art and geography

dang, i just finished reading the comic of Persepolis last night - it's *really* good, quite heavy going at times being confronted with the amount of persecution and injustice, and one of those books that really opens your eyes to your own ignorance of matters.
It's very much up there with Joe Sacco's Palestine and Art Spiegelman's Maus as political commentary and a personal tour of troubled times and countries.

This morning I tried to start reading Guy Debord's 'Society Of The Spectacle' but have to admit i found it immediately annoying, with such paragraphs as

"To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned society which ultimately expresses nothing more than it's desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep"

The central tenet i could gleam from it was how society holds illusion in greater esteem over reality, which at first i could accept as something similar to the Buddhist story 'Fingers Pointing at the Moon' whereby people interpret the sign instead of what the sign is pointing to.
However the more i flicked through 'Society Of The Spectacle' it seemed more like it was against all forms of abstraction. Yet, in my mind that is exactly what gives art or life it's meaning - things by themselves are dumb, buildings mean nothing except a pile of bricks, a drawing is merely a squiggle on a piece of paper - its the meaning we imbue in such things that give us context and a sense of history, why we attach emotion and feelings to objects, time and place.
I'm sure it's just me being overly simple - maybe i need to sit down in the pub with someone and have them explain Situationism to me with a more human voice than Debord's!

From all my reading of historical London recently, my reading path has been guiding me towards some psychogeography reading, which should hopefully allow me handle my end of a conversation in the pub with Max or Ruaridh! i've started readin Merlin Coverley's 'Psychogeography' which seems pretty good based on the opening chapter, and looks to cover the origins of psychogeography from Debord (spit!) in Paris during the '50s; retrospective validation in the writings of William Blake, and Thomas De Quincey; and through into more recent work covered by writers and filmakers like Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home and Patrick Keiller (whose "Robinson in Space" film is astounding - max owns a copy of this and it would often get put on as a surreal backdrop to our house parties or a strange post-club viewing experience!)

Labels: books, comics