Anamnesis

if i am able to reference many myths without knowing their exact meaning, then will i be stealthily justified by post modernism? de Kooning's women reference an archetypal woman, an Artemis of sexual convulsion whose eye looks over history and directly at the viewer and directly at herself. ever present things "simulacrum of meaning where the overtones combine and harmonise"... i do not see them as postmodern, but simply as origins within origins. take the late string quartets by beethoven. what makes them more relevant, more "modern" than Godspeed or Sonic Youth is not that they are more fragmented and layered, but the originality of the concept. a total break from bach and mozart and from beethoven himself, and yet a return both to life and to inner feelings--the life and feelings that were there before and after. new ways to describe feelings, conscious or unconscious, is not new and nothing about it will ever fundamentally change. texture , layers, grammar etc are structural changes that we can pragmatically ascribe to time periods to give ourselves collectively a sense of direction. charles jencks in his list of postmodern "aspirations" tells us of the things that a post modernist searches out to add to stylistics. intuition doesn't make the list, but every mode of aesthetic does. how is this possible? no matter the parameters of creating a new building-if they are constraining or liberating-the architect will always have to navigate a space in his mind and in nature, and if the end product is to have any integrity then there will always be that intuitive, mythological sense as a precursor to academics and stylistics. the overused phrase "imagination is more important than knowledge" is perfectly relevant here. there is scarcely anything more imaginative than the columns of ancient greece. like an archetypal splinter, they will forever be stuck in the minds of people who think about them and don't think about them, and they will never lose their status as an origin. but the most innovative present day architect meditating on her new idea does not start his concept by a rote reference to the academics of her predecessors; rather she unmistakably departs with a feeling (not nostalgia, but a more raw feeling of herself and his basic relation to nature), and then the saviors of history may guide her and cause her to want distort, to reorganize, to comment, to lose control and regain it, and to symbolically and poignantly conjoin history at axises and ledges and windows. "Disharmonious harmony" is a birth pang of artists of every sort with too much information in front of them. the desperation in creating rough beauty is a heartbreaking attempt to locate non religious meaning and deliver it to those who would be slightly receptive. jencks is right when he says that the postmodern artist, like any other artist from history, is definable by the stylistic formulae which she "invents and adapts." the cardboard architecture of charles moore, who i like very much, "allows new spatial experiences" because of a bold use of texture stemming directly from cost efficiency-an inner comment on the practicality of building. but the idea behind his papery aesthetic is clearly something abstract, having little to do with stylistics or even pastiche. the feeling conveyed is something mythological and magical and to those critics who detract from him i would ask what it is that they could possibly mean by an architecture that deteriorates rapidly. all architecture deteriorates at some rate.
recycled, cost efficent, unsuspected materials i not only expect to be in contemporary art, but it is a collective duty to seek them out. geova the new york fashion designer http://www.geovafashion.com/ is immensely resourceful in his use of material and one gets the idea that he does not judge or give some fabric more importance than the next. he loves all his materials and embraces them by fusing each with a necessarily discordant other. His roughness does not prevent him access to citing classical style, even baroque. if you look at some of the hats, they look as though the could come from a fragonard, and and yet they could also be found in a dumpster on the lower east side. and that's just it, isn't it? not only have we emerged from the mannerist supposition of skill and the renaissance idea that nothing can be added or substracted except for the worse, but we can accept the deterioration of the product as part of its function and an allegory to death.