Essentially, the situation is like this: The planet Earth is enveloped by an information environment. This envelope functions in a similar way to the frame of an artwork. So the planet itself becomes an artwork.
The planet is not a readymade. It is being made, and re-made, all of the time . . .
The first definition of "readymade" appeared in André Breton and Paul Éluard's Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme:
"an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist."While published under the name of Marcel Duchamp (or his initials, "MD," to be precise), André Gervais nevertheless asserts that Breton wrote this particular dictionary entry.
Immersed as we are in the environment, if, and when, we enter into an anti-environment, or counter-environment, it affords us the experience of "seeing" (and maybe for the first time) where have come from.
In Sensory Modes . . .
Electronic Man approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.
This presents no solution to the previous problem of decorating the environment.
Quite the contrary.
The new possibility demands total understanding of the artistic function in society.
It will no longer be possible merely to add art to the environment.
The situation that McLuhan identifies, with co-author Harley Parker back in 1968 in their book THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT - SPACE IN POETRY AND PAINTING on Page 7, referring to our past and present conditions; i.e. going back to the electric telegraph and forward to the computer screen as an extension of the human nervous system, and that relates directly to the contemporary fact of the information environment that surrounds the planet.
Why a cliché?
The word cliché is drawn from the French language. In printing, "cliché" came to mean a stereotype, electrotype or cast plate or block reproducing words or images that would be used repeatedly. It has been suggested that the word originated from the clicking sound in "dabbed" printing (a particular form of stereotyping in which the block was impressed into a bath of molten type-metal to form a matrix). Through this onomatopoeia, "cliché" came to mean a ready-made, oft-repeated phrase.
In McLuhan's terms, a cliché is a "normal" action, phrase, etc. which becomes so often used that we are "anesthetized" to its effects. To this extent our entire environment is to this extent a matrix of multiple actions and effects that are imperceptible.
Google Earth's overlays of information, embedded in the visualisation of the planetary surfaces, consists of multiple clichés. The planet becomes an object of augmented reality. But to what purposes? Advertisements? Fake news? The generation of revenue? It may be that:
"There is no such thing as a free lunch!"But, is this a useful idea, is it true?
For McLuhan the instance of the electric light proves illuminating
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out a verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium.
The "content" of the envelope of information environment, that exists on a planetary scale, is "our world"!
The satellite medium, according to McLuhan, encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which:
"ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed."All previous environments (book, newspaper, radio, etc.) and their artifacts are retrieved under these conditions ("past times are pastimes"). McLuhan thereby meshes this into the term global theater. It serves as an update to his older concept of the global village, which, in its own definitions, can be said to be subsumed into the overall condition described by that of the global theater.
From 'Through the Vanishing Point' to 'Through the Looking Glass'
The crux of the McLuhan and Parker's notion of passing through the vanishing point in their exploration of spatial experience in poetry and painting is the reversal of spatial perspective. Gerard Manley Hopkins "inscape" is referenced along with Seurat's utilization of the Newtonian analysis of the fragmentation of light to produce an image through creating the optical effect of light coming through the picture surface rather than light falling on the surface of things. This luminous quality of illumination from within the image was an augury of a now ubiquitous screen based technology on scales that range from the intimacy of the palm held mobile device to the video-wall scale of billboards.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Stepping into an alternative world
Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection. Climbing up onto the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through it to an alternative world.
So too, with Cocteau's Orphée
Jean Marais’ journey through the underworld gains new strangeness and rapture in this restoration of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Orpheus myth
The camera as actor and the screen as placemaker
Pages 29-30 Sensory Modes Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan, Parker, 1968
art, environment and anti-environment
Art projects, artworks, environmental installations and happenings are potential anti-environments.
In early 1951, the composer of experimental classical music Christian Wolff, then a student of Cage, presented him with a copy of the I Ching, a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events.
The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination.
For Cage, this meant;
Using chance through the workings of the I Ching provides a strategy, and a tactic, to escape the anaesthesia of the normal, of the multiple clichés we use to conduct everyday life, but without thinking, and in so doing help the composer, and his audience, to awake from conditioned habitual responses, and to begin to perceive the imperceptible environmental realities.
Cage's lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:
Marshall McLuhan's ideas and approach to media fascinated Cage.
