the big B (aka Pierre)
OK This is going to be a bit of a work in progress because my brain is in the toilet. So this may be a blog style wiki attempt to engage in some theoretical discourse. - and maybe - that's what we could start doing on this blog perhaps??? - ya know? - "the stupid as a painters guide to critical theory"????
Ghassan Hage (cool anthropology dude from Sydney Uni) gave a really nice introductory lecture on Pierre Bourdieu last year at sydney University. The lecture was free and open and if he runs it again - I'll let people know. Ghassan has done lots of qualittative ethnogrpahic researhc on contemproary communities - particular pelstinian disapora - and he has written some punchy but elegant stuff on contemrpoary austrlaina racism. I *think* he takes a structured/sociological approach to analysing racism inpopular culture - and he uses PB's framworks to do this..... (but i've read his stuff very quickly and briefly - and I need to read books 3 times before my brain remembers anything
Life Facts: Pierre Bourdieu (In strine say his name as Bored Yer) came from COrreze in central france (same region as Jaques Chriac). Its a hole of a place and I bet he was glad to get out. He was a university sociologist - doing lots of nice qualitative ethnography - partcularly of the culture industries (see books I have read below), but in recent years - decided to adopt a higher profile as a public intellectual. I think the later years were inspired by Jacues chiracs government. Apparently PB was extremely worried about the possibility for independent research continuing when the naiton was being run by a bunch of right wing ingorant crypto fascist clots - and he decided that research could only be independent - if it was acutally contested and fought for in the public sphere. so in addition to writing cool books and journal articles, he went on demos and strikes and stuff and went on lots of chat shows. He became a bit of a leftie saint in the media in France. Nouvelle Observeteur did a big frature on him when he died - but that doen't detract from the quality of his writings. since he died (end of 2001) he's become a bit of a hotshot word to bandy around Australian critical cognoscetti circles. this isn't helped by the fact that Artspace ran some big symposium "the Rules of Art" in homage to 2002. I was working that day and couldn't go - and I'm still quite cheesed about the fact - but if anyone did go or knows how to get copies of the proceedings - lemme know.
The Bourdieu I have read - are basically 3 books: "the rules of art", "the love of art", and "distinctions". I've read them only in translation in english.
"Rules of Art" - is more about literary than art criticism, and is based around Gustave Flaubert (who wrote Madame bovary). I guess Flaubert is the 'field' that PB analyses. PB was a sociaologist first and the reason why he is intersting to art(s) writers is because he brought a fresh approach to analysing artworks/practices. rules of Art is nice - because he gave an acocunt of the Frnehc 19C avante garde as a socilogical entity - and had nice defamiliarisation things going on so the narrative of 'the assent of modernism' was able to be looked at in a context - and some of its limitations accounted for sensibly and clearly.
"the love of art" - is a classic ethnographic style text. He and the other guy (the co-author whose name I've forgotten) did a whole heap of interviews with patrons at big french art gallleries - and analyised their income, aspirations, backgrounds, views of art etc. In france, ART is this freaky fucking state religion that the grande bourgeoise totally wet themselves aobut all the time - and it is an extremely elitist aspirational kind of thing - so analysing art like some exotic little social practice - was a bit subversive in this context. Especially since it was done in the 1960's.
"distictions" - was written in the 1980's - and covers similar turf to the love of art - but he uses more sociological discussion of various layers of the art public. actually my mind has gone completely blank - even though i've spent the past 2 years reading bits and citing bits of it in bits of writing that i've done. It could be because I've got a full bladder and am arrranging my evening by SMS.
Distinctions has more of the famous Bourdieu stuff about "habitas" in it - plus his analysis of how aspirationaism actually works itself out in cultural practices.
PB is interesting because he's analysed class not as a fixed thing - but looked at what happens as poeple negotiate their class mobility and identity. I guess this is why his stuff on the 19C parisian avante garde is so interesting - because he was one of the early people to describe artists' own quite complicit role in challenging but also supporting? err - being supported by capitalsm - particulalyr the more entrepreneurial end of emerging bourgeouises.
