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Archive for the 'Culture' CategoryPage 2 of 7
LikeI realized today that I don’t care about trying to define what is and is not a work of art…. not that it doesn’t matter as a project. It just doesn’t matter to me. I’ve never been very excited about this project of aesthetics, anyway. What exactly are we trying to accomplish in so doing? David is a work of art, and fountain isn’t. The Isenheim altarpiece is a work of art (albeit religious art, so some might not agree), and the Easter Island Moai aren’t, unless of course one of them happens to be in an art museum, in which case it could be, although… blah blah blah. Don’t take my cheek as irreverence toward the fields of contemporary aesthetics or art criticism. Quite the contrary. I’m more interested in talking about the above mentioned pieces themselves, rather than stipulating whether and how aestheticians may talk about them. After all, it is, or should be, a bit of a common place that works like the above weren’t necessarily created with the kind of museum culture that we often presuppose (with the exception, possibly, of Fountain). Nor where they necessary created to be works of “art” as we understand that word. Rather, these works each demonstrate an elasticity and plurivocity in their ability to function within and without that museum culture. We might say that they function in a milieu that is significantly more robust than the one provided by the western art world.
Contrary to my position, Jerome Stolnitz maintains that the iconic status of these works depends on the disinterestedness that the museum culture preserves1. This assertion or judgment, it seems, relies on two judgments of which I remain unconvinced. First, regarding this iconic status, he presupposes that the reasons for which these works are valued is and ought to be grounded in their being works of the museum culture, or works that we value in a disinterested way. Is this in fact why many or most people do value these works? Is this the only reason why they can value these works? For instance, the Isenheim altarpiece might facilitate a new way of experiencing Mary’s role in the passion of Christ, or, in it’s original context, it can change the way in which the space is experienced, niether of which seem to be especially reliant on ways of viewing that are explicitly dependent on the contemporary museum. And thus, second, Stolnitz asserts that the museum culture fosters the right way of viewing or experiencing works of art. Why? Who decides which aspect of the artistic milieu is the one that ought to be emphasized? What does this say about the revival of urban murals? Are these murals to be viewed the way that one would view visual art in a museum? Is one detrimentally impaired in viewing an urban mural if one hasn’t been formed by the museum culture? Or, is it possible that developing an awareness of the way in which murals shape urban space, and are contextualized by urban space, can actually improve viewers’ sensitivity to museum pieces by thinking about the ways in which context and space change the our perception of works and the way in which works change our perception of space and context? In this case, the intention of the artist and the intentions of the viewers are not unimportant. Nor are they the focal point of a work because works are plurivocal, they function in ways that neither the artist or nor viewers anticipate when working from the perspective of the museum culture. They exist in a milieu of activity, intentions, contexts. Similarly, in Art in Action, Nick Wolterstorff says the only thing that works of art have in common is their varied activities, their ability to do many different things.
Thinking about aesthetics this way, how much does the status of the piece as a work of art or non-art make a difference? I don’t really have a defensible answer at this point… just a hunch that it doesn’t make much of a difference at all.
- “On the Apparent Demise of Really High Art,” JAAC 43 (1985): 356↩
Needless to say, she’s beautiful and totally kills in concert. However, I’ll let Aron explain this song…
A Song for Melody Gardot – recorded 8/18/08, mixed 8/24/08
The Land of Unlikeness, which sometimes performs live, solo and duo, under the name Gooddust, has two songs, just recorded, for those of you heading back to school tomorrow. I’ll post them separately for those of you who have a slower connection and use RSS or are subscribed via iTunes – a good idea if you haven’t done so already.
For All of Womankind – recorded 8/18/08, mixed 8/23/08
A friend here in DC directed my attention to this list (of propositions, basically) that the author deems essential for an Anglican dialogue with Rome. Click the link to see the list. Anyway, this list got emailed around and struck a kind of debate not so much about ecumenical dialogue with Rome, but rather a kind of “what do you need to hold to be Anglo-catholic”… that sort of thing.
Aside from my contempt for these kinds of lists – I don’t think any list of propositions can get at the essence of something like Anglicanism… unless you’re talking about the creeds, and they’re not lists! – it got me thinking about what Anglicanism essentially is. Back when Orombi wrote his like op. piece for First Things (which they’ve still not provided a counter piece to, thank you very much!), I wrote about it here, alluded to it here, and argued about it at Per Caritatem. Orombi lodges the essence of Anglicanism in the Scriptures and the Martyrs. I pointed out then that it’s unusual, I think, for him, an Anglican Archbishop, to provide a definition of Anglicanism which omits any reference to common prayer. Moreover, as one Anglican theologian today will say, if you want to know Anglican theology, read Anglican poets. It’s a messy state of affairs, but it’s Anglicanism. Not having a CDF or a Curia is not a dispensable part of who we are. The prayerbook, however, is indispensable.
JADR in a recent manifesto wrote here:
Catholic Anglicanism is the Christendom of the imagination. It’s a utopian project. It’s a church that never was and never really has been. You can’t find it in the phone book or even on the web. And you definitely can’t find it in the newspapers. I read in the UK´s Guardian the other day about the alternative conservatives: GAFCON. It´s a conservative gaffe, all right. Read the signs. It’s time for Anglicans to come clean. We’re the church of the drunks, the homos, the dandys, the dreamers. We pray like Warhol made paintings. Because we like images.
