Yes, but is it Art?

[I apologize in advance for the incoherent ramblings and general disorganization of this blog. It’s just the way I am this afternoon. The next one will be better. Probably.]Although this week’s readings captured my attention more than other theories we’ve read this semester, I have a few problems I’d like to point out. First, why is beauty and pleasure the chief function of art? Although I like pleasant looking still pictures, with beautiful colors and images, it is only a fraction of what art can do. Take Marcel Duchamp, for example. In reading Lessing, I couldn’t help but notice Lessing’s archaic ideas dealing with the plastic arts. Lessing says that painting fleshes out a single moment because a picture is unable to illustrate chronology as poetry does. Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” renders this idea obsolete. Clearly there’s a chronological movement in this painting. Although it may be the illusion of movement, it is an artistic manipulation of scene that is in keeping with the artist’s sculpting of Laocoon’s face. Working further with Duchamp, the idea that art’s chief function is to render beauty that induces pleasure in the spectator is also broken. This can be seen in Duchamp’s use of readymades. The best example of this is his sculpture “Fountain,” which is a signed urinal, placed in a gallery.

This conceptual art can be seen as an example of what Bourdieu would call cultural capital. [“These rich folk are nuts!” a person of the lower class may say. “Did you see what’s in the art gallery? A urinal, a bike wheel, and a text book!”] I would disagree with this assertion, however, as I see Duchamp’s use of readymades as a challenge to the elitist view of art—the artistic concept being to provoke the art establishment’s idea of cultural commerce. However, with this contemporary era of conceptual art, I am beginning to ponder the question of whether art even exists. In visiting the Tate Modern Gallery in London a few years back, I was intrigued by a piece called “An Oak Tree,” which is a glass of water on a glass shelf.

Upon seeing this, I thought, “Well I’ll be goddamned! A glass of water on a shelf called Oak Tree. That’s brilliant!” Although I disagree with Bourdieu in his assertion that the idea of high art is a codified system illustrating class difference (my group’s task was to support his ideas), I can see how his ideas work in certain situations (but not always, which is the reason I disagree with him). The excesses of conceptual art act in this way. This is cleverly illustrated in the popular art medium of the Britcom. In Absolutely Fabulous (written brilliantly by Jennifer Saunders), Edina Monsoon, a wealthy socialite, purchases a number of modern art sculptures that she acquires to display wealth. In showing this art to her friend Patsy, Edina comes across the casket of her dead father, for which there is a memorial service in her house later that afternoon. “This is a, sort of…this is a corpse in an oaken…oaken oblong coffin. It’s a dead body, Pats.” To which Patsy replies, “Yes, but is it art, Eddie?”

GOO GOO GOO JOOB: Julia Kristeva and John Lennon

"I Am the Walrus”
By John Lennon (officially by Lennon/McCartney)

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun see how they fly.
I’m crying.
Sitting on a cornflake – waiting for the van to come.
Corporation teashirt, stupid bloody tuesday man you been a naughty boy
you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen – I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB.
City policeman sitting pretty little policeman in a row,
see how they fly like Lucy in the sky – see how they run
I’m crying – I’m crying I’m crying
Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess boy you been a naughty girl,
you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen – I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB
Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun,
if the sun don’t come, you get a tan from standing in the English rain.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen – I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB
Expert texpert choking smokers don’t you think the joker laughs at you? Ha ha ha!
See how they smile, like pigs in a sty, see how they snide.
I’m crying.
Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementry penguin singing Hare Krishna man you should have seen them kicking
Edgar Allen POE
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen – I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB
GOO GOO GOO JOOB GOO GOOGOOOOOOOOOOOJOOOOOB

In the excerpt from Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva theorizes that we are full of energies that become arranged in the course of human development based on the constraints imposed upon them by family and social structures. Kristeva labels this energy “chora,” defining it as “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (2170). This chora is prevalent in the semiotic state, which is the state of being prior to the acquisition of language, but still exists in the symbolic state one enters after learning language. Kristeva illustrates this in her discussion of the genotext, the part of speech dominated by the semiotic chora, and the phenotext, the part of speech dominated by the symbolic—the “grammar” or “literalness” of speech. In discussing the genotext, Kristeva writes: “Designating the genotext in a text requires pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm), in the way semantic and categorical fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis (fantasy, the deferment of detonation, narrative, etc.)” (2177). This can be seen in the “poetic” devices of speech. Kristeva uses the examples of Mallarmé and Joyce as being authors in touch with their chora. Having thumbed through Finnegans Wake, I can only assume that the bulk of the novel IS genotext.

