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Repetition: or, actually, more new stuff about needing to know more than we can manage
(I tried to put this under an LJ-cut but they seem to have changed the rules, or I am misremembering them.)
I had quite forgotten the dimensions of “hyacinth/Hyacinth” textual problem in T. S. Eliot (i.e., “they called me the hyacinth girl” in the line I didn’t remember, which comes just before the other person in the dialogue refers to their visit to “the Hyacinth garden”), and this lapse is illustrative of how much the High Modernist literature that was written in English no longer seems like something I feel the need to revisit frequently. I won’t say it is “irrelevant,” because very few things in life are irrelevant; relevance is relative, and ultimately everything reveals some otherwise unsuspected aspect of everything else.
I recall how impenetrable the historical parts of “The Waste Land” were to me at age eighteen; in fact, it took decades before I completely understood the extent to which the poem depends on historical references that were completely clear to anyone who was reading the London newspapers in 1919 and living in the rapidly changing English society that has captivated the TV watchers of “Downton Abbey.” Eliot was sufficiently captivated or alarmed by the fundamental transformation of Central and Eastern Europe circa 1920 (to an extent that would not be replicated until 1945 and 1989) to go back to the German language in which he had once studied philosophy, and pore over Blick ins Chaos with its offhand reference to The Brothers Karamazov.
I’m surprised that I didn’t remember that the “hyacinth garden” passage is almost a direct translation of a poem by Catullus that I had loved in high school because it was a frustrated love poem (I didn’t then realize it was Catullus’ translation of a poem by Sappho) and because it happened to flow pleasingly in accented syllables, in contrast to the clunky-sounding rhythms of so much of Rome’s quantitative verse. Reading the helpful bilingual version of Catullus 51 on Wikipedia, I noticed that Eliot’s “heart of light” is his transformation of a Roman idiom that Eliot turns into a mystical sexual vision.
We could do this sort of interpretive play with quite a bit of the Modernist past; I’ve finally gotten hold of the 1968 bilingual edition of that other great poetry book of 1922, Mário de Andrade’s Paulicea Desvairada (English translation Hallucinated City), which Brazilian bookstores don’t even carry in the original. (Nobody in São Paulo knew what I was talking about when I asked in 2012, and not because my Portuguese is nonexistent.)
And this is further illustrative of the problem of ever knowing enough about enough things. If Octávio Paz didn’t mention it somewhere, I am ignorant of the inheritance of Mexican literature, never mind contemporary writers. If I may cross the Atlantic to Africa for a moment, I know exactly one poem by one writer from São Tomé e Principe, and I read that poem thirty years ago; and back in the Western Hemisphere, I know a modest bit about the art and literature of Guyana, but what about next-door Guyane, which obviously has a francophone literature and indigenous and/or international art?
John Leonard kept us anglophones up to date on global literature via such entertaining compilations of his reviews as When the Kissing Had to Stop, but he’s dead. (I note that an anthology of his essays has just been published.) Pico Iyer’s Tropical Classical was illuminating with regard to currents in global literature, but Iyer seems to have moved on to other interests—or maybe it just hasn’t occurred to me to do a web search for his uncollected book reviews.
I am working my way through The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, a brand-new volume based on an exhibition in Karlsruhe. It itemizes the 150 or so global biennials (local efforts like the Atlanta Biennale don’t count, though New Orleans’ Prospects 1 and 2 are in there) and summarizes the high points of the evolution of a global art world, from the demise of Euro-modernist provinciality in the wake of the stink over the 1984 “’Primitivism’” show and the 1989 riposte of “Magiciens de la Terre” to the proliferation of global biennials beyond the range of Venice and São Paulo and Havana’s riposte to them both. (Despite its best efforts, the Whitney Biennial is still primarily a look at what’s fashionable in New York, which is still regarded as obviously the only art world really worth caring about.)
