Christmas Greetings

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Wishes for better days in Greece...

Yannis Stavrou, Christmas 2013, oil on canvas

Death pulls us, more than life, with subtle wile...

And plunge, as in a dream, in either eye,
And in their lashes' shadow sleep awhile!

Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas (detail)  

Charles Baudelaire

Semper Eadem

"Whence," ask you, "does this strange new sadness flow
Like rising tides on rocks, black, bare, and vast?"
For human hearts, when vintage-time is past,
To live is bad. That secret all men know —


An obvious sorrow, with no mystery, shown,
Clear as your joy, to everyone around.
O curious one, seek nothing more profound,
And speak not, though your voice be sweet in tone.


Hush, ignorant! Hush, soul that's still enraptured,
And mouth of childish laughter! Neatly captured,
Death pulls us, more than life, with subtle wile.


Oh let my thought get drunk upon a lie,
And plunge, as in a dream, in either eye,
And in their lashes' shadow sleep awhile!


(Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire, New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

Charles Baudelaire

Semper Eadem

«D'où vous vient, disiez-vous, cette tristesse étrange,
Montant comme la mer sur le roc noir et nu?»
— Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange
Vivre est un mal. C'est un secret de tous connu,

Une douleur très simple et non mystérieuse
Et, comme votre joie, éclatante pour tous.
Cessez donc de chercher, ô belle curieuse!
Et, bien que votre voix soit douce, taisez-vous!

Taisez-vous, ignorante! âme toujours ravie!
Bouche au rire enfantin! Plus encor que la Vie,
La Mort nous tient souvent par des liens subtils.

Laissez, laissez mon coeur s'enivrer d'un mensonge,
Plonger dans vos beaux yeux comme dans un beau songe
Et sommeiller longtemps à l'ombre de vos cils!

Destiny...

The town in the night
Death in a cry
And the child in life...

Yannis Stavrou, Destiny, oil on canvas (detail) 

Jacques Prevert 

Family Life

The mother knits
The son is at war
It seems completely natural to the mother
And the father, what does the father do?
He does business
His wife knits
The son is at war
It seems completely natural to the father
And the son, the son?
What does he think, the son?
Nothing
He doesn't think anything... the son
His mother knits
His father does business
He is in the war
When the war is over
He will do business with his father
The war continues
The mother continues knitting
The father continues doing business
The son is killed
He doesn't continue
The father and the mother go to the cemetery
They find it quite natural, the father and the mother
Life goes on, life
Knitting
War
Business
Business, business, business
Life with the cemetery.

The mother knits
The son goes to the war
She finds this quite natural, the mother
And the father?
What does the father do?
He has his business
His wife knits
His son goes to the war
He has his business
He finds this quite natural, the father
And the son
And the son
What does the son find?
He finds absolutely nothing, the son
The son: his mother does her knitting,
His father has his business
And he has the war
When the war is over
He'll go into business with his father
The war continues
The mother continues knitting
The father continues with his business
The son is killed
He doesn't continue
The father and mother visit the graveyard
They find this natural
The father and the mother
Life goes on
A life of knitting, war, business
Business, war, knitting, war
Business, business, business
Life with the graveyard

Familiale

La mère fait du tricot
Le fils fait la guerre
Elle trouve ça tout naturel la mère
Et le père qu'est-ce qu'il fait le père ?
Il fait des affaires
Sa femme fait du tricot
Son fils la guerre
Lui des affaires
Il trouve ça tout naturel le père
Et le fils et le fils
Qu'est-ce qu'il trouve le fils ?
Il ne trouve rien absolument rien le fils
Le fils sa mère fait du tricot son père fait des affaires lui la guerre
Quand il aura fini la guerre
Il fera des affaires avec son père
La guerre continue la mère continue elle tricote
Le père continue il fait des affaires
Le fils est tué il ne continue plus
Le père et la mère vont au cimetière
Ils trouvent ça naturel le père et la mère
La vie continue la vie avec le tricot la guerre les affaires
Les affaires la guerre le tricot la guerre
Les affaires les affaires et les affaires
La vie avec le cimetière.