Here at TLOU, it seems it’s becoming our claim that there’s something important about images, art, and prayer that must be reckoned with before you throw up a smoke screen of propositions. So, that said, I think it’s as good a time as any to pick up the question that Cynthia began last year. But I don’t want to ask just what is Anglicanism, but rather what is at the core of Anglicanism? Jump in…
“…The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:29b-30). So responds John the Baptist when questioned by the religious leaders seeking to lodge a wedge between Jesus and John. His inquisitors appeal to a temptation similar to the one offered to Adam and Eve, the temptation to throw off their identity as the IMAGE of God in order to BE God. The tragedy of this sin is that seeking to be “more” than the Image of God does not lead to greater life. Continue reading ‘He Must Increase…a meditation’
In the latest installment of the Batman series, the Joker has been wonderfully distilled to the essence of the Satanic. He is radically evil for this reason only: He does not care about money (like mere criminals), but he only cares to corrupt those around him, to show that they are just as vile as he is, and that goodness is always a ruse. Kant said that only a good will is truly good. The Joker aims to prove that this good will exists nowhere. The movie in large part proves that he is right, but for those of us who are still trying to be good, this is strangely inconsequential. As dark as the movie is, and Heath Ledger’s perfomance as the Joker is riveting, his character more often elicits laughs than gasps (of which there are a few, but not all supplied by the bad guys). The Joker is a great character because he reminds us of Satan’s basic predicament. He has refused to bend his knee to a “good” God, and has dedicated his life to distorting those who are stupid and weak enough to spend half their lives kneeling and praising. Basically, then, he is lonely and wants company. Continue reading ‘A Devil of a Joker (slight spoiler alert)’
This is my second time posting this … post. Anyway, the server lost the first one, or kidnapped it, or whatever.
Anyway, the original post said something like you all should read one of Janet’s most recent posts. She summarizes and builds on several months of discussion on Deep Grace of Theory. Especially interesting to me right now as I write yet another conference paper is her stuff on -ike. Rather than summarize it for you, I’m going to append a segment, and encourage you to read the entire post.
The “-ike,” of course, as my readers here will know, is a reference to this original theory of knowing, the Greco-European vision that inspired education for 2000 years in the West until the rise of science in the 17th century gave birth to a new “theory of knowledge.” The term “ike” derives from the manner in which the Greeks formed disciplinary names by adding -ike to the name of the subject matter, as in poietike, musike, logike, grammatike, physike, arithmetike, and so forth. (This would eventually yeild our “poetics,” “physics,” “arithmetic,” “mathematics,” and so forth.)
The -ike suffix, in other words, indicated that a “techne” or an “episteme” was in view. (Poietike or arithmetike were short for techne poietike or techne rhetorike, but the “techne” part dropped out most of the time.) The Romans translated the Greek techne as the Latin ars, artis, and along with this, they translated the Greek episteme as scientia, thus giving us our modern “arts and sciences.”
Yet today we tend to forget or overlook, given our deeply engrained scientific outlook in the Modern West, that while Aristotle formalized an existing distinction between the technes and epistemes as the “productive” ikes and the “theoretical” ikes, nontheless he still frequently employed either word in order to refer more generally to any formalized disciplinary practice, irrespective of its subject matter and methodology. (We would view arithmetic as a scientific discipline, for example, but while Aristotle saw it as “theoretical” and hence an episteme, it was still called techne arithmetike, just as poetics was called techne poietike. This wasn’t incidental, either, but crucial to take into our account.)
By the way, Plato and Aristotles insisted upon using fluid vocabularies because they were concerned with teaching the nature of thought itself, and so, as teachers first, they inculcated the capacity to register and attend to the complicated formal levels of organization manifested by the various kinds of things. This emergence of flexibility and deftness on the part of their students was more important to them than the modern insistence on honing an exact set of technical terms.
Victor Vazquez portrays Carribean culture through a dusty sepia lense. His images are riddled with shadows and dark recesses hiding the ghosts of Puerto Rican and island culture. These images, although employing local symbols, embody the universal problems of life and death, sex and birth, acculturation and isolation. His subjects are nearly always nude, and mainly women. They appear to be asleep or dead. Their passivity is the background to their persecution. Vazquez’s Liquids and Signs depicts living organisms oppressed by artificial sexual objects, genitalia, blades, and swimming sperm drawn large on their bodies. Sex, in these images, is not a life-producing event, but rather ravages its subjects. Sex brings death and affliction.
Continue reading ‘Death Shall Make Life His Dominion: Victor Vazquez’
The movie begins with us inside the voice of the old, soon to retire sheriff, and though ostensibly the action occurs elsewhere, we realize at the end of the film that we’ve never left this voice, in fact we’ve fallen deeper into its Texan cracks, even into its dreams. How do we know this? We know this because, like a sheriff, and unlike a movie, we miss most of the action. Sure, we come upon it in anticipation, but most of the killings are (literally) veiled from our eyes. We can’t figure out who the heroes are because they keep dying in very anticlimactic ways, right before, or right after, our attention has been called. I’m so excited that a filmmaker (two even!) have resurrected the art of “not showing”–Hitchcock definitely had that one down, as did many others, though perhaps in part out of regard for the censors. Well the censors have mostly gone home, but the viewers remain, and No Country for Old Men is described as a “violent” film or one that is “action packed,” but these lines come from censors who were once viewers. The truth is that the film simply shows us what it’s like to be an old man who is too slow, too peaceful, and too intelligent, for the world of terror.
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