animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

can someone please explain the appeal of these sounds to me? i've been playing my secondhand copy of Animal Collective's Feels and it does almost nothing for me. i feel as if i hear this style of shriek-singing and certain pastoral guitar tones and am instantly turned off. also w/ that Manitoba record Up in Flames. do you have to know something about American folk music to really get it?

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

haha, i was just reading a discussion on another board about what the appeal of animal collective is supposed to be.

i'm at work right now and can't get all into it quite yet but i just wanted to pop in and say i absolutely love them. the 'why' of it actually relates to part of why i also really like "up in flames" in that folk music is so well known for strumming its way into oblivion, remaining simple and focusing heavily on the acoustic guitar and all the very zen things about it. why it features so prominently in earth festivals and the 'enlightened liberal' household is its assumed connection to the earth and all things organic, so follow it by finding a string and plucking at it. no electrical cords, no buttons, or any of that.

the problem is that nature is not a calming thing. nature is crazy. it fights back where it can and grows twice as fast where you cut it. there's no expression for the exhiliration of it, just the "at peace" sentiment. so when you take the "natural" human voice (something folk singers are big about), and you use it to yell as loud as you can, or put it against a calamitous backdrop of bells and wind instruments, the expression of natural environments is just as natural as your regular folk music purports to be.

animal collective have mentioned a couple times (because i looked for it) in there being a strong spiritual aspect to what they do. their most recent ep, "people" is a flagrant abuse of the idea taking over considerations of structure, and its linear quality and repetitive vocals put one, as the pitchfork review said, in a very specific place. and after a few rounds of shouting "PEOPLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE!!!!!!1" it finally completes the idea by descending into scattered whooping and hollering. the primary thing with animal collective is a sense of celebration (which is why banshee beat was such a departure for them), and they communicate it so much better how they do it than if they really tried to write any specifics.

anyway this turned out long and now i really do have a lot to do.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

omg i totally forgot to read this thread.

thanks - that's really helpful. it makes total sense that Animal Collective would be channeling those feelings, but i'm not sure how clearly it comes across. i keep picking up hints of indie, for osme reason; it makes me take them a little less seriously, but i haven't listened to the Panda Bear or Grizzly whatever albums yet either.

the MV & EE show, on the other hand, totally did this too, without sounding 'like' nature - but i'm not sure how comparable they are.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

I adore Animal Collective and Manitoba/Caribou.
As far as it making sense for you, I think its like anything else in life, it either works for you or it doesnt. But give it another try!! =)

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

haha, i just thought my reply was so incoherent that it was just dropped.

panda bear sounds (and this is going to be super helpful) like a jacked out brian wilson who grew his hair and went to live in germany. deep layers of golden pop that only reminds of AC and can remain totally seperate from it. i like it quite a bit but it's not a favorite like so many other peoples. my favorite track is "i'm not". the shortest one of the bunch, a friend and i had this on repeat in addition to the album while driving 6 hours through the california hills during sunset. it was pretty fantastic.

but really, this all comes from an unassuming dude living in portugal with his kids.

fun fact: AC's best memory of 2006 is the daft punk gig at coachella. i'm a sorta member of rerz where they discuss a bunch of crap about future releases and what they're digging and they pretty much all agreed that even if their own concert had turned to shit they still would have had the time of their life.
it was funny because i usually hear them plugging people like ariel pink or some obscure musique concrete

i think i talked about burial with deaken tho.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

i want to confess my undying love for animal collective and panda bear. Saw them live last night and it was mental. I can't wait for them to get more money together for a proper tour with more musicians. but they did ok with what they had.

kid cue, do you have the same response to panda bear's new one? person pitch? Its not very far removed from the collective sound but it is a lot more lush. I fucking love it. definitely one of the best for 2007.

for me the band represents a youth and a rebellion of musical spirit. there's a strong chord of brutality mixed with a quasi religious anamistic chanting, mixed with a strange beach boys melodic beauty. I don't know. I do know I probably see them differently than a lof of the other fans. A lot of them at the show sported chunky glasses, ironic tee shirts, full grandfather beards and all looked like they've collected every mcsweeney's anthology ever printed. And I don't associate usually with that kind of crowd.

(lol at the 20 yr old kid with the grunge shorts smoking a pipe)

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

yeah, i'm still not into them. i'm not familiar enough with Beach Boys material to comment much on that relationship, but i just get this nagging sense of modern-day boho pseudo-escapism that constantly interferes with my ability to get into Animal Collective. i know this isn't very fair and a live show would probably clear up this issue for me. the quasi-religious aspect strikes me as really pretentious though, like a Brooklyn aesthete.

i haven't been able to listen to Person Pitch very closely, but i'd like to hear it some more.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

yeah I may later decide that they are pretentious and that I'm pretentious for my enjoying their music, especially finding something religious in their music. But i doubt it.

1. music and religion have *never* existed apart from each other since we were erect and banging on rocks with other rocks because the moon was eclipsing and that kind of felt good as a way to express the awe of it all. I specifically mentioned animism. by that I mean a religion without an anthromorphic deity, but a more gaia principle where nature presumes a kind of consciousness that is not necessarily human, but still self aware. this is the oldest form of relgiious thinking and is something that I personally feel represented in that native, stripped down musical rules and structures combined with the notion of celebration that is in their music. I mean if you don't like the music then you'd want to think that it wouldn't be very religious at all. it would just be bad music.

