Back from the Grave

Back from the Grave



Sorry I've been gone so long. Busy keeping myself busy. This is a subject in an of itself- why is it so easy to keep oneself busy doing nothing, or at least, nothing much?

Anyways, I have this wonderful class on Early 20th century European painting. Very useful, very exciting. Not only is it informative to the subject, but the class becomes an excellent pretext for thinking hard about readings, of focusing on art in a dedicated manner, of getting the ole intellectual juices flowing, and of keeping one's instrument sharp.

But yeah- very useful. I've been convinced, through readings on Picasso, to dust off an old art project/alter ego. The alter ego is a fella called Poop Ruiz, some remote relation to Picasso. He's got all sorts of artistic delusions. The work is meant to be an ill-fitting, stunted early modernism filtered through post-postmodern eyes. It's meant to talk about artistic failure, play, the contemporary institutional structures of art, and more.

The reason I've decided to dust him off is that I've discovered that Picasso is more compelling and interesting than I had thought, that he was a figure who batted away conventions often enough with no idea what monsters might come out of it, perhaps merely because he could. Picasso's cubist constructions and collages do not comfortably fit with the modernist ideas and intentions that have been ascribed to them.

In general, we have a way of sainting our revolutionaries, of enshrining them. All revolutionaries and all revolutions are messy and so are revolutionaries. But that's a good thing! It's a disservice to saint just about everyone.{I daresay saints aren't really the saints we create for ourselves, to simplify the world and make things clean and easy} But it's doubly a disservice to saint people like Picasso, people who screwed around, and screwed up the old version of art. After Picasso, you simply can't make the same paintings. Or, if you do, it means something else. That's what the avant garde means!

That's why we should be simultaneously appreciative of our revolutionaries and exasperated. The new world can be a scary place to live. And some people don't realize what it means to live in the new world, so they try to pull back the clock- to build a world that no longer exists. And these people don't realize that they can't build a past with todays tools, you get a sick, bizarre shambles!

And Poop Ruiz is about this phenomenon, only, of course, with a twist. Today, Picasso's is an old revolution. But Picasso's revolution, on a number of levels, failed. Avant gardes are supposed to become old hat, but Cubism is simultaneously consigned to a deep past and still threateningly "modern."
Is ours not at least a modern, if not a postmodern, or post-postmodern age? Well sort of. But ask a conservative... or don't.