FORWARD MARCHE: An Avante Guard Advance Towards A Poetic Aesthetic

‘I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermillion goldfish’

Henri Matisse.

Advice from a petite poisson or why I am against concrete.

One can’t breathe in a dead atmosphere. This is the problem of literalism and the pandemic of the cliche. When all we repeat is ‘Mu”, all we see are cows. If we make art works, which pre-explain and illustrate what it is we wish to say, we destroy the potential for dreaming with a work of art. We kill the romance and the seduction. We insult the intelligence of whoever is intimately engaged in the aesthetic dialogue of the work and we arrogantly talk ‘at’ them, rather than ‘with’ them.We should be better dance partners than this. We have to in a sense ‘kill’ the cliché. What I mean by this, is that if our artworks just keep on repeating what has been said and done before, than we are truly remaining stuck and powerless. We should stop masturbating each other so much, and start to challenge ourselves to push through our limited approaches in art making.

Why I don’t dansky with Kandinsky:

Vassilly Kandinsky, that incredible pioneer for an autonomous artwork, that devoted, divine fool; implemented a synesthetic, intuitive, evolutionary ideal for the plastic arts. Yet he jumped too high in the sky and forgot to come back down to earth.In one way, art interpretation can be thought of as being ‘read’. This means that the visual symbols or signs in the artifact signify a reference to something else. Kandinsky’s attempt to liberate the visual artwork from all references to the world, to make the visual arts as autonomous as music, through an esoteric intuitive language, is questionable. There is little or no reference to anything tangible and we can end up talking gibberish.This is a polarized position. There are I’m sure, other ways of appreciating Kandinsky. However, we can see that Kandinsky’s approach can leads us to take the extreme abstract formalist position of signifying and giving reference, to nothing other than the work itself. There is now a need to move forward, allowing art again, to open us up to the possible.

The importance of Surrealism and the European tradition.

What is poetry? What do I mean by a poetic aesthetic? Poetry sparks in our minds new ways of thinking, perceiving and being. Arshille Gorky was a central character in bringing the ideas and practices of the European artistic tradition to America. Here he elaborates on the thinking of that mad, magical conjurer, prophet and poet; Arthur Rimbaud:

‘Rimbaud has epitomized for me the true function of the artist when he wrote: ”The poet should define the quantity of the unknown which awakes in his time, in the universal soul. He should give more than the formula of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward progress. The enormous becoming the normal, when absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplication of progress.’

I do not believe that we walk on metaphysical water and idealist notions of a pre-given reality. Fish need to swim free. I am for ‘Immersion’. An artist must be in the world, she must be part of life. In order to break out into the many, we need to have a deep relationship with life, and a much deeper spirituality with history and with the world. This shall help us to spark new sign systems, not as a pre-given formulae of what spirituality is, but as a true search for spirit. As a real exploration into doubt, the existential, the unknown.

An understanding of semiotics here is of benefit. We do not just think our language. Our language thinks us. Language is formed through our history and shapes our interpretation and perception of the world. Therefore these interpretations are shaped by the contributed experiences of all of us throughout history.

One of the positive aspects of the European influence through post-modernism is its approach to breaking out of these language patterns and habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. Like a zen koan, its approach is stratergized to ambiguify our minds, taking us into an unknown wandering of ‘what could be’ and a deep wondering of ‘what is (?)’. This also protects us from any pre-given substitute for God and lets us take part in knowing and realizing reality. We can once again heed the call of the eternal quest(-ion).

Our senses need to be extended internally and externally. To pick up on what is happening in our planet, not just through normative forms. We can develop our intuitive capacities also.We are smarter than we give ourselves credit for. We pick up on more than we realize, and we can look ahead and see what’s coming. Our collective psyche is immensely powerful. At each and every moment we are collectively harmonizing the future of our world. If our brains really are antenna for spiritual energy and collective thought patterns, we need to develop our capacities in these areas to not only anticipate future changes, but to respond to them. Just as if we were waking consciously in a dream state, or recalling prophetic reminiscences of a dream, we can awaken to our collective unconscious capacities and allow them to come through.