2. the definition of pretense implies that the artist panders to the audience. I just don't see that with them. They are too difficult and create the responses of hatred by too many people for them to be considered pretentious. I mean its hard to argue this conclusively when pitchforkmedia.com and the hipstsers who treat urban outfitters as the single largest direction of their paycheck all cream their ben sherman pants for the band. ANd I did smell the whiff of pretense from the crowd and its really kind of silly to think I'm some how a stalwart monument of authenticity in a wash of pretense.

At the same time I genuinely like them and its not because I want to be weird or hip. And I do believe that there is a lot of that going on. I just fucking love their bravery (which is the antithesis of pretense) and their ability to challenge not on purpose, but by being who they are and in the midst of the sounds they create, that for me is a religious experience of some quality.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

1. i don't at all disagree that making and experiencing music can be like religion in nature. music must be the artform that most readily touches that kind of transcendence. but i find it annoying (or problematic at worst) when the content of the music necessarily points to our conscious notions of what "religion" is, as if transcendent music weren't inherently "religious" to begin with. obviously it's their prerogative if they want to use chanting and other primitivist sounds to channel these feelings, but it's all sort of cloying and obvious IMO. i don't think there's something inherently wrong with it, but the New Age echoes of all this gaia stuff aren't to my taste at all, and for me only ensure that the semi-conscious/whatever religion in the music gets in my way.

2. i'm not sure what being a pretentious artist has to do with pandering to a crowd. i know plenty of pretentious artists who could not care less about pandering to anyone.

i appreciate their audacity too, but i guess i just don't like their style.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

so basically you're saying its just not your cup of tea? so cool. Beyond that I have a few problems with what you're saying. HOw can it be a problem hearing a particular kind of religious quality when we agreee experiencing music can be religious in nature? This is kind falls flat when you take away the first premise of your argument: you don't like animal collective. I happen to know from previous conversations that you appreciate the music of bach, which you must understand emotes the kind of religiousity that only someone with his religious sentiments could create. other artists evoke different religious principles. BUT ALL OF THIS is irrelevant because I never said Animal Collective is shooting for a religious experience. I never read that anywhere. That's completely my own reaction to the music, independent of any desired effect. Which means I can pretty much say it as much as I want. Its not a math equation, its art.

??!! what is your definition of "prententious?" I consulted google and got this to come up on top....

making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction

which implies observation, which implies the existence of audience. what definition are you using?

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

umm, please chill out a little :confused:

of course you can say whatever you want. it's not like i've decided that i officially dislike the band and am thus presenting an algorithm to justify that dislike (where the hell did the math equation comment come from?????). i said the quasi-religious feel of the music doesn't sit well with me--to which you responded that all music is or can be somehow religious, to which i responded: yes! but it doesn't have to be music with Religion in it. especially not nature and animal spirits and Gaia, Earth's mother. i know you brought this up because you were just responding to the sounds (so was i), but let's take Religion in Animal Collective as an axis of discussion: Bach was making music in a highly religious atmosphere, where his music literally had a religious function, so I have a much easier time accepting it as part of the music. (also, as music, i like Bach's music about 100000000000x more than Animal Collective's.) meanwhile, i think it's reasonable to say that Animal Collective are either consciously or semi-consciously choosing to suffuse their music with religious or proto-religious themes, but in a secular environment. this is an aesthetic choice that i could either take or leave. i kind of can't stand it by nature, so i'm leaving it.

i mean, in theory. what i'm actually now going to do is go and listen to Feels a couple more times -_-

sure, and my dictionary says that to "pander" means to "gratify or indulge". if anything pretentious is necessarily "pandering" to anyone, it's to the artist himself. going back to your original point, i thought it was kind of ridiculous to claim that i can't hear Animal Collective's music as pretentious simply because they are "doing their own thing."

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

that part you said about them attempting to get a 'religious' reaction out of primitivism and necessarily limiting that type of experience by putting it through that scope? all that cloying ends with 'loch raven'

song is f'n BEAUTIFUL.

but all that stuff about new age echoes and gaia n stuff... '#1' on the next album is either gonna get a lulz or a hate-on or both from you. it's like they found stock fx samples from jean michel jarre, alan parsons, and those people that do carl sagan documentaries. i love it because it's the fun kind of drunk, but maaaaaaan....

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

sorry if I seemed amped. not intended. nothing but love for all the commentaries I've seen you post on here and I think you're probably brilliant. I meant it when I said I might later decide the music and my interpretation is pretentious, if for no other reason that I take stock in your comments.

That being said I just have to clarify a few things.

1. what I mean by I can say what I want and that its not a math problem is that on some level, there's no point in criticizing someone's response to art. On some level. As long as its a genuine response. If someone listens to wagner's tristan and isolde overture and thinks its the most jovial fucking music ever made, as long as the response is unforced, there's not a lot you can say to tell them they are wrong, imho.

On the other hand if I said "Pop goes the world" is a song about consumerism and marx's theories that capitalism alienates man from his natural state you could say I was a twat. Just like if I said animal collective's music is about an earth based religious experience. Luckily that's not what I said. I said that my unforced reaction is that of an earth based religious experience. Which may be as foreign to you as finding wagner jovial, but hey, what can you do? ONe then you absolutely CANNOT do is come at someone and say "I don't like this music, therefore how you feel about it is wrong"

There's two ways to criticize art at play here. You can pay attention to your response and come to conclusions, or you can make a conclusion and then criticize the resposne. I'm kind of a fan of the former and not so much of the latter.

