imomus | Revolt into Classicism

Revolt into Classicism

Postinteresting is my new article in Voice: the AIGA Journal of Design. Elsewhere, I've been posting my reservations about the work of PJ Harvey. If there's a common theme to these apparently unrelated bits of writing, it's the attack on Romanticism, or rather what Romanticism has become in popular culture, more than two centuries after its invention. The original impulses of Romanticism were radical and rebellious. Now, though, re-incarnated, it's become a conservative mass cultural tic, an unsavory spectacle in which fragmented consumer-individuals look up to, and model themselves on, irresponsible, irrational and aggressive celebrities.

The song I'm working on today is The Artist Overwhelmed By The Grandeur of Ancient Ruins. It's about two gay archeologists on holiday in Italy, listening to Christoph Willibald Gluck on their iPod. The title comes from Henry Fuseli's watercolour. Fuseli is an early high Romantic: in his paintings all is darkness, sturm und drang, gothic nightmare, feverish imagining. My interest in him was piqued by an essay by Brian Dillon in Frieze magazine. Dillon writes:

'In Romanticism the ruined aphorism is exhibited afresh in the form of the fragment. Romanticism is in love with ruins: in Henry Fuseli's The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins (1778?9) the hapless artist contemplates a gigantic, severed sculptural hand and foot. Théodore Géricault's Severed Limbs (1818?19) depicts bodies hacked to pieces; the whole era is transfixed by fragments: everything remains tantalizingly unfinished. An aphorism by Friedrich Schlegel states: 'many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.' The dream of a perfect aphorism - thought squared, condensed to crystalline angularity - lies shattered in contemporary confusion.'

As if to illustrate the shocking fragmentation that arrived with Romanticism (when the rationalism of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment came back all jumbled, chopped up and ruined, a sort of deranged and feverish dream) I've taken a piece of stately pre-Romantic music, Handel's 'Concerto Grosso in D Major, Opus 6, Number 5', and isolated the chords, slowing it right down and filling it with icy silences, until all that remains are fragments, with a voice precariously balanced on them, like an archeologist scrabbling across broken rocks.

My position on Romanticism is that I admire its political effects (the French and American revolutions) and some of its lurid imaginings (De Sade, bien sur, but also the continuation of Romanticism into Dada and Surrealism). I admire it as a critique of the Enlightenment. Wendell D. Garrett describes the process: 'The very intellectual underpinnings of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were being knocked out. The ideals of the previous age -- urbanity, precision, reason -- were under attack from the Romantic cult of the natural, the simple, and the ordinary.' What I don't like is Romanticism's third coming, in the form of mainstream pop culture products and movements: Goth, punk, Hollywood. David Lynch films, for instance (I just watched 'Lost Highway' the other night), strike me as somewhat ridiculous in their emphasis on 'the dark side'. I see nothing politically hopeful or helpful in this emphasis on all that's evil and irrational and inexplicable. Finally, I want to come down on the side of 'urbanity, precision, reason'. That's why, getting back to my design article, I don't really want designers to become artists. I want the future to be 'a clean, well-lit place'. I want the aristocratic Classical virtues to prevail: reason, harmony, proportion, restraint, good manners, poise, wit.

The essays Classical Composers and Classicism and Atrocity go further into my ideas on Classicism and Romanticism and their relationship with Rock and Pop.

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Wow. That might possibly be one of the most interesting things I've ever read on LJ. I agree with you about Romanticism, it kind of ate itself really, didn't it (although I suspect you know lots more about it than I do, so correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, thankyou- I enjoyed reading that.

PS Are you famous or something?

Thanks, Emma! It's a question I've been coming back to ever since I read Sir Kenneth Clark's 'The Romantic Rebellion' aged 14. No, not 'Are you famous?', the other question, the one about Romanticism v. Classicism!

