>As soon
>as you turn towards the "moderates" you find a belief in the aesthetic,
>and a pull away from the progressive. But the quality I'm seeking to
>promote is something more like authenticity than a purely aesthetic
>construct.
Terms like "progressive" and "advanced" have an air of the 1950s to me -
a kind of earnest aura of black skivvies, long playing jazz records and
horn-rimmed glasses, all frozen in a black and white photograph with no
one enjoying themselves very much. But I guess I'm just showing my age...
Aesthetic is a word that's usefully posited against anaesthetic: it is a
concept rooted in sensation. Western mass culture is largely
anaesthetic: Hollywood movies, most television, Prozac, Valium,
"recreational" drugs - everyone wants to be asleep. A friend of mine had
a baby under anaesthetic simply so she could boast of a pain-free birth:
I was completely shocked, I couldn't work out why she want to have a baby
if she was so eager to escape the experience. And what about the baby -
was she going to have a pain-free child as well? Art is a way of waking
up, poetry is a way of waking up language. To drop "aesthetic" in
artistic practice is surely more accurately to reject one aesthetic
practice in favour of another. I am completely flummoxed how the practice
of any art and the formation of an aesthetic are separable. Perhaps
someone could enlighten me.
Lorca's idea of duende seems to me a way of describing the authenticity
Peter suggests. (I like it also because it doesn't have the gender
connotations of "muse", which are sometimes tricky). "The true fight is
with the duende", which "always heralds a radical change in forms." It
demands the tearing apart of "skill and security", the debacle of the
intellect. It is a "mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of
the dead, in search of new landscapes ... announcing the constant baptism
of newly created things".
It's also totally unacademic, because it leaves only improvised
structures to work with. But I think it's no accident that Lorca so
focussed on performance, as a writer and a thinker.
Best
Alison
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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