▦ 7 → Swollen Appendices
by: Shahruz Shaukat
Select Brian Eno essays from "A Year with Swollen Appendices":
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Letter to Dave Stewart (pg. 368)
- "One of the reasons I am attached to this idea is that it is capable of dignifying many more forms of human innovation under its umbrella than the old idea of ‘genius’, which exemplifies what I call the ‘Big Man’ theory of history - where events are changed by the occasional brilliant or terrible man, working in heroic isolation. I would prefer to believe that the world is constantly being remade by all its inhabitants: that it is a cooperative enterprise. Folk arts and popular arts have always been criticized because they tend to exhibit evolutionary, incremental change - because they lack sufficient ‘Big Men’ making shockingly radical and unpopular steps into the future. Instead the pop scene carries much of its audience with it - something the fine arts people are inclined to distrust: the secret question is, ‘How can it possibly be good if so many people like it?’"
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Roles and Game-Playing (pg. 396)
- "I had been thinking about game-playing a lot. It was an approach that Roy Ascott had pioneered at Ipswich Art School during my time there, and I had most recently seen it working with my wife’s family. At Christmas and other times the whole family play quite elaborate games which allow normally retiring people to become suddenly enormously extrovert and funny. Watching them, it occurred to me that the great thing about games is that they in some sense free you from being yourself: you are ‘allowed’ forms of behaviour that otherwise would be gratuitous, embarrassing or completely irrational. Accordingly, I came up with these role-playing games for musicians."
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- "a small game Brian Eno and I played to loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future. We were both struck at how improbable current events would be to anyone in the past, and how incapable we are at expecting the improbable in the future." (Kevin Kelly's description)
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- "Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘the things that nobody ever thought of not doing’. A version of this happened in clothing fashion. There was recently a style - variously described as non-fit, un-fit and anti-fit (the name didn’t stabilize) - which was to do with people wearing clothes that exist at the never-before-desirable end of the newly discovered axis well-fitted <—> badly fitted. These clothes were deliberately chosen to look completely wrong. This was way beyond baggy, which was a first timid step along that axis. Baggy implies the message ‘These are my clothes, but I like to wear them loose.’ Non-fit says, ‘These are someone cIsc’s clothes’ or ‘I am insane’ or ‘I cannot locate myself’ or ‘I don’t fit.’"
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- "Let's start here: ‘culture’ is everything we don’t have to do. We have to eat, but we don’t have to have ‘cuisines’, Big Macs or Tournedos Rossini. We have to cover ourselves against the weather, but we don’t have to be so concerned as we are about whether we put on Levi’s or Yves Saint-Laurent. We have to move about the face of the globe, but we don’t have to dance. These other things, we choose to do. We could survive if we chose not to."
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- "In the last two decades this idea has become seriously eroded (though you often wouldn’t know it from reading art critics). Instead we see a broad and dense field of cultural objects connected very, very richly - with lines going every which way depending on who you are and where you stand and what you’re looking for anyway. Thus a cultural event such a ‘Picasso’ can figure in many different ‘stories’ (a story is a non-absolutist version of a ‘history’ - it’s a version of events that makes no claims to be ‘the truth’) and can have quite different values in each. The entity called Picasso has thus become of negotiable, not absolute, value. This is the key idea. If you abandon the idea that culture has a single centre, and imagine that there is instead a network of active nodes which may or may not be included in a particular journey across the field, you also abandon the idea that those nodes have absolute value. Their value changes according to which story they’re included in, and how prominently. It’s a bit like modern currency: all values are now floating, and there is no longer the ‘gold standard’ that art history sought to provide us with."
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- "We’ve been approaching the next stage of the work in the normal way - thinking, naturally enough, what else we could put in to the music - what types of instruments, what sorts of changes, what vocals, etc. I thought, ‘Why don’t we also start thinking of what we can put round the music?’
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"Where do you work? Do you work ‘inside’ or ‘outside’? To work inside is to deal with the internal conditions of the work - the melodies, the rhythms, the textures, the lyrics, the images: all the normal day-to-day things one imagines an artist does. To work outside is to deal with the world surrounding the work - the thoughts, assumptions, expectations, legends, histories, economic structures, critical responses, legal issues and so on and on. You might think of these things as the frame of the work."
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"A frame is a way of creating a little world round something"
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- "I think of it like the layers of an onion: in the traditionalist view, it would be easy to identify that core of the onion and then to rank all other activities - performance, production, etc. - in terms of their apparent distance from it. But popular culture keeps confounding this picture by producing artists who decide to focus their compositional attention on a more ‘peripheral’ layer of the onion - and who conversely often pay very little attention to the things that copyright legislation would deem central."
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"The idea is very clear: here is an object of culture which you must finish to be able to use it. Another way of saying that is to suggest that culture-makers are moving away from providing pure, complete experiences to providing the platforms from which people then fashion their own experiences."
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"This is the most optimistic thing I can think of - that people abandon the increasingly perilous old definitions of Identity, such as race and ethnicity and class and blood, and start thinking of identity as something multiple, shifting, blurred, experimental and adaptive. I think the philosophical underpinning for such a change is already sliding into place under the guise of pure entertainment."
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- "I met up with him one day and, on the subway, told him how down I was and that I felt like a completely empty shell. ‘But, Captain,’ he said (he always called me this), ‘don’t you realize that all over North America people are shelling out enormous fortunes to feel the same way?’ I nearly fell on the tracks laughing, and felt wonderful for the next six months."
🕊 Where to next?
✸ Tabs roll call
1: "John Lennon" - Genius is Pain
⬆ Content warning: Most of the writing here aged poorly, parodying John Lennon at his angriest, angstiest, and most unhinged. It seems a bit extreme and unfair as parody until you learn every single line is almost verbatim something he said in this interview he did with Rolling Stone in Dec 1970. Anyways, the last minute and half of this popped into my head while re-reading the scenius essay.