First Day (*)

White sheets in a closet
Red sheets on a bed
A child in its mother
The mother in agony
The father in the hallway
The hallway in the house
The house in the town
The town in the night
Death in a cry
And the child in life

(*)(Copyright (c) 1997 by Alastair Campbell)
"Poems of Jacques Prévert", Alastair Campbell, 
Apt 1006, 5303 52nd St, Yellowknife, NWT, Canada, XIA-IVI

We are the vain predetermined river...

We are the vain predetermined river,
in his travel to his sea.
The shadows have surrounded him.
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away...

Yannis Stavrou, At the Port, oil on paper

Jorge Luis Borges

We are the time. We are the famous

We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.

We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.

We are the river and we are that greek
that looks himself into the river. His reflection
changes into the waters of the changing mirror,
into the crystal that changes like the fire.

We are the vain predetermined river,
in his travel to his sea.

The shadows have surrounded him.
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.

Memory does not stamp his own coin.

However, there is something that stays
however, there is something that bemoans.

Our judgments judge us...

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false...

Yannis Stavrou, Coffee and Books, oil on canvas (detail)

Paul Valéry

Aphorisms

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.

Politeness is organized indifference.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Paul Valéry 1871-1945

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

A man who is ‘of sound mind’ is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

Love is being stupid together.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

At times I think and at times I am.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

The Drunken Boat...

Yannis Stavrou, Red Ships, oil on canvas (detail)

Arthur Rimbaud

The Drunken Boat

As I floated down impassive Rivers,

I felt myself no longer pulled by ropes:

The Redskins took my hauliers for targets,

And nailed them naked to their painted posts.



Carrying Flemish wheat or English cotton,

I was indifferent to all my crews.

The Rivers let me float down as I wished,

When the victims and the sounds were through.



Into the furious breakers of the sea,

Deafer than the ears of a child, last winter,

I ran! And the Peninsulas sliding by me

Never heard a more triumphant clamour.



The tempest blessed my sea-borne arousals.

Lighter than a cork I danced those waves

They call the eternal churners of victims,

Ten nights, without regret for the lighted bays!



Sweeter than sour apples to the children

The green ooze spurting through my hull’s pine,

Washed me of vomit and the blue of wine,

Carried away my rudder and my anchor.



Then I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,

Infused with stars, the milk-white spume blends,

Grazing green azures: where ravished, bleached

Flotsam, a drowned man in dream descends.


Where, staining the blue, sudden deliriums

And slow tremors under the gleams of fire,

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our rhythms,

Ferment the bitter reds of our desire!



I knew the skies split apart by lightning,

Waterspouts, breakers, tides: I knew the night,

The Dawn exalted like a crowd of doves,

I saw what men think they’ve seen in the light!



I saw the low sun, stained with mystic terrors,

Illuminate long violet coagulations,

Like actors in a play, a play that’s ancient,

Waves rolling back their trembling of shutters!



I dreamt the green night of blinded snows,

A kiss lifted slow to the eyes of seas,

The circulation of unheard-of flows,

Sung phosphorus’s blue-yellow awakenings!



For months on end, I’ve followed the swell

That batters at the reefs like terrified cattle,

Not dreaming the Three Marys’ shining feet

Could muzzle with their force the Ocean’s hell!



I’ve struck Floridas, you know, beyond belief,

Where eyes of panthers in human skins,

Merge with the flowers! Rainbow bridles, beneath

the seas’ horizon, stretched out to shadowy fins!



I’ve seen the great swamps boil, and the hiss

Where a whole whale rots among the reeds!

Downfalls of water among tranquilities,

Distances showering into the abyss.


Nacrous waves, silver suns, glaciers, ember skies!

Gaunt wrecks deep in the brown vacuities

Where the giant eels riddled with parasites

Fall, with dark perfumes, from the twisted trees!



