Of couse it all depends on how you look at it....
What place does poetry take in the postmodern age?
Poetry? What is poetry in the first place? The arrangement of words into a specific form intended to represent some concept through lyricism, form or maybe content. It lacks specific guidelines or form – it’s art of some kind. The question, then should concern the relationship art has to the world- whether it reflexively addresses its politics, or unidirectionally asserts its content or lack thereof. Art will always be political in some form: it will reflect the author, their own upbringing, also the means of display (location, currency used for payment, etc all reflect political norms). If art always has its politics, does it then have a responsibility to politics (to assert political ideas, rhetoric, etc)? The choice lies somewhere between art that negates itself as art, that deconstructs all of the relationships that brought it to be, and art that de-politicizes itself and unproblematicly ignores them.
Art that is constantly and consciously political denies art itself. By always asserting political questions, and thinking in terms of politics (which inevitably require definition through relationships to other people), no room gets left for the author, for the irreducible human creative something that makes art and innovation from the status quo possible. By constantly referring back to surroundings, it would only reproduce a negative-image of those surroundings in the piece itself, instead of asserting something new.
Art that is uncompromisingly just art goes to the opposite extreme by reducing political meaning to the meaning intended by the author. By this view, the famous picture of Che Guevara would be nothing more than a newspaper photo, taken for profit or whatever. This ignores the symbolic role it has played in (sometimes useless) political movements, as a symbol that means more than “there’s Che…” Meaning is fluid, because power is fluid, and the truths that define the moment in which an artist composed a piece shift along with power relations and our collective knowledge of the world.
So, the role in postmodernism lies in between these two points (or, maybe above them, beside them, or just somewhere nearby and influenced by both). If those damned cartoons taught us anything, it has to do with the meaning and role of art. Meaning derives from how an image becomes translated into media- art cannot remain just speech or expression, it has a responsibility to the appropriations and permutations it spawns. The role then, should concern creation and creativity- embracing the muse and that weird something inside us that produces ideas, but to reflexively understand its political functions as an image and simulation of the original thought process.
At what point does an art form become needlessly pretentious and trite?
At the point where someone considers it so. However, this by no means indicts that art form as a practice- if you think it’s important, then damn it, keep doing it.
Fuck my brain hurts and I'm probably wrong anyways.
Duncan
Poetry? What is poetry in the first place? The arrangement of words into a specific form intended to represent some concept through lyricism, form or maybe content. It lacks specific guidelines or form – it’s art of some kind. The question, then should concern the relationship art has to the world- whether it reflexively addresses its politics, or unidirectionally asserts its content or lack thereof. Art will always be political in some form: it will reflect the author, their own upbringing, also the means of display (location, currency used for payment, etc all reflect political norms). If art always has its politics, does it then have a responsibility to politics (to assert political ideas, rhetoric, etc)? The choice lies somewhere between art that negates itself as art, that deconstructs all of the relationships that brought it to be, and art that de-politicizes itself and unproblematicly ignores them.
Art that is constantly and consciously political denies art itself. By always asserting political questions, and thinking in terms of politics (which inevitably require definition through relationships to other people), no room gets left for the author, for the irreducible human creative something that makes art and innovation from the status quo possible. By constantly referring back to surroundings, it would only reproduce a negative-image of those surroundings in the piece itself, instead of asserting something new.
Art that is uncompromisingly just art goes to the opposite extreme by reducing political meaning to the meaning intended by the author. By this view, the famous picture of Che Guevara would be nothing more than a newspaper photo, taken for profit or whatever. This ignores the symbolic role it has played in (sometimes useless) political movements, as a symbol that means more than “there’s Che…” Meaning is fluid, because power is fluid, and the truths that define the moment in which an artist composed a piece shift along with power relations and our collective knowledge of the world.
So, the role in postmodernism lies in between these two points (or, maybe above them, beside them, or just somewhere nearby and influenced by both). If those damned cartoons taught us anything, it has to do with the meaning and role of art. Meaning derives from how an image becomes translated into media- art cannot remain just speech or expression, it has a responsibility to the appropriations and permutations it spawns. The role then, should concern creation and creativity- embracing the muse and that weird something inside us that produces ideas, but to reflexively understand its political functions as an image and simulation of the original thought process.
At what point does an art form become needlessly pretentious and trite?
At the point where someone considers it so. However, this by no means indicts that art form as a practice- if you think it’s important, then damn it, keep doing it.
Fuck my brain hurts and I'm probably wrong anyways.
Duncan
posted by Duncan at 11:02 PM
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