Sunday, February 10, 2013

Modernism, visual and literary

Thinking about Josipovicii. ... his take on literature and Modernism... I'm doing assemblages, what amounts to abstract expressionist painting... primal late Modernist stuff. For Josipovici (literature), the Modernist experiment was cut short. Left unfinished... vistas unexplored. For very different reasons .. .I should write "reasons" ... in quotes. Visual art was cut off from that stream as well. Equally unfinished. The economics in each case were instrumental--but following a different thread. The strange intervention of the CIA promoting American art... and it's "freedom" versus... the cold war stuff, shot modernism into an economic ascendancy that eclipsed lts literary parallels... way ahead of popular acceptance. But what came after was along the same lines... in the visual arts, a comodification of modernist conventions ( you see them in every institution you walk into) ... and in literature... a limited use of modernist conventions in support of a wholesale retreat into pre-modernist illusionist 'Realism'... I'm so glad I've been straddling this divide... waking me up to what ALL the arts have in common.. I mean, all the artists (not the art) who don't want to pimp for our bloody Empire of Money & Death..

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