A General Impression

At the moment overcoming my apprehension of crossing into the visual arts genre as a novice (this apprehension to be channeled in the near future into making a visual journal), I will begin by assessing the Modernist experiments in the literary realm as in many ways clinging to the coattails of the various radical, avante-garde movements in visual art also underway. To name the most obvious example that comes to mind, Ezra's Pound "imagist" movement seems to attempt to do for literature what the impressionists or even surrealists did for art -- to capture an ideosyncratic moment in time, favoring the expression of emotion over obvious representationality. Both the impressionists and the surrealists, indeed along with all pioneers of absract art, operated as "first responders" to a Western crisis of the subject and its representation, deriving from Christian humanism (CCM, 204), that resulted from the works of Freud and Darwin. The latter removed humanity from its centrality to the world order, and the former served to complicate notions of free will and objective truth: these new philosophies that would come to define the modern world had an obvious impact on art, later on literature.

For me, the Surrealists' (and magic realists') theoretical and visual combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic thought presented a highly creative (and bizarre) new form. Though we still have a legacy of perceiving art as primarily consummed by an elite for the sake of decoration and cultural capital, (particularly even in terms of more abstracted art) it is obvious through this genre that art can also operate as an incitement to revolution or an indictment of a given society. I'm no Marxist, but the idea that unconscoius connections can be channeled by visual media/images in order to disrupt a hegemonic or stagnated worldview is highly intriguing.

To retrace the links between literature and art, what seems to be endemic in both spheres during the Modernist era is a sense of warring schools, each seeking to be the dominant form (as opposed to our own, in which fragmented niche forms coexist simultaneously). It would take a seperate post to work out which groups and philosophies corresponded -- indeed, this week's readings seemed to complicate which areas intersected and which contrasted. For example, while abstracted art seems a more elite, mathematical/logical form on par with Eliot, Hulme, et. all, MacCarthy and Bell focus on its ability to take a snapshot of the artist's emotion, without having to sculpt this feeling into "cold" representational reality.

Furthermore, what Desmond MacCarthy observes as the post-impressionists' rethinking of traditional chiaroscuro in representation (99) appears to be a precursor to a post-structuralist, or at least an anti-metaphysical, understanding of binaries as they have historically operated in eschatological thinking, particularly in our CCM's depiction of the choice to throw our foremother Eve out of the shadows and into full color. With many of the assumptions of Western philosophy and spirituality thus critiqued, artists were also able to experiment in a more diverse, multicultural way than ever before; for example, Van Gogh's use of Japanese prints or Picasso's rendition of African masks. Surely, Modernist literary London must have felt concurrent exhileration and envy as they studied their artistic cousins.