POéSie: or the death of…

I live in a small town in France, a commune as they call it here.
The art scene in the town is small, small but as is usual in the arts, cliquey.
The ‘scene’ has its own self-appointed entrepreneurs of taste, who project, usually via their gallery walls, what is art: what art is. Their lens is tepid and narrow….there are rarely any surprises in these spaces, just a gallery playing to the gallery. A word they often, too often, like to (mis)use is ‘poetry’.

‘Everything’ is poetic and if you are in doubt of this fact merely by looking at the work, they will ‘tell’ you why it is poetic, or the accompanying advertising rhetoric will drive this point home. If asked, they are unable to define what is meant by poetic in this context... the space which the word exists in is amorphous, homogenous, and only varies slightly, depending what’s on sale.

The use of poetry in this contemporary art context - contemporary because they tell us so – is usually devoid of rough edges, anxiety, ugliness, turmoil, turbulence, precarity, dirt, struggle, pain, challenge, provocation....I could go on.
It seems that the (mis)use of the word ‘poetry’ (or poésie in French) in this parochial setting, emanates from its total disconnection with the implicit politics of life and of being ‘alive’. More often than not, in the gallery setting, the word is used in a self-consciously artificial way that attempts to control poetry and subordinate it to non-poetic ends. It snatches it from a multidimensional space of free expression and nails it to a one dimensional wall of art(official).

I went to a larger exhibition recently, in a neighbouring town, sponsored by Le Clerc, a billion-pound French supermarket enterprise. This, of course, was an aspect of their philanthropic output, a giving back to the community they make so much money from. A community that cannot benefit from offshore holdings or corporate tax breaks. The very community that is asked at the till point of Le Clerc (via the automated credit card machine) if they want to donate to ‘Cancer Research’ or ‘Le Croix Rouge’. Nudge psychology is of course at play here, guilt is implicit in this confrontation with the customers conscience. But, if one reflects on this cynical grift, we can conclude that Le Clerc itself has billions from which it can donate to these causes rather than seeking to exploit the customer even further. Perhaps their financial investors at Aquiti Gestion could make a donation on behalf of the company’s loyal customers?

The philanthropic guise has long disguised nefarious financial accumulation by corporations and individuals. The most famous individual being, perhaps, John D Rockefeller. Despite what the Wiki page says, John D manipulated and monopolised many financial markets, and he became so disgustingly wealthy that his popularity began to wane and instead be replaced by disdain and disgust amongst the general public. To counter this dint in his image Rockefeller was forced to undertake philanthropic investments.

One such endowment went to the University of Chicago, where controversial professor of economics and statistics, Davis Rich Dewey, began his experiments with the education system. Experiments that were to leave an indelible imprint on the American education system and, by association, worldwide. Dewey was a disciple of Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, who asserted that ‘man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism’. Following this belief, Wundt ‘set out to prove that man is the summation of his experiences, of the stimuli which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.’
I won’t go into detail here, but I recommend reading the brilliant, and long suppressed, book The Leipzig Connection by Paulo Lionni if you really want to know where the education system emanates from, and what it is geared towards. Lionni offers a brief insight into the psychology of the educational psychologists when he writes that Dewey and other Wundtians regard man as:

A social animal who must learn to adapt to his environment, instead of learning how to ethically adapt the environment to suit his needs and those of society. Individualism and the developing of individual abilities give way to social conformity and adaptation; the product of education becomes “well adjusted” (conditioned) children.

Conditioned for what one might ask, and that is at the heart of arresting Lionni’s book.

Anyway, that aside, the Le Clerc exhibition was called ‘Animal’ and had a mixture of works ranging from Degas to Beuys and from modern abstract artists to ancient pieces that arose from a natural connection with nature. But it was ‘life(less)’....it was inanimate, and, paradoxically, for an exhibition about ‘animals’ and animal instincts, it was devoid of the visceral essence of the multifaceted nature of aliveness. The instinctual origins of the pieces on display were totally smothered by the retentive curation, and over explanation, of what was on offer. Too often, we are told what is worthy and what is not....diatribes that are written on tiny placards that sit alongside the pieces and that are guided, curated if you like, by an ingrained reverence to the contemporary art canon: which is, of course, determined by financial markets and self-appointed arbiters of taste.

Must we hang everything on a wall? Crushed together as if the artists were the best of friends, members of a club in which they all agreed to be exhibited side – by – side. Beuys would be appalled to end up as a film clip on a tiny screen nestled alongside Abramovich whose piece on display, She Wolf, was a direct rip-off of his piece ‘Coyote’: though not acknowledged at this exhibition.

In short, poetry in this world of gallery art, is beauty, smoothness, birds chirping on walks beside the wild sea, a leafy woodland stroll, an artist in a studio, a nice studio usually, contemplating colour or the promised glass of wine after a day of work(ing) - the art. It is a co-opted (or corrupted) vision of beauty that responds to the mainstream projection of beauty, the fashionable product(ion) of ‘what is’. It has no room for ‘outsiders’, unless they can be curated by one who ‘knows’.…by one of the beauticians, one of the curators - devoid of curiosity.

Fortunately, a few ‘outsiders’ exist in this commune of mine. Artists who ‘do not know’, and, consequently, search to find. Their search is where their poetry lies. One of these astronauts called his space ‘Poetry Is Disaster’, and we became immediate friends! How could I not be drawn to such a declaration. It turned out that we are both advocates of Pataphysical thought, but that is another story: undoubtedly without any discernible narrative!

I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognise in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated.
(Joseph Beuys)

 Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
(Phillip Larkin)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
(T.S. Eliot)