The issue of power relations aside, one reason so much of the world’s art remains obscure even in the age of the internet is that there is simply too much of it, and too much of it is worth seeing. (It used to be axiomatic that although we might have to learn its aesthetics to address it on its own terms rather than ours, art, unlike literature, didn’t require translation; but now that so much of contemporary art is video-based or computer-based conceptualism incorporating text, it does require translation. A few years ago, an artist born in Belgrade (Beograd) and living in Zagreb, according to the web text (the book has him currently in Belgrade), made an often-reproduced piece that consisted of the slogan, “An artist who cannot speak English is no artist” since the global curators cannot read, for example, text-based art or artist's statements written in Serbian or Croatian.) I have been putting off for the past year attempting to review a thick volume documenting contemporary Indonesian art, which of course means mostly art from Java and in fact mostly from Jakarta—when they haven’t already decamped for the art capitals of Europe and North America. If I find artists represented who are working in Kalimantan or Irian Jaya, I’ll be surprised.
Then there is the fact that we would really like to go back and look at something a little older once in a while, and maybe even reinterpret it. Here where I live in Atlanta, the current Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera show at the high Museum is happily supplemented by two reading rooms created by hotshot Mexico City designers, giving us an up-to-the-minute glimpse of globally attuned creativity in our usually neglected neighbor. But we also would like to reach beyond the previous century, and we do, as in the Carlos Museum’s groundbreaking show last year, “’For I Am the Black Jaguar,’” a survey of the role of shamanistic and visionary experience in the art of the ancient Americas.
This illustrates the other problem with keeping up with global art; you can view digital reproductions online (and even download or stream videos and project them at the scale at which they were intended to be seen), but except for video and digital media, the stuff itself has to be wrapped and shipped. In the case of video and digital media, the compatible viewing equipment isn’t always within the budget of the folks who would like to have access to the work.
And then there is the time factor; even though it takes less time to watch a video or go through an art exhibition than it does to read a novel, at some point most people have to stop long enough to earn a living, or keep up with what is going on in science, technology, politics, and maybe their own families. Not to mention acts of mercy and compassion, grocery shopping, and maybe an occasional non-artworld movie, which leads to the guilty feeling that they ought to be doing more to keep up with popular culture in their own culture and across the planet, with the stuff they can’t endure being the stuff they should be familiar with most of all.
After they have done all this, some theory-minded friend will reproach them for not having noticed the latest twist on the school of thought that was discarded with contempt by the followers of intellectual fashion only a couple of years previously.
No wonder we end up saying, “Oh, to hell with it.”
(I tried to put this under an LJ-cut but they seem to have changed the rules, or I am misremembering them.)
I had quite forgotten the dimensions of “hyacinth/Hyacinth” textual problem in T. S. Eliot (i.e., “they called me the hyacinth girl” in the line I didn’t remember, which comes just before the other person in the dialogue refers to their visit to “the Hyacinth garden”), and this lapse is illustrative of how much the High Modernist literature that was written in English no longer seems like something I feel the need to revisit frequently. I won’t say it is “irrelevant,” because very few things in life are irrelevant; relevance is relative, and ultimately everything reveals some otherwise unsuspected aspect of everything else.
I recall how impenetrable the historical parts of “The Waste Land” were to me at age eighteen; in fact, it took decades before I completely understood the extent to which the poem depends on historical references that were completely clear to anyone who was reading the London newspapers in 1919 and living in the rapidly changing English society that has captivated the TV watchers of “Downton Abbey.” Eliot was sufficiently captivated or alarmed by the fundamental transformation of Central and Eastern Europe circa 1920 (to an extent that would not be replicated until 1945 and 1989) to go back to the German language in which he had once studied philosophy, and pore over Blick ins Chaos with its offhand reference to The Brothers Karamazov.
I’m surprised that I didn’t remember that the “hyacinth garden” passage is almost a direct translation of a poem by Catullus that I had loved in high school because it was a frustrated love poem (I didn’t then realize it was Catullus’ translation of a poem by Sappho) and because it happened to flow pleasingly in accented syllables, in contrast to the clunky-sounding rhythms of so much of Rome’s quantitative verse. Reading the helpful bilingual version of Catullus 51 on Wikipedia, I noticed that Eliot’s “heart of light” is his transformation of a Roman idiom that Eliot turns into a mystical sexual vision.
We could do this sort of interpretive play with quite a bit of the Modernist past; I’ve finally gotten hold of the 1968 bilingual edition of that other great poetry book of 1922, Mário de Andrade’s Paulicea Desvairada (English translation Hallucinated City), which Brazilian bookstores don’t even carry in the original. (Nobody in São Paulo knew what I was talking about when I asked in 2012, and not because my Portuguese is nonexistent.)