2. here's my thoughts on pretense. It describes the relationship between the artist to the audience. Withouth either audience or artist there's no pretension. (nor art for that matter). I agree that the artist can treat themselves as the audience just as someone can lie to themselves, but that's a kind of weak force of pretense. Scott Stapp singing arms wide open to a crowd after drinking himself tits up back stage would be the strong force of pretense (larger audience). I also agree that the word "pandering" doesn't completely encompass the actions that artists do to make their art pretentious. There's several ways of engineering the audience's experience without pandering. But here's the thing. No you can't find ac pretentious by definition as long as you concede that they are "doing their own thing" or in other words definitely NOT trying to engineer the affect of their art on the audience. that's by definition.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

i actually might like sung tongs better than feels, depending on my mood.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

i just don't understand why you are making this a personal issue. i wasn't criticize your response at all. but you asked me what my response was (to Person Pitch, which i hadn't heard, so i decided to respond to the rest of your post). if there is one thing i really can't stand it's this idea that opinions can't be talked about simply because they belong to someone. when i put it into words--which is what anyone does when they talk about music, including yourself--my response to everything is based on operating principles that are completely subject to debate & discussion. when you bring up the presence of religion in all music as a response to my distaste for Animal Collective's pseudo-religious quality, that comment in itself is something that i'm able to respond to. it doesn't have to be about you or the validity of your response at all. but when you articulate the reasons why you like something, i'm allowed to offer my thoughts on those reasons; anyone is.

my responses to music have changed so many times based on what people have said. these dialogues only strengthen my understanding of why i like or don't like things, and sometimes make me change my mind. is that such a bad concept?

but i wasn't trying to change your mind at all. sometimes the problem with talking about such abstract concepts is that every answer implies an all-encompassing framework within which a given opinion is necessarily wrong. of course every opinion is valid, but when we try to act like rational human beings and talk about subjective things, one would hope that that's a given, and that all the talk is happening because people just want to talk.

i already said the latter was not the case. i've made no conclusions, and i was responding to your response. by all means i'd love to LOVE Animal Collective (why not?), but everything i say is based on my response too. put simply, i'm coming with a bottom-up approach to the music and to your comments, which your'e interpreting as some kind of top-down dismissal.

yes i still can. any artist has a relationship to his/her own work. you define an aesthetic/style/artistic 'mandate' from subjective impulses. how you think about & shape that aesthetic can be pretentious or it can be not-pretentious. of course you don't have pretension when you excise thoughts of how others will react to your work, but you as an artist are the first audience member. art only exists with a concept of an audience. i refuse to accept this idea that the band exist in a creative hermetic bubble and their choices thus can't debated. as creative people (not just artists, everybody) we should constantly be taking stances on how we feel about these choices, just like talking about art should be encouraged.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

its not like you offended me or anything. I think if you reread this thread you can see why someone might confuse your comments as arguments that conclude the limits of experience based on the premise of distaste for the music. (which would be the second kind of art criticism we talked about)

All of a sudden I don't believe in talking about art? I wouldn't even be having this discussion if that were true. No what I stressed is that *on some level* there's no point to pursue a discussion. There's parameters and limitations and a universal language to talk about art but there's no algorithm, as you said. So when you say animal collective has a pseudo-religious quality and I say I am affected in a religious manner by the music, at that point I'd like to say, ok we disagree. Unless there's anything actually specific you want to say about the music where we could come to a better understanding?

To say that their chanting is cloying and obvious as a religious expression is irrelevant unless you can find an interview where panda bear says "yeah what we're trying to do is evoke a gaia principle religious experience in the spirit of starhawk's spiral dance" The religious response is completely my own unsolicited response. Not their intention. So its not a valid criticism of their work, only my response. see where we're getting confused?

With regards to pretentiousness - ok let me be more specific in my thoughts. We talked about pretentiousness as a quality of the reliationship between artist and audience. You respond that you have to have that relationship as no artist lives in a vaccuum and yes that's true. What I was trying to say is that to thave that relationship is not pretentious. to have a certain KIND of relationship can be pretentious. IE a dishonest relationship. Dishonesty is the sine qua non of a pretentious work of art. So I have to ask, how are you able to determine that ac is pretentious and do you even think they are or are you just taking exception to the idea that their audacity is sufficent enought to exclude the possibility of their being pretentious?

edit: edited for readability (sorry for all the errors).

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

ok, i basically agree with you, and my last post was about why i think it's inherently hard to pursue any discussion without seeming to "conclude the limits of experience based on the premise of distaste for the music" (well put). i did get that the part about religion is your "own unsolicited response" and not their stated intent. i said that (not very clearly) here:

but, i don't think there's any point in considering what is or is not the band's intent (and to attempt to separate that idea from one's own response, which must always relate to one's personal, underlying concept of what the artist is "about"), and using that to determine what to say and not to say about it. to me, the music comes across as being pseudo-religious--and it's not the implied philosophy, but simply the sound of it, that strikes me as a little cloying and obvious. i'm just making an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one, about the effect of that sound.

pretension: i use the word as a subjective qualifier of the music: a description of how i personally hear it, not a label for the artist which would invalidate their every move. i don't know what "the truth" about them ultimately is, but that's a moot concept, because that word is more about how i'm responding to the music than about my understanding of whatever their intent is (obv. the latter follows from the former, but i'm only talking about one specific record and why i don't like it too much.....).

yes that's it! for all the praise they get, i feel they should sound much more audacious & radical than they actually seem to me. i'm not at all saying pretension is inherently bad (most great artists in history must have been at least quite pretentious) but if the music doesn't justify that sense of pretension, then it annoys. lately i've been listening to the Ghost record Hypnotic Underworld, a meandering, totally religious-mystical trip by a bunch of hippies who rehearse in abandoned temples and etc. i may or may not decide that this is "pretentious," but it doesn't matter to me, because i'm moved by the music before i start caring about that. meanwhile, whenever i hear Animal Collective i mostly think of some dorky guys trying really hard to be different (even if they are being 100% true to their impulses). the fact that they have such a hipster following does not help me to believe in them either, obviously. anyway, yeah.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

yeah I'm starting to see that now. This conversation really put that into light for me. The seeming and the doing are very subtly different in discussions like these.

ok so I guessed right that we are operating under different definitions of the word. Mine has a much more negative connotation and the existence of pretense is, for me, assuming a certain knowledge of the artist's intentions.

