The Autonomous Hand of the Artist

 

When Walter Benjamin wrote the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction, he commented that reproduction removed from art it’s ‘aura’ (Benjamin, 1936). Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold, but this aura was removed by machinic production. As Roland Barthes and others have noted, the author of the text was dead. (Barthes, 1967).

When we purchase commodities, we no-longer understand their conditions of production – what Bernard Stiegler has described as the ‘unknowable past’ of technologies. (Steigler in Gallope; 2006). For music and the arts in particular- technologies which we use to store our consciousness – this lack of ‘aura’ hinders the ability to have an intimate relationship with these machines. As Gallope exaplains, this storing of consciousness outside the body requires trust: “Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” (Gallope; 2006) Steigler, who used the word technics to refer to philosophies of technology, argued that we trust technics as consciousness prosthetics, as workable instruments whose “history we did not live” (Gallope; 2006).

“It is this duality of a technical constitution and a necessary trust or faith in the unknowable past that determines consciousness as extended outside itself, where memory is deposited in technical objects, where consciousness is outside itself” (Gallope; 2006, 7). 

Our trust in the technologies we use relies on their congruity with our own body - and since almost all our interactions are mediated through our hands – trust in their suitability for them. In order for us to trust and purchase commodities we rely on this hand-mark, and so techniques of re-instating the hand have been employed: The re-instatement of ‘hand-made’ aesthetics (made-by-hand). & the creation of ‘ergonomic’ products (made-for-hand). This post will focus on the circulation of conspicuously hand-made commodities which attempt to re-instate the missing aura of the commodity.

Let’s talk about this concept of re-instating the hand-made using the example of a vinyl album released in 2006 by JDilla (James Dewitt Yancey), titled Donuts. The album is a collection of short edits of soul and funk songs, looped and cut together live on a sampler. It is important to consider that at the time the album was produced, JDilla was in hospital (he passed away three days after the album was released).

The album is heavily stamped with the artist’s own touches – recording the album live, adding errors, scratching, re-cueing the records, adding static, out of time loops, etc. At each song we are reminded that whilst “recordings exist without death, available for nearly infinite playback”, the producer, Dilla, can still be present (Gallope; 2006, 8). Abbate theorizes that we can “sense within the events of music, the voices of the commentators that enunciate them.” (Abbate; 1991, 15). Knowing that he would soon die, J’Dilla has marked himself on the record with song titles including: ‘Bye’; ‘Dilla says go’ & ‘Don’t Cry’. The album is an attempt to impress temporaility and ‘live-ness’ onto the continuous commodity of the record. This is a tactic that is increasingly common since the adoption of digital reproduction techniques.

Gallope sees this drive for ‘live-ness’ as a response to the ‘cold-ness’ of digital recording.

“Performance suddenly appears nostalgic, more real, vulnerable, expressive, ephemeral or drastic. Modern musical performance, whether on the classical stage performing a composed work, touring an album, or reproducing a traditional style, it must be anxiously marked live, authentic, organic, real, as if to preserve the difference of humanity against the constant haunting of immortal, insomniac recordings that seem to proliferate in ever increasing numbers, seeming to come out of nowhere.” (Gallope: 2006, 9)

The liveness of Donuts is in direct opposition to the modes of production critiqued by Adorno & Horkheimer in their essay Enlightenment as Mass deception, in which they noted that in mass entertainment ”every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth.” The anxious inclusion of errors, static, noises and the artist himself aims to counteract the disembodied nature of digital music.

Donuts transcends the death of the artist brought about by recording, and in this case, death of the artist literally. JDilla demonstrates that the death of body does not equal death of social presence “…in the absence of the body, social presence still persists, so challenging the current orthodoxy that our embodiment is essential to social membership” (Hallam, Hockey, Howath; 2001, 74). Discogs lists around 13 posthumous releases – he is still releasing albums, creating flows, spawing fansites, producing commodities after death.

To explain the circulation of a self stamped on a object we should consider Marcel Mauss, who wrote in his classic work The Gift that “The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver. The objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them.” (1990:31). This contradicts the logic of capitalism which encourages obligation free transfer of capital through monetary systems. Hand-made commodities have the indelible ties with their producers. This intersection between native values of eros and capitalist value of logos is discussed in Hyde’s critique of Mauss, in which he positions the gift as eros in opposition to the market economy as logos. (Hyde, 1983).

