The task of art is to create ‘conflictual situations’ in an Aristotelian sense. Its conflict leads to liberation, to catharsis. The artist is either given the task to lead us down one such macadam road, or he/she is not an artist. Those who retell the yearning through verbal images, who tell the truth about the grief and joy of the world must undertake some risk and be adventurous and fight against safety and comfort. Safety and comfort are the imperatives of our time, of the societal concept emptied of ideologies and utopias. They are now the relevant visas for a successful biography. But the artist, who penetrates the world bravely and is ready to walk through it with open wounds, must be in a state of constant resistance. The artist must be an activist of sorts. On another occasion I said that the true activist must be a dedicated lover and that being an activist involves risks, experiments, and opening of new worlds. The artistic resistance, just like the political, must involve love, madness, courage, intransigence, method, knowledge, structure, yearning for a better and just world – and a passionate search for the many various obverses of truth. The artist must be ready to travel in parallel with the mainstream culture and at the same time critically penetrate to exhaustion every pore of this existing and not very attractive world.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley wanted radical poetry. He dreamt of poetry able to change the world. Only the radical poet can be called a poet.
All groups and circles, starting with Romanticism, through Surrealism, to punk, do precisely that – they live a life that is opposing and resisting the norm, they live a life through the dream of freedom. When I was 20 and I sat an exam on Romanticism as a literary movement, having attended Professor Uroshevic’s lectures. I decided to take a ‘revolutionary’ approach to the exam and express the aforementioned discovery of mine about these connections. Professor Uroshevic just sat there and listened to me in silence. I continued with the other questions of my exam and I finished. But my interest in the topic I augured in a single sentence then, during the most important university exam in my life has never finished. Romanticism as a paradigm for radical resistance, and all those people that dreamt of the modern Prometheus in the guise of Frankenstein while spending a weekend together near Geneva, the people that thought of the strange pilgrimage of Childe Harold, who saw the pain of the world and wanted to change it into a confronting vision, into a utopia, if you wish, of a different world – all of them were memorable part of the battle for digression, for the enfant terrible, for a merger of the artistic and political, intrinsic to both Surrealism and the punk movement… of all subcultural formations in art and culture. These are not only literary movements but also social and cultural formations. These are elements that, through art, penetrate deep into the political, infusing it with the sensibility of all emancipatory reflective narratives.
In this merger, in a slightly unusual manner, that important dimension of the avant-garde movements comes to the fore—the desire to knock down the bastion between the artistic and the political, between the artistic and the social responsibility.
The author has the responsibility to offer a political aesthetics, even through his/her meta-narratives, and these narratives must be intertwined with the political system. The artist is the translator of one reality into another, a tailor who produces cutouts for the constant mobility of values, which will then create a critical ideological environment opposing the ruling system of values, whichever system that might be.
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‘Against this world stands a flute, a flute of art. Without a doubt, it represents the principle of courage in the very feat of thinking. We have to be buried deep in the current of our time, and yet, we must act outside it.’
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam wished to tell us that the essence of poetry is in patience, in patient waiting. When defining poetry as a paradigm of patience and waiting, we should stress that poetry does not belong to the promises of future, or to the memories of the past, or to nostalgia or melancholy, as is usually believed. Poetry is constituted by and from the subjectivity existing in the moment of its creation, and it creates a present that contains both the future and past at the same time as T.S. Eliot put it. And in this very credo hides the slumbering resistance to all human suffering. Poetry is the core in which the boiling resistance is articulated and through which the poetics of this time can be perceived as poetics of patience when confronted with the phenomena of barbarism and violence.
The creative engagement of the artist and cultural worker, if we are to pulsate with the dynamics of the contemporary cultural practices, but also in retrospect, when we look at the history of artistic and cultural creation, must be the instigating rivet though which dialogue, conversation, critique is established with and of the existing social reality. If we re allowed to choose a slightly higher linguistic, thought and emotional register, we might say that the artistic creation must constantly turn its sails to sail towards change, towards the ‘revolutionary’ urge, towards the emancipatory avant-garde. There is a two-way connection between art and politics, between aestheticization and politics, between art and social engagement. And for this very reason, we must accept that art and culture must break the semantic fence of the elitist ‘oasis’ and that they exist to take the responsibility of shaping every segment of the quotidian.
The work of art does not exist separate from the time and context in which it was ‘produced’, but it is in conflict, in argument with, and in reflection of, the truths that have attempted to shape it. The work of art comes into existence through its firm relation to resistance and through the comments on what it has learnt, experienced and reflected with regards to the social milieu.
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All this gives rise to questions concerning the artistic responsibility. Do artists have the capacity to take upon themselves this creative, political and social responsibility as creators, not only of works, but also of attitudes and relevant political positions in their works, as artists that have delved deep into the public sphere.
The artist becomes the central figure around which the identity of the time and of the state apparatus is built.
After all, art is derived from the life that is lived within the state as a social product. This implies that the aesthetic, the ethic and the political must always go hand in hand in the process of creating art and culture.
The artist and the cultural worker are those who demystify and deconstruct the established power relations in the given social and cultural context. The authors who accept the engagement of their works as social and cultural and whose actions reveal that there exists more than one truth as well as the necessary commentaries on those truths that participate in the shaping of the cultural meanings. They reveal that nothing is universal, that history is happening here and now, an not in some distant point on the segment of time and that they do not have just a single format when creating a certain actuality against history, especially the actuality that critically records the meanings and values in culture and art. Every artistic initiative should always be a courageous step into the orbit of the radically independent, non-institutionalized activity in the public sphere, marked out as an artistic and cultural practice.
If we are in search for artistic autonomy, hybridity, responsibility concerning the social and cultural context, political emancipation through a critical attitude, and for feats that involve enduring on one’s own in a community that swallows artists and denies them legitimacy and involve asserting one’s presence in a politically fragmented space, a space that even degrades and ignores, then we only have to follow the concepts of creative resistance. This is a complex phenomenon, entwined in a net of poetical, political, activist, aesthetic and contextual differences, enmeshed in creative conflicts and constant changes that mark the dynamics of the times and spaces torn between freedom and the power formats that tend to swallow that freedom.
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‘When a language, or better metalanguage, is drawn by its own strength to aim for the non-actual (in the same way the dominant community reads actuality), it becomes an exile because it does not belong to any flock. What is left with is to become a place, as inconspicuous as it might be, of affirmation. This affirmation, which is exiled and which is the only justified resistance to the feeling of non-belonging to the normative world, is called a place of love and freedom,’ in the words of Roland Barthes.
But unlike Peter Schlemihl who sold his shadow to the devil, we have to organize and reorganize ours, and to kidnap our stolen body if we have to, but above all, we have to show that we are entitled: politically, artistically, productively and socially. Cultural workers in this country need to shape their body to match the shadows they dream of, but they often get trodden on, sometimes by the cultural workers themselves. This body must not be imposed in panic and formulated as a cutout originally meant for somebody else’s body, but it should be re-articulated, re-formulated and re-institutionalized instead.
Споделено на: јули 4, 2022 во 2:11 pm