A poetic surrealism is one way we can allow for this to happen. We can lucidly dance in our dreams, not just sleep. Through poetic surrealism we are able to ignite a potentially unlimited range of possible worlds. It is not fixed or stuck in one way of thinking or being. It opens up all of our resources, on all levels of existence. If we allow for poetic openness in our works, we can again not just listen passively to what a work of art says to us, but we can talk to it also and have it talk back to us.

This is the calling of a poetic aesthetic. A strategy which can move us out, and open up our art making. It allows for the multiplistic, for the many and for the new.

In closing I would like to say that the Avante-Guard may be at the moment a sleeping elephant, but it is not dead.

‘They (the critics) forget that while the artist never works outside his time yet his art will go on to be merged gradually into the new art of a new age.There will be no short stop. We shall not, contrary to the expectation of these people, hear of the sudden death of Cubism, abstraction, so-called modern art… …they have merely not understood the spiritual movement and the law of direct energy of the centuries… …if they could but realize that energy is a spiritual movement and that they must conceive of working under a law of universal aesthetic progress, as we do in science, in mathematics, in physics.’

Arshille Gorky

This elephant shall soon wake up. She is no longer going to be traded in to the ivory hunters. Woe betide to any who get in her way.

The skeletal system provides an internal framework for the body and anchors skeletal muscles so that muscle contraction can cause movement. I hope this theoretical skeletal frame-work is strong and flexible enough to allow for this muscular contraction. I wish to propel movement and explore our unknown universe. We can truly taste the sky with our tongue, caress the world through our eye, and wrestle together like the thunder which echo’s in our ears.

I leave you with a poem by the marvelous saint, Arthur Rimbaud:

Democracy

‘The flag makes its way through filth-ridden lands, and our dialect muffles the pulse of the drums. ‘In the interior, we shall feed the fires of cynical prostitution. We shall meet justifiable revolt with massacre.‘So – to the dark, dank lands of spices! In the name of the most craven industrial and military exploitation.‘Goodbye to this place, anywhere will do. We’re willing conscripts. We take an implacable line. We know nothing of science but we’re gluttons for rest and recreation. The world and it’s notions can crawl off and die. This is progress – the real thing. Forward, march!’

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Spiritual art is meaningful art

Our era is one of a sudden cohesion of the entirety of our history of world-views and values.[1] This is resulting in a massive upheaval of the very foundations of our civilization. The current world crises are reflecting the inadaptability for solving these problems. There is a great confusion of voices representing all the expressions of the historical development of civilization, all vying for not just a place in the sun, but to be the centre of the universe. The ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives[2]’;was stated succinctly by Jean-Francois Lyotard. His insight reflects the pluralism, which is correlative with a loss of faith in anything meaningful and purposive. This has resulted in a powerlessness and inward collapse of our systemic body.

The psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl made an important contribution to humanity when he recognized a fundamental requirement of human nature, that is: humans have a need to make sense of things, and find meaning in life.[3] This insight was gained not through a scientific methodology, but via a test of the human soul. Through his experience in the concentration camp, Frankl found that those who survived great challenge, were ones who were able to find significant meaning through their trials. Those who did not – simply perished. To reiterate; we as a civilization need to find meaning within the challenges ofthe new, emergent life conditions of our civilization. If we do not, we too shall fall.

The problem of our times, are not a lack of resources. The problem is how we think. Or rather, how we are being thought. In other words, it is the meaning and the values, which condition our perceptions, that are determining our ability to handle the complexity of the times. Part of what we require in response to the new conditions is semantic development, enabling us to hold apparent contradicting perspectives, within larger contexts. As a response to today’s challenges, as well as en-framing a foundation for tomorrow’s future, artists of today arecalled to establish a politics of meaning.[4]

Art is a way of building a semantic hermeneutics, or meaningful interpretive dialogue, through inter-subjective interiors. This also entails that this particular form of aesthetic engagementis an active engagement, as opposed to a mechanical authoritarian governing ofour souls, our interior subjective world, to which our cultural psyche is soentrained[5]and denied[6].