What I like about your definition is that it handles the problem of esotericism. What I mean is there are certain artists like Jackson Pollock who people generally want to call pretentious. Especially when they throw a fit when they see their splatter paint being hung upside down at the Met. Unfortunately nobody knows if his splatter paint really does say something about his worldview because its done in a language that only he is fluent enough to discern. You would have no problem calling him pretentious based on the experience of seeing his paintings.

What I like about my definition is that actually provides an objective measure on art where you can say an artist is pretentious or not definitively. Just as you can tell whether or not a lie is a lie definitively. And my experience is usually its pretty obvious when there's a deliberate facade or falsity about a work. And if it isn't obvious it soon will be. (right, moby?) This is why I'm hesitent to say AC is pretentious. For now.

yeah well artists always struggle with the fact that they are represented by not only their art but also the quality and behavior of their fan base.

Yeah I'm with you on hypnotic underworld. That's a wonderful work. I think you raise a great point about their audacity not giving them a free ticket out of pretense-ville. Let me say this about AC, their dorkiness also registered for me on first encounter. ANd it was actually something that I had to overcome to appreciate the music.

That's either saying something about their talent or the fact that I'm more accomodating to dorkiness. one of the two :)

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

at the risk of making this more confused....

i still think that reading an artist's intentions into his work, and reading the work itself, need to be two separate experiences. underneath the framework with which you consider Pollock, i'd probably agree that he would by definition have to be "pretentious." but i don't actually see him or his work as pretentious--largely because i see his splatter arrangements as conveying a pure visuality: his work retains such a visceral power even without having any knowledge of his process or stated intentions. the paint isn't an obtuse language meant to communicate some arcane worldview; the paint itself IS the communication. partly this is Pollock's genius (he accomplished what any artist wants, to become one with his medium); partly it's the abstract expressionist era he was a part of.

but this is tangential--the point being that if you simply read Pollock's work, without trying to read into it too much, then you can see what the work itself has to say (not that you don't know this, but for the sake of this point) ... i acknowledge that Pollock's methods were audacious without getting hung up on their audacity, and the issue of whether or not he was "pretentious," because to me, the paintings are amazing, and i HAVE to accept all the splatter as a totally pure extension of the artist's self.

this is similar to what i was saying about the Ghost record--the music is powerful enough to negate the word "pretentious" altogether. i could maybe retroactively apply the label "pretentious" to the band, but it is completely beside the point. whereas a less successful artist is going to need to deal with his work coming across as pretentious (not that we can't enjoy pretentious-seeming work anyway; we all do)--until he hits upon that ideal balance of audacity (inspiration) and execution that transcends the issue entirely.

i'm not really disagreeing w/ you, just attempting to clarify my stance .. if only for myself

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

one thing that kind of strikes me as paradoxical in your thoughts is that you don't allow for pollock to be speaking an "obtuse language to express an arcane worldview" but you also admit that you have no choice but to accept that "his art is an extension of himself." I'd argue that this extension is too similar to one's worldview. to debate this would require we drudge up all the nuanced differences of the world's affects and one's opinion of it and one's "self"

The fact that you "have to accept" means it's kind of giving the benefit of the doubt for lack of contrary evidence that it isn't an extension of his "self". but I have to ask: who is Jackson Pollock anyway? what is his self? How is this communicated to you as the audience so that you have a certain understanding? So that you feel something was communicated?

I understand the existence of the visceral power of the painting itself. Perhaps it moves one to feel a certain way. In this way I agree that pollock is great. (I read recently that his most popular works exhibit pleasing mathematical proportions). But because there are no visual clues, no common, shared iconography, its kind of a crap shoot what that visceral power entails and what its nature is. Is it hopeful, is it a staggering critique on racism? Is it expressing his jubilence at being alive? No it isn't so important that the paintings are any of these things, but it is important to know what they actually are.

This is the problem with the abstract expressionism movement as a whole. Its esotericism is the ultimate form of selfism, a demand that the audience shouldn't even be bothered or trusted to understand the meaning. They should just sit back and enjoy it, like the sounds of humpback whales communicating. It's supposed to be freeing to the artist to more perfectly express themselves, because they are no longer fettered by the ambiguities of a shared language. but this is a cop out, imho. And at best we can say that the movement was important, it brought up several questions about the relationship between artist and audience, but the answer was that art was required to move on, to accept the responsibility of communicating something. To intend to communicate something.

When people tell me they read Ulysses by James Joyce and found it so "meaningful" and a work of genius, I have the same reaction as when someone tells me Pollock's artwork is so meaningful and a work of genius. I either think they are much smarter than I am or they are lying. If for no other reason than how obvious it is that these artists were *not trying* to be meaningful to us. That was tangential to the point of the art. To me they give academics jobs. They do *not* speak to the common man. And that's a real artistic crime. This is why I want to call them pretentious. But I can't because just as I question anyone's ability to find hte meaning of their work, I'm unable to see any lack of truth to it. But I'm sure its there. If nothing else its a pretense that the art is meant to communicate.

