An Ontology of Artistic Freedom and Relevance

An Ontology of Artistic Freedom and Relevance

Herbert Blau’s article ‘Art and Crisis – Homeland Security and the Noble Savage’ refers to the response of artists, who in the wake of 11th September 2001 thought of the “diminished relevance” of art as being an ‘inconsequential anticlimax’. Blau cites architect Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum and its testimony to the figure of the ‘Muselmann’ — representing the “the short circuit between the noumenal [Thing] and the phenomenal … the living dead, the desubjectivized subject … the witness of what one cannot bear witness” (139, Zizek 2002) — and the Holocaust as one of those artists who “think it unconscionable to abandon their art, since there’s nothing else with the power to materialize an adequate response” (16, Blau 2003). In the process of this research, the question “Why the necessity of art — performance?” returned to haunt the project repeatedly again and again. This question posited, might be crudely equated with supervisor Dr Barry Laing’s consideration “what makes a work something more than just a fucking wank?”. Writing here now is the time to return to Matthew Goulish and a micro-lecture on ‘Beauty’ as a riposte of sorts.

Avant-garde musician John Cage is quoted in reference to the music of Morton Feldman as the “highest responsibility of the artist is to hide beauty”. For Goulish, the statement implies that in order for beauty to be hidden, it must be present and that the “attitude” of the artist toward beauty might be then something like “I know it’s here somewhere” (82, Goulish 2000). For me, the answer to the question of “why the necessity of art — performance?” is very simply “because I exist” — to feel-being-alive. By way of director Elizabeth Le Compte’s commentary on the Wooster Group performance Brace Up!; Goulish refers to the “transformation of actors from self to more-self” by the process of “gathering, altering and recombining texts”. Goulish posits that this layering of texts on the surface of performers might be “what Gilles Deleuze meant when he spoke of … in contrast to [psycho-analyst Carl Jung’s] … ‘collective unconscious’, the ‘constructed unconscious’ and its imminence to creativity” (83, ibid). Following this — the phenomenon of an artistic play in disguising beauty — inverts Nietzsche’s ‘profoundly tragic Greek culture’ whose ‘superficial, serene and simple beauty’ was founded on an understanding that the ‘truth of existence’ is ‘violently meaningless’. Le Petit Mort is ambitiously constituted in the ‘liminality between things’. This Kiekergaardian synthesis of me-you, truth-falsity, freedom-necessity, sacred-profane, life-death, temporal-eternal, the finite and the infinite and the notion of a ‘constructed unconscious’ that renders what Goulish (following from Zen Buddhism) considers as “not mine” of “me-Self” but “BECOMING”, from a “first principle” and “basic constituent of the universe” — the body as “small self” — to “larger self of everything else” — LeCompte’s “more self” (78-9 ibid - emphasis in original). By these processes the ‘I’ becomes the ‘body through which the dream flows’ and once again evokes, Picasso’s response to being interrogated by a German in 1937 about the “GUERNICA” painting “That’s your doing, not mine!” (34, Virilio 2000 – emphasis in original) as well as ‘Butoh-esque-Artaudian’ notions of a will’s force impelled from without — a conduit, channelling forces beyond the self or a certain je ne sais qua.

Le Petit Mort; (again following Artaud and post-World War II Japanese dance philosophy, – butoh; and 11th September 2001) — as a constructed, collective unconscious, manifested in reality; are examples of an ‘aesthetic’ that (re)presents a monstrosity of form upon beauty and the ‘Dionysian absurdity of existence’. The in-authenticity of Western culture, Wilson posits, is inherited from Socratic optimism, whose dialectic negation renders existence as “knowable and rational” (184-190, Wilson 2005). Instead of the “genuine culture” of the Greek “tragic age”, the aesthetic phenomenon par excellence for the 20th and 21st Centuries might be of a Dionysian veil over Apollonian nature rather than the application of an Apollonian veil upon Dionysian nature (190, ibid). From Freud’s “repeat compulsion”, traumatic events in artistic performance might be remembered, re-collected and “turned over” at the mind’s end, where following Blau, thought demanding ever more thought escapes and presents a demand for an-other to contemplate and act, causing the pursuit and enlivenment of thought (13, Blau 2003).