Notes Toward a Peculiar Romanticism by Andrew Prieto MFA AP14
Mildred's Lane, Morgan J. Puett and Mark Dion
In his book "In Praise Of Love," a short book of interviews with Nicolas Truong, Alain Badiou offers a practical treatise of romanticism.
His philosophical stance begins with the analysis of online dating, which he proposes is a risk-free arrangement based on similarity and consumerism, while in truth, love is founded on risk and difference. Despite Badiou's politics (politics are always romanticized, particularly communism) there are some intense moments of insight. We see in quotes like, “We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.” He speaks with an almost Freidrichian sense of scale and unavoidable allusions to the sublime. His is a drive to push the confines of compressed, mediated space outward, to expand and expand with it. This emancipatory force is a crucial quality of romanticism, particularly the unapologetic optimism of peculiar romanticism.
Alain Badiou with bird.
Popular culture has also shown these leanings since the turn of the century, especially in the UK, the home base for the "hauntology" movement in popular music (Boards of Canada, their offshoot record label Ghost Box Music, internet writer and theorist Mark "Kpunk" Fisher, and critic Simon Reynolds). This genre is defined by using sonic information and textures from the past to evoke a sense of time slippage, gazing backwards from the future, a kind of self-conscious, evaluative nostalgia. In the US we see almost the opposite approach to the same phenomenon with the explosion of lo fi bedroom recordings made possible and accessible by digital technology. These artists tend to use traditional instrumentation with the occasional mixture of sounds made on electronic equipment to channel sounds from the past with the feel of a future past. The American ambassador of this trend is the artist Ariel Pink (who began as a visual artist studying at CalArts). He extends postmodernist pastiche into the personal by using recording techniques and stylistic cues from the past, for example in his break out track "Round and Round" the use of both the mouth beatbox and lush, Beach Boys-esque Baroque pop, where both become idiosyncratically all his own. It is all about his hand, his presence, his aura. He then transmits these recordings through digital media, which changes their meaning and implication by the simple fact that these technologies are available to most everyone. In all of this there is an element of Wabi Sabi, which we know is a pre-modern, nonwestern view of aesthetics based on "transience and imperfection." For example, there are companies creating iPhone cases out of natural hardwoods with the idea that we will then sense the supple texture of aging through the earthy material (wood is always alive and changing), and iPhone speakers crafted out of a simple sections of bamboo to amplify the digital sound. I am reminded of the romantic modernist William Morris' "News From Nowhere" as an earlier example of an attempt at providing insight into technological production through the return to natural forms and tradition.
But today there is a peculiar romantic sensibility, best seen in certain currents of performance art as demonstrated this summer in a performance I witnessed by artist and fellow Art Practice participant Brenda Perry. This installation/performance hybrid entitled "Water Bearer," by my estimation, reconsidered the function of the performative as much as the subject of the actions performed. Perry is an artist/resident of the historically drought-prone Rio Grande, which was the focus of this work. In the installation room we saw a video of a digitally imaged rainstorm projected on the back wall of the space. In front of the projection was a mass of sand where clay vessels were seated. From above commonplace water bottles dangled from the ceiling, upside down. Their caps were punctured so water slowly dripped onto the sand. Above the water bottles was an improvised system of PVC piping which had also been pierced, then routed down to the floor. The artist periodically forced dry ice through the holes in the pipe above, producing clouds of vapor propelled by a small fan. The resultant image was that of either "raining" clouds, or at times, the illumination of the water by the fog produced by the bottles. All systems were faulty by way of the improvised assembly of the recyclables used to create this environment. Of note, Perry utilized the throw-away materials that are harmful to the environment she was attempting to save; here is where the "peculiarity" of her romantic gesture lives.
Throughout the performance Perry would carefully tend to her makeshift system like an artist/researcher/worker climbing a step ladder, squeezing the water bottles to force out the drips, only to come back down and shovel more dry ice, so as to create more smoke, which would undo her former task. In this case, the artist became a deus ex machina, however Sisyphean and potentially futile that role proved to be. Due to the overspill from the water above as it dripped into the bowls below, she was tracking her wet bare feet through the dirt (now mud) leaving a trail as slow as a snail throughout the installation. There was no rush as Perry met this problem with unsanctimonious grace (unlike much performance art). These lines in the sand that left a trace of the body in time, in memory, are as out of reach as the parched soil of Perry's Rio Grande is to the illusion of the would-be pregnant clouds she crafted for this performance. Perry's "Water Bearer" is a great example of what I mean by peculiar romanticism—real world issues tackled with a careful idealism through the aesthetic experience. With the absence of absolutes, Perry operates inside the fact of her system, problem-solving each catastrophe and collapse, small as they may be, like a life-size game of mousetrap. There was no touristic distancing, nor a declarative attempt to produce a moment in time as an absolute in itself. The act and action of “Water Bearer” as Perry attempted to transform the dry drought-afflicted land of her native Rio Grande, forecasts the very possibility of our own activity, of a larger global movement of remediation.
Nausicca of the Valley of The Wind, Hayao Miyazaki (1984)