Anomie und Hooey

These are notes I wrote to myself over the course of a few days about what will become a new photographic series…

Introduction

October 10, 2020

I’ve been tidying up my study, making it more friendly and efficient (though it is still too cluttered for most mortals). I had finally finished organizing the shelves in the alcove that used to hold my pipe rack. Two overflowing shelves containing my Criterion collection have taken up a little more than half the space previously occupied by the pipe rack; the bottom portion, with an extended hemispherical shelf, was somehow miraculously clear. What to do with all this newfound space?

I had thought of building a marble run I received last Nubbins Day, but I lacked the time and patience to do it, especially to do it properly. But I felt an urgency to fill the space with something. (Clutter abhors a vaccuum.)

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but I had a thought to fill it with a diorama utilizing my various construction toys for The Network Vista (another series I'll discuss another time), and maybe add some of the other unused toys (Playmobil, Schleich) filling up space I don’t know what to do with.

So I spent an hour or so constructing one of my space-filling dioramas, like the one in the corner alcove above the gas fireplace in the TV room, or like the ones I used to do in Webkinz that were so much fun. I didn’t think about it, I just set up the pieces, in a symmetrical pattern of course. I put some figures in it. Done.

Then, a day or two later, I thought: Hey, why not take a picture of it? I’m not working on my visual music. And I’ve had an idea for years to take a pictures of Network Vistas with figures in them…

So I put a mirror behind the scene to open up the space. Set up my camera. Took a picture.

Here, then, is my first pic of the diorama.

This was nothing more than a test. But I am immensely pleased with it!

It has obvious problems (compositional details; lighting; camera angle; lens; f-stop; construction flaws; etc.). But the concept is proven.

Now I am hungry to do more.

Tension und Hooey (… ?)

October 10, 2020

Where did this concept come from? What does it mean?

Stress und Hooey (… ?)

As I was ripping some of my classical CDs (Zelenka & Boccherini) I filled time by perusing a list of baroque & gallant composers. One thing led to another, which led me once again to CPE Bach’s wiki page, where I read about his legacy wherein he “exerted enormous influence on the North German School of composers”. Since I love CPE so much I listened to YouTube samples of each of the 6 composers mentioned (previously unknown to me) who were decisely influenced by him. I heard his influence in the works of each composer, but only one piece really struck me as very worthwhile.

So I visited Johann Gottfried Müthel’s wiki page to learn more. (Indeed I was so taken with this piece that I impusively purchased recordings of 5 of his keyboard concertos performed by Marcin Swiatkiewicz, a truly excellent harpsichordist, which led me down another path, which ultimately sent me down yet another path to discover this lovely Concerto Grosso by Francesco Scarlatti, a member of the Scarlatti family whom I did not previously know until only 30 minutes prior when I came across his name in that original list I was perusing of baroque & gallant composers. (Turns out he’s Alessandro’s younger brother, Domenico’s uncle. I’ll probably get the recording of his six concerti grossi later today.))

Anyways, on Müthel’s wiki page it said “Along with C.P.E. Bach, he represented the Sturm und Drang style of composition,” which I found curious since CPE’s style, to my knowledge, wasn’t considered truly Sturm und Drang, but what is usually referred to empfindsamer Stil, which is not as melodramatic and demonstrative. But, I suppose, in a venn diagram, I can see how empfindsamer Stil crosses into Sturm und Drang.

I’ve always liked the phrase Sturm und Drang. Though I have only passing familiarity with its literature, I’m more familiar with some of the artists and composers associated with this movement (if it can be called a movement, as opposed to a cultural mood). The term has heft, even untranslated, because its sound conveys its sense of unleashed drama and tempest, and maybe anguish. “Storm and Stress” indeed; though, as I learn from wikipedia, it literally translates as “Storm and Drive”, which definitely gives it a more nuanced, and even intense, connotation.

What does this have to do with the photo test of my diorama?

I wanted to find a name for what I’m doing, the name of a movement to which it would belong, and when I accidentally came upon Sturm und Drang I really like the feel of it. But it’s obviously not right: my dioramas are not about this melodramatic, individualistic subjectivity running rampant. My dioramas are controlled, humorous, tense, saracastic, off, absurd, silly…

So I needed something reminiscent of Sturm und Drang, but with a different connotation.

