Meditation for November 26th
Avant-Garde
Before I delve into this meditation, I must define what avant-garde means. It comes from the commandos that went ahead of the army to survey and warn of upcoming dangers. They were the “fore-garde”.
How does this translate to art? These artists are ahead of their time and are coming up with fresh ideas of art and culture. We can get into cultural ruts and have a hard time accepting a newer stranger form. It takes these forward thinking people to escape the prison of art to create something new. It can’t be words on wood (life is between coffee and wine) or prints of birds forever!
Dadaists were one of the first major avant-garde groups in the shadow of the First World War. They made strange art because they blamed the mainstream for creating a world that went to war. They watched the massacre and complete destruction all around them. It was all absurd to them. They warned us that a world with continuous war and destruction is devoid of any meaning at all.
Now there is no avant-garde anymore. There is nothing to warn us of the destruction of mainstream culture. There is no one making anything fresh, new, and/or radical. That means there is no meaning but consumerism. Keep your head down and buy, buy, buy! When people are comfortable and confident in the economic and political world, they rely on what’s established. There is nothing pushing them to think outside the box.
People have become creatively lazy. No one is running ahead to make sure we know the dangers we are facing. That job was taken by memes.
The avant-garde is made fun of or entirely ignored because it isn’t easily digestible. The music isn’t catchy. The literature strains the mind. The art is strange and sometimes entirely too absurd to understand. When people break the rules and reach farther than ever before, we become better humans.
Art has never been less innovative than now. Music halted in the 80s at best, visual art has become graphic design-centric, and literature is stuck on the novel. And no one was aware that the world was getting ready to become a very dark place.
Somewhere in the shadows nearest the corners are people who are still creating noisy, messy, nonsensical things, but you won’t see them or hear them. You will be staring at the world in shock and wondering why it all happened, but no scouts were relaying a warning back to you.
A lot of people have talked about how good the music will be now that the cultural and political world is the way it is, but I think they’re thinking of a kind of punk or hardcore that already exists. They aren’t thinking or wanting anything new.
If you want a look-see at what is avant-garde from the past, check out UbuWeb.
Or you can just keep enjoying safe art.
Prayer
In the Fire
There was nothing
Great news, frothing at the bit
Falling onto concrete layers
Shading away from the bulls to come into the rosemary
Shows on the ivy-covered car, no cats mew
Gossip from angels titter in my ear
But you have become a being that is not being
I will cry for the invasion of normal
Craft
Dadaism was an art movement that started right after World War I, and the whole European continent was destroyed. Nothing made sense, and artists wondered whether there was any meaning or even any goodness. Stripped away was the idea that society, nationalism, religion, or tradition was the glue that kept society together. The art of Dada, which is in itself an avant-garde movement that shrugged off form and rules to create unexplainable things, just like the world around them.
Now the world has a similar feeling: that governments and corporations are so corrupt they can’t be counted on, and while there isn’t quite the body count of World War I, the world keeps becoming more unrecognizable. How do we respond to this? By creating art that tells the story of where we are today. Not making for money or notoriety, but art that expresses. There is a reason you go into a snooty art gallery and feel nothing from the art there: it isn’t art for art’s sake; it’s art for money, and those two things are usually mutually exclusive. Make some bad fucking art that offends and confuses.
Goal
We have become too afraid to appreciate art that challenges us, not in any moral way, but in an intellectual way. We don’t read books that challenge our comprehension, we don’t look at art that isn’t easy on the eyes, we can’t listen to music that isn’t cute. We get funnelled into a world where art becomes homogenized and everything becomes the same. Challenge yourself to appreciate things that aren’t easy.