Subject: Re: Is there an avant-garde.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 11:42:43 -0700




>   Where are the new mediums and how are they
> >being used?
> 
> At the present time the new mediums seeming to be doing little more than
> mimicking the old ones
> 
> 
> 
Well, new media, like older media, seem to require a stage of
gear-happiness, or rather, a fascination with the mechanical attributes of
the medium, before they begin to take on more widely useful
meaning-functions in the culture. Vide the "Edisonian imaginary" of early
filmmaking--

Also remember that when film "got over it," so to speak, it became largely
a narrative art. I don't think this was a result of top-down tyranny, I
think it was because people like narrative. That is, for a medium to be
culturally useful in a broad sense, it must participate in pretty extensive
overlap with foregoing media--when redundancy is high, messages are clear.
When messages are clear, people grasp them, feel empowered by that grasp.
Is this a "bad" thing? Some would say, certainly yes. I don't think
good/bad has much to do with it. 

This, I guess, has relevance also to other avantgarde issues. One reason
for disenchantment with notions of avantgarde is that art had become under
that rubric a stick to beat slow pupils with. This isn't fun for anyone but
the nasty schoolmaster. If art is to be the thing that, rather, transforms
the school, then a very different idea of avantgarde is necessary--and
given what can be derived from the American experiment with a culture
derived largely from the impulses and desires of mostfolks, and the
American experiment with new media (despite the hijacking of the airwaves
by corporate types), this may simply not be a possible thing. Think of
Bakhtin (not what he intended but the material he used) and it seems
evident that "holiday" is the container for all the freedom mostfolks want.

Gradualism, eh? Littles by littles, and making sure the physical world
isn't dystopianized, wrecked, drained, betrayed and abandoned before some
grindingly slow incremental change makes it possible for us all to live in
paradise--

Off to get spring water from the morning of the world--

Ann K


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