File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-06-16.223, message 184


Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 16:36:15 -0400
From: ostrow-AT-is2.nyu.edu (Ostrow/Kaneda)
Subject: Re:


>Brent, to see a Kluge Movie, you might try to ask a Goethe Institut
>to show one. I know there is one in Vhicage, maybe there is also one in Huston
>or somewhere else in Texas. Anyway, maybe you find something on Kluge,
>Alexander, in your library, maybe a history of movies. Klaus Eder writes
>sometimes in the screen list, on movies from Mongolia etc...

October did a special issue on Kluge's writings and films a number of years
ago as did the New Geman Critique.
>
>Saul, your concept of romanticism is from the books.

yes, but as they say in the States if the shoe fits, wear it,I think my
discription of ramnaticism is applicable. The fact that it is text book
does not make it any less useful unless it is serverely flawed.

 As far as Beuys is
>concerned, I dont see any links. Its rather easy to write something on
>mysthicism, but I dont see anything mystic in his work. Maybe something
>as a symbol for it, but this would be something else.

To evoke the  symbols of mysticism is itself a Romantic act. Just think of
all the Romantic painters who did this. You also  seem to ignore that he
portrayed hismself as a modern day shaman setting out to use art to heal
society. Hitler also saw himself as healing society and saw themselves as
fulfilling some mystical and mythical destiny. Such an appeal if blieved or
not seems to me decidely dangerous.

>His personal symbols come from the airplane crash and what followed.
>The cross etc have all very simple meanings. This is also where the
>sensibility for simple things come from. And some folklore, the crimea.

Bueys symbols arise out of both Romantic German and Christian cultural
traditions (are you telling me the  Hare and the Stag have roots in his
experience in the Crimea and not in German folklore), his  myth is one of
death and resurrection ( the actual facts of his nervous break down is much
more mundane). He portrays himself as both a Teutonic Knight and as a
Christ like figure, while aesthetizing his war experience.  The fact is
that he over the years he told contradictory versions of his tale should
indicate that his tale is metaphrical rather than factual.




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