Broad, Sweeping Assertions
You could say that my New Genre Art forms class is about kitsch and staging performances. It’s your call on wheather or not that fits the title. I know I have been talking about this class a lot lately, hey, it’s a three hour class that meets twice a week.
Here are some things I have been thinking about:
Blurb by Tao Lin about Tao Lin written by Todd Zuniga:
I like my book of poems. I like salmon. I want the salmon to shake
hands with the book, but I ate the salmon and now it’s in my stomach,
and my stomach has no fingers. The book is good, but I don’t care. I
want the book to punch the salmon in the face. Then I want the
universe to punch itself in the face.
This is the current dilemma of time and identity in art. We are confronted with things that touch us, but they are not related other than within our own minds. We are aware of this and it is depressing. Identity is composed of concrete memories with constants, but we are not sure if there are truly constants. But it doesn’t matter. We still ate the salmon, which did not shake hands with our book of poems (see above poem). Likewise, we still experienced something touching us, even if the significance of that touch is a result of what we have trained our minds to do. Thus, even if we can become aware and overwhelmed by time and identity, we continue to compose it.
This thought process causes people, humans, to make art. Out of our sorrow births metaphor. Contemporary artists are essentially wrestling with the question, “how can I communicate with people who use abstractions?” It is about communication. We are hungry for it because we think it creates, or adds to, our identity and perpetuates time.
I was thinking a lot about this on a ride home from L.A. on the Metro gold line. I tried to identify my criteria for the best piece of art I could make right now. This caused me to ask myself what I considered good art, which led me to ask myself what it is that I want to, am trying to, say. But this just made me unbearably aware of my existence/consciousness. I became aware that I am just like the tapeworm inside my kittens intestines. I have lodged my head into the wall of I-have-no-idea-what and am starving for touching/beautiful/significant moments. I gorge myself on them. This is all I do. Then I became utterly paralyzed. How can we go on and make art within this thought process; this hunger for identity (and not just roll over and hold someone)?
We cannot help ourselves.
It seems to me that kitsch touches on these dilemmas of identity and time, or rather, ability to conceptualize our relationship to the abstract notions of time and identity. Rather than contemporary artists who show their work in quite white spaces, people who create small meaningful/less objects, what we refer to as kitsch, distribute their products freely and overwhelmingly. There is no privatization or ownership of thought or idea. The image and/or object belong to everyone because it can be obtained for a reasonable price. Quality is not the objective, but rather, distribution. This is the contrast between high art and kitsch, the principle conceptualization of the self. Does thinking about your existence paralyze you and cause you to isolate yourself, or does it numb your brain and make you completely able to roll over, completely able to forget and move on. The lonely artist sitting in a studio, birthing the idea that will revolutionize our perception of the human condition is an icon of the elite, wealthy class. But kitsch just is the human condition, taking time and being itself. It does not continue into frustration, it feels warm and touched by the small plastic figurine of a lamb.
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“There is no privatization or ownership of thought or idea.”
The way you talk about kitsch, I feel like it should be classified as open source
Comment by matthew — November 30, 2007 #
While they relate to each other on the levels of accessibility, the primary concepts of kitsch and open source are very dissimilar to me. Open source is about making things better through collaboration and giving that greater knowledge to the people. But kitsch is void of this second/third dimension. It’s makers are only concerned with distribution. The meaning is up to the buyer. Does that make sense?
Comment by Laura — November 30, 2007 #
I didn’t mean to misinterpret. I really like how the sentence sounded. But I understand what you are saying. Kitsch still sounds somewhat generous to me. Generous in a way that could seem more important than ‘art’. Maybe true art is somewhere in between. Not “an icon of the elite, wealthy class”. Not “only concerned with distribution.” Or at least that’s what I like to think we do here.
Comment by matthew — November 30, 2007 #