Re: Beethoven Quartets


<david7gable@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1142833033.918804.101460@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




Mr. Emerson writes:

"Your post does nothing so much as demonstrate Sontag's point."

If this is true, it means my post on the internet obscured the inherent
outrageousness of the art I discussed. I didn't realize this intrinsic
and fundamental outrageousness was so weak I could destroy it merely by
discussing it.

"Works like Finnegans Wake, everything Artaud ever did, the painting of
Pollock, the music of Bartok, Ornette Coleman, Les Six, you pick it --
were designed to be disruptive, to throw a wrench in the works, to
react to surrounding and intolerable conditions, to do anything but
(loosely quoting a Creeley remark)"

I'm not going to go through this artist by artist, but this is
absolutely 100% false in the case of the classic poured Pollocks. As
for Artaud, he was psychologically disturbed

So was Schumann.

and a dangerous a**hole
toward many people: but he was hardly a writer to be mentioned in the
same breath with many of the other artists you mention, despite the few
interesting ideas and insights put forward in the essays anthologized
in The Theatre and Its Double, ideas that he never really managed to
realize himself despite his influence on Boulez, Genet, et al. Nor
have I read anything about Artaud that downplayed the character of
Artaud's pathologically vitriolic attacks on certain of his
contemporaries, on Coleridge, or on all of the greatest playwrights of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

Many artists have expressed hostile and sometimes hyperbolic criticism
towards others past or present. Debussy is a good example.

so how has his undeniable (and
pitiable) outrageousness been hurt by writing and thinking about it?
I'm acknowledging it upfront.

If you're claiming that artworks create a new imaginative order, that
some artists set out "not to reassure but to disturb," I agree with
you, but there's a big difference between the complex imagination of a
James Joyce and the attempt by smaller fry to epater la bourgeoisie.

I don't think anyone in this thread is claiming that artistic work is
valuable simply on grounds of 'epater la bourgeoisie'. The original point by
Sontag (about whose work I've got mixed feelings myself) was about how
over-rationalisation of certain artworks seems to blind those who do so to
the raw power of what is being expressed. And, yes, sometimes this can be
shocking or disturbing. To me, the types of artwork that encourage and
induce modes of thinking, feeling, experience that go beyond the commonplace
are amongst the most important of all. To many people such qualities can be
disturbing. I continue to find something rather disturbing and disorienting
in the twisting and startling harmonies of the D# minor Prelude from the WTC
Book 2, for example.

Finnegans Wake is a great comic masterpiece: I don't see how it
creates "intolerable" conditions,

That wasn't what was said - Steve said that Finnegans Wake and other cited
works of art were intended 'to react to surrounding and intolerable
conditions, to do anything but (loosely quoting a Creeley remark) -- speak
with a voice that proposes that everything is OK, when everything is
patently not OK'. Reacting to the world around one and one's perception of
it is surely something that an awful lot of artists do, and many are drawn
to create with the intention of demonstrating alternative possible realities
and experiences through their work (though which can of course overlap
significantly with perceived external reality). This certainly seems true of
Joyce, even more so of Beckett.

although it will always remain
unreadable and unread by the vast majority of human beings for evident
reasons. People don't fail to read it because it's "intolerable" or
disturbing or so intensely expressive as to be more than most people
can stomach.

It simply takes quite a degree of time and concentration. And it helps to
have some book detailing the myriad references alongside the Joyce one.

The trouble is, the more limited the provocation, the less efficacious
it proves upon repetition. The "provocations" of a Beethoven or a
Joyce have a greater staying power than most dadaist and surrealist
pranks. "Piss Christ" is certainly outrageous. It's also intolerably
boring, the nature of the provocation inherent in it entirely
unoriginal.

There is art which aims to respond to the here and now and is less concerned
with staying power - I don't see why it should necessarily be denigrated for
that reason.

"This [Pollock] is not a man who went about painting in some detached,
neutral, Bauhaus-like manner without interest in expression."

These are not remotely the only two possiblities, but when did I ever
say he did? Of course he was a tense, intense, and anxiety ridden
painter. But he was not remotely the action painter leaving his sweat
and blood on his canvases of Rosenberg's fantasies.

He did leave both such things on his canvases. And, to me, the very dynamics
of the paintings' creation are somehow inscribed into the surfaces.

On canvas, he
wanted to duke it out with Picasso, not with his own psyche. In any
case, I reject the facile equation of art and life.

Then why do you use Artaud's actions and attitudes towards others as grounds
for criticism of his work?