Romanticism's "third coming" (well-observed) unburdens itself of its striving, agonistic, self-transcending character, and retains only fits of picturesque sentiment. Faustian over-reaching decays into infantile self-gratification. These are pop-culture fragments of Romanticism, fragments of fragments.

Yet even if Romanticism's reincarnations decline in profundity and value, Classicism's may yet increase. A New Enlightenment? A paradoxical idea, but so were the others.

People often call Hollywood the dream factory but David Lynch is the only Hollywood director whose work prods beneath the limin (even Hitchcock is only occasionally unheimlich). Perhaps not Lost Highway, but Mulholland Drive captures oneiric logic perfectly. Or maybe just my dreams . . .

http://www.livejournal.com/users/noble_savage/18728.html

I wish David Lynch would die.

B-b-b-but . . . Twin Peaks!

Well, Twin Peaks is unquestionably excellent, but it's also unquestionably his peak, and if I get one more fan of his informing me that Mulholland Drive is his greatest work, never mind good work, I'll blow-up like the Hindenburg.

Lynch’s lost it, like David Bowie, but unlike David Bowie less people seem to realise it. Perhaps it's just because I've recently watched Dogville, which is, in essence, the antithesis of contemporary Lynch, that the merit of his output has been brought into perspective. He doesn’t necessarily have to die. Alzheimer’s will do.

I recently listened to David Bowie's box-set 'Sound + Vision' and decided that the Tin Machine-era was my favourite. I thought if Manners can get away with thinking the Anthony Newley period best and Jamesward can get away with liking Never Let Me Down, then I can have Tin Machine.

The same eclectic unconventional attitude is possible with Lynch, so erratic is his oeuvre (Dune??!!). I enjoyed MD, it's representative of my dreams if no one elses . . . as is Dogville.

I enjoyed MD, it's representative of my dreams if no one elses . . . as is Dogville.

I would really have expected you to have countless more lesbian and rape scenes during your visits with Morpheus, Icelus, Phantasos and (regrettably) probably Phobetor too.

I try not to base my opinion on convention, and instead on whether something is good or not. It's simpler that way; less research.

and, of course, once you've established that connection, Albert Speer comes knocking with his Theory on Ruin Value (https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/7.4.html). I think there's a really interesting point to be made by setting the philosophy behind Nazi architecture up alongside, say, Genesis P-Orridge's "Splinter Test":

No matter how short, or apparently unrecognisable a sample might be in linear TIME perception, it must, inevitably, contain within it, (and accessible through it) thee sum total ov absolutely everything its original context represented, communicated, or touched in any way. On top ov this it must implicitly also include thee sum total ov every individual in any way connected with its introduction and construction within thee original (host) culture, and every subsequent (mutated or engineered) culture it in any way, means or form, has contact with forever...(in past, present, future and quantum timezones).

"Any two particles that have once been in contact will continue to act as though they are informationally connected regardless of their seperation in space and time." - Bell's Theorem.

If we shatter, and scatter, a hologram, we will real-eyes that in each fragmeant, no matter how small, large, or irregular, we will see thee whole hologram. This is an incredibly significant phenomenon. If we take, for example, a SPLINTER of John Lennon, that splinter will in a very real manner contain within it everything that John Lennon ever experienced; every that John Lennon ever said, composed, wrote, drew, expressed; everyone that ever knew John Lennon and thee sum total ov all and any ov those interactions; everyone who ever heard, read, thought, saw, reacted to John Lennon or anything remotely connected with John Lennon; every past, present and/or future combination ov any or all ov the above.

has anyone yet composed music with the specific intent of letting it become a grand memory once the piece itself is forgotten, and it lives on only in the sampling and borrowing of lesser artists? if not, why?

See P. Orridge's Electric Newspaper series.

yeah, I know P-Orridge's claims about the significance and social value of the Newsletter but it just sounds suspiciously to me like he and Thrasher dumped their sample libraries to CD and starting selling them at inflated rates. I've got a 3.5 gig sample folder on my computer-- can I be a countercultural icon too?

