"Poetry and 'Stupidity': Beats to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E." Kevin McGuirck. Open Letter 11.1 (Spring 2001): 96-112.
If the preceding statement is true, then I, the aspiring hermeneut, am already dead. The fatal infection of naivety is at the core of what I (perhaps foolishly) consider the roots of raw authentic inspiration. Introspection on my own practice-based art-research leads directly to an awareness of the role of naivety in creation; often it is only through a naive clarity, an innocent mood, uninhibited by critical compulsions that projects initiate themselves. Yet I am aware that to situate or affiliate oneself with naivety is contentious; it risks provoking questions which can puncture the validity of an argument. Let's examine potential objections that might arise.
If art is the conscious mastery of communication and tools, what role has naivety in art? Doesn't that suggest we should value the art of the insane or childish more than masters? Art Brut did just that (collecting the art of marginalized anomalistic personalities). Art Brut was a movement led and espoused by Jean Dubuffet; it is a vivid example of valuing naivety in art; it's philosophical embrace of naivety is almost total. In Art Brut, often practitioners are literally the victims of organic obsessive compulsive disorders; art brut hovers between aesthetics and a freak show, aesthetics emerges through anomalies; it attracts paradoxically through revulsion and simultaneous wonder. In Art Brut, the edges of sanity melt away. Words or activities are transfigured through relentless repetition into large-scale monuments to endurance. The Art Brut path is one aspect of naivety; it is not representative of what I intend by naivety. Also naive are the relentless hordes of innocent postcards and romance novels, the aphorisms and injunctions that knot sentimentality into cliché. This ubiquitous practice is also not at the core of my definition.
Instead, there exists among the diverse alternative modes of naivety that remain un-enumerated by the incomplete preceding catalogue, a path that incorporates naivety without surrendering intelligence. It is a pathway that adheres to the nature of thought as it is thought; that cherishes the instantaneous gesture without deifying instinct; in a sense this form of naivety can be considered a proposal for neurological egalitarianism. Given that a human is a complex apparatus of intersecting neurological and enteric modules, it proposes that artists are not emphatically ruled by the reentrant circuits of analytical logic. Conjunctions of patterns arising through internal interfaces all contribute to the nebulous swirling notion of our self; art that is honest must allow the voices interior to this cloud-self to speak. In other words, artistic creation can arise spontaneously from the raw datum of thought, independently of a conceptual precursor. As Joyce wrote: "I shall express myself as I am." (James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Contemporary theoretical initiatives are emerging from credible research institutions which advocate a clear play of ideas, free from the formal censorship of conventional scholarship. Naivety is not any longer fatal; it may stigmatize, but as a methodology it has its advocates, notably Henry Jenkins from MIT:"Popular culture is defined in part by its immediacy and it is not clear that one can meaningfully understand how it works or what it does without stepping at least temporarily into the realm of the proximate and the passionate."
Henry Jenkins, April 16, 2007. http://www.henryjenkins.org/
By juxtaposing the immediacy of culture against the slow production values of classical scholarship, Jenkins advocates a 'temporary' leap into 'the proximate and the passionate'. His argument generalizes well into a model for artistic practice in the digital era. Naive uses of technology need to be reexamined, but first of all be allowed to happen. Poetry without play is not poetry.
As Kevin McGuirty says in his essay on poetry and stupidity: "poetry, I would argue, has engaged more variously and promisciously, sometimes covertly, sometimes brazenly, with the many forms of the stupid." (Open Letter, 11.1, p.99). McGuirty emphasizes how this courtship is paradoxical: stupidity is deviously intelligent innocence. A preeminent example of the lucid innocent wild child persona is Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Patchen's highly idiosyncratic style and pleasure in severely raw innocent visual poetry have limited his audience. Critical receptivity to Patchen is rare; his works are too hallucinatory, and rabidly political to be subsumed by the academy. He represents a dangerous subject, America's own William Blake.
Kenneth Patchen
It is from this tradition that digital poetry emerges. And as with any child it can deny or refute the influence of its forebearers only at the risk of inducing a hypocritical schism in its nature.
Labels: authenticity, passion, proximate
