Conceptual Poetry: Shrug

In the ongoing, often heated debate about conceptual poetry, some voices have a more grounded analysis than others. One of these is Robert Archambeau, of Samizdat blog, who recently contributed an article to a Poetry Foundation roundup about all this brouhaha:

Charmless and Interesting: What Conceptual Poetry Lacks and What It's Got:

Fourteen months after reading at the White House, Kenneth Goldsmith found himself in the real center of American power: cable television. His appearance on The Colbert Report, though, coincided not with a general celebration of the conceptual poetics with which he is associated, but with two stinging attacks on such poetics: one by the young poet Amy King in The Rumpus, and another by the esteemed poet-critic Calvin Bedient in Boston Review. King’s criticism revolved around the idea of conceptualism as an in-group phenomenon, and on the hypocrisy of conceptual poets striking anti-establishment poses while simultaneously seeking, and beginning to find, such laurels as the established institutions of American poetry have to offer. Bedient’s article criticized conceptualism for a lack of concern with emotion and affect, which he linked with both a truncating of poetry’s possibilities and a kind of reactionary political stance. People’s responses to these criticisms, to judge by the emails, texts, phone calls, and Facebook messages I received, were passionate—half of my friends in the little world of poetry expressed delight that the horrible careerist bastards were finally getting called out for their sins, while the other half spluttered in outrage at those who dared try to quench the glorious yet fragile flames of poetic innovation.

This is a moment, then, for an assessment of the virtues and vices of conceptual poetry. What does conceptual poetry lack, compared to other poetries, and what does it have to offer? Any brief answer will, of course, be too general, but we can begin to sketch things out with reference to two aesthetic categories: the charming and the interesting. Whatever else conceptualism has got going for it, it lacks—at least in its pure form—the former. And whether one likes conceptualism or not, anyone who has engaged with it has found that it has, wonderfully or frustratingly, got plenty of the latter. . . .

I encourage the interested reader to peruse the rest of this article first, as what I am writing here is essentially a response to Mr. Archambeau.

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My fundamental reaction to the brouhaha of pro/con argument regarding conceptual poetry as currently practiced is a resounding "Meh."

I shrug at the idea that anybody really cares about any of this except those already engaged in defining the argument and nature of conceptual poetry. While I highly respect Kenneth Goldsmith as an archivist and cultural bellwether, in my opinion his ideas about conceptual poetry, as most such are, give me nothing but smoke and mirrors, an no meat on the bone. I feel like Mr. Archambeau has come up with a very good synopsis of the whole situation, in his article, although he very politely avoids ripping the curtains aside to reveal the non-wizards behind them.

Conceptual poetry is, like conceptual art—and the point has been made that poetry lags behind the other arts in which this battle over conceptualism has already been fought and settled—the idea that once you understand the concept behind a poetic work, you don't actually have to read the work: the concept IS the artwork, the idea itself is what you are supposed to perceive as the aesthetic moment, while the artistic product itself is unimportant.

This applies to a lot of writing that is exactly like sample-based music: sampling art made by other artists, over which one layers one's own rap, or concept. It applies to re-writing an existing poem, to recontextualize it as a new work simply by putting a new frame around it. (This is not the same as John Cage's practice of, say, "Writing Through Finnegan's Wake," because Cage used an existing text to make a new experience of the text in a new way, which is a lot more than merely placing a new dust cover on an existing book.) You see a lot of writing nowadays made by doing a web search online then assembling a "found" text as a new work. Much conceptual poetry is anti-originality and anti-writing. A lot of it is about sampling, often without changing anything.

Of course, another way to think about this kind of poetry is that it really is nothing new, but rather is mannerist, or in the art-historical sense, Mannerist.

That is, self-referential (as opposed to observational or original), decadent (as in not interested in doing anything other than forms of conceptual quasi-masturbation), and late-historical in the sense that it is the end of an artistic epoch rather than itself being a new artistic epoch (post-modernism is to Modernism as Mannerism was to the Baroque, a recycling in exaggerated form of already-existing ideas). I see all of that in "pure conceptualism," especially when one considers that the idea that one doesn't actually need to see the art or read the poem to get the concept is an idea that Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists already did. Arguably, Duchamp did it better, too, and not just because he was first, but because he was a better artist. Similarly, "found" poetry is a very old practice.

I would think more of conceptualism if it actually had something new to present, either in terms of idea or in terms of product—but it doesn't. And that is precisely why it lacks all charm, even though it can be interesting.

And I do find it interesting. But most of it, having encountered it once, doesn't ever need to be encountered again. Like puzzles, once you solve it, there's no point in doing it again. There's no discovery in repeating the problem-solving experience because you already know the outcome.

And that is the problem in a nutshell: art needs to be charming—engaging, enticing, enveloping, inviting—not just interesting. I mean, if there's no point in having an audience, even if that audience is just a few friends, what's the point? Pleasuring oneself alone? (The dreaded M word again.)

"Interesting" in this context is just mental. There's no soma to it, no body, no sensuality—and they're PROUD of that. But art is an experience, not just a mental game. I've written before on the point that poetry that appeals only to the intellect is ultimately going to fail, and fail to have any kind of audience other than those who make it. Sound familiar? (Here again. And here.)

I find it hilarious when poets complain about lacking any kind of significant popular audience when they have worked so hard to create that very situation in which no one is interested in what they're doing.

"Charm" on the other hand is precisely what attracts us to poetry, or art, or dance, or music, which is as much as about embodied sensuality as it is about intellectual interest. In the context of conceptual poetry, "charm" is actively negated. So is anything but purely intellectual interest and engagement. This wing of the contemporary avant-garde in poetry, which sometimes oxymoronically calls itself the post-avant, is very much about disengagement, unoriginality, disembodiment, and disenchantment. I view it as an artistic dead-end. It might be very interesting in the present moment, but ultimately there's no man behind the curtain: he has been willfully removed.

So I remain unconvinced by the arguments supporting conceptual poetry—it should be said that some practitioners, like Mr. Goldsmith, seem to enact arguing about conceptual poetry as a form of performance art in its own right. I don't have a strong argument about the contents themselves of conceptual poetry, which for the most part are uninteresting, and deliberately so. I regard the meta-concept (the conception of conceptual poetry) to be itself fundamentally mannerist, and the arguments in favor of the meta-concept to be often transparently, hilariously inept. It's as if we all know that there's no man behind the curtain, but we all must wink at each other knowingly as we pretend otherwise. It's all a game. It's writing about writing that pretends to itself be writing: a labyrinth of recursive mirrors at a party hosted by narcissists.

Identities

A Spiral Dance essay

Thinking how the poet plays with identity. How poet Fernando Pessoa created personae (which he called heterenyms): other identities, each with their own characteristic styles and personalities, who wrote his poems. He even had biographies for them. The poet mirrors and duplicates himself. When Pessoa granted himself an imaginary interview, he played both roles, although when the interviewer asked a question the reader saw only dots, so sometimes the answer seemed to arrive from another continent at first.

Sometimes the I of the poem is me, mostly it's not, or perhaps it's part of me, a partial identity. Not as fully realized as Pessoa made his, but that's a matter of degree rather than kind. I do create a speaker in a poem who is not me, or not exactly me, or was me at that moment but is never locked into that stance forever. A snapshot, not a manifesto. I change, what I write will change, how I read what I wrote years ago will change.

Identity is fluid, that's the point. It's neurotic to fix yourself permanently into one identity and become inflexible. There is a playfulness to Pessoa putting on and taking masks off identity, no matter how serious the poems he created were. One of his poetic personae was very serious, actually, while another was a bit of a Trickster.