This semantic aesthetic may be called‘Neo-Mythicpoeticism’.[7]To break down the composite parts so as to clarify what principles this semantic aesthetic might work with:

1. It means being a participant in the making and original pattern constructor of a work (an artist).
2. It means taking an active role in finding meaning in one’s self, in coming to know ones own interiority, through the intermediation of the artifact and active engagement with the work (and therefore with the originator an engagement with the history of art, which the particular language of the artwork is a partof ie; culture). This naturally entails having works of art which allow for a moving dialogue of exchange from artist to participatory engager (albeit a oneway dialogue in most cases), the artifact of the work, being an intermediary, with the dialogue[8]insilent working relationships of meaning within the participant.
3. This follows that it means making works which are ideally in a more or less open state of becoming; allowing for the imaginative participatory intelligence of the viewer, yet at the same time being inherently significantly meaningful symbolically.

This definition of spiritual art as meaningful art would not exclude itself to various factions of humanity. Itdoes not require a religious or mystical framework. For example, it may allow for a non-theistic world reality, such as naturalism. It would grant the humanspirit of any humanistic world, such as an emancipatory Marxist spirit. It would allow for a variety of competing and/or complementary views within its framework.

Spiritual art is meaningful art as well as meaningfully engaged art. It respects and honours the interwoven nature of subjectivity and of the interactive nature of culture. It does not necessarily mean an art form that is literalistic, or ideological. This would not fulfillits purpose in constructing more expanded, contextualized understandings of our existential soul. As stated earlier, mankind has run up against the wall of an interior development of meaning, and is no longer satisfied, nor can she renew her faith in her previous world. The interior and therefore the exterior world of man thrives on meaning. It is also what the continuance of species Homosapien requires.

Background references:

Power Vs Force
Dr. David R.Hawkins
Veritas Publishing, 1995

Man’s Search for Meaning
Victor Frankl
Verlag fur Jugendund Volk, 1946

The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature
Carl Gustav Jung
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin, 1936

Spiral Dynamics
Don Beck and Chris Cowan
Blackwell Publishing, 2005

Integral Spirituality
Ken Wilber
Integral Books, 2007

The Cambridge Companion to Habermas
Stephen K White
Cambridge University Press, 1995

Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy
Carl Olson
State Universityof New York Press, 2000

[1] Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan,Blackwell Publishing, 2005
[2] Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). LaCondition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir. Les Editions de Minuit.p. 7.
[3] Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl,Verlag fur Jugend und Volk, 1946
[4] Habermas argues for an aesthetic discourse as a form of communicative action: ‘A work validated through aesthetic experience can then in turn take the place of an argument and promote the acceptance of precisely those standards according to which it counts as an authentic work’. ‘Theory of Communicative Action Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society’ (Jurgen Habermas, 1981, Beacon Press.
[5]See Walter Benjamin’s essay of 1936 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
[6] Ken Wilber has shown how both modernity and post-modernity have denied the perspective of the interior, resulting in a fragmentation and sickness of our collective psyche. Integral Spirituality, KenWilber, Integral Books, 2007
[7] A neo-mythic poeticism would mean: a non-ideological, open yet sensible (neo-poetic) language structure which builds upon meaning making (neo-mythic) by enabling the interactive participation of inter-interior (of historical self and other) knowledge quests.
[8] Dialogue here means any form of meaningful process internally engaged in such as: an empathic emotional response, semantic association or kinesthetic, felt experience.