When Mauss says “the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given” (1990), he touches on not only gifts, but on secondhand objects themselves. Movies such as The Eye (2008) centre themselves around the continuation of a person when their objects or body parts are transferred to other people. The fear of such object-personification is dealt with in rituals of ‘cleansing cursed objects’. Such superstitious practices are in place because some cultures recognise that “diabolical undeadness is what partial objects are about” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006).

So what are we refering to when we talk about autonomous partial objects? Zizek, following on from Lacan, sees the partial object as a site of fear, because it acts without meter or constraint (Zizek, 1995).

The tongue is driven into action by its desire – and must seperate from the body at large in order to persue its desire. The machinic processes that bind the tongue – namely the mouth, teeth, the body, notions of civility and good manners – are transcended by the autonomous tongue which can now fully embrace its own ‘toungue-ness.” Whilst this was considered an abject image, and spawned much criticism, it was ultimately a more comfortable situation than the other possibility: the man becoming the tongue.

Zizek mentions the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Red Shoes in a short peice on Lacan. In this story, an impoverished girl chooses a new pair of shiny red shoes, which cause her to dance uncontrollably day and night, almost killing her. She is saved when an executioner cuts off her feet, which continue to dance around. “These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being.” (Zizek, 1995).The fear of ’becoming the other’ is a metanarrative used in Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde, The Exorcist and numerous zombie/werewolf films. Zizek terms this the ‘ventriloquist effect’ – something acting through you. (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). But as Zizek speculates; “Perhaps the ultimate bodily part which fits this role of the autonomous partial object is the fist, or rather the hand.” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). For an excellent website on disembodied hands in horror films, see this site.

The Hands of Orlac (released 1924, remade by Christopher lee in 1960, below), stars a pianist whos hands are severed in an accident. When they are replaced with the hands of a murderer, he takes a liking to strangulation rather than sonatas. As the excellent trailer below asks: “Do the hands control the man that owns them?”

The Beast with five fingers explores the return of a dead man’s hands, seeking revenge, and playing pianos.

 

 

Similarly Dr. Stranglove, played by Peter Sellers (below) literally is unable to control his right hand. The fight to control this object which does as it pleases it central to the film - to control mindless acts of total identification with something.  

 

The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of ‘organs without bodies’, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”…the dimension of the undead, the living dead, something which remains alive even after it is dead. Something you cannot destroy – the more you cut it, the more it exists. It goes on. (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006).

Zizek employs the Deleuzian ‘Bodies without organs’ concept in reverse, an act which i ultimately see as nothing more than a slight re-orientation, rather than a true shift in meaning (Deleuze & Guattari; 1972). It is possible to see the BwO as the result of a body shifting from a metamachine, an organised whole compiled from smaller parts, to a single machinic entity, which is the subject of singular desire. Is not the BwO a single organ? A disorientated autonomous partial object/organ seperated from a whole?

Michel Gondry’s excellent film The Science of Sleep (2007) also deals with partial objects, centering around Stephane’s inability to control his hands. In the opening sequence of the film, a piano falls down the stairs of his apartment, crushing his hand. When it is being bandaged, a neighbour sprays his hand with foot deoderiser as a placebo – which he perceives as being effective. It is as if his hand lacks identity - it is effortlessly re-territorilized as a foot.

Stephane’s seeming lack of control in his own life is represented in his dreams by cumbersome hands, which cause him to ‘make mistakes’. In his dreams they become “the size of houses,” they become autonomous -violently attacking his dull co-workers. This is ultimately a liberating experience for Stephane – he takes the boss’s office, has sex with the secratary over a xerox machine, and relaxes in a desk chair. “This is what liberation means…the only way to get rid of this autonomous partial object is to become the autonomous partial object.” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). Stephane’s hands, the autonomous partial object, ‘take over’.

This desire to become a pure ‘hand-machine’ sees Stephane lust after a character who is dexterous and in control of her hands. Stephanie’s skill is embodied by an apartment full of delicate hand made dolls and dioramas, as well as her ability to play the piano (a hand-centric instrument). In the short clip below, he comments that “it’s as if her synapses are directly married to her fingers.”

 

Liveness and transcience are key markers of hand-made objects – seemingly because they enunciate their circumstances of production. Machined products are ideally without flaws, without seams – most perfectly represented in the modernist alien spaceship of the 1950s – a circular single, perfect peice of smooth metal. But with the hand-made, we distinctly desire a roughness, an uneven, ’striated’ surface (Deleuze & Guattari; 1987).

