~sthetic experience of computer-aided sound creation. Computer - manipulated sound becomes textural and visual rather than a calculated, notated or mathematical condition. Interface design strategies will continue along this trajectory, informed by the existing visual language of sound treatment. The interplay of equivalence between scopic, haptic, aural and olfactory systems of perception continuously suggest novel methods of representation. Sound that is wet or dry in terms of effect processing, bright or dark in frequency response, sound that is sharp or soft in attack or decay, or warm or cool in tonal colour - all these attributes could be graphically modulated. Due to the fluid nature of digital information there is no reason why a Photoshop blur filter could not be applied t.o a section of sound data in Pro tools, or for that matter why a digital delay could not be translated onto an image in Photoshop, or an artist could not 'sing' the shape of the clouds in his or her digital painting into a voice recognition circuit. Maybe ballroom dancing will advance as style t.o edit those gliding bezier curves in Illustrator and Freehand. Certainly an enviable Wacom tablet would be required. 27 5. Irishchiaroscuroasia "Until seventy-five years qo in the male artistic tradition of the West, women's natural amplitude was their beauty; repnsentations of the female nude revealed in women's lush fertility. Various distributions of sexual fat were emphasised according to fashion - big ripe bellies from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, plump faces and shoulders in the early nineteenth, progressively generous dimpled buttocks and thighs until the twentieth- but never, until women's emancipation entered law this absolute negation of the female state that fashion historian Ann Hollander in 'Seeing Through Clothea' characterises, from the point of view of any age but our own, as "the look of sickness, the look of poverty, the look of nervous exhaustion." '4 Beauty is not what it used to be. Nor will be. Though Beauty seems an axiomatic value - a complex of gratification of the senses and admiration of the 1esthetic whole "Id quo visem placet"6. The star-crossed schism between Beauty as a universal value and it's vital presence is persistently difficult to mend, in this languages and, certainly, within the exluoition stand of cummtly sanctioned ideology. Here is the delicate epidermis of Wolf's thesis, representing a good deal of feminist ideology, no matter how hyper-vented with windy statistics and billowing belief, blimpish argument pressing hard onto a small sharp pinnacle of euphemism tends to pop. Ultimately, 'patriarchal society', in this instance coded as 'the male artistic tradition of the West', is held responsible, without let, for all the actual and possible ills that beset women in particular and society as a whole. It may be that patriarchy is indeed the force producing all negative effects pronounced by feminist ideology. However, a rigorous, judgmental reading of a model and popular set of writings such as Wolfs, reveals, disappointingly, beneath a dense collage of data, little but paradigm and no evidence. No more fact than the factual status of any other belief system. As much as a notion can be propounded - such that, an entire gender of a species subordinat.es another so completely that the world of artifice that society inherits is so tragically and utterly masculine - anyone can, in terms of pure logic, at least, as validly speculate that inherited language and technology affect mind and character 4 'The Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf pl84 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991 6 "Whenever I~ thia I am pl.eaud, th#!re{ore it muat be beautiful" St. Thoma• Aquinas p.11. 'TM Meaning ofB«wty' Eric Newton 1960. 6 " .. .it ia the ,tudy of the ,ignifyiTIII regime that fir,t tatifia to the inadequacy of linguutic preauppoaitiona, and in the very name of the ngime of ,igna." Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari ''.A Thou.and Plaleau," University of Minnesota Pre88 4th Ed. 1993. 28 completely that the world of artifice that society inherits is so tragically and utterly masculine - anyone can, in terms of pure logic, at least, as validly speculate that inherited language and technology affect mind and character without regard to gender and merely by 'accident of history', thus creating another euphemism or better still a speculation, a platform for thought, that preludes the opportunity to mount a further paradigm shift1. In the nature of paradigm manipulation, it is ever possible that one belief system supersedes another, even unintentionally, in the way that aspects of Western feminist ideology have intercepted and diffuse the need to globally redistribute wealth. For example, the lat.e nineteen eighties Western 'power-shoulder' Madonna syndrome is concerned with 'empowering' or conditioning women to align themselves absolutely within the value structure of high capitalism, as her debut hit single "Material Girl" peddles the lyric "I'm a material girl, living in a material world". The mediated connotation being that it is in the universal interest of women and all of society that as many as possible, without equivocation, sit.e themselves high on the executive ladder and only within the capitalist hierarchy to languish as broadcast models of behaviour, as professional angels to be counted on the corporat.e pinhead, for the rest of women to emulat.e, humanity to admire and, presumably, men to envy. The strength, if not worth, of any collectively held system of ideas or ideology, is the formidability of its display and interplay of useful and useless int.elligence that it grows, purchases, solicits and exhibits along the way until it becomes sufficiently convincing an intricat.e and impressive pantheon of synthetic belief to mutat.e into social canon then, inevitably to religiosity. Thomas. S. Kuhn points out that "particular learned communities or specialities rest upon acceptance of 'a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications 'e and Jeremy Hawthorn further explains: 7 " ••• Kuhn's view of the necessity for a paradigm shift to enable major advances in scientific theory to take place seemed to have something (but only something) in common with what Louis Althusser was saying concerning the need for the theorist to move from ideology to science. The difference is that for Kuhn there is no promised land of science; paradigm succeeds paradigm like the succession of blinkered generational views with which Phillip Larkin's poem 'High Windows' presents us, each seeming as if it represents an advance but each with its own inevitable limitations." Contemporary Literary Theory Jeremy Hawthorn p178 Edward Arnold/Hodder and Staunton 1992. 8 The Structure ofScientific Revolutiona Thomas S. Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, 2nd Ed. 1970 29 explanation. Kuhn's paradigms are not just the illustrations he mentions but also the assumptions which are to be found behind, and constituted by these illustrations. In other words, a paradigm is constituted by a set of beliefs which both enables and constrains research: a framework or scaffold which can underpin or support further work but which of necessity also excludes a range of possibilities. Readers of Kuhn's books from the Humanities were much struck by his accounts of cases of scientific evidence which was not recognised as such because it did not fit into known and accepted paradigms: for instance the scientist who actually isolated oxygen but was unable to recognise what he had done because it did not fit into phlogiston theory within the confines of which he was working. This had more than a passing resemblance to then influential theories of ideology... Kuhn's concept of the paradigm. shift attracted criticism, however, because of its 'inwardness': the shift was engendered and triggered by internal contradictions rather than by (as in traditional Marxist views) the pressure of external forces which, in Darwinian mode, excluded theories which could not adapt t.o new external needa.9 For the sufferers and carers of anorexia or the bulomenia, the emergency defines itself - obvious and imperative - it is, literally, a matter of life and death. For subjective observers of the disease (and I include all consumer - citizens as participants in some kind(s) of addiction, as well, I think, for the objective-expert, presumably not addicted? photomedia practitioner, historian or theoretician) I predict that it will be seen as necessary to oppo,e familiar ideologicallychargedjudgements by shouldering the responsibility to attempt a phenomenol.ogical assessment combined with the humanitarian, altruistic intent to relieve the ghastly end phenomena encapsulated in the quotation used by Wolf proscribing the immoral epithet to twentieth century 'beauty' as: "the look of sickness, the look of poverty, the look of nervous exhaustion". In any resolute phenomenological inquiry it is necessary to speculate that there may be further, important, complementary, conflicting, discrete and serious causes behind the mediation of thinness and eating, than a single big spook like 'patriarchal society'. It is always imaginable that there are other affects on our consciousness informing social codes that include belief. Codes, in this instance, concern notions of beauty in the twentieth century as briefly 9 Contemporary Literary Theory Jeremy Hawthorn pl 78 Edward Arnold/Hodder and Staunton 1992. 