This revolutionary experiment provided an alternative means of imagining events and its effect: in the gap left by splitting apart the image of the maternal body from that of her child, the temporality of the objects displayed emerges as an aesthetic device, in which the process of collection and the presentation of objects plays a key part, tracing the process of change but holding time in suspense, stretching out, in its document’s materiality, into the future.
For the authors, “profundity” is by definition polysyllabic: it means something too precious to be exposed to the uninitiated by the vulgar employment of the right word in the right place. Language is, for them, the iconostasis that preserves the holiness of the sanctuary within; only the clergy may enter, the congregation remaining strictly without, uncomprehending but adoring—preferably adoring because uncomprehending.
…Only state-dominated education and funding of cultural institutions could have resulted in this prose, which, incidentally, makes that of Leonid Brezhnev seem like Mark Twain’s.
If you want real art, go here: http://www.artrenewal.org/
Thank you for the link, Damo. That is a great site. It is very encouraging to see.
“the gap left by splitting apart the image of the maternal body from that of her child”
“stretching out, in its document’s materiality, into the future.”
With my Freudian head on, I suspect there is something here of the guilt of severing what should be the sacred tie between mother and child (contrast with art of Mary Cassatt).
A crass Materiality of appetites has been allowed to obtrude as substitute for our future, our legacy – a recognition of a violence to our dearest domestic ties
“In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.”
Edmund Burke
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.
Burke.
“profundity” … means something too precious to be exposed to the uninitiated by the vulgar employment of the right word in the right place.
When I read it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscurantism immediately struck in my mind. just fyi.
Actually, with regards to tie between mother and child, I should probably have just gone with ‘dearest domestic tie’ or equivalent.
But then there’s lots of ‘probably should have’s’ in what I write.
Bless you but the blog won’t wholly download for me. I could just read the text, however it is really awesome.