The Scene
There’s a solid chance history ended like forty years ago. At least, cultural history. This is not exactly but sorta the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 landmark (and since back-pedaled) book The End Of History And The Last Man. Fukuyama argues, ludicrously, that as of the fall of the Soviet Union and the ascendancy of Western Democratic hegemony, the world is pretty much set in place. We have end-staged, and the closing chapter which will run in loops until the sun explodes is, can you imagine?, mostly just manageable and recursive democratic un-rest, presidential scandals and tyrannosaurus Senators glued to their seats, propped up by teams of oil-funded focus groups. Aren’t we a lucky bunch? Doesn’t Nirvana make more sense, now?
Of course, Fukuyama was wrong. Like, kinda hilariously wrong—see: Ukraine, The Belt and Road initiative, global autocratization— but jimminy the guy knew how to swing for the fences, ey? It’s like predicting the world will end in nuclear holocaust. Every day that passes in which it doesn’t, you are proven wrong, and if it ever does, no one will be around to award you with a medal. It’s a prediction for the love of predictions. Reputational suicide, the boldness of which payed off in spades. Fukuyama is considered amongst the most notable living voices in political philosophy— he went on to champion and then denounce Neoconservatism, and has spent the last twenty years quietly wood-working and funding the publications of Russian sex-workers.
But consider this thesis, not socio-politically, but culturally. Does it not, comrades, feel a tad musty in our stratospheric dome? Is there not a layer of dust accruing on all these fine works of ours? Is there a chance, pray tell, that the shadow of the 20th century is a bit stifling? Think of the greatest novel ever, think of the greatest film of all time, for gods’ sake think of the best painting ever painted. Was it before 1975?
While placing a stone pathway with my old man a few weeks ago we started talking about insurgency. At least, I was talking about insurgency, and he was talking about un-civil unrest. I assented: my generation has a wick the length of a panda’s tail (aka, short). We are, how you would deride, reactive. #reactiveaf, tbh. What we are reacting to, I needn’t remind you, is the continuation of the long-standing practice of absolutely heinous immorality on the part of the ultra-rich. They aren’t snuffing out koala bears, friends. They are starving Yemenis and poisoning the atmosphere beyond breathable. They are toppling any economy which doesn’t play the free-market ballgame and, by-the-by, convincing us to call nations— those beautiful, soulful things, those formalizations of ethos’— economies. Tis bleak, but we’re working on it. Slowly, in our own way, we are working on it. “You’ve had it pretty good,” I told him, in a playful twist on the old cliché. “The prime of your life was lived in peace— what other generation, across the last couple-hundred thousand years, could expect to rock the ages ten to sixty without a single conflict dirtying your picket-fence, while simultaneously experiencing mythical levels of economic growth? It may very well be my generation’s fate to learn to shoot weapons from cubicles in Arkansas. That, or how to grow a beet from nuclear ash while wearing a hazmat suit and fighting off scavengers. What your ilk love to call the total-descent-of-normalcy may in fact be the end of a miraculous period of absurd prosperity (tallied, lest we forget, against a fairly steep bill, which, thanks for not charging rent, this one’s on us).” You think we enjoy this? Well, okay then, I suppose we do.
Now hold on right there— what in the mouse-car moment are you talking about, Ry? You don’t mean to imply this is fun for us, do you? The flagrant destruction of all of our precious structures, the roiling of fear and the roistering of civility? The disquietude, the distension and dissipation of values, the snipping of the threads of reality— you’re saying that’s what we call a good time? But of course it is. In the words of Walter Russell Mead, “we are not destined to live in quiet times.” In the words of Bane, “we were born in the darkness.” Shit’s been haywire since day one for our kin. The towers had already crumbled, it never made sense and we were never asked to play. We did not adopt these rules, we forged them from the ashes we inherited. So, what are those rules?
