tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7120755123134887404.post1163454103774979287..comments2015-03-16T05:32:56.170-05:00Comments on A Common Fire: Avant-Garde, Marginalization, and the Stories of the WorldGale Kennyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09051295784299114920noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7120755123134887404.post-50866387152934544832008-06-22T10:10:00.000-05:002008-06-22T10:10:00.000-05:00I, too, attended the founding conference of the EA...I, too, attended the founding conference of the EAM ( European Avant-garde and Modernism) association at Gent, and was struck by its grand scope and particularly fascinated by the program's intention to integrate the scholarship on the avant-garde cultures of Eastern Europe, of the former Soviet satellites. I was disappointed, however, by the fact that the very sessions addressing the Eastern European avant-garde, where also scholars from these regions freed from totalitarian repression and victimization saw their chance to speak to an undivided Europe, were somewhat marginalized by relatively low attendance. This unfortunate circumstance brought to my awareness once again that specific energy that comes from marginalization which somehow speaks more to our most intimate feelings and hidden desires than any representative culture. In fact, the very history of the avant-garde is based on that energy.<BR/><BR/> By contrast there is, of course, the continued significance of representative humanist culture, for example of Tolstoy, as addressed by Joyce Cheng' s comments on the conference in order to question a reduction of the discussion of the Eastern European avant-garde to political constellations. We all can still connect our hearts minds with great masters of the 18th and 19th century; in fact, somehow we still sense our identity as individuals being formulated and put into form by them ( while we are unable to relate in such personal terms to the mannered creativity of the Baroque, for example). Yet, do we not sense that our continued intellectual affinity and what appears to be a significant emotional bondage to the great literary men may be "naive," if not understood critically ( as "sentimentalisch," for example). Is this experience perhaps not tied to a kind of "oceanic" fixation on our cultural ancestry which we rationalize as "universal," "timeless," and "sans frontiers." Indeed, we cannot easily forgo such ancestral father figures as we offer sacrifices to them that may, in the extreme, be the abdication from connecting with a world that has changed, is changing and will change all along. Yet there remains our empathy with young Werther's suicidal torments of love or with Hoelderlin's visions of the gods in the phenomenon of a great river or of a forest descending like a divinity on a forgotten town. The historical avant-garde was not free of that experience either: the surrealist experience of convulsive beauty appears to be still tied to the apparition of the female torso as a trace of a classical image - experienced in the midst of the flow of informes. The German expressionists, too, were part of a culture in the maelstrom of modernization which brought about new forms in all life worlds: Janus-faced, they ruptured the old syntax while reaching for the depths, the space of interiority where they somehow felt closer to the Romantics. Nevertheless, one was aware of the widening gap that lay between oneself and the great masters of the past.<BR/> A modernist writer like Kafka in multilingual Prague or an avant-garde poet and artist like Hans/Jean Arp in multilingual Strasbourg - in other words authors representing the cultural predicaments of marginalized regions - were most aware of the politicization of the great writers and artists of the past as national, if not nationalist monuments in the European culture centers threatening the uniqueness of the outlying regions. However, their view of the great masters was "sentimentalisch, " "sentimentalisch" in the sense that one knew of the profound creativity they represented for the self-understanding of the Western man at the time, while critically sensing, as Kafka put it in regard to Goethe as a national monument, that the genius ' writing in the name of the individual had become an obstacle for a much needed creativity in their own era at the brink of unparalleled disaster. Hence these critical minds and creative spirits of the marginalized regions were to excavate, as it were, from below the strata of the ruling culture of metaphor the images fitting not only Western modernity, riveted by one political catastrophe after the other, but attesting to a global experience as their images traveled like nomads from the regions to the metropolis, to Paris, Berlin, on to New York and beyond, to Asia or Africa. <BR/><BR/> Shall we therefore not also think about the significance of the marginalized, indeed victimized, avant-garde of Eastern Europe before, during and after Soviet imperialism? And why not talk specifically about the avant-garde as victimized by the ideology of the power of a state that had so terribly perverted the creative messages of international communal social thought with which many avant-garde writers, artists and intellectuals had identified. Why not then review the aesthetics of the avant-garde in terms of the extreme stress test of totalitarian politics based on the ideology of Socialist Realism. Or shall we rather escape the issues and join a quasi-religious convocation of a nostalgic, isolated emigre culture of interiority that finds its identity more likely in the exalted embrace of classics of the past? Our feelings, do they not rush to such refugium and sanctum? Yet, critical historical analysis tells us, there is no such alternative: Marginalization which as such is always already a form of victimization needs to be reviewed as a site and source of creativity, of a vital creativity which included a resistance against all forms of control and alienation that marked the 20th century.<BR/> In short, the relationship of avant-garde' s creativity to the creativity of humanism and idealism is rather one of a family tragedy, in which the key protagonists are "art" and "life" ( where "art" is always already a historical phenomenon), the individual and the collective. On the one hand, the avant-garde 's aesthetics had to stand up against the terror of 20th century politics, yet it cannot be measured in categories of politicization (wherever they come from), I agree. On the other hand, we cannot conflate its creative vitality with the suprahistorical stasis of a contemplative artistic evangelium. Aesthetic autonomy after all, has been the cultural insignium of European domination while claiming universality. Is not our predicament then the experience of a "the simultaneity of the untimely," the rift between the contemplative experience of the totality of perfect form and the simultaneous awareness of the impossibility of such a moment as a political form, in which Augenblick the images of the avant-garde release us from traditional aesthetic and cultural constraints while articulating an experience of freedom that is always already political?Feuerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02175586836064230050noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7120755123134887404.post-21501322917055653842008-06-04T14:50:00.000-05:002008-06-04T14:50:00.000-05:00Not only is it philosophically problematic to focu...Not only is it philosophically problematic to focus on a figure's importance because of his marginality, it's lazy. Marginality alone, or perhaps better said, the fact that no one else has studied Writer X or Artist Z, does not justify your project. <BR/><BR/>If marginality is your sole way in . . . then you need to think harder about your work.<BR/><BR/>The USSR problem is an interesting one, I think. Do you get a sense that anyone you heard was traced a longer history of artists/influences that spanned beyond 1917? I would think that for the generation of artists working in the 1940s-50s, the pre-USSR period would not be so distant - Tolstoy might still be a looming figure, even if in a post-Stalin era.Gale Kennyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09051295784299114920noreply@blogger.com