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Seeing far beyond his time — John Berger’s Way of Seeing (1972)

Art & Criticism, video
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If you have two hours to spare, spend them watching Ways of Seeing, a four part documentary by John Berger from 1972, ostensibly on how photography has changed the way in which we see art, but moving beyond that to examining the European tradition of oil painting, what its purpose was and how it’s reflected in modern day publicity.

For something itself now fiftytwo years old, from a time when colour television was still a novelty and no such thing as personal computers let alone mobile phones and social media existed, it’s still incredibly relevant. Just that first episode alone, looking at how a painting was changed from a still, silent image rooted to one unique location to something that can be chopped up, moved about, re-contextualised through the ability to photograph and reproduce it, is a revelation. Then in the second episode he takes a punt at how nudes, female nudes, are represented in oil painting: how these are not naked, truthful images of the women they supposedly portray but passive pictures to be consumed by the male owner of the painting. The female figure as a possession to be displayed. And then, echoing what he said in the first episode, that he too uses these painting to send his own messages, he acknowledges the absurdity of his the sole voice on the subject and hands over to a round table of women to discuss this further.

Episode three than looks at the real purpose of the oil painting as a medium, not the lofty ideals ascribed to it, and argues that it is about showing off your possessions as the owner/displayer. That in turn leads to the fourth episode where it juxtapositions publicity and advertisements with the oil painting tradition as a sort of mirror image. If paintings shows the things you already own and you in control of them, ads feed the dream of owning them, the aspiration.

A very heady mix of ideas here and no wonder it had such an impact. It is an interesting rebuttal to the far more traditional view of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), to which this was in response. Art as a mystical, uplifting activity versus art as a capitalist tool that needs democratisation as much as any other such tool. In this context, the most interesting idea of all may have come from the end of the first episode, after he has argued that images are like words, but:

The images may be like words but there is no dialogue yet. You cannot reply to me. FOR THAT TO BECOME POSSIBLE IN THE MODERN MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION ACCESS TO TELEVISION MUST BE EXTENDED BEYOND IT’S PRESENT NARROW LIMITS.

Fifty years on we got this through social media; now we know that this democratizing dialogue has broken our modern elites’ minds.

The Rest Is Indeed Noise

Music, video
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For the past few months I’ve been mostly been listening to classical music in its broadest possible definition, everything from 17th century baroque pieces to the work of 20th century composers like Bernd Alois Zimmermann here.

Listening to his Intercomunicazione today it struck me that this is Zimmerman doing in 1967 something not too dissimilar from what bands like Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten or Nurse with Wound would be doing roughly a decade later, just with classic instruments rather than electronic ones. It activates the same neurons as their music in my head. A far cry perhaps from a Mozart or Beethoven or even a Mahler of Schoenberg, but even Beethoven’s Ninth was said to be deliberately unplayeable when it was published. Apparantly it’s only due to the improved skills of musicians today that we even stand a chance of hearing it in its intended form. Not that different in intent perhaps from what Zimmermann does here.

La jeunesse emmerde le Front national

Fascists, politics, video
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How can it be that this song and this slogan from it is once again relevant, forty years after it was first sung?

I love Bérurier Noir and this song, but it’s fucking frustrating that the same issues they sang against back in 1985 are still alive and kicking now in 2024. François Guillemot gets it exactly right her in this interview in The Guardian:

Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.

It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.

She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.

I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.

The past four decades all through Europe and America we’ve seen our political choices being steadily reduced to one between cynical centrists slowly destroying the world to enrich their friends and literal fascists promoted as their main opposition as they’re less dangerous to the status quo than anything even vaguely leftist. Whenever anything on the left has had even a small change of getting near power it is stomped to death (cf. Corbyn) while people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen are activily promoted. So now in France you have a choice between Macron, already executing the sort of policies Le Pen would kill for and Le Pen, but at least there there still is a leftist movement to oppose both. In the UK meanwhile the only thing you can chose is the colour of the tie the leader of the crackdowns and austerity party will wear, while in the US it’s between genocide Joe and cheeseburger Nazi Trump. Forty years of neoliberal centrism really has achieved a lot.

In a better world we could all follow our obsessions this way

science fiction, video
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Everybody has played Tetris right? I remember when my little brother got the original Gameboy for his birthday and that was one of the games he also got for it: everybody in our family played it. Simple but addictive, something you play for five minutes or an hour and you can put down again.

But of course there are always people who get obsessed even by this. Ever since it first came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System, people have been trying to beat it. But what does that even mean? That’s what this video tries to explain by diving into the history of people trying to beat Tetris:

This is not normally the sort of thing I’m interested in, but I got it through a Twitter recommendation or maybe it showed up in the Youtube algorithm and I ended up watching it when it struck me that this was the future we had always been promised. This is basically the sort of shit the people in the Culture fill their days with. Beating Tetris really doesn’t matter, it’s neither useful nor will advance your career but it is something that people rather than AI excel in: stting yourself arbitrary challenges as part of play. Throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties the assumption always was that automation meant we would need to work less and would have more leisure time to fill, but instead we got shittier jobs for worse pay. In a better world everybody could be a Blue Scuti and follow their obsessions like he did.