Revolt into Classicism

[imomus]

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.

Comments

regarding the PJ thread

[bendovacasanova.livejournal.com]

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

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[bendovacasanova.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[(Anonymous)]

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?)

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[(Anonymous)]

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)

Re: regarding the PJ thread

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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!