And this is further illustrative of the problem of ever knowing enough about enough things. If Octávio Paz didn’t mention it somewhere, I am ignorant of the inheritance of Mexican literature, never mind contemporary writers. If I may cross the Atlantic to Africa for a moment, I know exactly one poem by one writer from São Tomé e Principe, and I read that poem thirty years ago; and back in the Western Hemisphere, I know a modest bit about the art and literature of Guyana, but what about next-door Guyane, which obviously has a francophone literature and indigenous and/or international art?
John Leonard kept us anglophones up to date on global literature via such entertaining compilations of his reviews as When the Kissing Had to Stop, but he’s dead. (I note that an anthology of his essays has just been published.) Pico Iyer’s Tropical Classical was illuminating with regard to currents in global literature, but Iyer seems to have moved on to other interests—or maybe it just hasn’t occurred to me to do a web search for his uncollected book reviews.
I am working my way through The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, a brand-new volume based on an exhibition in Karlsruhe. It itemizes the 150 or so global biennials (local efforts like the Atlanta Biennale don’t count, though New Orleans’ Prospects 1 and 2 are in there) and summarizes the high points of the evolution of a global art world, from the demise of Euro-modernist provinciality in the wake of the stink over the 1984 “’Primitivism’” show and the 1989 riposte of “Magiciens de la Terre” to the proliferation of global biennials beyond the range of Venice and São Paulo and Havana’s riposte to them both. (Despite its best efforts, the Whitney Biennial is still primarily a look at what’s fashionable in New York, which is still regarded as obviously the only art world really worth caring about.)
The issue of power relations aside, one reason so much of the world’s art remains obscure even in the age of the internet is that there is simply too much of it, and too much of it is worth seeing. (It used to be axiomatic that although we might have to learn its aesthetics to address it on its own terms rather than ours, art, unlike literature, didn’t require translation; but now that so much of contemporary art is video-based or computer-based conceptualism incorporating text, it does require translation. A few years ago, an artist born in Belgrade (Beograd) and living in Zagreb, according to the web text (the book has him currently in Belgrade), made an often-reproduced piece that consisted of the slogan, “An artist who cannot speak English is no artist” since the global curators cannot read, for example, text-based art or artist's statements written in Serbian or Croatian.) I have been putting off for the past year attempting to review a thick volume documenting contemporary Indonesian art, which of course means mostly art from Java and in fact mostly from Jakarta—when they haven’t already decamped for the art capitals of Europe and North America. If I find artists represented who are working in Kalimantan or Irian Jaya, I’ll be surprised.
Then there is the fact that we would really like to go back and look at something a little older once in a while, and maybe even reinterpret it. Here where I live in Atlanta, the current Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera show at the high Museum is happily supplemented by two reading rooms created by hotshot Mexico City designers, giving us an up-to-the-minute glimpse of globally attuned creativity in our usually neglected neighbor. But we also would like to reach beyond the previous century, and we do, as in the Carlos Museum’s groundbreaking show last year, “’For I Am the Black Jaguar,’” a survey of the role of shamanistic and visionary experience in the art of the ancient Americas.
This illustrates the other problem with keeping up with global art; you can view digital reproductions online (and even download or stream videos and project them at the scale at which they were intended to be seen), but except for video and digital media, the stuff itself has to be wrapped and shipped. In the case of video and digital media, the compatible viewing equipment isn’t always within the budget of the folks who would like to have access to the work.
And then there is the time factor; even though it takes less time to watch a video or go through an art exhibition than it does to read a novel, at some point most people have to stop long enough to earn a living, or keep up with what is going on in science, technology, politics, and maybe their own families. Not to mention acts of mercy and compassion, grocery shopping, and maybe an occasional non-artworld movie, which leads to the guilty feeling that they ought to be doing more to keep up with popular culture in their own culture and across the planet, with the stuff they can’t endure being the stuff they should be familiar with most of all.
After they have done all this, some theory-minded friend will reproach them for not having noticed the latest twist on the school of thought that was discarded with contempt by the followers of intellectual fashion only a couple of years previously.
No wonder we end up saying, “Oh, to hell with it.”
