Reading a lecture by Camille Paglia on religion and the arts offered a lead-in for talking a bit further about the film world's recent losses. Towards the end of the essay, Paglia makes a fairly predictible argument about contemporary art:
But here's the bad news: the avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated two hundred years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It's time to move on.
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center.
Here is the appealing part of the argument: if we adopt too strongly the post-Romantic, avant-garde attitude toward the function of art, whether that be "oppositional art" or radical versions of "defamiliarization," I think we run the serious risk of missing altogether the vast artistic productions of the first several thousand years of human art. In other words, we end up defining art as opposition, which isn't exactly what the Sistine Chapel, for instance, was all about. The challenging part is what does "moving on" look like? Because you can't go back. Whatever it was, the avant-garde made something happened, and at least for the immediate future, we will not be doing anything other than "post-avant" (to use Ron Silliman's term) art.
I don't seek to offer an answer to what moving on would look like; "recovering a spiritual center" is a rather vague response. But I will point to Bergman here. For Bergman's films seem to me to have the feel of "new art" and yet I wouldn't call them avant-garde. Indeed, if someone were to ask me for an example of an artist who wasn't directly in the avant-garde line and yet was making great, even amazing art, Bergman would be on the top of my list. Interestingly enough, Bergman clearly uses a number of avant-garde/experimental techniques--but those techniques are always situated in . . . something else. Could we not call it a spiritual center?
Compare this with Antonioni, who, unfortunately, I can only speak of in terms of one film, but it's a great one to consider: Blow-Up. It is somewhere between avant and pop, a film that draws from a particular poppy cultural moment (it features the Yardbirds for crying out loud) and yet not a bubble-gum piece by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, it's a meta-film, an adventure in the risk and seduction of the image, walking the line between Godard's postmodern games and meditative mystery fiction. Are philosophical and spiritual explorations one way forward from both the oppositional avant-garde and the annexed postmodern?
Affirmation without moralization, devotion without dogma. Sometimes I doubt we'll recognize it when we see it, but maybe 100 years from now the new art of today will make a big splash.
Posted by pjaussen at August 1, 2007 9:57 PM