The fetish of serendipity & chance is realised through physical movements of the body – most obviously represented by the abstract expressionist art movement, and in particular the works of Jackson Pollock. As for music, artists are encouraged to use machines that allow experimentation - machines that produce varied results. Rather than brokenness or obsolescence, musicians speak of the warmth, authenticity, humanity, and even sexuality of analog sounds, tube amplifies, and vinyl LPs, as compared to the coldness, inauthenticity, and disembodied character of digital recording, integrated circuits, and compact discs.(Goodwin; 1988, 265, Auner; 2000). The disembodiment of digital recordings can be taken literally: when we create, play and use a digital file, we no-longer engage with it physically. As the jack of all trades Brian Eno elaborates:

I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated.

A musician’s own personal style is communicated through movements which are difficult, if not impossible to emulate due to the “unreliable muscles” we enact. This aesthetic allows individuals to trust technics whose “history we did not live” (Steigler; 1998, Gallope; 2006, 7).  I think this is Link’s point when he comments about roughness, mistakes and distortion, which he terms ‘noise’.

“Noise can thus function as a ’suture’ in film theory, stitching our subjectivity into the recording. An LP’s hiss, crackle, and warpage emerge as surprisingly essential aspects of listener identity.” (Link, 2001)

This yearning to understand the terms of production which in mass production are obscured and hidden is allowed by hand-made aesthetics, which enuciate the terms of a commodity’s production. This yearning to understand process is touched on in Northern Exposure, Season 3, Episode 12 “Burning down the house”. This episode deals primarily with Chris’s attempt to create a personal, hand-made event by flinging a cow using a trebuchet .

“I’ve been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I’ve come to find out that it’s not the vision, it’s not the vision at all. It’s the groping. It’s the groping, it’s the yearning, it’s the moving forward. I think Kierkegaard said it oh so well, ‘The self is only that which it’s in the process of becoming.‘ Art? Same thing. The thing I learned folks, this is absolutely key: It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.”

For more on this episode, see my post here.

So what does the actual flinging of a piano represent?

When Chris is dragging a log down main street for part of the trebuchet, there is an obvious allusion to Jesus carrying the cross.

In creating the trebuchet, Chris is creating an event, an element stretched over following ones that forms an infinite series that contains “neither a final term, nor a limit.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). Later in the fourth season the trebuchet is re-used to fling the coffin of a deceased friend of Chris.

This ’stretching’ of the event over time is also apparent in Christ’s crucifixion. Rather than his death being the limit of compassion, of ’god’s love’, the event is repeated both symbolically in the form of the cross and relgious services, and also by Catholic Flagellents in New Mexico, who actually crucify themselves (not to death, however).

Both Chris’ strive to fling a cow and Christ’s death include what Deleuze names as the third component of the event – the individual – which comes to represent “creativity, the formation of a new.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). To Chris, a character obesessed with the creation of his own becomings, the event is symbolic of his own “groping around in the dark”. For Jesus, it wasn’t the death that mattered, moreso the act of dying. Crucifixion, which is a slow and public death, suits this purpose perfectly. If Jesus had been guillotined, or shot, or thrown off a cliff, the transitory nature of the dying body would not have lasted long enough to me remembered. To be on the cross is to be in the becoming state between life and death. It thus served to create the death of Jesus as an event. And even the final death and entombment became the opportunity for another becoming – the ressurection.  

The trebuchet fling is an event crafted by Chris to create ‘tomorrow’s memories’, to create a social participation that will likely outlast his own physical embodiment. In his strive to create the authentic, he is striving to create something original, something hand-crafted that demonstrates his own personal becomings.

If indeed industrialization of art removed it’s aura, then perhaps the action of handmade aesthetics re-instates this aura, marking it within a time and space. The circulation of such commodities is based on both a fetish and fear of the disembodied object or artist. A hand free of a body is free to pursue its desire – for better or for worse – which is why this motif has been so heavily utilised in screen texts. The hand is an event that is depicted as ‘going on’ after death – demonstrating that even if the author is dead (literally in the case of j’dilla) he or she can still ‘touch’ you.

