animal collective / 'freak folk' / manitoba etc.

[Strangelet]

i thought we were just scratching the surface. 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.

[kid cue]

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

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

Oh god, there's more.

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

[patrick]

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?

[dubman]

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.

[Strangelet]

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....

Originally Posted by kid cue

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?)

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.....

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

[Scott Warner]

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.

[dubman]

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.

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by dubman

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.

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

[kid cue]

hi

Originally Posted by Strangelet

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.

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

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.

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.

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...?

What I'm saying is however self aware of the impulse the artist is, its fucking necessary and sufficient for art to take place.

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

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.

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.

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

did you read his review of Stankonia?