Well, it would have had more cachet in 1995.

story of my life, right there.

I get frustrated with heavily neo-neo-Romantic art and music sometimes too, but a lot of the music that you seem to classify as Classicist offers its own frustrations. I want ideas, ironic detachment, optimism, and reason, but I find the kinds of beauty that usually accompanies them in music and many other media to be less involving and pleasurable. My favorite music tends to offer a balance of the two tendencies. Put another way, a song like "The Hues of Longing" by Mors Syphilitica doesn't tend to stimulate my brain in new, progressive, optimistic ways, but it stimulates pleasure centers that no Pizzicato Five song has ever been able to find, let alone touch.

I get why you don't like PJ Harvey (I have mixed feelings myself, some of which overlap with yours), and I think part of the reason I do find most of her music stimulating is that I'm not with you in mixing "ethics with aesthetics." Her lyrics often irritate me but her sound goes beyond her authorial intent or its historical context, at least as far as I'm concerned.

This morning I realized I'd been typing "Romantic" and "Classicist" and somewhere along the line started thinking "Dionysian" and "Apollonian." I think I'd better shut up before I embarrass myself further. :)

stumbled upon your journal today.

its wonderful.

wanted to tell you that and i've added you.

great stuff.

The 3rd variant of Romanticism (or shall we just call it US culture), has now been reduced to turning rebellion into a commodity. "Rock and Roll" is now appropriated by conservatives and corporations to pacify turn a profit . Thus any form of true rebellion is castrated. For me "Rock and Roll" has always seemed mindless, self-obsessed and conservative. Its sole aim has been always been self-destructive and its rebellion unilateral rather than political. It is adolescent, it does not grow up and as an atavistic form is easily understood. It sums up America today.

Music that dares to be intelligent is derided because it does not conform to this set pattern and 'purity' of impulse . This is evident in the Ilx thread. Nick is attacked for his ideological dislike of PJ Harvey's music. I also have a mistrust of emotion that is primarily concerned with' authenticity' and machismo. Her music is all pose and no poise. Well this thread neatly brings me to a recent PBS Frontline (current affairs show) that basically posited the fact that the music industry in fearing the Mp3 is again turning to the familar model it knows, namely "Rock":

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/artists/

The people who like Rock know the rules, ie buy product and buy into the clichés willingly. The programme shows how the daughter of a sixties novelty group is being marketed because she embodies the "rock-chick" attitude ( railing against boyfriends and parents ). Then there is also the hybrid of Guns N Roses and the Stone Temple Pilots. It's amusing to watch the record company A&R people salivating on how successful "Velvet Revolver" ( no joke) will be . I think the programme just goes to show how out of touch the music industry is; how bankrupt it is and how it only knows the romantic formula of "Sex, drugs and Rock N Roll" . I hope that the corporate structures of the music industry are destroyed and turned to ruins by their very ignorance and fear of change. I have great hopes that a new age of music enlightenment will come from the internet and the experiment that has been conducted here.

Richard G

i don't like classicism, it's a favourite style of every oppresive regime.

A fine piece, as is the Aiga essay, and a promising direction
for the mature Momus.

I think it's a lot more interesting (and necessary) to reinvent the Romantic. As far as I was concerned, people are 'rationalised' to death. We don't (or can't) believe in the transcendental anymore, so why bother to stretch up for it? I was intrigued by the Summerisle stuff because I thought Momus was moving into that territory (ie, breaking down the decorum of time signature, the clarity of meaning in favour of a mystical 'something', etc). What's rational and classical about your recent 'dada' output? To be honest, I'm not sure the Romantic/Rationalist dialectic even stands up anymore, it's all grist for the culture industry.

The fact is that I'm going both ways at the same time, and each because of the other. A bit like Lynch doing 'The Straight Story' next to 'Mulholland Drive'.