Art is a language. Its intention should be to communicate. My favorite artists are those who have said something to me and I know what they said. I understand their world (which is also the world I live in) more clearly because of them.

This brings us to what you said about viewing the art and delving into the artists intentions as two different pursuits. I totally agree with this. But to me it's important that the art should speak so clearly that you wouldn't even need to query the artists intentions external to experiencing the art. The degree to which you need to is the degree to which the art failed to express itself in its own language. In this line of thinking, art truly exists as an independent entity - the existence of the art's meaning is not dependent on the existence of the artist.

And yes its true that what the audience experience can be far removed from the experience that was intended. Its also possible to look at a sunset and feel a new sense of inspiration about one's life and rediscover one's youthful idealism to focus on the things that really matter. But none of this was the intention of the sunset. Just like a lot of how we experience art is not the intention of the artist. We don't call the sunset art because there was no intent behind it to be art. beautiful yes, but not art. Likewise we can judge art by its ability to evoke what the artist intended. (not to mention judge our ability to be open to the experience)

so yes the two pursuits are different and should be. But the fact that you have to go outside of the work to discover pretentiousness is not a problem with pretense being dependent on intent. It's a problem of the artist being incapable of expressing his intent. But a lot of the times, because of the dishonest core of pretense, the audience has no choice but to investigate the intentions of the artist because they are lying in their art. Britanny spears suggest virginal innocence at the same time having dancers lick sweat off her body. This is a clear pretense. A dishonest attempt to affect a reaction of blossoming womanhood at the delicate and dangerous point of being plucked. Moby packages detailed essays that read like instructions on how to see his art as pretentious with every album.

anyway I'm done blathering.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

i have to consider Pollock's obtuse methods as an extension of himself because he demonstrated through example that these methods could produce great results. these great results are radical paintings that are incredible visually, emotionally, physically, and intellectually. as an artistic sensibility, i don't see why these horizontal splatter-gestures need to have anything to do with a "worldview".

in a sense, we're both talking about authenticity, but mine is more about the artist's methods vis-a-vis their manifestation in the work (whether the approach works artistically), while yours seems to be about relationship between the artist's claims and how these are expressed (whether the approach literally makes sense)....

i only see Pollock's "self" tangentially--in his methods. i don't feel the need to connect his artwork with any concept of who he was as a person, because the work is its own entity. i look at the work and then i stop. i might conjecture as to what kind of person he was, but it seems almost irrelevant to me. he left this work, and this work is what i care about.

why must visceral power need to be attached to a "critique", a theme about Pollock's life, or a one-word emotion? it is what it is; that is its nature. we know what these paintings are--we are looking right at them. they are incredibly pure that way. they are also great in that they still allow us to make connections to other ideas, but ultimately, these connections are irrelevant to the bare, physical, visual facts of the paintings themselves. they are about a pure visuality. Pollock worked the way he did because he cared about the way his methods looked. i once took a course in which we looked at some Pollock under UV light, and saw that he had actually extended & embellished his some of his gestures after the splattering with a small paintbrush, which is more proof than we actually needed to show that what he cared about was how the paintings literally looked--i mean composition, surface, texture, rhythm, etc.

i disagree with this 100%. the "meaning" of an abstract expressionist painting is exactly, literally, what the audience sees before them. the extent to which the audience "understands" this relates directly to their visual fluency with the painting medium. it has nothing to do with being able to deconstruct the artist or his intent, as if his visual gestures are supposed to contain some kind of symbolism that simply isn't there, and supposedly should be. i don't agree with that at all. this seems like an act of projecting certain arbitrary notions about what art is or should be, to justify not understanding a given artwork on those arbitrary terms.

music is inherently 100% abstract and no one tries to make these arguments, because the emotional effect of sound is more intuitive to most than that of sight.

well, i agree--because your "meaningful" is not their "meaningful". how can this be a crime?

i would probably say the same, except i get the feeling that your understanding of this phenomenon is a lot more right-brained than mine, going on the critique you've spun in this post.

this is one exact reason i feel Pollock's work is so amazing and successful. as intricate and esoteric as it is, its effect is absolutely clear. it--the paintings themselves, not so much ideas that can be reduced & expressed on paper--is forceful, joyous, conflicted, ambitious, etc etc. IMO any attempt to reduce this to a specific theme or idea would contradict the fundamental notion of art. and again, i don't feel as if i'm letting myself understand something less clearly than i want to (i.e. giving the artist the 'benefit of the doubt') -- far from it -- the language of art such as Pollock's is not "its own"; it's a universal language because it's purely abstract. at least, that is probably what all abstract expressionists believed, and what i certainly believe too. that art can be understood without being coded.

okay, but for those of us who prefer to experience art independently of its purported intent, i don't see why the sunset or any of the below matters.

why did millions (incl. myself) enjoy "I'm A Slave 4 U"? was it because they weren't critically smart or astute enough to avoid being tricked by her pretensions at virginhood? or was it because we simply couldn't resist the pure pop pleasures generated by her superindustry? does it matter if Mobb Deep weren't really thugs and thus had no real right to rap about thug life? etc etc.... i have to run, but i know there are countless examples of good art that threatened to "lie" to the audience via your definition.......

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

Like I said above you say tomato I say worldview. YOu argued for "extension of self" as more important than worldview as something the artist communicates. I think i clearly argued that it in't worth the time to argue the differences.

