Thanks for this, Robin. However, I think this is a
little harsh on the naivety of my (rushing again)
unconsidered term "white space of the imagination" -
as if using it made me join in totally with other
users of the expression. I'm happy to say now it isn't
the right term for what I was trying to say: perhaps
"the paintings (hung) between the lines".
> The "white space of the imagination" might not be as
>pure as the driven snow, therefore. If Baudelaire`s
>concepts seem to be dragging him kicking and screaming from
>Romanticism into Modernism, eventually the Romantic conceit
>of the imaginative tabula rasa will get ushered into a
>quiet room for a chat with Dr. Freud. Imagination as white
>space could, among other things, be related to the 19th
>century drive/drift towards aesthetic autonomy...
I accept this completely, and have no more truck with this
than you, Robin. I said "readers might see that painting as
what they felt between the lines" and then called that "set
up in the white space of imagination". Fair enough, I used
a wrong cliche for "the painting between the lines" (which
is not, in my examples, white). I'm not after advocating
the white space of painting or anything else, and certainly
not "aesthetic autonomy"! How could I be when I've said
*readers* "might see that painting as what they felt between
the lines"? Surely, I was suggesting not a private
solipsistic artist but a social one? One who could
articulate something felt by many, hitting the right note
(another cliche, esp with my interests in 20th C music),
the same note as a community, or one within one, or readers
"... as they paused on an image or, better, a rhythm and
texture effect, when they read Ovid or the Bible...."
Consider Joyce's Dedalus's brooding over the couplet
"And no more turn aside and brood/ Upon love's bitter
mystery". The painting that might be in that couplet
is, in my opinion, precisely not what "... maybe, from
Giotto to Delacroix, they were painting [as] the WORDS of
the text they were reading and not the spaces in between..."
and it's my fault that you got that from my account,
on an assumption that my silly use of the expression
"white space of the imagination" cancelled out "the
painting felt between the lines": that I was saying
that readers were hungry for all the white paintings
they felt reading Ovid and the Bible (maybe they were,
as you say; whether what is around words is silence,
white noise, or sand-dunes, is a big 20th century
question, but not the only answer).
Suppose there were a painting of/in that
Yeats' couplet: "And no more turn aside and brood/ Upon
love's bitter mystery". I think it would take all the skills
of one school of perspective (where is a modern painting's
alternative school of perspective equivalent to serialism's
alternative school of harmony?) to render in foreground and
back both "mystery" and "bitter", the "oo" of "brood"
and the ironising yet sharply intook breath of starting with
"And...". Musicians, text-setters not least, know how to
do this, how in the harmonic structure of a piece, certain
words intensify or focus an expression while not losing
the whole melody line - a melody line like "And no
more turn aside." Parry's terrible setting of Blake's
"And did those feet" is a good example of how one part
("walk upon England's...") stands out and the rest is used
as filler, ie neglected by the melody and by most
singers happily patriotically singing it. It doesn't
matter what of "England's" we are upon, nor whether
we have feet, a bow, desire.My point was just that painters
could *read* in sympathy, and appeal to other *readers*,
succeed or fall to get deep into some hearts/souls on
the strength of social interpretation and empathy - not
virtuosity and the appeal of irreconciliable solispism
talking to irreconciliable solispsism (with that appeal's
problems of the admiration of power and the vicarious
voyeurism of wanting all artists to be self-destructive
yet live out "irresponsible" desires which Donald Davie
critiqued in the appeal of Dylan Thomas).
And to dally more over this postscript: though
I like what you cite from Baudelaire
> The artist before the model, or the viewer before the >
painting, as site of a continual battle between
> what the imagination can conceive, what is seen NOW and
> what has been seen...Baudelaire has the artist`s memory
> of the model as a necessary boundary to the flight of the
> imagination...
I feel I didn't make clear what I was talking about, which
was something else from this, I think. There is more
than a simple binary opposition between "model" and
"not the model/the other". This Baudelaire actually sums
up the social modernistic model of responsibility
(literally, pre-emptively, *responding* to, appealing to,
possible interpretations of the object by readers) that
I'm trying to argue for in literary painters [*].
My postscript, however, was trying to ask
about memory reverie during formal objectivism
not life painting: the act of making, fashioning the
object of words in Oppen and Zukofsky etc. I was
wondering if doing non-expressionist procedure in
writing can both yield reverie for the writer in
its "dry" making and, after all, produce an
expressive writing; if that can happen in art and
music. My memory was *not*, I think, triggered
off by words in the writing I was doing, the word
"madeleine" making my mouth water or anything,
but exactly the concentration, memories popping up
between writing two letters out to fit the scheme.
Ira
[note *]. "literary painters".... I'm wanting painters
who see that if painting is a language it can no be more
private than Wittgenstein's; it is the temptation to
believe in despair that these languages are private
that sells the pass on social art, cos it's so great
and so fulfilling that not to hope for seems easier
than hoping for it in empty hunger in most galleries
and pages.
On Mon, 8 Dec 1997 13:27:27 GMT [log in to unmask]
wrote:
> From: [log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997
13:27:27 GMT
> Subject: Re: "70's" type art/music/poetry now?
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Cc: cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>,
> Ira Lightman <[log in to unmask]>,
[log in to unmask]
>
> Thanks for the reply, Ira. If I can deal with your post
scriptum
> first... You may well be familiar with these texts
already but Baudelaire`s
> Salon de 1859 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, art
criticism of a
> great poet, have some difficult but fascinating
meditations on the
> relationship, or identity, between memory and imagination
which might
> answer some of your questions. The artist before the
model, or the
> viewer before the painting, as site of a continual battle
between
> what the imagination can conceive, what is seen NOW and
what
> has been seen...Baudelaire has the artist`s memory
> of the model as a necessary boundary to the flight of the
> imagination...the imagination as the necessary flight
beyond what is
> known - then in some passages the distinction between the
two
> faculties seems to be utterly collapsed. A feature of
Baudelaire`s
> concepts which runs through the Baudelairean corpus like
> BLACKPOOL through Blackpool rock.
>
> The "white space of the imagination" might not be as pure
as the
> driven snow, therefore. If Baudelaire`s concepts seem to
be dragging
> him kicking and screaming from Romanticism into Modernism,
eventually
> the Romantic conceit of the imaginative tabula rasa will
get ushered into a
> quiet room for a chat with Dr. Freud. Imagination as
white space
> could, among other things, be related to the 19th century
drive/drift
> towards aesthetic autonomy...locked inside you like
Schroedinger`s
> cat where the radiation of history can`t penetrate, or
maybe it did
> and you just didn`t (want to) know... [Derrida`s "Force
and Signification" is
> partly a review of a book about this way of thinking the
> imagination.]
>
> Maybe, from Giotto to Delacroix, they were painting the
WORDS of the
> text they were reading and not the spaces in between. How
do you
> paint a white space...see the history of all-white
paintings in the
> 20th century, from Malevich to Ryman, and especially (Cage
on)
> Rauschenberg, all the same, all different so none of them
all just
> white.
>
> robin
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