File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1997/97-03-30.002, message 148


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



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