Bascially if you've ever wondered why 'arty' suburbs slide so fast into the morass of new money boringness, then Pierre's the man you should be reading.
Habitas? - kind of a funny term - where you want to be, where you imagine yourself to be, whihc is not always where you are........
Pierre also had some great postmarxist sociology on time, retirement and the uselessness of leisure, which is right up my Raole Vaneigem (situationist)loving little street.
I think I like distinctions - because he analyses various pretentionus wankers seriously, in the sense of showing the inflected and contested nature of originality, authenticity and appreciation in art. Other people have done this further since - sociology of art -and in some art-pedagogy..... I'm interested in it for my own research because he provides a model - not only for doing sociology with various art communities (contmeprary, professional, amateur, traiditonal etc.), and emphaiszing wha practics occur and the attitudes that form them.
I also find his approach an extremely refreshing change from the semiotic emphasis in a lot of art theory - which focusses on finding meaning in certain images or objects (or artifacts of practices) - and which I find overly textual. i'm interested in why poeple do bad drawings, why people make certain kitsch shit, or do things which seem meaningless......... and what meaning they derive from that.
Ghassan Hage (cool anthropology dude from Sydney Uni) gave a really nice introductory lecture on Pierre Bourdieu last year at sydney University. The lecture was free and open and if he runs it again - I'll let people know. Ghassan has done lots of qualittative ethnogrpahic researhc on contemproary communities - particular pelstinian disapora - and he has written some punchy but elegant stuff on contemrpoary austrlaina racism. I *think* he takes a structured/sociological approach to analysing racism inpopular culture - and he uses PB's framworks to do this..... (but i've read his stuff very quickly and briefly - and I need to read books 3 times before my brain remembers anything
Life Facts: Pierre Bourdieu (In strine say his name as Bored Yer) came from COrreze in central france (same region as Jaques Chriac). Its a hole of a place and I bet he was glad to get out. He was a university sociologist - doing lots of nice qualitative ethnography - partcularly of the culture industries (see books I have read below), but in recent years - decided to adopt a higher profile as a public intellectual. I think the later years were inspired by Jacues chiracs government. Apparently PB was extremely worried about the possibility for independent research continuing when the naiton was being run by a bunch of right wing ingorant crypto fascist clots - and he decided that research could only be independent - if it was acutally contested and fought for in the public sphere. so in addition to writing cool books and journal articles, he went on demos and strikes and stuff and went on lots of chat shows. He became a bit of a leftie saint in the media in France. Nouvelle Observeteur did a big frature on him when he died - but that doen't detract from the quality of his writings. since he died (end of 2001) he's become a bit of a hotshot word to bandy around Australian critical cognoscetti circles. this isn't helped by the fact that Artspace ran some big symposium "the Rules of Art" in homage to 2002. I was working that day and couldn't go - and I'm still quite cheesed about the fact - but if anyone did go or knows how to get copies of the proceedings - lemme know.
The Bourdieu I have read - are basically 3 books: "the rules of art", "the love of art", and "distinctions". I've read them only in translation in english.
"Rules of Art" - is more about literary than art criticism, and is based around Gustave Flaubert (who wrote Madame bovary). I guess Flaubert is the 'field' that PB analyses. PB was a sociaologist first and the reason why he is intersting to art(s) writers is because he brought a fresh approach to analysing artworks/practices. rules of Art is nice - because he gave an acocunt of the Frnehc 19C avante garde as a socilogical entity - and had nice defamiliarisation things going on so the narrative of 'the assent of modernism' was able to be looked at in a context - and some of its limitations accounted for sensibly and clearly.
"the love of art" - is a classic ethnographic style text. He and the other guy (the co-author whose name I've forgotten) did a whole heap of interviews with patrons at big french art gallleries - and analyised their income, aspirations, backgrounds, views of art etc. In france, ART is this freaky fucking state religion that the grande bourgeoise totally wet themselves aobut all the time - and it is an extremely elitist aspirational kind of thing - so analysing art like some exotic little social practice - was a bit subversive in this context. Especially since it was done in the 1960's.