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On Strategic Practice In Art -an analysis of what can be done
by Fareed

‘The priests of the small galleries must be ruthless in their dealings and be adept at the selling of indulgences, as ordained by the Church of Contemporary Art, to those who wish to purchase a culture…any outside commodity or ‘thing’ would not be useful to them because it does not conform to sellable doctrinal convention. So much then, for the avante-guard artist who bases their soul in such an obtuse position, they have no choice but to be excommunicated down into the lower realms of uneventful purgatory and endless waiting in the hope of redemption.’

This article deals with the problem of the communication of material art-works to social groups as well as the promotion of an artist’s reputation for commercial means and historic embedded-ness. This may seem to the naive reader to be of superfluous and superficial importance, artists are not meant to have material concerns or be ambitious in establishing themselves outside of their bohemian circle. For those practicing in the field of course it is obviously on the forefront of the mind, although many may be reluctant to be admitting of such personal ambition.

The article represents only an extremely simple analysis of an inter-related complexity and does not take into account various contextual variables such as different strata of what may be termed art or an artist and what kinds of cultural and ethnic backgrounds or societies may constitute inclusion in a more thorough study. It is written primarily for those western oriented, practicing artists who are essentially lost in the void of unrecognizability and feel that something can and needs be done for the sake of their practice at a collective level.

What this article does take into account are the problems involved in an artists choices to how they go about this task, a brief compartmental abstraction of the key elements incorporated in this terrain that arise with this intention as well as a suggested strategy to go about this in an ideal way, ideals always varying to practical reality, but a basis and ground for an approach none-the-less. When an artist takes it up on task to make a name for them-selves, they immediately and irrefutably are confronted with a huge empty crevasse, an unforgiving girth of dark, impenetrable ignorance that looms before them and their dream.

How are they possibly to do it? How on earth is this small little picture that is being made from the heart, ever to be recognized and valued by the capricious art world machine? They think and believe that others will recognize their talents immediately and that others will be supportive of all their efforts and skill and realize the understanding rendered in their work and the relation to the world that it conveys.

Then of course they find out that so many, many others have exactly the same idea as they do, that they are not only up against an indifferent system of institutions and agencies, but they also have to compete politically with all the other artists who want exactly the same thing. Their strategy is one that is too often employed by the upstart generations that value narcissistic image projection of the personality and lifestyle. It need not matter what kind of approach it takes, as long as it magnetizes attention in one form or another. At least then there is some form of recognition and acknowledgement.

Anything is better than being unseen and invisible from the eyes of the parental world. Yet all of these tactical maneuvers, weather ideally self-aggrandized trophy waving or identifying as the poor naïve little victimized lamb are based upon the emphasis of the self over others. It is all and only: me, mine and myself and if others are included it is exclusive to our sect or clique with no risk at all for real communication or critical discussion that might bruise fragile egos and weak alliances. All this futile flag waving does very little to actually change the stuck situation that all of these individuals are facing on a near existential level. The term existential is used here because recognition and being seen and valued is a constituent component of the background practices of their being in the world. The artist does not ever live in a vacuum in isolation from the social, but is a kind of foot-stop in the door that acts like a wedge between the subjective and inter-subjective social discourse. This is not the place for philosophy however, but for real strategy and direction.

We have assessed the way an artist responds to their situation through contracted rather than expanded means. The other fatal falling in the moves along the chessboard is one that is fundamentally suicidal and soul denying; that is the one of mimicry. It is a temptation that falls upon those who have not yet learned the basis of their self-efforted practice and who fear to actually be authentic to what is living in their own natures, because they either fear rejection, or have no real will of their own, or they feel there is just nothing there. These children need to find their voice and spend time alone in isolation, cultivating and culturing their own way. Often they are good at the social connection side of the street, being able to merge with the norms and private assumptions of any group they gravitate to.

Yet art is not about replicating models that worked previously, for what is the point of that? This way of, what ever you might call it, ‘art-game’, ends up like so much junk that is passed for culture and thrown away on the rubbish piles and garbage dumps of every city and town the world over. The path of replication however is a tempting one for many who do not yet shape their own soul. Here the established model; the institutionalized work, is recognized by the institutions and the market alike. Really they are the same thing only in different guises.

