Art predicates and structures the world, such as we are in a position to
apprehend, comprehend, or know it. Stein and Joyce are as intensely aware of
this as are Paul de Man or Jacques Derrida. This apprehension is crucial. It is
the stuff good art is made of, yet it places the practice of painting in a
slightly uncomfortable position. For if art is"made" of this apprehension,
if objects in which the language-nature of Being and reality have
already been installed, pre-programmed in an implicit or immanent way, how then
are paintings to register this distinctive twentieth-century tension without in some sense relinquishing their nature,
without becoming something other than art, as traditionally understood. This
is a predicament in which any work, any poetry responding to this
sort of apprehension, would place itself. If the constitution and motive of painting shuttle from immanence and silence to
explicitness, can it still be art? Or will a mode of poetic discourse
have emerged that is somehow art and not art at the same time, sharing the
same bizarre fusion of organic and inorganic, dead and living elements of
Kafka or Matisse. Such an uncomfortable but at the same time funny and
mold-shattering work might well be something new under the sun.
See you next week, john.
No comments:
Post a Comment