30 and partially but fairly outlined by Wolf. It cannot sensibly be denied that a phenomenological10 examination, independent of ideological or other manifest preconceptions notifying consciousness of the presence of a coda, such as beauty, may show that there are unidentified agents currently at work supporting, impinging upon, or superseding fashionable, gender-based sanctioning of socio-cultural codes representing value, or morality, such as beauty, power, fear, order or chaos. Finally, I suspect, beyond modernism and predilections to ideological ownership of form, that there may be some trope in the machine it.self. Before approaching the tapping heart of the simulacra, in order to synthesise the essence of what it is that (at least part of) it is doing to us, this strange turbulence and historical abuse of beauty that Wolf; amongst all of us, accepts or alludes to; some conventions of current thinking, mostly ideological or politically conditioned, will need to be broken. The spar in all of our eyes may be recognised in episodes not previously known, shifting one or two steps ahead of the present forever foreshadowing apprehension. The mundane, or apocalyptic, burden of premonition, ahead of time to drop the known bundle, now, in the middle of times and spaces. "As the sign of hisoory, the episodic then always bears its multiplicities and variations as the possibilities of its existence. The episodic always signifies the necessity of linking, making connections, and noticing it could be otherwise. In this respect, the episodic always marks a 'middle' in Lyotard's idiom: and Lyotard (or by analogy, anyone) is always caught in the middle, in the midst of diverging pathways, in between specific ways of speaking, in between specific modes of thought, in 'the middle' of things,' in 'the middle oftime ... One always begins in the middle amidst the flux and relativity- the contingency of possible, alternative paths, phrasings, and framings. The interval alludes oo the 10 Phenomenology originates in the writing of the German Edmund Husser}, whose philosophy takes as a starting point the world as experienced in our consciousness. It thus rejects the possibility of considering the world as experienced independently of our human consciousness, but seeks oo get back oo concrete reality through our experience of it. For Husserl, consciousness is always consciousness of something: it is directed outwards rather than inwards - even if it is directed onoo something imagined. It is thus ooo simple oo describe phenomenology as idealist, for although it posits the impossibility of our gaining knowledge of the world which is unoouched by our perception of that world, it does suggest that through an eidetic method we can build up a successively more and more accurate understanding of the objects of our consciousness by filtering off accidental and personal elements in our perception of them. In order oo so analyse our consciousness we must suspend all preconceptions about the objects with which it is concerned. Contemporary Literary Theory Jeremy Hawthorn pl82 Edward Arnold/Hodder and Staunoon 1992. 31 emerging of 'bist.ory,' but not hist.ory in the sense of defining the limits or boundaries of a period, but hist.ory as that which remains t.o be written or composed• as that which 'will have been doM' "11 The language that each of us inherits enframes a reality, representing to our minds - our own minds, our consciousness of the world. We struggle to make sense of the world by making sense of language we are rooted in. In the middle of all of this, Deleuze and Guattari introduce their strangely attracting notion of rhizome, the tuber - and without stating it, the fractal as common sense - into the lmown world of psychoanalysis, language and existences: A rhi:zome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhi:zome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and... and... and .. .' This cortjunction carries enough force t.o shake and uproot the verb 't.o be.' Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are t.otally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation • all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiat.ory, symbolic ... ). But Kleist, Lenz and Btlchner have another way of travelling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting or finishing. American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction t.o an even greater extent; they know hoe to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ont.ology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how t.o practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localisable relation going from one thing t.o another and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.12 From the middle that has no point, as I write, this language itself is emphatically abstract and minimally concrete - this alphabet itself is phonic and, except in the case of onomatopoeia, these words themselves maintain a distant, if not arbitrary connection with actuality, the phonic sign having 11 Phenomenology Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard - extract from the Foreword by Gale L. Orm.inst.on p13, State University of New York Press 1991 12 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari ''A Thousand Plateau." University of Minnesota Press 4th Ed. 1993. 32 little or no concret.e relation with the signified. Additionally, a further related issue of meaning is controlled by the graphic representation of sign. In this instance, the forming of the beautiful and varied shape of Romanised typography (though no more beautiful than any other script such as, Arabic) redolent with graphic signals that do lend specificity of meaning or ambience (such as 'authority' or 'casualness') to the scan or reading oft.ext, including a massive bank of style (meanings) well known to the graphic design industry and commonly so, for example, in all the qualities and quantities of advertising signage. The latter often suggests that the shape of sounds we make may, at times, be subconsciously concret.e, that is to say, the phonics and graphics of a word such as pot or camera or rush may be more pictographic, poetic than we care to admit in the west; because Romanised language is a colonising force. In another way, rhyming or rhythmic verse and prose, or dialect, returns musicality to the sonic of language that breaks against the Latin alphabet of power. Ultimat.ely, of course, unselfconscious, everyday language is always poetry, without end, and certainly the source for many an accredit.ed lyric. As a matter of int.erest, the Australian artist, Joyce Hint.erding noted, with some justifiable delight that when she wired up her heavily graphite drawings of electrical symbols and passed a current through them, the drawn symbol performed the same act as its linguistic meaning. Thus a sign for a resistor or capacitor does, respectively, what resistors and capacitors do along an electric circuit1s. I think the delight that work, and its process, engenders is to do with the compression of intent or meaning of a 'picture' in classic form, pencil to whit.e paper. Its pictorial authority implied in terms of scale; these drawings are larger than conventional electronic diagrams, but similar to general expectations of 'art drawing'; accreditation is further confirmed by attachment to an art gallery wall. When the drawings are complet.e they are wired up by the artist and a current passed across the drawn symbol. Wiring up is a 'mundane task' that an electrician (not an artist) might be expected to do to a house circuit (not an artwork). Nonetheless the meaning of the drawing is made invisibly active, or visibly so, tracing a burnt record of electJ·ocution. In this special case the current follows the sign exactly and the sign and the signified perform an unusually meaningful accord. 'Delightfully', the travel of electricity across the sign which interrupts or controls the 13 "Circuit" Joyce Hinterding, this work was first exhibited at Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Australia 1991. 33 transmission that it names simultaneously supplies a prescient metaphor for the viewers participatory scan across the surface of any picture, into and out of reference or illusion. Thus revealing the fact that simply viewing any picture is always electrifying. A collaboration, for the viewer following the compositional intent of the auteur activating a third, nascent element - meaning - like a glowing min-min light or electric arc. Viewing a picture is always as creative an act as the auteur renders by skilful control of formal 'grammatical' or tensive interference combined with pools of ambiguity (capacitors, resistors and absence to be 'filled in' by the viewer). In successful instances, an exercise in restraint as much, if not more, than determinancy. Resulting, at best, in a precise and efficient charge of meaning between the two poles of maximum and sufficient impact. All depictions always present the potential of 'interactivity'. In fact building 'interactive' computer programs are always exercises in compositional control, of editing and mediation of what may be a tiny fragment of thinking or sliver of feeling. As with earlier forms of machine-imaging, the history of 'conventional' picturing contributes a colossal bank of information of continuous value to technologically 'new' practice. Nevertheless, English, in particular, is problematic on a daily basis, given different emphasis, at all social levels and including it's commonly assumed 'useful' current global status as the practical language of international debate • because of it's Imperial Latin aspectu, a portable militaristic and missionary lingua. In first breaching parts of the language, ambivalent or simply unexamined in terms of gender analysis, it will be seen that there are passages of thinking that parallel, converge or diverge with classic feminist 1" Britiah Langu 34 notions particularly of patriarchy and the displacement of ideas of domestication and wildness. Such openings can release a deeper itinerary to arrive at unexpected and conventionally disturbing plateaus of beauty that, I think, may be more mundane or more apocalyptic than gender-based. "Gulio Cesar presents 'The World's Finest Animal Circus'. The words were painted six foot high in modest black and white. Circus master Guilo Cesar, 'King of the Ring', was a worried man. "1& Latin of the Roman army and that of the Catholic Church - arcane Latin taught in English public schools, loosened from living Romance languages, provides the basis for the mobile twenty-six letter English alphabet - classically Latin1a. Derived from the easily transportable twenty-three letter Latin alphabet impressed on European mindsn as the landscape was articulated by road for the movement of the 'Roman Circus', the 'Colosseum' - the military machine1s - colonising disparate peoples over vast imperial territory or canvassing the ocean as religious epistle. 