Welcome to the Après-Garde
Pause, kiddo. You’re not trying to answer that question, are you? Take a smaller bite, man— you ain’t even got an MFA yet. For the love of Allah, stick to purple pants, muse all you want on the eclipse but don’t you dare go on speaking for a generation which you barely pay attention to (Kendrick and Drake are mad at each other?). But here’s the rub— I can’t work on anything, can’t write anything or produce anything or appreciate anything, especially the work of my peers, without context. Why do I love Matisse? Because of what he did to realism. Why do I love Charlie Parker? Because of what he did to Swing. Virginia Woolf is brilliant in a vacuum, a genius when placed next to Hawthorne. Hawthorne, in turn, looks best while standing slightly to the right of the Brontë sisters. I learned to read cultural-historicism by its relationship to thought; read: I only understand art by what it has succeeded, by what it has replaced. This post-renaissance rigamarole, the Antiquity —> Classical —> Modern —> Postmodern schematic is such a convenient lens that I blithely ignore its admitted smoothness, its over-simplified nonsense, because the narrative is just too damn juicy. Because this lens produces those wonderful GMO fruits we’ve come to call tomatoes despite having no historical relationship to the Tomato. So yeah, I do need to define these things, for my own boat to push off the coast I need to put this on paper, need to name it— name our cultural moment beyond the ominous Z, need to call the next shot if only for someone with a finer degree to tear me to bits, or for some wee thing currently swaddled in a cradle to come and replace it once they are of the appropriate age. So here I go, swinging for the fence— swinging for the parking lot, for the stadium in the next county over. Since the best the cultural theorists have offered us is post-post-modernism, and since I’d rather not live in the shadow of a shadow of a movement, I present to you the Après-Garde.
But first, a brief tour.
Generally it goes like this: Science and Technology jump first, launch themselves over the ledge, durn what follows. Just as there is no Hellenism without advanced sea-travel and celestial-navigation practices, no Rome without plumbing, there is no renaissance without Copernicus placing the sun at the center of the universe, no English Civil War without the printing press. What follows, after those pesky thought-leaders are the-relative-equivalent-of murdered by the-relative-equivalent-of the Church, is an evolution of social awareness leading to a bilateral progression of the political landscape. The telescope and heliocentricity and cartographical breakthroughs inevitably spark humanism, which inevitably sparks revolution, which inevitably is assuaged by a political shift. Through a process called mimesis, all of this seeps like sweat from a gym-sock into the minds of the public, and the first to suckle from that juice, if we are lucky, will always be the artist.
[sidenote: This is the section of the essay where you all tear apart my, let’s say playfulness, with historical fact. Where you tell me the Magna Carta came two-hundred years before heliocentrism and Petrarch came one-hundred years before Cromwell, etc ad nauseam. A convenient place (though let this be the last time I ever sidenote a tenet) to mention one of the core principles of the Après-Garde— namely, the usurpation of history and linearity and causality. These terms were abused by the powers-that-be for about a minute too long and we’re kindly asking for them back. Narrative is a foundational principle— Things Could Have Been Any Way That They Were, so to speak, and it’s time we started forging mythos rather than worshipping on the altar of technicalities. Technicalities, truths (as in Things That Happened), the narrative of history… these things have always been workable concepts, and, for that matter, have always been worked by the ruling class to our detriment.]
The 19th century brings us vaccines and steam engines, international trade brings us coffee houses, coffee houses bring us empiricism and social consciousness, the swirling vortex of progress, ever-more complicated the closer we view it from, produces shifts in cultural thought which blossom into (in this case) democratic principles, which bring us Locke and Hobbes and Thomas Moore. The artists frenziedly seeks these dripping sweat juices, takes big, putrid gulps and does what they can to digest. The juice becomes them, those lightning rods, and they exhale in foul-smelling rants the Works of a Moment. Fast-forward to the turn of the 19th century. War ravages the recent past and near future. The world has become frighteningly small and frighteningly aware— it takes a day, not a week, to hit up Boston from New York. It takes an hour, not a month, for news of the battle to reach the citizenry. Apparently those folks in that colonized country were humans! Apparently, and don’t quote me on this, reality is subjective?? Did you hear about Nietzsche? Have you seen the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower? Look what the Bolsheviks are up to, listen to what our students are chanting. I like this Stravinsky fella, but who can stomach that Schoenberg? Queue Joyce. Queue Monet, Manet, tippy-tippy day day. Combustible Engine —> planes and tanks —> trench warfare —> To The Lighthouse.