Anyway, are you able to explain his results? Are you able enumerate the qualities and properties of the visual, emotional, physical, and especially intellectual results? And what's your criteria for proving that there's an objective reason for your response? Especially when you agree there's nothing he intends to communicate? This is the sunset thing i mentioned. You can find visual, emotional, physical, intellectual responses from nature. it wasn't intended. intention is the creative spark of art. Without it, its just the audience making shit up.

tangentially? you just said above that it was a perfect reflection of his methods and thus his results


exactly my point.


who care's about the painting medium? that's like saying I can throw a bunch of words together and call it a serious exploration in the literary medium, and say its up to the audience's fluency to "get it". Anyway I've always read that the intent of abstract expressionist painters generally and jackson pollock specifically is to make visual the subconsious. IE the inner states of the artist. which means you really should, if you want to know if the artist was successful, know what the inner state of the artist is. which is absurd, meaning art as communication is NOT abstract expressionism.

if any art is 100% inherently abstract then all artforms are. I mean seriously, its all sense data being processed by our brains.

Right brained? wtf? please explain this? Because to me its just reasonable and devoid of elitism. I'm not saying you're being elitist or unreasonable. I am saying that I really can't follow a lot of your arguments because this really doesn't need to be so complicated. Art as communication doesn't seem right brained. It seems common sensical and lacking any elitist notions of fluency.

Its very tempting to point out that calling splatters of paint conflicted and ambitious is no better or worse than calling drums and chanting in animal collective's music religious. Seems like that could be just as painfully obvious if not cloying. all I've ever argued is that art is meant to communicate something. You're debating me on this by taking it to mean I think everything should be a doctoral thesis at oxford.

why is she so viscerally hated by like everyone now that she's older, a mother, fatter and bald? Possibly because the suspension of disbelief has been popped like a balloon and no one likes to have their disbeliefs all of a sudden unsuspended?

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

the difference is worth the time when the entire point of everything i'm writing is about attempting to outline a paradigm that is completely different from your paradigm. you keep repeating the things i am saying under the terms that you have presented, which i have been arguing all along are not the same as my terms. for example, i did not argue that "extension of self" was "more important" than "worldview". when i said that i consider Pollock's splatter technique to be authentic to his "self", i was not at all saying that was the ultimate virtue, much less the point, of the work. in fact that's contradictory to everything i've been arguing--which is that when thinking about the quality of the work, it has and should have total autonomy from the author. if i were saying that "extension of self" were the most important quality, i'd be saying that the degree to which some concept of the artist-as-person/soul/whatever shows through is what i cared most about. that's much closer to what you're saying.

are you serious? when you say Pollock is pretentious, are you able to quantify the degree to which he fails to "communicate" his worldview with his paint? or any other criteria you've presented in your own framework? how can you quantify the degree to which an artwork is a lie? (further, how can you even compare Britney lying that she was a virgin to Pollock somehow not sufficiently communicating some presumed 'worldview' by painting in too obscure a manner?)

let's be clear about this: the only objective marker in Pollock's work is the object. i will never pretend to be making an "objective" argument about the nature of that work. however, i will argue with you when you try to project other notions of objectivity--these notions of truth, statement, idea, theme, language (syntax?), communication (as in, "talking" an idea to a "listening" audience)--onto that object. to put it simply, i largely don't find Pollock's work pretentious because it makes no pretense to being a hoity-toity abstract vehicle (language) for conveying any of these ideas that you have suggested. only when you suggest that it does, and then fails, does it become pretentious.

i also can't agree that "intention is the creative spark of art". not one good artist i know can actually tell you, before making something, what exactly he or she intends to do, in anything more than extremely general & vague (for a reason!) terms. (sometimes they pretend they do, which means that it seems like a good idea to them, and they hope it maybe works, but really they just want to feel like they know exactly what they're doing. a normal human impulse, but it's too rational for art.) the entire process of art-making is so much more abstract and left to chance than that. creativity is the creative spark of art. one of the most common feelings in making any kind of art is ending up someplace where you never expected to be when you started. considering that, how can you even take seriously an objective framework for judging art whereby the artist's original intents are successfully or unsuccessfully communicated in their results?

intention isn't even necessarily the creative spark of procreation (hormones are). intention is the creative spark of science and engineering.

refer to beginning of post.

you are going to have to deal with thinking about the painting medium, if you're going to think about modernist painting, which was totally about how to change people's preconceptions of that medium (such as, the idea that painting, or art in general, is meant to "show" or convey some image or theme--as opposed to being a purely visual phenomenon. purely visual, NOTHING ELSE.)

okay, all art functions in some context. but music is the least physical, the least burdened by (again) preconceived ideas, thus the most direct. at least, that's what many artists and critics believe. it's really a whole other can of worms.....

no ... it seems reasonable and devoid of elitism because it seems practical and simple to think of Art as being a literal vehicle for conveying idea-bodies from one mind to another. i didn't say i disagreed with the idea of art-as-communication-of-ideas, but i've been saying that the nature of that "communication" and those "ideas", as exemplified in Pollock's abstract expressionist work, which is less about transmitting some ideas from Pollock's brain to our brain than about the paintings-as-objects being the ideas in and of themselves, is NOT limited to (what i perceived to be) your more literal definition of what art is.

again, I AM NOT SAYING each splatter embodies some "conflicted" or "ambitious" emotion straight from Jackson Pollock, like a language. i am saying my very general, subjective, emotional reaction to his best paintings, and his work as a whole, comprises some of these feelings. if you want me to go into a much more rigorous, in-depth formal analysis of one of these paintings and why exactly i think the whole thing makes me feel those feelings, i could probably try, but i'm not sure i have the time right now.

