Re: A warning for all those...
Unclaimed Mysteries
> ... stuck in the Kroker/artist quadrant of my TINY NOTE Chart.
>
You are sounding like you're channelling L.L. Cool Ron Hubbard more
every day.
No, that's not a good sign.
--
It Came From C. L. Smith's Unclaimed Mysteries.
http://www.unclaimedmysteries.net
purple
... stuck in the Kroker/artist quadrant of my TINY NOTE Chart.
The following is why McLuhan thought that explaining where post-WW2 Art came
from was more important (and artistic) than the Art itself:
"It is quite literally true that since printing it has been the poets and
painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print,
of prints, of press, of telegraph, of photograph, movie, radio and
television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media had led to
prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have
yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control
of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That
is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating
private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new
experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive
public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The
new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can
no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns
of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological
development." - H. Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New
Media, Part VII(Exhibits), p.i, 1960.
McLuhan believed he was the only Artist with perfect pitch for his day. All
the Gutenbergian artists were fodder for his craw. This is why he may have
appeared to lack good taste. "Garbage in, garbage out" meant he could grab
any content at random for his purposes, as he says in UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
(1964).
The Great Bob Dobbs
On 5/9/05 4:54 PM, a colleague wrote:
> Harley did paint well and his teaching specialty on colour theory is
> present in his paintings--at least the few I've seen. But and maybe more
> importantly and as Tom Wolfe exclaims (The New Life Out There by Tom Wolfe
> (c) 1965 The New York Herald Tribune) Harley was also into performance art
> or happenings through his work in mounting exhibitions at the Royal Ontario
> Museum.
>
> Wolfe says " In the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a McLuhanite named
> Harley Parker is designing a "pure McLuhan" gallery for displaying
> invertebrate paleontology, fishes and things, "a gallery of total sensory
> involvement," Harley Parker says, with the smell of the sea piped in, the
> tape-recorded sound of waves, colored lights simulating the fuzzy-plankton
> undersea green, "not just a gallery of data, but a total experience.""
>
> In particular too I heard his -Harley's- exhibit on West Coast Native
> Masks ( Recalls Carpenter's work AND Picasso) from George Thompson at
> various times Harley's and McLuhan's assistant, was itself a work of art
> causing great effect in the audience.
>
> Remember this is the late 40's.
>
> As for Blake, new examination of his plates indicate that rather than the
> great technician he claimed to be his plates show tell tale signs of heavy
> reworking and covring up many 'mistakes' . Which is to say that there was
> a lot more perspiration going in relation to the spiritual activities.
>
> At 09:23 AM 5/9/2005 -0700, someone wrote:
>> As an artist, I have always been mystified by McLuhan's appreciation of
>> the role of the artist. For example, I've never felt that Harley Parker
>> was as significant a painter as McLuhan thought he was or perhaps,
>> wanted him to be. On the other hand, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists
>> are an important chapter in art history but not ultimately, I think,
>> because "an artist is primarily concerned with getting your attention"
>> but because they had a primal/cosmic/spiritual message to convey. I
>> believe that this is what gives anything longevity and is ultimately
>> why MM has longevity. So where do we switch off the flow of whatever
>> gets in the way of primal/cosmic/spiritual perception? To quote Blake:
>> "The role of the poet is to justify God's ways to man".
>>
>> Am I oversimplifying?