Stir two-parts Einstein, one-part quantum-theory, a dash of Atomic Warfare; shake well over The Lost Generation, serve alongside the spread of Marxism, rim the glass with the Military-Industrial Complex, sprinkle some CIA on top and strain into a technologized environment— I call it, Postmodernism. Sipped in morose parlors by the French surrealists, the Dada daddies, the relativists and the pluralists, Postmodernism is a drink to wash down a pill. It is a confusing swirl shaken and dished out by the confused. It is the sound of recognizing how gosh darn complicated everything has gotten, how gravely we’ve lost the plot. It is the symptom of a literate populace, the antidote to unilateral domination. The process moves from the visual arts— Pollack et al— into high-music— Philip Glass, John Adams— down through the literary— Pynchon, Vonnegut— sifts into low music— Madonna, the Velvet Underground— and finally, always finally, into Cinema. Kubrick, 8 1/2, the Cohen Bros, Pulp Fiction and Blazing Saddles.
Now, as a wee lad, a young commie who heard rather late that God was dead and didn’t leave a will, I worshipped these folks. Most of what we consider the crowning achievements of each art-form mentioned above exists within the time period and under the philosophical insinuations of the Pomo atmosphere. Oh darling, must we drown all our heroes? Must we bid arrivederci to The Godfather, sayonara to The Great Wave— must we exit the cave? We’ve grown so pale in here, couldn’t we lounge just a moment longer? The world, let’s be clear, is not any more linear than it was when these artists set out bravely to declare that nothing has meaning, that no one exists but us except everyone else, that every single institution is new and will soon be dead but all feed on one singular will-to-power. It is exactly because of the universality of these truths, their hard-fought but long-since won acceptance that yes, we must burn that barn. It is time to build a new one.
The New Barn
Now, okay. Okay so, here’s the thing. I’m not smart enough for this. The artist is meant to vibe out these cultural shifts. Suppose to take shrooms and intuit and then spit out what feels right to them. Suppose to taste some scientific theory, chew on some news, and then take a fat dump into the collective psyche. It’s the theorists, the critics, the historians, the academia who sifts through the shit with tweezers looking for gems, curating a narrative. And it inevitably happens after the fact, post-mortem, so to speak. More accurately, the philosophers catch on to the new, hip Truth— the artists can’t comprehend what they’re talking about but just slapdash some work anyways, and then the theorists draw a through-line. This bumfuck of a manifesto will not hold up in court, I fear. But what I’ve tried to do is set some context and build a blueprint. Against my better judgement, and for the sake of me getting over the what-the-hell-is-my-art-suppose-to-smell-like hump, I have to go into this weird unknown. So, we start with the scientists.
What is the defining, ground-breaking scientific theory of our time? Born in the 1970s and not-at-all empirically verified to this day, that would be String Theory. I will not for the briefest blip of non-linear, random, one-slit photon time purport to understand String Theory. I am still wrestling, to be quite honest, with the Einstein-debunked Newtonian sort of fare, to say nothing of the Relative, to say even less of the Quantum. What I do know is that the scientific community is shook by it, that it changes everything, that it explains much and calls into question much more. That it is the unifier of the cosmic and the microscopic, the peace treaty ‘tween the Relative and the Quantum. What I gather is that it supposes that the smallest of known particles are not an ensemble of unique creatures, they are the results of a smaller material, so fundamental we may call it an essence. This material, these strings, vibrate at unimaginable frequencies with a cosmically profound tension to just sort of, um, vibe into our subatomic ingredients. Einstein taught us that everything is relative, the Quantum suggested chaotic, absurd levels of randomness. One was intuitive, one supplied all the correct answers without anyone understanding how or why it works. Both cast us into an irrational and unknowable universe. This new force of synergy, this String, is the answer to what comes next.
See, imagine that instead of an ever-growing list of “smallest-known-particles,” instead of “we are an infinite collaboration of increasingly tiny ingredients,” instead of three Ds, String is one-dimensional. It plays on the increasing complexity of reality by saying the most complicated thing of all: that all complexity flares upwards from one beautiful, invisible and eternal hum. God rolls over in his coffin, there’s a quiet noise not registered on the finest of Seismographs, an unimaginably subtle flutter— as God opens an eye. Just one, just barely, but I swear, it moved. Beneath all this rubble, amid all this chaos, a harmonious and singular particle emerges from the darkness and reinstates what we’ve been lacking for one-hundred and forty years. Wholeness.