 

 

Bibliography:

Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera & Musical Narrative in the 19th Century, Princeton University Press, UK, 1991

Adorno, Theodore & Horkheimer, Max; the Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, London & New York, Routledge, 2007

Benjamin, Walter, the Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 1936
Cage, John Silence: Lectures & Writings Wesleyan Publishing, NY, 1961

Deleuze, Giles, & Guattari, Felix Anti Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia University of Minnesota, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, The Smooth & the Striated, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (trans) London & New York, Continuum, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles; What is an Event? In The Fold: Leibniz & the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, London, The Athlone Press, 1992

Eisenberg, Evan, Music Becomes a Thing, in the Recording Angel: Music, Records & Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, Picador, London, 1987

Eno, Brian. “The Revenge of the Intuitive: Turn Off the Options, and Turn Up the Intimacy.” Wired 7/1 January 1999. .

Gallope, Michael, Heidegger, Stiegler, and the Question of a Musical Technics, New York University, July 2006

Guattari, Félix, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984

Hallan, Elizabeth; Hockey, Jenny; Howath, Glennys; The Body In Death; Contested Bodies eds

Holliday, Ruth, and Hassard, John. London and New York; routledge, 2001.

Link, Stan, The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise, Computer Music Journal; Spring2001, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p34-47, 14p

Lyssiotis, Peter; Gyorgy, Scrinis; CD’s and other things, Backyard Press, Melbourne, 1994

Steigler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (trans) Collins & Beardsworth, Stanford University Press, 1998

Zizek, Slavoj, Organs Without Bodies, Deleuze & Consequences, Routledge, New York, 2004

Zizek, Slavoj; Love beyond Law, The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society issue 160-61 1996

Filmography:

Fiennes, Sophie & Zizek, Slavoj; The Perverts Guide to Cinema, 150 min, 2006

Gondry, Michel; the Science of Sleep, 105mins, 2007

Harrison, Nate; Can I Get an Amen? [Sound recording on acetate], total run time 17:46, , 2004

Johnsen, Andreas; Christensen, Ralf; Moltke, Henrik; Good Copy, Bad Copy, Rosforth productions, 58mins, Denmark 2007

Kubrick, Stanley, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, 93 mins, 1964

Shallet, lee, Northern Exposure, ‘Our Tribe’ (Season 3, Episode 12) Original Air Date: January 13, 1992

Thompson, Rob, Northern Exposure, ‘Burning down the house’ (Season 3, Episode 14) Original Air Date: February 3, 1992

 

Digital Disembodiment

 

The defining characteristics of older technologies are valued over the new. Rather than brokenness or obsolescence, musicians speak of the warmth, authenticity, humanity, and even sexuality of analog sounds, tube amplifies, and vinyl LPs, as compared to the coldness, inauthenticity, and disembodied character of digital recording, integrated circuits, and compact discs (Goodwin 1988 265, Théberge 207-13). Eno describes how the apparent “weaknesses” and limitations of instruments and media, these aspects regarded as “most undesirable,” become ‘their cherished trademark.” (Auner, 2000)

Auner’s point of disembodiment of digital recording can be taken almost literally: when we create, play and use a digital file, we no-longer engage with it physically. As the jack of all trades Brian Eno elaborates:

I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated.

Musicians are a touchy feely bunch of people. They like to hold things in their hands, tweak things, bend things, break things, scratch things. Most of the iconic musicians did things with their hands and instruments that had never been done before – most often they interfered with the instruments normal actions – lets say the distortion of hendrix, the scratching of Grandmaster flash. And they could do so because the instruments they used allowed their hands to get in the way.

Digital technologies don’t allow phyiscal movements to be utilised : because we interact with them, as Eno says, through “mental activity”. It doesn’t matter how many buttons i have on screen, how many things to manipulate, how many choices, i have a single mouse with one or two buttons, and a keyboard. No matter what variable i change on-screen, the physical process is the same. I use the same mouse click to copy and mp3 file as i use to transfer thousands of dollars between online bank accounts.

And it doesn’t matter who i am: even the most technically astute programmer is no better (or worse) at clicking on an icon than I. Obviously this is not the case with analogue technologies, which required different physical skills for each machine:

In drawing our attention to the technology itself, its machines and media, noise becomes a metaphor attaching a kind of tactility to sound. Radio static becomes the feel of a tuning knob. The crackle of dust becomes the vinyl itself. The hum of tubes evokes their warm temperature. A stylus dropping carries the weight of a tone arm. (Link, 2001).

We enjoy these actions because they allow individual differences – DJs can take playing a record, a universal, mundane action which (20 years ago) we all would have performed, and skillfully scratch and manipulate music. Their own personal style is communicated through these movements, movements which are difficult, if not impossible to emulate due to the “unreliable muscles” we enact.

