From: "Rick Visser" <rick.visser-AT-greenspeedisp.net> Subject: RE: the new avant-garde BETA Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:17:33 -0700 I will try to get into this conversation a bit if time permits, but for now can only this very brief fragment of a poem by Alan Ginsberg; my artist statement in a nutshell: And what is the work? To ease the pain of living. And everything else? Drunken dumbshow. Rick Visser -----Original Message----- From: owner-avant-garde-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU [mailto:owner-avant-garde-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU] On Behalf Of David Westling Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2004 9:42 PM To: avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Subject: Re: the new avant-garde BETA Ann Klefstad: > Will someone read the 2 articles I mentioned before ("Playing on the > Barricades" and "Choices: On Art and Politics", on mnartists.org, > --scroll > down to "Articles--" etc.) They're written for a very general > readership, > but are attempting to bring some of this stuff to bear on notions of > artmaking. . . . > AK > No need to assume I didn't read these articles before I sent my last post. Your sketch of the relation of art to politics is a good beginning to the subject, but for me it lacks depth. It's hard to assess just how far it is possible to go in the exploration of this phenomenon. One can hardly disagree with such statements as "A broader notion of what constitutes 'politics' will lead to a more grounded and far-reaching discussion of the relation of art to politics", but, for example, there is no need, in my opinion, for "qualms" about treating consciously political art and "art that is only accidentally or tangentially political" as partaking of the same sort of relationship. Ann, I fear you are undercutting your own beliefs about the political efficacy of art by asserting that "I've come to expect art may not be worth much except to its makers". It is by art's effect on others that art and politics intertwine. A more considered examination of this difficult subject may be found in the _Cambridge Companions to Literature_ series in _The Cambridge Companion to Modernism_ (1999). There are several articles here that shed light on this, especially Sara Blair's "Modernism and the Politics of Culture". In it we find W.H. Auden's admonition to politically-minded artists that "Art is not life and cannot be/A midwife to society", an attitude that was often modified, but not necessarily repudiated, by the generation of artists that embraced the new ways of seeing starting around 1910 and that have come down to us under the name of Modernism. Perhaps the most important and celebrated instantiation of the relation of art to politics in the modernist period was that developed by the Surrealists. They caught the public imagination in 1925 in the fallout from the notorious Saint-Pol-Roux banquet, with which the surrealists separated themselves from a previous generation of litterateurs, the Symbolists, particularly Madame Rachilde, close friend of symbolist luminary (and exemplar par excellence for the surrealist sensibility) Alfred Jarry. A thorough account of this banquet may be found in Mark Polizzotti's _Revolution of the Mind_ (1995), an extensive biography of Andre Breton. According to Polizzotti's account, Rachilde had recently made pointedly disparaging remarks about the German character, writing in the _Paris-Soir_ that it was her conviction that a Frenchwoman could never marry a German. Polizzotti writes: "The banquet began with Breton and art critic Florent Fels trading insulting quips at Rachilde's expense. When others around the table (including Saint-Pol-Roux) reproached them for their lack of gallantry, the Surrealists answered with cries of 'Down with France!', which in turn sparked shouts in defense of the fatherland." Matters quickly escalated as Breton further exacerbated the tensions between him and Rachilde by solemnly accusing her of insulting his friend Max Ernst by her remarks noted above, and then possibly flinging his napkin into her face and calling her a "camp follower". This provocation set off a general meelee, and the police were called, Michel Leiris shouted down to the five hundred spectators amassed below "Down with France!" for which he was severely beaten before being dragged off by the police for inciting a riot, and Rachilde was arrested for inciting the disturbance. Thus was launched a movement that focused for a large segment of the public the "dark and bloody crossroads" (as Lionel Trilling has termed it) of art and politics in this era so ripe for transformation. The Surrealists, it seems to me, got too close to organized politics; many of them joined the French Communist Party around 1930 and tried hard to integrate surrealist programmes into its agenda, but they were roundly rebuffed after some modest initial interest. They wanted to change life and change the world simultaneously. But it's just not that easy. The Surrealists believed that social transformation was a prerequisite to the liberation of the individual, and so also believed that the revolution could proceed along the lines set by the Communist International. But it makes more sense to put it the other way around it seems to me. At any rate change on a large scale runs hard up against the deeply entrenched attitudes of the cultural majority. Even Herbert Marcuse abandoned his earlier insistence on a program of revolutionary communisim by the time of his 1975 article "The Failure of the New Left?"; now he advocated liberal progressivism as the only realistic tool available to effect minimally substantive change in an anti-revolutionary epoch. This I cannot stomach personally. I believe this would merely further entrench the status quo in the final analysis. To get back to Sara Blair's article--she continues by examining Modernism's connection to Fascism in the persons of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, with their trenchant critiques of the Christian ethos--as Blair puts it--"...[T]he energy of formal and narrative experimentation is clearly understood as a political force. In particular, that energy is a salvo directed against Victorian humanist social ideals and the contemporary versions of populism, individualism, and liberalism they were thought to inform." This approach to critiquing bourgeois society was also utilized by the cultural Left for different purposes. Where Lewis and Pound wished to promulgate "guerilla action" against what they perceived as degenerate cultures sullying ways of life in White Europe, the leftists, like Wilhelm Reich in the field of psychology, wished to expose the authoritarian underpinnings of bourgeois society via Freudian formulations concerning the underlying nature of the dynamics of the nuclear family. Ultimately, it seems to me that one must recognize him- or herself as situated on one or the other side of the Big Cultural Questions, as an artist, or in any other role within our society, one question being: Do you beilieve that the human soul is better off, as T.S. Eliot believed, in denying that the individual soul is better off self-directed, that to reject God's stewardship is to damn oneself not only in the hereafter, but in this life, by committing the ultimate sin of _hubris_? Or do we follow the trajectory of increasing personal autonomy, a project that began in earnest over three hundred years ago in the work of John Locke and others and in the subsequent rise, initially in England, of "affective individualism"? Of course, we can always continue to wallow in that no-man's land in between, which seems to me to entail a regression to some unholy form of authoritarian social structure, now on the horizon? These issues must be successfully addressed before any meaningful political change can occur. Art can help in this sorting out, I think, by keeping in mind such sentiments as are expressed in the words of Norman O. Brown, that art invites us to partake in the struggle against repression. We assume at the outset that this struggle against repression is a benefit and not a detriment to the health of both the individual and the society he or she belongs to. David Westling --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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