Wittgenstein, Zettel:

711. There is a way of looking at electrical machines and installations (dynamos, radio stations, etc., etc.) which sees these objects as arrangements of copper, iron, rubber etc. in space, without any preliminary understanding. And this way of looking at them might lead to some interesting results. It is quite analogous to looking at a mathematical proposition as an ornament. --It is of course an absolutely strict and correct conception; and the characteristic and difficult thing about it is that it looks at the object without any preconceived idea (as it were from a Martian point of view), or perhaps more correctly: it upsets the normal preconceived idea (runs athwart it).

Carl Einstein, "Absolute," Encyclopedia Acephalica, 1929:

It is undeniable that man invented God so that his wretchedness might be forbidden by somebody greater than himself: God is the dialectical opposite of human imperfections. Ideal entities serve as compensations for wretchedness; that is why the qualities ascribed to the gods delineate by contradiction the failings and servilities of their creators.

The absolute is the sum of the compensations for human wretchedness. To create so perfect a notion, man has been obliged to renounce his peculiarity and miserable content. The absolute is powerful because perfectly empty: it is thanks to this characteristic that it represents the perfection of truth. Nothing can be demonstrated by the absolute: the absolute is precisely that supreme truth which remains indemonstrable. Only the details, the interludes can be demonstrated. Yet it is precisely this impossibility of proving the absolute which makes it irrefutable. It is impossible to shatter a lie which, having no object, cannot be related to anything: the lie, in effect, can be proven only if an object, which is readily and at first glance observed, does not seem consistent; which amounts to saying, in instances without importance. The lie limited by an object can be proven, but never the artifice of a construction, because that excludes the object. It is in this way that works of art are indemonstrable, on account of their being separate, like the absolute, from the object.

The absolute is the greatest expenditure of energy made by man; he then seeks to recoup the energy expended by means of prayer: from which it is evident that man is unable to endure his own energies, being obliged to separate himself from them in order to find equilibrium. It should be added that man, above all, is afraid of himself and of his own creations, imaginary entities he has separated from himself. It is thus that he has done everything to forget his dreams, because he fears his wandering soul. I believe that man has less to fear, faced with the Universe, than faced with himself, because he does not know the world, but only a little corner of it.

The absolute has been man's greatest exploit: it is thanks to that exploit that he outgrown the mythological state. But it was at the same time his greatest defeat, because he invented something greater than himself. Man has created his own servitude. That absolute is identical with the void and with that which has no object. It is thus that man dies by the absolute which is at the same time his means of freedom. Man dies, killed by his fetishes, whose existence is more or less situated in the absolute.

It would appear that philosophy is the degeneration of the mythological state: in fact, in the epoch of philosophy, the absolute is so enfeebled that it needs to be demonstrated. Things – whose frailty is such that, after having accepted them without due consideration, one must still demonstrate them – are called facts of science or of knowledge.

The absolute gods were, to begin with, the ancestors of governing classes, who deified themselves to enhance servitude and fear. Like money, the neutral absolute is a means of power; each may be changed into anything whatever, since they do not possess precise qualities. The absolute belongs to leaders, priests, madmen, to animals and to plants. On the one hand to the mighty and to kings, on the other to those without any power, entirely separate from objects and that very fact from their poverty.

The power of the absolute shows itself in its identity with the unconditional. The absolute has been identified with the essence and with being itself, and it is by means of the absolute that one is immortalised. What a fear of death! People must begin by seeing words through death, and it is thus that they become immortal spirits like the latter. Words, created by man, become his nightmares, and notions are the padded cells of the logicians; it is by means of notions that duration is conned.

The absolute belongs to the tectonic-ecstatics; the contemporary "contortionist" believes only in his own banal and obsequious "I": in this way he has discovered the most obnoxious form of the absolute and a freedom which, after one has forgotten death, has ceased to be limited by "taboos" and is no longer anything other than abject and ugly.

