Subject: Re: paralogy and the Vortex Date: Mon, 2 Jun 97 01:23:47 +0100 From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk> I hope you will forgive a mail from a newcomer to the list, but I wanted to add some comments to the discussion on various avant-gardists. On 1-6-97, EricMurph-AT-aol.com wrote >I'm a little concerned about Pound being right wing art and Appolinaire being >left wing art. I'm with Benjamin here. I don't know that such distinctions >are really that useful. Granted Baudelaire was an extreme reactionary, but in >his role as flaneur, he saw the changes taking place that would lead us from >the arcades to the malls and their spectacles and captured it is his art. [snip] >I am concerned that judging an artist on his or her politics usually leads to >bad art. I am certainly leftward in my leanings, but I would not want to see >art and literature return to the social realism of the thirties. > >Also, I would argue that Appolinaire and Pound, despite their many >differences, shared many technical innovations in common. To a certain >extent, they were both futurists! Baudelaire could be taken as both revolutionary (he was on the streets in 1848) or a reactionary (of the clerical variety). As Benjamin points out (via Marx), Baudelaire's politics (and, Benjamin suggests, his poetics) is that of the conspirator - the putschist. (see Benjamin - The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire). The same could perhaps be said of Pound and Appolinaire. Benjamin, however, doesn't see distinctions between right and left wing art as not being 'useful', it is just that his understanding of what constitutes the politics of art goes far beyond the apparent political sympathy of the author or the material. His tirade against Marinetti at the end of 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction' is a case in point (and not irrelevant when considering Pound and Wyndham Lewis, although perhaps not all of the Blast brigade). If we take this dandyism of the avant-garde as a more general phenomenon - as one frequent component of late 19th and 20th century modernism, I feel that it might raise some questions with regard to Lyotard; at least the Lyotard of 'Answering the question: What is Postmodernism'. To precis crudely, in this essay, Lyotard's account of the postmodern event is based on fundamentally modernist aesthetic practices (I use the term in its more general aesthetic sense, not in Lyotard's) in terms of the undermining of conventional 'language' (the examples are nearly all visual) in search of a new, or old, truth which is not put in place. This sublime moment, in which the presence of the unrepresentable is represented in the failure of representation, is what is important for Lyotard. Yet, without the underpinning of some form of metanarrative 'truth' being at stake, even if never achieved, this sublime moment would seem to be far closer to the calculated and strategic ambiguity of the avant-gardist dandy. I am not sure whether the politics of the provocateur is quite what Lyotard had in mind, but the strategies of many of his own examples (Duchamp, Malevich, perhaps Picasso etc.) tend in that direction. My worries would be twofold. One that this is indeed an 'aestheticised politics' to paraphrase Benjamin. Two, that as an aesthetic strategy, dandyism has long since been recuperated and its putschist nature turned to cynicism in a manner which is not effective either in Lyotard's terms or in a more practical politics (Warhol and all those who find some legitimation in him). The refusal of meaning/position can also be a game, as Duchamp well knew. As a final gesture, I would agree that 'political art' is indeed frequently (if not always) bad. But then, all art is inevitably political... I am very interested in the (post?) modernist sublime and would be delighted by any responses. Yours Giles Giles Peaker, Historical and Theoretical Studies School of Art and Design, University of Derby, Britannia Mill, Mackworth Road, Derby. DE22 3BL (U.K.) (01332) 622222 ext. 4063 G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk Editorial Collective: Detours and Delays. An Occasional Journal of Aesthetics and Politics http://art.derby.ac.uk/~detours/detours.html
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