"Mainstream art...even when it is seemingly critical on a specific issue, can only be revisionist at best. It may suggest that things have gone wrong but can only point to options already existing within the culture. It has no deep way of evoking the possibility that the culture's deepest unconscious presuppositions might be the problem: that it might be desirable to reconstitute our very way of being human."
-Richard Foreman, Foundations for a Theater
21 comments:
If you believe it's possible to "reconstitute our ways of being human", I can see why "mainstream"* modes of communication would seem obsolete.
"Revisionist" then becomes anything that doesn't offer radically "new" solutions that point the way toward becoming "new men".
Deep, unconscious presuppositions, are in this case aptly described as anything that suggests such a reconstitution is not only undesirable, but an impossible folly. Like so many critical theories, it ends with a snake choking on it's own ass; it's very viability depends upon "things gone wrong" ( as opposed to coming to real understandings of how things are): the only "new" it can bring is more acute alienation from being human as we've understood it through Western Traditions.
* What does he mean by "mainstream"? Soap Opera? Damien Hirst is probably the most mainstream contemporary artist right now, based on how much he sells his work for..
Thinking that the artist might be able to "reconstitute" in such a way is very attractive though; it'd be like becoming a secular, po-mo priest figure..
I think that before we would ever be able "to reconstitute our very way of being human," we would first have to learn to loathe ourselves, our appetites, and our desires. In a sense, as ULand stated, an "acute alienation from being human as we've understood it through Western traditions." Very few have the mettle to question themselves that thoroughly and to the end of self-obliteration, and ultimately most simply seek some kind of comfort zone. The most they are generally willing to challenge themselves is to find a new comfort zone.
Self-preservation, no matter what the cost, no matter how cowardly, seems to be the rule of the day. But again, perhaps that is tied to what Uland described as Western Traditions. That attachment to individuality and its paradoxical need to belong to something.
he goes on to say:
"reactionary critics have a point, therefore, when they attack contemporary trends in art because they fear such art might undermine western culture. in the long run, it well might. but they shouldnt worry. something better is coming. my theater is one attempt among man to listen carefully, in order to hear the approaching footsteps."
you can take from that what you will.
its comforting, i suppose, to suggest that "the way things are" is the cold reality that we all need to face up to. but foreman, i think, is doing the stronger thing of admitting to how cruel and inhumane things are/have always been coupled with the need for art that can--inch by inch---maybe help.
and, of course, its not "the artist" that does the help/reconstitution...but rather ALL of us, paying attention and thinking bout our lives. foreman's art is his way of doing that thinking.
austin, your new pages look really good. and i can see how they offer something that is outside the possibilities of the mainstream as it exists today.
i wonder if we could say: nonmainstream work offers us a window to an alternative reality that seems strange but perhaps familiar in an important way; mainstream work offers us a mirror, that we may see a clear picture of our own reality, which is still important and relevant to us.
pomo has focused too much on the mirror (the hall of mirrors) and i'm glad to remember the beauty of the window, but i think the mirror is still a nice thing to have.
(how did you make this image, btw? i can't figure it out. really striking)
again, my problem with this spiel, and the comments (aside from the tossing around of rhetoric on a huge issue) is the pragmatic nature people take.
even with you blaise, you say "pomo has focused too much on the mirror (the hall of mirrors) and i'm glad to remember the beauty of the window, but i think the mirror is still a nice thing to have."
you're speaking from a place of negation. this is all personal taste, but I dont think it's a smart idea to try creating art anymore from a place of negation. didnt we already get over all this high/low asininity? you're just kind of changing terms around based on some really washy ideas.
also, it's just me, but I'm 20 years old and I dont like to make any claims at all of the type of work I make and think I 'should' make. I find something incredibly intriguing and great about the work posted and mentioned here, but I dont think it's the work that's "me." I feel that way about artists I have huge respect and love for, like CF or Gary Panter. Ive seen types of art spanning all types of categorization, and I dont think it's honest to approach work from a perspective of trying to NOT be something, or trying to be something. that's why I feel icky when I see a 24 year old artist talking about being anti mainstream. you're 24 years old, how do you know what the best stuff you make is 'supposed' to be or 'should' be?
