|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Does Writing Erase Art?
| Article
# : |
18960 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
6,301 Words |
| Author
: |
Ellen Dissanayake
After fifteen years abroad (in Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea,
and Nigeria), Ellen Dissanayake now teaches at the New School
for Social Research and is employed by Transcripts Associates
in New York City. The author of numerous articles on art and
the arts, she is currently completing a book, Deep Art, in
which she proposes an alternative to both high and superficial
art. |
To suggest that writing erases art (rather than being itself erased or erasable) might appear to be one more twist in the postmodern formulary of grammatological buzzwords, and not a particularly original one at that. According to Derridean scripture, writing is "the name of [the] gesture that effaces the presence of a thing and yet keeps it legible, "so that art--like knowing or the psyche or being--can quite legitimately be put under erasure (sous rature).
Although I do propound something rather similar, my discussion of the erasure of art by writing has a very different ancestry--call it prehistoric, nonliterate, anachronistic--and is guided by a down-to-earth orientation foreign to the Parisian literati and other mapmakers of the poststructuralist universe. It is rather amazing that coming from such different traditions we could reach such an apparently similar conclusion and mean something so different by it.
The perspective I use rests on a fundamental premise that, in the intellectual and aesthetic climate of present-day America, may sound impossibly--if not naively--clear and straightforward. This is that art can (and must) first be considered as a universal predilection and compulsion of the human species, and that we Americans of the late twentieth century belong to that species as well. In other words, when we think about human existence in general and about human desires and needs (of which art is one) in particular, we have to broaden our sights to take into account more than just our city or nation, our race or geographical area, our decade or century.
This species-centered view of art and life, I believe, corroborates concretely and persuasively from the bottom up, as it were, a truth about human existence and human nature that postmodernist philosophies--and indeed all the permutations of romantic thought--are responses to. This is that reason and rationality, analysis and objectivity--which modern societies extol and attempt to enshrine as supreme--values are not by themselves fully satisfying to the human animal. Despite all the benefits of comfort and leisure they have bestowed, they are not enough, and the deprived creature cannot help but flail about in search of what will give more complete nourishment.
Hence the emphases (in art as opposed to life, which in modern society have been separated) on emotion and spirit, the unconscious, the archetypal, the earthy, on unpredictability and immediacy. For the past two centuries, primitivism and the elemental have fascinated and allured those who feel
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
