tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16876687.post112995218294635965..comments2024-02-27T16:59:54.089-05:00Comments on (The New) Theatre Ideas: Corrupting Young MindsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16876687.post-1130224378202110772005-10-25T03:12:00.000-04:002005-10-25T03:12:00.000-04:00I had a comment here - was it removed? I see the c...I had a comment here - was it removed? I see the conversation has moved on since then, in various directions. I'll try to paraphrase - I can't quite remember what I said. I know I did say that I cherished deeply the irresponsibility of the artist, that it is the sole freedom that art offers: unfettered imagination can be freeing - in indirect ways - in many other spheres of life. This is why dictators fear it so. The only responsibility that an artist <I>must</I> have is to his or her artform. <BR/><BR/>That responsibility is a terribly complex question that doesn't simply boil down to art for art's sake. As Peter Handke said, a writer's ethics is in his style. The question of representation is a vexed moral question, as well as an aesthetic question. It is quite a different thing to "self expression". Any artist who thinks he/she is just about expressing him/herself is sadly misled and should go back to kindergarten. Art is about an impersonal passion for form as much as it is about passion. You don't have to agree with artists to admire their work - Pound's anti-Semitism is grossly offensive, but to argue that therefore his work should be banned is philistine. Art is not social work. It doesn't necessarily make anything "better". Its necessities lie elsewhere - as William Carlos Williams said:<BR/><BR/>My heart rouses<BR/> thinking to bring you news<BR/> of something<BR/> that concerns you<BR/> and concerns many men. Look at<BR/> what passes for the new.<BR/> You will not find it there but in<BR/> despised poems.<BR/> It is difficult<BR/> to get the news from poems<BR/> yet men die miserably every day<BR/> for lack<BR/> of what is found there.<BR/><BR/>I basically agreed with Scott's call here: <BR/><BR/><I>So if our experience of daily living is fast, intense, overwhelmed, bombarded, meaningless, violent, intellectually simplistic, emotionally deadening, and spiritually empty -- then shouldn't we, as artists, try to alter perception by doing its opposite? If a late-capitalist consumer society is decidedly materialistic, would not a truly revolutionary act be to create art that finds meaning in non-materialistic perceptions?</I><BR/><BR/>But I argued that art does this precisely by questioning assumptions in ways that are not always welcomed by the society that depends, for example, on certain power relations for its privilege and riches. Sometimes, inevitably, the response to this will be hostile. And I wondered why, if Scott wanted an anti-materialist (consumerist) ideology, he used the metaphor of "credit", as if art was really like banking.<BR/><BR/>Maybe what I'd like to question also is the idea that artists don't know "real" people, but live on Mt Olympus as lonely geniuses. Which artists are these? All the artists I know, including myself, face the quotidian struggles of daily life, like everyone else: they have family, children, bills, rent, etc. They are usually poorer than most middle class people, especially if, like myself, their entire income comes from their practice - I am a full-time writer - but they are very often middle class themselves (I am certainly "middle class", whatever that means). The Romantic idea of artists that has them placing themselves "above" society is surely long gone. The reality is, in my experience, neither of those things. Surely it's an artist's very engagement in society that makes him or her want to question it? <BR/><BR/>Basically I'm with Isaac on his comments on the artworks specifically mentioned. I don't think they are principally about shocking people, just as Sarah Kane's <I>Blasted</I> was not, despite the hysterical accusations on its premiere.Alison Croggonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16876687.post-1130009543531225232005-10-22T15:32:00.000-04:002005-10-22T15:32:00.000-04:00Scott--Sorry to quibble with you yet again, but wh...Scott--<BR/><BR/>Sorry to quibble with you yet again, but while I feel strong agreement with the thrust of your speech-- namely caring about your audience (something I;'ve had many a fight defending at times)--I feel said speech is backed up by total straw men in Mapplethorpe, Serrano and (of all things!) Paula Vogel. Your post shows a misunderstanding of their work (have you seen it? all three things you mention, I mean?) and a use of it in exactly the same ways that those who castrated the NEA would use them.<BR/><BR/>You commit, in other words, the same sin as the artists you are angry with, but as an audience member. It's simply the reverse-- the audience member as King, who has no responsibility to investigate the art they are responding to, or indeed, their own response. <BR/><BR/>First to Piss Christ: What you neglect to mention is that the photograph is itself gorgeous. It looks holy, sacred, an ominous. The lighting through the urine is truly beautiful, a difficult strange effect that would be hard to recapture. It is only once the title hits that the piece becomes at all jarring. And it is at this point where it (hopefully) provokes some kind of reflection in the viewer-- what is going on here? WHere is the intersection of the sacred and the profane? Can something be both at once? What is my relationship to images of Christ and how does that affect my viewing of the work? etc.