Ezra Pound on machines:

Machines are not really literary or poetic, an attempt to poetise machines is rubbish. There has been a great deal of literary fuss over this. The Kiplonians get as sentimental over machines as a Dickensian does over a starved and homeless orphan on a bleak cold winterrrr’s night.
Machines are musical. I doubt if they are even very pictorial or sculptural, they have form, but their distinction is not in form, it is in their movement and energy; reduced to sculptural stasis they lose raison d’être, as if their essence [sic].
Let me put it another way, they don’t confront man like the faits accomplish of nature; these latter he has to attack ab exteriore, by his observation, he can’t construct ‘em; he has to examine them. Machines are already an expression of his own desire for power and precision; one man can learn from them what some other man has put into them, just as he can learn from other artistic manifestations. A painting of a machine is like a painting of a painting.
The lessons of machines is precision, valuable to the plastic artist, and to literati. …
I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new emotion. But to return to the vorticist demands:
‘Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form, it belongs to the art of that form.’
I am inclined to think that machines acting in time-space, and hardly existing save when in action, belong chiefly to an art acting in time-space; at any rate Antheil has used them, effectively. That is a fait accompli and the academicians can worry over it if they like.”

Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 1924/27

Outline 11/8/10

1. Introduction

2. Léger’s machine paintings: 1918-24 – space, objecthood and the commodity after Cubism

3. Valences of the sphere – problem of the absolute object [this chapter looks at the long history of the sphere in art and theory; also considers case studies of interwar avant-gardism, ubiquity of the sphere and circle, pictorial aporia]; planetary space of technology
[Consider Badiou’s Le Siecle; Heidegger and/or Hegel]

4. Léger and Le Corbusier/Ozenfant, 1924-30: Equivalence

5. Le Corbusier’s minimalism: circuitry, infrastructure, “poem of walls”; factory space/factory as object; [“why blast furnaces matter now more than ever”] – pursue analogy with ‘60s minimalism.

Car designer J.A. Gregoire in Best Wheel Forward (translation of French autobiography): "I consider a number of American engines, surrounded by forests of wires, accessories, and bits and pieces, without thought for line ... nearer to beauty than the elegant Bugatti engines." Quoted in Banham, "Machine Aesthetic," Architectural Review, no. 117 (1955): 226.

# ?

Victor Basch, in response to Behrens' presentation at the 1st Congress of Aesthetics and a General Science of Art, Berlin 1913:

"When we race through the streets of our metropolis at high speed, we can no longer see the details of buildings. Thus it seems to me that the most modern architecture should be adapted to the cinematographic character of our age. Now I ask Professor Behrens how it follows that the most modern architecture in Germany should scorn this desire? ... in Cologne I was truly dismayed when I saw department stores in the somber style of Egyptian mausoleums.... Department stores which should embody the speed of commerce and exchange ... and above all the rapid changes of fashion. ...

Does not Herr Behrens think that our department stores-the new Printemps, the Galeries Lafayette ... held together through only a few iron ribs, which look as if they could be taken down every day like houses of cards and erected elsewhere-[does he not think] that they better express the spirit of the time?"

burton: "monochromeness" [map: about aesthetic and salable void]

"decoy, urge to roll call, appropriative gesture" [awareness motion to
reference without meaning appropriation, mode, marketing, referencing
referencing]

"violent erasure, pining homage" [v. 80s read of problem of reference]

"resolve a monochrome" [resolve?: do all the artists she sites

"resolve" the monochrome? resolution v. claims for problems of
painting imaging lack of image (Wall) absence of picture after
photojournalism - this is a kind of referencing not actually
appropriation it references appropriation as a dominant strategy, you
can't appropriate a monochrome only reference its production something
that is so imitable its actually inimitable (as appropriated) -
conflation of imitation and mimesis with appropriation, stakes of
appropriation are question of property, what is proper to the artist's
task as work - if it is to be a user of culture then this work betrays
an exhaustion with that model v. Burton's "productive panic" (more a
function of her position as writer confronting the work) this panic
sounds almost ahistorical as she describes it, does not adequately
convey the contemporary reality of being an artist making art]

"institutional critique" for Burton tenets of institutional critique have
been accepted by institutions, has become a style (Buren) [map: has
become a style but the tenets have not been evacuated they remain (corresponding point)]

map: task of artist making things - "aboutness" is a accepted way of
making "good" things (impotence content context language), this goes
back to the legacy of conceptual art which automates the execution of
the artist's task, guyton's work signals an exhaustion with principles
of art as solemn task of artist make aesthetic works - question of the
commodity has fallen out of critique that conceptual art began)

