me...

Pop Monday: i want to talk about Rebekah. And artistic movements. And emotions. And duality.

As you may've noticed, i believe in a dichotic understanding of existence. i believe that we are both objective and subjective beings, and that we can not possibly be wholly honest until we recognize our inherent duality.

Our emotions are an excellent example. Dostoevsky identified that one kind of anger, once triggered, would cease in the face of an obstacle, but another kind would continue to afflict the mind. What we commonly refer to as one emotion, is actually two experiences. And this is true of every emotion. There is the initial subjective chemical rush of anger, joy, sorrow, fear, and then there is our objective recognition that we experienced an emotion a second ago, and that there is every reason to still experience it.

Rebekah is an artist. She takes empty photographs of trailer parks, and creates documentary montages of naked butts. Some very loud part of me insisted that this was all silliness, but i sensed a much more compelling truth being whispered, and turned my head to listen. When you talk to Rebekah about art, you get an idiosyncratically genuine sense of disillusionment. And that's when i realized that i had before me the reenacted genesis of Postmodernism. That artistic movements are very much like emotions, with a profoundly honest and reactionary spark, and a quite longer, intentional, diluted continuation. That the progenitors of a movement are not so much innovating as they are desperately grasping for a last resort, and that the rest of a movement is merely regurgitation for starving artists. All at once, i had found a new respect for the idea of art. So thank you, Rebekah. i don't do regrets, but it will always sadden me that i didn't get to explore you more.

Current Mood: imaginative
Current Music: "i'm surprised that you've never been told before that you're priceless and you're precious, even when you are not new" - Fascinating New Thing, Semisonic

posted by Arthur @ 9/02/2002 06:55:00 PM

Monday, September 02, 2002