| | The question of what makes an artist fascinates me, which is partly why
I chose to do the term paper for my class on nineteenth century
American literature on Emerson's philosophy of art. I've been reading
from The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World
by Roger Lundin for background on the Romantic philosophy of art and
the artist. Lundin brings out the close connection between Romanticism
and Postmodernism, which I must admit I never thought to associate with
each other. I've heard Modernism and Postmodernism compared and
contrasted within an inch of their lives (such as they are), but
Romanticism and Postmodernism? Not really. I didn't know that the
notion of projecting, rather than discovering, a world, took off with
Kant, who said that, The intellect does not derive its laws (a priori) from nature but prescribes them to nature. It's the artist's job, according to Kant and the Romantics, to create a world with his imagination, to express himself,
not to accurately reflect an existing world (Heaven forbid, that would
be unoriginal!). Instead of understanding Nature as the self-revelation
of a God both immanent and transcendent, Nature was understood as a
reflection of the human mind, a tool for revealing humanity to itself.
No wonder by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we feel trapped in ourselves!
"In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings
by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting
of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of
frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair,
prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of
tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking
hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures,
all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this
tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood
in front of the painting and cried. . . . She had looked down at her
feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had
only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower,
was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away
from nothing, there'd been no escape." (The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, 1965).
Have you noticed how terribly we want connection, communication, how
much we want to be known? (To ask it another way: have you noticed how
many people crave romantic relationships as if they alone give life
meaning?) It makes you wonder if people need reassurance that they're
not alone, that the world isn't all illusion and there IS an objective
reality.
Exalting the self and the individual hasn't landed us in a very pleasant place.
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| | Posted 10/28/2005 1:12 PM - 1 view - 7 comments
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