The Case Against Art by John Zerzan
Posted: November 10th, 2005, 3:52 pm
Post your poetry, artwork, photography, & music.
https://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/
Doreen he loses me right there with the first million years. I think he saw too many grade B movies called One Million Years BC. I know I am only the eternal college sophomore but I did manage to take an advanced course in physical anthropology, there is not any evidence of any Cro-Magnon humans skulls, (that is us, the first artists and the most efficient killers to walk this earth) before about 35,000 years ago. Assuming that skulls say something about the brains they contain, this nine pound universe inside our skulls did not exist before then. I mean that our skulls reflect the morphology of our brains. The Shape and organization, what is wired in.During the first million or so years as reflective beings humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 28,00.htmlI cannot begin a painting until I feel like strangling someone
The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment - a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening.
This guy is a cultural anthropogist? He knew what those killers were thinking when they hunted pre-historic cave bears to extinction? Well maybe it was the climate change that did those giant fifteen or twenty foot high bears in. But they killed a hell of a lot of them. Built shrines out of bear skulls.It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away.
How about that one, does that sound like it makes sense? How the hell does he know that? Mythology had to be an oral tradition what physical evidence would we have for it? Deep thinking going on here but I can't articulate the arguement. What came first the myth or the art, how about a mythology of art? I spent my last two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a painting of a Campbell's soup can. I don't know much about art but I know what I like.Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory.
Just another tangent but I been thinking about “state art” Fascist art and Marxist art, how real did it make Mussolini or Stalin.Or, as Tolkien put it, (paraphrase) "imagination" is the act of thinking up something new; "art" is the act of making it real
I like this bitThe first clue that Rand's estimation of Hugo may be misguided is that she proclaims him to be "the greatest novelist in world literature". Since I hold Hugo's novels in high esteem, I would not necessarily disagree with the sentiment that they are some of the finest ever written. However, it is anachronistic, not to mention false to Hugo's own self-definition, to call him a novelist; for, despite the fact that he wrote seven novels (two of which are commonly thought of as classics), Hugo's main literary activity was the writing of verse, and he considered himself first and foremost not a novelist but a poet.
http://www.saint-andre.com/thoughts/hugo-rand.htmlHugo, in his own poetic way, recognizes this fact. In his book William Shakespeare, which contains his most sustained reflections on the nature of art and especially literature, Hugo argues that "the poet is necessarily at once poet, historian, and philosopher" (II.1.i). And in the Post-Script to My Life, he observes:
It is needful that there be in the poet a philosopher, yet also something more. He who is lacking in this celestial quality, the dream, is a philosopher only. (§2)
What is this "something more"? It is "the secretion of the ideal" (William Shakespare, II.5.ii), the celestial quality of the dream — and "man is virtually made up of dreams" (Love in Prison, §5). Yet although "the human mind has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real" (William Shakespeare, II.5.ii), the true challenge of art is to "generate the real in the ideal" (William Shakespeare, I.2.ii, §1). So in art there is no opposition between the real and the ideal, between the thought and the dream. For "the ideal is nothing but the culmination of logic" (Les Misérables, V.1.xx) and thus "poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason" (Post-Script to My Life, §12).
Hugo pays homage to philosophy and reason, but he knows there is more to life than reason: there is passion, there is wisdom, there is friendship, there is love. According to Hugo, these are the spark and the fire of life, and it is the sacred purpose of poetry to capture that fire, concentrate it to a white heat, and shower an exhalation of light upon the human soul
I
The distinction is not unimportant, especially when one considers that Rand admitted she was "not an admirer of poetry" (quoted in Torres and Kamhi, What Art Is, 354) and when one realizes that out of an entire volume devoted to "a philosophy of literature" (The Romantic Manifesto) Rand wrote only twenty-one words about poetry.
Ayn Rand was a novelist, so naturally enough she argued that "a novel is the major literary form" (The Romantic Manifesto, 81). Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would be surprised to hear it. Indeed her argument could make sense only in quite recent times, since it was only around 1900 that the novel supplanted the poem as the leading form of literature (a development which followed on the demise, round about 1800, of narrative and dramatic poetry in favor of the prose novel). Rand's argument is revealing (The Romantic Manifesto, 81):
A novel is the major literary form — in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely literary form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect.
That is nice, so phenomenological for me, Husserlian.Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
Second, art has nothing to do with feeling, or emotion, or anything else human (or animal or vegetable or mineral).
Marks,Some of them even want to make art "objective" instead of what it is: a multi-cross between dreaming, intoxication and masturbation.
Both painter and poet have always wanted to reach the silence behind and within art and language, leaving the question of whether the individual, in adopting these modes of expression, didn't settle for far too little. Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without symbols, such a breakthrough seems impossible outside our active undoing of all the layers of alienation. In the extremity of revolutionary situations, immediate communication has bloomed, if briefly.
we have a moment before we fall from grace. just at that moment we come slidding out of that tunnel to this world, slippery slimey bloody little poliwogs. Just then we are in a natural state as we will ever be in this best of all objective fact worlds. Than acculturation begins. We are at the peak of our powers at that moment, we can speak every language know to man, if we could only remember our baby talk.hence the notion of the fall of man from nature's grace is mythic also.