Dear Madawg,
As the current secretary for Secret Fluxus, I�ll try to answer your question as I see it. I�ll be meeting the others next week, and if they disagree with my answer, I�ll report back. While I�m only speaking for myself for now, my guess is that the others will take a similar view.
I�ve checked with the member who is best versed in art history, and this reply incorporates the advice I received.
The answer is that we do not feel that we are doing kitsch.
According to your definition, kitsch is an art form that looks back to the past. We are not looking back to the past. The work we perform is alive and contemporary when we perform it.
Many performable works are far older that anything by the Fluxus artists and composers. Any drama or music written before 1960 is older than Fluxus. No one asks whether performing Euripides, Shakespeare, or Ibsen is kitsch. No one asks an orchestra that performs Handel, Scriabin, or Monteverdi (George Maciunas� favourite composer) if they feel that they are doing kitsch.
So, the answer is no. Using your definition, we do not feel that we are doing kitsch.
Our art history expert points out that kitsch should not be confused with the earlier Romantic painting that is the distant source of much contemporary kitsch.
Today�s painting of the sublime mountain sunset may be kitsch. When the Romantics first painted such scenes during the industrial revolution, they were not kitsch. They were a response to changing times, a response to the conflict between the industrial landscape that was changing the face of Europe and a look backward toward an idealized but deeply felt past. Had you been a displaced cottager forced for lack of work to move from a country village to the new industrial cities of Northern England, you might have looked back to your country home without being accused of �sentimentalising.� The nobility and the rich industrial and merchant class patrons who could afford paintings also preferred the clean air and pleasant surrounding of their country estates to the dirty air and noise of the cities.
This is mope complicated than the short description I give here, but the kind of easel paining that might be kitsch today was not kitsch when it was a genuine part of its time. Thomas Kincaid is kitsch. Odd Nerdrum has apparently claimed that he is a kitsch painter. No one who painted in the early industrial revolution would have made such a claim. The themes they painted were part of a larger project and a greater debate. This debate remained significant through much of the industrial era, a fact that can readily be seen in Martin Heidegger�s writings on art.
The Welsh novelist Richard Llewellyn wrote a marvellous book that wrestled with the changes that industrial life and its struggles brought to rural England. Llewellyn�s book was How Green Was My Valley. It became a movie in the early 1940s. The book and the movie both depict many of these problems with sensitivity and insight. In his book, Llewellyn wrote, something like �There is no fence or hedge around time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough�. Is Llewellyn�s view a reflection of human emotion or is it mere sentimentality?
As the great-grandchild of a Welsh miner on one part of my mother�s side of the family, I can tell you how my cousins feel and what the land means to them. When we meet and talk about the past and the future, they still speak with depth and feeling on what it must have meant to live in villages so close to the land while digging the coal that fuelled the industrial changes that brought our new world into being.
This is a long way from Fluxus, but it has a great deal to do with the kind of art that became a major source of kitsch, at least until someone invented Elvis paintings on black velvet.
I took David-Baptiste Chirot�s advice and consulted the Oxford English Dictionary.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, kitsch is �art or objets d�art characterized by worthless pretentiousness; the qualities associated with such art or artefact�.
To make something kitsch is �to render worthless, to affect with sentimentality and vulgarity�.
Now that I�ve answered your question, I�d like to turn the question around to ask you something, Madawg.
Do you feel that the work of artists like Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi, Ken Friedman, or Robert Watts is kitsch? Do you feel that their work is �characterized by worthless pretentiousness�?
If so, why?
If not, why?
Sincerely,
Secret Fluxus
From: ArtnAnts Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Please define kitsch Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 14:39:43 -0700
Well, I think Kitsch is debated as to its exact meaning. As I understand it it is an artform that looks back to the past. Kitsch was born in the early days of the industrial revolution. Easel painting that reflected a sense of doom or the sublime. Sentimentilizing is associated with Kitsch in the way that anything far back enough in the past gets sentimentilized. Perhaps other fluxlisters can offer more.
From: David-Baptiste Chirot Subject: RE: FLUXLIST: Please define kitsch Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 16:55:54 -0700
Dear Friends:
the best way to define the word is to consult the dictionary as a starting point
certainly some aspects of kitsch can be what one might term the entropy of the sublime--or --its deteroraition--kitsch is usally a derogative tern--ceratinly associated with asp[ects of thesentimental that are borderingon the �distasteful�--yet do evoke passionate feelings in some--while repulsion in others-
there�s aloo camp--but i don�t think secret fluxus is either camp or kitsch--
this is why i wondered if the aspect of mimicry is not a camouflage, thus attaineing to secret-hood-
or if the ritual reenactment of a historical one-time-only event--is not an attempt as it were to �contact the gods� via a sort of cathartic identification by means of mimicry---�acting out�--yet under strict controls--
or, on the camp theme--there is the impersonation aspect--but i don�t think secret fluxus is into this
maybe more like textbook illustrations? or like those reenactments one finds at historical villages?--
it does--have to do with history, at the core of it--�getting it right�--
but yes consult ye dictionary!--
�for now we see, as through a glass darkly�--david-bc
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