Jean Baudrillard spent a life time writing about how the simulation of reality will soon and maybe already has replaced reality itself. He references Borges Fable where a cartographer starts to draw a map of the kings empire, however through wanting to draw it as accurately as possible with as much detail as possible he ends up covering the whole empire with the map itself. When the empire falls, the map takes its place as the new empire but fades into the landscape leaving neither the land or its representation behind. Baudrillard uses this as an example of hyper-reality and we are now seeing this hyper-reality in the media and advertising, popular culture, music and television. Our televisions now display simulations of reality instead of actual reality and our music and graphic design does the very same thing. These days pop music simulates a real song, so what we hear on the radio is 3 places removed from the actual song itself and the actual studio performance of the song. It is the same with graphic design, the average consumer now requires this, and a 'real' performance of a song or a 'real' painting is somehow not good enough, for it is not hyper-real. So as Baudrillard and Borges Fable predicted we now consider the 'real' to be inadequate and the hyper-real or the simulation of reality to be the authentic expression.
Societies' thirst for hyper-reality has caused modernity to reach a saturation point whereby popular culture in all its genres and sub-genres and styles has been over expressed and exhausted. The internet has killed subculture altogether and now any new expression of youthful angst or any intellectually motivated art or musical movement instantly becomes available on the open market of ideas that is the world wide web. So within weeks and months millions of people can feel some sort of ownership of these ideas. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it is the beauty of this exponential growth of intellectual and social evolution which we have longed for ever since we invented the wheel. The problem however, is to be found at the tipping point at which our inventions, creations and artistic expressions outgrow their own value. It is when they start to swallow themselves in an infinite circle where the medium and the creation are indistinguishable and the expression itself is lost in the quest to express. So these things lose the beauty they once had at the very hands of their creators?
(picture - Xeni Jardin)
The only way for art and music to survive is for the artist to take a step away from their usual 'post modern' tricks. The use of irony and juxtaposition to express cynicism about the frustrations of tradition or conservative thought now seem diluted by over use. To add to this list of oppressors there is the hyper-real itself; the very art and music that wants to rebel, is now its own enemy due to its cyclical self consuming nature.
The only way to express artistic protest now and to fully create something new and 'real' is through art which is devoid of statement, commentary and cynicism. It is to express the beauty of the abyss, the random observation of things without joining any dots and without linking ideas. It is the naivety in ones work that makes it powerful amongst the deluge of vapid attempts of expression which seem impotent when undermined by their own style. An achievement of true integrity would present itself in a non-statement and through a lack of opinion. This would be far more radical and 'real' than art which deliberately strives for this.
Alter-modernism is the lack of statement, it is the space between ideas, and through its moderate expression of nothing but random observation it achieves something more powerful than any satire, parody, ironic genre melding or intellectual dissection. The new breed of hipster has cut off the legs of their own motive. They are so caught up in style that they have forgotten what it was they were trying to express. Allen Ginsberg would be turning in his grave if he saw what has become of the so called forward thinking youth of today.
Let us usher in the new without even thinking about it. As E.M Coiran says: "I live because the mountains cannot laugh and the worms cannot sing". So let us sing and laugh and express just that, and nothing else. Let us fight off tyranny, conservatism and hyper-reality with nothing more than a haiku. Let us simply observe, let us express nothing and everything, through a portrait of a face or a song about a feeling.
- by Daniel Merriweather
- by Daniel Merriweather
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