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hyperobjects and hyperobjectives: notes towards an exhibition I do not actually plan to curate, but wish I did
I have the dubious distinction of being an increasingly elderly white male who still owns a considerably battered copy of the Marshall McLuhan issue of Aspen, “the magazine that comes in a box” that was the forerunner of numerous deconstructed pieces of print media (mostly artists’ books, though a 1968 issue of a college literary magazine I edited and an entire 1986 “bagazine” architecture issue of Art Papers took their cues from Aspen’s example). I assume Aspen took its inspiration from Fluxus’s intermingling of the highly aesthetic concept and the commonplace object, since Fluxus itself was the topic of one of the later issues. (All the contents of the seven years of the magazine can be viewed via ubuweb, but of course the point was to handle this incredible variety of objects and textures, and that sensory experience can’t be communicated online—yet.)
I bought said volume with considerable excitement because it was clearly attempting to extent McLuhan’s insights regarding the impact of media by defeating our expectations of what a magazine ought to be while forcing us to think, via what a subsequent generation would call the deconstructed print medium, about the new electronic media. In so doing, it questioned the limits and the legitimacy of both.
Or so we thought, anyway, even if we didn’t quite understand what McLuhan was telling us about the dialectic in question.
The reason we didn’t quite understand was that a great deal of what McLuhan was saying was nonsense. And this is a problem I have encountered again and again over my lifetime: the writers who perceive the full dimensions of a previously unconsidered question almost always articulate their perceptions unintelligibly, with explications of the topic that are frequently just plain wrong when they can be deciphered at all. But the fundamental perceptions behind the wrongly conceived articulations are completely valid.
This generalized insight could be pursued in so many different directions that for once I do not wish to attempt to analyze all of them in a single blog post. However, I do want to present references to two or three ideas that I may never get around to pursuing beyond these preliminary notes. (My blog seems to be turning into a series of prefaces to projects that are never begun, something that in itself has a distinguished history, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project being a classic example of the larger category of books for which there exist an immense amount of preparatory materials but no actual product beyond a few preliminary fragments.)
Anyone who wishes to pursue this topic on the other side of an LJ-cut is welcome to click ( here )
I have the dubious distinction of being an increasingly elderly white male who still owns a considerably battered copy of the Marshall McLuhan issue of Aspen, “the magazine that comes in a box” that was the forerunner of numerous deconstructed pieces of print media (mostly artists’ books, though a 1968 issue of a college literary magazine I edited and an entire 1986 “bagazine” architecture issue of Art Papers took their cues from Aspen’s example). I assume Aspen took its inspiration from Fluxus’s intermingling of the highly aesthetic concept and the commonplace object, since Fluxus itself was the topic of one of the later issues. (All the contents of the seven years of the magazine can be viewed via ubuweb, but of course the point was to handle this incredible variety of objects and textures, and that sensory experience can’t be communicated online—yet.)
I bought said volume with considerable excitement because it was clearly attempting to extent McLuhan’s insights regarding the impact of media by defeating our expectations of what a magazine ought to be while forcing us to think, via what a subsequent generation would call the deconstructed print medium, about the new electronic media. In so doing, it questioned the limits and the legitimacy of both.
Or so we thought, anyway, even if we didn’t quite understand what McLuhan was telling us about the dialectic in question.
The reason we didn’t quite understand was that a great deal of what McLuhan was saying was nonsense. And this is a problem I have encountered again and again over my lifetime: the writers who perceive the full dimensions of a previously unconsidered question almost always articulate their perceptions unintelligibly, with explications of the topic that are frequently just plain wrong when they can be deciphered at all. But the fundamental perceptions behind the wrongly conceived articulations are completely valid.
This generalized insight could be pursued in so many different directions that for once I do not wish to attempt to analyze all of them in a single blog post. However, I do want to present references to two or three ideas that I may never get around to pursuing beyond these preliminary notes. (My blog seems to be turning into a series of prefaces to projects that are never begun, something that in itself has a distinguished history, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project being a classic example of the larger category of books for which there exist an immense amount of preparatory materials but no actual product beyond a few preliminary fragments.)
Anyone who wishes to pursue this topic on the other side of an LJ-cut is welcome to click ( here )