We all create characters when we retell our lives to ourselves. We use the scattered bits of memory, most of us, to construct a linear narrative out of our own life, to give it shape and order and purpose, and we fill over the gaps with what we tell ourselves must have been true. Then we convince ourselves it was true, and come to believe it. Most people are scared by the chaos and unknowns of life, so construct a narrative to make sense of it. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, so without even realizing it, most people live mythic lives; especially when they project themselves onto the narrative mirrors of mass entertainment media, novels, sports, movies, pop music, fairy tales. (Which makes you wonder why zombie apocalypse narratives are so popular right now. But I digress.)

One of the innovations of modernist literature, a century ago, was to grow impatient with the unraveling lie of linear narrative and orderly progress, and begin to represent in writing the fragmentation and scattered spotlight that consciousness really is. Not that there is no continuity, rather that continuity flickers and is not orderly and unidirectional. This insight is still true, and still only half-understood. We do love to impose order and make sense of things, even when it's impossible. About half of the past century of literary criticism has been a desperate attempt to reimpose older species of order upon the fragmented state of contemporary literature; that is, an attempt to stuff the genie back into the broken bottle.

And now, a century later, we have a century of writing that depicts stream of consciousness, fragmentation, and the chaos of life, after a century of continuous bloody war, and fragmentation and superficiality have become the fashionable tropes. In this postmodern era of mannerist art, the Ouroborous eating its own self-referential tail, with a hipster wink and ironic smirk, if you write neither reactionary classicist tomes, post-Dickens, post-Tolstoy, nor fragmentary arcane superficial (in the sense of being focused on the surface effects of words rather than their meanings) language poetry, all the critics and other poets will tell you you're lost at sea. In truth, Hip-hop poetry is no different than LangPo practiced by credentialed academics, in that both focus on rhetorical effect rather than content. I've been to readings by both camps where any poet who tried to do something slightly more deep was effectively booed off the stage.

Pessoa, I think, would be tolerantly amused. Because I think that he, like Virginia Woolf, understood the psychology behind what he was experimenting with in his writing. A great deal of the first generation of avant-garde and Modernist art and literature was made in response to the discovery by psychologists of the unconscious (Freud), and later, the collective unconscious and archetypes (Jung). Pessoa was exploring the hall of mirrors that is the personality, the self that conceals from itself the Self. He knew there was a man behind the curtain, pulling the levers, so he gave him a name.

A century later literature has become all about that hall of mirrors: imitation and self-referentiality. Narcissism, which is confused with literary referencing, and is mo longer about finding new ways to depict the evolving workings of consciousness. That psychological insight was new to the artists of a century ago, and they found ways to make their art new thereby. Now that their methods have become the mainstream, there's a lot of flailing around, some of it admittedly better than others, but it mostly repeats the now-familiar. As always seems to happen, the avant-garde becomes established.

Now people are tired of trying to make it new, be original, say things in ways that are new. Exhaustion and irony and despair (in the sense of giving up) are the mainstream of art. Artists are praised these days precisely because they spin the past. The avant-garde has literally become the academic establishment. They hate that, even though they have nothing left to rebel against. Calling a brash new poet every few years "the James Dean of poetry" is more accurate than they know.

We're back to Pessoa's hall of mirrors, his closet full of discrete identities. We don't know who we are anymore, or how to be, and we don't know what to do about it.

And that's a good thing. Because that kind of identity confusion is fertile ground to grow something new and solid in. You see hints of this in the current round of public discourse on identity politics; which is perhaps now in its third generation. People have turned back from a couple of decades of narcissistic identity politics in which they demanded for themselves their share of the pie: now you see a lot of identity politics that is, rhetorically, collective calls for social justice. Thirty years ago the political left was very narcissistic; now, lagging behind as always, the conservative right has become even more self-absorbed and self-centered than the left ever was. What does this have to do with poetry? Everything. If you think that popular culture, and entertainment, and the media, do not reflect all of these evolutions, on every level, you need to start connecting those dots.

And, as a hundred years ago, there are many on the margins, ignored by the critical center as usual, who are doing something new. You mostly haven't heard about them, unless you go questing for them. There are artists making landscape sculptures seeking to reconnect the cultural fragments with the old spirituality of the land. There are poets who wish to synthesize the scattered fragments of consciousness together again, not into the old linear narratives of apparent order, rather into a higher plane of observed order.

Just as mathematics evolved, beginning in the 1970s, from catastrophe theory towards fractals and chaos theory, in which order itself is observed as an emergent property of chaotic systems. (Anyone remember catastrophe theory? I can recall two science fiction books based on the concept. Although surely by now you've heard of fractals and the butterfly effect.)

If I knew where poetry was going, I'd be a prophet, but I'm not. Nevertheless I sense the stirring of change over there, and over there the smell of freshly-turned earth. We find ourselves (our selves) in turbulent transitional times, creating new identities as we go along, as needed, and often by surprise. One great lesson that Pessoa can still teach us is to float, and not take ourselves too seriously.

Who's that knocking at the door?

Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual In Art

One hundred years ago, artist Wassily Kandinsky wrote and published a small book called Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). It was translated into English and published in the British Isles in 1914.

Here is the complete text of that translation online: Concerning the Spiritual in Art. (The first page is the translator's preface, which is an interesting historical document for its context, although reading it almost a hundred years later, some of the big arguments about Modern art in this preface have long since been considered settled.) And here is a downloadable etext of the book from Project Gutenberg.

Kandinsky was Russian-born, lived and worked in Germany, and is considered by many to be the first abstract painter of the Modernist era. He sort of started the whole abstract painting project. A lot of what followed, including the flowering of Abstract Expressionism in the USA in the 1950s, flowed from what Kandinsky had started. At some point, every abstract painter needs to deal with his ideas.

The key point in all this for me is the word "spiritual." After a century of Modernism and Postmodernism, and more, the one part of Kandinsky's contribution to ideas about art is the spiritual aspect of art. This remains entirely unfashionable. I have written before about mannerism and decadence, about the re-enchantment of art. The spiritual component of art, so important to Kandinsky, is the main thing that the past century has worked hard to ignore or dismiss. Not all contemporary artists agree with this, though; the spiritual in art is beginning to return to the notice of artists and critics alike.

For example, a recent article by Taney Roniger: Beyond Kandinsky: Toward a New Sense of the Spiritual in Art. I have on my shelves next to my art-making part of my living room creative corner a small collection of books that look at this very topic. This isn't just art therapy, this isn't just psychology, there's more to it than that.

Creativity Beat website boils this down to a nutshell in a post on Kandinsky, and I quote:

In his introduction Kandinsky says, “The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in it grip”. A little over one hundred years later these words speak succinctly to our current state of crisis. The world financial crisis, global climate change, escalating violence and high-tech wars, all point out the destruction brought on by the greed of excessive materialism.

In Kandinsky’s time the vast majority of museum goers and art lovers could only understand art that represented reality. And even though modern and post-modern art have opened us to new ways of seeing, the gate-keepers of the art world currently have very little room for art with spiritual content.

But today, there is a great awakening, a re-membering of our soul’s connection; more and more people from all walks of life are responding to the spiritual in art. As an artist I take these words of Schumann to heart. “To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts- such is the duty of the artist.”