I reject such an equation as well, especially the types of over-biographical
criticism which make an artist's work simply into a footnote to their
biography. But that's a different thing from asserting that an artist was
engaged in an ongoing battle with the conscious and unconscious elements of
their own psyche whilst they were creating their work, which I do indeed
think was true of Pollock (and doesn't contradict the fact that some of his
techniques, proportions, style, etc., might have something to do with the
impressionists). Anyhow, the presence and work of Picasso was itself surely
something that impacted on Pollock's psyche, as do many traces of one's
encounters with the outside world (to paraphrase Gramsci).

To believe that an artist's life does impact upon their work is not the same
as to make the equation you rightly describe as facile. Artists are only
human, after all. Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin seems to emerge from a
variety of concerns on the part of the composer, including his obvious
interest in the music of Couperin and how to reconfigure stylistic
attributes of this music in a neo-classical context, tinged with influences
from jazz, Lisztian (and Saint-Saens-ian) piano writing. But I do believe
his experiences as an orderly in a military hospital, witnessing first-hand
the devastation brought about by World War 1, is also a factor informing the
piece. His life experiences and their impact upon his psyche were a
determinant, just not the only determinant.

I'm not interested
in the inarticulate and insecure yahoo with a short fuse

Like Beethoven (the short fuse), by many accounts?

and a drinking
problem who underwent Jungian analysis but in the painter who was,
finally, for a brief period, articulate with paint on canvas. What
matters is not how he did it or his state of mind while he did it but
what he actually did.

Well, in one sense I agree with you, but I look at it from a different
angle. Rather than trying only to interpret his work through the lens of
what we know or believe about his life and personality, one can instead
attain a wider perspective upon the life and personality through the work.

In any case, it's possible for a volcanic
personality to be intensely involved in creating art that is not
"expressionist" or volcanic art. (In that sense, Pollock and the
Boulez of yore are very similar cases.)

Artistic personalities can be composed of many different aspects - sometimes
those things that are expressed through the work are those which are somehow
kept hidden in the rest of their existence. But that doesn't mean that those
sides expressed through their art aren't part of their personalities.

:> It's also possible for artists
to react violently to misunderstanding of their art regardless of what
kind of art it is, to be misunderstood regardless of whether or not the
art is expressionist.

Of course, but isn't that a separate point entirely?

If you think Pollock bared his guts, or that some such metaphor is
appropriate to those masterpieces of sublimation and transcendence, the
classic poured pictures, I think you're just wrong, and so do the most
interesting writers on his paintings that I've read.

Well, Beethoven to me managed both to bare his guts and achieve sublimation
and transcendence, sometimes in the same work (for example in several of the
late quartets). These two things aren't necessarily contradictory.

(I'm not talking
about his totemic earlier stuff that he painted while he was undergoing
Jungian analysis. He was so far beyond that during the brief great
period. Pollock was also desperate for the approval of others in the
art world whom he respected: he wanted his pictures to be liked and by
the broader the public the better. He did NOT expect the classic
poured pictures to disturb, to be found intolerable, in the sense that
you mean.

I don't think it was ever said that Pollock wanted his art to 'be found
intolerable'. But I think he did want to make a powerful and highly personal
statement through it, one that might seem quite outrageous in the
superficially genteel America of his time.

He wanted to be crowned for his glorious achievement on
canvas and was impatient for the day.

Again, that doesn't necessarily contradict the other things.

Drinking binges like the one
that lead to his death were in part the result of a childish self-pity
experienced because he hadn't "arrived" on schedule with the poured
pictures.

Well, plenty of artists have had an infantile streak. Mozart, for example?

And they did outrage, but again, not in the sense that you
mean. They outraged in the sense of "You call dribbling on the canvas
art? My three-year old can do that!")

To which a good response is usually 'then get them to do it and see if what
they produce is like Pollock'.

I know that Miss Sontag is dead, and that what you quote may be quoted
out of context, but . . . either thinking and writing about art are
inherently bad for art or they aren't. My God, people indulge in
"Monday morning quarterbacking" after the super bowl. That's what
people do in the case of subjects that interest them.

Neither Sontag nor anyone in this thread is saying that 'thinking and
writing about art are inherently bad for art' - that is a caricature so
hyperbolic as to be meaningless. The issue is about different types of
thinking and writing about art and their relative virtues.

There are football fans who obsessively memorise all the minutae about every
player in each game over a long period of time, who scored which goals,
which penalties there were, etc. This can be interesting and informative,
I'm sure, but it doesn't necessarily communicate to others the visceral
excitement some feel at the moment of watching a game.

Ian


.

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