"distictions" - was written in the 1980's - and covers similar turf to the love of art - but he uses more sociological discussion of various layers of the art public. actually my mind has gone completely blank - even though i've spent the past 2 years reading bits and citing bits of it in bits of writing that i've done. It could be because I've got a full bladder and am arrranging my evening by SMS.
Distinctions has more of the famous Bourdieu stuff about "habitas" in it - plus his analysis of how aspirationaism actually works itself out in cultural practices.
PB is interesting because he's analysed class not as a fixed thing - but looked at what happens as poeple negotiate their class mobility and identity. I guess this is why his stuff on the 19C parisian avante garde is so interesting - because he was one of the early people to describe artists' own quite complicit role in challenging but also supporting? err - being supported by capitalsm - particulalyr the more entrepreneurial end of emerging bourgeouises.
Bascially if you've ever wondered why 'arty' suburbs slide so fast into the morass of new money boringness, then Pierre's the man you should be reading.
Habitas? - kind of a funny term - where you want to be, where you imagine yourself to be, whihc is not always where you are........
Pierre also had some great postmarxist sociology on time, retirement and the uselessness of leisure, which is right up my Raole Vaneigem (situationist)loving little street.
I think I like distinctions - because he analyses various pretentionus wankers seriously, in the sense of showing the inflected and contested nature of originality, authenticity and appreciation in art. Other people have done this further since - sociology of art -and in some art-pedagogy..... I'm interested in it for my own research because he provides a model - not only for doing sociology with various art communities (contmeprary, professional, amateur, traiditonal etc.), and emphaiszing wha practics occur and the attitudes that form them.
I also find his approach an extremely refreshing change from the semiotic emphasis in a lot of art theory - which focusses on finding meaning in certain images or objects (or artifacts of practices) - and which I find overly textual. i'm interested in why poeple do bad drawings, why people make certain kitsch shit, or do things which seem meaningless......... and what meaning they derive from that.
posted by mayhem at 8:33 pm
40 Comments:
B was big before he kicked the Bucket.
Ian I glossed over Escape Attempts and it was kind of depressing although it is possibly a good litmus test for how self referential the reader is, which I was more so at the time and that is probably why it seemed to bleak. My superficial reading of it was that the authors were hammering home the futility of self consciosness.
Avital Ronnel wrote about Madam Bovary in Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, which touched on emerging self consciousness.
Last night I was reading the death row data put on the internet by the dept of Corrections, State of Texas, (light relief), and the inmates are mostly male, black, white, hispanic, (no mixed backgrounds mentioned, sorry Alfred Hitchcock!) and they are mostly in dead end jobs. The men tend to be labourers and the women tend to have several jobs, and a lot of it is murder in a robbery. They sometimes frame the death in terms of going to the other side, and there is a hopelessness in a lot of those cases, there's a sense of being lower class, die while you're young, get out while you can, live it up and ask for an upscale last meal. Cornered like a rat. It's fucked up shit. They're fucked up, the death penalty validates this. I sound like a face funiture theory head etc, still haven't read the big Der.
Ian, I know for a fact that Aviatal Ronnel was required reading at COFA in the early nineties, she was interviewd in the REsearch publication Angry Women, which was an extra-curricular entertainment, back in the day.
That Matrix article, hmm, tick all boxes, it reminds me of the amatuer trend in self diagnosing medical conditions based on information read over the internet. Been there.
Spelt Ronell, Ronell, Ronell, Ronell, Ronell...
Georgette Heyer? I'll look out for her. I'm just about to read Voltaire and Flannery O'Connor for the first time. Will check out rural studio.
"Frances turned and clung to him. "Oh Norman!"she sobbed. "I'm sorry. It was all my fault!""
Chuckle chunder.
Could be addictive.
I saw the rural studio houses. Wow! They truly are beautiful, they would cost a packet if they were built in Australia by architects, although it's the sort of sea change house you see in the wealthier strips on the NSW coast.
Some of the householders look kind of uncomfortable. Where do they go for fun, or work I wonder. There are bush blocks on the South Coast NSW and west of Cessnock like that, come to think of it there were hamlets in the Royal National Park. The trees look very calming, great for creative or outdoorsy types.