Burton: "once Buren legible as painting, painting will have died"
[map: end of production of works once codes destroyed or forgotten,
Burton seems to sound a quasi-existential tone in her account of the
Guyton's persistence in making art, this is an Octoberist narrative in
that what matters to it is art historical discourse, the imminent
failure, the meet subversion, in that sense Burton's is an
anti-historical narrative that fails to consider the institutions of
art function and produce a specific historical situation now - the
paradigm of aboutness the task of making that makes making
transparent, is what aboutness is about, links to the history of
monochrome are superficial in that sense, "ostensible" (are we giving a fair
account of Burton's position here?)

what this means is the Guyton's work is not about anxiety about history (the history of painting) as much as it functions in a contemporary field, monochrome falls out of
the critical tradition, take up legacy of this discourse, Burton wants
this to be a certain kind of essay, a less interesting essay would do
a synchronic reading (are we saying out essay would not try so hard to
be "interesting" i.e. involved in seductive historical aboutness?)

here the diachronic is the decoy, Guyton accepts painting as a unit of
meaning, color is in play, its is a carrier of meaning. appropriation
as a cancellation in early inkjet works partakes of the easy charge of
the appropriative gesture (develop) his is a tragic practice, it
accepts as a given that task of the artist as appropriator (mechanism)
- he wants to produce something like a mediumness in his use of
printed ink, which is an abstraction of appropriation, a canceling
that is not negating, it refers to a discourse of medium specificity
as a something that could be appropriated wholesale as a discourse. -
why wrong to read works as "also" aesthetic, conceptual gesture takes
for granted that things look good, suspends that but doesn't cancel
it, that is actually its problem. gestures are not negative, what do
you do when even junk looks good, mobilize that desirability, these
works want to be seen as works that want to be high modernist, (how
can?) the artist produce an object that can be desired, when
aesthetics no longer a category, how to make a desirable monochrome,
the blips in Warhol screens - machine image that involves the erotica
of imperfection, showing not showing v. total image, its
attractiveness is indexed to the attitude of the producer, carelessly
executed bearing different signs of care, questionable lack of care,
referencing not simply the producer of image but the relationship
between producer and image, that is why there is an erotics? as a
viewer you are asked to be interested in his interest, erotics of
celebrity, and celebrity artists, not about caring about the thing
that the work is ostensibly about but that the artist cares about it
(readymade) connoisseurship - modality of interest not the thing
itself?

aboutness not about commitment, why it is linked to erotics of
celebrity position of consumer is fortified, return to specificity of
medium in recent sculpture is one way to counter the mandate of being
interested, after Judd if the criteria is merely interest (formulation
that obscures relations of social-capital) relief not to have to
desire "anything" and yet remain desirable - its taken for granted
that artists must participate in taste culture, convention of artist's
top ten, this is a reversal of conceptual art, which was to be the end
of taste, the radicality of Judd's rejection of taste as an organizing
principle for art, art henceforth community bound to interest in the
world, impossible counterclaim aestheticism cultivates elite taste

universality of the burden to continue to desire things unspoken problem
ostensibly desire in general, specific art world taste a taste regime,
institutionality of taste making, artforum
taste making no longer "i am critic and these are my criteria, what
people like pre-given, question of what is good obscures conditions of
social-capital
relations abstracted taste is arbitrary not a function of a critical
criteria, (arbitrariness secures the mechanisms of social capital)
art's inability to re-function object where taste is (dialectical?)
forlorn referentiality aesthetic contingency arise in art in the age
of reproduction, modern, stuck with its aesthetics (?) monochrome
doesn't carry meaning meanings, it is a style, idea evacuated
melancholy, loss tragic (distinguish from 80s post modernism?)
Burton: tragic persistence inutility (check quote) map: but for right reasons?
not a question of painting after painting not about painting, but
rather the general conditions for producing art work, makes visible
those condition of making art, everything predictable and yet you
still want it, you want coconut lamps that work.