The Destruction of Art & Prose (was Extreme Writing)
Hunter
> I am curious here, is there a connection between what Marinetti did with
> writing and the appearance of non-objective art in the early years of
> the twentith century?
>
> I noticed that among the so-called beat writers there was a decided bent
> toward floating abstractions as a substitute for accurate thinking,
> during that same period there was
> an enormous increase in the popularity of Dadaism, Surealism, Cubism and
> other forms of non-objective art.
>
> Jackson Pollack pouring paint on the wheels and on the floor then
> driving a tractor across a canvas smearing the paint randomly, was a big
> part of an art movie I saw during that period and attracted the same
> kind of positive reviews as did Eric Nord, beat poet of the Venice Beach
> school.
>
> Pollack threw paint directly from the bucket at the wall then smeared it
> with his hands as it
> flowed down to the floor. This was very similar to what Nord and others
> did with words, throwing them into the air randomly and agreeing
> heartily with reviewers who called it art.
>
> What I saw was a destruction of the people's
> ability to percieve reality similar to what you say Marinetti did with
> people's ablilty to think clearly.
>
> Where is the source of this terrible atrocity against man's mind? Why
> have so-called intellectuals not stepped up to put a halt to
> this terrible crime against humanity?
THE DESTRUCTION OF ART & PROSE
The Dada movement began in Zurich in 1916. It sought to replace
objective standards of art with utter nonsense. Dadaism mocked and
overthrew set forms and rational language of all previous poetry,
prose, print, etc. Dadaism is destruction by derision. It attacked
everything by disintegrating everything. Dadaism represents the total
disintegration of the mind and reality. This movement coincided with
FT Marinetti's Freedom for Words manifesto, which consists of ten
principles including:
* War on intellect
* Ending syntax & spelling
* Creating the ugly
* Machine-like living
* Maximum disorder
Many kinds of poetry and literature resulted from this "freedom". It
established the right to disregard the reader's understanding, i.e.,
the right to produce unintelligible prose. This right became firmly
established when surrealism arose courtesy of Andre Breton. Whereas
Dadaists were emotionalists, surrealists claimed they were scientific:
they relied on the unconscious, dreams, automatic writing, etc.
This drive for destruction in art, literature and prose culminated in
atonal music a la Stravinsky, "representational" art a la Picasso, and
the crowning jewel of total demolition: Marcel Duchamp's painting a
mustache on da Vinci's Mona Lisa. As aptly stated by Jacques Barzun,
the era of construction had ended and the era of destruction had
begun.
The mustache on Mona Lisa gave permission for anything to qualify as
art, which means in this context: anti-art. Art at this point was a
joke, albeit a serious joke. Striving to destroy a culture is a
serious task. Thus arose "found art" such as flotsam, "junk art" such
as appliance parts, "disposable art" such as flimsy objects. These
made a statement to the world: art -- as a discipline with societal
value -- is dead.
Duchamp's world of forms was supplanted by Dali's work arising from
surrealism. For example, see Self-Portrait as Mona Lisa by Salvador
Dali (1954). The rest of Dali's work is what occurs in dreams and
nightmares. Surrealism devolved from unconscious art to vibrating
colors, shades, dots, lines, planes and splotches on a canvas. These
became the new "still life" art. This led to human beings depicted in
a dehumanized form: body parts distorted and amputated, gruesome
backgrounds and morbid colors. For example, art consisted of a green
nude lying in a coffin or worse: excrement as art.
Obviously, the production of modern art does not require talent;
anyone can produce it. This means the demand for genius has
evaporated. Thus we see the rise of children's art, art by the
mentally disabled, art by convicts, art by chimpanzees, etc. And this
explains is why there are no more Mozarts, Beethovens, Michelangelos
and Raphaels.
As envisioned by the destroyers of art and prose a century ago, modern
art affected everyone via cultural diffusion in the form of
advertising, entertainment, design, etc. Thus, those neocheating
intellectuals and artists achieved their goal: the total demolition of
the arts, poetry and prose. What they did not realize is that modern
art ruthlessly reveals the modern mind: a chaotic, disintegrated
psyche that is breaking down in the face of a rising high-tech
civilization. But this is a moot point for those neocheating artists
and intellectuals. They were rewarded handsomely by neocheating
statists, who supplied those artists and intellectuals with fame,
fortune, promiscuity and protection from the predatory state.
Primary Reference: From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun
Secondary References: The Dehumanization of Art by Ortega Y Gasset and
The World of Marcel Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins
Leo Wong
http://www.albany.net/~hello/restore.htm
Leo Wong
http://www.albany.net/~hello/