I think this is Link’s point when he says that:

Transduction noise can thus function as a “suture” in film theory, stitching our subjectivity into the recording. An LP’s hiss, crackle, and warpage emerge as surprisingly essential aspects of listener identity. (Link, 2001)

Hand Made Donuts

“Are the events of music simply there or do we occasionally sense within them the voices of commentators that enunciate them.” (Abbate; 1991, 15).

Let’s talk about this concept of re-instating the hand-made using the example of a vinyl album released in 2006 by the now dead JDilla (James Dewitt Yancey), titled Donuts. The album is a collection of short edits of soul and funk songs, looped and cut together live on a sampler. It is important to consider that at the time the album was produced, JDilla was in hospital (he passed away three days after the album was released).

The album is heavily stamped with the artist’s own touches – recording the album live, adding errors, scratching, re-cueing the records, adding static, out of time loops, etc. At each song we are reminded that whilst “recordings exist without death, available for nearly infinite playback”, the producer, Dilla, can still be present (Gallope; 2006, 8). This album is an attempt to impress temporaility and ‘live-ness’ onto the continuous commodity of the record.

Gallope sees this drive for ‘live-ness’ as a response to the ‘cold-ness’ of digital recording.

“Performance suddenly appears nostalgic, more real, vulnerable, expressive, ephemeral or drastic. Modern musical performance, whether on the classical stage performing a composed work, touring an album, or reproducing a traditional style, it must be anxiously marked live, authentic, organic, real, as if to preserve the difference of humanity against the constant haunting of immortal, insomniac recordings that seem to proliferate in ever increasing numbers, seeming to come out of nowhere.” (Gallope: 2006, 9)

The liveness of Donuts transcends death of the artist brought about by recording, and in this case, death of the artists corporeality. JDilla demonstrates that the death of body does not equal death of social presence ”…in the absence of the body, social presence still persists, so challenging the current orthodoxy that our embodiment is essential to social membership” (Hallam, Hockey, Howath; 2001, 74). Discogs lists around 13 posthumous releases – he is still releasing albums, creating flows, spawing fansites, producing commodities after death.

‘Ready to Hand’ – Technics and Trust

“Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” - Gallope, Michael

Bernard Steigler, who used the word technics to refer to philosophies of technology, argued that we trust technics as consciousness prosthetics, as workable instruments whose “history we did not live” (Gallope).

“It is this duality of a technical constitution and a necessary trust or faith in the unknowable past that determines consciousness as extended outside itself, where memory is deposited in technical objects, where consciousness is outside itself” (Gallope; 2006, 7). 

Our trust in the technologies we use comes from their congruity with our own body - our trust in their suitability for our hands. Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold – by signiture or by style. But the indsutrial revolution saw the producer’s signiture becoming dislocated from the commodities produced. In order for us to trust and purchase commodities we rely on this hand-mark, and so techniques of re-instating the hand have been employed:

• the re-instatement of ‘hand-made’ aesthetics (made-by-hand).
• the creation of ‘ergonomic’ products (made-for-hand)

buying nothing: digital music.

Yosh kindly queried whether the cd’s ‘becoming’ is valid, because it can quickly cross territories, be copied, shared etc.

The digital file can undergo territorial becomings…but i’d argue that without being dropped back to a physical form, the becomings leave no impression.

a becoming: “produces both a rupture and possiblities for new beginnings” (Guattari, Adolescent revolution, 67). Without a physicality, a history, something to be inscribed on, the becoming is simply a new ‘being’. an mp3 is not marked by time, or space, but flows above them.

a copy is not degraded…the cd carries no trace of its past, asides a short name. a pure simulacrum? it does not present it’s history, it hides it.

its the old homage versus pastiche debate: i’d argue that a vinyl re-edit is more a homage – we know it’s a re-edit. whereas when eminem samples labi schiffre, the digital file doesn’t carry this information: it hides it.

All digital files attempt a concealment of their history. There is no such thing as a vintage / retro mp3. They conceal their workings (binary, lasers) as opposed to the physical analogue record / tape / anything that moves. We cannot see the cd: we load it into the machine – a machine we cannot see the workings of.

The vinyl machine is in some ways translucent – we see each part’s contribution to the whole. Label, to pressing plant, to independant shop. The needle in a groove. Whilst machinic, it has seams to be broken into, opportunities for manipulating. A record player can ‘work’ in mulitple ways: it can create more than one single machinic flow – but a cd player can either work, or not.

