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Is cynicism killing creativity?

04:16 / 28.08.02

A thought which has been going through my mind lately and has coalesced into something more concrete when I started thinking about art movements.

Would it be possible to start an active art movement with a manifesto now? Or would too many people sneer at it in jaded hipness? I almost wonder if it's possible to create anything in earnest any more or whether you have to stand one step removed ready to defend your with qualifications of "irony" or "pastiche" or "homage". Almost as though it's not enough to feel things any more without having an overly intellectual - and almost sarcastic - justification for it.

Without such a justification, is there a danger of having the work dismissed as pretension or posturing or, at worse, accused of naiveté?

Thinking further about it, I realise that this extends to the way I perceive a lot of activist type actions - be it posturing or protesting - being dismissed with a shake of the head and an under the breath "wanker".

Are we over post-modernism - for want of a better word - yet? It seems that almost any book I read is either quite po-mo, or if it is a more pure creation, it's because it's structure harkens back before po-mo, probably through a conscious rejection of it. Am I reading the wrong books or have I not seen the point where po-mo went from being deconstruction to construction?

Should this be two separate threads?

Professor Silly

06:20 / 28.08.02

I try NOT to think to much about manifestos and what-not. Nearly everytime I mention I play music in a band I get the question "what kind of music do you play?"...and I'm never sure how to answer it. Maybe we're getting ready to move beyond labels and just focus on continually creating new things...

...bright and shiney new things....

As for the cynics: fuck them. If they can't create something for others do they have to complain about the work of others? I guess they'll do what they do, but that doesn't mean I have to listen. Both cynics and manifestos deal with TALKING about something rather than DOING something....

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:48 / 28.08.02

Stuckism and the New Puritan movement might both be seen as recent artistic "movements" seeking to escape the oppressive fug of irony under which we all apparently labour.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:32 / 28.08.02

A movement, in the formalised sense - or a manifesto - implies an acknowledgement of the need for a verbalised, theoretical basis for artwork. Possibly the only way to get past irony and conceptually-based work is simply to do the thing itself. In much recent art, the object itself is secondary to the dialogue which surrounds it, which makes it inaccessible to those who don't follow theoretical discussions and oddly irrelevant for itself.

I'd look for something which comes without a verbal iteration of meaning, but which looks toward immanence - something which eschews critical self-appraisal, and instead tries just to be.

Tryphena Absent

12:55 / 28.08.02

I once accused a friend of being cynical, his answer was 'I'm not cynical, I'm an idealist who's lost all hope'.

As for those people who sneer at the jaded hipness of the art manifesto- well, why worry about them? - don't you think they're kind of sad.

13:56 / 28.08.02

Earnestness is the only salvation. Isolated artistic cells creating new things, believing in them and turning their backs on the all-seeing eye of the media might be the answer. Self-sufficiency assured by one's actual proficiency and talent, of course, if present for enought time to be noticed as a "trend" should be enough to get the ball rolling. Of course, we need *real* good material and people prepared to be lynched and martyrized as good precursors always are. And 15 years from now, who knows, we can get people wondering why they felt satisfied with mere streetsmart when they could have genius.

15:29 / 28.08.02

Even the most fertile soil needs to rest a while between harvests. Picture our current cultural situation as late winter, with not much going on above ground, but lots of decay happening underground to provide nutrients for next season. We pull down the style and message every so often so that we can reconstruct later, in a new way.

I'm not sure what you mean by cynicism -- to me, that's the willingness to do something even though you know it's bullshit, because you can profit by it, but maybe I use the word wrongly. I think what you're talking about is a sort of knowing parallysis that will loosen up once it's time to loosen up -- once spring is sprung. Once you start actually working on some creative effort, though, you'll probably find it's not an intellectual exercise at all and your fears, while real in their own way, were not related to your ability to make good art.

The idea that art must have some theory behind it comes, I guess, from a cynical assumption that art must be useful in some way or it's a waste of time. I don't think that's really necessary -- it just needs to be pleasing in some way, to some one. If enough different artists are pleasing in similar ways at roughly the same time, other people will come up with theories as to why. A theory is not proof, though. The work is its own proof.

pointless and uncalled for

20:16 / 28.08.02

I'm inclined to think that cynicism spawns creativity.

