Twelve
stories
Story
1 Unexpected
discovery: During a visit of an ageing relative: "ethics"
, who is whiling away it's remaining time on this planet reminiscing
about the good old times, our writer accidentally discovered "Art".
Art, by itself, in a clean 'white cube style' room, looked old. Appearing
fatigued and frail, Art was asleep, alone in the room and hooked up
to a full life-support system. After all the recent claims at sighting
Art in various locations around the world, put forward by critics and
academics and the odd citizens (who wouldn't recognise art if it fell
on them .... ie. anyone without an arts degree), it seems peculiar that
Art was discovered in such an inactive state. Obviously someone is interested
in keeping Art alive, despite it's obvious frailty and the unlikeliness
of Art recovering it's vigour which we all remember so fondly. Who? Story
2 Ingres
did the entire painting from sketches. Data projector lashes into action.
The lecturer quietly converses with his computer: yes, the software
has everything ready. All the URL's are already pre-loaded into the
presentation panel. Netscape 24.1 is sooo intuitive.. Before the the
words "Jean Auguste Dominique" have completely rolled of his
tongue, before the badly pronounced "Ingres" has a chance
to follow, the computer has already anticipated and created the necessary
links. The lecturer continued to make references to various sketches
and to demonstrate how these sketches convincingly make up most of the
figurative content of the circular canvas. The students are mostly dozing.
If they need any of the information presented here, they will get it
of their laptops. Nobody has used the word plagiarism for years. Some
drawings were excecuted several years before 1852 when the painting
itself began. The "Turkish bath" no longer hangs in the Louvre.
Why? Story
3 Interlace
the Futurist manifesto with O.S. error message listing. Pick colours
that also work well in Grayscale. Will this work? Story
4 Disembodied
intellects proliferate the interface. They compete for primary positions.
This means the retention of the margin. How? Story
5 Imagine
the memes of the entire aesthetic dimension of our time suffering from
a variant of Huntingtons disease. Can you? Story
6 Can "Art"
take on a new name and identity, like someone in some witness protection
program, start again...someplace else.. Can it? Story
7 Digital
Aesthetics. Yes, I know about that. I use a Holbein Number 5 brush,
having of course rounded the pig-bristles a little more away from the
flattish middle of the curving tip by lovingly re-scripting that part
of the brush . The Shaft of the brush was moulded to my fingers by a
Korean custom stylist. My avatar does all my work. I make tiny "likenesses"
in the style of Daguerre. Precious, stilted and restrained likenesses
for my publicity shy clients. They pay me well. For what? Story
8 Something
about passion: "After all this time, we still don't know where
passion goes when it goes". This sentence stayed on after all the
other words from the book were forgotten. I think it was Tom Robins
that typed them first for "Still-life with woodpecker". I
wanted to write something about passion and all I could come up with
was a quotation, a drifting fragment. I am learning more from what I
cannot do, from what I could never do, or from the unlearned skills
that are barely a flicker of information in the now barren expanse of
my memories. Who was I before? Story
9 Something
about truth. We had just walked through a romantic and awe-inspiring
frozen gorge. Wet and clammy granite around us, natural drama unfolding
in the form of water rushing past bends which would slow it enough to
cause it to freeze. The Hoelentalklamm near Garmish-Partenkirchen is
beyond Wagnerian. I was eight or ten . The whole family was on one of
it's rare outings. My mother had purchased an Agfa camera recently.
It was chrome and warm grey, with a grey vinyl case and strap. She lovingly
allowed me to carry this, the most advanced and precious technology
in our household through the gorge. Naturally I was not allowed to view
the damp and dangerous beauty of the gorge through the camera or take
the camera of my shoulder for that matter. It dropped. I could feel
the sudden limpness of the loose strap sliding of my shoulder. The impact
of the camera on granite produced a clatter which terrifyingly pre-empted
my mothers hysterical reaction. Last Christmas: my son, age twelve,
gave my mother a present. He plays politics better than his father so
he produced a card to go with the present. I mean he made the card himself.
How? He scanned one of Larsons cartoons, one he liked, into Photoshop,
positioned the image, coloured some parts and printed it with one side
blank to allow for folding and captioning. He wrote some standard Christmas
greeting, but personalised for my mother (it included her name) into
the blank half. She exclaimed superlatives about the fact that he made
this card for her and that he is so clever, knowing how to use a computer
and "that she could never do anything like that". These two
events will always mean more to me than the sum of their parts. Why? Story
10 Something
about expectations. We mine the future for elements of truth that we
are not yet able to contradict. Does certainty provide comfort? Story
11 Forgetting
Acid on a Rembrandt, a virus in the software, grass finally growing
on a mass-grave. Upset ? Story
12 Remembering
The first computer I used was a Tectronics desktop. In 1978 it felt
important to sit in front of this machine and make myself familiar with
code named "basic" (learning quickly that "basic"
and "simple" actually mean quite different things). That same
year I learned a lot about Dada and Surrealism. Marcel Duchamp became
my hero. I worshipped his mind, his clarity and understanding and insatiably
read everything I could find on his life and work. There was a lot.
I still have a bookshelf full of books on Duchamp and I still admire
his mind. The Techtronics machine had cost about three times the cost
of a new family car or half the value of a house. It had less intelligence
than a family pet, but roughly the same capacity of built-in memory.
My analogies between the Techtonics and the family pet does not stop
here, the similarities continue when I remember my bloody-minded all-nighters
working on a programme for "hidden line removal". It fits
the same category as trying to make a cat eat something it prefers not
to. Even if you succeed, you have had to endure more than the corresponding
value of outcome. Duchamp understood our craving for empiricism, absolutes,
truth and value. That's why he maneuvered these expectations into a
check-mated position so frequently and so easily. Are we having fun
yet? Ending
© Werner Hammerstingl 1997 |