Let me repeat a key statement from that: The gate-keepers of the art world currently have very little room for art with spiritual content. I can attest to this personally, as an artist whose visionary and shamanic art has been rejected more often than not. Something about my artwork seems to scare people and attract them at the same time. Perhaps due to its often archetypal contents. I've written about this before, and I've thought about it a long time. So Creativity Beat accuses the gatekeepers of the art world as being hostile to spirituality in art, I can only nod my head in agreement. I do think, though, that Kandinsky would have been dismayed by this hostility's ascendance in contemporary arts culture; although he may not have been surprised.

For myself, I find new resonance in Kandinsky's words of a century ago, because as artists we are right back where he started from, a century ago, finally addressing these issues of the spirit in art after having denied their existence for so long. Or perhaps addressing seriously for the very first time.

Here are some quotes from Concerning the Spiritual in Art that I find worthy of contemplation.

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There is no form, there is nothing in the world which says nothing. Often - it is true - the message does not reach our soul, either because it has no meaning in and for itself, or - as is more likely – because it has not been conveyed to the right place.. ..Every serious work rings inwardly, like the calm and dignified words: ‘Here I am!'

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All means (in painting) are sacred when they are dictated by inner necessity. All means are reprehensible when they do not spring from the fountain of inner necessity.. ..The artist must be blind to ‘recognized’ and ‘unrecognized’ form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity.

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The artist must have something to say, mastery over form is not his goal but adaption of form to its inner meaning.

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In a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completed abstracted

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The artist must train not only his eye, but his soul.

Ignore Art HIstory and Just Make Art

(Hat tip to Robert Archambeau for finding some source materials here.)

I have two artist friends, one of whom just finished art school a couple of years ago, and one who was so traumatized by her post-art school career some decades ago that she effectively stopped making art until her recent artistic renaissance. Both of these are incredibly talented artists; both of them have made pieces of art unlike what you've seen before. Both of them have come under attack, in art school and later in gallery showings, for being out of step with their times and the artistic fashions. Both of them make sincere, unironic art, art that has meaning and beauty, art that speaks to the audience (if not to the critic), and has spiritual content. (Not overt religious symbolism, which I know is what you first thought of when I said "spiritual content," rather archetypal, deeply psycho-spiritual imagery.)

In an interview with poetry editor Micah Robbins, Daniel Nester makes a point or two that I find brilliant:

Nester: I’d like to run it up the pole here for you and see what you think, and I am sure I am wrong, because I usually am and I’m, like old now—is that we have reached a period of late style, where the already bankrupt aesthetic battles of yore—lyric versus narrative, Ron Silliman’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude, subjective versus written-for-the-ages—have all been decided on. We’re all to be lyric, subjective, post-avant poets now, and that’s that. Baudelaire used the term “Rococo Romanticism,” and I think American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase.

Robbins: I find this both depressing and hilarious! And I don’t disagree with your assessment. I’m imagining Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Ron Silliman in leopard print spandex and frilly boas dancing around to “Rock You Like A Hurricane”! Ahhhhh. No! Someone make them stop!

OK. So what do we do about it?

I can’t pretend to have a simple answer, but I can say that I don’t think US poetry ever enters any stage without the calculated and concerted efforts of various individuals with very specific interests in mind. The 21st century scene seems to be dictated from above by a rather small group of poets with institutional (i.e., financial) connections that are constantly protected by a weirdly bureaucratic fiat (i.e., MFA dogma). The result is that contemporary US poetry has become, perhaps more than ever, part of the ideological state apparatus. It’s really no surprise that the gross capitulation to those approaches that you identify as having been ‘decided on’ has quite literally sucked the vitality out of contemporary poetry. It has also contributed to a proliferation of journals that fall neatly in line with the status quo. And this—the disturbing obedience of editors to what’s been ‘decided on’—is not only bland, but it’s frightening in its conservatism.

On one level I think the phrase "American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase" is one of the funniest assessments of PoetryWorld that I've encountered in a long time. Also one of the most accurate. One a more serious level, Nester's description serves as a scathing attack on the current state of affairs; and Robbins' reply explains why some poets have become disenchanted with the MFA writing programs that have proliferated all across the land (even as they participate).

I've been writing for over a year now on how mannerist art has become, while noting also that some of the same problems exist in contemporary music. This has been occupying my thinking about postmodernism and the arts for some time now.

That it's been "decided on" by the artistic mandarins that we are all supposed to be lyric, subjective, ironic, post-avant-garde poets and/or artists now makes me think of my two artist friends. That they were rejected by the artistic taste-makers and establishment mandarins seems to me exactly parallel to the state of affairs described by Nester and Robbins. Both of them ran afoul of critiques by other artists—I repeat, because this is important, critiques by other artists—precisely because their artworks were epic rather than lyric, archetypal rather than subjective, sincere rather than ironic, and influenced by art-historical iconography without being shallowly postmodern about their sources. My younger friend constantly felt attacked during critique sessions while in art school, because he was making art unlike anyone else, and he wasn't afraid of expressing darker emotions. My older friend, after her art school experience two decades ago, while she was starting to make a career of her art after art school, ran afoul of very similar critiques, and rejection after rejection from shows and galleries.

I've been through that rejection, too. For myself, I am quite aware that the art I make, and the music, and poetry, is the opposite of lyric, ironic, post-avant. It can be subjective art, but mostly in the sense that I approach the universal through the personal. My goal as an artist is not the "self-expression" of ego-display or the cult of celebrity, my goal is transcendence, getting past my "little self" to find the archetypal Self, which is mythic, shamanic, universal. A lot of my art actively scares people, or causes approach/avoidance behaviors, not because the art is shocking (intentionally or otherwise) or depicts brutality, but because it strips away shiny self-reflective filters of denial to deal with the big issues of life and death.

Over the past few years, as I've dealt with a chronic illness, had a few near-death experiences, and undergone life-changing surgery, my art has become even more focused on the big issues of life and death. In other words, as my life has been pared down to its essentials, its core questions, stripping away all unnecessary artifice and detail, so too has my art. I find that I don't care anymore if my art scares people, because I just don't have time or energy to waste on worrying about what people think of me. I've faced my own mortality, and I know my time here is limited, and I know too that I still have a lot I want to get done.

The younger of my two artist friends said to me, when he was still in art school, "You might as well admit it, the art you make is shamanic." He stopped me in my tracks, then, because I had been flailing for a way to market my art that was avoiding sincere words like "shamanic" or "visionary" or "archetypal," for fear of continuing to drive away the public and the critics alike. I had been using "visionary" as the most neutral possible term—but after my young artist friend called me on it, I made a new business card that openly said "Shamanic Artwork" on one side, with this image on the reverse:



It has in fact been a very popular business card. It might not be ironic or reserved enough for the mandarins of late-stage mannerist art, but the general public seems to love it.

So, where does this leave us?

In talking with both of my artist friends, the older trying to restart a career now that she's gotten past a lot of trauma she'd gone through back then, the younger having just survived the rigors of art school, I've found myself saying to both of them: Let all that stuff go. Let go of all the judgments and theories and -isms that were thrown at you, let go of all the career expectations they wanted to prepare you for, expectations which skew the critical judgments made in school and after. Just empty you mind and make art.

Ignore your history, ignore art history, ignore the mandarins and just make art.

That's my best advice to any artist, writer, or composer. I do my best to practice what I preach. I find it liberating to encounter the blank page with no expectations or history, beginning as if for the first time every time. In Zen, they call this practice "beginner's mind," which is fluid and open and playful, as opposed to expert's mind, which has become inflexible because it thinks it already knows all the answers. The state of affairs that Nester describes, the late stage of poetry, where the ossified are in charge of teaching, to paraphrase Robbins, is very much an example of expert's mind.

