‘Any practice which critically questions and actively challenges the conditions of its own possibility aspires to the condition of art.’ Discuss
It is of fundamental importance that art be open to a rigor of self-criticism and reflection if it is to stay vital and avoid the pitfalls of dogma and blind institutionalisation. Without a direct critique of their own nature and authenticity, artistic practices are liable to perpetuate their own assumptions and become docile with the generalised anesthetic of unquestioning tradition. The task of actively challenging presumptions has long been the concern of the Avant-Garde, who as abhorrers of the triteness of fashion and the falsehoods of typecasting have ensured that the very condition of art is not itself conditioned. The iconoclastic challenge instilled in the Vanguardist approach ensures that cultural practices are constantly reassessed and pushed further in order to escape the prison of history, and in many cases they have campaigned for the gilded laurels that sit on masterpieces to be replaced with wreaths. This action ensures that the parameters of what art can be are redrawn and re-speculated in order to avoid sentimentality, tautology, and an untouchable academic sovereignty. In his text, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) Clement Greenberg famously created a binary polemic between the concerns of the ‘high’ Avant-Garde and that of ‘low’ Kitsch production, which he identified to be the ‘rear-guard’ of culture and a lamentable embodiment of spuriousness. Greenberg argued that without the activities of the Avant-Garde art would become entirely stupefied by low culture, as not only was Kitsch rife in mass production but also in the unquestioning following of tradition as ‘all that is academic is kitsch’ (Greenberg, C. 1939). Greenberg later went on to revise the unanimity of this statement but maintained the importance of developing practices that not only challenged the nature of their opponents, but also of themselves and the conditions (e.g tradition, respect, value) that support their existence.
The longstanding relationship between the actions of practitioners (artists, writers, designers, etc) and those who comment on cultural output such as critics, philosophers, and educators, has been continually reappraised since Modernism, and the difficulty of defining the interconnected role of ‘maker’ and ‘commentator’ has been consolidated into a central concern for many 20th cultural movements. The differences between such philosophies as Structuralist thought and Existentialism are distinct, but like many other movements since the birth of Modernism both have a core level of self-examination and a hermeneutic process of challenging orthodoxies of thought and the legitimacy of their communication. Central to modern literary criticism is the inescapable problem that it is itself literary and therefore as prone to the same discrepancies as the texts that are being critiqued. Using one literary device to analyse another is problematic as the tools employed are themselves open to similar analysis and therefore unable to provide a sense of objective assurance, but instead further shroud meaning or use with yet more assumptions that hide as much as they reveal. Many artists and writers have attempted to devise a metalanguage with which to talk about their work, both within their practice as an occupier, and externally as an organiser of thoughts. A metalanguage is created out of a desire to critically question the conditions of a practice, but as to whether the drive behind its creation is always an aspiration for the condition of art is difficult to confirm. The desire to be privy to one’s own limitations certainly suggests a desire for quality, and although this quality may be art, or become art, it may also be a separate desire for knowledge or ‘truth’. To construct a metalanguage is to propose a desire for epistomological clarity free from the constraints of an internal vernacular.
‘the advocates of Postmodernism have been dreaming a language of excess and endlessly deconstructive reflexivity, a language that could never be held captive in any conceptual forms, a language released from the logic of identity and the grammar of the same.’ (Levin, D. 1997)
The Cut-up writing technique employed by William Burroughs and the single roll of paper used by Jack Kerouac (referred to as ‘the roll’) when writing On the Road where both devices used to speak about the problem of writing and the very nature of what it is to write. These techniques were propositions that challenged writing’s authority, turning it in on itself whilst also having the effect of liberating its creativity. The transgressions initiated by these acts can be seen as violent subversions of convention and conditioning that became art wholistically because of specific attributes such as content, intent, process, context, etc. By negating degrees of traditional practice many members of the Beat Generation were able to produce work that questioned its own possibility and therefore construct a kind of metalanguage that is not only used retrospectively on that period of history, but also to illuminate links with other practices in a kind of arthrology.