01:05 / 29.08.02

I think that perhaps my negative feelings come from a blurring of terminology. I actually went and looked cynicism up at dictionary.com and one of the definitions came back with is:

An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others

Which is pretty much in line with my own mind. I am cynical of just about everything but will explore and learn as much as I can so I can for an opinion beyond the initial "that's shit".

I guess what I am railing against is the cynicisms that sneers but does not explore.

Haus: Do you disagree that irony permeates almost all creative endeavours of the current age? (In western society at least.)

Special Boy: Do you mean in an "I can do better than that!" and then going out and doing it sort of way, or something else? Can you please elaborate.

07:38 / 29.08.02

I consider the Dogma film movement as pretty much an active art movement with a manifesto.

And cynicism never stopped anything that was going to happen anyway. If it ever did have an effect it just made the people it was directed at a little tougher and more considered in their actions - never a bad thing.

09:30 / 29.08.02

Are we over post-modernism - for want of a better word - yet? It seems that almost any book I read is either quite po-mo, or if it is a more pure creation, it's because it's structure harkens back before po-mo, probably through a conscious rejection of it. Am I reading the wrong books or have I not seen the point where po-mo went from being deconstruction to construction?

Why on earth would anyone want to "get over" post-modernism? It has been one of the most fruitful and creative periods in the history of art. Deconstruction has given us such powerful insights into the processes of creation and reception of art, which, speaking for myself, has made me a far better writer than I would otherwise be. I fail to see any antithesis between deconstruction and construction. To investigate the process of artistic communication and the concepts on which it is based in order to see how it works is one of the most useful things an artist can do. Preferencing "pure creation" over deconstruction is just as limiting as the reverse.

Surely any serious artist wants to explore hir art and attempt to understand how a piece of art works on its audience. The mystery of how meaning is created by the reader/viewer/listener when ze approaches a work of art is something I believe to be very worthy of exploration, and it's fine with me if people want to write plenty of books about it, or explore it consciously in their work, playing with the concepts of artist/audience and meaning/non-meaning etc.

However this does not mean that you should feel compelled to produce work that is consciously post-modern. If the only kind of writing I could find anywhere was post-modern novels toying with these concepts then it would be a pretty limited world. Anyone who criticizes you for writing love songs rather than theory is someone to ignore, yet at the same time, anyone who is afraid to taint their "pure creation" with "cynical" theory is falling into the same trap. I think this dichotomy is a forced one, and needn't trouble you if your aim is to create the most meaningful art that you can.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:49 / 29.08.02

Fist: And cynicism never stopped anything that was going to happen anyway.

I'm afraid, me old darling, that you are talking through your hat. In any number of industries, mine not the least, a cynical reaction can kill a project stone dead at a number of stages. And cynical decisions by originators often produce mediocre results.

I battle the problem under discussion every day. Self-referential work is tired and tiring, yet work which does not acknowledge itself can be trite. Getting something off the ground - even in your own head - whilst fighting that battle can be very hard. Let alone persuading others to play too - which they'll have to, or you're playing to an audience of none.

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:55 / 29.08.02

Haus: Do you disagree that irony permeates almost all creative endeavours of the current age? (In western society at least.)

I think that Greek Tragedy and the Platonic dialogues are positively riddled with irony. Beyond that, I am not sure why you keep talking about cynicism and then asking about irony.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

14:40 / 29.08.02

Don't answer that. Make him work it out.

Come on, Haus, it's a no-brainer.

15:55 / 29.08.02

But the irony at work in, say, Oedipus, is way different from the self-conscious ironic commentary that permeates art today. The first is used as a resource to heighten the dramatic effect. The second is merely a wink at the audience meaning: "Look at my references! Look how I quote! Am I adult or not?".

at the scarwash

20:46 / 29.08.02

Fist--Von Trier wrote the Maifesto, right? And has continually broken its precepts in letter and in spirt, especially in Dancer.

Anyway, I think manifestos are entertaining at best, and it seems that most 20th century artists agree. Look at the various Dada (I keep wanting to write manifesti) manifestos (manifestoes? manifestuses? Manifetuses?). And most art movements with serious manifestos are at their most interesting when they break dogma. Who needs manifestos, anyway.

As for being post post modern, I think that artists are starting to use to tools of post modernism to say things that post modernists never really allowed themselves to say. I would say that David Foster Wallace, who uses truckloads of post modern techniques, is trying to say something true, something that the abrasively experimental pure post-modern approach would call a meaningless attempt to capture something that can't be captured. I think that in some ways, The Roayal Tannenbaums is a film that uses post modern methods, but to tell a nice family story. Pomo has become mainstreamed, and I think that is where its best fruits will come from.

