Monster by Mark Irwin

Author:Mark Irwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
Published: 2017-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Tolstoy then continues to illustrate how art can fail through various and flawed combinations of these notions.

Thus among young artists heartfelt sincerity chiefly prevails, coupled with insignificance of content and more or less beauty of form. Among older artists, on the contrary, the importance of the content often predominates over beauty of form and sincerity. Among laborious artists beauty of form predominates over content and sincerity. (Tolstoy 57)

He finally argues that the work, arising from some inner doubt, “should create a new and clear impression of reality” in poetry and the other arts. Perhaps what we should ask, however, is how many of them are new and clear?

There are certain crises of our age that must be revealed, revisioned in a new dialect just as Duchamp revisioned the Industrial Era. In Ross Bleckner’s series of paintings, Architecture of the Sky (1990–93), points of light are abscessed with paint such that they resemble stars pouring from a constellation or the scintillate-lights ← 101 | 102 → of a chandelier, but there is something odd in each canvas, as if an opaque shadow resided in each wrought point of light. In the catalogue, we later find that Bleckner based these circular-patterns on Kaposi syndrome, a type of skin sarcoma found in AIDS patients. Bleckner in fact achieves the sublime here; we approach in beauty but suddenly turn away in terror as we attempt to grasp the incomprehensible.

—Magic, story, lesson, and beauty tempered by a new sublime. Is it still possible?—Risk of the self pushing toward veiled truths.—Impact and resonance. In Jorie Graham’s “The Swarm,” the speaker (in Italy) tries to capture the sound of vesper bells on a telephone so that a lover across the ocean might hear them. The title subtly echoes The Aeneid (and the diasporic founding of Rome) through a technological swarm of beauty: church bells, their possibility and impossibility as information being sent through the transatlantic cable. The transformation of an entomological image (bees swarming from a damaged hive) to a religious, and then finally a technological one (swarm of bell sounds) is a startling metaphor for the translation of beauty in a high tech age.

—the plastic cooling now—this tiny geometric swarm of

openings sending to you

no parts of me you’ve touched, no places where you’ve

gone— (Graham 57)

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