There is already a following of the ‘big wig’ superstar. People know what it is and so are confident in its accepted-ness and recognize-ablity. The tree has already borne fruit and people are happy to take a copy of the original to place in their trophy cabinet or display their cultured sophistication while they suck the life from those below them. No guilt intended here, it is the way of all classes in one way or another and this is only a frank observation of impersonal psycho-economic systems as they function.

This leads us to the artifact-ual institutions themselves; the galleries and the art-worlds that govern them. They are of course made up of cliques and although different in functions, the former being as a retail store apparatus and the later as a kind of socialized political party. They function the way political parties operate naturally; standing for nothing except the trendy dialogue of post-modern gossip gravitating around ‘who’s in’ (‘who’s out’ never gets a mention, it is too risky to introduce any real controversy). Around theses cliquing wine glasses and ‘oh so critical stares’ are the artworks on the wall that serve as an obvious façade for the fascist propaganda. The idol that each party member is ready to bow to is the ideology of Relativism. The ideology has become such a paralyzing poison and it has filtered into the academic thought system so effectively, that any form of evaluation or ‘grounding’ of values is excommunicated. In the replacing of this form of authentic difference, immediate self-interest rules as commentary upon commentary is layered over and over with the same tired rhetoric of self-reverent reference to the institutionalized language (art for institutions sake). The market value is what determines the conversation and that value is determined by that conversation that is the spawn of another conversation and so on so that what ever is placed within the walls of the said ‘contemporary shopping mall’ can be hyped up to a meaningless relation to whatever is hanging on the wall of the other side of the gallery.

If you think about it, just who it is that profits from this kind of state assembly, it is rather a stretch of comprehension. Firstly the academic institutions are able to justify their existence. They excel at gossiping and rhetoric is what they are basically trained in. So they get to look at themselves and to admire their plumage in the mirror while feeling clever and sophisticated, the gossip attracts cliques and the allure of exclusiveness and specialness appeals to the wistful glamour of the ‘Neo-Artzi’. The institutions and academy’s operate as global corporate entities. They are interconnected and so the profiteering is lucrative to every sucker on each of the octopus tentacles. It is quite ingenious really. Ingenious, yet life denying.

The same is true for the contemporary art galleries, however on a much smaller scale and they cannot really be written off entirely for how are they to survive against the power of the institutions that fool the ignorant masses? The priests of the small galleries must be ruthless in their dealings and be adept at the selling of indulgences, as ordained by the Church of Contemporary Art, to those who wish to purchase a culture.

To stretch the analogy to its limits, any outside commodity or ‘thing’ would not be useful to them because it does not conform to sellable doctrinal convention. So much then, for the avante-guard artist who bases their soul in such an obtuse position, they have no choice but to be excommunicated down into the lower realms of uneventful purgatory and endless waiting in the hope of redemption. What is it though, when we see the images of the damned, the souls in hell, what is it they are doing? They are being swallowed up or tortured by giant masked entities or they are pulling each other’s hair out, trying to clamber to nowhere.

This is exactly the situation that individual artists are left in, it is of course not salvation that they require, but they do need to find a way out of the position in which they are trapped by their circumstances. They are without any means to truly bring their work to the population and allow it to be seen and appreciated. They have been able to make images from visions and dreams yet they are unable to communicate these dreams to others for failing to be understood for what they are. They are frustrated that the work that they are making is of quality and meaning and yet that quality is unable to be held and valued by a culture that is not able to see or even to know that they exist.

What they need to do now is to fight fire with fire. Like the institutions that have turned too much inwardly upon their own reflection, schizophrenically reverencing the sounds of their own voices, they must now learn to build dialogue with one another. Not in the sense of establishing small cliques of excluding parties of associates, but through genuine interchange of discussion, ideas, views and critique. This can then be the basis for real and genuine movements to slowly form and blossom. There has to be some form of value judgment and rational discourse that can help shape and determine future contexts and approaches.

