post title is from "Ars Poetica"
originally from Streets in the Moon (1926), also found here among other places
Bocola on Modernism and the "primitive," and Cassirer on theoretical and mythical thinking
– minor editing/formatting Jan. 28, 2015
This post has been added to the Hatter's Cabinet site via its Best of the Poetry Daily Critique page
Yes, I post immediately behind my note on my absence, but I told you I had a couple things on the burner. And, yes, I realize my last handful of posts seem to be as often about theory or criticism than looking at specific poems. But, as I said a few posts back, I had a feeling I would be branching out from the original paradigm, and I think it is rather more fruitful to go where I am thinking than to force my thinking to go somewhere else.
The aim of this post is to present two interweaving ideas from two texts without adding too much commentary beyond the ideas being presented. The first is more demonstrative, the second wholly theoretic. I just want to lay them out for you and let you address them – and their interaction – as you will. Both concern the aesthetic. Both also concern art and language.
The first is a moment from Sandro Bocola's The Art of Modernism (Prestel 1999), which is to me the best survey of Modernism in the plastic arts that I have yet to come across: not so much in its inclusiveness but in its exploration of what was/is Modernism, and in turn what is a period of art, and in turn (though less to the fore) what is art. It succeeds greatly because it lets the artwork, and the social and intellectual currents influencing the art world, speak the nature of Modernism. That is, it is descriptive, not prescriptive exploration.[FN]
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******************************* [FN] For example, even though much of Bocola's discussion comes out of the ideas of the psychologist Heinz Kohut, the use of Kohut does not act to define Modernism. It is but a tool through which the currents of Modernism can be described. ******************************* |
As I said, an excellent read, though if I may one critique of The Art of Modernism, it is that Bocola understates the importance of the occult in Modernism (and the period leading up to Modernism): taking that word "occult" in its most expansive, to include not merely spiritualist (to wit) explorations, but what underlay the popularity of the occult in art and society from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries: a spiritual engagement with the cosmos and, ultimately, with the unconscious self.
