Thank you Aaron for your letter.
as noted in my response to the original question re
painting
earliest art forms are visual poetry--the cave paintings,
petroglyphs
also the amazing Goddess/Earth Mother figures found throughout
the world
art/fertility/earth mother!
hmmmm--
and noted all this painting activity going on continually in
streets amongst which live here in milwaukee--and in me
own work/eating/sleeping/smoking room here
painting then--is at once "timeless","time honored" &
"timely"
hence in a sense "always on time"!
as part of ongoing rhythms of human seeming
desire, compulsion, fascination, dedication to--marking, making notations
visual, verbal vocal, musical, gestural
"the dance of life"
should note since someone mentioned Baudelaire,
that it is in his essay on Constantin Guys, "THE PAINTER OF MODERN
LIFE"
that Baudelaire gives the first definition of modernity:
"The (painter's--poet's, artist's) business is to seperate from
contemporary fashion whatever it may contain of poetry within history;
to extract the eternal from the ephemeral."
in MY HEART LAID BARE AND OTHER PROSE WRITINGS
Edited with an Introduction by Peter Quennell; translation by
Norman Cameron
(New York: Vanguard, 1951, p.37)
By the "eternal" Baudelaire does not mean some Platonic Ideal of
Beauty, but something rooted deeply in the reality of its own time--
the documentary aspect of presenting things in their present state, which
in the study of "rock art" (not rock music album or cd covers, but cave
paintings, petroglyphs, Goddesses--) what is called"taphonomy"--the study
of things in their present state"--whether that be "brand new"--or
dilapidated, corroded, fragmented--patinaed by time--Duchamp's"Large Glass"
as landing strip for dust for example--
Baudelaire intends an intersection of the documentary presentation
of the taphonomic present--and that which as well cuts across layers of
time, as say a long vanished river cut for eons swathe of evidence
through landscape and left behind bared strata up on strata--
palimpsests, strata--and the documentary
the intersection of the ephemeral/eternal--which is not some
vanished Ideal or elusive one, but rather one PRESENT
in the work--
"This ephemeral and fugitive element, subject to so
frequent metamorphoses, is not to be despised or ignored. By disregarding
it, you necessarily fall into the void of a beauty abstract
as that one woman who lived before the first sin was committed."
(hmmm--well, I don't feel I have to apologize for Baudelaire--his
views in this regard with women are--well known--and a complicated k/not
enough to untangle what with the labyrinthine junctures of his personality,
hois psychology, the period and culture he lived in and so on . . .)
Another view of the "fugitive" in relation to the "fixed" may be
found in the introduction to William S.Burroughs' JUNKIE (first published
by Ace Book, NYC, 1953 under the pseudonym William Lee--)
Burroughs has included a "Glossary" of drug addict slang for the
reader of his pretty much dead pan Dashiell Hammett-styled "docu-fiction"
of way of life of a junkie--for the "docu"aspect read--autobio--)
("I have learned the junk equation . . . Junk s a way of life."
. . . as is Baudelaire's portrait of Constantin Guys' way of life and
working as "the
painter of
modern life"--)
final comment re the "fixity' of " Glossary" and its
"fugitive"/"ephemeral elements--words & their definitions-
"Not only do the words change meanings but meanings vary locally
at the same time. A final glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words
whose
intentions are fugitive."
(New York: An Ace Star Book, pp. 11. 17; this is a 1967
reprint under the name William S. Burroughs, noting previous edition as
being under "pen-name of William Lee"--the current in-print edition is
from
Penguin/Viking)--
This juncture of the fixed/fugitive, eternal/ephemeral as a
both/and rather than either/or--
a both/and AT THE SAME TIME--
is that of light, what Einstein famously posited as the constant
in the universe for the measurement of SPACE/TIME--another both/and--
that is, light is simultaneously particle and wave--
the particular particle of this painting now--and that painting
which is wave movement from "time immemorial" of ever older and older
works
being found around the world--to those works being produced "as one
speaks/writes/reads"--
The current--well already the tradition being a good thirty years
old by now--fascination and cliche of "the death of the author", "the end
game of art", "the death of the avant-garde" and so on--
is basically a kind of millenial/apocalyptic urge of the
fin-de-siecle, fin-de-millenium for a kind of "closure"--despite all
arguments presented often enough by same people
"against closure"--
that is, the desire for a theory to over ride practice
for if theory does this, the retrospectives, as have been done
with such bally hoo--and lists of the "best of--" and so on--may b
produced and distributed throughout the world--and in this manner, those
who "mistakenly
" still produce paintings, poems, etc will be made to feel "out of
date"--in
the arenas of the current global net--which is intimately tied to
capitalism--
in which case, to do something as seemingly "out of it" as to
produce "art"--is to be resistant to the current trend--i.e. sign up for
e-bay, email etc!
yet as well have it dangled in front of one--perhaps you,
too--might win this lottery!--either by producing sme hoary old "objet
d'art" found in basement or attic or under the rug--and produce it for
the
riches promised by "Anqtiuqes Roadshow"--(no doubt cut up among agents,
tv show prouducers and experts, lawyers, before some paltry sum delivered
to the findee--or hit the jackpot of "discovery"--!
and make bill gates and others rich--so they can buy up all those
famous "Old Masters"--as tax write-off investments----!
as well, the discourse of apocalyptic end of "old forms" always
occurs with the introduction of new technologies of reproduction, from
print, the printing press, to the computer, scanner, fax machine, video
camera, to the xerox, the mimeo machine, the radio, the
tapeplayer, the x-ray, the telegraph, telephone, television, cinema,
virtual reality, etc. etc etc--
at every stage of history of technology, some new development is
proclaimed as the supersession of the previous generation of machines,
technologies--
amazingly , however the wheel so far has proved--impervious to
obsolesence, as has the lever, the alphabet, the graphic presentation, the
vocal presentation etc etc etc
people still--dance!
if people stopped making art, all art made before its demise would
of course increase greatly in "market value"--
and benefit the rich--
so why not as protest--continue to make these "questionable" and
questioning works?
remember--that wonderful "modifier" attached to guns pointed at
those marked for assasination is called
a "silencer"--
