The Freakish Hybrid Straddling the Fence By Rad Tollett
Food and music aside, Texas isn’t known for its creative exports. Yes, we have given the world Greater Tuna, and we gladly contribute people like Jessica Simpson and Anna Nicole Smith for your viewing pleasure, but overall our work can be summarized in an oil painting consisting of a weathered wagon wheel resting in a batch of bucolic bluebonnets. However, where we lack in export we compensate in import, and no one institution excels more at this than The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2003, MFAH successfully prodded MOMA to lend 200 of its prized possessions while they were renovating their Manhattan digs. Entitled The Heroic Century, tens of thousands of Texans sporting big hair and big opinions stormed the event for a chance to see some of the 20th century’s greatest artists. I was residing in Austin at the time and was one of the lucky ones in attendance, but what inspired me was not so much what was there as what was not. With audio guide in hand, I was herded through a chronology from post-Impressionism to Pop. Put simply, shit was heavy. Wonderfully heavy. However, the weight of the show did not remain consistent from end to end. The final gallery paid homage to post-Modern and “emerging art”, and it fell flat. My audio guide’s lofty and detailed explanations turned into defensive and somewhat muddy diatribes of where art has been heading for the past 20 years. I left the museum feeling both cultured and confused. On the drive back to Austin I realized those in the visual arts community faced the same, uncomfortable reality artists of all kinds are experiencing: a lack of originality. Perhaps the great post-Modern philosophers and theorists of the mid-20th century had gotten it right; there are no new layers to uncover, only existing layers to inhibit.
Ima ge by Je nnif e r M a r a v il la s
This was a depressing if not downright harsh perspective. Even while living among one of the largest pockets of Cultural Creatives in the country the signs of a creative dearth were everywhere. Fashion seemed to look to past decades and bygone eras for inspiration. Spoon and Okkervil River were great bands, but they weren’t producing novel sound. Even the newest restaurants relied on fusing disparate palettes in attempt to make something we hadn’t tasted before. This all seemed more like dabbling in safe waters rather than exploration into the unknown. Then, of course, there was my own industry of media and marketing. Put simply, nothing seemed to stand out from what had been done before. Even award show judges, famous for inflating that which is flat, moaned about a lack of new thinking in the craft. Rehash. Remix. Revive. Re… Nevertheless, I remained unconvinced that we must begrudgingly continue reflecting upon the creativity of past generations. Like many of my fellow “creatives”, I believed a new age – a Digital Age – was beginning to provide us with the context needed to shed the constraints of our Industrial forefathers. And perhaps it already has. I have never claimed to have my finger on the creative pulse of society more than any other man, but the confusion that followed my visit to The Heroic Century has recently turned to clarity thanks to the works of two men. The first work was a speech given by Clay Shirky, author and NYU professor, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this past April. I wasn’t there, but I picked up his keynote as it began flying through the tubes of the Internet within hours of its original delivery. Based on the way it was tagged, people didn’t know what to make of his theory of cognitive surplus, but I found it to be the most simplified explanation of an incredibly complex idea. It goes something like this:
In the Agrarian Age we worked from sunrise to sunset and rarely had time for anything but a quick smoke around the campfire with friends. These face-to-face conversations were our primary media option. 67
In the Industrial Age we shifted to a regimented schedule working from 9 to 5 with disposable time from 5 to 9. With this largely new resource – free time – we began to balance our active, verbal communication with more passive forms such as books and newspapers and later radio and television. The Digital Age has given us an additional asset – accessible and affordable technology. Today, more than ever, we can quickly distribute the content that we could only consume in the previous age. The active, verbal conversation of the Agrarian Age and the passive forms of media we all grew up with are now blending together. In other words, we went from largely producers to largely consumers to some freakish hybrid that straddles the fence. This phenomenon is our cultural mark on history. It was the answer to what I was looking for, and it only took Shirky ten minutes to explain it. So where’s the proof? I guess you could say it’s been building steam for years and is now surrounding us. Fashion on Threadless comes in the form of user-generated design voted on not by judges but by the end consumer. Wikipedia has proven that a group of disparate writers can produce something worth reading. Nike is no longer passively telling us to “Just Do It” but rather enabling us to track our own runs, upload them onto Nike+ and create new bonds with the larger running universe. My favorite example is the emerging musical style of sampling. Artists like Danger Mouse and Car Stereo Wars prove that disparate genres of music can be fused to create an entirely new sound. Yes, they are remixing and therefore stereotypically post-Modern, but at what point does remixing become so ubiquitous that the incorporated elements of the past can no longer be isolated from the whole? If through accessible and affordable technology musicians are able to truly blur the lines between the past and present then the Digital Age has entered the equivalent of post-Impressionism in the Modern Age. A recent (and I would consider remarkable) example of this blur effect comes to us as a rail-thin, goofy, digital savant named Greg Gillis. He is the byproduct of too much free time and affordable, accessible technology and is therefore Shirky’s theory incarnate. 68
Gillis, otherwise known as Girl Talk, has recently produced two “albums” each comprised of over 300 sampled songs from every genre to hit the radio waves in the past 50 years. It’s brilliant, scattered, and crass. There is very little rhyme or reason and not a single original note from Gillis – it is sampling purified. I believe Chris Deline of Culture Bully nailed it when he noted “the end product of [Girl Talk’s] work is a piece of music that is almost impossible to recall, a piece of music that is fresh every time it is heard because of the fact that it passes the listener by with lightning-like speed.” In a sense, Girl Talk is our Digital Age man straddling the fence between production and consumption. He rebuilds from the past so completely that what we hear is something we should only take and can only take as new. He is, at least by my account, one of the few artists that has pushed the envelope of post-Modernism so completely that we must identify his work as part of an entirely different artistic movement: Mash. No, it isn’t a new term, but Girl Talk and his contemporaries both offline and online are proving the over-generalized era of post-Modernism is now in our collective history. Besides, I can’t tolerate the irony that veils the multiple terms already proposed for this new creative era. I mean, who thought the terms post-Postmodernism and pseudo-Modernism were worthy of description? In a sense my original concern regarding the state of originality and creativity has no solution. In fact, we have never lived in a world with new layers to uncover. The heroic, Industrial artists of the previous century were merely using the resources they had at their disposal to identify – and sometimes brilliantly isolate – the layers in which we have always existed. Now, in an age comprised of seemingly endless communicative resources, a new crop of artists are fusing, twisting, rebuilding and mashing the layers of our culture into something we have never seen before but seem to recognize at least on a subconscious level. Is it new? Is it old? It no longer matters. Their work is simply heroic.
Rad Tollett, a native Texan, recently moved to Richmond, Virginia where he works as a Senior Strategic Planner for The Martin Agency.