| and now for something that is more of the same as the previous post. |
[Nov. 16th, 2007|10:54 am] |
I would point out, for the sake of earlier discussions, that the recent concatenation of events has been filled with the type of small transitional moments that do find their way into literary symbolism, and which life affords in abundance, because "this thing" really is like "that other thing."
For instance, Ackerman’s book, which reached my hands after a long delay, deals with many of the same topics with which Sebald’s novels deal, but in a totally different emotional register, and with a different strategy of digression. But she also deals with, to take only one example, a case I remember vividly from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (the European bison and Göring’s plans for the species), which I knew only from Schama’s book but which Ackerman seems to derive from completely different sources.
And, to cite an irrelevancy parallel to ones I have seen announced in awe by coincidence-hunters, when I received the e-mail regarding Louise, the Art and Ghosts artist, I had just been discoursing in this journal about the composite biography of Max Ferber, the artist whom Sebald relocates to Manchester. Louise lives in Manchester. At the same moment, I was about halfway through completing my edits on next week’s newspaper column about an artist whose show at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery deals with our enduring wish to believe in ghosts. Despite its use of fake ectoplasm, Katy Malone's show is not at all about fantasy or the fantastic.
But Art and Ghosts, or more precisely the We’re All Mad Here part of Louise’s website, has brought me back to the topic of fantasy art, on which I had touched a few posts ago without going into more than the issue of (guilty) pleasures in liking things people of taste are not supposed to like. Some of the art Louise cites incites my imagination. Some of it makes me physically ill, quite literally. But that's just me.
Actually, most of the world's fantasy art is not just awful, it appeals to the worst levels of childishness on the most visually illiterate level. So when someone is capable of making art that segues off towards the low end of the aesthetic spectrum but who is also capable of extraordinarily delicate perceptions embodied in works that really, really work on several levels at once, well, I can’t help but think.
And the varied perceptions of the direction of the spinning dancer, from people who like the same stories by a writer whose work appeals to many different parts of our mental apparatus…well, that also sets me to thinking.
But let us stick with the fantasists in visual art, please. I can’t help but feel we have entered a house of imagination in which Freud’s key gets us no further than the front hallway, though that is better than not being able to get through the door at all.
I have often pondered how much very early childhood experience influences our later preferences…not just whether we were left uncovered in cold cribs versus being overprotectively smothered in blankets in ninety-degree weather, but whether those blankets had blue outline drawings of bunnies on them, or little maids watering rows of flowers, or reproductions of Van Gogh paintings. And whether our later responses to many unrelated things may derive from how we felt when we found our faces stuck up against these patterns of color and texture that meant absolutely nothing to our infant selves.
I say this because when Louise proudly shows off one of her more successful artworks, I can’t help but feel she is combining an excellent adult aesthetic sensibility (she has looked at the right grown-up artists alongside the right children’s books, and drawn the right conclusions from them regarding how to put a picture together) with individual early-childhood experiences that may be less universal than some, but more broadly shared across personality types than we would expect.
At least one of the artworks by another artist that she singles out as touching on feelings she can’t articulate but that are very, very deep in her…well, that particular artwork arouses similar feelings in me, of a world I knew once somewhere else, and while the work in question can be Freudianized as the exact structural parallel to Courbet’s famed pornographic painting The Origin of the World, the fact remains that (a) there are lots of enclosed courtyards in houses overgrown with greenery that don’t do a damn thing for me and perhaps do nothing for Louise as well, and (b) we would both describe our experience in almost the same way in spite of differences in age and gender and quite likely experiences of the birth canal. (Incidentally, Freud’s blithe assumption that infants remember what the birth canal looked like, and that small children always glimpse their parents’ genitals, strikes me as out of touch (yes, I know) with how repressed Southern Protestant households work, a culture-specific error which is excusable in a circa-1900 Viennese bourgeois, just as his error regarding the infantile sensory apparatus is also chronologically excusable.)
So I have to think more about what sorts of things lead us from really bad fantasy art to aesthetically defensible fantasy art, and why we cannot agree even remotely on what aesthetically defensible fantasy art is, despite having had childhood experiences that are chronologically different but parallel in many other ways. (Your childhood cartoons are not my cartoons, but childhood sarcasm is similar, and childhood dis-illusionments versus childhood wishes and dreams, even though the proportions differ in crucial, essential respects. Witness how many people have structurally parallel aw-shucks responses to differently sophisticated versions of the same sort of thing, according to the level of complexity their education has attained in other respects.)
I can write about why this or that work is bad art by any established standard of aesthetics, but not about why one single work out of a generally dreadful oeuvre will stand out as not only well composed as an artwork but successful in appealing to feelings for which, in the case I've cited, evolutionary biologists offer explanations (i.e., we like looking through gaps in tightly-enclosing foliage, not because we are reminded of the birth canal, but because those of our ancestors who survived were the ones most inclined to be pleased at being hidden where they could see out but predators couldn’t see in, or at least couldn’t get at them). I have written before about the problem with all such just-so stories in the sciences, since there are lots of other reactions that the just-so stories don’t account for at all.
But anyway, there is a network of hitherto unsuspected artists like Louise. You will not see their style of work at the few fantasy art shows of which I have any experience, most of which seem to be male-dominated. But this particular network also seems so different from, say, the network of artists and their admirers who offer opinions on crowleycrow’s posts, that I have to start figuring this one out. This network includes lovers of kitsch and adorers of schlock who nevertheless produce the occasional bone-chillingly imaginative allegory; there are cynics with a luscious sentimental side; there are more types and conditions than one would suspect from just looking at the folks who get their stuff reproduced in most fantasy zines. (Which is presumably why these people, all of whom seem to be female, sell their work on etsy.com.)
I have appreciated people’s silence on my own evident quirky preferences, and am thus reluctant to explore the quirks and motivations of people of whom I know almost nothing at all, but there are unresolved larger questions here, ones for which I have read no satisfactory explications. (Gender questions aside, does it matter whether the theorist of fantasy sees a rotating human figure moving clockwise or counterclockwise?)
Art and Ghosts has a running bibliography of clickable titles linked to amazon.co.uk, but I know most of those books and they don’t really answer the questions either. I am not sure if the books I haven’t read solve the question of where the fault lines lie between depth-oriented fantasy and mere wish-fulfilling kitsch, or whether it is possible for the former to be done very badly, and the latter done so well that it qualifies as a work of serious art. (I would say that it is quite possible, and that is part of what complicates our discussion.) |
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