In expert's mind, what poetry is has been already "decided on." There are things you do, and that is Poetry, and things you don't do, and that is not-Poetry. I've run afoul of that myself, in a telling moment when a neo-formalist poet objected to a poem of mine on essentially moral grounds. Mind you, not on literary grounds, but on ideological ones. This is another example of expert's mind in operation, but also reflects on the aspect of postmodern Mannerism that focuses on means rather than ends.

So, again, I say that the answer is very simple and plain: Just make art. No matter what, make art. Don't stop. Make art. Don't get tied up in knots by expectations. Ignore the worst baggage of history. Just make art.

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Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
—Adrienne Rich

Poetry is just something you have to do, all the time. It's a wide and varied artform, and like many other wide and varied artforms it can accomodate a wide range of tastes and audiences. Don't limit it. Just do it.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 3: the Decadent Present

In a recent article in Prospect magazine, The dustbin of art history, Ben Lewis defines clearly, and in historical context, what has baffled so many: Why is so much contemporary art so very bad?

Lewis makes some very convincing comparisons between the decadent art of the Rococo period in European art history, among other end-phase periods of former grand art styles, and what is being presented nowadays as post-modern and conceptual art. His central point of comparison, which I find convincing, is that we're now living through the final-stage death-throes of the Modernist project—a point I have made many times: post-Modernism is really Late High Modernism, not a new trend but the end of Modernism. What was once great and vibrant and life-changing and original has collapsed into self-reflexive decadence.

Lewis writes:

There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody.

Over the last decade, not only conceptualism—perhaps the dominant movement of the past three decades—but the entire modernist project has been going through a similar process. Of course, some important and inspired artists have made important and inspired work in recent years—from famous photographers like Andreas Gursky and painters like Luc Tuymans to lesser-known video artists like Lindsay Seers and Anri Sala. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with much of this century’s famous art than its absurd market value.

I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.

Self-parody (art that refers only to other art), narcissism (the personal self is the only real subject), formulaic rule-sets for art-making (in the absence of truly open-minded exploration, we reproduce and copy), the cult of the artist-personality (especially post-Warhol), the cynical use of cliché and sentimental iconography to simultaneously manipulate and mock the viewer and/or buyer: all these are aspects of the art that is now considered the gallery/museum mainstream. In a nutshell, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and their ilk. (I've never yet been able to decide if Koons was actually making fine art, or if he is rather a one-man icon factory.)

The archetype of the Hero-Artist that Modernism was founded on (itself the ultimate flowering of the Romantic notion of the heroically feeling-motivated artist)—the lone rebel breaking out against the backdrop of stale salon and academic art—was the leading narrative of Modernist art's technical and thematic innovations: from Picasso through Pollock, from Mondrian to Frank Lloyd Wright, from Georgia O'Keeffe to Edward Weston, from Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot through to Jerome Rothenberg and Octavio Paz, and the many innovators in between, in all their various styles. A full century of the Modernist enterprise has left us with many high marks to reflect upon.

What archetypes do we have now?

We have the Sellout-Artist rather than the Hero-Artist; the conceptual artist who feels entitled to a museum career merely because they have the ability to shock and provoke. The artist as Brand, in which artistic variation means only diversification of media. The artist who consciously embraces commercialism, who attempts to portray their own commercialism as a mocking commentary on the commercialism of the overall art-market system. The successful insider who mocks being a successful insider.

We have the Reproducer-Artist, he or she who (in genuine postmodernist style) thumbs through art history to borrow images and meanings and icons and reproduce them on a theoretically level playing field, for them to interact—which usually means disjunction and juxtaposition rather than genuine interaction—in other words, steals the art of the past and present and recombines it in theoretically new ways. This is collage-making brought to its ultimate end: the only thing "new" is the recombination; none of the elements are original. In fashionable literary circles, we get flarf and Oulipo and other "post-avant" poetry and flash-fiction stylings; most of which proudly state, in multiple manifestoes, that they mean nothing. Cleverness is all: content is dead and gone.

At what point does an artist quoting another artist's work, referring to other art by reproducing it as a reference, become outright plagiarism? If you quote another artist's entire opus and put your name on it, are you really making a comment about anti-authorship, or are you really just being lazy? Are you attempting to conceal your own lack of ideas in your appropriation and cooptation of the ideas of others?

We have the Theorist-Artist, who must write a manifesto before making any artistic move, whose works are mechanically determined as well as mechanically reproduced. There is always a Movement, an -ism to be named. The artist must be a permanent avant-garde, rebelling against an establishment, even if the artist becomes the establishment, the institution. Permanent avant-garde placed in permanent opposition: to what? Sometimes to nothing but other theories. In literature, neo-formalism and Language Poetry are alike in their conception of political rebellion against a straw-man status quo; although they are opposed stylistically, they are identical psychologically in their need to put theory before art-making, ideology before inspiration.

We have artwork after artwork that plays out in the mind without ever really touching the soma, or the heart. Art which is some cases openly claims this to be a virtue.

Antinomially, I do feel that artists as diverse as Andy Goldsworthy and Donald Judd have been our alternative artists who have been involved with vision and re-enchantment all along, even as the decadent art goes on simultaneously in the urban centers. More than one artist living and working outside Gallery Row in New York City has shown us ways towards re-enchantment, all during this same period: but they are not the darlings of the galleries, the museum retrospectives, or the art-buyers who listen to the dealers who promote artistic fashion over enduring quality.

As many working artists will tell you, the gallery and art-buying big-city "scenes" for the most part perpetuate this state of affairs. There is too much profit invested in the structural edifice of decadent postmodern art for galleries or dealers to let it collapse anytime soon: there remains much money to be made. Does anybody buy a Koons because they love it, or do they buy it as an "investment"? What form of capital is involved in such a transaction: social, financial, spiritual, or aesthetic? Does anybody really like this stuff? Meanwhile, genuinely visionary artists, and artists who have something different to offer, are for the most ignored, or kept in their place as outsiders. Galleries are inherently conservative financially: they rarely show anything that hasn't sold well before. To be "inside the system" means one has to become like what sold well last year: cynical, self-reflective or narcissistic, and ironic.

Irony.

Irony is the new sincerity, and has been throughout postmodernism. Irony replaces civic grace. Irony is the only acceptable way of approaching the world. Anything non-ironic is labeled retrogressive and mocked. If your art isn't heavily ironic, you probably won't get noticed, much less lauded by dealers or galleries.

When Lewis refers to "the alibi of cynicism," I feel he is at root discussing irony. The excesses of art are claimed to be critiques of society's over-valuing of art in a decadent way. But such art is rarely convincing—except as irony. As Lewis writes about cynicism:

Contemporary artists and their curators and theorists concede many of these faults, but invoke in their defence a critical attitude towards their material. Yes, Koons’s shiny balloon dog is kitsch—but it thereby subverts hierarchies of taste in art. Yes, Hirst’s gold-plated cabinets containing grids of industrial diamonds are glossily vacuous, but they are a critique of the society that admires them. Other artists have made works about their own shortcomings. One of Maurizio Cattelan’s brilliant early works, in 1993, was the installation of a live donkey and a chandelier in a New York gallery, to thematise his inability to come up with a good idea. The German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-97) spent much of his (now acclaimed) career making art that described his frustrating quest to make important works of art. A surprisingly honest sense of failure, hopelessness and a bankruptcy of ideas are fundamental components of this end-phase of modernism. . . .

Here is art celebrating its own superficiality. In doing so, it absorbs any criticism made against it, like Warhol’s celebrities—or Hirst’s Golden Calf, which ironises the adulation and criticism his art receives.