When the work of any practice is date-stamped and signed it is open to the possibility of consumption and a process of characterisation that allows for replication. The fact that not only a Francis Bacon painting can be described as Francis Baconesque, but also a painting by an unknown artist regardless of intention or quality is a problem of definiton that can be further perpetuated by the desire to create a metalanguage, or by the characterisation of an artist as a rebelious outsider who challenges the norm. In his book The Non-Objective World (1927) Kazimir Malevich describes the inspiration which brought about the enduring images of Suprematistism and his ‘escape’ from the restrictions of representation and colour. No sooner had he constructed a Suprematist 'grammar' with which to speak about the possibilities and condition of art, than his language of fundamental geometric forms had been replicated and imbued with an idiosyncracy that limited its possibilities, particulalry any notion that it was capable of presenting the sublime. Many practitioners of Surrealism endured a similar fate, whereby the idealistic emphasis on spontaneity, automata, and subconscious creation was only able to test the limits of what art could be for as long as its ‘language’ was able to avoid the ridicule of pastice, self importance, and an anti-real predictability.
The anti-art ethos of the Dadaists marked an Avant Garde protest against the cultured values of the art of the time (and past) and its appeal to sensibilities of aesthetic and moral taste. The viscera of Dada’s distaste was an act of violence towards art, but more fundamentally towards the doctrines of logic in society and culture that ultimately led people into war and gave ammunition to the atrocities of WWII. Theodor Adorno’s infamous statement ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ (Adorno, T.1956) asks the question ‘how can art can be possible in reflection of inhumanity?’ as surely critical intelligence would be concerned with this rather than an individualistic ‘indulgence’. Dada and Adorno challenged art to justify itself in a world where its possibility seems questionable, and by doing so they were able to again articulate its limits, not as a confirmation of a grand narrative, but for freedom from one.
In order to break out of a restrictive tradition, moral stupidity, or desparate compartmentalisation of knowledge, an act of violence or transgression is required. When this is in the form of a challenge to creativity’s existence a ‘plateau’ may occur whereby art can form a metalanguage derived from either a hermeneutic semantic analysis or conversely from a kind of ‘outsider’s art’ or ‘asemic’ writing that says what cannot be said in the dominant language. The challenge of how to step outside of a practice’s boundaries whilst still maintaining productivity can be seen to be embodied by Franz Kafka’s famous letter to Max Brod in which he said that he couldn’t write in German, Czech or Yiddish for fear of restriction, but he could not not write.
It is of fundamental importance that art be open to a rigor of self-criticism and reflection if it is to stay vital and avoid the pitfalls of dogma and blind institutionalisation. Without a direct critique of their own nature and authenticity, artistic practices are liable to perpetuate their own assumptions and become docile with the generalised anesthetic of unquestioning tradition. The task of actively challenging presumptions has long been the concern of the Avant-Garde, who as abhorrers of the triteness of fashion and the falsehoods of typecasting have ensured that the very condition of art is not itself conditioned. The iconoclastic challenge instilled in the Vanguardist approach ensures that cultural practices are constantly reassessed and pushed further in order to escape the prison of history, and in many cases they have campaigned for the gilded laurels that sit on masterpieces to be replaced with wreaths. This action ensures that the parameters of what art can be are redrawn and re-speculated in order to avoid sentimentality, tautology, and an untouchable academic sovereignty. In his text, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) Clement Greenberg famously created a binary polemic between the concerns of the ‘high’ Avant-Garde and that of ‘low’ Kitsch production, which he identified to be the ‘rear-guard’ of culture and a lamentable embodiment of spuriousness. Greenberg argued that without the activities of the Avant-Garde art would become entirely stupefied by low culture, as not only was Kitsch rife in mass production but also in the unquestioning following of tradition as ‘all that is academic is kitsch’ (Greenberg, C. 1939). Greenberg later went on to revise the unanimity of this statement but maintained the importance of developing practices that not only challenged the nature of their opponents, but also of themselves and the conditions (e.g tradition, respect, value) that support their existence.