I know this already super long, but that's what I think is special about certain artists-- CF or Brian Chippendale probably never said 'this needs to be anti mainstream, rghgthgh', by all accounts CF wanted to be Jim Lee. what he ended up with is an arrival at a really idiosyncratic way of approaching comics. I think it was deliberate and honest and 'arrived at', not created through really purposeful sidestepping of the norm or something.
but whatev.
'I feel icky when I see a 24 year old artist talking about being anti mainstream'
'Jesus Christ'
I just defended the mainstream.
I am not negating anything.
Unless you're talking about Austin; I think he is 25 years old.
I think it's a mistake to think that "the way things are", or human nature, as it's been understood, is some kind of static, cold reality, or that everything worth saying about it has been said. It's much more a way of seeing than it is prescriptive. It is not some effort to pretend horror doesn't exist, or to find comfort as an end. In fact, most traditionalist types would argue that the real coldness and inhumanity is in the modernist denial of beauty and in the revolutionary ethic, best expressed in materialist ideologies.
Trying to find a "better" way for the "new man" has often resulted in the most egregious forms of inhumanity. Often times, just like this guy, they offer a mythic promised land that they can see ahead, if only we'd follow, and the only way to do that is to completely deracinate ourselves from tradition.
Tradition means very little to us now, I know, but that's a really recent development. It's meant cutting ourselves of from centuries of accumulated knowledge; it's what culture/society is really made of. It's been replaced by a conception of culture that's guided by market forces, or legalistic policy, where cartesian egos go bump in the night with nothing but the desire to satisfy desire motivating them. "Injustice" has become a denial of access to the achievement of desire. That too, is pretty new, and it seems to me like it's not going very well. It's fine if you're privileged, and art is something that's there to indulge you, to help you meet those obscure desires ( that oddly enough seem harder and harder to locate the further we cut out those roots) , but those things really do depend on market forces, and the whims of policy.We've willed that into being. Those things have no intrinsic value, as we've understood values.
Those values have been the means by which we've understood what it is to be human, not the way we denied humanity, or justified horror.
— I think it's silly to think that someone like Brian Chippendale didn't start out with ideas about what he didn't want to be like, or find ways to distinguish himself from a perceived "mainstream". The best way to do that when you're in art school is to latch onto something really mainstream, like Jim Lee, or whatever.
— Deciding that you don't want to make something like A or B is just as much as part of any process as the opposite. Unless you've latched onto some kind of tradition, it's pretty much about how you want to present yourself.
— There is a distinction to be made between high and low forms of art/culture. It might not be beneficial to you, right now, to pay it much mind, but it's there.
Trying to find a "better" way for the "new man" has often resulted in the most egregious forms of inhumanity. Often times, just like this guy, they offer a mythic promised land that they can see ahead, if only we'd follow, and the only way to do that is to completely deracinate ourselves from tradition.""
Like this guy. sheesh. Maybe try to read Foreman before lumping him in with jim jones style *push fowards."
Here's a good example
*when i stage a play i make an attempt to match every moment with its counterelement. for instance, one actor might say to another "i hate you, and therefore im taking out a gun and im going to shoot you."
but i would stage it so love is implicit in the action. a love song might play over the loudspeakers, and
the gun we see him pull out from his pocket might turn out to be an unrecognizable object, wrapped in a handkerchief, which makes both actors dissolve in tears.
every feeling we express arises from combinations and mysteries of this sort: hatred arises because of a potentiality for love that has failed, feelings of hatred do not arise in a situation in which love is not possible. but because i embody the counter-element on stage the spectator might say, I dont understand, is he loving or hating?
the point is hes doing both."
its that expression of two feelings at once that foreman is advocating we have more consciousness of and that mainstream art dulls our sensitivity to.
and i dont hate mainstream art. i love it too much actually...but you have to remind yourself at times how dulling and dangerous it can be.
blaise that image is two linocut prints. one done above the other printed vertically. i soaked the roller in way too much ink and then pushed the ink around by hand a little bit.
wasnt gonna use it as the cover image...was gonna have it at the end of the book without text but jesse told me to use it for the cover.
Useless.
Uland, did it ever occur to you that these people who accumulated "centuries of knowledge" forming the basis of traditionalism didn't REALLY know thing one about the nature of human beings? I mean, psychology is only about 100 years old, and scientific psychology is even younger. Until recently people viewed areas of the humanities like anthropology and sociology from a complete ass-backwards moral hierarchy.
