Much of this comes from rough drafts that inspired a piece in The Immanence of Myth. This is an important post re: the intent and future of this site so please read on...
Art is a medium of personal and cultural revolution.
How do myths of progress and individuality effect our perspective of art and
creativity? Though we regarded it from a macro- level in PrettySuicide Machine, I would like to turn our attention back to the
micro- level: specifically the myths that we have of artistic
progress, which we can then fold back into some of the larger issues
of progress within Western, which is to say, industrialized and
capitalist, culture. It is impossible that the myths that structure
the place of art within the world should not similarly structure our
views of value and commodity, or perhaps it could be flipped around
and remain the same.
Let's
consider: it
is a common conception that breakthroughs in science, philosophy and
the arts have all come about through critical analysis of an
established corpus of previous works, and that the process is a
gradual one. This is a myth cemented in the natural methodology of
teaching art history, or history in general: we assume a gradual
progress from one point to the next through time, carrying up to the
present day. Perhaps the rate of progress accelerates or slows down,
whether through the convergence or divergence of trade routes, the
friction and choke points of information of culture in the formation
of cities, or the growth of an arts culture in a certain location,
(not unlike a bacterial culture) and so on. But we imagine that we
can safely assume that this Hegelian myth of gradual synthesis is a
sound one. “In all ways we have Progressed, and this progression is
towards some end,” so says the teleological myth. Let's proceed
with it, but also consider the possibility that, like all myths, it
is also misleading.
It
also follows that wherever
we have a prevailing myth of “the artist,” rather than a
tradition of artisans and skilled tradesman that attempt to do
nothing beyond furthering and perfecting traditional methods, the
real breakthroughs occur in the hands of rare individuals who change
the playing field in varying degrees. Through figures such as Charlie
Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, or Ornette Coleman, blues and
jazz were transformed into bebop and free jazz. They all had varying
experience in the traditions that came before, but all of their
contributions are measured in the uniqueness of their own voice, and
how the addition of that voice forever changed the tune afterward. An
artist is often somewhere between a medium and a curator, picking
which elements in the screaming cacophony around us to focus on, to
enlarge or elaborate upon, or to rail against. What was Hunter Thompson's mode? What's yours? The emphasis on the
role of artist in this process, which really involves everyone
engaged within a particular social domain, is clearly something
valued in Western culture, even if it is also feared by the
conservative elements of that culture. (If a conservative
perspective is one that seeks to be backwards facing, emphasizing and
idealizing the importance of tradition rather than revolution.)
We
simply
don't find the same emphasis on an artist as a unique individual, at
least as the rule, in traditional tribal cultures of South America,
or in many Asian cultures before Western values began to take hold.
(Through it does crop up in various forms of guru worship, which is
probably a variation on a similar theme.)
