I'll be in a show at Cohn Drennan Contemporary Gallery here in Dallas, Texas starting November 19th called Post-Pop Punks, and strangely enough I've become sort of sensitived or magnetized to the possibilities of the thematic. I guess part of what I've been thinking about recently is Baudrillard's final book _The Agony of Power_ and his construction of the concept of hegemony, which in my understanding is sort of like post-human ideology in the sense that ideology has become post-social or post-humanist. Now, this way of speaking isn't going to clear things up, you have to read the book, and a lot of it is things we heard before, but more or less, you get the idea that "humans + their own abstraction = aporia" which is more or less Grotesque Theory 101, but, his description of "The Hegemony" makes me think of things like Clockwork Orange, and really, of a kind of "Pop-Apocalypticism". So I guess in a way, I am kind of looking at Pop being an analogue of democracy, and punk being the aporistic hegemony. We intuit, or discover by apperception, that say, Democracy is now the Post-Democractic hegemony, and he goes on to cloud this further with things like Convivial Deregulation, as if somehow, Baudrillard sees Orthodoxy as a kind of resistance. That's his kink. He plays his instrument. Anyway, something I saw recently, like today, kind of brought some of this thinking into focus for me, because I have made quite a bit of work very similiar to this.
At Sprueth Magers in Berlin, John Baldessari has a new show up which definitely has some kind of Post-Pop Vibe to it, but I'm going to stick some Baudrillard in here, and make an assertion as to why materially, these works represent something of this Pop-Apocalyptic Hegemony. I'll just assert it now, though it is pretty lame. Now think, Ecstasy of Communication combined with say 'printing technology'.. these are inkjet canvas prints slightly modified by painting. Check them out at Contemporary Art Daily. In Art Historical terms, they aren't all that different from what JB. hey that's odd. Jean Baudrillard and John Baldessari have the same initials. weird. They aren't all that different from what John has always done, except, personally I like them better. Anyway. I would insert the Baudrillard bit, but it just doesn't sit well without reading into and out of it..
If interested in the _The Agony of Power_ at all check out the section called "Where Good Grows".. He more or less says we have entered into a final revolution which is in effect a nihilistic instrumentality, and that our own revolutionary praxis is to end the human, or some such. Rhetorical art. Instead of typing that stuff in,
I thought I would copy some stuff out of _The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit_. This is from 1972
from a piece called _The unfilmed Scripts of Paolozzi_:
OLYMPIAD
When the cuttlefish is brought to
light, touch would have had to be
carried by business -- and might
surely have been used to convey
feverishness as well.
NUN
When I think of a good, pure
rigid and as though ironclad;
when it is rarified, it hovers
weightless, incomplete, immobile.
OLYMPIAD
the second body is garden magic;
but from the bamu to the Kerewa
area the stress is on the revela-
tion to boys and girls of the
secrets of adult sexual life.
NUN
Who then can teach me about the
logical foundations of mathematics?
MONKEY
They call me imitator, and in my
role as such I have made many dis-
coveries and copied out the most
dreadful inventions, phones as well.
And just to follow that up, something I thought was kind of sad and funny in a punk-pop-hegemonic way from Roberto Bolaño's _Tres_:
I dreamt I was fucking Carson McCullers in a dim-lit room in the Spring of 1981. and we both felt irrationally happy.
Well, he got the year exactly right I think on that one, and what is the object of contemplation in such an utterance? Is it the genre of melodrama? Is it what things we turned away from in the 80's, those of us who were 'of the 80's' in a manner of speaking. Only once in my life have I seen a person with a Raymond Pettibon tattoo, and the person I saw had the tattoo of the Pettibon image which was a crucified autopsy of a baby, and the caption which I don't know if the person had the caption, but the caption was something like, "I was a medical student at the time of my conversion.." The person with this tattoo was at a Black Flag show at a bar called _The Twilight Room_ where you could see things like men in suits but with mohawks, having martinis with Harley Davidson biker dudes. I saw a girl giving a blowjob in full view of everyone in a booth. Punk in the 80's was not a myth. It was real. Just like the 60's, only creepier, shittier, and absolutely fantastic.
