Comments on: The Rest of Now

By: Quepem by the kilo Hartman de Souza on Mining in Goa « Kafila

Quepem by the kilo Hartman de Souza on Mining in Goa « Kafila — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:20:39 +0000

[...] comments buzzoff on The Rest of NowPrasanta Chakravarty on The Rest of NowCh. Muhammad Ashraf … on Kavita [...]

By: buzzoff

buzzoff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:29:13 +0000

‘The vocabulary of contests and gladiatorials has not changed much in the last two millennia. Speed and prowess matter as much as they did when prisoners, slaves and beasts fought it out in the Colosseum’s arena. If anything, the Olympic virtues, “citius, altius, fortius” (faster, higher, stronger) have become the governing maxims of the contemporary world – the pace of life and labour gets faster, profits and prices rise higher and armies get stronger. Our societies are Colosseums reborn. We are spectators, gladiators and beasts.’

Not being an intellectual per se, I am ill equipped to actully comment on the essay / article. However, as to the section quoted above, I ask you: isnt the sense of grandeur irrevocably lost? The grandeur that was (we feel) there in the meaningless slaughter of beasts and men, and bloodthirsty audience cheering them along, do we really have anything like that in our ‘Colosseums reborn’? I was reminded of Ruskin while going through your thoughts on art, but while reading the section in question, I was more specifically reminded of this:

‘There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say, irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is nver so noble as when he is reverent in this kind: nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it… or that old mountain servant, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief? – as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, ‘Another for Hector!’ And therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly, and famine and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them…’

Rather lengthy quote, but I hardly could have said it better myself. Where is the honour, the glory, the grandeur? Even in art, if the artist has to live for another painting, there must be categories: these are for my pleasure, and those are the ones that will be sold – because there are buyers who like such paintings. Not being judgemental here, not at all, but do you really find the grandeur anymore? If indeed you do, you are fortunate to have retained /acquired such clarity of perception which I have found myself lacking for perhaps the last twenty five years at least.
Thank you for what has been for me a very nostalgia evoking article :)

By: Prasanta Chakravarty

Prasanta Chakravarty — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:57:21 +0000

A brilliant piece. The delicate negotiation between memory and forgetting through the residual signposts is indeed a novel and noble idea. The aesthetic risks that high modernism took were bound to be politically highhanded as it reached a sort of crescendo in futurist practices. As Marinetti proclaimed: “…strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.” They are intensely connected to anarchist thought, especially indebted to Bergson’s intuitionism. Yet, political radicalism in art cut both ways. It is only that the likes of Marinetti, Carlo Cara or Wyndham Lewis tried reaching their inner being, the Absurd, via dynamism that they may have ended up celebrating fascism. One would do well to remember that Futurism did have a strong left anarchist backing too, especially by philosophically enjoining Bergson to the nihilist tendencies. Leftists continued to be associated with Futurism right up until 1924, when the socialists, communists, anarchists and anti-Fascists finally walked out of the Milan Congress. I guess the sixth Fururist doctrine will be equally welcomed by high modernnists (later trasferred into art deco and minimalism, fluxus & manga, for instance) and left phenomenologits, who celebrate the likes of Holderlin and pre-Socratists, that “The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.”

The artist engaged with the residual, I gather, is attempting something different, and distancing itself from the primordial. The ideals of slower, softer, deeper are politically extremely sage. But will such nobility produce art, which is more often than not, a business of charred souls and celestial rumblings?