Does “art” make me think? Is it supposed to? I guess the question is what do I mean by “art” and what do I mean by “think.” While I can easily accept the artistic categories that have developed over the course of Western history do works created within these categories make me think? Think about what? Plays and films and paintings and sculpture and music and dance may make me think about social issues or aesthetic issues, or moral issues, but do they make me think about plays and films and paintings and sculpture and music and dance? I certainly buy Clement Greenberg’s notion that “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” But what happens when an artist uses the medium to criticize itself? Is this the shift to the “postmodern”?
Hugo Ball, under the sway of Bakunin, points out: "Know thyself." As if it were so simple! As if only good will and introspection were needed. An individual can compare himself, see himself, and correct himself wherever an eternal ideal is firmly anchored in closely knit forms of education and culture, of literature and politics. But what if all norms are shaky and in a state of confusion? What if illusions dominate not only the present but also all generations; if race and tradition, blood and spirit, if all the reliable possessions of the past are all profaned, desecrated, and defaced? What if all the voices in the symphony are at variance with each other? Who will know himself then? Who will find himself then?” (Flight out of Time)
These are fantastic questions. Do we need rules to guide us? Could we cope in the absence of any and all authority? If we play by the rules because we have internalized them does that leave us any room for true and unique creativity? What happens if we place the genius in the same rank as the idiot? What happens if we accept that life asserts itself in contradictions? Western culture seems – then as somewhat now – mired in a linear logic. A logic of either/or as opposed to Venturi’s both/and. If I place a Shakespeare sonnet next to one generated via Tzara’s Dada poem strategy of cutting up words and pulling them out of a bag what is at stake? Does an art built on chance ask questions that an art built on skill and technique and training and rules doesn’t ask? If I place Duchamp’s urinal next to Michelangelo’s David what happens? Do I as the viewer need to draw the line as to where I think “art” is? If I dismiss the urinal then nothing has changed. If I acknowledge the urinal as “art,” even with the tiniest glimmer of doubt, do I then have to acknowledge everything in the world as art? Or, do I just have to follow John Cage’s dictum that "Everything seen - every object, that is, plus the process of looking at it - is a Duchamp" So it is a combination of object plus the looking at it. I suppose the “looking at it” part is where the thinking comes in. Hmmmm.
I’m not sure that we have ever gotten this deeply into these questions in this class this early in the term. Not sure why that is. The questions and comments from the students today were great, quite engaging. I needed to largely abandon my notes and follow those questions. I look forward to the Surrealistic Museum projects on Tuesday, mainly because we still need to loop back to discuss DADADAY as well as the notion of chance, juxtaposition, and challenging an audience. I am curious as to how these ideas fit into the scope and focus of a conservatory education.
In any case I agree with Tzara in that “ Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with Protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous gray entrails” (Dada Manifesto 1918). In truth, “Morality creates atrophy like every plague produced by intelligence. The control of morality and logic has inflicted us with impassivity in the presence of policemen who are the cause of slavery, putrid rats infecting the bowels of the bourgeoisie which have infected the only luminous clean corridors of glass that remained open to artists” (Dada Manifesto 1918). Art that only follows the rules, that only adheres to a collective morality, that only in meant to be looked at passively and not thought about is a deadly art. Live art challenges – everything and each successive movement must in turn challenge the last. Not a snake eating its tail image, but perhaps one of creation/destruction/creation. Much to think on.
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