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November 11, 2004
A nice quote from Alain Badiou from a talk
"I think the great question about contemporary art is how not to be Romantic. It's the great question and a very difficult one. More precisely, the question is how not to be a formalist-Romantic. Something like a mixture between Romanticism and formalism. On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms. But, on the other side, is obsession with the body, with finitude, sex, cruelty, death. The contradiction of the tension between the obsession of new forms and the obsession of finitude, body, cruelty, suffering and death is something like a synthesis between formalism and Romanticism and it is the dominant current in contemporary art."
Would this be an example of formalist-Romantic.?
Francis Bacon, Figure Study II, (The Magdalene), 1945-46
If the key question is how not to be formalist-Romantic, then what to be instead? Is it to create something new as a challenge to what we already know; a creation of a new knowledge?
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