File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1995/avant-garde_Jun.95, message 10


Date: Mon, 5 Jun 95 10:18:52 EDT
From: ma-AT-dsd.camb.inmet.com (Malgosia Askanas)
Subject: Re:  Fascism


Whit wrote:

>> Disparagement,  impatience, attack are not quite _it_: it is
>> when they combine with the view of art as religion, the artist
>> as priest who links "the people" to a higher order of reality 
>> - then, it seems to me, the mix begins to resemble fascism.

> Shamanism then must be divorced from art because it is "archaic" and because
> historical fascists made some use of its forms? This seems an argument that
> anything which has been used badly cannot then ever be used well. It also
> seems akin to imperialist rationales for destroying shamanic societies - or
> at least smashing their idols.

Why?  Where is the link?  First of all, we are talking about art now,
here, not in a shamanistic society.  Secondly, the passage you quote
explicilty talks about a specific _mix_, not about shamanism or
archaicism per se.   

> Art, anthropologically speaking, largely derives from shamanic practice.
> Perhaps the weakness of art in the last decade or so comes from a pomo
> renunciation of this link.

Art may derive from one thing or another, but it is my feeling that people 
who invoke these derivations as a foundation for their artistic position 
usually do so for political purposes, as a kind of legitimizing myth for 
their disparagement of the social order.  I wish you'd stop picking on
one side of my argument and reducing it to absurdity; it would be
much more productive if you either helped refine the argument, or
tore into it as a whole; I am sure it could benefit from that. 

- malgosia 


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