Author: Darren Poynton

Music and Rebellion

Post author By Darren Poynton
Post date March 12, 2020

Arnold Schoenberg – Six Little Piano Pieces

Can popular music be subversive? According to the critical theorist Theodore Adorno the answer is firmly, ‘no’. The reasons for this are related to the structure of contemporary society itself; “We live in a society of commodities—that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not primarily to satisfy human wants and needs, but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well as the human interrelationships.” – A Social Critique of Radio Music – Adorno

Tags Cooption, Pop music

Culture Film

The ABC’s of Dada

Post author By Darren Poynton
Post date February 20, 2020

Art is a reflection of the society that produces it. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Europe had turned itself into a vast slaughterhouse. In Zurich a group of artists gathered in the Cabaret Voltaire and set about a total rejection of the values that had produced the First World War. The irrationality and absurdity of capitalist society was mocked and satirized in an iconoclastic and nihilistic style that was as irrational and meaningless as the times that had produced it.

Tags Art, Dada

Culture Film

On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment In Time

Post author By Darren Poynton
Post date January 30, 2020

“The cinema too must be destroyed”

Not many films are made to deliberately discourage passive consumption. Instead of trying to entertain or seduce the viewer with aesthetically soothing shots this film deliberately interrupts itself and pauses to criticise the institute of cinema itself. It is a commentary on the fractured and fragmentary nature of everyday life with all its discontinuities, contradictions, hopes and frustrations.

Tags Paris, Situationist International

Culture Film

Donde Nada Ocurre. Toro Mar.

Post author By Darren Poynton
Post date January 23, 2020

Donde Nada Ocurre (Where Nothing Happens) is an artistic project conceived by Ibiza born Irene de Andrés. First shown in its totality at Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, north-west Spain. The project consists of five films, and other models and architectural structures.

Tags Ibiza, Spain