Not to be all, String-Theory-will-save-us-all-from-destruction. There are plenty of scientists who do play that game, and power to them, I certainly hope they are right. But from my viewpoint, it is so laughably obvious that these successive theories come like waves, one after the other, washing over our heads as they prove the previous one to be incomplete. But there’s me being pluralistic, there’s me being postmodern— fuck it, STRING THEORY WILL SAVE US ALL FROM DESTRUCTION. Another tenet of the Après-Garde: we decide what we believe. No more pre-packaged values, no more towing the party line. Thought is determined from the focal point of the soul. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s see what the tech people have been up to—
*turns page*
Ah, shit. So while I was talking, apparently, the cow farts suffocated us all, nano-bots replaced our brain tissue, and AI either turned us all into gods or paperclips. But isn’t that exactly right? Isn’t that so apropos? Isn’t the only lesson us twenty-somethings have ever been fed that you have no idea what will happen next? So in one hand: unity; wholesome and melodic humming; harmony, and its contingent beauty— a brand of beauty that we haven’t dined on since the time of Kings and Dragons. On the other: every piece of known data in our palms, Total Entertainment Forever, virtual reality and the particular sort of cruelty national leaders partake in once they have accepted and dismissed the fear that we will find out immediately. This is the collective consciousness of our mouse-car moment. This is the state of things, the soup of our wombs. This is our lot. Us renters, us tik-tokking toddlers, us micro-plastic fed hackers and anti-capitalist capitalists, us citizen journalists, us all-famous-all-the-time highly viewed invisible youngons: this is our landscape, our frollicking grounds are littered with land-mines. So what in the get-to-the-almighty-thesis bullshittery does our art look like?
Tenets of the Après-Garde
The easier-to-deride-than-comprehend David Foster Wallace coined a term in his placed-on-the-nightstand-to-get-laid magnum opus, Infinite Jest. A tiny detour: Wallace is the perfect person to coin the term for whatever comes next. He has that ideal lead-you-to-the-promise-land-but-not-allowed-to-enter self-hating rope-swinging posture, that torn down vibe, that unmistakable Millennialism; and, as the cherry on top, he hated postmodernism. “Postmodernism has run its course,” he says “the problem now is a lot of those shticks— irony, cynicism, irreverence— are a part of what’s enervating the culture itself.” In Jest, 7th grader Hal Incandenza writes an essay on the Modern vs. the Postmodern hero. The modern is single-faceted, gruff and determined, and has a single-minded goal achieved by a single-minded will. The Pomo hero lives in a world more reflective, or so we’re to believe, of reality. He deals with thirty problems at once, each influenced by yet independent of the others. He is not the main focal point of the drama, but a refracted piece of it, full of conflicting pluralities. In his final paragraph of his essay, Hal predicts what awaits the hero in the following era: non-action. A hero straddled by inactivity, malaise, and boredom. Wallace spent the final years of his life trying to put this concept to words in his final tome, The Pale King. This theory undermines the fundamental requirements of narrative: 1) conflict finds a hero, 2) the hero acts.
Though prescient, Wallace can not be the person to define and embody the next chapter in the progression of human thought and art. Born in ‘62, he was too early, too young, so that his lot in life was to be squarely in the Pomo camp, deride and rue it as he may. That section of history was not played out yet, those lessons did not sift from the high to the low as they must, until the lessons therein are so ingrained at the level of the commons they seem trite. The equivalent of Your Brilliant Idea to Revolutionize The Way Burgers are Prepared for Customers being perfected so totally until the end-product is the blandest known entity on earth: McDonalds. That is precisely when the next era must shuffle in and kick down dusty doors with a bottle of spray paint in one hand and a torch in the other. Wallace suggests the phrase Après-Garde, defining it as “a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence.”
Avant-Garde, that dutiful a-structural madness which energized the art scene of the last hundred years, was once a term to denote a scout, who walks Avant (ahead) of the Garde (the army), risking their safety to get a sense of what lies ahead. Forging into uncharted territory to bring information back to the generals. Our movement, in a nod to the “post-post” supplication, in a recognition that we live in the shadow of towering greatness, is not Avant but Après (after) that Garde. We are the clean-up crew. Those who come in after the last structure has been toppled, the last bomb dropped, the last prisoner taken, in order to survey the damage. We are the Après-Garde, the inheritors of destruction being asked to make a life out of what Nonsense has left in its wake. The map is not at capacity, it has just been wiped clean.
