I picked up a book called Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide, by Christopher Kul-Want. He gives short shrift to Augustine and Plato, then spends a hundred pages on the likes of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. There is a sense even in the term "avant-garde" that there is a way to be ahead of the culture, and to hector the culture forward.
I think this is wrong.
One of the things I like about ancient Japanese tea ceremonies is that they appear timeless. There's no great hurry to get anywhere.
We are all in some great hurry to arrive at a new state, and to agitate for it, and to move "progressively" toward some enlightened new state of tolerance where everything goes, especially in terms of the liberation of the libido (thought to be a great plus since Freud's cocaine-induced ramblings at the turn of the last century turned artists toward explorations of weirder and more solipsistic perversions).
Result: many of our "greatest" artists died young. Jim Morrison loved Rimbaud. I can't really take too much of either of them. I prefer artists who become at least nonagenarians. Wodehouse died at 94. I like his novels probably best out of the 20th century. He wrote about a hundred of them. I like the state they put me in.
Kul-Want describes many of the fascinating avant-gardists in his book, but never mentions Pierre Klossowski, who also lived into his nineties.
I'm quite interested in the art and poetry of the elderly. I think there's probably some kind of wisdom in it that you can't find among the fashion plates of the boho and Soho and hohoho communities. I like Santa Claus, because he's depicted as an elderly fellow who likes animals and children (but isn't inappropriate toward them).
I think aesthetics should break through to a timeless state. I like Sophocles' plays, especially the ones he wrote at age 80 or more.
I saw a neat documentary about Yoba Linda, or somethng like that, a 7th Day Adventist town near L.A., where people live to be about ten years older upon point of death than in most places. They eat a vegetarian diet, exercise quite a bit, and they have good social networks. There were four of these places studied by a guy named Buettner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-jk9ni4XWk&feature=related
I'm not sure we can really save the avant-garde communities. They seem to want to revel in sin, and in unlikely sexual scenarios, and to promote what seems like the culture of death. I find it dull. One aspect of the surrealists that I could never understand is their promotion of suicide as an avant-garde act. I find that repellent.
I do like one of their writers enormously: Philippe Soupault. He lived to be 93.
I don't know why: I just like writers and artists who live a long life and who are still making art at the end of it.
Friday, December 24, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
I too enjoy the complexities of a long career. Shakespeare, Bach, John Cage, Charles Dickens, Borges, Henry James, John Hawkes. For me, it's not so much how old the artist lives to be, but how extended the writing career itself is.
That's why Rimbaud seems a bad example. I don't know how old he was when he died, but his death didn't cut his artistic career short. He stopped writing poetry well before he died.
Then I feel the sadness of great careers cut short: Kafka, Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Jane Austen. Or of long, but frustrated, careers, like Ralph Ellison's. I can't imagine how, say, Chekhov's fiction might have continued growing, especially if he experienced WWI. He was already ahead of the modernists in the 1890s, and I think the Great War would only have pushed his deep humanity into deeper territory.
One of my heroes, Brett Weston, the great Modernist photographer and sculpture, lived to be 81. Not long before, he had ceremoniously burned all his negatives, in the firm conviction that leaving negatives after his death would invite misuse and misinterpretation (if others made new prints, or "versions" of them). As Adams had always said, "the negative is the score, the print is the performance." The burning of the negatives may seem like a kind of self-effacement, as if putting one's ashes in an urn prior to death; but it was more like settling on a burial plot, a necessary step in controlling one's legacy. Adams, of course, didn't destroy his, willing them to the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography. I've never thought of actually "retiring" though technically I retired from my government job in 2001, after 27 years of drudgery.
L'chaim!
i think 99% of all photographs should be burned
tomorrow...i'll decide which ones stay
jh:
We aren't talking about the whole universe of photographs, just those of great photographers.
The issue is whether or not to leave one's negatives to posterity. The new age of digital imaging may seem to render this question irrelevant, but I don't think so. The software files that people create have potentially the same position as negatives, prior to their "photo-shop" enhancements towards a finalized image (printed or not).
So, yeah, of the millions of pointless images people make, most of them are worthless, at least to other people. A picture of mom and dad with junior, taken in 1958, is only of use or interest to the participants, unless, of course, it's someone famous. Like you!
famous my ass
Post a Comment