Plastic Dreams and the 7″

 

I’ll admit, i’m an addict.  I collect records insatiably, often with little regard for my bank account, and little regard for logic. If i already have a song legally downloaded, or on a cd, i will still go out and buy the vinyl if at all possible.

at estimate i have around 1000 vinyl / vinii?!?

Just for a frame of reference, a new 12″ single, with 1-3 songs will cost around $20, and a new 7″ single will cost around 12-16 dollars. Albums retail for around $30-40. Second hand vinyl varies tremendously, but albums usually cost around half the original price.

So why is it that i am so ready to part with my money for music?

“The buying is what counts, which is one reason why the record buyer is insatiable. The desire to buy does not always co-incide with the desire to hear music…a record is tangiable, like money.” – Evan Eisenberg, ‘Music Becomes a Thing’, 1987

Whilst music formats come and go, and whilst there are many other formats that are both commodified and collected, vinyl has an unbreakable grip on the balls of the collector. I want to begin to explain why, with a particular focus on 45rpm records (7inch singles).

Prior to RCA’s invention of the 7″ single in 1949, music was pressed on brittle shellac 78’s. These were heavy, fragile disks which required a turntable motor to spin at 78rpm.

Celebrating the notion of carefree, high school bobby soxers (whose only concern in life was to have a good time and dance), they began to promote a new social type they dubbed…’teenagers.’ Like bobby soxers, teenagers were tied to the new high school world of dating, driving, music, and enjoyment. The concept was spreading rapidly, particularly as a marketing tool.  – (Palladino, 1996, p. 52)”

The rise of the 7″ co-incides with the rise of the ‘teenager’, as a distinct marketing group in postwar America. The upwardly mobile youth, with leisure time and disposable income were quick to grab onto the new format, which increasily catered to their musical tastes (in particular, ‘pop’ music, rock and roll). 

As well as catering to music genres, the 7″ also shaped them. Time constraints of around 3 mins per side of a 7″ were essential in creating a standard generic length for a pop single, a legacy which continues until this day.

The 7″ single had the advantage of being small, flexible, cheaper to produce, lightweight and incredibly portable. Record players for the first time were marketed as highly portable, to be used outside the house. This was an interesting development as prior to this players were generally as impressive and cumbersome as possible, designed as peices of furniture made to blend into the modern home.

 

This was the birth of music portability, something which has been developed extensively with the ipod and walkman generations. The 1950’s in particular saw a huge number of portable, battery powered players hit the market, including Fisher Price and ‘Smurf’ players. This difference in portability is intially what bifurcated the pop culture format and equipment from the ‘high’ adult culture of the 12″ and home stereo.

Numerous historians of the US sound recording industry have noted that the post-war period saw the rise of what Philip Ennis calls ‘a strategy of age stratification’ within the white mainstream. This involved differentiating market segments by age, with teenagers and adults as the basic constituencies. Ennis argues that, in the early 1950s, the album and singles markets ‘diverged’ and two different ‘exploitation systems’ emerged, radio and jukeboxes for teen-oriented singles, and store display and print advertising for adult-oriented albums. - Spencer Drate, ‘45 Rpm’: Cover art

What is important to note is that the 7″ single, which was the birth of ‘disposable’ music, has slowly worked it was into a ‘high’ culture position. Original pressings of rare collectable tunes fetch exorbitant prices: northern soul vinyl can fetch well over $5000.

So why fetish the 7″?

-Because it was cheaper to produce, smaller labels could release vinyl: possiblity for rarity

-Cost allowed experimentation: skit records, instruction records (even toy instructions)

-Many 7’s contain alternate takes or instrumentals that were not released on album formats. This trend continues, with bootleg labels, mashups etc. still being produced and released on 7″.

-Free ‘promo’ records in magazines, picture postcards, stories. The 7″ was often used as a short-press promotional tool, so copies are scarce. These promos were distributed to radio stations and dj’s in order to generate attention for an album.

-Because records were treated as disposable, finding copies, especially ones in good condition, was difficult

-A physical music collection can be seen as cultural capital:

Cultural capital can be objectified or embodied. Just as books and paintings display cultural capital in the family home, so sub cultural capital is objectified in the form of record collections.” (Shank, Bennett & Toynbee, 2005)

Collector’s mythologize vinyl as a format that is somehow unrelated to the mass music machines of today, which, whilst entirely untrue, makes vinyl seem ‘free’ and authentic. Vinyl is a physical medium, an analog, rather than a digital format. And as such, it degrades, ages, wears and is imperfect. Many vinyls have defects, but it is almost a point of affection, like one grows to love the mole of a beautiful actor. It is a point of indivuality.