The number-one-with-a-bullet tenet is sincerity. It is the only antidote to the hold-nothing-sacred zeitgeist of pomo’ism, and should be a core value of what follows. On first glance, it may not seem fun to have to bear that weight. The last few generations got to be irreverent, they got to tear down and deride, got to place themselves safely out of the way of vulnerability by not caring about the consequences of their actions. And that does sound fun. But what I see churning within our cohort is not irreverence, but a profound sense of empathy. A belief that we can and should push our weight against the system to try and pervert its momentum. If that doesn’t sound fun, it at least sounds meaningful. And that sounds fun.
Close behind #1 is the idea that this should be fun. Not just because the crushing tendencies of life has been so exposed that there’s no other response than to laugh and rebuild, but for a more utilitarian purpose. When all entertainment lies within our pockets, the art of the Après-Garde has some severe competition. Entertainment devoid of substance is so pervasive that the concept of a Guilty Pleasure is antiquated. So much of our content is blatantly surface-level, that the practice of digesting and investigating art with patience and introspection is bygone. Since we are inundated with so much of it, each individual piece loses its weight, and we have lost the knack to chew on art, to consider why rather than if we found something good— to say nothing of powerful. What I’ve learned from doom-scrolling is that nearly everyone uses humor to sell their brand, and that to give someone a little hit of it will endear them to you. The work of the Après-Garde should be humorous in a meaningful way, should use that age-old human hack to plant itself into people’s minds. Plus, there is no greater weapon than comedy. If the world finds us funny, they will have nothing to throw at us. We will be exercising that most human of traits: laughing in the face of the abyss.
These works should be self-contained. The allure of the meta, the self-referential, has been stolen from the arsenal of the bold by the mainstream. This is the lesson from Deadpool and Marvel post-credit scenes. The “Meta” has literally been usurped by Mark Zuckerberg, and if you need any other reason to abandon it then you should get cozy in blandness. We have deconstructed the wall between viewer and art— there is no longer an illusion of separation, and that is a powerful tool. Without that barrier, the art can speak directly to us, it can make vulnerable statements and be regarded as it ought to, as the story of a story-teller who feels they have something important to teach. The practice of self-reference was a defense against vulnerability. It was the placing of hands in front of the face to avoid direct criticism. It said “even I don’t take this seriously, so why should you?” It invites a gap of trust which de-fangs the power of art, and removes one of our few tools to fight against all those pesky megaliths of the past.
Linearity is subjective, and its ours to subject. This point was mentioned in the essay above, but it warrants repeating. Postmodernism illuminated us all to the illusion of objectivity— there is no one left who believes that a thing is a thing, end of discussion. Reality is Subjective: this lesson is repeated again and again as scientists prove the ways in which we perceive memories, the present moment, sensations and interiority differently. It is suggested that there are multiple, perhaps infinite realities. It is suggested that we live inside a computer, that the world suffers timeline-lapses, etc. Most of the literature on this subject is hogwash, but the underlying theme is that we have disregarded the idea of a singular, linear experience of reality and are exploring the ways in which it may be fractured. Postmodernism danced with this concept, it is our lot to marry it.
This doesn’t mean we should be flippant with data, or disregard lived experience. It means we should allow ourselves to draw intuited Truths from the metaphorical substance available. If Pomo tore down the edifice of objective fact, we may now put the raw material to use. In bygone eras, artists and thought-leaders might tell the story a tortoise outrunning a hare, not to teach about the tortoise but to teach about persistence. We don’t really have observed nature, we don’t have natural mysticism or the enchantment which guided our ancestors through dark nights. What we have is our own stories, the ones hammered into us from grade school for the purpose of socialization, and its time we used them.
I think there is a place for religion in this movement. Not the Old Guard, bend-at-the-knee-and-adhere-to-our-dogma sort, but religion in the sense of a guiding philosophy to give us structure. It feels like so many thought-systems have been run-through— from the monotheistic to the nihilistic, our history is full of theory, and it is all available for us to learn about. With the delusion that religion must be true absolutely gone, we can figure for ourselves how it may be helpful. Make your own religion— take Pan and Thor and Yahweh and Athena and stir them up, light incenses for Krishna and practice rain-dances. Many of the young Christians I know do this— they have their God, attend their services, and scratch out the parts that say slavery is okay and queerness is not. It gives them a foundation, and in making the active choice they, by definition, remain above its tendencies for manipulation. If the Pope ordered a Crusade today, these folks would laugh. Design your own lore, and stick to it. Decide what happens when you die, and make it interesting. Living without this guidance has proved brutal— we have no value system to turn to when shit gets complicated, no empowering myth to handle the depression and anxiety growing ever more pervasive.
