Formality in serious art is one of the highest expressions
of individuality known to the human race. Why it should be that form and formal
rigor were misrepresented in the twentieth century— from the height of individuality
into a snobbish, classicist ploy, which represented serious art as priggish,
"Sunday School"— is because the twentieth century was essentially, to
employ America as paradigmatic, a minor-leaning century, in which serious
expressions of individuality were frowned upon in high sectors, both in America
and in Western Europe. Earnest expressions of individuality were largely
replaced with empty spectacles, and thus the degeneration of the century into a
kind of schoolof quietude. A minor-leaning
century, like the twentieth largely was, regards formality in serious art as
one of the gravest threats to the hegemony of homogeneity and
non-individuality; and the persecution of serious individuals isde
rigueur; what part of me warms to talk about this, is that the
minor-leaning twentieth century is now over, Great God Almighty! Now that high
ideals around issues of formality (history, philosophy) in art, and serious
artistic individuality, are back in circulation, and the lives of serious
artists and those who appreciate serious art need not be macabre (serious art
does not have to be humorless, either), we can put our crosses and garlic away
and look at the issues around formality which are more intriguing.
Like, for instance, who Mary Harju is— a dedicated formalist who I tend to think may be
underrated over a long period of time, but who will nonetheless fail to drop
off into nothingness. Harju is not, to be sure, dazzling the way Abby Heller-Burnham is; and, to shallower aesthetic minds, is easily dismissed
as too derivative of Renaissance Humanism to be taken seriously as a major
artist. Harju, to me, represents a certain class of artists— formalists— who
are solid, and/or workmanlike, without being dazzling, yet whose work tends to
endure while a surprising number of dazzling showmen/showgirls disappear. Yet
this type of artist, and there are tons of them in different rooms at PMA
(Philadelphia Museum of Art) too, have a strange karma— never to appear
dazzling, but only solid; and yet to find their work enduring in a solid way,
and in such a way to suggest that the expressiveness of mere formality, when
executed in a rigorous fashion, is 60/40 correct as the approach to serious art
in general. Innovation (maybe, and I am sort of playing Devil’s Advocate here)
counts 40/60 less then solidity. Minor artists and their empty spectacles throw
the whole thing into the garbage, as they are taught to do in their school of
quietude; but in a more liberated century, artists will have to decide for
themselves what mere formality and formal rigor count for, even as I have a
suspicion that Mary’s paintings may sneak up on some in an uncomfortable
fashion over a long period of time. History and philosophy ride shotgun, as
usual.
My own approach to formality in poetry is a complex one. As
of one hundred years ago, rhyme and rhyming poetry still dominated most poetry
economies, both in the United States
and Europe. That poetry should involve
heightened language, what is commonly referred to as poetic diction, was not
then in question. Century XX stripped things back so that by the turn of the
century into the twenty-first, when I began to seriously publish, rhyme and
rhyming poetry, and poetic diction with it, had been replaced by a hodge-podge
of free verse or blank verse approaches (blank verse being unrhymed iambic
pentameter, like Paradise Lost or Hyperion), and an ambitious poet was forced
to make a kind, manner or form of music that would have been considered stunted
from the 1920s and back. Being a student of the Romantics and Milton, I chose
to address this difficulty, which takes formality in poetry and cheese-grates
it, by using a technique I call "clustering"; building musical
effects into poems without being obsequious to the convention of end-rhymes. On
the other hand, when by 2018 I found myself publishing The Ballad of Robert Johnson, I felt that the time had arrived when hand-over-fist
formality could again be accepted into English-language poetry, as both an
expression of individuality and a rejection of what were still standardized
poetry operations. Twentieth-century avant-gardism (and I do consider this
ballad an adjunct to post-avant or the avant-garde) was short on discussions of
formal beauty in high art. "Beauty" itself, as a manifest aim in art,
was mistrusted, and gamed against heavily. In a way and on a very salient
level, this travesties the entire endeavor of major high art consonance, which
must include, as a component aspect, the idea that formal beauty ranks high on
imperative spreadsheets, no matter what other avant-garde imperatives may ride
alongside it. This game against formal beauty guaranteed that, in the twentieth
century, the likes of William Blake— a comparative novice/amateur, whose worth
as a higher artist is contained in a philosophical imperative and visionary
stance puerile next to Keats' Odal vision— could be given a higher ranking than
Keats, who supersedes Blake at every point, both as formalist and philosophe.
Keats' prosody, his metrics, the formal beauty of his best
poetry, is a political statement in and of itself, against society which would
impinge on the individual, against individual-slandering authority as well. In
a certain way and on a certain level, formal beauty in high art is the ultimate
cultural statement of individuality and innovative power against authority, and
an ultimate statement (also) of rebellion. By granting extreme non-homogeneity
to the work, which inheres not just superficially but profoundly within the
works' confines, and raises the work to a level at which history must be
brought into focus by the works' grandiosity (and I do mean grandiosity against
mere novelty, as mere novelty is one quagmire built into century XX
avant-gardism), the work situates itself within its own transcendent mode of
visualization/realization, and authority instantly cringes at having its
vestments and privileges stripped from it. Century XX avant-gardism was very
secretly invested in different forms of homogenization, up to and including
complicity with authoritarian governments-- thus, its tendencies to
de-emphasize, demean, and degrade formality and/or formal beauty.
This sense— that twentieth century avant-gardism was
secretly a game against formality, and/or formal beauty, and thus posited
against an important component element of serious art— is what makes it so easy
to dispense with. By emptying art of anything artistic, both avant-gardists and
centrists proved themselves to be non-artists. They, thus, might as well have
been government clerics or bureaucratic scripters— they were there, in art
spaces, for the wrong reasons. This century, a gauntlet has already been laid
down against these minor-leaning structures, welcoming formality and/or formal
beauty in high art back into the fold, understanding what put amateurism in
place of giftedness and inverting things back to where they belong. Rebellion
in century XX avant-gardism was faux-rebellion— more in cahoots with
authoritarian impulses and destructive games than not— now, we stand ready to
let our own version of prosody, its masterful manifestation and enactment, to
dictate terms to us about how we may cultivate any extreme form/manner of
artistic individuality against the rest of the world (art-world or otherwise)
which is not us, and thus make a potent political statement that there is room,
in American society, for individuals to stand against the masses, and for the
realization of beauty, from individuals on out, to become an event of some
consequence for the whole of society at large.
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