Yes, he is doing something truly positive and it's very rare the artists you speak of do something positive. Architects with minds like steel traps might appreciate something pretty dopey and obscure and bewildered though Ian, let's try to appreciate the diversity that is there, although often it isn't really all that diverse.
I'm curious to learn more about what Bourdieu made of Flaubert's work.
Mayhem,
you didn't miss too much with "the Rules of Art" symposium at artspace. i went along because i was hoping there would be people who would speak about the implications of the rules of art for practicing artists. unfortunately 80% of the day was taken up by academics reading (and i stress reading rather than presenting) dense theoretical papers which were more aimed at "correctly" interpreting Bourdieu's writing than dealing with anything relivant to art making.
i hadn't read any Bourdieu before i went to the symposium but i was drawn in by the title "the rules of art" in the hope that there might be some inscisive comment on the forces that serve to construct, define and place limits on artistic research, (or to borrow a little from Ian wrote maybe i was hoping that there would be a kind of de-masking and making explicit of the roles that individuals and institutions play and how they are complicit in the creation of "the field" of artistic research).
from memory there was only one speaker who made a connection with art practice, that was a guy from the states who presented with a technique that he attributed to dada where he had someone else read his essay on Bourdieu while simultaneously read some unrelated text. it was refreshing for the fact that it was a healthy contrast to the very dry academic presentations that proceeded it.
So in some ways this was another case of the theory being all there and its relation to practice being notably absent.
"Madame Bovary, c'est nous!"
Wow!
Nice to read such chunky comments! thanks for all the feedback and stimulation. Ben thanks for rerpot off Artspace Ruls gig - and I'm sorry about sniping before..... I hadn't read Gregory Sholette - so thanks Ian for the reference.
there is a hell of a lot that I *haven't read* which i why I like to have links to stuff. Its also why I'm doing a PhD (that and the difficulties of staying on centrelink)
As a doc marten wearing 3rd wave feminazi of the 90's I learnt to recite bits of the Re/Search Angry woman bible with my eyes shut. But I always found the Avital Ronnell interview quite frightening. I think it was that wierd lily holding photo with the author.... I mean what the fuck was that about? If they wanted to explope their femininity why didn't they show their tits? (maybe I'm just gross)
Hmmmm. I like Irigaray tho. Its probably a freaky virgin mary thing.
anyway, Recently I went and hung out at a FRENCH ACADEMIC SEMINAR at PAris VII University - coz my friend was gving a paper. The crowd were pretty hard core bunch of second wavers - one chick was talking about Antonio Negri tho, but the bit I liked is that they made a difference between FEMININE STUDIES and FEMINIST STUDIES. They called the 80's funky french feminist thing "FEMININE STUDIES" whihc I thought was kind of cool.
anyone want a blondes guide to contemporary feminist theory?
Intersubjectivity ploise?
Sometimes I'm a font of misinformation by there is a flower that was associated with photos of Marlene Dietrich, and I think in Germany that was a coded sign that she dug broads. Was that flower a Lily?
Can't confirm but I think the star was Marlene Dietrich, not Garbo or someone else similar.
I'd forgotten about Ronell until big B and Madame B came up, but I've always liked her because I learnt the word platitude from her writing and because she used groovy sentences like, "We have to stop this mimetic and regressive posturing".
See what i mean?
What's wrong with mimetic and regressive posturing?
(I DID work as an artists' model for 4 years: Mimetic and regressive posturing WAS MY LIFE)
Intersubjectivity..... err.... between what and what?
I've never thought about it, I just remember the voice saying "Irigaray...intersubjectivity...Irigaray...
intersubjectivity...."
O.K., I wan't paying attention. What's the blondes guide to contemporary feminist theory? At least I cand re-read it if it doesn't sink in the first time.
