newarch1980
Allow me to justify myself and feel validated. Yes indeed.

In the comments on my post the other day, The Elevator Speech, I said, “It’s the unexpected good result that causes the artists’ high, which, in my opinion, is way better than the runners’ high”. There’s nothing like a momentary thought that you just made something perfect. That’s a good day. You just want to do it again. And I inevitably fall for the idea that it wasn’t an unexpected good result at all, and in fact, I had cleverly planned the whole thing. It’s best to shake that before you start the next project, otherwise second rate crap is on the horizon.

I just read “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace” From The Review of Contemporary Fiction Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2, By Larry McCaffery. I follow livelysceptic, and the post Stargazing, had a comment by someone else I follow, Dyssebeia. The comment had a link to the DFW interview. That link is also at the bottom of this post as a footnote. I like footnotes.

Here’s what Mr. Wallace had to say, “But you’re talking about the click, which is something that can’t just be bequeathed from our postmodern ancestors to their descendants. No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did magnificent work, but you can’t pass the click from one generation to another like a baton. The click’s idiosyncratic, personal. The only stuff a writer can get from an artistic ancestor is a certain set of aesthetic values and beliefs, and maybe a set of formal techniques that might–just might–help the writer to chase his own click. The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment”. FN1

There are a few things to discuss here. First off, the artists’ high and the click refer to the same thing. Secondly, DFW and I seem to be in agreement about Postmodernism being unhealthy. If you’re interested, I go on about that in The Communist Manifesto without Nouns. And for more on the subject, here’s the Editorial from Wegway, issue one, 1995, back when it was a photocopied, folded and stapled zine.

EDITORIAL

Did you know that when I was a kid, I made a neighbourhood newspaper with an Underwood typewriter and carbon paper? The print run was, I think, around 5 or 6, and a couple of the copies were pretty hard to read. When I was 15, two friends and I took our life savings (I worked part-time in a public library for 90 cents an hour) and we bought a used Gestetner ditto machine. We published an ‘underground’ magazine called Karma and sold it on the streets in Yorkville (that was Toronto’s ‘Haight-Ashbury’ area in the days of Hippies). Using the same Underwood typewriter as before, I wrote concrete poetry under the pseudonym of Lenny Ankersfeldt. Now is almost 30 years later, and now is Wegway. As W. S. Burroughs says, “Isn’t life peculiar?”. But enough of maudlin wool-gathering.

I have been wondering why art has become so puny and irrelevant. It may be because art is about too many things these days. Art is so distended with content, it has de-materialized into an infinite balloon of cultural æther. Oddly, our present situation is also like the old saying, “A very tiny baby can easily get lost in its bathwater”. Obviously then, when things get either big enough, or small enough, they become invisible. It is time we learned that trying to force relevance, inevitably leads to kitsch. And it is time to remember, that if you would just stop being a wise-ass for a minute, we would all agree that kitsch is bad.

I have also been wondering why no one since Arthur Cravan has gone on record saying something tactless. Are we all filled with so much self-pity for our irrelevance, that we want to leave our pathetic little careers unthreatened? I realize that our pond is small: That is why we submit to civilization and its discontents. Perhaps that is why nobody will say something like, “David Salle’s paintings are the cloying dwarf offspring of that empty man, that thief and charlatan, Picasso”. You will notice that I also prevaricate in my saying of such a thing. I believe that this is an era of minced words because outside of our art-confinement, nobody cares. That is how unimportant art has become. Since no one else cares, we need to flatter ourselves, and show feigned support for each other although we know in our innards that we and a few others are good, while the vast majority are “salon painters” or some other fatal thing. This fawning has the additional side benefit of inducing wealthy idiots to divert some of their money to art instead of baseball cards. If we really cared, we would honestly say what we think of our peers, and we would tell the world that its money belongs in hell. If art is real, then it is serious.

The Modern world worries everybody; it is not just a problem for silly artistes. That is why the L’il Abner / Beverly Hillbillies myth is so touching. We want an Eden that has not been bothered by the Modern. That is also why the science-fiction theory of “Post Modernism” is so enticing. Jed Clampett and Post Modernism are both wish fulfilment fantasies. There is no Post Modern perception, nor is there a Post Industrial world. Our present mode of perception (assuming there is such a pretentious thing) began with the camera obscura and was confirmed for all in 1839 with the invention of photography. Dirty industry is merely sliding out of Western sight into the Third World. Beware of Marie Antoinettes of theory who rush to declare the new era of the Post Modern and the Post Industrial.

Things are the same as they ever were, only worse. It will have to get much worse yet, before there is a radical change. We are nowhere near a critical mass, and nowhere near the magical point where an epiphenomenon might pop up. Now the Modern is pervasive enough to be opaque. We cannot see outside the virtual. Everything is subsumed. Here is your challenge: Do not give up on Modernism; it is yours; take it back from the cosmetics manufacturers and the advertisers. Take Modernism back from your television set and your personal computer. Art is becoming irrelevant because artists are losing their vision. I have decided that I am not an artist: It has become a foolish thing to be. There is no dignity left in the word ‘artist’. It has become no better than ‘shopkeeper’ and ‘poseur’. I am not an artist because I am not nothing. Wake up. Fight back. Jobs, entertainment and apartments darken our souls. Throw away your television. Cancel your newspaper subscription. Dump theory. Embrace practice. In a couple of months you will begin to realize what you are in. You will begin, once again, to see the difference between double entendre and self-consciousness.

S. E. Armstrong

I greatly admire David Foster Wallace’s writing. I feel validated that we agree on some points, this in spite of the fact that he will always be the better writer. I have pencil drawings to fall back on.

FN1
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F8296-B0D0-B086-B6A350F4F59FD1F7.html

Image – Steve Armstrong, The New Architecture, an aerial perspective, graphite and coloured pencil on paper, 8″ x 10″, 1980.