Wrong? A Project About Doing Things 'Right'

[Jeroen D. Stout]

I certainly am arguing here from my own point of view, and mostly for the sake of argument, rather than representing any group

I see your point, and I think we simply have opposite delectations; total havoc gives me no life-affirming existentialism, havoc gives me absolute nihilism. For me to take BF3 serious would probably mean enticing myself to depression as I would be part of a world and an experience that has no meaning to me.

And equally, I do not feel the flower is always there; all flowers die. To me feeling alive is enjoying the flower while it is there, or revelling in realizing some mathematical equation, or to see a returning smile from a stranger; a moment that life may be appreciated, understood or shared, it may be thrilling and yet tranquil.

This is truly into 'how I experience it' territory - but meditation, trance, 'engulfment' in sex bore me to no end. Instead, I seek control over my voice in singing (which may in experience come close to trance), see sex as an artistic medium in itself (much like cooking) that, if anything, channels my thoughts. In reaching a gallop with a horse it is thrilling to exert control over oneself, one's fear of the speed, and yet also directly finding a way to comprehend, compliment and release the horse. The enjoyment of me comes from such understanding and mastery in myself or another, rather than being overcome.

But I think now that we simply have differing reactions. BF3 does not engage me because to me, there is no transcendental nature and I find my brain running out of fuel before succumbing to lethargy. And conversely, I do remember one scene in Swan Lake which comes close to transcending life; as-if for one moment I had in my mind perfect movement, the combination of control and elegance, like for one moment my whole understanding of the moment came together.

In that sense, I would not say I am fooled by the representational - far from it. Despite many dissuasions I have learned to enjoy the representational and see it as the goal of my life to enjoy. We use different lines of thinking to add to our lives. I do not think that on an aesthetic level seeing a depiction of a horse as I understand a horse is any less important than a depiction of war which overwhelms me. That I prefer things to 'come together in clarity' is clearly my preference; and personally, perhaps, I simply do not see 'edges' where you see them.

[ghostwheel]

Beauty, the representational, the expression and the enjoyment of it is not fluff. Your attitude KnifeFightBob, is more of the same crap we've had to put up with throughout the 20th century. It's not truth, it's just a bad attitude.

[God at play]

Thanks for your clarification Bob, I do think it is very important to have a variety of perspectives here.

[ghostwheel]

Other points of view are important. We don't want this to be an echo chamber. But I'm still going to argue about it.

[God at play]

But I'm still going to argue about it.

Agreed! Debate encourages progress.

[ghostwheel]

KnifeFightBob, you know, all Metal music has always had a pretty damn big romantic streak. From the imagery to the lyrics. Sure, it tends to focus on the dark side of things but that affinity for the sublime is very strong and persistent.

Your argument that the consequence is more important reminds me of the process vs finished work argument. What is more important, the process of creation or the creation itself? Actually, you're going a step further; it almost sounds like you're saying the intentions of the artist are irrelevant to the audience. In your example, you didn't care about what the band was saying or trying to accomplish artistically, you were purely about your own personal experience. I've been making this argument here in an old thread. That the intentions of the artist are, ultimately, irrelevant.

Your mistake is that you're saying your experience is the only one that has any merit. That somehow, all other experiences are more shallow than your view of art. Everything else is "kitsch" and fake (fucking Greenberg). You can't make a pluralist argument then contradict it. That is exactly the mistake all contemporary art has made. You're chasing your own tail.

[KnifeFightBob]

It's been a few days since I posted. I will briefly touch on some things that have come up.

@Ghostwheel: When I said "fluff" in that context, I didn't mean what you are implying I meant. I rather meant that the things, reduced to themselves, was not what the experience of BF3 was about for me. Looking at the particulars becomes uninteresting when the total sum is what I am after. That does not deny merit to individual elements, however.

Re: metal, you are quite correct Ghostwheel. Then there is of course metal and metal, where the things I am most interested in personally are lesser bedfellows with Romanticism than most things. Still your point is generally very, very valid. There is a classical conception of musical performance and setup involved as well, so much of what we think of metal is really just a smaller version of the classic orchestra. Bands like Angelic Process or even Atari Teenage Riot however contradict to small or large extent much of that.

In any complex discussion there are going to be moments where contradictions occur. 'The process of creation' is not without merit, but I think it is up to each work on its own to involve or not involve the legacy and story of it within its presentation. Often it bears no visible marks of that. The thing with game design is that "ideology" or at the very least, possibility spaces, are all that design does. It is structural work. Intentions are encoded in the design and (by other called 'gameplay') layer. In that regard I do NOT HAVE TO be intending anything (ergo, agitprop or idiot propaganda) because my intentions have already formed what you are playing, interacting with. That end has nothing to do with classical aesthetics. My problem here has probably been in the fact that I place much greater value in the design stages than in any other, so it seems we are at odds, although that is a difference only in what we are interested in dealing with. Notgames should not only vary, opposed to mainstream games, their look, but also the underlying presumptions. This is the only thing I think the initiative should concern itself with.

