The NYT has a brief story about an upcoming performance near the Ground Zero site of a performance by the ensemble Bang a Can of Stockhausen's "Stimmung". Unsurprisingly, the article focuses on Stockhausen's infamous statement regarding the events, which are best explicated in the transcript of an interview given after the controversy, reprinted in the comments section on that page.
I wrote a response, which is awaiting "approval". In case it doesn't make it, here is my reaction to the piece:
I think there's a crucial question absent from this heated discussion. Why were Stockhausen's comments even mentioned at all? It seems to be central to the article's main talking point: that a dead composer who said something controversial about 9/11 is now having his works performed near the site of the atrocities. Yet by the author's own admission, Bang a Can hadn't received a single comment about including Stockhausen's piece in their lineup. I'm sure that has since changed.
These journalists, they're artists too. The real news story is not about a piece of music by an important composer being performed near a historic site. It's about a news publication who have decided that the merging of these two things is worth your thoughtspace, despite a formerly staggering silence on the part of the public.
In the information age, any one with a pen or a podium is trying their damndest to make art out of the cultural landscape. Every man his own artist indeed. Every mind is culture's sandcastle.
Much has been written, less controversially, about the terrorist's horrendous acts as public relations stunts for their mass movement against Western culture; timing it for maximum impact so it would catch the morning headlines all over the world, targeting symbols of power rather than maximizing destructive effect (one of the flights flew along the Hudson River where it easily could've crashed directly into Indian Point, causing far more catastrophic devastation). Aren't public relations an extension of the performative arts? Look at Bush's press conferences with fake journalists or his town hall meetings with fake townies (like "Our Town", but with an unlimited budget and empty rhetoric rather than empty stage props). The reason they haven't struck again is not because all this money we've tossed at the military industrial complex has made us safer. As far as I can tell, sales of boxcutters are steady. It's because they are watching us closely, reading our news, and studying the ways in which they can effect us most deeply (like the American equivalent of flushing a million Korans down the toilet at once).
Of course, there's plenty of disagreement with the arguments of calculated mass spectacle as political art statement. Notably, Baudrillard, who spent his life uncovering the diverging layers of simulacrum seperating ourselves from reality, called the September 11th attacks the "absolute event", less a simulation than the terrifyingly real birth pangs of a globalized society beginning to eat its own tail.
9/11 was the most talked about movie all over the world for months, debatably years. It perfected a formula Hollywood execs would die to get their hands on; a film no one wants to see, but watch repeatedly anyway. In fact, their very fear of a sequel causes them to line up at the multiplexes for whatever irrelevant retaliatory piffle the studios roll out (see the Iraq War).
And the journalists, ah, what beautiful art they made when they were called to help write that feel-good blockbuster.
It's amazing that seven years on, there's still such a sensitivity to the subject- as if it were a piece of shared cultural heritage (the holocaust, slavery, etc.). Perhaps what Al Queda proved more successfully than anything with their act was that Americans feel like participants in an event after merely watching it on TV, that by simply existing on a rotating earth we somehow effect its axis. We identify virulently with a culture known only second-hand. 9/11 seemed to be about removing the protective armor of television's gaze, its promise of safe distance from the U.S.'s devastating foreign policy. Yet, we still play war like a video game and hold elections like an elimination challenge. Judging by our own ignorance of the how and especially the why of Septemeber 11th even this far down the line, America can relax secure in the knowledge that the terrorists did not succeed in teaching us anything.
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Well, if anything the Times just brought a few hundred more people down to Bang on a Can because Americans are known to flock to what they have been told they shouldn't flock to. As an American, I am guilty of this kind of behavior thousands of times over. So because of the hoopla, I might go. Probably not though. Have you read Sontag's words on 9/11 in the issue of the New Yorker that followed? If not, you should. Controversial then, apt as all holy hell to anybody conscious now. However, the intention was sadly ignored and now our actions are giving birth to a new crop of disgusting fears. Go see Iron Man. I have been told it reeks of the good ol' fashion cold war, contra blood thirst.
ReplyDeleteVery nice response though. The Koran flushing could raise a couple hobble-gaga eyebrows. Good luck though.
I don't deny that the controversy was a free advertisement for the show. I guess I just wanted to point out that it was a non-news story, wherein the writer scribbled a few hobbled notes in the sidelines to avoid re-printing a press release. As a stub, the article could have read "No Controversy Surrounding Upcoming Show". The 24 hour news channels constantly run these "Where's the Outrage?" pieces, which, in turn, create outrage. And though there's a growing distrust of these outlets, it's interesting to note that the liberal journal of record can just as easily manufacture news. It also seemed apt to point this out in the context of Stockhausen's own art-spectacle comments, which don't seem so crazy in the context of Chris Burden, reality TV and the Iraq War.
ReplyDeleteThe mainstream media essentially owns the public podium, thereby making all dialogue an agent of the media's dialectical ownership.
That makes the rest of us merely consumers and reactors to its dialogues. The public can rarely create the dialogue, but by reacting to the controversy it feels like its is a participant in what is largely an antidemocratic process. If Marx's era was defined by class struggles, our era is defined by the suppression of class struggles through the deterioration of the class system not by willful oppressive acts (like union-busting) but through language (legal bureacracy that allows unions to form but allows companies to fire organizers or close branches before this comes to fruition).
As an example, much is talked about Evangelical Christians and their disdain for abortion. Little do we hear about those same Christians's disgust over the situations in Darfur, Myanmar, New Orleans, etc. Their religion must be defined by the social dogma that power structures need so they can operate an office that runs completely counter to their theology. And like an old high school tactic, if you call somebody a loser long enough, they'll start to believe they're a loser. If you tell someone their most important issue at the polls is abortion, they'll believe it. If you tell someone a show is controversial, they'll believe it.
The media, as the mouthpiece for the self-replicating power-structure, must constantly defend its own existence without and against the people it reports to (not for) using language.
I realize much of this is tangential. I do plan on seeing Iron Man, haven't heard much about the subtext. Who is the enemy in the film? It seems kind of quaint to make cold war parables at this point. My four-year old nephew has been known to sing Sabbath when he's wearing his Iron Man shirt. He has no interest in seeing the movie, though.
Though I have mixed feelings about the previews, i'd be interested in seeing if the upcoming Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder has anything to say about war-as-art from the perspective of a group of actors dropped into a battle zone who think they're filming a war movie.