And so to a thesaurus for help, where I played around with lots of combinations. The one thing they had in common was they all began with Stress. (Actually, my first choice was Paranoia, but that was too precise, and multi-syllabic.) I started with Stress and Silliness because that seemed like the right direction, but not perfect. So here, then, is a small sampling of the search for the right name:

• Stress und …
  • Silliness
  • Farce
  • Bull
  • Crap
  • Nuttiness
  • Nonsense
  • Folly
  • Tommyrot
  • Hooey (…?!)
  • Twaddle
  • Poppycock
  • Lunacy
  • Hogwash
  • Jest
  • Piffle

That was the idea. When I hit upon Hooey that felt right: it had a frisson of Sound=Sense I liked.

And so I settled on Stress und Hooey… at least for a day and half.

Oh… and why und instead of and?

That should be obvious. And no, not pretension! I wanted to draw an obvious resonance between the two. I wanted to build a bridge, as it were, connecting our cultural and historical chasms, to emphasize the contrast between then and now as two distinct periods with little in common. We have moved from a time where culture — in the sense of taste, aesthetics, elevation of style — mattered, to a time of technocratic bread and circuses to keep the herd distracted. Indeed Sturm und Drang was about the power of individuality and subjectivity where people were agents of their own destiny. Now the equation is different: we are no longer individuals with a subjectivity, but a brand we promote for others to buy, the commercialization of our own identity in a ubiquitous consumer culture… Ok, maybe it is pretension…

No — Tension und Hooey!

But no, it still didn’t feel right. Stress didn’t have the same ring as Sturm. And Stress is both a bit too literal (whereas Sturm is metaphorical), and has too many connotations that dilute its power.

And so to a thesaurus again, where, after about five minutes I came upon Tension. After some consideration, that captures what I’m going for. Indeed, it led immediately to the following summary that just flowed out of me…

So What is Tension und Hooey?

We’re living in a time of extreme tension, and extreme absurdity. Everything is a fucking joke now, on all of us. Even the elite pranksters who are destroying lives cultures countries with their blatant psyops — of which the vast majority seem to be blissfully dangerously arrogantly oblivious — don’t know that the joke is also on themselves, since the dark games they’ve started (which they, themselves, couldn’t help to start since they, too, are driven by factors beyond their understanding), will careen out of their control to their surprise. The jokes on everyone! Everything is funny! Pain, suffering, misery… These ultimate realities are completely ignored as everybody’s too busy playing their role in an Ionesco play.

Basically, everything is tense, and it’s all hooey.

There is no storm, there is no stress. And yet tension is the ether in which we live, and it is unabated, and unabatable. We are tragi-comic figures that have no agency. We are all marionettes, our strings pulled by universal conspiracies, from the historical and economic forces that have decisive impacts on our material circumstances, to the psyops foisted on us by vorocrats and their minions, to genetics pre-determining the physical realities of the body we live within, to our personalities, which are the result (in conjuction with the gross matter of the brain we’re born with) of neural connections created by our familial and cultural upbringing that form permanent channels which are the deep ruts along which our thinking and behavior drive, determining our view of reality in certain and definite ways that are almost impossible to divert. We are all prisoners to drives, desires, and beliefs that originate from sources outside of ourselves that are beyond our control.

We are little more than actors driven by a barrage of scripts that are already written for us, and which we have little volitional ability to alter, except through extreme and rare efforts of self-conscious will, which darn few of us are capable of.

So unlike Sturm und Drang, which takes our individuality and subjectivity seriously enough to make us believe in our own causation as having agency in our own free will in a world fraught with drama, Tension und Hooey takes the viewpoint that we are little more than meat puppets, controlled by the hands of cosmic conspiracies reaching up our noumenal rectums to drive our behavior in an absurdist play.

In other words, we have little control over our lives. Even our exercises of so-called free will are the result of forces that drove us to “choose” that particular exercise.

So what do my dioramas signify? I don’t know, I don’t think about that. I’m just building a diorama that I find aesthetically interesting, which may have some kind of historic, political or psychological resonances. If, after the fact they could be taken for a miniaturized gallery installation of a pointed abstract representation of, say, Genet’s Balcony performed in a theater at a zoo designed by Lebbeus Woods, or Monty Python filtering Pasolini’s Salo through Moholy-Nagy’s channeling of Busby Berkeley, or Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera directed by Ken Russell staged in a multilevel steel & glass stockyard designed by Piranesi working with Tschumi, then who am I to say otherwise?

I suppose, ultimately, it’s the visual incarnation of my long held literary notion of The Conspiracy of Life combined with my long held aesthetic conception of The Network Vista.

