Another great Behind the News, well because Rachel Kushner's novel The Flamethrowers... not that I've read it, but if it matches her interview, then that's good enough, because it deals with a subject dear, the crash of American Art in the 1970s. I discovered the manual for this phenomenon. It's Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, Harvard Lectures, 1973(?).
I suppose you could call it a lot of other things, but after that brief period, it was gone, evaporated leaving nothing but some night perfume hints of what it had been for its moments. TJ Clark wrote a very long and impossible to read, Farewell to an Idea which I suppose is suppose to tell it in more detail. So according to Kushner, she switches between the fading authenticity of NYC and something in Italy, some riot or at least more self-conscious movement between art and politics, maybe philosophy, or at least some form of `higher' content, Arte Povera? Poor art? No, it's the reductionism of some sort, that I never really figured out, probably because the Palazzo Vecchio is not just down the street. The trouble with art povera is the interlocutor is the classical facade itself. This part of contemporary art history is almost genuinely beyond reach. A much easier insight is provided by a simple exercise. Just get a collection of top jazz figures and play them from about 1950 to 1970 and listen to the movement that reached into oblivion. What still remains somehow hidden is why and how did they get from there to out there? I am not in the mood for fiction and haven't been for a long time. I don't know why, probably because the real has become the fantastic. But let's say I read The Flamethrowers, and had the same impression I did of Kushner on the radio today. I thought, well she mastered the moment about as well as it could be in retrospect by a near stranger. She had a childhood contact and that sometimes is all you need. Motocycles? Well, yes as a matter of fact. I was dead broke, living with my girlfriend and facing yet another year of graduate school emptiness, when, like J. Thaddeus Toad, I discovered the Motorcar! It was a bright red Alfa Romeo Spider circa 1957 in boxes next door, for only 450.00 dollars, almost the entire semester of my NDEA loan, which I blew and then spent the next 6 or 7 months building back into something that could pass DMV. It was an art project of sorts, but I could hardly drive it into a seminar and get credit... Some machines are beautiful and this was one of them. I got to LA in under five hours from Berkeley. I don't know really. Abstraction had hit the wall with Minimalism and you really could only think your way out. Some trite phrases come to mind. Running on Empty. The core of everything just seemed to have been drained blank. I got fascinated with this emptiness, but it was impossible to actually evoke or depict. Maybe by accident, like Antonioni hit three times in a row and was then more or less out of business. I thought maybe that frieze like quality of extreme telephoto? Samuel Beckett almost always hit it. It wasn't just a matter of style. I was particularly fascinated with Alain Robbe-Grillet, particularly In the Labyrinthe. R-G is good for working into a conceptual place to do art, like Beckett in that way, even if much different. In the end I couldn't sustain it, the studio, the hours, all money out, no money in, and the all the rest. The most damage came from the damned redevelopment agency. You'd find a place and the damned real estate types would start nosing around and the rent would go up. It happened all the time out here and it wasn't really down to the last crap warehouse until sometime in the 1990s in the West Oakland nomansland near the railroad tracks and shipping yards, which had all the charm of a good place to dump a dead body. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