15 "Puckoon" p 104 Spike Milligan, Penguin pbk. ISBN O 14 00.2374 7 16 "The modem national alphabets of the western European nations are, strictly speaking. adaptations of the Latin alphabet to Germanic (English, German, Swedish, Dutch, Danish etc.), Romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak etc.), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian etc.), and other languages." Encyclopedia Brittanica 1 620b, 1984 17 "When the various European countries had shaken off the political authority of Rome and the learned communities had been dissolved and their members scattered, a marked change took place in he development of the Latin literary, or bookhand. Several national hands, styles of the Latin cursive, assumed different features. There thus developed on the European continent and in the British Isles the five basic hands, each giving rise to several varieties: Italian, Merovigian in France, Visigothic in Spain, Germanic, and Insular or Anglo-Irish hands." Encyclopedia Brittanica 1 620g, 1984 18"There is no complete agreement as to how or why certain alphabets have come to dominate the world. Some scholars believe that the alphabet follows the flag; that is the diffusion of the alphabet results from political and military conquest. Others hold that the alphabet follows trade. More accurate, perhaps, is the theory that the alphabet follows religion ... The Latin language and script were carried by Roman legionaries and Imperial officers to all parts of the vast Roman Empire, particularly to the regions that were not Hellenised. In later centuries, however, churchmen and missionaries carried the Latin language and script still further afield" Encyclopedia Brittanica 1 620{, 1984 111 "When the Romans first came into contact with the Greeks, they became aware of themselves as comparatively barbarous and uncouth. The Greeks were immeasurably their superiors in many ways: in the manufacture of and in the technique of agriculture; in the kinds of knowledge that are necessary for a good official; in conversation and the art of ertjoying life. The only thing, in which the Roma1111 were •uperior were military tactica and social cohaion •. The relation of the Romans to the Greeks was something like that of the Prussians to the French in 1814 and 1815; but the latter was temporary, whereas the other lasted a long time." 'Hutory of We.ten Phil011ophy' Bertrand Russell lst.Ed 1946 p283 Unwin Paperbacks 1979 (*my italics). 35 "A clatter of hooves. What appeared to be a Roman soldier galloped up to the sentry. 'Halt!' he called. Have you seen a circus go this way?' said Shamus. 'Er,no.' 'Say sir when you speak to Julius Caesar!' rapped Shamus. 'Sir!' The Roman lashed his mount and galloped over the frontier towards the back of the church.19 'Who the blazes was that?' said Lt. Walker doubling across. 'Julius Caesar,' said the sentry, and wondered why he was demoted on the spot ":.;io Oxford English like Academic French and High German produces discussion replete with serious, monumental generalisations; carved into stone, compulsively shrouding and obscuring content within form, the obstinate prestidigitation of reality whisked into the brevity of the graven word. Whether known or not, traditional European imperialism's - those of the English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish kind, but only where 'unsoiled' by Cyrillic, Nordic or Arabic contact - exude a modernity afflicted, at its most unctuous, with the obdurate 'funny at a distance' sophistry of a 'Yes, Minister' bureaucracy and at its most bellicose, an heroic 'unfunny at any distance' fascist tribute to Ancient Rome. Military-industrial power absorbs value as a mould assimilates substance, and replicates its appearance, unsheathing a sword - a modern amalgam of powerindustrybeauty - the exploding shell. Beauty becomes a Bladerunner's beauty, monumental and ever-repeatable - until the production run stops. The mass can no longer claim their own experience as beautiful - because it is not beauty sanctioned by power. Although the latter is commonly distributed as replicant beauty, and everyone is bestowed the flashing-sign lottery of Warhol's 'famous' moment of powerfamebeauty to be auto-switched on and off as a prestigious, immortal production-line of beautiful people - flash power flash beauty flash fame and flash death - channelled and broadcast - all along the wat.ch t:ower. :io "Puc'le,oon" Spike Milligan, pl42 Penguin pbk. ISBN O 14 00.2374 7 36 6. Lupercab1 Camden Town London 1969 Danny (the Hippy): "l recommend you smoke some more grass, man." & I: "No way• no fucking way!" Danny: "That is an unfortunate political decision, reflectin' these times." Withnail: "What are you talking about Danny?" Danny: "Politics, man. If you're hangin' on t.o a risin' balloon, you are presented with a difficult decision. Let go before it's t.oo late, or hang on and keep gettin' higher. Posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They're sellin' hippy wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the hist.ory of mankind is over, and as Presumin' Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed t.o paint it black. "22 Withnail and I is an exquisite, tender elegy on dismal passages from the filthy radiant, full-spectrum anarchy of the nineteen sixties into the arid, monochromatic utilitarianism of the nineteen seventies, lewd and evangelical greed of the nineteen eighties preceding the Gothic, hygienic fraud of the pack of ninety lies that closes a century - are you ready for the show! Most importantly, beneath the dialogue, there are two visual references to caged wolves at the beginning and the end of this tale. In this instance, the wolf is a code or symbol for the unintended release of wildness in the sixties, the forgetting of domestication, the media-denominated 'permissive era'. A romantic abundant anarchy - returned for a wonderful while, transmitting one hundred watt pulses on the largest scale in known history - all along the watch tower - broadcast television, a platform above all the other media. The two male anti-heroes are, typically, domestically inept, if not wild. They are cowardly and sexually niiive. Literate in the parboiled English public grammar school way, similarly adventurous in terms of chemical abuse, particularly Withnail. Early on in the narrative, Withnail and I, twenty-something old unemployed actors remove from the inadequate, cold vileness of the lodgings, to a local park. The gloriously stoned, panoramic lassitude of the sixties mode-vivant is 21 "The wolf cave, the Lupercal, was maintained as a shrine at least until the fall of the (Roman) empire but is now lost." EncyclopediaBritta.nica 15 p 1075g 1984 22 "Withnail and I" Written and Directed by Bruce Robinson, Handmade Films 1985 starring Paul McCann, Richard.E.Grant and Richard Griffiths 37 reflected in the terrifying antediluvian bog-pile of unwashed dishes filling the (possibly) rat-infested sink. It's all too much t;o cope with, for boys brought up by servants or mothers in the post-war decade. On the park bench the solution agreed is t;o sojourn t;o the countryside, at the expense of Withnail 's very gay, rotundly erudite, vegetable-loving, well-connected and comfortably off Uncle Monty. At this point, in the park, behind a spiked fence the audience is able t:o see part of a menagerie and, within the enclosure, a glimpse of a wolf, pacing. By the close of the film, immediately after Danny the hippy's summation of the times, '& I' has shifted in t:owards the next decade, a haircut, a trilby and a job. '& I' i.s the seventies, tamed by longed-for employment. Regretfully mutating from the sixties, 'responsibly' facing the retribution of the unmentioned 'powers-that-be' . A hard forcing round of the telescope, by unseen hands guiding a one-eyed electorate, to view from the other end a reduced world. A stealthy reclaiming of broadcast media from the masses - popular music becomes commercial, Stones becomes Abba, Lennon becomes McCartney, and so it goes - the absorption of revolution into suburbia, education into Thatcher, wealth into Reagan, free press into Murdoch. There was only so long we could get away with imagining a larger world, before they caught on. In the distance, two or three horses of the apocalypse, tiny silhouettes on the horizon, the World Bank, IMF breaks all int.o galloping debt and jockey 07 alternately cracks the whip and squeezes the rein.'& I' departs for the train. Withnail i.s the sixties, remaining in the sixties, revenant with a morning bottle of 1953 Margaux, an umbrella and the drenching rain. The parting mis-en-scene circles t;o the back of Withnail, gesturing umbrella high against the rain, as he faces the black spiked fence, to the left of frame. At the word, "how like a god/ the beauty of the world! the paragon ofanimals!", one wolfin profile, poses within the enclosure, then two and three appear, pad across frame from the viewer's right and traverse the path of the figure ofWithnail. Because of the long focus lens the wolves move into him at frames end, as it were. Now, superbly delivering his version of Hamlet's lament to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a passionate tightly wound railing against the end of this beautiful, wild time, himself. The camera position reverses t;o the wolfs view, the audience are taken int;o menagerie side of the bars. Withnail is seen exiled in time, spectral within the park. Then the scene passes through the black twist-spiked bars t;o this dark, wolf grey mordant moment. His heels are framed padding off int:o puddles, the 38 wind whipped trees and pissing rain. An elegant, sodden, melancholic, lupne hangover, tuned only to the ailing, steamy wheezing of a sonorous fairground organ, an emphysemic Sergeant Pepper - newer histories shabbily yearning to preclude the past. "I have of lat.e - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, foregone all customs of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire - why it appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work man is! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and in moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me - no, nor woman neither - no, nor woman neither. "2s At the close of the story, Withnail and the wolf are symbiotic. Both irrevocably fenced off, one by the encroaching park and time, the other in the menagerie. Wilderness exiled or contained, fenced with iron spike. The feral sixties, whereupon, the mass abruptly overran, on an unprecedented scale, the first platform of broadcast media that comprised television and radio, cinema, the print and recording industry - all along the watch tower. Urban life disrupted from within and without, Withnail and I. Progeny of the sixties, escape ('holiday') to the wilderness ('country-side'), but are woefully, manfully incompetent when it comes to surviving beyond Camden, North and West of London and the motorway ('civilisation'). Withnail in his wisdom continues to party, a prow to pathos past. '& I' naively reversing towards a stem future. A sombre revolving of empty vessels splintering on the surge. Remnants of wilderness impounded into parkland withering as art, culture, education, commerce, technology or any fallow assortment of tillage. The wolf, the last of the serene savage, long vanished from Britain and the west, banished then exterminated by human habitation, is the unteachable freedom we cannot learn, only know2•, since Roman times. is "The Complete Woru of Shakespeare - Hamlet" Collins Edition 1951 - Adapted somewhat to fit Withnail's edited delivery :.t "It is psychology in it& truest sense: paulehe I psych, soul; ology or logOtl, a knowing of the soul." WorMn Who Run With~ Wolve.t Clarissa Pinkola Estes Random house 1992 39 "Romulus and Remus born t.o Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numit.or, the king of Alba Longa. Numit.or bad been deposed by his younger brother Amulius, who forced Rhea to become a vestal virgin (and thereby vow chastity) in order to prevent her from giving birth to potential claimants to the throne . Nevertheless Rhea bore the war god Mars the twins Romulus and Remus. Amulius ordered the infants drowned in the Tiber, but the trough in which they were placed floated down the river and came to rest on the site of the future Rome, near the ficulas ruminalis, a sacred fig tree of ancient times . There a she-wolf and a wood-pecker, both sacred to Mars - suckled and fed them until they were found by the herdsman Faustulus. Reared by Faustulus and his wife Acea Larentis, the twins became leaders of a band of adventurous youths. Eventually recognised as the grandsons of Numitor, they killed Amulius and restored their grandfather to the throne. They subsequently founded a town of the site of where they had been saved. Romulus surrounded the city with a wall, but when Remus contemptuously jumped over the barrier, he was killed by his brother with the words 'thut1 perish any other who leaps over my walls.' Romulus consolidated his power and the city was named for him. He increased the population of the city by offering asylum to fugitives and exiles. Since there was a shortage of women in Rome, he invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and abducted their women. The women married their captors and intervened to prevent the Sabine from seizing the city. In accordance with the treaty drawn up between the two peoples, Romulus accepted the Sabine king Titus Tatius as his co-ruler. 