Comments on: The age of creativity?

By: Adrien

Adrien — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:53:40 +0000

Age and creativity?
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Lloyd Reese? Goya? Tom Wolfe? Hitchcock? Hey Clint Eastwood. Their asses aged like wine.

By: Adrien

Adrien — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:35:02 +0000

Dick Rortee – So all this talk about “systemic failure” doesn’t get your structuralist oils flowing?
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I think Marx had a go at the ‘systemic failures’ of Capital before there ever was a thing such as structuralism. Postmodernism, for want of an actual word, is still the orthodoxy of what used to be literature departments at universities. No death knell is in evidence. Only a profound and weary groan.
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So we can’t discuss that. What we could discuss is that the GFC could be such a death knell. To do that we’d need someone to make an argument about how the Hell that’s gonna work tho’.
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Be my guest.
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The groan might be the death knell but the moaning started well before the GFC old bean. One thing’s for damn sure. Damien Hirst isn’t gonna be auctioning off hundred million pound skulls for a while. But he doesn’t need to. Unless he invested his money in Lehmann Bros that is.

By: Fine

Fine — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:48:58 +0000

Eric Rohmer is an amazing director, Mark. It’s also notable that there’s still quite a few active French dorectors in his age group including Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and even Godard’s getting up there. It says something about age and creativity that surely doesn’t fit into the conceptulist/experimenter binary. They’ve all been making strong work since the 1950s.

By: Out Of Sight Out Of Mind, Hypocrites Forget

Out Of Sight Out Of Mind, Hypocrites Forget — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:57:03 +0000

Systematic failure

And here's where I've got to give it up, like JPZ, for the futurists. Now there was a crew who even did their breakdown of social order systematically. In chaos and riots, the screech of machines, as PWEI prophesied postmodernistically. Or is the future revolution to be led by a vanguard of the folk?

I remember seeing the Finn Brothers live and this song was just incredible, it had the whole crowd dancing within seconds. The security guards tried to calm everyone down, Neil told them to bugger off and everyone cheered.

BTW, as Flava would scream incoherently, how is Babbeee worn, boyeeeeeee?

By: Dick Rortee

Dick Rortee — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:43:33 +0000

So all this talk about “systemic failure” doesn’t get your structuralist oils flowing? Maybe you are stuck on “Get Set” and need to see the “Go” light. Push that structuralist pedal to the metal. Yeah Babbeee!

By: On Your Marx, Get Set

On Your Marx, Get Set — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:36:54 +0000

“The GFC was the death knell for postmodernism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies.”

A global financial crisis is being analysed here in terms of its impact not on jobs or the political economy of the world, but on what impact it will have on its own analysis philosophically. Postmodernism is alive and well QED. NTTATWWT.
[Points first fingers in the air like Brendan Fevola off on four goals, fifteen good disposals in the first quarter and .15g of cocaine]

By: Dick Rortee

Dick Rortee — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:11:48 +0000

“The GFC was the death knell for postmodernism, poststructuralism, and cultural studies.”

Discuss.

By: Adrien

Adrien — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:05:21 +0000

Labor Outsider – Art critics and scholars have acknowledged the breakdown of their explanations and narratives of contemporary art in the face of what they consider the incoherent era of “pluralism” or “postmodernism” that began in the late twentieth century.
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Art history changes at certain times. The story gets reshaped. For example, sometime during the 20th century art history changed into what is still more or less the current orthodoxy. The criteria for ‘serious’ art became, unbeknownst or unadmitted, that of Gustav Courbet and the Realists: a conflagaration of quasi-radical politics and (sorta) rebellious art.
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As the photograph developed visual artists moved away from the realistic and various painters who’d implicity rejected Courbet’s ideas explored the mythological and the symbolic as a kind of ultra-Romantic negation of the industrial society and aesthetics of the belle epoque. By 1900 this manifested as a radical break with classical forms. The innovations of certain suymbolists and impressionist remet Courbet’s political ideas about art.
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Thus what follows is a series of movements, stylistic approaches and philosophical hand-wringings. This persists until Rothko and Pollock. Then Warhol et al puts a stop to the avant-garde project. Like zombie, however, it still moves around looking to feed. ‘Movements’ perist but more as fashion trends than any ‘serious’ inquiry into political, psychological and/or social transformation.
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The experiences of the actual world rendered the aspirations of, say, the Russian suprematists, null and void. Lenin argued with a leading artist viz the perfect conflation of art and politics. Remeber here, that it was Lenin who was skeptical! Within 15 years art and politics were aligned and the result was neither good for Art nor those who made it.
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Now there’s a predominance of theory descendant and morphed from various post-structuralists with an especial view to promoting identity politics. The new Academy is an ‘avant-garde’ orthodoxy and one gets a sense of this reading the ‘legitimate’ art publications. This work, imho, is mostly cold. (Cue: Damien Hirst.) However there is a counter-culture which rejects theory tho’ not necessarilly the political as featured in new art mags like Juxtapoz. There’s also a renewed interest in Symbolism which for decades was always a little out of place in the avant-garde dominated art history mode.
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My guess is that within two decades, art history will once again reorganize. The late 20 century will be seen as a time of mannerist decadence and new strands in art that have definetely left the Manifesto Crowd behind will begin to be considered. At the heart of that will be what David Hockney referred to as the reintegration of the optical and the eyeballed – separated for a century – and finally reunited.

By: Labor Outsider

Labor Outsider — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:37:45 +0000

“In social scientific terms, it’s important to attend to what actors themselves say they’re doing. Such categories as style and movement, then (which are neither typologies nor binaries), are methodologically useful among other reasons because they reflect the self-understanding of people working within a particular set of social and cultural contexts. There’s a really important point to be made here in terms of the philosophy of social science about imposition of a pattern on the data based on theoretical fiat compared to a classificatory approach which is, in a sense, ethnographic and value neutral in that it takes as its starting point contemporary understandings and discourses.”

I’m going to leave this alone shortly as well.

Of course it is important to pay attention to what actors themseleves say what they are doing. And I certainly was not trying to imply that his conceptual/experimental distinction should REPLACE existing categories of style and movement. That would be plain silly. But surely you would acknowledge that there are patterns in actors approaches to their art and influence on that art that those actors may not be conscious of? That an actor’s art cannot be solely understood in their own terms? Indeed, the continual reinterpretation of the past – whether that be in the arts or other fields of endeavour – is one of the things that keeps the historical profession going. If historiography were limited to solely interepreting events/actions/creations in the terms of their originators, rather than also seeking alternative patterns and explanations, it would be a much thinner discipline!

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:29:30 +0000

How about Eric Rohmer, Fine? Romance of Astrea and Celadon released when he was 87!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0823240/