The longstanding relationship between the actions of practitioners (artists, writers, designers, etc) and those who comment on cultural output such as critics, philosophers, and educators, has been continually reappraised since Modernism, and the difficulty of defining the interconnected role of ‘maker’ and ‘commentator’ has been consolidated into a central concern for many 20th cultural movements. The differences between such philosophies as Structuralist thought and Existentialism are distinct, but like many other movements since the birth of Modernism both have a core level of self-examination and a hermeneutic process of challenging orthodoxies of thought and the legitimacy of their communication. Central to modern literary criticism is the inescapable problem that it is itself literary and therefore as prone to the same discrepancies as the texts that are being critiqued. Using one literary device to analyse another is problematic as the tools employed are themselves open to similar analysis and therefore unable to provide a sense of objective assurance, but instead further shroud meaning or use with yet more assumptions that hide as much as they reveal. Many artists and writers have attempted to devise a metalanguage with which to talk about their work, both within their practice as an occupier, and externally as an organiser of thoughts. A metalanguage is created out of a desire to critically question the conditions of a practice, but as to whether the drive behind its creation is always an aspiration for the condition of art is difficult to confirm. The desire to be privy to one’s own limitations certainly suggests a desire for quality, and although this quality may be art, or become art, it may also be a separate desire for knowledge or ‘truth’. To construct a metalanguage is to propose a desire for epistomological clarity free from the constraints of an internal vernacular.
‘the advocates of Postmodernism have been dreaming a language of excess and endlessly deconstructive reflexivity, a language that could never be held captive in any conceptual forms, a language released from the logic of identity and the grammar of the same.’ (Levin, D. 1997)
The Cut-up writing technique employed by William Burroughs and the single roll of paper used by Jack Kerouac (referred to as ‘the roll’) when writing On the Road where both devices used to speak about the problem of writing and the very nature of what it is to write. These techniques were propositions that challenged writing’s authority, turning it in on itself whilst also having the effect of liberating its creativity. The transgressions initiated by these acts can be seen as violent subversions of convention and conditioning that became art wholistically because of specific attributes such as content, intent, process, context, etc. By negating degrees of traditional practice many members of the Beat Generation were able to produce work that questioned its own possibility and therefore construct a kind of metalanguage that is not only used retrospectively on that period of history, but also to illuminate links with other practices in a kind of arthrology.
When the work of any practice is date-stamped and signed it is open to the possibility of consumption and a process of characterisation that allows for replication. The fact that not only a Francis Bacon painting can be described as Francis Baconesque, but also a painting by an unknown artist regardless of intention or quality is a problem of definiton that can be further perpetuated by the desire to create a metalanguage, or by the characterisation of an artist as a rebelious outsider who challenges the norm. In his book The Non-Objective World (1927) Kazimir Malevich describes the inspiration which brought about the enduring images of Suprematistism and his ‘escape’ from the restrictions of representation and colour. No sooner had he constructed a Suprematist 'grammar' with which to speak about the possibilities and condition of art, than his language of fundamental geometric forms had been replicated and imbued with an idiosyncracy that limited its possibilities, particulalry any notion that it was capable of presenting the sublime. Many practitioners of Surrealism endured a similar fate, whereby the idealistic emphasis on spontaneity, automata, and subconscious creation was only able to test the limits of what art could be for as long as its ‘language’ was able to avoid the ridicule of pastice, self importance, and an anti-real predictability.
The anti-art ethos of the Dadaists marked an Avant Garde protest against the cultured values of the art of the time (and past) and its appeal to sensibilities of aesthetic and moral taste. The viscera of Dada’s distaste was an act of violence towards art, but more fundamentally towards the doctrines of logic in society and culture that ultimately led people into war and gave ammunition to the atrocities of WWII. Theodor Adorno’s infamous statement ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ (Adorno, T.1956) asks the question ‘how can art can be possible in reflection of inhumanity?’ as surely critical intelligence would be concerned with this rather than an individualistic ‘indulgence’. Dada and Adorno challenged art to justify itself in a world where its possibility seems questionable, and by doing so they were able to again articulate its limits, not as a confirmation of a grand narrative, but for freedom from one.
In order to break out of a restrictive tradition, moral stupidity, or desparate compartmentalisation of knowledge, an act of violence or transgression is required. When this is in the form of a challenge to creativity’s existence a ‘plateau’ may occur whereby art can form a metalanguage derived from either a hermeneutic semantic analysis or conversely from a kind of ‘outsider’s art’ or ‘asemic’ writing that says what cannot be said in the dominant language. The challenge of how to step outside of a practice’s boundaries whilst still maintaining productivity can be seen to be embodied by Franz Kafka’s famous letter to Max Brod in which he said that he couldn’t write in German, Czech or Yiddish for fear of restriction, but he could not not write.
No comments:
Post a Comment