Shuffle, Fracture & Time:

Records created the notion that you could program your own listening: the autonomous listener. Rather than be pinned to what the radio dj was playing, you could play your own records, create your own collection. (Highly relevant to the Ipod generation).

“Where radio unites, records fracture. They are well suited to a society where everyone is off pursuing his own dream.” -  Evan Eisenberg, ‘Music Becomes a Thing’, 1987

Recorded music also fractured time: a specific moment (iterally a live music recording, or what the recording become associated with) could be kept and listened to years later. How many movies show the reminiscing old man digging out his favourite song? But i think the format affects this. There is something human about the way a record ages with you, unlike the ‘picture of dorian gray’ digital file, to which time is infinite.

“Man uses the music itself to slip inside time and undermine it” – Evan Eisenberg, ‘Music Becomes a Thing’, 1987

The Plywooden Brain Grotesque

 

Marx’s critique of the ‘wooden brain’ from which ‘grotesque ideas’ form is highly relevant in the commodification of skateboarding culture. The wood from which Marx sees a table being hewn is very similar to the plywood from which a skateboard is formed.  ‘The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a [skateboard] out of it.’ Obviously so, but a table and a skateboard are relatively simple objects. Unlike the clock, or the computer which humans have an uncontrollable urge to glorify as great engineering achievements, a piece of wood is, after all, a piece of wood. So the question is howcan a piece of wood sell for $300 dollars more than another?

The frontpage banner for Element Skateboards website lends hints as to how the mythologization of the skateboard occurs: through the construction of what Benedict Anderson would call an ‘imagined community’. The links at the top include family and community, concepts which aim to humanise the company and create in the consumer a yearning for identity and acceptance. 

An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. In Dogtown where the skaters talk of their Australian fans, and of being swamped by supporters in Japan, they talk of the imagined community which is constructed, i would argue, through an international spread of commodities. If a Japanese skateboarder can purchase a “Alva” skateboard, then he can imagine himself as being involved in the Dogtown movement.

Anderson’s concept relied heavily on the spread of print capitalism to form the nation state (ie. the national identity of say, Australian-ness). I would similarly argue that the spread of image based culture has been the primary medium for skate culture. Skateboarding is still perceived as an ‘authentic’ culture: but this urge is created by what Baudrillard called ‘a nostalgia for the real: a fascination with and desperate search for real people, real values, real sex.’ Whilst initially the Z-boys were ‘real’, they were soon snapped up by the culture machine, packaged and sold. The skateboarding filmmaker’s participation in cultural production is always seen as more ‘authentic’ – but is this justified? Whilst the use of fish eye cameras to capture a wider aspect of action is common, the distortion is only a mild divergence from the dominant modes of filmmaking. Is holding a camera down low really enough to register as different?

 ”Ah, the fisheye… First and foremost, people almost EXPECT to see skaters shot with fisheye lenses since we’ve been seeing those types of shots for years. I don’t know who started it all, but I do know it definitely fits the genre. One of the great things the fisheye does for you is really exaggerate reality. It makes it look like people are jumping higher or flying further than they really are. You can make a 2ft drop look like a 10ft drop with the right angle. It really strokes the skater’s ego.” - “Dizzo” from the creative heaven that is www.istockphoto.com

From Surf to Skate

Initially the skateboarder as an identity was sublimated through the overriding personality of the ’surfer’, which in a way had been legitimized by society.In Dogtown we see all the original riders say how ‘they wanted to bring the surf to the land’ and how skateboarding was simply what they did ‘when the waves were not breaking’.

Also, the skateboard itself was an assemblage stemming from surf culture, the boards being shaped like surfboards initially, and using parts (literally) from rollerblading.  It is only as we see the identity of the skateboarder evolve, we begin to see the evolution of the board into something that is particularly ’skate’: a curved deck with upturned ends.

 I think it would be interesting to note how current skateboards have artwork on the bottom of the board: meaning that to be seen and photographed, particularly in a skating competition, the ‘bottom’ must be presented. Thus the skater is encouraged to perform aerial tricks – bodily movements – in order to fulfill the sponsor’s duties. The branding of clothing is particularly present in skating culture: as the logo comes to signify the capabilities of the body as much as the ‘intel inside’ logo signifies the capabilities of a new computer.

