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Cast a glance backwards.
Cast a glance backwards. The romantic movement practically defined itself by following William Blake’s insistence that art should open the doors to perception. In ensuing culture wars, however, a rallying cry of “epater le bourgeoisie” situated the visionary experience within a social frame where it narrowed to a shock attack on moral propriety and the repressive decorum of an often hypocritical social order. The concept of “novelty” often drove the twin engines of commodity marketing and art world publicity along parallel and related tracks. Strangeness, abstraction, eve the conceptualism of Moreau or Redon were terms on which distinctions among class-based practices became articulated as much as they were aesthetic exercises in expression of hitherto-unimaginable thought forms. By the mid-20th century, esoteric practices are famously defined in Adorno’s terms as the very foundation of resistance to the numbing formulae of culture industries and administered thought. Familiar territory. But the critical apparatus of subversion and critical resistance are still invoked as if the difficulty inherent in odd shaped representations is itself sufficient to provoke thoughtful insight. But what are the alternatives? If making-strange has become the all-too-familiar, shall we unlink aesthetic experience and knowledge, knowing, ways of seeing as thinking? Or reformulate the terms on which it occurs?
(Johanna drucker)
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Apr/15/2013, 7:42 am
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Re: Cast a glance backwards.
A bunch of years ago I read an author to say today's Romantics do not seek out strange and exotic places. Rather, they turn local, go into places tucked away. Local color, I guess, hidden and not highlighted, can give out secrets that do not make it into the headlines.
As for strangeness-in-perception I cannot think of any poet who has made progress in that direction since Rimbuad. He didn't just write the playbook. He made it classic.
The altrnative is, as it has always been, the lyrical voice.
Tere
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Apr/18/2013, 7:38 pm
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