Good gracious Rupert, you've said something I agree with...
>"GCSE students have to endlessly
reproduce Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' as a compromise between history and
practice, while fine art courses are incresingly driven by project-
learning
as opposed to craft-learning.
What was wrong with the 'contending' ground between craft and
experimentation?"<
- we should celebrate.
And what you say about the creative writing courses and programmes
rings true as well, though often the emphasis on established formal
models is also balanced by a series of quasi-personalist rules related
to content. Mind you, I haven't witnessed a creative writing class for
quite a while now - it might be interesting to be a fly on the wall of
a current one.
Art School practice - what a bloody minefield. Don't really want to
step across there at the moment. I usually take a few tentative steps
then BANG, I find myself in very awkward disagreements with people I
feel I should be more in harmony with.
I also agree with you that Heaney's comment about stepping off the
cliff edge is a contradiction, but this whole question of
experimentation in the arts, any of the arts, is so damn relative. In
one sense we know what Heaney means, for himself, in talking about his
own work, but it doesn't really help clarify anything in the wider
context. I find this happens a lot with a certain way that writers
talk about their practice, and this gets reflected in the way
sympathetic critics talk about it too - slight rhetorical nuances are
expanded into value laden statements. If somebody praises Heaney, or
such, to the hilt for the way he 'improvises' in his poems, what can
that critic then do when faced with something that takes improvisation
to a different level? They can't handle it without appearing stupid -
so they diss it by bringing in a raft of other values that appear to
make such improvisation artificial etc. In this way of thinking
'successful' art becomes no more than a kind of balancing act - and
somebody like Heaney fits that perfectly.
Tim A.
|
