RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,167
(art, pt. 1)
More thought than anything else,
my own exclusive intrusion into
this enchanter's domain has always
had something to do with mesmerizing
others. Maybe. In the long history of
what's been done, 'Art' has traveled,
and transcended. We have now entered,
in a seeming lockstep, a realm where
Art has degenerated to trash; to forms
of 'behavioral therapy'; and to such
momentous decline that today (honestly)
I saw an ad for 'the first music done by
an infant in utero.' (I want to ask, 'If it
was twins, would it be a cast album?).
-
The world has succumbed to trash; it
used to be within only our waterways
and along highways. Then it went to
audacious roadside billboards, shopping
plazas and parking lots. Now it's just
everywhere and graffiti itself has
been re-termed 'Art' - and, of course,
that has somehow been done by the
usual forms of 'social engineers' who
plan and categorize and label the
acceptable things, which are then
allowed to wend their way into the
fabric of everyday life. That doesn't
advance 'graffiti' into any higher
realm of art status, of course, but
it does bring art down to the scabbier
levels of the social fabric. Which
then takes it to the streets, to babble
and bleed right where they live, and
gains acceptance by those who, as
agents, inspect and grant acceptance
to poverty, degradation, sexual
perversity, mind-numbing subtraction
from quality-of-the-essence wellness
and the least admirable qualities of
post-intellectual lifestyles.
-
It has been said, and I learned it thusly,
that the best Art is done by those under
conditions of adversity. I question that,
now, totally. I remember once going to
an art exhibit, in about 1970, at the Met
or somewhere, and a friend, along with
us, with very little art consciousness,
went through the rooms with us - all
those Vermeers and Giottos and Monets
and Manets and Valezquezes and the rest.
We then went to another floor, where the
featured art was titled as 'Nazi War Drawings.'
Meaning 'Art' done by camp inmates.
He was enthralled, and thought it was
great - and only later did we tell him
that it had been a special 'side' exhibit
of camp-prisoner art. He was under the
impression that it was part of the more
general canon of traditional, accepted,
art. Of the sort people swoon over.
That always stuck with me. Curiously.
-
One thing about 'Art' as it is taught,
in Art History anyway, is that it's often
encoded, instead of as just Art, as an
'encoded political cartooning or as
social history in pictures.' It ought to
be viewed as by a person 'moved'
by it, rather than by someone who
encapsulates what he or she sees into
a pre-ordained format of category,
style, or scene. That's very difficult
to do. I've never really known what
a 'philistine' was, or what was meant
by it, derogatorily, when addresses to
someone who partakes of art as a
'part-time' or Sunday endeavor. It
reeks of elitism, to be able to call
someone out for that.
-
Goya painted demons. Bosch and
Breughel painted oddities of fantastic
presence. Others painted battle scenes,
royal portraits, the vast and heavy
interiors - Vuillard, Matisse. It was
all done, those old formats and now
encyclopedia-ized styles, in another
world and one that no longer exists.
The 'modern' idea, after TV, movies,
photography and the rest had superseded
much of the role painting once had,
was that, or became, that 'modern
painting, having ceased to be
illustrative, ought to be decorative.'
(Instead, I guess, though that stark
word was left out). The old jobs
or portraying bank presidents,
battle scenes, landscapes, showing
off the manor house, and the
faint and bucolic forms of a
dwindling 'Nature' with its
horses, farms, barns and
windmills, having been turned
over to photography and the
movies, left to painting what
painting still did well, and that
was to paint.
-
I don't really wish to belabor
all of this, but I want to say that
the axis of 'Freud/Marx' did change
everything about painting and about
art. Once the psychological angle
was introduced into the realm of
art and creativity, all the other aspects
fell away - or should have. The Left,
the political movement of Marx, we
can see, did also step in and agenda-ize
much of 'Art' - often enough just
turning into the social- realism of
WPA stuff as well as the theatrical
Soviet realism of collectives and
farms and military bumbling; red
sashes and furious coats of arms!
Now, almost a hundred years on
as well, we have even de-calculated
all that and ended up with piles
of bricks, or squats of dung, being
called art. Put into our own social
services of propaganda foolishness
and high-style, often gay as well,
frippery. It's a different world and
we are, surely, adrift in a different
and very de-centralized, place.
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