man & nature # 135 ~ the daily show
Monday, May 4, 2009 at 08:31AM 
A sign of things to come • Red True Temper wheelbarrowStruan Gray wrote:
I like your blog, and your photos, and - I think - you.
But your writing about the academic lunatic fringe is just so much willy waving at strawmen. You are using exactly the tactics you say you despise in them: name calling, empty rhetoric, and a firmly closed mind. It's Limbaugh lite, and it leaves a nasty taste.
Eagleton isn't the lunatic fringe by a long chalk. Even the bleeding chunk you've posted here makes sense. You don't have to buy into the whole post-modernist programme to see the utility of thinking about how your available tools and habitual mental habits might limit your ability to be creative.
Struan - I'm just having a spot of fun at the expense of the academic lunatic fringe but, that said, I don't think that that fringe is merely a harmless and/or irrelevant phenomenon.
Case in point, Milton Friedman and his gang of free-market zealots - it was Friedman and his gang that advanced and propagated the ruinous concept that laissez-faire government policy is more desirable than government intervention in the economy. It was academic economic theories from the U of C gang - markets always work and that only markets work / markets can't go wrong and government intervention can't serve a useful purpose - that were adopted by the free-market zealots / absolutists. The entire world is now living in a reality that has flowed from that academic genius.
But, this a photo blog, so I write about the academic lunatic fringe and what I see as its effects upon the photo world and the Art world, Photography Division, in particular. I don't like what I see - the fetish of concept over what is actually pictured. So (admittedly) I engage in a bit of verbal theatrics to make my point although ....
I prefer to think of my verbal theatrics as being more from the Jon Stewart/Daily Show School of Social Criticism as opposed the Limbaugh School. That is why I post under the nom de blog of gravitas et nugalis, aka - seriousness and lack of appropriate seriousness. Get it? You know, the ying-yang thing. A bit of self-deprecation, if you will.
That said, I'm thinking of changing that to gravitas et levitas in order to make the distinction a bit more clear. On the other hand, either way I do it, my nom de blog may be a bit too subtle for the room.
Reader Comments (6)
Has someone been reading "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein? I visited the University of Chicago not too long ago and I swear I felt the ghost of Uncle Milton clanking around and disturbing the peace. What a crock o' shit he and his boys have dumped on the world eh?
Perhaps I'm over sensitive.
But I think you're over-stressing the importance and influence of the hard-core po-mo theorists. Worse, I think the general way you bandy words like 'academic' about papers over the good work that is done in teaching institutions with an inaccurate label.
How do you feel about photographers like Emmet Gowin, Nicholas Nixon, Thomas Joshua Cooper or Abelado Morrel? All academic, all successful, canonical even, and all producing work with a strong conceptual coherence. Your postings suggest you would throw them out with the bathwater.
Don't change the blog title (I'd have to change my bookmarks file :-) Demagogic language puts you in sleazy company, even if the target is a deserving one. At the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm: you can do better than that.
Hmmm, this may be a Euro-thing, but I'm afraid Jon Stewart's is not the voice I'm hearing on this blog. Like Struan, I find the disconnect between the tough-guy, no-nonsense, "WTF" words and the sensitive, interesting and often compelling visuals a puzzle (and, if you like, a perfect example of Terry Eagleton's fairly commonplace point that "to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself").
In fairness, this does seem a common feature of the blogs of American artists and photographers, which often seem to give with one hand and rapidly take back in equal measure with the other. I'm reminded of a recent review of poet August Kleinzahler that commented on the tough-guy rhetoric of artists in the US, which the author sees as a defensive reflex in a hyper-masculine culture that is suspicious of poetry and art.
In case you don't "get it", your pointless and slightly insulting combativeness in the last two paragraphs is an example of what we're talking about. Unnecessary.
N.B. Since you raise it, the name change is not a bad idea -- "nugalis" is an adjective (and an obscure one, at that; "a bit too subtle for the room" is putting it mildly) and doesn't pair happily with the noun "gravitas". "Nugae" (nonsense, trifles) might have worked better, though levitas is readily understandable by anyone without access to a dictionary...
Oh, come on. Don't be such bullies, you people. Anyone who can write "photography that pricks the unthought known" in their banner heading clearly has language issues. Give him a break.
The pictures are nice, aren't they? Although perhaps faking the Holga corners is a little too knowing, dare I say even a touch too po-mo, for some tastes. Perhaps Mark is saying "Look, I know and you know the frame is a convention, and to emphasize this I'm going to pretend, in a purely rhetorical trope, that these pictures were made with a completely different sort of camera, something which both you and I know not to be true, yet at the same time can accept as an aesthetic foregrounding device, if you will. The images are seen as if through an imaginary/imagining/imaging porthole, allowing the play of differance in the arbitrarily placed frame." Or maybe not.
Ah, yes, the acquired taste. After quite some time reading here, I'm into the swing.
Personally I like the rants. Not sure it's quite Jon Stewart but I see the leaning. Sometimes, to get people to think, let alone enter into discourse, one has to be overtly provocative. It's a way to oercome stasis or inertia. I certainly don't think as hard about these subjects as I do without coming here.
More I say, and if you don't like, you can always leave.
All of the po-mo, no po-mo, esoteric artisitic blog-o-ranting by day frees the mind of gravitas et blovius to be able to yell at the tv while watching ice hockey by night.