'litus Tatius' early death left Romulus the sole king again, and after a long rule he mysteriously disappeared in a storm. Believing that he had been changed into a god, the Romans worshipped him as the deity Qirinius. "26 "How like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"2e Romulus was suckled from the wolf symbolising the distinction between the wild and the tame. Allowing chaos into the fold 'asylum to fugitives and exiles' but not to release it unless it conforms to order 'the Sabines', darkened freedom rendered mischievous 'thus perish any other who leaps over my walls' and then 'after a /,ong reign' returned to chaos 'mysteriously disappearing in a storm'. Finally a model for the community on the process of living as the 'deity, Quirinius '. 26 Encyclopedia Brittanica VIII p661 1984 26 "Th~ Complete Woru of Shakeapeare • Hamlet" Collins Edition 1961 40 Beyond the dark divide, Hendrix the wolf silently stalks a parody of the gait of the guard upon Hadrian's wall - all along the watchtower. Inevitably, as everyone knows and wants to participate in, but finds difficulty in saying - because conversation in meta-language is not common and we seem constrained to use the same habits of language to define its own actions, like using the drug to kick the habit - the language that character-ises thinking in West.em culture erects a palisade simultaneously declaring and petrifying notions of universal value - proclaiming territory. Because of its winning ways the language of power succumbs to ancient arrogance, thereafter decadent corpulence, commming only what is immediately within grasp. The remainder flourishes wildly and returns as the weald to re-cover and lay to ruin architectural stone. And when things change, though very old, this god, Quirinius,is still quick to adapt. Nevertheless, it takes its time, reflexes are slowing, there are gaps. "I too know all the boundary st.ones of our land, but t.o me they are something different. They are where the world begins. Beyond them lies Rome and all the known world that we Romans have power over. Out there, beyond the boundary st.ones, the mystery begins. My mind ventures out, t.ouches the old worn boulders for luck, and then goes on in the dark, populating the unknown with what must have been imagined since it cannot be seen."21 In her feminist tract Women Who Run With the Wolves Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes claims the wolf as the symbol for her archetype of the Wild Woman. The naming of the wildness within her and 'everywoman' is a suffusion of her studies of wildlife biolog}'2s, Jungian psychoanalysis and her expressed experience as a cantadora, storytellen9, She characterises the wolf, the wildness as the rich and gentle, natural strength that all women need to find again in themselves: 27 "An Imaginary Life" David Malouf p87 Picador edition 1980 38 The studies of the wolves Canu lupus and Canu ru(UB are like the hist.ory of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails. Women Who Run With the Wolvea p4, Clarissa Pinkola Estes Random house 1992. 29 "My life and work as a Jungian analyst and cantadora, st.oryteller, have taught me that women's flagging vitality can be rest.ored by extensive 'psychic-archaeological' digs int.o the ruins of the female underworld" 68 WorMn Who Run With the Wolvea p3, Clarissa Pinkola Estes Random house 1992. 41 "So the word wild here is not used in its modem perjorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means t.o live a natural life, one in which the criatura, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries. these words, wild and woman, cause women t.o remember who they are and what they are about. They create a metaphor t.o describe the force which funds all females. 'Ibey personify a force that women cannot live without. "ao The collected fables, myths, stories, are choreographed by Estes into a program, a book, designed to 'empower' women to encourage them to re accommodate chaos, the occult, wilderness, the Wild Woman, to run with the wolves. It's a noble, warm, missive that does deliver confidence to all women exhorted to follow the track of the Wild Woman. 'Domestication' and 'extermination' of 'wolf are, respectively, as mundane and apocalyptic as much as gender-driven. It may be that subjugation of woman emanates from masculine drives, historical and current and potential. Additionally, it might be that subjugation is more diffuse and unevenly spread across geographies, histories, communities and realities, intense and faster currents than Estes is able to deal with from her tracings of subjugated woman, although her references and synthesis are valuable ferrying to and fro across the middle of the river, without end. Eventually, it may be that the keys are deeply silted into the languages, 'empowering' one group beyond another, whether they can speak it or not, they might know it in, at the very least, a Jungian sense. Wild Gaelic, feral Brythonic the Arcadian-Celtic and Brythonic components of English language - the other shapeless void of innate English-speaking feeling and English-speaking thought - is the crucial and vigorous part of an omnipresent need to make description in dialogue subjective, less abstract and a closer representation of reality. Contemporary Roman and Sicilian Italian employs poignant gesture with the same objective of fulfilling simple demands for accurately drafted, properly textured and coloured expression. Celtic-Gaelic and Brythonic is similar, though unrelated, to Asian languagess1, where specific symbolss2 define particular subjective eventssa - so Women Who Run With the Wolves p8, Clarissa Pinkola Estes Random house 1992. 31 "The fact is that there is no occasion for the philologists of Europe t.o 'look down' on Malay as a primitive and outlandish language: it has solved problems that bother the speaker of English, German, or French; it has achieved a logic and simplicity which the Western t.ongue do not know. Every school curriculum in Europe should provide an 42 which explains Asian reticence with generalisatioru• and predilections to what appears t.o the western mind as imitation, but t.o the Asian sensibility is akin to a mapping process, as distinct from, what seems to the Asian mind, confusing and precious western notions of creativity, associated with imagination and expression arising from a constant and simple practical need (pictogram in absentia), particularly in this instance, English, to de-pict or de-scribe the world by personal and social invention of metaphor, analogy and anecdote; the comfortable emphasis of the musicality, melodic or rhythmic, of regional accents and an anglo-gallic amusement with the puru6; to bring expression closer to reality by-passing abstraction or spanning the gap between sign, sound and reality, simply to get closer to the truth of a matter at hand. A Joycean dialectical tension between the general (Classic Latin order) and the particular (Gaelic sensitivity). opportunity for at least a dabbling examination of an Oriental language, in order to see how the other half of the world (very much more than half) contrives not only to live but to think and express itself." Language Made Plain p186, Anthony Burgess Fontana 1st Ed. 1975. 33 "The Western alphabet is believed t.o have begun with picture-writing, but at an early period the system was changed so that symbols stood not for objects or ideas, but for the sounds of the words used for these things. Thus Western language has specialised in the representation of sounds. This is a change which took place in most languages of the world. But the Chinese language has never become completely phonetic or alphabetic. Chinese has specialised in visual representation, the word is made so suggestive to the eye that it immediately calls up ideas and vivid pictures without the interposition of sounds." The Changing Society ofChina Ch'u Chai and Winberg Chai, p167 Ment.or Books 1962. 33 The "Chinese writing system is basically a logographic writing system using symbols of pict.orial origin to represent ideas expressed in the Chinese language. Dictionaries of Chinese record as many as 40,000 distinct symbols (usually called characters), but a corpus of about 10,000 (those used by Chinese telegraphers who represent them by 4-unit code groups) is sufficient for practically all purposes. Knowledge of at least 2,000 characters is necessary to be literate in Chinese. Particular words in most cases are represented by either one symbol intended to express the meaning of the word or by a combination of symbols." Encyclopedia Brittanica II 857 1984 3' " ... one is sometimes impatient at the unwillingness of Malay to generalise (there is no one word for 'you'; 'rice' is padi when growing, beras in the shops, TUJBi on the table; there is no single word for 'brother' or 'sister') ... " 'Language Made Plain' p185, Anthony Burgess Fontana 1st Ed. 1975. 35 The syndrome runs along the following lines: English tend t.o work very much within the word, for example, the verbal banter exhibited within a program like the "Two Ronnies" (abducted and domesticated by the South), whereas the French are more optic in the way of sophisticated visual puns that Cartier-Bresson phot.ographs or Jacques Tati makes movies. Raw visual humour, such as 'Benny Hill' type slapstick has appeal 'on the continent' but seems most thoroughly appreciated in North America. 