Subverting hierarchies of taste in art: even if I could take Koons seriously on this point, I would never be able to forget that Warhol did it first, and did it better. What is Koons but a third-generation Warhol, only with bigger and brighter and shinier toys? (I admit I do prefer Warhol's art.) Another difference between Warhol and Koons is that Koons' art is deliberately decontextualized, ahistorical, non-referential—more characteristics of postmodernism—in ways that Warhol's art is not. Warhol remains bound to the context of his times; because, in his time, he was innovating something new. Warhol may have claimed to celebrate the popular and the superficial, but his art nonetheless resonated with history. Postmodernism, in removing historicity, indeed celebrates its own superficiality (which becomes another form of narcissism).

One of the contemporary trends in art that I personally find alternately mystifying and infuriating is its smallness: its smallness of scale, smallness of interest, of ambit, its unwillingness to even acknowledge grand themes, much less embody and express them. As Lewis writes: Art has become small, superficial and self-indulgent in its emotional range: sentimental rather than truly intellectual or moving.

Now, I like the gods of small things, too. I like close-up photographs of tree-bark and pond-water textures that reflect the fractal nature of the world's geometry. But I also like broad landscapes. One needs to look at the whole mountain forest, not merely the moss on the north side of one small grove of trees. Postmodern art's narcissism is actually part and parcel of this smallness: a refusal to look outside the self-recursive self, to see the larger, cosmic Self.

The parallels in literature are the dominance, in poetry, of the post-confessional lyric (the dominant style emerging from MFA workshops) wherein the subject is always the writer's own life and emotion; and in fiction, the short story about small personal lives in relationship, the parlor-story, as opposed to, for example, the historical sweep of Dr. Zhivago. The latter is a novel equally personal, equally a love story, to any being published now—but on a large scale, using a large palette. Who writes such epics now (that don't refer to the epics of the past, with irony)?

Smallness of ambit also manifests as repetition of themes. In genre fiction, for example, fantasy publishing is glutted with High Fantasy trilogies featuring elves, magic, heroes, trolls, and all the usual characters—none of which would have been conceived had not J.R.R. Tolkien written The Lord of the Righs. Several of my SF/fantasy-reading friends keep trying to engage me in various of these High Fantasy series being published now; but few strike me as more than warmed-over Tolkien; or worse, self-recursive winking ironic acknowledgments and parodies of Tolkien.

Another aspect of the superficiality of postmodern art is its smallness of feeling, its narrow emotional base. This is perhaps one of the most pernicious smallnesses in play: Because evoking strong emotional responses—other than shock and disgust, that is—is considered passé by so much postmodern art, we are left with the numbing-out of psychological disassociativeness and depression. Acedia is actually considered a positive value in postmodern art; although few would give it so clearly a spiritual label. Spirituality is suspect, spiritual content, even meaning itself, are suspect, and to be avoided at all costs. This isn't really about blandness: it's about numbness. Once again, irony stands in for genuine feeling. One is expected to be numbed-out in front of the paintings; one is supposed to have no strong feelings either way. Responses to art other than intellectual are devalued. The shrug is taken to be a supportive response; in a bizarre use of doublethink, indifference is redefined as love.

I want to be clear, in my criticisms here of contemporary art, which echo Mr. Lewis', I am being neither despairing nor apocalyptic. In fact, there is a great deal of art being made nowadays, as well, that is inspired and endowed with meaning. But you might not have heard about it, if only because it's not making millions of dollars in sales for the artists, the galleries, and the dealers. The wrong turns that contemporary decadent art has made has been perpetuated, even exaggerated by the gallery/dealer/financial systems. But it is not the only kind of art being made. I will be getting around to that soon in this essay series. I am working my way towards describing possible re-enchantments in art; but we must first honestly survey what is happening, right now.

Lewis concludes his article with, in part:

There have been inspired and important artists at work during the last ten years, just as there were in the late 19th century. But in order clearly to see what is in front of our eyes, we must acknowledge that much of the last decade’s most famous work has been unimaginative, repetitious, formulaic, cynical, mercenary. Why wait for future generations to dismiss this art of celebrity, grandiosity and big money?

We must first assess the current state of affairs, honestly and with a cold eye. Then we are able to see what visionary, enchanted alternatives have also been going on—if not so publicly, then at least chthonically.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 2: Tribal Voices

Sometimes you must look backwards, at your origins and roots, before you can proceed forward into the unknown.

Many contemporary anthropologists have learned the lesson that writing ethnology is literary writing: anthropology is a literary discipline as much as an ethnographic, research-oriented one. Fieldwork is still essential: going out and living with the culture and people you intend to study, becoming a participant-observer rather than a fictively "objective eye" reporter. When you immerse yourself in a culture that is not your birth-tribe's culture, you learn as much about your own roots and birth-tribe as you do about the other, since it is impossible not to reflect on your own life in the context of reflecting on the lives of others. We travel to learn about our homes. We learn what is different, what is alien, what is Other. This Otherness that we encounter when we travel to the field is the mirror of our own Otherness.

Without stealing or appropriating another culture's beliefs, without co-opting anything, without being superficial and naive about it, there is deep artistic and social value in listening to the tribal voices. In terms of art, fine artists have often looked to tribal art for renewal, for inspiration, and ideas. Picasso and his contemporaries were openly inspired by African tribal art making the rounds in the museums of Paris about the time that Cubism was being developed; there was a direct influence on Cubism. Is that stealing from a tribal culture? Perhaps not: if the artist then runs with it and incorporates it into his or her new art: a fusion, rather than merely copying. Influence is only theft if all it does is imitate, without going beyond and developing into something new. If it's more than just quoting, if it's more than merely reproducing, there is a chance of renewal.

Yet artists don't have to look to indigenous cultures alone for inspiration. Every culture has its own tribal voices, even those cultures considered post-tribal, urbanized, and industrialized. What is more tribal than inner-city ghetto culture? Or graffiti "tag" culture? Tribalism always reappears and reemerges in unexpected ways. Hip-hop culture all too often expresses the darker shadow side of tribalism, yet still it coheres as a tribal way, and that is its power.

Since the philosophical and scientific Enlightenment, 300 years ago in Europe, Euro-American culture has increasingly come to live in its head, forgetting sometimes that it even has a body. We intellectualize everything, and think we can solve our problems by thinking them through. Thus, we ignore easy and obvious solutions that had been available to us, before we forgot about them, that are body-centered, even body-prayers, and that connect us with the land.

My own birth-tribe, which I can trace back to the Vikings and to the Celts, has a rich source of tribal wisdom to draw on. There is northern European traditional shamanism from ancient Ireland. There are the Sagas, preserved in Iceland and written in Old Norse, which tell the tales of men and gods from the Viking era of conquest and settlement. There is a legacy of daily contact with the masks of god, with the divine and numinous in many forms.

it is this recovery of the daily encounter with the numinous and liminal that can re-enchant our art. It is the awareness that what is magical lies close to the surface of the everyday world, if we but pay attention. It is the sense of wonder that every child has, which is eventually beaten out of them in school, and by life, but which can be recovered. Even a life's darker moments are liminal.



In a festschrift volume about mythopoetic writer Robert Duncan, Sean Golden contributed an article which contains an excellent overview of the unified Celtic approach to art, literature, music, and indeed to life. This stands well as a descriptor of both ancient and modern Celtic modes of making art: a tribal heritage I can also call my own. This excerpt also appeals to me because it addresses my own pursuit of abstract realism in photography.