Ah, you canny man

Could you expand more on "literary humanism" and whatever its pitfalls?

Literary humanism. Okay. I went to university and studied literature, so understand this as a criticism of something which is very much my own culture. Literary humanism is:

A genteel and gentle-minded view of human nature, the subject and civilisation. It's 'To Kill A Mockingbird' and 'Our Town', but not 'The Trial' or 'The Threepenny Opera'. It's the Social Democratic Party, but not the Communist Party. It's a poem in which the narrator describes herself as 'dancing', but it's not the Chapman Brothers' installation 'Hell'. It's a Bush speech about his foreign policy intentions, but not Bush foreign policy itself. It's The Waltons, but not 'The Spurt of Blood' by Antonin Artaud. It's Frasier, but not the 9/11 events which killed the originator of the Frasier series. It's a funeral sermon, full of platitudes, but not death itself. It's the way tender-minded literary folk, full of good intentions, want to see the world, rather than the way the world is; at once more terrible, unpredictable and extraordinary than mere language could ever begin to convey.

Ah ha! That's what I think Bukowkski referred to as the "Disneyfying" of the world—peach fuzz, silver-plated linings, the antithesis of Mirbeau's "Torture Garden, Hirst's rotting carcasses, and Serano's "Piss Christ."
Does this vapid outlook get formed by superficial art? Or do we seek out books and paintings that support our already fixed version of the truth? In lit classes, I was always drawn to the broken people in Tennessee Williams' plays, especially the minister in Night of the Iguana, haunted by the atrocities he'd witnessed in the jungle. Even more I preferred William Blake and how he acknowledged the truth of child labor and other oppressive institutions; yet his poetry testified to the ideal, our original grace as human beings. The best artists I believe balance the wretched with the sublime, or even point out the latter in the former. The real trick, I believe.

So are you saying, in your own way, the Adorno idea (that I realize he eventually rejected) "no poetry after Auschwitz?" At least in terms of the terrible...and mere language makes up "The Trial." I don't mean to be the humorless, rhetoric-less poster, but I do wonder what your feelings are toward the "literary world" today. Who are your favorite poets? (Probably Brecht?)

Brecht, yes. In terms of people writing now, I actually like Ian McMillan quite a bit, after initially thinking 'Who is this annoying whacky git?' But his work is strong:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/speech/theverb/askian.shtml

Here's his 'Wool In History':

http://www.theshed.co.uk/woolfacts.html

Ah, thank you. I like that, and it's further proof that you don't have to be a feverish poet to surprise and in some way astonish. So for you, not a surprising choice.

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth132

"He was Writer in Residence at Padgate Library, Cheshire, and Bolton Boyd Adult Literacy Centre, Bradford, in 1984, and Creative Writing Fellow at Sheffield City Polytechnic from 1984 to 1985. He is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Northern College, near Barnsley, and is Poet in Residence at Barnsley Football Club, as well as being Yorkshire Television's Investigative Poet and Mobile Bard of the late Northern Spirit rail network. In spring 2002 he became Poet in Residence for Humberside Police Force."

Hahahahahahha...

-Robyn (the previously unsigned anonymous of this block)

Well, he's the opposite of an ivory tower Parnassan poet, isn't he? It reminds me a bit of 'Stars Forever', when I was 'Mobile Bard in Residence' to the Indiepop List and Other Music!

I knew you were a fan of frieze, and it's always delightful to be reminded that people are actually reading my stuff, but I must say I was utterly charmed to discover that my aphorisms and fragments piece might have obliquely contributed to a Momus song: quite made my day.
Brian.

Wow! It's like that moment in 'Annie Hall' when Woody goes and fetches Marshall McLuhan from behind a potted plant! Greetings Brian Dillon! Enjoyed your piece on Pierre Klossowski in the current issue.

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Revolt into Classicism

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P.S. The State of Classicism in Britain

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A scrabbling around in the ruins of pop culture

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regarding the PJ thread

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