Conceptual art: what's the point?

version

Well-known member
we had an intellectual discussion about shit in literature a while back. maybe on the nova trilogy thread?
me and luke have these aesthetic perimeters we refer to as "faecal". it crops up in heavy metal, in rambling rants, in school shooter manifestos.

and here it is on page one explicitly. a complete preoccupation with "shit". it's written in total school shooter, rambling syntax. alienated, fustrated teenage boy sentence structures.
 

version

Well-known member
I like Pynchon's thing when he starts going on about paper and its three uses. The three American truths. Shit, money and The Word.
 

luka

Well-known member
did you mention the shit eating in GR in our intellectual discussion? cant remember
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'd recommend going atm if you can, it's usually so busy, plus they've got a lot of stuff on loan at the moment. You really could, were you stoned enough, spend several days in there.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Joyce being into shit. Is that a sort of sacreligious thing, do you think? Or is it to do with humiliation, one way or the other? It somehow seems like an apposite perversion for the author of Ulysses.
 

luka

Well-known member
being into shit, like being into feet, is a fetish i cant imagine myself into. not my cup of tea at all. i csn see how shit functions symbolically in literature, but actually being into it, nah mate, not me.
 

luka

Well-known member
i was with my mates 8 year old twins on monday and one of them was boasting about a green shit he'd recently done
 

version

Well-known member
I had a mate claim he'd done a perfectly spherical shit during an acid trip. I didn't see it, but I smelt it in the corridor and it definitely smelled unusual.
 

version

Well-known member
Joyce being into shit. Is that a sort of sacreligious thing, do you think? Or is it to do with humiliation, one way or the other? It somehow seems like an apposite perversion for the author of Ulysses.
One of Bloom’s mooted entrepreneurial schemes involves selling human waste on an industrial scale. Joyce’s work is mired in excremental language and imagery: water closets, commodes, sewers, ‘clotted hinderparts’, ‘slopperish matter’, ‘nappy spattees’, ‘pip poo pat’ of ‘bulgar … bowels’ and so on. Nowhere is Joyce more potty-mouthed than when taking on the language and procedure of religious devotion. At the outset of Finnegans Wake the books of Genesis and Exodus become urinary and colonic tracts and Christ the salmon turns into a big brown trout, a ‘brontoichthyan’ thunderfish or turd floating in a stream mingling with ‘piddle’. But, again, the process has already begun in Ulysses. Bloom starts his day by votively bowing his head as he enters his outhouse to perform the act of defecation that will see him hailed as ‘Moses, Moses, King of the Jews’ who ‘wiped his arse in the Daily News’. Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginary stool sample floating in what he has been presenting as an altar bowl. The shaving bowl doesn’t contain faeces, but other sorts of human waste: stubble and cast-off skin cells. These things, too, belong to the category of excreta, as do phlegm, bile, navelcords and blood: whatever is excessive, leaking, trailing, dragging.

Ulysses is packed to overflowing with such things: in it every concept, no matter how intangible or rarefied, is transformed into something lowly, degraded, abject – and the more so the more elevated it held itself to be. Poetry turns into snot; nature, and the contours of the Romantic sublime, into a bowl of sluggish vomit. Forget Apollonian beauty: what Bloom wants to know is whether statues of Greek gods have arseholes. For him, the heart, seat of refined emotions, is a rusty pump; communion is cannibalism; justice just ‘means … everybody eating everyone else’. He’s obsessed with falling bodies, their weight and volume and the speed at which they fall. Ulysses is a heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book. What has fallen in it, into it, is everything literature previously held to be immaterial or abstract: in its pages metaphysics collapses into what the artist Jake Chapman nicely calls meatphysics. It’s hard to think, outside of zombie movies, of a work more omnivoric – and omni-emetic. Rats eat corpses; savages eat missionaries; Bloom eats cheese; cheese eats itself; dogs eat themselves, spew themselves out, eat themselves again; the city and the day eat and spew out Bloom …


https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/tom-mccarthy/ulysses-and-its-wake
 

version

Well-known member
I was thinking about Luka's War on Dust the other day. Kept thinking about dust allergies being triggered in your own home being the body reacting violently to its own cast off cells.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
One reason I like reading old books (besides the fact they're well vetted as being worth reading) is that people in the 19th century could see things that we now can't see.
I remember reading something from 19th century I think, I forget what unfortunately (maybe just maybe it was Guy de Maupassant), but anyway it was about an artist. Just a short story I suppose, and it had a bit where peasants were looking at his work on his easel (cos he'd gone into the countryside to be inspired obviously) and they couldn't see what it was. He - the author not the character - was claiming that uneducated people literally couldn't understand a figurative painting, couldn't recognise that it was supposed to represent something, were unable to translate the 2 dimensional daubs of paint into anything more. Can that have really been true though? I mean when you see people running away from the Lumiere Bros train they didn't have a problem seeing what it was... was it just GdeM (or whoever it was) assuming that uneducated people were like animals or what?
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
a lot of conceptual art is just about size and scale isn't it? my friend was telling me about an exhibition she went to last week and how much she was annoyed by the laziness of it all. you just think of something and magnify it with 10000 and it becomes conceptual.

Katharina-Grosse-c-Jacobs-2-900.jpg


i feel this is more a showcase of some sort of paint brand than art.

christo is an even better example:

61919667.jpg


how much attention would this guy get if he'd use small objects such as a chair or a trumpet?

it's something you see among painter as well. canvasses getting bigger and bigger and bigger. for scale and size will automatically create some sort of experience. it also functions as a form of gatekeeping because in order to work in such dimensions you need to have materials, money and connections.
 

luka

Well-known member
Anish Kapoor taught me that. It's about scale and scale = expenditure = corporate sponsors
 
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