Illuminated manuscripts, the greatest examples of Celtic painting, typify Celtic art with their intricate abstract forms which reveal a simultaneous realism. Whole borders of manuscript pages are taken up by interlocked spirals and concentric circles which, distinguished at first only by color, depict birds, hounds, or serpents whose elongated necks and limbs entwine their neighbors. They clasp each other in their jaws and ancillary lines followed out to the sides reveal legs and claws, but the body has been subjected to abstract patterning. Abstraction and naturalism as a visual pun introduce an exuberant humor. An example from the Book of Kells will illuminate this.



One page is devoted entirely to the word Quoniam. The Q dominates half the page, containing u and o within itself, while the letters niam are relegated to a lower corner. A troop of human figures wind their way among the letters. A translation of the Latin introduced by this word explains why—"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand. . . "—it is a verbivisual pun. The pun is the essence of Celtic art and literature, and many passages cannot be adequately translated because they are, like [James Joyce's] Finnegan's Wake, densely packed, multilayered sequences of puns whose meanings are simultaneous and often contradictory. Verbal facility, the felicity of puns, emphasis on individual words, particularly proper nouns, etymologies—all of these form the content and structure of Celtic literature. The tendency towards abstraction reveals itself through strict and intricate rules for meter and sound. This insistence on a careful and intricate patterning of sounds to which content is frequently subordinated parallels the abstract quality of Celtic art. The Celtic mind took in everything whole.
—Sean Golden, "Duncan's Celtic Mode," in Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous (New Directions, 1979), p. 212

The "verbivisual pun" aspect of Celtic art leads towards my own experiments in illustrated, illuminated, visual poetry. Like my Celt ancestors, I like how puns within a poem can create multiple layers of meaning, adding what I sometimes call resonance or depth of meaning: the further in you go, the more layers you find, sometimes contradictory, sometimes all the way down to the substrate where the gods are born. I like visual puns as well as literary puns, and when I illuminate a poem (illuminate rather than merely illustrate, leading us towards that combination of words-and-image that is visual poetry, haiga, etc.) I think about how to access and emphasize some of the "hidden" meanings of the text. Not hidden, actually, but off to the side, or not obvious on the surface.

Celtic tribal perception was gestalt perception: taking in everything as a whole, rather than breaking it down via reductive analysis. There are plenty of details to look at and analyze, but the overall form and shape, its shimmer and weave, are more important. When I write music, or poems, or make art, I leave room for indeterminacy to come in, and surprise me. As the artist, I like to amaze even myself, first, before any one else sees the work. In music, I often think in terms of gestural shapes and forms, in which the actual notes are subordinate to the phrase and arc of the form.

What do our tribal voices say to us? What do they remind us to feel and be? This is what they say:

Be mythic in your art (not inflated in your ego). Stand on the shoulders of the tribe of giants who are your ancestors. Use their wisdom, which they acquired across millenia of living. Reclaim your own rootedness and groundedness in the earth itself, through the feet of your tribal history. Respect the land you husband, rather than own. (Who can own the land? We'll all here only a short time, while the land endures for millions of years.) Find connections with the animal and plant spirits that surround you, connections which sustain and nourish. They are a dialogue with the spirits of the place where you live. Remember that nature is not other than us, it is not separate from who we are, and it is not merely "dead matter"—it breathes, just as we do. The cycles of the moon, sun, and the planet we live on are all interwoven, and affect us more directly than we often let ourselves be aware of. Stop living in your head, and move back into your body. It's through the body, the dancing feet, that we feel the land, and know ourselves to be part of it. Hike barefoot wherever possible.

By way of closing, here's an incredibly inspirational and sharply pointed video from Yothu Yindi, the indigenous Australian band. I saw them on two US tours in the early 1990s, and was utterly enchanted; both with their musical fusion of Aboriginal and rock musics, but with their political message delivered in an artistic, toe-tapping way.

Voice Farm lyrics

Yothu Yindi Tribal Voice Original Video Video - Voice Farm Music Videos

The opening lyrics to "Tribal Voice" are central to what we're talking about here, so I'll give them the last word. Listen!

Tribal Voice

There’s a wakening of a rainbow dawn
And the sun will rise up high
There’s a whisper in the morning light
Saying get up and meet the day

Well inside my mind there's a tribal voice
And it's speaking to me every day
And all I have to do is make a choice
'Cause I know there is no other way

All the people in the world are dreaming (get up stand up)
Some of us cry for the rights of survival (get up stand up)
Saying c’mon c’mon! Stand up for your rights
While others don’t give a damn
They’re all waiting for a perfect day
So you better get up and fight for your rights
Don’t be afraid of the move you make
You better listen to your tribal voice!

The Re-Enchantment of Art 1: Preliminary Thoughts

Back now from the recent vacation/photo roadtrip, thinking about making art, thinking again about how marking art brings me back to life, sitting on my porch on a sunny warm March afternoon, reading through a vast array of new books acquired on the roadtrip. The most interesting to me at the moment are the books about art, about making art, about putting hand to earth, pen to paper, bow to string, foot to dancefloor, stone against stone against earth.

I find I've lost my patience (again?) for the arguments about what is right and wrong, who is right and who is wrong, in all this. I look instead for the re-enchantment of the art world, as well as the world in general.

I remember thinking, as I was gathering driftwood in Mendocino County in California, that if I were to live out there, my art would no doubt become even more shamanic, more rooted to land and natural materials, more focused on process and relationship and connections—those very things that have made my art "fail" in most urban art-world settings. More than one of my artist friends have pointed out to me, however, that I'm also more likely to find an audience there than I ever have in the big cities of the Midwest, which is where my art has been so often rejected. Or at least misunderstood.

I've long since come to accept that the art I make out of my own need to make art—which is the opposite of artistic "self-expression," but rooted in the world and in connection both physical and spiritual—is going to be largely passed over by most people, for various reasons, but mostly because it seems to make them uncomfortable. I chafe at that, on occasion, less than I used to, but still a bit; not because I wish to be rich and famous, but because the art itself seems to carry seeds of reconciliation and healing. I've had people tell me they feel like they're getting an energy-healing treatment when engaged with some of my music, some of my art; I don't plan that, it just sort of happens, yet it does please me when someone tells me that they feel changed in a positive way by their encounter with the art that I've made. (The fact of making, to be clear, does not presume ownership on my part.)

I've long since come to accept that the usual commercial art world of galleries, showings and art-criticism will never be a home for my art. It's too outside the usual expectations of that art-world. That chafes too, on occasion. But then, I'm not an artist who buys into much of the assumptions of that art-world, to be honest, and I find some of them to be horribly toxic. How do we measure "success"? How do we measure fame, or wealth? How do we decide that great art must meet these criteria, and not those? We live in the time of a massive cultural paradigm shift, and the art-world is not exempt from it.

What's deeply wrong with the post-avant-garde is that its stance of opposition is ridiculous: the former maverick avant-garde of Modernism has been entirely bought out and co-opted by the mainstream of reproduction, repetitions, and commercial application of art as design: so there's nothing to rebel against, which makes the post-avant's stance of permanent rebellion appear silly in the extreme. The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate and renowned poet, had this to say about avant-gardism:

Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism. . . . I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call "disjunctivitis." The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment "mainstream," to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against "late-capitalist" discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?
—Octavio Paz

The post-modern disruption of meaning, its denial of the possibility that art has any utility or meaning or social usefulness, is not in fact "post-" anything, but is the final flowering of the Modernist disruption and destruction of the the pre-Modernist established canons of meaning. But when nothing means anything anymore, when it's all a homogenized equal playing field, what is there to revolt against? Nothing. As Paz says, I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. That alone should tell us how silly the post-avant-garde truly is: nobody devours their products but themselves, in an endless hermetic cycle of theory and self-presentation, self-promotion and incestuous marketing. Nobody outside Poetryworld remotely cares. Paz was and is read by non-poets; the post-avant is not. That's also because Paz had something to say, that he wished to say, and said most articulately.

