Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 10:02:32 -0600 From: ann klefstad <klefkal-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us> Subject: Re: avant-ostrow >>depiction need not be so stinky- ain't art in the details? >>ain't the form the curve of content? >And some how when one depends on only depicted content one tends to produce >immediate satisfaction purely because it insufficiently challenges. This >you prove by identifying that the level at which we describe ourselves says >something almost authentic though the discription itself may not be. The >medium is after all the message. > I don't think depiction need be so stanky. Mimesis is still a repository for nonverbal knowledges, nonverbal technologies. and even nonverbal narratives. Medium can be (chunk of) message in mimetic artforms--fahgodsake, the phrase was invented re tv. (although here of course mcluhan's thing was structural and not concerned with individual instances--it's usually confusing when this quote gets applied to nonelectronic media. It's really specific, after all) Premature closure is a problem in mimetic or narrative forms because of course "recognition" (and not re-cognition) can occur, but in this (at least in visual art) materiality can aid. There is nearly always a remainder, an excess, of physicality that cannot be accounted for by the artist's purpose. (to return to a far earlier strand, this "remainder" was what, I think, LANGUAGE poets tried to produce, but that whore language bends too easily to one's will, and what was generated was not the inchoateness, the stuck-in-the-matrix that I'm trying to evoke here, but confusion instead. Course LANGUAGE poets did other things too--) What do people think of the sudden sort-of-vogue for "realist painting" that seems to be occurring? Out of what desire does it seem to come? Nostalgia for closure? A Flemish/Dutch respect for solid and buyable things? Yet another bout of convertible irony? Hunger for quantitative "standards" by which to judge artifacts? Myself, I don't like these paintings much, but it's an interesting phenomenon. Klefstad --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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