At what point does vulgarity, the crudest level of profanity and the excited, blurting noises of those who have no other words to call forth, become poisionous to art? At Chicago's vaunted Stppenwolf Theater, the current play, The Motherfucker With The Hat, may be a good play but why does it require the obscene title if not to add shock at the cost of cheapening the context and lowering the expectations of the audiences?
The century-old fascination with high-low may be the best reflection of the democratic spirit as a whole but it does not add to the quality, and I mean the reach, of art. Many eras of art have achieved stunning greatness by admitting the ambition, the aspiration, of reaching for more than can be grasped in reality. It is a way of having faith in the human conditon. But our era is centered on so-called reality, the dismissal of hopeful aspiration and relegating it to the bin hastily labeled 'romantic mythology'. I've had enough of it. I'm sick of impoverished language, of the three-hundred word average adult vocabulary, decorated in moments of befuddlement with a string of vulgarities that add nothing to awareness. It's very hard to create something that has an emotional sting that does not rely on ugly, deliberately crude, wanton vulgarity. One has to get to the mind, the life of the mind, the imaginative center of any private universe, where skin and bones, bodily functions and even desires are transformed and are made suddenly transparent by the magic elixir of creative free-play. Haven't we had enough of irony, the wrench that disassembles the nuts and bolts of reality and gives us the child's play of reducing the clock to so many banged up inert pieces? When playwrights need to put the un-word Motherfucker into their titles they are announcing that their little canoe of a play will float on a shallow sea. Who needs it? When celebrated painters portray incestuous antics, they aim to shock and thus escape the less vivid, unshaped troubles of human life that beg subtle metaphors to give them presence. Where is the new language? Where is language that's worthy of being celebrated? Where is Art? I'm for an elegant, difficult visual art. I like to read words that somehow bloom into bushy, scented metaphors; I like music that echoes Nature. I like to create shapes that expand and close in, sweep toward, nudge, and mingle suggesting whatever you see. I think the best art alerts consciousness to an invisible and supremely confident presence that we can suddenly imagine as ourselves growing beyond ourselves. wc
