The parable of Plato’s cave is an interesting one for
Neo-Romanticism. The idea, that all we perceive with our brains are shadows of
a higher, more perfect reality which exists in some ethereal realm in (perhaps)
a parallel universe, fits in perfectly with the sometimes gratuitous
gorgeousness of Philadelphia’s
architecture. If Philadelphia’s architecture amounts to shadows on the wall of
the proverbial cave, echoing a more perfect reality, then Neo-Romantic art, if
it is to fulfill its task and obligation to Philadelphia’s architecture, must
embody a similar sense of the gorgeous. The duality inheres: Neo-Romanticism
has on one side Philadelphia’s
architecture, on the other side deep-set engagements with English Romanticism
and French Neo-Classicism. All of this is involved, in Neo-Romanticism, in an
unbounded sense of idealism around the potentialities of serious art. Our
idealism, in fact, was and remains a kind of ghost for us; the sense of
channeling worlds which must remain ghost worlds on earth, of translating the
untranslatable, of manifesting the sublime as a mode of echoing a higher,
inaccessible sublime. Art’s illustrious past is thus so well-worn in Philadelphia’s consciousness, from PMA on out, that Philadelphia artists must get used to the ghosts, the way
citizens of Phoenix
get used to the tarantulas. Idealism and the past form part of the mind’s
architecture in and for Neo-Romanticism, and the Platonic which girds up the
buildings which form our landscape become built into our mindscapes as well.
This Apparition Poem attempts a co-opt move of Platonics, towards a realization
of irony towards absurdity amidst the sturm und drang of the domestic:
The idealistic idea that somewhere in the universe hovers a
more perfect pregnant wife or mistress hangs heavy here. If the juxtaposition here— Greek
philosophical gravitas with down-in-the-dirt domesticity and sexually charged
strife— is a rich one, it is because the “ghosting” or apparitional process has
happened in an unusual context or at an unusual moment. It has also erupted
from the brain of an unusual protagonist. Abby’s Lost Twins is even richer,
creating a scaffolding of allegories over parables under allegories about art
history, gender, queerness, form (engagement, importantly, with David), and
also the sense of dislocation, of being “ghosted,” through alienation
alternating with familiarity to art’s past. The idealism in Neo-Romantic art is also
a conceit, as in The Lost Twins— that the works of art we create can encompass
everything, from pop culture to Duchamp to David, all at once, and put together
in a novel formal package as elaborate and maze-like as anything on Broad
Street or Pine Street in Center City Philadelphia, for example, or Fayette
Street in Conshohocken, which is its own Narnian paradise. Somewhere, says the
Neo-Romantic narrative, there exists a perfect universe of perfect works of
art, which permanently capture and embody all important forms and themes. The
ghost of this perfect, spectral world holds us in thrall as we attempt to
channel it. We have our hint of it in Philadelphia’s
architecture, Keats, Ingres, David, and now we become psychic lightning rods to
bring it down to earth again. If this sounds Romantic, good. The idealism of
Neo-Romanticism has as one of its foundations the belief in a shuddering,
resonant, inter-connected and interstitially linked world, not just the shards
and fragments of Modernism and post-modernism. What they chopped to bits, we
impose wholeness and unity on.
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