Perhaps Language Poetry, and it offspring-sibling post-avant poetry, didn’t start out as avant-gardism, but it has ended up there. When the LangPoets started out they had some fresh things to say, they viewed themselves as a necessary rebellion against the existing poetic establishment—already dominated by the academy, in turn dominated by the New Criticism and the post-Eliot, post-Pound varieties of Modernist poetry. But now the LangPoets and the post-avant have become the establishment, and are fighting hard to keep their well-fought turf. You cannot claim to be an outsider poet when you win all the academic professorships and literary awards. If the post-avant-garde began as a rebellion, it has nonetheless become ossified into the new establishment. Which is precisely what Paz is describing as avantgardism, because once you're the establishment you cannot realistically claim to be rebelling against the establishment.

Of course, and this is one of my strongest personal reasons for my lack of interest in the post-avant poetry world: One thing that most LangPo or post-avant poetry does not leave room for is silence. Rather, LangPo is a theology of grammar, of meaningless content, of style over substance, of surface over meaning: it lauds that, it applauds it, it rewards it. In this, it is indeed the ultimate flowering of the Modernist disjunctive and dislocative trends. I've said before, half-humorously, that postmodernism isn't really post- anything, since it includes "Modernism" in its very name; it's own rhetoric proves itself to be the end-result of Modernism, rather than anything Other that genuinely comes after Modernism. That other is coming into existence, all over the art-making world, in the works of dozens of artists—most of whom are still working below the radar of the art establishment, which cannot perceive or acknowledge them because they come from a genuinely different paradigm; a paradigm not of disjunction but of connection, not of heroic individualism but of communal justice, not of rebellion but of gathering-in.

A prophet's voice in the art-world wilderness was Albert Camus. We still haven't caught up to his insights, especially with regards to the art establishment or avant-garde. Camus once wrote:

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
—Albert Camus

In whose presence his heart first opened: to me, this is one of the keys to the re-enchantment of art. The rediscovery of what we first loved about art, about viewing it, about making it. This is the living key to how we can still approach a work of art, or engage in the art-making process itself, and let it be a living process.

Whether or not it's the academy, art schools, or the commercial gallery and art-criticism scene that denatures and destroys that open-hearted first love, it's observable truth that most artists in those scenes have lost that first love. The definition of success, commercial or in terms of fame, is of an innovative elite, in that world: a world of individuals, of hero-artists, of rebellion against an establishment. The whole history of art, as it come to be taught, is a list of individual artists (almost all men) who rejected the past, innovated the future, and made changes in technique and/or in subject matter that demonstrated artistic "evolution." The titanic struggle of individual genius against the dead and deadening packs of establishment conformity. The rebellion of the genius-hero against the stupid masses. If you get the sense from this description that the history of art is taught from the same mindset as military history, you're not far off.

Camus and Paz both speak of the open-hearted encounter with the real as the source of art, and art-making. Both speak of art as a response to life: a dialogue, an engagement, a web of relationship and connection. As poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.

Professional Critics

It is encouraging to read a well-respected critic such as Terry Teachout writing that, when he teaches students about criticism, he always tells them these three things:

Always treat artists with respect. Most of them know how to do something you can't do.

Don't be afraid to be wrong.

Don't be afraid to be enthusiastic!

I think this is wise advice. While I think all three points merit discussion, I want to focus on the first point for a minute: Always treat artists with respect. Most of them know how to do something you can't do. This bears constant repetition, because in the personal and professional politics of critiquing and literary criticism it is often overlooked. I appreciate Mr. Teachout's humble presentation of the role of the critic, in his reminder to always treat artists with respect. The simple truth is that most artists (not all) do how to do something others don't: namely, create art. Artist make art: critics write about what the artists make. When those roles get confused, it can be a problem. When the critics start thinking they have the right to tell the artists what to do, it can be very serious problem. Critics have the right to tell the artists what they think of their work, but not to dictate to the artists what to do, or how to do it. Artists, for their part, have every right to listen to or ignore the critics. It's wise for all involved to remember these roles clearly.

Yet there is another aspect in which this advice is flatly wrong, or at least, far more nuanced: namely, when the professional critic is also an artist. (Ah yes, the many things we do to support our art.) This can be a difficult balance to negotiate, if one is reviewing work in one's own field. Sometimes one thinks the principle motive behind a pan, in the case of certain critics, is artistic jealousy, or some subconscious belief that they could have done a better job, if they'd been given the chance.

I do write reviews, and occasional critical essays.

This Dragoncave is for my more finished essay-form pieces, and the occasional poem. Over at my main website, the Road Journal is more like zuihitsu, or "following the brush," in random composition format, and is about whatever I'm thinking about. I write about things over there that I rarely mention here. The two journals have different roles, different purposes, and I prefer to keep them separate. I talk about dreams over there; I talk about poems about dreams over here. Perhaps that's an artificial distinction, but I started the Dragoncave as a way to compile my more finished essays: compile, revise, focus, tune, re-compile again. It gives me a place to look for patterns, themes, recurring obsessions. This means I might spiral around a topic for awhile, before locking it down. That in turn means the reader might encounter a little repetition, but hopefully will view this as I do: looking at a theme from multiple directions, like different facets on the same jewel.

Many of my concert and CD reviews have been published in various print and online media over the years, although I've rarely been paid for them. So, I can pretend to be a professional critic, in that I'm published, and even had a minor following for awhile; but in truth I remain an interested amateur, not a paid critic.

Nonetheless, some level or form of objectivity is achievable. After all, an artist is trained (hopefully) in aesthetic appreciation, and may be well able (if articulate) to report to non-artists why a work is worth paying attention to, or conversely why it should be avoided. It is possible to do all that, and leave one's personal prejudices out of the mix. It is possible, but it might be difficult for many, and almost impossible for a minority of artist-critics who are unable to set aside their competitiveness with their artistic peers.

I think the negotiation comes around how honest one is with oneself, when writing a review, about one's own agenda. One thing the best reviewers seem to share (I think of Conrad Aiken, Edwin Denby, and one or two others) is an ability to be honest in their assessments while at the same time setting aside their personal agendas; or, if unable to set them aside, then openly disclosing them, so the reader knows where she stands.

But humility in criticism is a valuable thing, and is highly underrated. So to hear a distinguished critic, such as Mr. teachout, promoting it, is a welcome zephyr of fresh air.

Does the Audience Matter? 3 (In the Extremes)

Several stories encountered this past week have led me to think about the artist's relation to the audience again.

On cable TV, there was on one of those home-design channels, a special about "extreme Xmas decorations" that featured people who went all out in there annual festival of excess. There was a segment on a young man in Palm Springs, CA, who has built over a hundred robot Xmas sculptures, including some made from recycled TVs. He had over a million lights in his hand-made toyland backlot, complete with Xmas rides and holiday-themed walk-throughs.

I am reminded of how people who have a passion for dance, for music, art, or poetry, by most ordinary standards lack common sense. Why would a young girl want to become a prima ballerina pursue a ballet career, knowing full well she will have to retire at an early age after a successful dance career that can cripple and cause lifelong chronic pain in feet, joints, and torso? Why would anyone subject themselves to that? (The easy answer to a complex motivation: because they have to, because it's like breathing, they have to do it, or die.)

