An attempt to make any sort of situated sense

Gözleme girl from Click Opera

I have to say goodbye to my favorite blog Click Opera. The blog that gave me Anne Laplantine. Aesthetics as politics. The blog that gave me Berlin. The blog of blogs!

It feels funny to start writing about Click Opera in a past sense but i feel like I've been secretly wishing for it all the same. I want to make a narrative and a narrative is hard to do in a place where you don't see clearly in both directions, back and forth. After a closure, it's much easier.

I started following Click Opera sometime around 2004 when I was in my early twenties. I didn't read it daily, by no means, but regularly. I spent the better half of the 2000s with it. It was no earlier than spring 2009 when I became conscious of it. It happened when I noticed myself typing search site:imomus.livejournal.com into google so many times -the search function was always the worst if not entirely obsolete aspect of Click Opera. In livejournal there are no such things as tags.

So what have I been doing all these years with it? I have been collecting thoughts. So many to mention. Another way to put it, I have been influenced.

What I'm going to talk about are thoughts as images. Thoughts and images, thought as images, images as objects that transform reality.

Personally Click Opera has pretty much defined the way a blog could be and should be. The way he takes things in his everyday existence and weaves them into a context and the way he uses text and images. You could say his text is dominating the images, yes, but there is definitely not one without the other. Starting to deconstruct the waves of influence, I feel ambigous about which things I have picked up from there and what I had before, so entwined they are in my aesthetics now. For instance I can remember discovering David Shrigley before he was ever mentioned in Click Opera but I recall not reading about him anywhere else. Now that the first decade of 2000s has passed, I can state he is one of the most influential artists of the decade. Easily. His images were everywhere, writing about him wasn't. So it was not so much Momus introducing me to artists and bands, more often it was him writing about them, making them visible and narrated into the 2000s art story.

Sometimes it was almost backwards. Like when Momus blogged about the japanese horror movie Hausu! in the end of 2009, I had already been psyched about it for a good while. Reading the entry was a strange receding recognizition, like he was no longer ahead- I was just happy that he had the chance to see it, or something.

But he did introduce me to concepts! And words, words like

superflat
cute formalism
tender half-lit
play ethic
gözleme girls

Along the way I went, picking up things. Things that were useful for me. Saving an image on my harddrive, writing down a new word in invisible ink.

I go back to the initial feeling, the beginning, the concept that made me take the first indirect steps of following Click Opera. It was an image of Pierrot. Momus called his beauty clumsy grace- an unfinished, melancholic kind of beauty, he saw embodied in a David Bowiesque character, a sad Pierrot rooted in the Commedia Dell'Arte archetypes. At the same time I worshipped Fellini films. Since getting into them in high school I had identified most with the character played by Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. A kind of autistic, half-witted but tender figure. I had invented an affectionate word 'hiccup beauty' to describe what I felt in the presence of such beings. Oh now I remember! Momus was talking about a music video for David Bowie, Be My Wife. In the video Bowie appears as a Pierrot character. He is out of it, as one YouTube commenter put it. Out of pride, out of the game. He does indeed resemble a Masina character, a ridiculed clown pleading to be cared about. It is the opposite of everything aggressively deliberate or try-too-hard-sexy or "rockn'roll". Seeing Momus, this strange old guy coming up with a concept for something that I craved for, how could I help but listen more?

Momus often referenced Rainer Maria Rilke, who spoke of beauty as the first sight of terror that we're still just able to bear. To me, the concept of clumsy grace has somehow replaced or perhaps reconnected sexy and beautiful, whatever those words mean, and I find myself lusting after it, depending on it. The same kind of graceful clumsiness I have lately found in Berlin-based Molly Nilsson's music for example... a mix of half-hearted and passionate...

When I started writing I felt it would be a mistake to illustrate this letter too much. Perhaps I was afraid I would get carried away with the images. Instead, to paint a picture in your ear, here is my favorite song from 2009, a concrete italodisko clip that Momus recorded in an Italian cafe to serve as a reference point to his 2005 Ocky Milk album.

It has been said that a strange and wonderful part of Click Opera were the anonymous commenters who provided the discussion around the topics. Anyway, the experience of reading Click Opera was not only about reading his entries but reading the comments too. Not pulling open every thread, livejournal was much too stiff about that, but a few every time. Of course not everything Momus was talking about appealed to me nor did I agree with him about every topic. I could even argue that none of that mattered much to me. I was not taking part in an argument or passing judgement. Momus was noticing things in the time that where simultaneously things that I half-consciously aspired towards. Simply because I felt I needed them to be alive. So I consumed images, images like Berlin.


Image by Erin Jane Nelson

Yes, let's talk about Berlin- the subject I most hate and love to talk about. It's highly dubious to me what people are talking about when they are talking Berlin, or any city with a strong Aura. I don't even know where the line between Berlin as a place, and Berlin as an image exactly runs, but I will try to direct my gaze towards the latter. Berlin as a picture, Berlin as a picture painted by Click Opera. I don't have to look at actual pictures to look at it. I already see people sitting in cozy flats knitting and playing music. Color. Patina. Artsy book store interior. A certain interior has been burned into my brain forever. The grass green of the carpet evokes the same kind of perfect romance of outside and inside as that lovely scene in Godard's A Woman is a woman with Anna Karina riding her bike inside. Snapshots of the Turkish Market, and the image of Gözleme girls in their multicolored, pattern-clashing outfits. Sea shell pattern, the focused gaze of the young girl who is folding the Gözleme. Open my eyes. I am now in Berlin. With the wooden floors, eating the same Spinat Gözleme at the Turkish market every Friday. My body is eating the fruit, riding the bike, breathing the air, browsing the art books, not paying for them.

Images affect you, whether you like it or not, my friend, artist Jessica Williams writes.

I think a problem with my generation of early internet-adapters and artists is that we take references for granted. We are involved in a discussion that circles around itself, re-blogging and re-referencing like we all know what we are all talking about. Taking air for granted seems dangerous to me. It's like that David Foster Wallace quote with the two fish swimming and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This good-bye letter to Momus is perhaps my own attempt to make my own structures a bit more transparent. And by that to emancipate a piece of myself, seeking new air to breath. Of course the new air will again get filled again with bits of garbage but new bits, until-now neglected bits. Imagine dust gathering on the gallery floor. And a ray of light cutting through. I need to do this, to continue devoting myself to this cycle of making sense and not making sense, to be able to be in the game, and out of it, and in again.

It's the strangest thing with images. As much as I want these images to appear, I want them to disappear. So I could emerge again, create, go on living. So good bye digital daddy! I will miss you.

"The kind of blogging I do has to be based in personal obsession, in spats and rivalry, in a kind of light, oblique but perpetual autobiography. There has to be a subject for all this data to make any sort of situated sense, and that subject has to be seen to have a body, clothes, a way to wear those clothes, and so on. As soon as I get tugged out of that embodied, situated world I get bored and anxious and mistrustful. I want to know always who's speaking, how old they are, what culture they were raised in, what their vested interests are, and so on. I do think pictures supply some of this background. I find the rational-enlightened taboo on pictures as curious as the religious-superstitious one it replaces but never quite displaces."

- Momus