But, for this discussion to be fruitful we'd probably have to agree on a definition of post modern, and that's never happened before ever in the world, so...

We're The Great Old Ones Now

21:16 / 29.08.02

It's far easier in art than elsewhere. At least there was a 'modern' period which can be identified.

09:14 / 30.08.02

Lyotard defines post-modernism somewhere as an absence of meta-narratives, which I think is quite a workable definition. It's definitely a feature of it which sticks in the craw for many; placing theory on an equal footing with art.

I find this a very useful thing to do, as it foregrounds the importance of all forms of creation, rather than being hung up on primary creation vs secondary analysis. And there's certainly no danger of theory books replacing novels, so we can afford to blur the boundaries and have novels which are conscious of their own artifice, and theory which utilizes language to the full.

And far from art turning into a "meaningless attempt to capture something that can't be captured", I think the revelation of post-modernism that all art is artificial and an exceedingly imperfect attempt at communication, frees the artist to explore all aspects of this process, rather than expecting a one-to-one communication of a self-coherent story from one person to another. Rather than attempting to ignore this process or assume it to be a negligible part of the transaction, it highlights just these imperfections, as the true repositories of the meaning being sought.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:46 / 30.08.02

all art is artificial and an exceedingly imperfect attempt at communication

I'd take issue with that. I think it's imperfect if viewed in the expectation of specific ideas. I think some art can convey volumes of non-verbal stuff. I've suggested this before - that art can be thought of as conveying experience and ethos without the empirical experience to back it up - so you get the feeling, the pre-verbal weltanschauung, without the endless micro-experiences which would go to produce it.

10:28 / 30.08.02

Yep, art can certainly convey plenty of non-verbal stuff. What I mean is that all communication is imperfect and indirect. Whatever you recreate from the artefact which I produce, whether it's a painting or a spoken "good morning", will never be the precise meaning that leaves my hands/mouth/etc. In fact, as Derrida points out, there is no such thing as literal language. Everything is figurative to a degree. And the recognition of this fact frees us from clamouring to find the "correct" meaning, and rather we may choose to investigate the process of retardation by which an act of communication eventually reaches an audience in an altered manner.

11:11 / 30.08.02

"Look at my references! Look how I quote! Am I adult or not?".
This has been going on for quite a while if my old lecturers are to be believed. My study of Augustan poetry consisted of little more than scouring the works of Ovid, Propertius et al looking for "bee sipping the sweetest nectar from the choicest flowers" or "I drink not from the mighty river but the bubbling fount of Helicon" type imagery and viewing the poetry as little more than the poets' attempts to place themselves within a (ususally Alexandrian Hellenistic) context. Disappointing really, as I imagine the poetry WAS more than a hall of mirrors.

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:44 / 30.08.02

Well, yes. And yes. They were. But they existed within a tradition, and particularly in Ovid and Horace that tradition was used with different aims to create a simultaneous ironic distance and identification with the messages of the form. Emotional and intellectual response is incited by reference, although often not the same emotional response as the original - vide Odes 3.9, where the two former lovers are mature, polite, complimentary, a little wistful but (in a bit of an upset on points) emotionally literate. Creates a very different setting.

Cynicism in Rakehell's case, as far as I can tell, means a distrust of the purity of the intent of the author (what? the alarm? to the Barthes-cave!) of work or movement. Irony, also as far as I can tell, means a knowing, self-conscious distancing in order to avoid inspiring cynicism. I would certainly agree that, within that paradigm, there are works too afraid to be seen as mawkish which disappear into endless reflexivity and reference. But for every one of those one could present perhaps a dozen examples of works or movements the absolute lack of self-awareness of which makes them intolerable.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

12:04 / 30.08.02

Loomis - Whatever you recreate from the artefact which I produce, whether it's a painting or a spoken "good morning", will never be the precise meaning that leaves my hands/mouth/etc. In fact, as Derrida points out, there is no such thing as literal language.

Perfectly true - but actually, I'd suggest that you won't know the precise meaning of your 'good morning' either - you're not conscious all the time of everything your actions mean to you. At least, not unless your consciousness is scarily different from mine. What an intriguing idea. Anyway, the kind of communication I'm talking about exists in (possibly even as) a state which preceeds definition and cogitation.

