Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 08:36:29 -0600
Subject: Re: the new avant-garde BETA
From: Ann Klefstad <klefkal-AT-cpinternet.com>


Aw, I'm sure David didn't mean it like that.

Of course the Ginsberg quote is wonderful as a testament to the fact that
good-faith attemtps at making art in and for and about the world (which are
not naïve) must be undertaken in a spirit of gleeful despair, or despairing
glee. Ginsberg was good at that. And it also takes into account that
Ginsberg, like many poets of the 50s and esp. any Jewish poets of the 50s,
hd to be in some sense a post-Holocaust poet. Maybe the project was/is still
on, but when half the people you wanted to do it for are dead, it's just not
the same. Hard to keep the ol pecker up for it.

AK

On 3/15/04 7:11 AM, "Rick Visser" <rick.visser-AT-greenspeedisp.net> wrote:

> I will pass on this conversation.  Good luck, Ann.
> 
> 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 11:18 PM
> To: avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: the new avant-garde BETA
> 
> 
>> 
>> 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
> 
> No, that's not why _I_ work.    Seems a bit masturbatory.  I find a
> different sort of communication to be intrinsic to the motivation for
> making art, a communication that goes beyond a mere transmission of
> some anaesthetic properties as a balm for human suffering.  One's first
> impulse is to regard Ginsberg as operating from within the modernist or
> avant-garde tradition if you will but this...I think this is in direct
> opposition to what motivated many of the luminaries of the early
> avant-garde.   For what it's worth.  Ginsburg apparently had given up
> on the project that animated the likes of Duchamp and Joyce.  Of course
> one must make one's own decisions regarding these matters, but for
> myself, I say the original project is still on.
> 
> David Westling
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> 
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