As per Neo-Romanticism and the Academy: we will have to be
both in it and out of it forever. The in/out dichotomy could express beleaguered
avant-gardism or half (or a third or quarter) academicism; but, because
Neo-Romanticism has a hinge both to philosophy and literary theory on high
levels, both of which flourish (usually) only in academic contexts, and because
I went to Penn and Abby to PAFA, we will never properly be “street” (as we
could be) in Philadelphia, New York, or anywhere else. The more aesthetically
valid version of academicism we espouse is our version of classicism— of
historical awareness which dotes on an elite handful of already elite
achievements, specifically in English Romanticism and French Neo-Classicism.
Yet, looking at Meeting Halfway, Abby’s boldest statement of queer
intentionality, and how classicism is balanced by an imperative to be intimate,
sexual, and provocatively so, we can see how Philadelphia’s architecture
insisted on a multi-leveled, multi-tiered approach, so that we as artists could
be, at least partly, of the street as of the Academy. Call it Neo-Romanticism’s
nod to Mannerism, or just a major high art consonant Wall of Sound; and this
whole syndrome, of balancing a plethora of imperatives, including raw, frank
sexuality, and a classicist dedication to elite forms, is also played out
provocatively in Apparition Poem 1649:
Oh you guys, you guys are tough.
I came here to write about some
thing, but now that I came, I can’t
come to a decision about what I
came for. What? You said I can’t
do this? You said it’s not possible
because it’s a violation and not a
moving one? It’s true, you guys
are tough. You know I have tried,
at different times, to please you in
little ways, but this one time I had
this student that was giving me head
and she stopped in the middle to tell
me that I had good taste and you had
bad taste, and I’ll admit it, I believed
her. She was your student too, maybe
you’ve seen her around. She’s the one
with the scarves and the jewelry and
the jewels and the courtesy to give the
teachers head who deserve it. Do you?
Fayette Street
in Conshohocken manifests a willingness to transgress, and so do we. When
themes and forms are juxtaposed in unlikely ways (City Hall, Center City
Philly), we demonstrate an extremely rugged sense of individualism, as does our
body of work. Neither Abby nor I were working with any kind of dossier or script to guide
our creativity; we were under the architectural spell we were under, and
winging it. Getting classicist hands dirty the right way round; the buildings
insisted on it (LibertyPlaceTowers).
Or, you could call it formal rigor with a socially relevant edge; creating
spaces for our audience where beauty and sexuality themselves could be
provocative issues, ditto aesthetic formality. Posit these constituent elements
to Neo-Romanticism in chiasmus with the Academy, and what emerges is something very indeterminate, to be honest. Or, the ambiguity between the Academy
and Neo-Romanticism has inhering in it the tension between formality and
thematic provocation, beauty and conceptuality, which (owing to an inferior
relationship to aesthetic form and formality) the twentieth century in literature and visual art never
particularly bothered to deal with, as the English Romantics and French Neo-Classicists did in
the nineteenth. The twentieth century, backwards and sideways, in
Neo-Romanticism, is all about what in our work is conceptual, including
concepts of forms, and why we have chosen to employ aesthetic formality the way
we have. In the aftermath of the glut of post-modern conceptuality in the last
fifty years, daring to be formally beautiful and socially relevant
simultaneously is its own gambit. Walks down the right Philadelphia
streets will show anyone that Philadelphia’s
spaces are constantly doing these tricks, between usefulness and ravishment,
what is serviceable and what is sumptuous, all in a time/space continuum
spanning a number of centuries. What our architecture revealed to us is a game
much more grandiose and all-encompassing then most of the twentieth century in
our disciplines dared to imagine— a way of taking raw sex, raw beauty, and
weaving it through with the right kind of conceptuality so that we’ve got all
the way from Ingres to Warhol, all the way from Keats to Pynchon covered.
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