So, what is it about obsession in the arts? Does it require monomania, or obsession, a very tight focus on an artistic project, in order to succeed at it? Does this mean that artists who manage to not become overly obsessed about their art—who manage, for example, to have a family life, a social life, to be engaged in relationship with the world—cannot succeed as famous artists?

Not at all. Keep in mind that the cultural stereotypes about the "mad artist" filter for stories about eccentrics, people who lack social skills and graces. We tend to hear about artists who live on the edge, who live extreme lives, doing extreme things—because such stories sell more newspapers, and get better TV ratings. Such stories are "sexy." The reason we hear so many such stories, which have the (unintended?) consequence of reinforcing the stereotypes, is because everone loves a good story with memorable characters. Extremism is good press.

By the criterion of having an obsessive occupation with your art, every troglodyte computer gamer/programmer would be a successful artist; the truth is, most of them are not. Therefore, obsession is not what makes the art great and memorable. Obsession may be what gets the social-misfit artist noticed, and ambition, perseverance, and determination in the face of all obstacles may be allows them to rise above the pack and succeed, financially—but the same is true of architects and businessman. What obsession does do, like the man in the desert with the giant homemade Santa robot, is get you your Warholian 15 minutes of fame. Remember too that Warhol, in his sly way, was satirizing his own fame, in which he had become "famous just for being famous," when he stated this (famous!) formulation. Soundbytes get repeated, because they're shorter and easier to remember than detailed, thoughtful analyses.

Obsession may be a genuine driving force in creativity: the fuse that allows us to do as much as we do. There is a positive side to necessity in creativity—the dancer who has to dance, or die—in that, if we keep it in balance with the rest of our lives, we can become terrifically productive as artists. Most artists have more ideas than they can ever execute: ignoring everything else in life but your art-making can at least relieve the personal pressure one feels to create, create, create. As an artist I have two favorite four-letter words: D-O-N-E and N-E-X-T. I know I'm not alone in this. There are indeed days in which I have to write a poem, or make a piece of music, or i feel I'm going to explode from within. I know that's common for other artists, too. What may look like obsession from teh outside, too, might be determination to follow one's bliss, follow one's muse, pay attention to the inner daimon, and do what one has to do. Like many other artists, when I'm on a role, I sometimes skip meals. You go as long as you can, while the iron's hot; you can collapse, afterwards. Rilke's "great giving," during which he finished the Duino Elegies and wrote all of the Sonnets to Orpheus, was like that. There is a discipline to this, as well, in the willingness to give up everything else, in order to focus on the iron, while it's hot. It's not a discipline approved of by society, which never seems to understand the necessity of art, but typically views it as a decorative luxury; but for all that, it is no less a discipline.

Where is the audience in all this? Present, but not accounted for. Of course, the robot reindeer sculptures are meant to be appreciated, to be viewed, even laughed over. The artist seemed to know how silly his project was, even as he kept doing it. To him, it was a project that mattered, and they may be all the justification any artist needs. But the audience is an unknown: you don't know who will show up to the viewing, or the recital or reading. You have to faith that there will be audience for what you create, but you don't stop creating simply because you haven't found your audience yet. Numerous cases of artists who became appreciated only after their deaths reinforce that point, even as they also reinforce the stereotype of the artist unappreciated in his or her own lifetime, like the prophet who is never listened to in his home village.

So, monomania may just be a necessary shedding of everything unnecessary, that distracts us from the process of making art. Obsession, even when it looks more like possession, can be the necessary focus we need to block out everything irrelevant to the process, in order to more clearly here the inner voices of inspiration.

Do I think the robot reindeer in the Palm Springs desert are great fine art? No. But they sure are interesting—and fun.

Photography Is An Artform, Just Get Over It

You ever get tired of people looking down their noses at photography as an art form? Yeah, me too.

It can take a good photographer as much time to create a finished photo as it does a plein aire painter to capture a scene. The changing light is the same, no matter what you capture it with. The trick is not in the speed of camera technology, which deceptively diminishes the apparent artistry by making it seem as though anyone can take a good photo, anytime. If this were so, all your vacation snapshots would be gallery quality; clearly they're not. The technology behind photography makes it seem easy when it is not. Photography is a populist media that the camera and film companies long ago realized they could market to Average Janes and Ordinary Joes as memento-generation devices: photographs as memories. Look, ma, we were at the Grand Canyon! But most photos as memento mori are technically bad, poorly composed, quick grabshots, with no artistry whatsoever. That's okay: they're not intended to be artistic.

Nonetheless, many galleries and art critics (those sniffers after the pissoirs of art-makers) still view photography as a non-artform, because it is so apparently easy to do. This is a tragic mistake, because it overlooks the demanding technical knowledge needed to make a good photo, rather than a snapshot. It overlooks the time it can take to set up the gear, frame the image into a good composition, then wait for the light to be just so—which can be hours, or instants, before the film is exposed. But even a photo that is seen and captured in an instant requires years of practice and discipline: a good photographer can spend years just looking at things, always watching the light, before snapping a great photo.

Photography is the discipline of seeing with the open eye. It can take years to make single great photo.

Yet we still have painters, collectors, gallery owners, and critics, who look down their noses at photography as a lesser artform. The attitude towards video and multimedia is even worse. Paradoxically, of course, opera, stage drama, and cinema are all accepted multimedia artforms, with their own conventions, critical literature, and followings. But most followers of these apparently cannot make the leap to see fractal art, computer art, or Photoshop art as legitimate.

I find it amusing when a bad painter looks down his nose at a good photographer, because "painting is an artform and photography isn't," yet clearly the photographer's work is much better than the painter's.

This negative attitude towards photography also overlooks the artistry of printing, mounting, and framing—you'd think at least the galleries would understand the technical demands of printing, mounting, and framing, even if they don't understand anything else about the process.

It's too bad. Such a limited, conservative view has of course always dominated arts patronage, and perhaps always will. The innovators will always be misunderstood.

But here's the real truth: genuine artists make art with whatever is at hand. They are opportunists and JOATS (Jacks, or Jills, Of All trades). They don't get hung up on the tools or the media. Strand a genuine artist in Death Valley, and she'll draw in the packed earth, or arrange stones, to make her art. Put a genuine artist into a kindergarten classroom with crayons and chalk, and they'll cover the walls and blackboards with images in erasable media that no-one will want to erase. A genuine artist will use whatever they find lying at hand to make art. A genuine artist is not limited by concept or habit, but will discover art in whatever they encounter. They make art because they must, it's as necessary to them as breathing, and they cannot be stopped or tamed. Artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, Keith Haring, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alexander Calder, John Cage, and Audrey Flack all prove this point.

With the new wave of technology, we are seeing new artforms arise. Anyone can now make a film, with image, music, sound, and moving text, on their home computer. Of course a lot of it will be crap—a lot of painting has always been crap, too. Nothing new there. A genuine artist will use these new tools, as well. The only thing avant-garde about "new media" artists is the same thing that has always characterized the avant-garde: an openness of attitude and approach, a willingness to explore new territory with new tools, and open mind, and open eyes and hands. Watch out for a coming revolution in the forms and medias of art, it's already happening, and no one in the arts establishment is paying attention. They'll catch on, eventually, of course, but they're always slow and late. Meanwhile, the channels of distribution have put the tools into the hands of genuine artists who no-one has yet heard of, who are about to make the new art that will be the mainstream of the future.