48 "In A Portrait of the Artiat aa A Young Man, the undergraduate Stephen Dedalus engages in a conversation on aesthetics with the Dean of Studies, an English Jesuit, 'humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions' ... The Dean leads the conversation t.owards the 'useful art.a' and, talking of the art of filling a lamp with oil, uses the term 'funnel', which Stephen has not met in that context: his word is 'tundish', which the Dean does not know at all. (Like many dialect terms in Anglo-Irish, it is of respectable Middle English ancestry.) Stephen feels 'a smart dejection that the man t.o whom he is speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson', and says t.o himself: 'The language in which we are •pea/ung is his before it is mine' [my italics]. 'Ibis is sentimental and self-pitying, not easily forgivable even in an undergraduate, and t.o erect a sense of alienation on a single pair of words is perhaps going t.oo far. From a lexical point of view there are hardly any differences between Stephen's English and that of the Dean of Studies. Stephen, like the characters in Swift's Polite Corweraati.01111, will ask for tea or washing water t.o be 'filled out'; he will eat a crubeen (a pig's or sheep's foot) and, in Cork, a drisheen or black pudding. He will refer to oxters rather than armpits and know that 'plain' in Buck Mulligan's "Ballad of Joking Jesus' means beer (locus clcusicua in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds: 'Do you know what I am going t.o tell you? A pint of plain is your only man.') But we need no special dictionary t.o read Joyce's plainer works. If, in Finnegan'• Wake, the Gaelic element is large, this is because Gaelic is a foreign language with a special claim on Joyce's attention, since ancient Ireland coexists in the book with various kinds of modem Ireland, but the Gaelic lexicon that has already been compiled out of Finnegan 's Wake is no bigger than the German one. The Italian one (which has probably already been completed) must be the biggest of them all. The works of William Faulkner and J. D. Selinger are foreign compared with Ulysses: Stephen and the Dean of Studies meet on everything but funnels and tundishes. But the continuation of Stephen's dejected musing bring us t.o the real point about Anglo Irish linguistic differences: .. .'How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of the spirit. His language, so familiar and foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.' ... What makes Stephen's soul fret are the simple differences between his own pronunciation of the words and that of the Dean of Studies. He feels the inferiority of a provincial in the presence of a metropolitan or ruling-class accent: his case is a little different from that of a Lancastrian or Northumbrian in the days when public school 44 English had the power to frighten and humble. But Stephen fee/$ the weight of three lcinda of authority in the Dean's speech - the ruling class. the Imperial power. the international church [my italics]. His own accent is not merely provincial, it is also that of a subject people.36 This is why, for example, Liverpudliansa1 - a substantially working-class catholic socio-economic group firmly within the English-speaking Celtic Gaelic milieu - are generally considered perceptively witty, amongst a British social culture dominated; as Peter Greenaway, amongst many others, would agreess; by a literary above a visual art sensitivity and production. A cultural history occupied, famously, by many an Irish writer, not to mention all of the other Celtic-Gaelic and Brythonic storytellerss9. Liverpool dockers or dock workers - commonly viewed by their own kind as the 'funniest' and most meaning-full Liverpudlians are characterised in the South-East as the most indolent and baleful of the working classes - work at the port that delivered immigrant Irish to the British mainland into the North-West, through Glasgow and into the Midlands, had the greatest Asian-Chinese population in Britain through the nineteenth century and delivered most of the Irish migration to America. A most acute reference on the inscrutable Gaelic truth might be the, apparently silly, inclusion by Spike Milligan of the Chinese policeman into his tale of the Irish village of Puckoon. Puckoon, the book, is ostensibly a short humorous 'nonsense' fiction, the sense of which is a Lewis Carroll-like allegory of the wonderful calamity of the natural semantic chaos sheltered within Ireland and the Celtic 'fringe' that ventures 36 "Joysprick - An Introduction to the Language of Jamea Joyce" Anthony Burgess. p27 Andre Deutsch 1973 37 Liverpudlian wit is invariably semantic/satiric, full of metaphors and puns, for example the Beatles (pun) song 'A Hard Day, Night' is a remarkably odd phrase that denotes a complex of meaning across a collision of industrial domesticity and labour, shift work, sex and sensuality. 38 Transcript of Peter Greenaway the English filmmaker talk and seminar for ABC Australia Radio National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, May 1994. 39 "The remarkable contributions that Anglo-Irish literature and drama have made to the world may be ascribed, at least in part to this cross-fertilisation of two cultures. Be this as it may, it is noteworthy that so small a country should have nurtured so much creative literary genius - men like the great satirist Jonathan Swift, the orator and political theorist Edmund Burke, the novelist George Augustus Moore, the poet William Butler Yeats, and the modern prose masters James Joyce, Llam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, and Samuel Beckett. In the theatre , too, Irish talent has won world-wide acclaim in the persons of William Congreve, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O'Casey. Encyclopedia Brittanica 9 p 888b 1984 45 out of its own enthusiasms, thoughtlessly encroaching and recklessly challenging the fortified, austere Roman language of Londinium - as Puckoon has already discharged ont.o these pages - an awkward, puzzling warm, filial affection, that could tum passionately nasty. "Ah Pong lay lynx-like and silent in a tree of his own choosing. He was about to descend when two shadowy ragged-arse figures carrying another box headed in the opposite direction. Shamus and Lenny heard a sneeze above them and were hit by a bare-foot.ed falling Chinaman. Running with a coffin-cart they disappeared firing their pistols in all directions. Ah Pong replied with a burst of whistle-blowing, took a pace backwards and disappeared into an empty grave. The guard turned out and opened fire, 'The I.RA!' went up the cry. A bewildered bugler in underpants blew the lights out and put the whole camp in darkness. Webster leapt from his bed int.o the po. Barringt.on faint.ed in his sleep. Father Rudden and Co. dropped their coffin and ran like hares for cover. Incendiary bullets criss-crossed the night sky, verey lights burst in the darkness. Private Dawson saw a gamboge Chinese face arising from a grave and promptly did in his trousers what cascara takes 24 hours t.o do. 'Halt who goes there? he said, hurriedly tearing up a newspaper. Quaking with fear the Chinese answered in Pekinese and was immediately fired at in Gaelic. The shot knocked the t.op off his truncheon. Hysterically he walked up the grave wall and ran chattering into the night. 'Sod that for a lark,' he said. He really was getting a grip on the language." [my italics]40 Liverpool was also the receiving port for cotton and other raw material from America and the colonies of the Empire for delivery t.o the industrial North. That gyrating northern axial blur of Latin and spoken branches of Insular Celtic are fused here on the humming hub ofWales, Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Mann - around the Three Legs o' Man - to generate enriching dialect 40 "Puclcoon" Spike Milligan, pl24 Pe~ pbk. ISBN O 14 00.2374 7 41 "Insular Celtic refers to the Celtic languages of the British Isles, together with Bret.on (spoken in Brittany, France). As the name implies, it is an importation from Britain and not a Continental Celtic dialect... The insular languages fall int.o two groups - Irish and British. Irish (often called Goidelic, from old Irish Goidel 'Irishman', or Gaelic, from Gael, the modem form of the same word .... The two other members of this group, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, arose from Irish colonisations that began about that time ... British (often called Brythonic, from Welsh Brython 'Briton') had almost the same degree of influence on the island of Britain and the Isle of Man. Inscriptions show that there was a non-Indo European language spoken there, usually called Pictish, which was later replaced by British. There were undoubtedly dialectical differences within the island, but the existing dialects arose from the fragmentation of the British by the Irish invasion of Man and what is now Scotland and by the English invasions of what is now southern England and finally reached Scotland ... .A British dialect, now labelled Cumbric, lingered on in the west.em borderlands between England and Scotland until perhaps the 10th century, but almost 46 that threatens to undermine, overturn and outpace the militaristic, bureaucratic administrative shanks of South Eastern England running Churchill's dream, Thatcher's fantasy and Major's legacy, traditionally drilling its middle and upper-class children in public school Latin. Be wars the idols of mars. "The sisters, Agnes and Millicent Grope, walked mincingly down the aisle on Minnie Mouse legs, fox furs around their long, thin white necks. 'It's JuuU11Ctnar again then,' said Agnes, taking her seat. 'It was JuliWI C2Bar last year, Agnes.' 