"The standard spin on it is that American Feminists are more concerned with pragmatic and referential effects of their work. They seem to ease into the system to disrupt certain moments of it. They're pragmatically oriented. Of course each one of the women you named -- Cixous, Irigaray, Clement -- is very different in her work. Even Sarah Kofmann. Very often they don't get along. There's not a sense of a "feminine" community, although there are feminist tribes in France. The women you named are philosophically highly sophisticated. They're dealing with questions of the Western logos, and how to make interventions. American Feminists tend to be more empirical, and more concerned with the psycho-pathology of misogyny, which is also extremely important. At the time Helene Cixous showed up in America in the first phases of her celebrity, in the early 1970s, a lot of American feminists were shocked that she was so beautiful in a French sense: she wears makeup. She dresses elegantly and that was considered to be completely contradictory with what feminism in the American puritanical tradition would be. At that time, the French feminists probably had a lot of scorn for the American feminists. And the feeling was mutual." Ronell interviewed by Alexander Laurence
Ian- I just read the art life's little spit. I do hope this means you and the others will be writing more articles on OSAS. There's no need to start your own blog, Ian, you're more fun to debate with.
At least 8 people are known to have read this blog, which is too many readers to be thought of as a brick wall and too few to create a stone wall.
I wouldn't mind writing something about blogs as a learning document, relating ideas from other writers, maybe even dreaded theorists, so I'll add something later on when I've had a chance to catch up on my reading.
If you read that talk TAL did at the PICA symposium then you would have seen their thoughts on the everchanging dynamic of their blog, which is true, they do need to cater for new people entering the debate, otherwise TAL would be long gone.
After about two years of fanatically reading TAL to the exclusion of just about any other blog, I hope I've learnt a thing or two about blogging itself rather than just narrow art blogging, and as lately they've been suggesting to others to start blogs they've stayed true to their mantra of diversity of opinion in Sydney art writing.
So maybe as a bit of learning focussed research rather than hard hitting arts journalism...
Okay, I'll email the reader.
I still haven't heard back from the reader. Hey, shouldnt't we canvass opinions before deciding if I'm in?
By the way, I'm going to start recycling all my TAL alter egos here. Not for any real reason.
Why, that's a swell idea, Plum.
Darn right it is.
We can all agree on that!
http://www.egs.edu/
I'm putting this url here because its a grad school with Avital Ronell and John Waters and DJ Spooky as professors. Wonder what their fees would be like.
There's no fuckin' way you've commented more than me.
Anyways, I'm very keen to write my learning document.
Awesome, the eagle reader has landed.
Then shut the fuck up and write it, idiot.
fanciful
sorry about the delay in getting you the invite to post here, you should have the invite now. i'm looking forward to reading the learning/blog thing, it sounds pretty spot on in terms of what's going on here.
oh yeah i was gonna say that i think it's still the case that anyone who wants to post on this blog can just send me an email. i was also thinking that if this ever gets out of hand a simple way to continue to keep this open would be to ask people to leave comments as a way of showing their interest and a kind of 'good faith', before they are invited to post. but for the moment i guess we can just continue with giving posting rights to anyone who is interested.
I though Spiv was supposed to be the enfant terrible of TAL, although lately he sounds as if he read Sade five minutes ago. How would the current situation not be working for him?
PS, the reader sent me the invite, and I'll spread the work and see if anyone else wants to join in.
PS, I'm using the name Tigger Winton, which is intended to be in the spirit of cheesy gonzo Hunter S. Thompson posturing (traditional Sydney practice), is Tigger a trade mark? Maybe I will change it to Tiigger to express my disdain for cultural baggage.
Thank youse.
That's a good idea Ben.
Heh heh heh... I agree though that you've been treated unfairly. If I get really keen I'll send a deputation over to discuss this with TAL. Not that I've done it before, but I'll bet it has worked for others. Jerks.
It's true, Ian has been turned out of the art life because he's telling the truth, and everyone knows the core of good wrting is to write what you know, and to essentially tell the truth. Think about it.
You people should be buying art instead of writing about art school, you poor buggers. I bought some installation art on the weekend and it looks like we will have to move the computer and use the extra room for the sculpture we bought from Robin Gibson gallery. That means "Vladimir" won't be taking part in any of this lefty rubbish anymore.
Did anyone end up seeing the self portrait exhibition at the AGNSW? It was pretty underrated when it was reviewed by John McDonald.
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