Contemporary existence
Just finished writing an essay on (to simplify) aspects of the postmodern world, as it relates to Poor Things. (Title, if you care to know: The Emancipated Self-Sufficient: Postmodern Indifference and Disconnection in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things)
I pose a question:
Is there no artistic coherence in a fragmented world?
Or are we only to fall prey to absurdity, meaningless confusion, flippant indifference?
Or perhaps we are only succumbing to mimetic ploys to create spaces that comfort and reassure us...
It could be this very thing that is keeping me from my writing this year. I need a month in the country. Some comfort would be grand. (I have all this perfume and no one to indulge in it). Right now I would trade all the electricity in my future for it. And it's damn hot today.
I pose a question:
Is there no artistic coherence in a fragmented world?
Or are we only to fall prey to absurdity, meaningless confusion, flippant indifference?
Or perhaps we are only succumbing to mimetic ploys to create spaces that comfort and reassure us...
It could be this very thing that is keeping me from my writing this year. I need a month in the country. Some comfort would be grand. (I have all this perfume and no one to indulge in it). Right now I would trade all the electricity in my future for it. And it's damn hot today.
posted by MissWanda at 12:12 a.m.
5 Comments:
I think the artistic coherence lies in the personality of the artist. Personality holds it all together no matter how fragmented the personality's various artistical expressions may be......
But what of the coherence of art in a broader sense, in a sense of it affecting the fragmented world of the "now"? Maybe the problem is in trying to discern between pure art and those people simply trying to "create art for art's sake". Art should be a natural process, not forced. Organic, like bodies.
I would hope I have the ability to tell in an instant whether art has been fabricated or is truly an act of creation. But the truth is, I'm not so certain. I certainly know when it is fake with my own work--when I try to push out a poem that is not ready to be born. Too many poems exist in the world like this. I refuse to contribute. Unless it is something that in turn affects me, after returning to it several times, I refuse to publish.
you said it yourself, you yourself (your personality) know when your own work is fake and what affects you and you hold on to that what affects you when you write - so - that's the thing to hold on to,where the coherence comes from.
The other question is of course how to determine objective laws for fake art and pure art and who makes the rules....yet here's now too much sun to think of this...
But there are never enough poems in the world...
great question...
Coherence in a fragmented world?
An answer is in your act of uttering the question.
Pronouncing fragmentation. Declaring coherence.
These are performances of valuing, casting concern upon artistic worlds.
God knows one can even romanticize fragmentation and set it as the highest ideal of art if one and more wishes.
And you have suggested the other part of an answer: affecting (and effecting, not just influencing but actually laboring to (re-)create) the fragmented world of the “now”.
Certainly it is the personality that is an agent of coherence, but the core of artistic coherence is that act of valuing the personality makes, the performance of one’s concerns, and it is the reception and redeployment of those interests by audience personalities that closes the circuit that carries the current of coherence art offers the world at large.
These two remain. Concern and connection.
And the greatest of these is concern.
I think I know what you mean by fabricated art. But perhaps the inability to discern real from fake art is a happy blessing. For to adopt a “faked” piece of art as deeply and genuinely one’s own is perhaps to rescue and resuscitate the still born child from a less thoughtful parent, and offer it a new life: consuming and benevolent eye of the reader.
Organic? As birth yes, but birth is force and agony too, orgasmic yes.
Tobin
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