Warhol's American Dream.
A mix by Paul D. Miller a.k.a.
DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
From A to B and back again... The sense is one of loops and repetition,
beats and bytes: repeat to become complete....
The philosophy of looking
at
a Warhol - almost any Warhol - gives you the uneasy sense of being in
some
sort of echo chamber. His style was one of intense repetition and anonymous
formalism - some of the core premises of mid 20th century American art
ran
across the surfaces of his paintings. DJ culture is a place where sound
evokes images, and the theater of sound is held together by beats - repeat
to become complete.
To quote Warhol quoting someone else: "It seems
to be
the same thing over and over and over... that's what the Factory is about."
What Wagner would have called a "gesamptkunstwerk," or "total
art," Warhol
would have called the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable." This,
I guess, is same
section of the Factory, just a different department. But one tends to
forget
that he was one of those people who couldn't be contained by one medium
-
film, sound, and "Happenings" were his forays into multi-media,
and in this
day and age of complete media overload, many of the basic themes that
one
can find in his media works have resurfaced like Nam Jun Paik - but for
radically different reasons - as almost intuitive engagements with how
we
think about culture in the age of information. Echoes are all about how
the "original" voice sends out a signal that is reflected by an
acoustic
environment, and, yeah, it all makes sense when you see and hear the
permutations in Warhol's work.
There's a great story of how Freud came
up
with his idea of the "uncanny." In his 1919 essay of the same
name, Freud
came up with his idea of "repetition-compulsion" by talking
about walking
through a city and encountering the same streets over and over and over
- he
was put in a state of "unheimlich" - the sense of displacement
and
familiarity caused him to feel lost in the "changing same" of
the landscape.
Images can somtimes do the same, and with Warhol's fascination with the
iconography of mass culture, one is brought to the edge of a kind of
transference point - once there, you can see the mass in his Mass
painting.... sampling and sameness, fragments and frames... transference
and transpodence .... all lost in a swirling, coalescing vor-text of sound
and image, sound and signification. That's the mass in Mass: the last
supper at the end of the sequence.... the algorithms make the repetition
become a total theater, a scenario like something out of Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author:" a scenario of human
beings in a
maze of pop culture reflections looking for something to grab ahold of.
Is
it "Flesh?" Are we seeing "Vampire?" Or is it just
"Trash?"
Warhol liked to
throw parties and the event I plan on having this summer is a remix of
that
situation: the "party," the "happening," the Inevitable
Plastic Explosion of
21st century aesthetics seen in a context of continuous change. Like I
always say "it goes on and on with the kickdrum, this ain't no re-run":
a
question hovers on the screen, palimpsest like, and like Ballard said
a long
time ago: form and function, fact and fiction, a return, an echo of a
value
system under duress. Sound and signification, sound and re-ification...
Like
Ballard said a while (complete with echo... echo... echo): "above
all,
science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature that will
cross
the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette
and videotape fictions of the near future...." I think Andy Warhol
was a
Ballard fan, so I'll end this piece with another invocation: repeat to
become complete.
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DJ Spooky and DMC of RUN DMC at Soul Festival, Jakarta, Indonesia! 10/31/2009
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
ORDER NOW!!! 
OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
RHYTHM SCIENCE:
DJ Spooky in Berlin 2008