Although Kristeva uses highly reputed authors to illustrate her theory, I would like to apply the theory to popular culture using “I Am the Walrus,” the great Beatles song from the album and film Magical Mystery Tour. The song consists of literal language and grammatical structures, which make up the phenotext, but, unlike other Beatles songs (at least the early ones), the song’s nonsensical quality and clever wordplay display a strong genotext. Rhythm, alliteration, and assonance dominate several lines, which create a singsong quality of language seen in the semiotic utterances of a pre-linguistic state (“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” and “City policeman sitting pretty little policeman in a row” for example). The surrealistic imagery also illustrate the dominance of the genotext over the phenotext in the song. The lines “Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye” and “Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower” are surreal images that, although disgusting, sound aurally pleasant to the ear. The lines “Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess boy you been a naughty girl, / you let your knickers down” display the interaction of the phenotext with the genotext. The genotext, and therefore the semiotic chora, dominates the lines, but the speaker’s labeling of the pornographic priestess as a “naughty girl” for letting her knickers down illustrates the laws of the symbolic and its subjugation of the semiotic. Although family authority is also referenced in the song (“man you been a naughty boy / you let your face grow long”), the semiotic chora dominates the song. This can be seen in the several affronts to logic—“you can get a tan from standing in the English rain” and “Sitting on a cornflake – waiting for the van to come,” for example. The speaker’s reference to himself as the eggman combines the symbol of the earliest state of human development with that of a grown man, which illustrates his desire to return to the semiotic state of human development—the phrase “GOO GOO GOO JOOB” acting as the pre-linguistic gibberish uttered by humans in this stage. Furthermore, the speaker’s crying throughout the song refers to the utterances of babies, whose cries are one of the few methods of communication—cries signify unhappiness, hunger, a dirty diaper, for example. It should be noted that Lennon is rumored to have written the song on LSD, which perhaps could explain its bizarre nature. (Another aside: Lennon is rumored to have purposely written baffling lines upon hearing that students at his old school studied his songs in class.) Perhaps the taking of drugs suspends the symbolic and gets people more in touch with their semiotic chora. I wonder what Timothy Leary would have to say about the subject? Hell, Freud loved cocaine and was one of its biggest supporters in his day. Maybe that would explain some of his theories.

Note: the above text of “I Am the Walrus” is transcribed from a picture of the lyrics printed on the foldout of the British LP Magical Mystery Tour released in 1976. The words in the audio recording are slightly different—most notably being the lyric “Mister city policeman sitting pretty little policeman in a row.”

Second Note: The author of this blog does not condone the use of drugs with one notable exception: Rock n’ Rollers, whose wonderful experiments with hallucinogenics ushered in the psychedelic rock music of the late 1960s. Thank you all!

Communist Commodity: The Che Fetish

“This I call Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them” (777). –Marx & Engels

I was going to apply Jameson to literature for my blog (I apologize for not writing about literature this time), but Professor Zemka’s remarks about REM reminded me of the phenomenon of the commodification of the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who fought with Fidel Castro in Cuba, as well as in the Congo and Bolivia. The image of Che itself has become a fetish, which adopts various meanings depending on the context. The image for this phenomenon originates in a 1960 photograph taken by Alberto Diaz Gutierrez—a.k.a. Alberto Korda—in Cuba, about a year after Castro’s ultimate success in achieving control of the government. In the photo, Che Guevara attends a memorial service for the casualties of what Castro called a counterrevolutionary attack upon Cuba backed by United States. (Claiming copyright over the Che image, Korda sued a vodka company in 2000 for its use of the image in a magazine ad). In this sense, the picture represents the perseverance of Castro’s communist government in the face of outside, capitalist forces. However, this representation changed when Che Guevara died in 1967—upon which he became a Marxist martyr—and his image from the photo was cropped and altered into the image that is spread so wide today. Although the initial image of Che was tied to rebellion, revolution, and Marxism, it has become a fetish and a commodity in our current climate, regardless of the intentions behind the image’s use.


To illustrate this, I will use the most popular of Che “products,” which is the t-shirt. A Che t-shirt, like any other t-shirt, is a commodity that masks the labor and conditions of those who produced it. The use of a Marxist “logo” to sell clothing produced in sweat-shop conditions creates a paradox in that the ideology of Marxism is tied to false-consciousness, and stamped upon a commodity that masks true class struggle. The Che image thus signifies something other than the Marxist revolutionary figure represented. The image becomes a fetish for the social relations of those who wear such clothing. Like Professor Zemka's example of the I-Pod Nano, the Che image on clothing is a signifier of “hip-ness” that represents the belonging to the larger community of the fashionably cool. In this sense, the image has been completely disassociated from the politics of Guevara and co-opted for capitalist gain.

In Glorious Black & White

El marxismo dará salud a los enfermos
(Marxism Will Bring Health to the Sick)

Frida Kahlo, 1954