<BR/><BR/>2) Mapplethorpe. I would recommend checking out Slate.com's article on his work a couple months back, as it says these things all over again but, as with Serrano, you have someone using classical techniques to photograph the totally ungodly and (to some) offensive. Mapplethrope's work exists on an edge between two things-- pure aesthetic delight and pure moral chaos. By combining these two, he created work that is far more interesting than had he done one or the other. (Note, for example, the difference between his photography and, say, David LaChapelle's). Again, if you abstract from content towards form, you have nearly perfect photographic compositions, if you zero in content you have a truly unsettling account of certain subcultures in American sexual practice. <BR/><BR/>3) Vogel. While I agree that <I>How I Learned to Drive</I> portrays the Uncle-Neice relationship as tender and sad, I hardly think she was doing that to piss off the MIddle Class. She was doing it because she was attempting to honestly examine a (Statistically) shockingly regular phenomenon-- incestuous child abuse. What she provided what a humane (and, I would add, aesthetically quite accessable) investigation into something that America (and the world) is criminally silent about. How this fits in to your thesis is beyond me. Furthermore, it is not this work of hers that caused the NEA any trouble, it was her work <I>Hot 'n' Throbbing</I> which she wrote partly in response to the NEA 4. <BR/><BR/>I think that, post NEA-4 (and thus post Mapplethorpe and Serrano) we have a movment in art towards the deliberately outrageous. (see, for example <I>Sensation</I> or Mac Wellman's <I>Seven Blowjobs</I>). This movement in art is an understandable response-- artists felt attacked, and so they fought back the only way they knew how, with art. I feel that it is also pretty clear that we are nearing an end of this. <BR/><BR/><BR/>Yours<BR/>IsaacAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16876687.post-1129983231400827832005-10-22T08:13:00.000-04:002005-10-22T08:13:00.000-04:00Err. I mean I did have him as a professor. He's ...Err. I mean I did have him as a professor. He's still my mentor.<BR/><BR/>Sorry. Don't want to rouse the ire of the great and powerful OZ. not when he lives down the road and knows where my baby girl sleeps.....oldphorthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08218851053043166120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16876687.post-1129983034526592412005-10-22T08:10:00.000-04:002005-10-22T08:10:00.000-04:00Heh. I DID have him as a professor and mentor. I...Heh. I DID have him as a professor and mentor. I even went to his classes, mostly.<BR/><BR/>Poor Scott. Too bad he met with such an untimely demise......oh, wait. I guess he's not dead - just in Denver.<BR/><BR/>----------------<BR/><BR/>So a bullwhip up the ass and a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine is not credible art? Or is it that the creators of such art are not taking responsibility for the influence their art has on others?<BR/><BR/>When is it okay for an artist to challenge the public? Who decides? If 9 out of ten people decide that the Piss Christ artist is being irresponsible, does that make it so? <BR/><BR/>I remember seeing that photo for the first time and thinking - "heh, it's kinda pretty. Nice orange and red tint, the christ figure is seen at a distance and a little blurred, but still held in regal dignity by the pose on the cross. What a good metaphor for Christianity in the 20th Century."<BR/><BR/>Ahhh, but others disn't see it tht way. When The Nat' Museum in Victoria closed the exhibit, the press release did not comment upon the reaction to the phot - it laid bare the feelings of the public about the TITLE of the piece - "Piss Christ". To excuse the wit, this is what pissed people off - the name. "Madonna and Child II" was also a pic of icons submerged in urine, but no one complained about them - ever.<BR/><BR/>Is it possible that Serrano WAS doing the responsible thing? By bringing the hypocritical-ness, the shallow-ness of fundamentalist Americans to the forefront of the nat'l discussion?<BR/><BR/>Here's the link to D'Amato and Helms' statements on the Senate floor regarding Piss Christ and Serrano.<BR/><BR/>http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r7.html<BR/><BR/>Do any of you agree with these two thugs?<BR/><BR/>Then, didn't Serrano do the right thing by making this contentious art and laying bare the prudishness and snobbery and holier-than-thou attitude of our society?oldphorthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08218851053043166120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16876687.post-1129953538229051392005-10-21T23:58:00.000-04:002005-10-21T23:58:00.000-04:00Wish I'd had you as a professor, Walters.Wish I'd had you as a professor, Walters.Freemanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01183078884824734105noreply@blogger.com