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Sep. 16th, 2010 12:17 pmMy take on realism/objectivity in art is that they're perfectly possible, though difficult - anything the human eye or mind can recognize can be reported to another person, if the reporter has sufficient mastery and adventurousness with vocabulary, paintstrokes or whatever's relevant. Some rare individuals can even sustain them, bringing across not just true things from the world but the feel of a whole world full of true things. And maybe some tiny number of people have been happy doing only that. I'd feared Chekhov was a member of that group - feared because what's the point? I'm not interested in the reality in front of an artist, but what she sees in it. But I'm also not interested in what she doesn't see in reality and/or sees only in unreality. Phantasmagoria in art isn't unreal to me, though; visionary elements are shorthand, are a mixture of how reality seems and how it feels to the perceiver, for example, or a blending of time periods.
(The time element is the hardest to successfully manipulate, in art, because you obviously have to depart from reality. Curious how much easier it is to convert images to words, and maybe even vice versa, than commensurate a two year story with a two hour reading experience or two minute gaze. You have to feel around for what works. Schematic experiments tend to be awful.)
Not that you can't get meaningful effects out of convincingly portraying a world full of apparently unconnected realities. E.g. Sentimental Education and Ulysees. But the point there is how people react to that, or change by failing to. Actually in Ulysses the mounting effect is how much that seems initially real but unintelligible can become something real and intelligible through memory and imagination, through the labyrinth of temporal connections even a day provides. Joyce does something with nearly every stray detail, mainly by having them all come back. The way they do for people going about among the same fifty places week after week.
I guess unrealistic art should be hypothetically possible. That is, something that means something that cannot be recognized and reported, just felt. The same reaching around in the wake that lets a novelist manipulate time effects convincingly or a visionary concoct a landscape that's also a map of something internal could theoretically come upon things that just hit us, all-new, all-different objects of uncanny effect. But I think the thought that this might be possible has flooded the world with fake unrealities, as it were.
The Steinian aesthetic (one of them, to be fair to her) of I-have-created-I-know-not-what-I-know-not-why, fool-CONTEMPLATE-it-it-is-the-thing is too vulnerable to the creator's pathologies, temporary conditions of her own environment while fishing/creating not accessible by her audience, and, worst of all, her own preconceptions about what a thing that isn't a thing must be like and own pride at being the finder of numinosities. The idea that a non-thing thing is out there means as soon as you have nothing in your hands you're tempted to return triumphant.
I had this problem even with Blanchot and (Bad) Ashbery - the need to escape all schemes, or show how all schemes escape, is itself ridiculously schematic. Possibly more schematic than anything else, despite the inevitable injection of randomness, because there's no weight, no traction. You can feel your way out of contingent reality, but never plunge. Plunging merely plunges you into your own real, bare intention of plunging and hopes thereat. Your dream of a home beyond the mind finds only your dream of home beyond the mind. Along that path.
(The time element is the hardest to successfully manipulate, in art, because you obviously have to depart from reality. Curious how much easier it is to convert images to words, and maybe even vice versa, than commensurate a two year story with a two hour reading experience or two minute gaze. You have to feel around for what works. Schematic experiments tend to be awful.)
Not that you can't get meaningful effects out of convincingly portraying a world full of apparently unconnected realities. E.g. Sentimental Education and Ulysees. But the point there is how people react to that, or change by failing to. Actually in Ulysses the mounting effect is how much that seems initially real but unintelligible can become something real and intelligible through memory and imagination, through the labyrinth of temporal connections even a day provides. Joyce does something with nearly every stray detail, mainly by having them all come back. The way they do for people going about among the same fifty places week after week.
I guess unrealistic art should be hypothetically possible. That is, something that means something that cannot be recognized and reported, just felt. The same reaching around in the wake that lets a novelist manipulate time effects convincingly or a visionary concoct a landscape that's also a map of something internal could theoretically come upon things that just hit us, all-new, all-different objects of uncanny effect. But I think the thought that this might be possible has flooded the world with fake unrealities, as it were.
The Steinian aesthetic (one of them, to be fair to her) of I-have-created-I-know-not-what-I-know-not-why, fool-CONTEMPLATE-it-it-is-the-thing is too vulnerable to the creator's pathologies, temporary conditions of her own environment while fishing/creating not accessible by her audience, and, worst of all, her own preconceptions about what a thing that isn't a thing must be like and own pride at being the finder of numinosities. The idea that a non-thing thing is out there means as soon as you have nothing in your hands you're tempted to return triumphant.
I had this problem even with Blanchot and (Bad) Ashbery - the need to escape all schemes, or show how all schemes escape, is itself ridiculously schematic. Possibly more schematic than anything else, despite the inevitable injection of randomness, because there's no weight, no traction. You can feel your way out of contingent reality, but never plunge. Plunging merely plunges you into your own real, bare intention of plunging and hopes thereat. Your dream of a home beyond the mind finds only your dream of home beyond the mind. Along that path.