i think we can all agree not many of us were made surprised by the sight of fat bald Britney as much as we were made disinterested. she looks ugly AND she isn't making music anymore. she can't be the vehicle for our self-centered fantasies anymore. as a celebrity, she's been shifted into the loser pile. this one REALLY isn't that complicated.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

all i'm basically saying here is that i think you place too much stock in what the artist says. an artist's stated influences, ideas, beliefs, or even intentions are interesting to think about and study, but they're really more for art historians than for the rest of us*. ultimately, you have to take the work on its own terms, as its own evidence, in deciding how good it is. as human beings we have the same senses, and the same fundamental creative impulse, so it's completely reasonable to allow each of us to make our own judgments about a piece of art without running it through a system of checks and balances vs. the artist's own claims to NOT be "making shit up". for instance, when you say Pollock claimed to be trying to visualize the subconscious--sure, i can see that that element is probably there in the paintings (i said it before, and it's also sort of glaringly obvious)--but the fact that he accomplishes this stated goal in some way ultimately isn't all that important to the success of the paintings as paintings.



*besides, too many artists are full of shit anyways!

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

It seems to me that applying rules about when it is valid to look beyond the piece of art to the artist is limiting. There are pieces of art that, for me, are best approached, or engaged with, with minimal consideration of what the artist intended and what was going on in their lives, and there are pieces where a lot of the value comes from the artist.

Henry Darger's work is interesting on its own, but I find looking at his art with a biographical portrait in mind is much more engaging. R Kelly's Trapped in the Closet, by contrast, I find barely interesting at all without taking into account the mind that created it (directly, in fact, through the commentary track he has created to go with it). I haven't listened to Wesley Willis much, but I imagine his work is more interesting in what it reveals of the artist than my immediate reaction to it.

However, there are plenty of pieces for which I feel no need to search past the existence of the individual piece itself. The flexibility in approach seems to me to be crucial.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

yeah--i'm not against different approaches in principle, any absolute rule about how to look at art is a bad one ... i guess i'm using a lot of words to say that "art" means someone makes this thing (physical or not...) and that thing becomes its own thing, with its own properties, and it's pointless to get hung up on other ideas about the artist as an artist, or a person, etc. the artwork isn't defined solely by the intentions or desires of the artist, because the rest of us are free to look at it our way.

i think a lot of things, like "Trapped in the Closet" or whatever, can be more interesting when you consider them in terms of biography. but i still think that's somewhat separate from the artwork as a work of art. like i think it's interesting that no one cared about Van Gogh and he was tormented and cut off his ear or whatever, but it still doesn't make his paintings very interesting paintings IMO. also, if R. Kelly made his own commentary track for the song, i'd argue that that's part of the artwork as well, as part of his process of self-reflexively riffing on his media persona.

also, the idea of both R. Kelly's public persona, along with an official R. Kelly self-commentary track, is totally as much a creative fabrication as his actual songs. rather than provide real, objective criteria (straight from the real artist) for interpreting his music, i'd argue that these "biographical" aspects (of our idea of the person R. Kelly) add more layers to the work itself.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

i'm a thread killa :(

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

thread killa? I just thought that you guys had talked this into the ground...

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

Amen. Word

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

well, talking stuff into the ground what i do. it's "my thing". i wish i could get paid for it.

:(

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

i thought we were just scratching the surface. :D thread wasn't killed, I've just had a real shit week and found it hard to make time to pick up all the pieces to respond meaningfully.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

:)

sorry you had a bad week ... take your time ;)

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

Oh god, there's more. :D

Just kidding, it helps kill time. Not as good as killsometime.com.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

So Caribou/Manitoba has a new albumn in the pipe-line available in the lofty heights of cyberspace. It is Andorra. I think it's his best work yet by far... It is a bit more focused in my opinion or maybe these type of songs just appeal to me more...

Anyone else feeling it?

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

yeah i like it. it's everything he said it would be. he's jammed with with as many melodies playing together as he could. he's truly focused on it in that there seem to be less happy sync accidents and steady beats and much more deliberation, changes in drumming, and consideration towards stereo function. (the drums especially like to move between speakers in fantastic timing for your headphones).
i dont know tho. i think i'm a bit past caribou. after up in flames basically made summer of 03 for me, i felt that 'milk of human kindness' was too considered to really get with. i saw where he was going and there was less chaos and more filter. i miss those rude recorders interrupting everything in bijoux, the organ that's louder than its supposed to be (which meant it was perfect) for jacknuggeted. it felt like it was deliberately doing the "this is what i'm influenced by" rather than just running naked.
so this record is him doing exactly that still, but better. but i still miss that feeling from before.
so while it's a good record, and it's got some great rhythms and drums to it, i still miss that feeling, and it just seems infected by the constraints of more accomplished songwriting, so i can't get overly excited about it.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

sup, kid? The good news is I had time to think about your perspective and see its advantages and motivations clearer, the bad news is I'm not going to pick up completely where we left off because it started to get a bit splintered and abstract. Anyway like you said we are simply arguing for and in context of two autonomous and inconsistent frameworks in which to experience art. I see the advantages of experiencing it in a more disconnected relationship to the artist, his/her intentions, his/her worldview his/her state of mind, etc....

For what its worth, I checked out your videos and I think you're a much more talented artist than Pollock, based on my own paradigm as art as communication. So yes I can quantify based on a scale callibrated on your work. You're better under my framework. You work in the medium of images which automatically load shared semiotics and archetypes. Splatter is what's on a canvas thrown on the floor under a wall being painted. I don't know, this may come across as insulting, sorry if it does.

