Cannibalism
posted by saurabh in Navel-gazing, The Future, We're Doomed!, What Is To Be Done |Here’s one to add to the “list of insights other people have probably already had”:
This morning I was at Mission Comics staring at some comic books - graphic novels, in fact - which are a medium I find attractive for reasons too numerous to list here. If you’ve read Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” you’re probably familiar with his presentation of the comic as a truly modern art form, whose loud, brash strokes and larger-than-life characters are appropriate allegorical vehicles for the oversized problems of the world. And as our cynical self-critique has become more elaborate, as the demand for analysis has become more stringent, comics, and the characters in them, have become more complex and fraught - a post-modern art-form, a digest edition of the contemporary mind. By peering through its pages we may get a glimpse of the cross-section of our gyri.
As usual* I am meandering towards my point - Anyway, I was looking at these comics; my companion commented on the revisionist nature of a lot of the work - hashing and rehashing old characters and storylines, reinventing them and updating them to reflect more modern sensibilities, or merely to explore the familiar tropes when pressed and extruded through the gears of a new apparatus.
This is nothing new, of course - art has always been collage-work, and maybe there is even a kind of prestige to be found in the artifice of reference. Shakespeare relentlessly plundered, from Plutarch and Ovid and many others. Did he even have a single original story? Is there such a thing? Perhaps not - the diet of words we’re fed on is itself formed from the regurgitations of thousands of generations preceding us; we are creatures built of contingencies. And of course, as Qohelet said, there is nothing new under the sun.
However, I don’t feel out of place in suggesting that contemporary art - contemporary media in general - elevates this kind of autophagy to a central principle. Practically all we produce is reconstructed from existing fragments - mashups, remixes, samples in music, “reboots” of film and television franchises, an endless parade of sequels, retellings of fairytales or children’s classics as seen through the bleary, fever-reddened eye of the present.
And simultaneously, as the lexicon of our culture expands, our memory (and therefore the body of reference we can draw on) narrows - we’re quickly going to proceed from chewing on our toes to swallowing up our own esophagus, Klein-bottle-like. Check out this Wired article suggesting reboots of scifi film and television stories, including the still-active television show Heroes, itself a shameless digest of superhero comics. The culmination of this trend will probably be publications composed only of chapter-heading quotes and a bibliography.†
To visit and revisit the past - even the recent past - is either the product of trauma - we are so overwhelmed by the events of the past century that coprophagia is a nutritional and digestive requirement - or else it is the product of fear. We fear the future, and we fear the presentation of new ideas, now that we are all so well-trained in the art of deconstruction. The scope of our problems is ever-broadening, but we long ago eradicated our traditional frameworks for addressing them. There is no way to imagine our future. So we re-imagine our past, again, and again, until all our flesh is consumed.
Meanwhile, the dragon looms ahead.
* I really ought to stop having these fanciful asides to my habitual readership, which surely does not exist. One can’t form habits around such an irregular basis.
† Juxtapose this laissez-faire referentiality with the accelerating trend towards corporations claiming copyrights over finer and finer grains of content‡; I probably ought to work this into my ill-formed thesis, but as usual I lack the intellectual rigor to bring this to completion.
‡ A disgusting coinage if ever there was one, as if words and ideas were so much birdseed to be held in vessels to attract the maddened and voracious flocks (viz., you, my dear readers). We ought to find the invidious bureaucrats who created the term “content provider” and scourge them till their skins are a tartan of bruises.
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I have an alternate theory. As you say at first, art has always been mostly recycled. So do you think that culture has really shifted dramatically in the last 20 years? Isn’t it more likely that you have changed, and being familiar with more things, find more and more that you’ve seen it before?
(On the other hand, kids today really are different.)
Well, I don’t think art has always been mostly recycled. I’d like to avoid the pitfall of implying a monolithic past, so I’ll start off by qualifying, and point out that the prehistoric and early historic past probably heavily favored “art” as ritual - building mythologies and figurative work and architectural styles through endless repetition of what preceded them, and only incrementally improving upon it.
But, in the intervening years, creativity became much more important, and the artist’s work was in inspiration, not in assembly. Joyce writes Ulysses around the skeleton of the Odyssey, but the import of it doesn’t lie mostly in that device. Prior to, say, thirty years ago, there’s nothing like a “remix”, or especially a “mash-up”, where the only creative work is in the surprising juxtaposition of two already well-established forms.
It’s possible that what we have in the modern world is really nothing new, but if so, it would really be surprising; the culture HAS changed. If the internet, the extreme democratization of media production via computers, the centrality of mass entertainment in public discourse, the motley diet of influences that our generation was raised on, had no influence on the way we produce art, I would be very shocked.
I’ll admit that my thesis is inadequately buttressed - many other possibilities exist: maybe we’re merely mythologizing the tidbits that made up our youth by turning them into symbols and elements. Or maybe the idea of ‘taste’ or merit has deteriorated, and therefore creativity gets lost amidst the doldrums of lazy work. And I don’t mean to be categorical, here, and suggest that there’s no such thing as original work in modern times, that all art is pastiche-work.
But I think we ought to be able to find a strong influence of the nihilism of our times on art, and I DO think the use of pastiche necessarily implies a fear of creating anew. There’s probably also something to be said for the increasing intrusion of criticism into the creative process, I’m not sure what.
All of this makes me wish I had studied some kind of literary theory so I would be better versed in the tools and language required to perform this kind of critique.
I’m given to understand (from Harold Bloom?) that Shakespeare wrote two ‘original’ plots - one of them A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
We fear the future, and we fear the presentation of new ideas, now that we are all so well-trained in the art of deconstruction.
Well, most people go about it naively - ‘deconstruction’ (in its crit-theory sense) transformed into consumerist behaviour patterns within a decade, and ‘remix culture’ hasn’t exactly increased the thoughtfulness of the average reader’s engagement with the ‘meaning’ of material. ‘We’re eating ourselves’ has been a common thread in cultural criticism for a long time, of course (ever read ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin? Extraordinary essay, nominally about its titular subject but diving into deep water by the end), and the early pomo theorists were preoccupied with the loss of the ‘grand narrative.’ You can get a little bit out of Debord, Baudrillard, Lyotard…but you don’t really need full-spectrum lit-crit background to catch their feeling.
The important counterweight to formal repetition, it seems, is emotional openness: if I recognize that my experience of The Princess Bride is not now what it was when I was ten - the Miracle Max schtick now reads as racially coded, the ‘true love wins’ ending seems more melancholy, Inigo’s revenge plan is pathetic/lucky rather than a good man’s destiny, etc. - then both experiences can cast light, and repetition isn’t terribly important in itself. As long as I give myself to the emotional logics the artist offers…
The Sopranos is a pastiche too, but the formal resonances between it and previous Mafia stories (particularly Goodfellas and the distant, sainted Godfather flicks) are meant to comment ironically on Tony’s life. That life is very real; it’s been rendered with care; and recognizing the fictional tactics doesn’t take away from the honesty and integrity of their execution. When people care about the stories they’re telling - which is to say, when people care about the people around them - you always know it. It always sings through, because we can spot a liar and feel comforted by people taking comfort in us.
In other words, don’t worry too much about ‘contemporary art.’ That insane categorization scheme exists only after the fact. Just listen to stories, and in your own stories, don’t lie. (Not to say ‘don’t fictionalize,’ which is unrelated.) Emotional connection isn’t graded on a curve.