The Art Anarchist surfaces again

[torquill]

I'm feeling the urge to hunt down the biggest proponents of artistic and literary criticism and bludgeon them with the collected analyses of Caravaggio's "The Calling of Saint Michael". Assuming I could lift a stack that heavy.

We're doing structuralism in Russian Folklore, analyzing the parts of a folktale. Gay Cuban Nation has forced me to read analyses of midcentury Cuban literature and poetry. I think the only thing that comes close to the nauseating frustration of being required to pick apart great works of Art and Literachure is having to watch someone else dissect it in exhausting detail and cherry-pick the tiniest bits in order to prove a pet theory. (I respect the professor, but his book has a revolting level of mental masturbation at its heart.)

I complained to my Russian teacher at the end of class, because (though it isn't her fault) I'm getting heartily sick of literary analysis. Russian isn't the worst class I've had for that, but between the literally stomach-turning quantity I had to read for Gay Cuban Nation over the last 24 hours, and the fact that we're taking folktales down to their component atoms now, I'm really losing patience with all of it.

I hate critical analysis of literature and art with a burning stabby hate. That hasn't changed since my first taste of music "appreciation" in high school, and it solidified into something articulate in my last English class. In fact, my final paper for that English class was a condemnation of the very sort of analysis we had been learning to perform. I detest the act of doing it, and I hate having to read the result. When the subject is something in which I have no interest, it turns into grinding tedium; when it's something I like, I get the dubious pleasure of having the beauty of it slowly strangled to death before my eyes.

My Russian teacher's solution was simple: don't take that sort of class. My response was that I have to -- it's called General Education requirements, and they won't let me graduate without taking them. I've avoided art and music appreciation/history classes like the plague, along with surveys of Literachure. Unfortunately, even the most carefully chosen humanities classes seem to be tainted with it; I had hoped the social sciences requirements wouldn't be, but here I am suffering through "Gay Cuban Nation" as it takes apart the works of great Cuban authors and poets in search of cultural trends.

I don't mind analyzing history. It's a set of events, driven by people; it's data, with all sorts of trends and underlying currents to anyone looking for patterns. People do things for all sorts of reasons, and looking at the human reasons behind historical events or cultures fascinates me. The Cuban Revolution was driven by one man, but he rode on the back of history, without which it wouldn't have been possible. I love sociological studies like that. Maybe I should take more history classes.

The act of taking apart poetry, novels, and art to find (or imagine) sociological signs and trends in the teeny details is maddening, though. It doesn't help that I don't see the worth of most of the Great Works, particularly novels -- most of them are either tedious or very unpleasant to read, either in style or subject matter. I suspect the only reason they have such a reputation is that they're great fodder for the people who love to do critical analysis on written works.

I wrote the essay for English because of my reaction to analyzing Caravaggio's painting. I went and dug out the essay again, because it's a (much tamer) articulation of exactly what I feel is wrong with analyzing art. There's more to it, but the main portion is here:

Many people enjoy finding out the facts about a work of art. There is
a certain intellectual pleasure that can be derived from a piece this way; one
can examine its past, its composition and use of materials, contrast the use of
musical tone and key with other works, and discover the identity of its
subjects and who or what they were in life. Done on the scale usually
presented to the general public, it makes the piece into a part of history, a
survivor which can tell us about the times and places it has seen. This is a
cold and distant pleasure, however, when compared with the keen grip of an
emotional reaction, the indescribable something which leaves the viewer
groping for words. It's a forty-watt lightbulb next to a blazing fireplace,
where both illuminate, but one is so much more than just light.

The problem with this kind of analysis is more than just a matter of
trading one type of enjoyment for another. In such a clinical breakdown, the
piece of art becomes valuable as an archetypical example of form and skill,
representing other things made by the same author or in the same period or
style. However, the shift from individual to type has some of the same impact
that reproduction supposedly does. Berger claims that the act of reproducing a
work of art diminishes it, that "its first meaning is no longer to be found in
what it says, but in what it is": the original of a reproduction. Yet in
labeling a work as an example of a larger class of art, it stops being unique
in its own right and becomes just one of many, perhaps special because it is a
particularly good specimen, but otherwise it is noted because of its
resemblance to the others in the group rather than because of its own special
composition.

When you take a thing down to the bones of its structure, you're left with a heap of parts. The parts may be useful, but it's no longer a thing of beauty; all its intrinsic attraction is lost. Many people seem to revel in that process, and I've never understood why.

Maybe it's the way I think. My Russian teacher asked me what major I was, and I told her; then I said that maybe that was the problem. I like science to be science, and art to be art.


Prof. Stuchebrukhov said that perhaps I should try writing my assigned fairy tale off the cuff, if I feel like I can get the essential characteristics of it in an organic way (as opposed to using the structuralist approach). At least she's flexible about it.

I'll get through the rest of the quarter, hopefully without succumbing to my urge to break something, or say anything uncharitable in one of the essays. If the graduation requirements say that I have to spend four hours a week stripping the wings off of gorgeous butterfly collections and pulverizing them to analyze their components, I'll do it. Just don't expect me to be grateful or enthusiastic.

Comments

[catnip13.livejournal.com]

Wow. I totally agree with everything you said there, but wouldn't have known how to articulate it.