Tuesday, April 20, 2010

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Our CATTt is derived from the one implicit in WIP?  Modernist arts are referenced throughout this text as a relay for understanding the "non-objective" (non-mimetic) treatment of ideas in the history of philosophy.  The "Documents of Contemporary Art" series includes a collection on "The Artist's Joke," which might have worked.  Duchamp anchors this collection, as he does the one we used on "Appropriation."  Pressed by an interviewer to accept sophisticated hermeneutic readings of his Readymades (such as the geometry book left out in the rain), Duchamp replied, "It was a joke.  A pure joke.  To denigrate the solemnity of a book of principles" (cited in Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art).

Appropriation is a twofer, since it includes the bit strategy while foregrounding the logical operation of detournement.  The CATTt context frames the collage method first in relation to the quarrel between philosophy and commerce.  Advertising already uses appropriate inference, including bachelor machine juxtapositions and fallacies of ambiguity and relevance.  The apparatus context shows that the flow of mass or pop media discourse is the "natural language" of electracy (pop media : electracy :: inscribed Greek epics : literacy).  Appropriation is electrate "writing" (designing).  The categories of image metaphysics are emerging through this modernist arts practice of the photogram (the principle of "taking" pictures).  The second point is that appropriation in general, and detournement in particular, extend the logic of joke-work fully into conduction as the fourth inference principle (the one that electracy adds to the -ductions invented within literacy).  The instruction from the CATTt is to introduce detournement into the joke mechanism, as the ultimate device for turning up the unthought.  Routine distinguishes its direction (attitude), its -vert on the plane of immanence, as diversion (not conversion, perversion, subversion, or adversion).

One example illustrating the logic is Jeff Wall on Dan Graham's Homes for America (1966-67).
The magazine pieces are structured as small, ironically insignificant defeats for liberationist ideas, as "defeatist interventions" in the mechanisms of ideological dominations.  They are aimed at interrupting the flow of standardized, falsified representation and language, and inducing a "mini-crisis" for the reader or viewer by means of the inversions they create.  Reflected in the provocations and interventions characteristic of 1960s Situationism,  in which an unexpected and confrontational gesture interrupts the established rhythm of relationships in a specific context, and induces a form of contestation, paradox or crisis, this approach thereby exposes the forms of authority and domination in the situation, which are normally imperceptible or veiled. The most notable artistic image of this is the unexpected "void" or "rupture" in this seamlessly designed social surface, and conceptualism's origins are filled with such blanks, erasures, tears and cuts [,,,]  It aggravates Pop irony by means of humour noir, and attempts to elicit a recognition of the terroristic aspects of the normalized environment of images, things, spaces and mechanisms (Appropriation, Evans, Ed., 43).

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