How does this look in the Après-Garde? It turns art into window-shopping. Where it was once “view this art and believe my thesis,” followed by, “view this art which destroys the idea of Thesis,” the Après-Garde may say: “Try this out. It kinda works, you just gotta tweak it a bit.”
A stress on quality. Most young artists of worth have accepted the fact that what they do isn’t very lucrative, and that that’s okay. Most young artists can’t sell a piece every couple of months and afford a loft in Paris, they have to work. But if you are trusting your soul to an artist, do you want that person to be living a fanciful life of luxury, or spending their day-times hours doing the same bullshit job you are? In this new paradigm, we should try to return a sense of rigorous quality to the work. Spend years on that painting, that novel. Put every dollar and every owed favor into your short film, leave it all on the court. Most of us ain’t having kids anytime soon, what are we saving for? Commit to your work, and insist on its worth. It will immediately separate it from the one-off pieces of content which we consume every day. It will help push against the bottom-line mentality of major corporations like Amazon and Apple who for some reason make most of the art we consume. Plus, like any Zen master will teach you, it is the all-out commitment to the work which will be meaningful in the end, rather than the work itself. In a world which makes it feel so good to sell out, don’t.
The Après-Garde should have strong values. Postmodernism has done splendid work in tearing down old value-systems, value-systems which were constructed to protect the elite and keep the rest of us subordinate. But a world without any values is a dangerous place, more dangerous than it has to be. The word has probably lost its meaning since every company has a tab on its website preaching their “Core Values” which amount to nothing more than a defense against lawsuits. This is mostly hot air, and it feels disingenuous to pretend that any of us actually live by these empty sentiments. But one of the most valuable functions of art is to give people something to believe, something to live up to. The sort of values I am talking about are not the antiquated Honor or Forgiveness. We are too conscious of muddy reality to adhere to these. The values I’m talking about are more along the lines of “every outlaw has a code.” Things like Standing Up For What You Feel is True, like If Someone Needs Help, Help ‘Em. They feel sentimental and corny, but that’s the idea. We should override that inner radar built-in by the ubiquitous irony of the last thirty years of art and say yeah, feels weird, but I guess that’s true. I think the revitalization of Campy movies speaks to this ability. We are re-learning how to enjoy stuff that is overtly grounded in tropes and cliches, because those tropes and cliches speak to an undeniable universality. There are certain tools we have stopped using because they just seem to obvious, but they are helpful, and they exist for a reason.
Which brings us to sentimentality, a loaded word in art but one that is ultimately seen as negative. R. H. Blyth described being sentimental as “giving to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” It has been maligned as gushy nonsense, as devotion to a thing too small to deserve it. But from an original position, disregarding all we have learned in the understanding that it may not be as true as we’ve been told, why should this be wrong? Why shouldn’t we be tender and devoted, more tender and devoted than even God? The answer is because we will then be made a fool, but the secret is out— we are already fools. We are the play-things of corporations, with votes that don’t count and net worths that don’t make a difference. We will all die and disappear into obscurity in a hilarious and foolish way. For fools to accept their foolishness is an honorable thing to do— it is a Thing being What It Is, which is, in a world which rewards conformity, a radical thing to be. Salinger notes on Sentimentality that “the human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.” The speaker, Buddy Glass, is a broken and confused man, and cannot help but see through this lens. But the lesson is not to accept his miserable philosophy, it is to overcome it. The work of the Après-Garde should take everything tenderly, should be obsessed with small things, simple delights, easy and cheesy victories and saccharine losses. A sentimental art-movement will not be devastating, it will be rewarding and robust, as strong as a fragile old monk living on top of a mountain.
These are my scattered thoughts on what ought to follow the postmodern wave. It is a wave which has lasted for 80 years, and if this current moment is not a watershed, if things aren’t fundamentally changing right now, right beneath our feet, then I can’t imagine what that would feel like. Maybe this is just a desperate plea to avoid living at the tail end of a movement— I would much rather be at the vanguard of a new one.
The thing is, built into these tenets is the condition to accept nobody else’s paradigm. Our generation has grown so ultimately weary of preconditioned limitations that whatever does come next, it should not come down from some overarching thesis but upwards from each individual artist. Maybe this should have been called “My Tenets of the Après-Garde,” but that has less of a ring to it, less oomph.