We are just now beginning to objectively understand where we as homo sapiens fit in to the grand scheme of nature. If you followed traditional thinking as closely as you claim to you would have realized how awfully skewed it's been. I mean, for example is everyone forgetting how mainstream an attitude like white supremacy was for centuries? It's only forged the awful shape that we find the world in today and it's been out of vogue for what, 40-some years?!
How can anyone think that humanity in general isn't in desperate need of a new worldview. Look at what the "traditional" one has given us!
Ian- I think it's way too simple to suggest that everything bad has been a product of Western thought , and everything good will come from doing away with it. First off, there are many different voices within that tradition. It's more of a dialogue than anything else.
Second, if you're willing to grant it that much power, you have to acknowledge all the good it's done. Did you go to college? Did you refuse the diploma because it represented a backwards hierarchy? Because it's a result of "white supremacy"?
I'm not suggesting that we refuse scientific progress. It's more a matter of how we use science. It's about motives informed by a way of seeing. It's about how we'd interpret knowledge.
And if this is really the course you're taking, I hope you never again complain about contemporary problems.That's all in the past, right?
You're taking a kind of statist/consumerist view of philosophy. You're basically saying that if this one all-powerful system hasn't given you what you want, you're going to reject it whole cloth in favor of a mythic "new" all powerful system.
It's the thinking of a modern, secular serf.
The approach of science is to ignore all preexisting values and OBSERVE things for what they are. Only by starting with this blank slate can the observer begin to really understand how things fit together rather than obsessing over how they are "SUPPOSED" to fit together.
The western moral hierarchy has been as such:
GOD
over
MAN
over
WOMAN
over
CHILD
over
NATURE
With the binding concept of this relationship beings "shit rolls down hill." If you want to add a few more gradients to the ladder you have to also consider RICH-over-POOR and WHITE-over-BLACK/BROWN.
You need to accept that almost all of the thought that occurred up until about 100 years ago operated within this structure. With that knowledge a rational person can not help to be anything other than highly skeptical of traditional thought.
Observation suggests that all of these factors, Man, Woman, Child, God/Universe, Nature actually persist in a dynamic balance with one another. It's not a ladder, it's an ecosystem.
I can't see how being completely ignorant of the nature and natural history of homo sapiens is an acceptable premise for any worldview. That's exactly what you get with traditional thought. Sure they got the ball rolling, but they were the fools jumping off of cliffs with homemade wings that came before the Wright Brothers. They get an "E" for effort at best.
Ian, you are such a fucking moron, it's just painful.
You're simply making up some kind of list and calling it a "hierarchy", clearly with no knowledge of what traditionalists would describe a hierarchy ( nature towers over man, for instance..).
It's really some college dorm room bullshit you just can't shake.
Science cannot describe the subjective nature of consciousness. It's not meant to. Actual, hard science, has always been incorporated into Western thought. You wouldn't have science without it. What values inform questions about what we do with scientific knowledge, or to what end we pursue it? — That's all subjective; exactly the questions philosophy pursues.
You seem to think that acknowledging wisdom that's centuries old means adopting ideas you ( in your infinite knowledge of what they thought) now know where demonstratively incorrect. They didn't have the technology, the direct means, to make many determinations that have been handed to you on a platter.
If tomorrow it's proven that the moon is made of concrete, will you have to burn the books of those who came before that discovery? Will it be because there was racism that day, too?
Why do I even try with you, someone who has already on multiple occasions claimed that evolution is a falsehood. Would you like to go on the record against Copernicus while your at it?
But I'm the moron right?
I look forward to your next effort to lecture Blaise about his blogging. See you next tuesday.
I never claimed evolution is a falshood, I tried to explain to you, on multiple occasions, that the theory of evolution by natural selection cannot explicate a "first cause", and cannot offer us anything coherent when it comes to questions about how we live, what we value, how we discern meaning and interpret the world from our subjective positions.
I think evolution is more than likely true, but it's just a mechanism.It describes a material process, nothing more.
You're trying to paint a picture with a hammer, Ian.
I apologize for insulting you. Uncalled for. It's really really frustrating to hear someone say "What the fuck does Kierkegaard know? I got this copy of Discovery that says..."
these comments suck
Let's talk about noise cassettes or something! Fuck yeah!! BROOKLYN.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/dec/29/evolution.science
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