September 16, 2003
Stephen D Ross Interview#2
The second part of Rick's interview with Stephen David Ross circles back to the relationship between philosophy and art mentioned in the beginning.
Stephen Ross mentions the extreme separation of art and philosophy. In Australia, under the hegemony of a scientific analytic philosophy, this relationship was a divorce. As Ross says it seemed that philosophy knew nothing about art and aesthetics, and that art pretended to knowledge. Ross then says that this historical seperation was a crime and that it was philosophy's crime, not art's. Philosophy spurned and scorned art.
And yet they both have something in common. A great work of art and philosophy are achievements that accomplishe and build something magnificent and unprecedented. Despite the easily recognized authoritative academic institutional side of art and philosophy both art and philosophy can be disturbing, unsettling, displacing, transforming. Nietzsche called this disruptive tendency Dionysian, and he contrasted it with the Appollinian side of an authoritative reason that he associated with Socrates.
Ross then says that in the academy philosophy's need to be authoritative won out over its admiration for what is unfamiliar and strange. And what an academic aesthetics had to say of art always passed through what philosophy had to say of itself. It could not take art and artists on their own terms.
All this is very true and to the point in relation to Anglo-American philosophy. But as we saw in exploring Rick's Susan Sontag project the disruptive unsettling, displacing, transforming side of philosophy in modernity can be found in Bataille. In the 1930s the French understood and read Nietzsche this way: in terms of those elements that resist assimilation to bourgeois life, refuse to be domesticated to the routines of everyday life and continue to evade the grasp of science. For Bataille that which resisted was the erotic. We can see this in this provocative painting:
Balthus, The White Skirt, 1937
The erotic is what can be unbounded and is understood in terms of spontaneity. Balthus thinks of this in terms of archetypes of purity.
But it is also about outlawed drives that disrupt our evereyday conventions through shock. An example of the outlawed and the shocking is a Balthus painting that is rarely shown in public, and would not be shown in an Australian newspaper today:
Balthus, The Guitar Lesson 1934
That shocks us today. It's violence and menace is a long way from the domesticated cheesecake of Unablogger. You can understand why Balthus has been charged with producing pornography.
But the disturbing quality of the Guitar Lesson is more than high art being seen to be pornographic. For those who know the figure of Christ in European art history the Guitar Lesson also blasphemes:
Dead Christ in the 15th-century Avignon Pieta
Hence a double shock that erupts through the conventions of everyday life. For the French in the 1930s the erotic is what is disturbing, unsettling, displacing, transforming.
The disruptive transgressive tendency is an attempt to escape the prison of an authoritarian modernity, which transforms the world into resources and instrumentally manipulates them for the sake of utility.
This disruptive tendency is barely known or rarely expressed in Australia. It was expressed with the Sydney libertarians in the 1950s known as the Sydney Push. But that libertarianism is pretty tame stuff. It rarely embraced the free play of the passions.
As is the current libertarianism that rejects political authority in the name of the free market, but which also embraces traditional customs and conservative conventions. Even the more consistent libertarians who oppose sexual censorship would recoil and reject the disruptive, transgressive Bataille in the name of reason.
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