Here's a way of thinking of it: I make a piece of art. I don't begin to comprehend consciously everything which I put into it. It is a statement of my identity at the time, in one way or another. I go on instinct and in some cases a technical or theoretical perception, but much of what is done will not be verbally explicable. You see this, and you take it on board. I've just dumped a whole ton of stuff in your head. I don't know what it is and nor do you. You may never have a use for it, you may never unpack it, it may do nothing for you. On the other hand, you may find yourself in a situation where you need a new template, where you come up against something of which you have no experience, but to which my art is relevant, and there you are, with at least a shadow of an approach to guide you. Transmitted experience, ready to use.

Goodness Gracious Meme

12:50 / 30.08.02

Couple of things, that interest me, is that whenever this kind of question around creation, intentionality and motivation comes up, people only ever really consider textual media - it's all books.... why is that? Plenty of artists and makers round here, why aren't they here?

And when (visual? conceptual?) art *is*referenced, it's used to support points that don't neccessarily work across artforms/take no account of the vast differences in creation across media.

And there is a 'modern' period in visual art, but there was plenty of post-modern, pre-modern, non-modern, whatever-else-modern activity during this period. Or the term is being used as easy curatorial shorthand. It *isn't* simpler.

13:09 / 30.08.02

Yeah Plums I'm definitely guilty of that, because I'm a writer, but also because the thing about the mixture of theory and art, is that theory is written, so it's always going to find the most play in an art that is also written, rather than painting or whatever. Obviously post-modernism applies to all art, but writing makes a convenient test case.

at the scarwash

21:32 / 30.08.02

"...with at least a shadow of an approach to guide you..."
--Nick

Yeah, and isn't that one of the things that makes art so goddamned exciting, it's that same rush I had when I was five and I wondered if my "red" was the same "red as my friend saw. What if, when we saw "red," he was actually seeing my "green?" And how would I ever know? My point about David Foster Wallace and Wes Anderson was not that they weren't aware that "all communication is imperfect," or that they (or I) feel that there was something impure or cynically clever about the PoMos, rather that they've learned the tools and decided that they don't care if communication is imperfect. The labwork on the topic has been done, and it is a good working theory. Now lets take some of the applications of the research and see what can be done with it.

05:23 / 02.09.02

test - I didn't want to bring up specific names, but I also view DFW as someone who "learned the tools and decided that [he didn't] care if communication is imperfect". I rememeber reading his writing for the first time and thinking that what I was reading felt really fresh and new, like I hadn't read it before.

I think what I meant by "get over" was control the fascination or obsession not discard. I may have had comics at the front of my brain when writing that and perhaps comics are a little behind in terms of artistic exploration, but a lot of the time po-mo influenced writing reads like a cop-out or just plain lazy. You know, the typical "Shock! Character breaks fourth wall and talks to reader!" Yeah, big deal.

I think even DFW sometimes gets a little to concerned with the style of writing rather than what he's writing - if such a distinction can be made - but he has enough talent to pull it off.

Perhaps that's what comics is missing: talent.

In regard to the cynicism, it just seems as though all artistic endeavour must now come complete with it's own critique. There seems to be a whole lot of things this represents, or is representative of, to me at least. Whilst I think this is a good in a lot of cases - and seems mandatory with a lot of abstract or conceptual art - it does rather forcibly move art from the emotional to the intellectual.

Poke it with a stick

09:35 / 02.09.02

Off at a slight tangent, but linking in to the ideas of a critique being included within the work and also the desire to be ironic rather than sincere/pretentious - Jake and Dinos Chapman tried to cover all the bases a couple of years back.
The pair studied for their GCSE Art and worked towards this in their ctrademark manner (viscera, gynaecological imagery). They then proceeded to hold up their deeply amusing "D" Grade as an example of how out of touch society was from the cutting edge.
Or they're just two silly boys who decided to get one up on an old art teacher.
The desire to shock appears to have become a manifesto of its own for many artists, but has been championed by people who are overly-fond of knob jokes.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

11:39 / 02.09.02

This business of including an autocritique, however, brings us back to the question at hand. The assumption appears to be that art requires justification. If you have to do it ironically, you're either defending or theorising in some way. Does that place a barrier between the artist and creativity? Between the art-ee and the object of contemplation? Irony is withdrawn, wry, disengaged from the object.

Does that mean that immanent art is impossible?