In McLuhan’s media studies, Cage discovered a framework to reshape some of his long-held philosophical views and give them a contemporary thrust. McLuhan argued, for instance, that the new electronic age creates an environment in which all kinds of diverse information simultaneously interact:
In engaging with an artwork that creates a counter, or anti-environment, it affords the possibility of becoming aware of where we are coming from, be it an habitual environment, our social and cultural origins, our prejudices and assumptions. In short - become aware of how our psychological and ideological projections shape a perception of a world we assume is there.
Only when this kind of awareness is achieved is it possible to withdraw these projections and begin to see the world as it is. This is a vital potential use value, immanent in all artistic activity, and that, in particular, includes the visualizing of the invisible, experiencing space and modulating the void using what John Cage calls Silence.
Instead, our predicament these days is the academies and cultural institutions only invest in informing us about "art", helping us understand what art is, rather than encouraging everyone to explore how to use art and artistic activities as a WAY to find out more about who we are, where we are, and where we are going.
The Emperor's New Clothes
Blake's Laocoön print, c. 1820
Blake's Laocoön print, c. 1820.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Stepping into an alternative world
Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection. Climbing up onto the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through it to an alternative world.
Jean Marais’ journey through the underworld gains new strangeness and rapture in this restoration of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Orpheus myth
"Art is ceasing to be a special kind of object to be inserted in a special kind of space. the sense of participation in the art process has reached an extreme in the so-called "Happenings" which are plausible simulations of environmental control."
Pages 29-30 Sensory Modes Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan, Parker, 1968
art, environment and anti-environment
Art projects, artworks, environmental installations and happenings are potential anti-environments.
In early 1951, the composer of experimental classical music Christian Wolff, then a student of Cage, presented him with a copy of the I Ching, a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events.
The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination.
For Cage, this meant;
"imitating nature in its manner of operation".(Pritchett, James. 1993. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge University Press)
Using chance through the workings of the I Ching provides a strategy, and a tactic, to escape the anaesthesia of the normal, of the multiple clichés we use to conduct everyday life, but without thinking, and in so doing help the composer, and his audience, to awake from conditioned habitual responses, and to begin to perceive the imperceptible environmental realities.
Cage's lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:
"When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don't need sound to talk to me."John Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991. From: Listen, documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003.
Marshall McLuhan's ideas and approach to media fascinated Cage.
In McLuhan’s media studies, Cage discovered a framework to reshape some of his long-held philosophical views and give them a contemporary thrust. McLuhan argued, for instance, that the new electronic age creates an environment in which all kinds of diverse information simultaneously interact:
“nowadays everything happens at once,” he said, “not just one thing at a time.” To Cage, the idea placed in a current context his Zen belief that all things are at the center of the universe, interpenetrating but not obstructing each other. “[T]he Huang-Po Doctrine is quite literally applicable to an ethics of the Global Village!” he exclaimed; “I feel closer to Chuang-tze today than ever before!”McLuhan also told him that in a book he and a painter friend had been working on, to be called “Space in Poetry and Painting,”
what they call Space corresponded to what Cage called Silence.From Kenneth Silverman’s biography of John Cage Begin Again, published by Random House (2010)
In engaging with an artwork that creates a counter, or anti-environment, it affords the possibility of becoming aware of where we are coming from, be it an habitual environment, our social and cultural origins, our prejudices and assumptions. In short - become aware of how our psychological and ideological projections shape a perception of a world we assume is there.
Only when this kind of awareness is achieved is it possible to withdraw these projections and begin to see the world as it is. This is a vital potential use value, immanent in all artistic activity, and that, in particular, includes the visualizing of the invisible, experiencing space and modulating the void using what John Cage calls Silence.
Instead, our predicament these days is the academies and cultural institutions only invest in informing us about "art", helping us understand what art is, rather than encouraging everyone to explore how to use art and artistic activities as a WAY to find out more about who we are, where we are, and where we are going.
The Emperor's New Clothes
"In social terms the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings in spite of magnetic deflection of the needle by the challenging play of forces. So understood the artist is not a peddler of ideals or lofty experiences. She/he is rather the indispensable aid to action and reflection alike."Page 238 Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan, Parker, 1968
"Therefore the question of whether art should be taught in our schools can easily be answered: of course it should be taught, but not as a subject. To teach art as a subject is to insure that it will exist in a state of classification serving only to separate art off from the other activities of woman/man."Page 238 Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan, Parker, 1968
"The whole Business of Woman/Man Is The Arts & All Things Common"
