A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan continues. If he had lived Marshall would have been 100 on July 21, 2011. Join me in the countdown to his centennial, and an exploration of more of his observations on the way media work in the electric age in which we live.
Art
Bless advertising art.
Marshall McLuhan (1969, age 58). Wonderous to behold!   Â
“Bless Advertising Art for its PICTORIAL vitality and verbal creativity.”
Me (March, 2011, age 58). Let’s take a look.
All advertising may not be art, but some definitely is. Would there were more.
 Cordially, Marshall and Me
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Reading:Â
Marshall McLuhan, Counter-Blast, 1969, p. 18.
What’s real?
Marshall McLuhan (1970, age 59). The genuine fake!   Â
“In art, the genuine fake, Rembrandt or Vermeer, is just as valid as the real thing because it provides the same new awareness or perception.”
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Me (March, 2011, age 58). An observation McLuhan made about advertising …
When he said that advertising was getting so good you don’t have to buy the product to enjoy it.Â
 
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 Cordially, Marshall and Me
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Reading:Â
Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business, 1970, p. 46.
Which came first the film or the book?
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). The book of course
“Even the film industry regards all its greatest achievements as derived from novels.”
Me (November, 2010, age 58). Can you think of any film that inspired a great book?
McLuhan observes that the book and the film are closely related to one another. As evidence for this he points to great films being inspired by novels and the difficulty of imagining a film being based on a newspaper. Yet it is odd that the forces of inspiration seem to work in only one direction. It is easy to think of novels (and plays and even comic books and video games) that inspired great (ok may be not great, but not completely schlock) films, but hard to think of any film that inspired a great (or even reasonably good) book and none outside the realm of fantasy and science fiction. No disrespect to Alan Dean Foster, but he’s no Charlotte Bronte.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 286.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Me (November, 2010, age 58). What can you learn from a cliché?
The clichĂ©, a picture is worth a thousand words, is the idea that Marshall McLuhan starts out with but he takes it to a new place. His take is that because a picture is worth a thousand words films (films are also known as pictures) must provide their audiences with at least a thousand words of detailed information in every scene. Clothing and props in historical dramas, for example, must be exactly right in every detail. On the stage or on TV – in sharp contrast – one can get away with far less detail. From TV, a case in point [and a little humour]:
Of course McLuhan would be a lot easier to read if he stuck to plain and simple expressions of his ideas but then if he did he probably wouldn’t have come up with the ideas that he did.
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Here is the way to say a picture is worth a thousand words …
“In terms of other media such as the printed page, film has the power to store and convey a great deal of information. In an instant it presents a landscape with figures that require several pages of prose to describe.”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 288.
Perspective is learned.
Me (November, 2010, age 58). But what does it teach?
Marshall McLuhan said that a perspective is a dangerous thing.  Dangerous to our understanding of the world because it closes off other possibilities. Here the artist David Hockney explores a different way of seeing:
Marshall McLuhan (1964, age 52). Print taught us perspective
“The old belief that everybody really saw in perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to paint it, is erroneous.”
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 288.
What’s art?
Marshall McLuhan (1970s?). Of course …
I was chatting with the artist Eric Wesselow. I asked him, “What is art? He started in on the fact that etymologically, art simply means something that is made.
“Actually,” I told him, “art is what you can get away with.”
He looked somewhat taken aback. So I asked him, “What is a portrait? “A portrait,” I said, “is the picture of a person where there is always something wrong with the mouth.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). And yet …
I have always found these oddball definitions funny. And perhaps that’s all they are. However they also have a ring of truth. The second calls to mind the most iconoclastic portrait in western culture – the Mona Lisa – the first has crossed the mind of anyone who has ever walked through a gallery of modern art.  At any rate the next time I go to an art gallery, I’m going to find it hard not to think of McLuhan’s definitions.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan, 1994, p. 222.
Want to stand out?
Marshall McLuhan (January, 1964, age 52). Here’s the rule.
Just finished chatting with Wilfred Watson, as usual it was a highly productive conversation. Wilfred is really quite a good listener. I realized that one can toggle back and forth between standing out and blending in. Anything that is part of the ground, the environment, is low definition, and goes unseen, unrecognized. Anything that stands out is figure, high definition, and commands attention. Stop reading and look at this page. What do you see? The words are figure, the space between them is ground. You can make a part of the figure ground and thus involving and invisible by a simple rule: repeat it. Thus:
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To reverse the effect eliminate the repetitions. Thus:
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Andy Warhol uses this technique to great effect in his Pop Art show. Repetition is the trick that allows him to turn Marilyn Monroe – who I hope you’ll agree is quite the figure – into ground. Ditto for Elvis.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Can life imitate art?
This is an idea that strikes me as extremely useful if only it could be applied. Say you’re at a party and you want to make an impression, to stand out. What can you do to be “figure” rather than “ground.” Or say you’re at the same party and you don’t want to be noticed. What can you do to be “ground” rather than “figure”?
McLuhan says the key is repetition. But how? One way to go from ground to figure is to speed up. To repeat is to slow down. In the extreme if you stop moving entirely you are constantly repeating the same image of yourself. This is what a wall flower does.
Some weeks ago Julien Smith asked the question; “Can you blend in and stand out at the same time?” McLuhan’s rule would seem to say no you can’t. You can either be figure, stand out, or be ground, and blend in. You can’t be both.
Or can you? [see earlier post]
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p.297.
The power of the artist
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1968, age 57). You can give Mailer a compliment but he hasn’t the wit to accept it
That chat I had with Norman Mailer on the CBC’s TV program, “The Summer Way,” is still on my mind, largely because despite the title of the program, “Meeting of Minds,” there was so little meeting of minds. Here’s how it went. I’d make an observation. (Violence is necessary to the formation of identity.) He’d say he didn’t like it.  So I made another observation, (the new electronic environment has abolished nature) and he’d say he didn’t like that and so it went. I don’t have a problem with his liking or not liking my ideas. But I don’t think liking or not liking is productive. In fact I’m convinced it’s counter-productive. Liking and not liking, which is so often masked as truth-seeking interferes as I said yesterday with just observation of the world.
I decided to try a new tactic. Norman, I said, you will be delighted with this – the artist is the only one who is able to face the present and see it for what it is. He alone has the ability to tell us what is happening. Poor Mailer was not delighted.
Me (December 2009, age 57). Marshall McLuhan: Artist or scientist?
At this point, the moderator of the meeting, Ken Lefolii, stepped in and asked McLuhan whether he thought of himself as an artist or a scientist. McLuhan’s answer was no, he didn’t think of himself as an artist or a scientist. He said he rejected these categories as unhelpful, fragmenting, nineteenth century devices, and in particular he implied they were not helpful for thinking about him as an observer of the unfolding electric 20th century world. McLuhan’s answer then in effect was “I refuse to be lumped in a category.”
But of those two boxes, artist and scientist, he seems to fit most easily into the artist category. Scientists he said are in the matching game. Matching ideas about the world with evidence of the world. Artists are in the breakthrough game. Looking for new patterns in the world. McLuhan tries his hand at the matching game in his observations about media. For example, radio is visual, TV is tactile and children who watch TV look at the world from an average distance of 4’6”and therefore are hunters not readers. But this science is not the science you met in High School. The matching is often difficult to separate from assertion.
What category would you place yourself? Artist or scientist? What about the people closest to you? Family, friends, colleagues? Should businesses be in the matching game or the breakthrough game?
Cordially, Marshall and Me