Or how about Angst und Hooey ?

October 11, 2020

Seriously? Yeah… should be considered…

Rolls off the tongue better, has more power…

Yeah, it’s got to be Angst und Hooey… Looking at my test pic it’s the only one of the three names that resonates with it.

Angst und Hooey it is!

October 11, 2020

To quote Abner Dillon, “That’s final!"

NO! Anomie und Hooey! And That’s Final!

October 13, 2020

Angst was better than Tension, but it still didn’t feel perfect.

Anomie feels perfect!

From an Alastair Crooke article:

The fear of social upheaval sows distrust. It can produce the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society; a conviction that the world around one is illegitimate and corrupt; that you are invisible — a ‘number’; a helpless object of hostile repression, imposed by ‘the system’; a feeling that nobody is to be trusted.

Later, Crooke begins the summary of his article with this very pregnant and disquieting question:

Finally, the salient question is: Are all this scattershot of expressions of distrust now reciprocated on all sides, something ephemeral? Are they simply a reflection of uncertain and disquieting times? Or, are we witnessing the build-up of explosive distrust? Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust, or a sense of detached alienation — it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy.

In aswer to his question he cites very disturbing historical examples which resonate all too strongly with what’s happening in Murka. As someone once said History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes. In our times that rhyme seems to me to be in the form of a dirty limerick written by Baudrillard played to the brutally humorous sounds of Nurse With Wound’s more schizophrenic soundscapes .

            Too much information
            Inducing suffocation.
                It’s like we’re fellatin'
                A choad intoxicatin',
            Then choke its ejaculation.

Crooke’s question definitely confirms to me that Anomie und Hooey is exactly and precisely the right name and focus for my aesthetic (bowel) movement.

Then, as if to confirm my concluscions, this from wikipedia:

In sociology, anomie is a societal condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards, or guidance for individuals to follow. Anomie may evolve from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community (both economic and primary socialization). E.g. Alienation in a person that can progress into a dysfunctional inability to integrate within normative situations of their social world like to find a job, find success in relationships, etc.

And that is the condition we find ourselves in that I wish to unconsciously channel in my pieces.

Influences

October 10, 2020

If I had to define my aesthetic (so as to focus it?), I suppose it’d be a combination of the following influences.

Busby Berkeley

Rob’t Williams

I really like that Rob’t Williams gives his work three titles. It shows an active mind that’s engaged with his work, most likely coming to understand it after its creation. A title for himself; a title for the pretentious cognescenti; a title for Joe Sixpack. He likes playing with images, words, idea… I get that, ‘cause the neural connections behind a piece are a gestalt feeding into each other. This painting has the following titles:

• Artist Title:
  Playing House Under The Tears of The Martyr And The Slobber of the Peephawks
• Museum Catalog Title:
  The Contrast Between The Intimate Detachment Of Adolescent Fantasy And Cold Pragmatism Of What Can Be Squeezed Out Of A Rock
• Colloquial Title:
  Gawk Strafing

Network Vista

I still haven’t come close to creating it, but the conception is still there.

Were the following Lebbeus Woods installation channeled by Piranesi in a geometric abstraction of an imagining of the essence of an Italian garden vista, that’d come close:

Webkinz

Designing Webkinz Rooms was great fun for me many years ago. I got into Webkinz along with my spouse and son as a fun family thing to do when he was little.

All I have are my memories of the fantastic(al) rooms I created, and how I went about creating them… Each room was a mini-masterpiece, if I don’t mind my saying so. Each room was a self-contained playful, awesome installation, full of rhythm and symmetry.

But it was more than that. They weren’t just regular boring rooms, they had presence. Working with objects that were the epitome of innocent kid’s commercializing glurge, each room had its own silly — yet sinister — edge to them. I fashioned some wonderfully pregnant spaces there…

And if I could do it there and then, I can do it here and now.

Tooker

Theatre of the Absurd

The Conspiracy of Life

Just the way I see the world…

Joel Peter Witkin

Hans Jurgen Syberberg

Diableries

It was originally a Victorian stereoscopic color series! Who knew!

The Shoot

October 11, 2020

The rest of my notes pertain to the actual shoot of the final photo.

The title of the piece came to me after the shoot. Indeed, in retrospect, I was driven — impelled even — to set up this photo in response to having read this article about The Great Reset, which was very fresh in my mind. The title seems perfect to me.

More photos of this series to come, once I clear out some clutter out to make room for a larger shooting space…