Answering the age old question: how many artists can dance on the head of a pin?
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Essences and More Questions
Submitted by Joshua Pablo Ro... on Wed, 04/29/2009 - 16:39
Henceforth, H*H* is that which must never be spoken. -------------- I spent some time this week ruminating on SAMPLING. What is the essence of sampling? I came up with a "trinity" of essential metaphors: THE HUNT THE LOOP THE CLASH ------------------- I also looked at the idea of SHRINES. A place of reverence for the past. Relic, Ritual, Invocation Sense of continuity/unbroken chain/"eternal flame" To ENSHRINE - "to place a revered object in an appropriate receptacle", "to preserve in a form that ensures it will be respected" to preserve, entrench, set in stone, contain, include, treasure, immortalize, cherish This led me to a sense of the underlying CONFLICT in the piece: Enshrinement (and a religious position in general) typically refers to a place of Unity, a single coherent universality. Sampling and Appropriation contaminate this sense of self-contained totality, presenting a fractured consciousness with a multiplicity of voices/sources in collision with one another. The "eternal" that is being enshrined is not a static, unified whole, but an evolving, participatory, open-ended process. The work depicts both the "grand narrative", the order of things, but is also disorderly, changeable, allowing for playful reconfiguration of old sources. It remains open and active for interpretations and associations by the viewers. ------------- The QUESTIONS I see in the piece at this point are: How can something be at once "enshrined" and constantly in flux? What is the essence of sampling? What kinds of metaphors does the practice of sampling engender? What are the implications of sampling as a way of knowing, interpreting, interacting with the world of representations? What kinds of conversations across space and time does sampling produce? To whom do samples belong, and for what ends? What are the legal and economic pressure on artists who use sampling? What is the relationship between legality and creativity? What are the pleasures and pains of collecting? How does a moment of music become a commodity, and how does sampling effect its value? What is authenticity in an environment of appropriation and reinvention? What is the smallest unit of funk? How is its power distilled and "reconstituted"? What are the products of this reconstitution? What does it mean intellectually and experientially to have a machine playing a beat instead of a human? What is the role of transgression and orthodoxy in H*H*? Are the two forces in tension?
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