Without this kind of exchange, there is no glue that can be poured along the grooves to create fissures and joins so that the newly emerging forms may hold together and work. Works form over time, and are influenced from various indirect conditions, that are atmospheric, such as the historical mood, as well as being directly reactive and responsive to and from other works and ideas. Both are important and this interchange of reaction formation tends to influence the scope and range of what a group of works might ‘hold’, entail or signify. One piece by itself does not have as many references and relations to instigate a new dialogue or ‘movement’ that can then be a visible argument or significant over-sign that contextualizes a gathering of smaller discourses. It does not mean that it is based upon replication or conformity toward a set of propositions, it means that from the interchange of contrasting views, approaches, clashing ideas; new images can start to generate, through the way it always has, integrating different and new perspectives into whole parts.

Real ideas can then have weight and gravity so that something can be born or brought to be, rather than ritualizing the institutionalized, conventional, established ideology that is the present wasteland. The second aspect of this proposal has to do with the communication vessels. It is not only artworks that are the forms of theses communicatory repositories of conglomerated meaning.

It is often important for there to be a kind of intermediary between the newly envisioned ideas and the established lens through which the culture looks through. In other words, if there is an addition or a change in the way images; ‘languages’ are utilized; then this change or alteration needs to be comprehensible to an appropriate degree. It needs to be able to be understood so as curiosity can then initiate a greater delving into the meaning and realization of what the images entail. If there is too much understanding, the forms are likely to be short and without duration. It indicates there is nothing further to look into and therefore a movement as such is without merit. If however the cauldron of gestation has been slowly heated over time, the experiments worked over and explored through interchange, the relations to meaningful worlds have been cultivated correctly, the practices have been ‘thought through fully’ by practice, then the depth of such a movement will have greater hold and be historically significant.

The intercession of what can be termed ‘Cultural Communicators’ can therefore be an important requisite to not only introducing the works but to, and perhaps more importantly, preparing the grounds for their reception. Traditionally this has been the role of the critic in not only writing about, but also taking part in the formation of the movements themselves. A critic may even go so far as to forge a movement through the indoctrination of their own ideas, upon the group they are interchanging with. They not only provide a channel between the works and the larger population of social groups, but also allow a linking between the artists and a potential gallery who might hold a supportive agenda for the arts and of culture. As unique as that might be, it is an historical fact that movements have been introduced by these rare individuals and in fact, if a gallery can recognize an authentic movement is taking place and works are forming that conspire around a particular principle or context, then they are valued.

It is never certain what really motivates people, or what forces are brought about to form historical epochs of cultural significance. The times change outside of our witnessing them and it is only afterwards, in looking back, that we call it history and can see it more objectively. Various forces conspire like the steady rushing of wind and the heavy falling of constant rain to change a terrain and these things are beyond anyone’s control. Every culture posses its own social mythologies and often the roles are set out well before the actors realize they are even on the stage. This being said, history changes when people change it themselves, collectively and not just through an individual herculean will.

Artists cannot change the way the institutions are run or the way the market operates. They are unable to educate the masses and they cannot perform miracles to make blind people to see. People will always require narcotics of one form or another, as long as civilization is repressive and exploitive, this is how things operate and function. What can be changed though, is most certainly worth changing as the approach from self-interest and self-referencing to inter-personal interests and contextual meaning can work as a lever against a disproportionate weight and indifferent opposition. It is therefore, up to the united self-efforts of those interested in the cultural heritage of our period to share authentic exchange with each other. To realize, eventually, what they are standing for and that the relativism is not helping us, but keeping us inert and passive. Artists need to learn to band together and breathe into the living organism of what they are part of. That the head has to work with the feet in order for the foot to push the earth, so that the body can move.