Q: What do Tom Green, Jean Luc Godard and Skateboarders have in common?

Rethinking the Space of the Mall

“The city, like architecture, is like all cultural objects – it is made not once, but remade over and over.”

 

The clip above from Freddy Got Fingered demonstrates alternative uses for the suburban Mecca of the Shopping Mall. The shopping mall has been described as a ‘theatre of everyday life’ (Shields, 1992: 7), and as such includes all the necessities of a small city. ‘Strolling, browsing and window shopping are considered acceptable practices because department stores are socially accessible and there is no time limit on how long one can spend in them…’ But the spatial arrangement of the department store also carries inherent modes of surveillance characterized by correct and incorrect modes of shopping. The skateboarder in ‘Freddy got fingered’ avoids the traps of the mall, the disorientation and the desire to purchase by making a beeline through the complex, working his way through the crowds and levels. He literally avoids the authority figures and creates a new use for the mall as a route of travel.

The scene seems reminiscent of Godard’s Band A Part (The Outsiders) in which the would be criminals try to beat the world record for visiting the Louvre: 9:43.

 

It is an absurd act: one that flies in the face of high culture. They pass through the halls of civilization at maximum speed, ignoring all that is around them: specifically the ideals of western society. In doing so they use the gallery as a place of recreation and challenge. The skateboarder does similar things: but they travel using a product of commodity culture. Is the gesture then less worthwhile – less poignant? Is Parkour, which does not rely on a technology as such more pure? Less commodified? Even when Nike can use it as a concept to sell shoes and an image?

This concept of movement through space is mentioned in a very romantic, but worthwhile essay by Peter Lyssiotis (a Melbournian)(read it here). In it he says:

“When we are out walking, we confront social and natural constraints, boundaries and obstacles. But these are the very sources, the conditions of possibility, of the experiences, pains, and pleasures that we encounter on the street. In an aeroplane and in a car, these particular constraints are transcended, as are the experiences that accompanied them.”

When Tom Green skates through the mall, his route changes due to the obstacles he encounters – having to ride up a wall to avoid security becomes a ’trick’, becomes ’style’. This element of serendipity is mentioned in Dogtown, when Stacey Peralta talks of Jay Adams, and his ability to turn a trick that was failing, into something new. This reinterpretation of obstacles is equally important in parkour, which treats literal barriers such as walls, fences and bars as objects to move the body around and through.  

Whilst David Belle in the Parkour video transcends commodity culture temporarily (he literally disrupts a TV aerial at one point) he begins and ends in highly commodified spaces: the office and the TV room, where he is seen passively sitting. In the end, once the subculture is presented in a (mass) media form, it has already been commodified, because the media forms themselves have inbuilt modes of communication that favour this.

Whilst the ideology of the skater would seem to reject the ideals of commodity culture, the skater can only exist in a commodified world. The spaces they inhabit, the clothes they wear, the technologies they use are products of capitalism. However, the skateboarder does demonstrate a large amount of cultural appropriation in transforming the commodities; creating myth, and using space in new ways.

In the end, the skateboarder seems to move through a conflicting world of capitalism and the authentic, where the identity is one that can be bought and sold. However, in the brief and transcendent moments betweenthese: eg. creating a new movement in a new space, i think authenticity does exist. For about as long as it takes gravity to kick in, and the video to be posted on YouTube.

 Bibliography:

Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., London: Verso.

Adorno, Theodore, and Horkheimer, Max (1993) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception in the cultural studies reader, ed. Simon During. London & New York: Routledge.

Barthes, Roland, The Eiffel Tower, and other mythologies, University of California Press, Berkeley ,1997

Borden, Iain (2001) Performing the City: Commodity Critique, in Skateboarding, Space and the city: architecture and the body, Oxford and New York: Berg, 229-260

Lyssiotis, Peter, Gyorgy Scrinis, CD’s and other things Backyard Press, Melbourne, 1994

Martin, Fran (ed), Interpreting Everyday Culture, Arnold Publishing, London, 2003

Marx, Karl(1867) The Fetishism of the commodity and the secret thereof”, Karl Marx Capital: An Abridged edition, ed David McLellan. Oxford University Press, 1999

Filmography:

Godard, Jean Luc Band A Part 1964

Green, Tom, Freddy Got Fingered 2001

Peralta, Stacey, Dogtown and Z-Boys 2001