But I think its important to read into my last post the key point: it is patently absurd to think of pollock as pretentious directly because as we discussed, and what is generally accepted to be true in the art criticism world, his focus was visually representing the subconcious. To assess the truth of his art is impossible. But under my framework that means the pretense is the very act of calling it great art. Its art, I won't argue that, but its greatness is extremely subjective. I'm just saying he's guilty until proven innocent. Like you said....

yeah pretty much. I mean it isn't even important for me to know that its some visual translation of a freudian psychology concept, that may itselve not even exist. But it would be better to know this. See if I could just look at a pollock as an independent object, I wouldn't like it. There's nothing for me to like. There's few visual clues of repetition and interval, contrast, or iconography. And its not so much that I dislike abstract work. I much admire the work of miro, kandinsky, de kooning, rothko (on occasion) etc. But they successful at evoking something. The only think Pollock evokes in me is a mild desire to find a rag.

As far as the artist not knowing themselves their intention, that's no argument against art is communication of intent. The artists themselves may be the pupil of the lessons art provide us, but yet it comes from them. We would never suffer the production of machines as art. If a random number generator were attached to a mechanical arm and a brush, calling the result a work of art would only work if you called the human that made the machine and wrote the program the artist. What I'm saying is however self aware of the impulse the artist is, its fucking necessary and sufficient for art to take place.

What I'm trying to get away from is art as a pair of lips talking in a vaccuum, disconnected from the body.

you really think so? I really don't think this is a supportable position. I'd like to be pointed in the direction of these artists and critics because to me there's a very real direct connection between the sounds we experience in nature, and their emotional effect and the sounds we experience in music and thair corresponding emtional effect. One of the greatest things about traveling is hearing the different sounds of the new environment and the sounds of the music that were developed there. Look, the first thing kids are taught to do in music appreciaton class is listen to some piece of classical music and write down the images that they recall. This wouldn't be possible without concrete, shared associations. I'm not saying music as an experience isn't very abstract, i'm saying its hard to argue it is more abstract a medium to experience than painting or poetry.

see this is what I've been seriously thinking about the past while and I have to say this makes a lot of sense. It really explains something about experiencing art that I just can't in my reductionist definition. Immediately on stumbling onto a piece of artwork the mind does not distinguish at as anything else but an object. The fact that its framed, in a museum, with a white card next to it reminds us to not look at it the same way as a chair or the urinal (especially when it comes to du champ). This is a real problem for my framework, because before it is communication it is that object that you take in your paradigm to be the primary force of experiencing art. just throwing you a bone. ;)


I'll wait. I'm seriously interested.

In regards to britany i'm not budging my position. Besides I got Chuck fucking Klosterman backing me up.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

I have to agree with dubman's sentiment. I really like the new Caribou but there was something really, really special about 'Up in Flames' that he hasn't captured again yet. It was the perfect summer record.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

animal collective is slowly leaking out there. so far we have about 2/3rds of it.
i'm trying not to listen too much because i dont want to familiarize myself with an incomplete picture but it's HARD because it's FUCKING GREAT.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

80% of their live set were new songs and they were pretty sweet.

Re: animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.
 

hi

thanks but that's why your framework is flawed ;)

"Splatter is what's on a canvas thrown on the floor under a wall being painted."

there is nothing inherently bad about this at all. in fact this is EXACTLY THE POINT i'm making! the sum total of ideas in Pollock's work, or any entirely abstract work, is the physical object that's there. as you put it below, "To assess the truth of his art is impossible," i.e., the "truth" as in "what he thought it meant compared to what he actually made." the only thing we have to go on is the piece itself, and the way that its physical facts come across.

music is no different: we can hear and be moved by something immediately, without a single preconception of what the musician thinks his own "focus" was.

the things i like about Pollock's work are largely the same qualities i like in Rembrandt or Hopper or Degas. the visual effects and atmosphere created by a certain palette of paint layered in a certain way. it's the same as any other painting; there really is no fundamental difference :confused:

i can agree that Pollock's later work can be impenetrable, but it's really just an act of giving yourself up to the paint and the color and the line. it's probably important that his canvases are splattered all over, because it encourages that kind of total surrender.

maybe you don't understand the appeal of abstraction in itself? an artist like Pollock understoood paint as being, literally, nothing but a chemical that could be splattered on a canvas in a space. Pollock (like Stravinsky) was good at abstraction because he was able to take that initial understanding and paint a beautiful picture without attaching it to "shared semiotics and archetypes." it's not surprising you like the artists you listed because most of their work (Rothko aside) either isn't particularly abstract, or is about consciously abstracting figurative imagery. (re: my own work, it's all photography and video, so of course it's attached to pre-loaded imagery! under your framework, what would differentiate an average photographer from a good one, or ANY photographer from a 100% abstract painter, in terms of talent?)

i have the opposite reaction to Pollock: there's a complete overload of stimuli when you examine a Pollock canvas like you would any other canvas. you start to follow a line, and your gaze is quickly drawn to another and another, not to mention all the intersections of different colored paints all layered over each other. it's exhilarating, not unlike the first time i heard "The Rite of Spring" (or fuck it, proper jungle). i don't think his work should necessarily be obvious to the untrained eye, but that's surely not a shortcoming...?

agree, of course, but this concept of "impulse" is different from intent IMO.

i don't think any association made with pure tone can possibly be concrete, unless it's a sample, or intentionally emulates some other non-musical sound. on the other hand, words themselves are already culturally specific, and loaded with various meanings. i'm not saying music is a bubble, or that it can ever be separated out of culture or environment, but i think sound is inherently more capable of it.

did you read his review of Stankonia? :(