'Oh? I suppose this is an enoore,' smiled Agnes, opening her program. "42 As thought is an articulation of feeling, so language shapes the way that we think reflexively- we talk and listen to ourself talking and listening to ourself in the voices of others, straining to hear our own voice amongst the melee of whispering, chanting, chattering, screaming ether of the mind. English is predominantly a Romanised language and the character that carapace adds to the whole is portability in a military, colonising way. The character of language defines social interplay and in the case of English (amongst other Romanised languages, particularly High German and Academic French) the dominant aspect spawns an hierarchical pandemic of ordered, utilitarian prescription which feminist theory typically characterises as 'dominant patriarchy'. Within that paradigm, institutions such as the militia, law, politics, science, technology become sited aloft aesthetic concerns like education, art, religion, culture and all of that above secular, peaceful everyday life. Nevertheless, for men and women alike, news seems such a bloody, murderous entertainment. The body adhered to the shell, the contained and subjugated aspect of English is the wild, unordered, gentle Ga!lic and Brythonic that persistently struggles to survive, because it so necessary for the being as a whole to survive. nothing is known about it. In what is now Wales, British survived as the dominant language until a century or so ago; it is now known as Welsh. Another pocket of British speech survived as the dominant language until the end of the 18th century. It was from this area that emigrants in the 5th and 6th centuries AD had brought Celtic once more to the European mainland by establishing a oolony in North-Western France, still called Brittany. Encyclopedia Brittanica 3 p 1064b 1984 42 "Puc/r.oon" Spike Milligan, pl29 Penguin pbk. ISBN O 14 00.2374 7 47 "And all winter I drilled with my company of guards and have discovered in myself what my father must have always known was there, however much I denied it, the lineaments of a soldier. How I have changed! What a very different self has begun t.o emerge in me! I now understand these people's speech almost as well as my own, and find it oddly moving. It isn't at all like our Roman t.ongue, whose endings are designed t.o express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling. This language is equally expressive, but what it presents is the raw life and unity of things. I believe I could make poems in it. Seeing the world through this other t.ongue I see it differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer t.o the first principle of creation, closer t.o what.ever force it is that makes things what they are and changes them int.o what they would be. I have even begun t.o find my eye delighted by the simple forms of this place, the narrower range of colours, the harsh lines of the cliff and scrub, the clear, watery light. Now that spring is no longer t.o be recognised in blossom or in new leaves on trees, I must look for it in myself. I feel the ice of myself cracking. I feel myself loosen and flow again, reflecting the world. That is what spring means."48 Across the Atlantic, North Americans seem so earnest in their quest to trim reality to euphemism by means of a written constitution, an obsession with legislation and, as Chomsky reveals,H, a greedy, dangerous capacity to cloak reality, a stuffing of stiff words with meaning - overloading the signifier with the signified. Portable 'bundles' of dominant language packs, headliners and advertising 'grabs' that excite a dialogue full of meaningless generalisation, great for propaganda - media rap - maximum amount of verbiage with a minimum amount of information. "Ten years have passed since that fateful day, ten years have journeyed t.o their end and Puckoon once again was rest.ored t.o its unhurried ways. The Church was rest.ored by a rich Catholic. Fat.her Rudden found a new pair of boots. The mute st.eeple clock once again ticked with a new life, the border posts were never rebuilt, t.o this day no-one is quite sure where the border lies, in fact each and every charact.er in the picture returned t.o his or her 43 "An ITTU:llfinary Life" David Malouf p64 Picador edition 1980 44 "And, as Taylor notes, it is leading liberal academics scholars who describe he exodus t.o the cities 'stimulated by "zippo" raids and air strikes, and the consequent wretched huddle in refugee camps and hospitals, as "forced-draft urbanisation and modernisation" ... a euphemism t.o end all euphemisms, fit t.o be bracketed with an American general's reported and less elegant judgement: "If you get them by the balls, the hearts and minds will follow." ' Noam Chomsky "Problem.a of Knowledge and Freedom" Fontana 2nd. ED. 1973. 46 "Puclcoon" Spike Milligan p156, Penguin pbk. ISBN O 14 00.2374 7 48 own ways, all except one man, a Roman Soldier hanging from a tree with a rusty organ pipe lodged over his head, from where came a muffled voice. You can't leave me like this!' 'Oh, can't I!' "e "The child is there. I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us. He is a wild boy. I have heard the goatherds speak of the wild boy, whether this one or another, I don't know; and of course I do not admit to them, or anyone, that I know him. the wild boy they speak of lives among the wolves, in the ravines to the east, beyond the cultivated farms and villas of our well-watered valley. There really are wolves out there. I have heard stories of how they raid the outlying pasture, and I once think I heard one howling in the snow. Unless it was a child. And I have seen a wolfs head that one of the bunters brought back to hang as a warning in his fold. It was grey, and not very fierce looking, despite the curling back of the flesh over its fangedjaw. I thought of the child, and how wolves must have something in their nature which is kindly, and which connects with our kind, or how else could the child live amongst them? what was frightening was the way the head had been hacked off, with ropes of dark blood hanging from it and the fur at its throat matted with blood. Later, I heard again from the goatherds perhaps, that there is indeed some part of their nature that is in us, since there are men, at certain phases of the moon, who can transform themselves into wolves. They close their human mind like a fist and when they open it again it is a wolfs paw. The skull bulges, the jaw rushes out to become a snout. Hair prickles down their spine, grows rough on their belly. The body slouches and is on all fours. The voice thickens. It is the moon draws on them. I believed such tings in those days, and wondered. Was the child a wolf boy? Were those wolf men who lived secretly amongst us, changing themselves painfully at the moon's bidding, children who had been captured from the wilds and brought in amongst us, to be adapted to the ways of men? Sometime when my own body had begun to change and I discovered the first signs of manhood upon me, the child left and did not reappear, though I dreamt of him often enough in those early years, and have done so since. I have forgotten the language we used, and if he were to reappear, perhaps we could no longer communicate. Did he have some message for me then? If so, he failed to deliver it. Or did so and it had slipped my mind. Or the language he used on whatever occasion it was had already passed my understanding and could not be translated into daily speech. I believe (I think I have always believed) that he will come again. But in what guise? As a child still? As a man of 49 my own age? As a wolf? or has he power t.o adopt other forms as well? Has he already turned t.o me, perhaps in a form 80 humble, 80 ordinary, that I failed t.o perceive his presence? I tell no one of this, as all those years ago I was careful t.o admit t.o no one that he was there - not even my brother who was the same age and would have understood. Under all my scepticism this grain of belief.46 Wolf is a language that is not dead at all. "Silence people, prevent them from speaking, and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven't said a thing: the famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How's that? Goats, you say? How interesting. Take away all the goats and all you have left is a wolf, 80 it's your father... That is why the Wolf-Man feels 80 fatigued: he's left lying there with all those wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all those libidinal values on hie body without organs. The war will come, the wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf Man will remain suffocated by all he had t.o say. All we will be t.old is that he became well-behaved, polite, and resigned again 'honest and scrupulous' In short, cured. He gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a true zoological vision: 'Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular zoology." 47 460An Imaginary Life" David Malouf p9 Picador edition 1980 ""A Thousand Plateaus" Deleuze and Guattari University of Minnesota Pre88 1987. 50 7.Sabine,honeyisthatyou? Feminist epistemology, object relations and cognitive science as synthesised in recent work by Shelley Turkle.a deals with her interest in computers as 'objects to think with', and in her case this is obviously, primarily related to the concerns of women•e. As with a lot of other research sourced from all over the place and located within feminist theory, the findings are too useful to be seen as confined to a discrete ideological position. Her synthesised research and findings are relevant to many similar approaches to social phenomena and to modes of thinking and language that smudge back, across gender partitions. In this instance, Turkle's main reference is from the structural anthropological research of Claude Levi-Strauss. She refers to computer culture in the current social condition as encouraging a dominant kind of programming that she nominates as 'hard mastery' or a 'formal analytical approach' and she fosters the term 'bricolage' as a 'soft mastery' approach to computer language. "Bricoleurs are also like writers who do not use an outline but start with one idea, as80Ciate it with another and find a connection with a third. In the end an essay 'grown' through negotiation and association is not any less elegant or easy to read than one filled in from outline, just as the final program produced by a bricoleur can be as elegant and organised as one written with a top-down approach." According to Gill Kirkup: "She has taken the term 'bricolage' from anthropology where it was used to describe ways of thinking in so-called 'primitive' societies. This style is more concrete than the analytical rationality favoured by the west and valued by modern science in particular. "so In discussing Turkle's research into the women and computer interface, Kirkup concessionally lifts the horizon line - beyond the commonly perceived source 48 "The Second Self, Computers and the Human Spirit" Shelley Turkle, 1..-0ndon, Granada 1984 49 "Inventing Women • Science, TechMlogy and Gender" Ed. Gill Kirkup and Laurie Smith Keller Open University 1992; p279 - essay "The Social Construction of Computers", Gill Kirlrup. 