“Make it new”
Ezra Pound dictum that is the heart of Modernism…….
But as anyone “knows”, everything we see or say or hear or touch
as been done before, what can be new after a million years of
human history? Recall your art history……. You have art from the middle
ages which was religious art up till 1880’s which was your basic portrait art,
the art that sits in museums like the Mona Lisa or you have landscape paintings…
pretty pictures of cities or the mountains…….
but Art beginning in about 1880 started to become something different……
you begin to have your various ism’s in art like Dadaism and surrealism
and art Nouveau and symbolism and fauvism and Die Brucke….
there are many different types of Art ism’s that existed after 1880…
You have to begin to historically understand, that by 1880 a new
medical approach was beginning in Europe which we now call
psychoanalysis……. This new method was beginning to make its
way into the conscious of people everywhere and it made it
home in the place where it made the most sense, Artists……
for Artist, the unconscious was where art is created and formed…
Art exists in the realm of the unconscious and Artists use
their unconscious to create that art. “To make it new”
was about taking the unconscious and making it manifest…….
Every great artist uses the unconscious but to “make it new”
the Artist began to show us the unconscious in many different platforms.
Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature…………
look at the art created after 1880 and you can see how the
Artist would try to show us the unconscious at work in their art.
For one example, stream of conscious writing in literature…
the act of putting down words without “editing” as in James Joyce
“Ulysses” for example. This form of writing would have been impossible
before 1900……….People did not have the “ears” to hear such
“babbling”… but because of the new “age” that we are in, the Modern age,
we now have ears to hear such “Babbling”… but can you also see the results
of the use of the unconscious in history? We have several events like
the “Two World Wars” and the Holocaust and the cold war…
There does seem to be a connection between this new process of
seeking the unconscious and the horror of the 20th century.
Perhaps this is the reason that the “Frankenstein” mythos is so
compelling in the 20th century. We have released the monster
and it is our unconscious. So the question of the release of
the terror and horror of the “Modern” age is the result of
the understanding that we “must make it new” and we pursued
this attempt to “make it new” into our unconscious and we made
the unconscious visible in our paintings and literature and poems
and architecture among the platforms made conscious.
This age has done something no other age has done, which is make
the unconscious visible. But once again we must ask ourselves,
why this age? Why now? What has changed that made it possible,
even necessary for us to explore the unconscious mind?
what event or event’s has forced us to engage in an understanding
of not only our physical bodies, but our unconscious mind?
The history of the 20th century is a direct result of this emphasis on
making the unconscious visible from the two world wars to the holocaust
to the nihilism and despair of the world of 2018.
For what must we do to free ourselves of our unleashing our
unconscious unto the world?
Doubt me? then ask yourself this, why do we have such an emphasis
to heal our minds? We have thousands who job is to heal our mental state,
to heal our minds, our unconscious minds. Why is psychology such a big business
nowadays? Why are we so mentally fucked up? This is beyond the normal state
of people who are mentally ill which has existed since the beginning of time to
the point where have a crisis in mental illness that exists in our “Modern” times
and to what can you attribute this crisis to? What has changed that has increased
mental illness to become perhaps the leading medical issue of our times?
We see mental illness existing even in the White House where clearly we
have a mentally unbalanced president. Why this increase in mental
illness? Answer this question and you have the answer to one of the question
of the “modern” age. What the hell is wrong with us?
Kropotkin