I agree with Conger's comments. Fully. WC
________________________________ From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, January 12, 2013 2:12:22 PM Subject: Re: shock On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 7:14 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > An interesting article in today's NYT contains comments by leading critics > about > the diminishing role of shock in the arts, or the difficulty of doing > anything > as art that is also shocking. > > Almost nothing seems to shock us anymore in the arts because the last > boundary > is the imaginative separation of life and art, regardless of efforts to > breach > it. The most vulgar, violent, bizarre imagery in the arts is always, > well, art, > and thus safely distinguished from real life. We can calmly watch a > cimema > rape, murder, and mayhem, knowing that it occurred on the screen, in > imagination, and not in real life. We can enjoy looking at a Peter Saul > painting > of the same -- so beautifully painted -- and walk away feeling good. So > argue > the people quoted in the article. > > But the ancient Romans went one better. When they put on a show of rape, > murder, mayhem, they did it for real. As everyone knows the fighters in > the > daily Coliseum (and elsewhere in the antique world) the 'entertainers' > actually > killed each other; the misfit Christians were tossed to the lions for > real. Now > today that would be shocking. so there really is one shock line that > hasn't yet > been crossed. Maybe. It the early 70s there were rumors of so-called > porno-snuff films in which female victims were actually said to be killed > or > "snuffed" on screen. I don't know if any of those rumors were true, but > the > idea alone was horrifying. Maybe the next action movie will record the > actual > shootings and axings of the actors. Then the audience can send flowers to > their > families. > > I once suggested that since the museum is the only venue where > moral-societal > views can be tested or transgressed in neutrality, such as 'safely' > displaying a > desecrated flag or religious image, they should be the location of state > executions. That would bring home, i think, the reality of 'official' > murder, > making it a topic for moral discussion, at least. It would be far more > shocking, I'm sure, that the blandly reported executions now going on > behind > prison walls. > > On the other side of the issue, one can say that the shock-bar has been > crossed > so many times that most people are now numb to the usual, everyday sort of > transgressions like four-letter words and all sorts of sexually explicit > imagery, to say nothing of headless, blown-apart corpses and blood puddles > covering our living rooms in lurid 3-D TV imagery. It's freedom of speech > of > course. But I'm not sure that the proof of freedom of speech needs to be a > great loss of civility and dignity. Why is it that freedom of speech is > mostly > exercised with extreme vulgarity and incivility? I can't get past page > one of a > daily free newspaper in Chicago without reading the f-word in several > hyphenated > forms. If I were to complain, I'd be blasted as a terrible > anti-free-speech > person, a Republican, or worse. What ever happened to well-reasoned > language and > good ideas? Aren't they the real substance protected by free-speech? > > If you want to do something radical in the arts, try doing something that's > civil, passionate, and thoughtful, without the f-word and its variants in > deed > or image, if you can. How did Montaigne manage to write so much without > resorting to ugly language? There's a model for the real free-speecher > radicals > to follow. > - On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 8:21 AM, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: 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. - It may be argued that, if the less vulgar is the higher, and the less vulgar is always that which addresses the better public, an art addressing any and every one is of a very vulgar order. Aristotle