50 "Inventing Women • Science, Technology and Gender" ed. Gill Kirkup and Laurie Smith Keller Open University 1992 essay "The Social Construction of Computers" p 278 Gill Kirkup 51 of attitudinal rigidity (described, for example, as the human calibre for 'rational thought' and 'our ability to process data and reason by analytical logic' as inferior t.o that of computers) as patriarchy - t.o refer, somewhat loosely, t.o a mode of thinking that is 'not only predominantly male, but Western and middle class 161. Kirkup classifies Turkle's thesis as optimistic, and her research limited to relatively well-off students. She suggests that: 'Most women's relationship to computers will be limited to operating equipment controlled by microprocessor or networked to a large computer and to manufacturing and assembling computer components in the underdeveloped world' 62 And she shifts from one ideological stance t.o a compatible other, from feminism t.o a Marxist position, dealing with redistribution of wealth: "AJ,though the predu:tions of the pessimists summarised by Webster have not occurred, this innovatory technology has not so far been used as a tool to restructure established sexual divisions of labour, or unequal race or gender relations ... " which Kirkup sees as the 'optimist's' or Turkle's position; along the lines that computer technology is, fortuit.ously, at an early stage of development and therefore subject t.o change of a socially acceptable kind. This is notably typical of, for example, many a western media artist's position, generating an assertion accepting the fact of the American military developing information technology systems, such as the personal computer or virtual reality, for warfare. But, at the same time, rejecting that source and purpose, delivering the rationale that artists have a 'mission', or social responsibility to appropriate available technology and ameliorate it in lieu of a peaceful agenda situated within a kind of eco-postmodernist objective. Well as Kirkup points out so far , it may not be 't.oo late', from the optimists point ofview, because, on the whole, the 'really bad' things have not yet happened, on the other hand neither have the 'really good' things occurred: "Neither has 61 "This supports Turkle's thesis that computers are used t.o validate a particular mode of thinking which is not only predominantly male, but Western and middle-class. 'Iliis model of thinking has permeated Western thought for some centuries now, and it may be the existence of 'thinking machine& that will draw our attention t.o the value of our other human attributes such as imagination, humour and love . When we validate these in ounelvea and in others we may find new ways of breaking down boundaries other than those of 1111der." "Inventing Women• &ience, Technology and Gender" ed. Gill Kirkup and Laurie Smith Keller Open University 1992 essay "The Social Construction of Computers" p 281 Gill Kirkup. 62 "Inventing Women • Science, Technology and Gender" ed. Gill Kirkup and Laurie Smith Keller Open Univenity 1992 esaay "The Social Conatruction of Computers" p 281 Gill Kirlrup. 52 1Ts3 contributed to a significant reduction in inequality between the rich and poor countries ofthe world. "s• Levi Strauss discusses his original notion of bricolage in terms of the dynamics of western art suggesting that 'it is common knowledge that the artist is both something ofa sci.entist and a "bricoleur', also that 'art lies half way between scientific and magical or mythical thought'H. The breadth of meaning and usefulness of bricolage as system is more fully explained as follows: In his The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss distinguishes between the sign systems of modem man and those of primitive man. Modem man, like an engineer, makes use of specialised and cust.om-made tools and materials, whereas primitive man resembles an odd-job man or bricokur, who makes use of those odds and ends of material which he has t.o hand t.op construct pieces of bricolage. The neighbouring peoples of Sabine, invited by Romulus. arrive at a Roman 'festival', a sham. The Romans, reckoning a 'shortage of women' of their own, abduct and rape the women of Sabine. What follows is a remarkable compact, whereby the women of Sabine 'marry' their abductors and thwart conflict of retribution between Sabine and Rome by negotiating a treaty investing the Sabine king Titus Tatius and Romulus as co-rulers. A durable civil peace is achieved, predicating the accession of Rome as the foremost municipality. Given the success of the treaty, Romulus continues as sole ruler, untroubled by the early demise of Titus Tatius. Eventually, he is 'mysteriously' taken in a storm and thereafter mythologised by the Romans as the god, Quirinius. The seamless, puzzling collusion by women in the taking of themselves by the media, like the Sabine women, knot a twisted cloth of compliance. The beautiful and palliate, but agonising and laboured exertion of women pushing and pulling identity mirrored in 'the audience' and all other spooky 53 " information technolOff (IT)" "lnventi111I Women - Science, Technology and Gender" ed. Gill Kirkup and Laurie Smith Keller Open University 1992 essay "The Social Cor&Btruction ofComputers" p 267 Gill Kirkup. 54 "Inventing Women - Science, Technology and Gender" ed. Gill Kirkup and Laurie Smith Keller Open University 1992 eBBay "The Social Conatruction of Computers" p 281 Gill Kirlrup. 56 "The Savage Mind" Claude Levi Strall88 Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1972. 53 incantations cloaking the legerdemain ofmediats6. A compact of appearance shaped by the other, engorged and ravenous with the response-ability of representing life through abstruse generalisation. A contract for living a rage inside evermore intricately boxed and divided set.s of gender or race or age67. A negotiation of filigree pathways constricted by exponentially detailed abstract artificial territories of conduct. The white sheet blackens with decree written over and over decree, until law manifests as obsession like a mad black painting. Wolf invokes first wave feminism. The abduction of value by any dominant culture, as feminist ideology reproaches patriarchal society, will never rid the subjugated of a natural desire for msthetic completion. It is like water - dam it, boil it, drink it, channel it, poison it. It floods, trickles, spills, rains and sustains-it is fluid. Neither Wolf, nor anyone, can abrogate anything as large as beauty, a natural, intrinsic human value. She simply reminds us that values are malleable, subject to change, and then detonates release from quaint and arrogant notions of 'Beauty' out of olde academe that "all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman"6s. Whether suppressed or released, particular and commonly identifiable universal values are not stasis - but a dynamic and natural condition, palpably subject to manipulation - as much subject to ethnographic, cultural, political, economic or chaotic alteration as any other quality. As Wolf asserts, neither ethnographic or evolutionary theory nor history supports the view that value "Beauty'' is consistent in anything but 56 The magazines message about the myth is determined by its advertisers. But the relationship between the reader and her magazine doesn't happen in a context that encourages her t.o analyse how their message is affected by the advertisers' needs. It is emotional, confiding, defensive, and unequal: "the link binding readers to their magazine, the great umbilical, as some call it, the trust." 'The Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf p73, 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991. 67 'The myth isolates women by generation, and the magazines seem to offer wise advice, tested by experience of an older female relative ... She is taught to dismiss her own mother's teachings about beauty, adornment, and seduction, since her mother has failed - she is aging. 'The Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf p74, 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991. 68 'The Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf pl88, 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991. 69 " 'Beauty' is not universal or changeless ... the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts. Nor is 'beauty' a function of evolution: Its ideals change at a pace far more rapid than that of evolution of the species ... Anthropology has overturned the notion that females must be 'beautiful' to be selected to mate: Evelyn Reed, Elaine Morgan, and others have dismissed sociobiological assertions of innate male polygamy and female monogamy ... Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the paring of the older richer men with young, 'beautiful' women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,0000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E. the situation was reversed ... Nor is it something only women do and men watch: Among the Nigerian Wodaabes, the women hold economic power and the tribe is obsessed with male beauty." 'The Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf pl3, 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991 54 principle6s. She also bonds undulations in the "male artistic tradition of the West"so representations of female nudity to the knot that legislates emancipation of women. Emaciation controls emancipation. Anorexia and bulimia are rationalised by her, as the means by which dominant patriarchal culture mounts a defence against emancipation so that feminist emancipat.or engendered traits of "high self esteem, a sense of effectiveness, activity, courage and clarity of mind"a1 are displaced by means of eating disorders mediated through industrial culture t.o "Prolonged and periodic caloric restriction" resulting in 'a distinctive personality' whose traits are "passivity, anxiety and emotionality" In other words Patriarchal society induces women t.o 'starve themselves into submission'. Wolfs metaphor/hallucination of the "Iron Maiden" is spun from a paradigm that objective and universal values are not static, monumental but "a currency like the gold standard". Which seems a strangely Reaganesque though sufficiently convincing allusion, Wolfs argument rests on what "Beauty'' has become: "Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modem age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves." One thing leads to another, bricolage, rhizome, fractal, language grows root like out of chaos. Here discourse is at its most rich. Platonic Wolf may well be right about the extent of control that patriarchy has exerted, she still misses the point on three accounts. Firstly, a welter of statistics, applied in the way that she does, can be employed to support an intellectually deficit paradigm as much as it can the most rigorously thought out case. Secondly, she does not sufficiently know nor appreciate phot.omedia in typical presence such as photography, film, video and all the attendant published manifestations as magazine, movie television, video. Thirdly, she does not refer to the hypnotic, haptic nature of high resolution, moving light and/or phased sound edited spatially and/or temporally ordering an addictive response. Maybe because there is only late data from which one might oo 'TM Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf pl88, 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991. 