Tonight, I'm a little compressed for time as I am also writing-up a piece for another blog, The Avant Guardian.
So, I will simply leave a little taste for you; a quote from Hal Foster's “Obscene Abject Traumatic.” October 78, Fall 1996.
In a sense Breton and Bataille were both right, at least about each other. Often Breton and company did act like juvenile victims who provoked the paternal law as if to ensure that it was still there-at best in a neurotic plea for punishment, at worst in a paranoid demand for order. And this Icarian pose is again assumed by contemporary artists who are almost too eager to talk dirty in the museum, almost too ready to be tweaked by Hilton Kramer or spanked by Jesse Helms. On the other hand, the Bataillean ideal-to opt for the smelly shoe over the beautiful picture, to be fixed in perversion or stuck in abjection-is also adopted by contemporary artists discontent not only with the refinements of sublimation but with the displacements of desire. Is this, then, the option that abject art offers us-Oedipal naughtiness or infantile perversion? To act dirty with the secret wish to be spanked, or to wallow in shit with the secret faith that the most defiled might reverse into the most sacred, the most perverse into the most potent? (118)This seems to fit-in nicely with this week's consideration of the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" and Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
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