PO-PO-mo-JO (was PO's Vision)

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> As Brian Eno notes, "we have moved from the notion of artist as creator
> to that of the artist as curator" or somesuch (source?  Can't recall,
> came up in re: My Bloody Valentine's "Soon," and that's all I can
> recall) ...


If the artist is now a curator what are TRP's books? We have
talked a lot about the penetration of literary scholarship
by Postmodernist Theories. I think we often forget that we
are talking about theories that purport to make claims on
what is transpiring in its midst. James K directs us to the
end of the century and we should also turn to the last
couple-few decades or so of art criticism that preceded the
end of the century, starting say, in the late sixties and
early seventies. There was Octavio Paz (Children of the
Mire), and  there was Jack Burnham (The Structure of Art),
and a lot of  essays in and around that time-- Lucy Lippard,
Roseline Krause, and others writing criticism and art theory
who tried to get an intellectual handle on the explosion of
art production, politics, and the collapsing art
infrastructure in museums, galleries, and private
collections. It wasn't long before writing on art turned
into art babble. Now, the era was more or less contemporary
with the first of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault's
works. It was, we could say, the period of transition
between what some would claim was modernism in its apogee,
dwindling even as structuralism seemed to extend the balance
for just awhile longer. The geometric work of the period had
been named Minimalism and during this balance in time, it
and many of the artists associated with it became
post-minimalist overnight. The move was from hard edge to
smear, from steel and plywood to fabric, liquids, resins,
materials that had no intrinsic shape. These works quickly
became the new icons for the new age, the post-modern, the
post-structural artifact as opposed to the modern,
structured, piece of art. The object once prized as the
medium of aesthetic, cultural, and monitory exchange, was
itself exchanged for the ephemeral, the transitory, even the
the transcendental. Events, concepts, performance, video,
mere wisps of things, reverentially documented became the
object. The maker of the object and authorship became as
murky as the idea that a performance was an art object. By
the mid-seventies the transformation was complete. Modern
art had become post-modern. 


Simultaneous with this transformation, as part of its
workings, artists became critics became artists, in a
kaleidoscopic  assemblage of theory/criticism/practice. The
works referred not only to themselves, their producers and
audience, but also to their site, their critics, and to
theories about art. Needless to say the only audience was
composed of other artists, art critics, and art students.
Art had completed the closing of its own circle. 

Could one argue that in the novel V. and in the Crying of
Lot 49, TRP satirizes these transformations and the
assemblage of of theory/criticism/practice? Incest being a
major trope? But, and perhaps he provides no alternative,
because although the traditional boundaries between theory
and practice, between artist and audience, between artist
and critic, between the object and the observer have served
the culture well, we cannot return. So, while we may say
there is a formality that belongs to these divisions which
has a critically positive contribution, this formality  was
destroyed in the name of  theory, criticism, and democratic
practice. There is no need to resurrect the heavy handed
elitism associated with modernism, but I think TRP suggests
that care for these invisible divisions is somehow related
to the quality of the production in art, criticism and
theory. And furthermore, the erasure, the collapsing of the
invisible boundaries, smears the object the human. Later in
V., a young lady will die a horrible death as a  fetish
during an artistic/fetishistic performance. The narrator
suggests that she was raped by her own father--incest. Here
in the early chapters of V., we find that humans have not
only come to love objects, to make love to objects, but that
they model their lives, their relationships, on stereotypes
and movie personalities. 

We read so much that advocates the idea that a text is not
sufficient to express it's own meaning and therefore
requires a theoretical superstructure to both elucidate and
support it, but if a primary text can not fully communicate
its meaning, and support itself as literature, how do
secondary texts accommodate the task?