> In real life it may not be like that. Some of us, for instance,
>without considering that we have gone reactionary in middle-age, consider
>that most of the "great experimenters" of this century (Joyce, Pound,
>Stein, Olson, Zukofsky, Burroughs, Stockhausen, Cage, Picasso, Duchamp....)
>led their own work into horrific barren wastelands which do nothing but
>threaten current creative enterprise with death.
I'm still trying to work out whether I'm middle aged. I thought I
qualified, being half of threescore and ten, but someone told me I wasn't.
Not that it matters.
Thanks Peter for elucidating a few problems I have with many of the
(admittedly limited) poetic arguments I encounter. All the great
experimenters you mention are terrifically interesting, but they surely
were following their own very particular obsessions ... they are only
threatening if their work is solidified into a kind of dogma. Which, as
you point out, is often the case in academic theorisation and is a
falsification of the contingency of the work itself. People who open
doors of possibility, as those those people did, might be horrified to
think the result was a closed room from which no one could escape.
All the kinds of assumptions you mention seem to be tied to an idea of
'progress' in art, which is to my mind anyway manifestly nonsense.
The playing out of an idea seems very clear in artists like Mallarme and
Rothko, who took their particular aesthetics as far as they could take
them. Especially in Rothko's case, where the only possible logical
extension was total erasure. How is it possible to "follow" that, and
who would want to, anyway? But all this begs the question of what any
particular artist is doing - are they merely copying what someone else
has done, which is impossible anyway (I always liked Borges' hypnotic
story about the man who rewrote Don Quixote) or are they struggling,
within the matrices of their lives and their consciousnesses (which of
course include influence, but influences are hardly determinate), for
some kind of adequate expression of what it is they perceive? I am
putting this very clumsily, but I do think that artists are shitty people
who don't like being told what to do and that ultimately, when it's just
you and the blank screen or piece of paper, all these things become
totally marginal to the struggle that goes on there. I'm puzzled by the
kind of people who say "you can't do that" (you may guess I've been told
that a few times) because they think that some avatar has shown the way
to the true real poetic that disproves all others and that any
disagreement is a capital offence.
But then I find disagreement - as opposed to abuse - stimulating, and the
negation of disagreement a stifling refusal of difference. I know all
this is a can of worms. Apart from anything else, it presupposes an
ideal forum where an idea of civilised discourse is possible, and in
reality this is almost always compromised by all sorts of factors - but
nevertheless...
And yes, I reserve the right to contradict myself.
Just an aside - in an individual, the inability to screen out stimuli, or
to create hierachies of perception, is one definition of schizophrenia.
Is that a problem with the Left?
Alison
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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