81 'TM Beauty Myth' Naomi Wolf pl88, 1990 1st. Ed. Vintage 1991. 55 obtain statistics out of which an appropriate case could be fashioned. Ultimately, she promotes a withering, earnest messianic view, infused with ideology, too lofty, too religious to be bothered with a humble phenomenological examination of the media. The constraints of any medium delineate and define its formal qualities. The potential of a phenomena, what is the best that can be done with a particular medium to deliver a message with maximum impact from the author to the audience. Compositional substructure across the picture plane, in and out of an illusion (referred to as editing in moving images or audio-visual representation) controls the scan of any viewer, no more and no less than it takes to deliver the message from the author to the viewer with maximum impact. Ambiguity, seen as important in picture-making, is about the release and withholding of information. The gap between what is presented and what is not, allows the viewer to participate in the construction of the 'invisible' third element, meaning. The condition of viewing becomes a creative act. This can be done badly or well, by accident, or not at all. Whichever way the audience is always seeking to construct meaning, and language as a path to that. 11 Just watching somebody else move or even imagining a movement is enough t.o cause the brain t.o physically rehearse the movement itself.. .'By observing or thinking about a movement, you do engage the same mot.or region in the brain, even if you are not conscious of what you are doing' ... Dr. Jean Decety, of the lnstitut.e of National research on Health Watching television or saccadically 'reading' a still image controlled compositionally or editorially, successfully or ineffectually by the author is an active event in itself but it always delivers a surrogate activity - the 62 SMH 15 October 1994 -Australian connection Dr. George Paxinos, UNSW. 56 representation or meaning within the frame. We 1ive through' the car chase, sex scene, news item on the screen, rehearsing the event in our 'minds eye'. Further, it may be that the audience becomes addicted in a haptic sense to the medium itself. So that the anorexic female wishes ideally, and directly to become the piece of paper, the sit.e of the image she rehearses over and over in surrogat.e form. In the West nudes become thinner through being photographed, Victorian pornography is redolent with well endowed, fleshy figures, thinning down through the century. James Dean has face weasel thin, high cheekbones, large eyes, defined lips, plain in the light of day, but slotting perfectly into the highly resolved chiaroscuro of black and white photography. Twiggy, the name resolves the emaciated 'look' of photography requiring light and the absence of light. In the sixties colour and light fill the frame, electronic strobe permits the use of soft light with great sharpness attained through maximum depth of field, so called 'beauty lighting'. Throughout the fifties colour is brassy and crude, red gloss lipstick pale flesh and blond hair becomes overwhelmed by Mary Quant plum and subtle saturation in the sixties as colour film arrives able to deliver purple. Grace Jones in the seventies and then punk as the audience aspires to become the medium, angular, hair topiary appearing different from different sides rather symmetrical like a multiple image attuned to paper, glossy, clay based paper, becoming bodily film, paper and tape or pixel. 57 8. A Blue Refuse "Wheels turn, gears crank, switches pulled, buttons pressed and picture f1,ickers into view - no more test pattern - now turgid afternoon television. Oh! the travelled travail of viewing- Sesame Street- desperate 4pm blues Degrassi High, into every day-is-Christmas day-prize shows, the snipe bits ofnews and then the cooking pogroms down into the dark valleys of currant affairs, rise into the foothills of enter the evening. Containment by contenting adults, negotiating the peaks ofothers achievement in surrogate channel. We think we can, we know we can, to bed - to dream - Oh! fuck off!" "Blue Refuae" an unpublished eaaay by William Donnelly 1993 Picture Frame Re-examining the remains of phenomenology in the shadowy cemetery of ideology under the big stone marking modernity is to exhume past decades of humanity rotting from conservative certainty to liberal despair to existentialism to communism to feminism and neo-capitalism to dissipation, from broadcast dictatorship to fanatic telecommunication and blind religiosity - these accelerated dark ages now being entered. From seeing is seeing, to seeing is believing - repeated over and over again. Turn up the 58 picture. How we experience the beautiful machine pictures whilst simultaneously becoming the beautiful machine in equal proportion to engagement with it. These and more, quite unbeautiful, as yet, invisible pictures depicting all those duplicitous and anorexic, disappearing pictures are the pictures that should be included as the pictures that should be seen. They seem to be part of everything, are grotesque and cannot be made picturesque, because they simply exist, apparently universally, and are not able to be scanned by the best machines that we are. For intellectual life here is so corrupt, so bound up and dominated by ideology, from 'taking a positionism' in an historical vacuumism - with the result that no-one can be acknowledged, at this point in time, for 'merely' looking and describing and synthesising. How we pierce life that includes the pictures (mad from machines) and see it for what it is, is not an ideological position, it is a vital action with the effect that perceiving arises, again, before conceiving. It is clear now that art can come from anywhere at any time, like a little jolt - more than likely when it is least expected and in a condition little known, if at all knowable. Or is this a replaying of the myth of Christianity? Ofcourse, none ofthis "matters" in the light ofthe past moving in reverse. Reverse in moving past the oflight the in "matters" this ofnone, course of Because it all happens together - the same cross of time and place - as it were, being witnessed all at once, once in a blue-grey and flickering negative. Globules of light on matters in two and three-dimensions, floating fat people at the screen to see if they bounce off. He's fat he's green, he bounces off the screen! Unhealthy sods, should be thin and photogenic. I mean the effort put in, and out, to becoming photofit must be rewarded. Even though it is a privilege, self-administered or quirk of gene, to be able to breathe clear and fit J)elftct into the frame there should be a reward in the material sense, particularly for fascists. I have many material senses, one of those sharpened senses senses immortality as reward. Well, at least, I can dream. Oh! the oddness oflife, the peculiarity, the chanciness ofit. Exercise is a way to overcome fear of risk, to more certainly 'fit the frame' and become a 'real picture of health", for all to see - thus, exercise is a thinly veiled exercise in becoming photogenic, nothing to do with fit, and in that light may be seen as a failed exercise. 59 "Black sheeps, surround the hills and circle dog in revenge attacks for centuries ofbullying and bossing around. 'Absorb the heat and remain cool!' they chant and bleat at the dog that proudly cowers on the brow. " "Comb" a abort atory by Annette Ho 1956 Everything is coming out strange now - it comes out backwards and forwards and sideways in dribs and drabs. As decay sets in. Age creeps on. Senility replaces nubility. In reverse and in decline. Pictures keep youth, thus are not pictures of you, but picture us. Sixteen pictures and twenty thousand words. Here tomorrow, gone today. All of those pictures are little narratives and all of those stories little lies - smudgy and sharp little extensions of the truth that add up to the big picture which is the natural site for dynamic philosophic synthesis impurely multiplying into ideology and dividing into religiosity. A comb. A blue refuse. Until sleepy eyes awake from dreaming. Art of deception. Act of kindness. Art and Kindness. 60 9. Selected Bibliography BENEDIKT Michael (Ed) "Cyberspace" MIT Press 1992 BOLTON Richard "The Contest of Meaning" MIT Press 1992 BURGESS Anthony "Joysprick Andre Deutsch 1973 BURGESS Anthony "Language Made Plain" Fontana 1975. CHAI Ch'u and CHAI Winberg "The Changing Society of China" Mentor 1962 DELEUZE Gilles and GUATTARI Felix "A Thousand Plateaus" University of Minnesota Press 1993 DONNELLY William "A Blue Refuse" unpublished 1993 ECO Umberto "Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages" Yale University Press 1986 EWAR Frank and MAILLARD Robert "Picasso" Thames and Hudson 1956 ESTES Clarissa Pinkola ''Women Who Run with the Wolves" Random 1992 FOSTER Hal "Compulsive Beauty" MIT Press 1993 GIBSON William "Neuromancer" Ace Books 1984 HALL Doug and FIFER Sally Jo "Illuminating Video" Aperture 1992 HARRISON Charles and WOOD Paul "Art in Theory 1900-1990" Blackwell 1992. HAWTHORN Jeremy "Contemporary Literary Theory" Edward Arnold/Hodder and Staunton 1992 61 HO Annette" Comb" from a series of short stories of the same title, Warier & Jobbies 1956. HOFSTADER Albert and RICHARD Kuhns "Philosophies of Art and Beauty'' Chicago Press 1976 HOFSTADTER Douglas "Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" Harvester Press 1979 KEAY Carolyn "Henri Rousseau" Academy Editions 1976 KIRKUP Gill and SMITH Laurie "Inventing Women - Science, Technology and Gender" 1992. KOLAR Jiri "The End of Words" ICA 1990 KUHN Thomas S. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" University of LAUREL Brenda (Ed) "The Art Of Human-Computer Interface Design" Addison-Wesley 1990 LYOTARD Jean-Francois "Phenomenology" State University of New York Press 1991 MALOUF David "An Imaginary Life" Picador 1980 MAYOUXJean Jacques and BLUNT Sir Anthony "English Painting" Skira Editions 1972 MILLIGAN Spike "Puckoon" Penguin pbk. 1972 NEWTON Eric "The Meaning of Beauty'' Collins 1962 PACTEAU Francette "The Symptom of Beauty'' Reaktion Books Ltd. 1994 REYNOLDS Graham ''Victorian Painting" Harper & Row NY 1987 RHEINGOLD Howard ''Virtual Reality'' Secker And Warburg 1991 62 RUCKER, SIRIUS and MU "Mondo 2000: A User's Guide To The New Edge" Thames &Hudson 1992 SANCHEZ Alfonso E. Perez and SAYRE Eleanor A " Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment Little Brown and Co. 1988 STRAUSS Claude Levi ''The Savage Mind" Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1972 TURKLE Shelley "The Second Self, Computers and the Human Spirit" Granada 1984 WILLIS Anne-Marie "Picturing Australia" Angus and Robertson 1988 WOLF Naomi "The Beauty Myth Vintage 1991 63