EDIT: I certainly do not wish to think that I am not a pluralist. Without breaking into a long-winded thing, it may help to understand in what context I do believe there to be a need for "deep" or "shallow" as terms when considering art appreciation. Remember that I have not used them, at least not extensively or that I remember at all actually, through the course of this thread. By a "shallow" appreciation I believe novice, new, or to some extent uninterested people can subscribe. This would involve acts of appreciation (looking, hearing, playing...) that involve immediate properties. This is not to say it has a qualitative difference. The work is just not "hiding" meaning or anything else. A broad range of people get into it this way, most probably.
A "deep" understanding understands 'short-cuts', the history of the artist/work/medium to a fuller extent than the novice, and a "deep" appreciator can find meaning or beauty or worth in details that are lost to one without the prerequisite understanding. By making dogma of certain art forms, expressions and laying value in socially conditioned categories we are back in Nazi Germany. No one wants that. What modern art has done has been building an increasingly intertwined network of connections, far too vast to be graspable for most, and likely any not directly involved in that scene. It is a form of "nerdship" (a fundamentally positive work in my vocabulary) that has, as a negative consequence, forced out a great many appreciators. In this I think that Ghostwheel is very much right. But I do not accept that art should only deal with a defined range of emotions, take a certain dogmatic stance against the positive effects of recent and modern culture and art, and it should not deny the possibility for this "deeper" appreciation. Essentially a deep understanding is formed around those things we cherish the most: in my life things like fine whisky and beer, art and other cultural artifacts and sexual encounters. All of these have evolved with me over a decade now. None of them came in a package deal. By only taking these things for face-value I believe we cannot truly merge with them or make them 'important' in our lives if they are placed in a system that is generic. Thus art must allow itself to be complex. The thing is just to remember that its condition ought to be equally susceptible to the open, the closed, the immediate and the metaphorical.

[ghostwheel]

"Angelic Process"! You get happy drone metal fan points.

[Jeroen D. Stout]

@KnifeFightBob

I agree with what you write in your last paragraph. Obviously I do not agree with your tastes or perhaps even the way you look at the world, but I am happy you are open about art as such - I want to be too. I hope you did not mistake my argumentation for 'we do not serve your kind here'. But obviously I argue for my taste; my taste would render me a solipsist if I did not engage others.

In fact, I think for culture to get any solidity it needs to have some form of dogma - though all in "this manner of looking". Only a chaos-appreciating culture would benefit from nobody being allowed to hold any claim to a truth larger than themselves I am happy to always serve the guests at the table from the right if that pleases decorum.

My problem with contemporary art, to just underline, is that I do not commonly like it, that there is a lot of it, and that culturally it has laid mines for other forms of art. However: The moment neo-classical art rivals its popularity I will happily co-exist in the same sense that I am somewhat able to co-exist with people who think t-shirts are decent enough to walk the streets with.

I am merely disliking something out of lack of cultural power, in that sense. I have no problem with you personally, even if I will be tempted to bicker with you until the forum runs out of disk space.

(To illustrate this: I still think flowers are more potent than machine guns to an attuned mind )

[AADA7A]

I enjoy your different takes on flowers, Stout and KnifeFight. For me, both are valid, at different points in time, in relation to different experiences/discourses. I can submerge myself in the reality of both emotions (flower as always dying, appreciation, and beauty as always there, thus to be appreciated must be circumcised, stripped away).

I think concerning the matter of Fukuyamas end of history and whatnot, postanarchism is important for my understanding:

"The prefix "post-" does not mean 'after anarchism', but refers to the challenging and disruption of typically accepted assumptions within frameworks that emerged during the Enlightenment era. This means a basic rejection of the epistemological foundations of classical anarchist theories, due to their tendency towards essentialist or reductionist notions – although post-anarchists are generally quick to point out the many outstanding exceptions, such as those noted above. Such an approach is considered to be important insofar as it widens the conception of what it means to have or to be produced rather than only repressed by power, thus encouraging those who act against power in the form of domination to become aware of how their resistance often becomes overdetermined by power-effects as well. It argues against earlier approaches that capitalism and the state are not the only sources of domination in the moment in which we live, and that new approaches need to be developed to combat the network-centric structures of domination that characterize late modernity."

Or as Ian Bogost has said concerning Persuasive Games: "Games like these undermine the very idea of "social change," if change implies solution and resolution. Instead of social change, we may end up with something more like "social churn"—situations in which people and things constantly negotiate with one another in order to struggle toward a tentative conclusion, one that will always be swooped up again into another foam of swirling sea."