I would have liked to show children dolphins

Of the blue wave, the golden singing fish.

– Flowering foams rocked me in my drift,

At times unutterable winds gave me wings.



Sometimes, a martyr tired of poles and zones,

The sea whose sobs made my roilings sweet

Showed me its shadow flowers with yellow mouths

And I rested like a woman on her knees…



Almost an isle, blowing across my sands, quarrels

And droppings of pale-eyed clamorous gulls,

And I scudded on while, over my frayed lines,

Drowned men sank back in sleep beneath my hull!…



Now I, a boat lost in the hair of bays,

Hurled by the hurricane through bird-less ether,

I, whose carcass, sodden with salt-sea water,

No Monitor or Hanseatic vessel could recover:



Freed, in smoke, risen from the violet fog,

I, who pierced the red skies like a wall,

Bearing the sweets that delight true poets,

Lichens of sunlight, gobbets of azure:



Who ran, stained with electric moonlets,

A crazed plank, companied by black sea-horses,

When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows

Skies of ultramarine in burning funnels:



I, who trembled to hear those agonies

Of rutting Behemoths and dark Maelstroms,

Eternal spinner of blue immobilities,

I regret the ancient parapets of Europe!



I’ve seen archipelagos of stars! And isles

Whose maddened skies open for the sailor:

– Is it in depths of night you sleep, exiled,

Million birds of gold, O future Vigour? –



But, truly, I’ve wept too much! The Dawns

Are heartbreaking, each moon hell, each sun bitter:

Fierce love has swallowed me in drunken torpors.

O let my keel break! Tides draw me down!



If I want one pool in Europe, it’s the cold

Black pond where into the scented night

A child squatting filled with sadness launches

A boat as frail as a May butterfly.



Bathed in your languor, waves, I can no longer

Cut across the wakes of cotton ships,

Or sail against the pride of flags, ensigns,

Or swim the dreadful gaze of prison ships.


Arthur Rimbaud 

Le bateau ivre

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs :
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

J’étais insoucieux de tous les équipages,
Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais.
Quand avec mes haleurs ont fini ces tapages,
Les Fleuves m’ont laissé descendre où je voulais.

Dans les clapotements furieux des marées,
Moi, l’autre hiver, plus sourd que les cerveaux d’enfants,
Je courus ! Et les Péninsules démarrées
N’ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.

La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.
Plus léger qu’un bouchon j’ai dansé sur les flots
Qu’on appelle rouleurs éternels de victimes,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l’œil niais des falots !

Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sures,
L’eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin
Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures
Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin.

Et, dès lors, je me suis baigné dans le Poème
De la Mer, infusé d’astres, et lactescent,
Dévorant les azurs verts ; où, flottaison blême
Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend ;

Où, teignant tout à coup les bleuités, délires
Et rythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour,
Plus fortes que l’alcool, plus vastes que nos lyres,
Fermentent les rousseurs amères de l’amour !

Je sais les cieux crevant en éclairs, et les trombes
Et les ressacs, et les courants : je sais le soir,
L’Aube exaltée ainsi qu’un peuple de colombes,
Et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir !

J’ai vu le soleil bas, taché d’horreurs mystiques,
Illuminant de longs figements violets,
Pareils à des acteurs de drames très antiques
Les flots roulant au loin leurs frissons de volets !

J’ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,
Baisers montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteurs,
La circulation des sèves inouïes,
Et l’éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs !

J’ai suivi, des mois pleins, pareille aux vacheries
Hystériques, la houle à l’assaut des récifs,
Sans songer que les pieds lumineux des Maries
Pussent forcer le mufle aux Océans poussifs !

J’ai heurté, savez-vous, d’incroyables Florides
Mêlant au fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux
D’hommes ! Des arcs-en-ciel tendus comme des brides
Sous l’horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux !

J’ai vu fermenter les marais énormes, nasses
Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan !
Des écroulements d’eaux au milieu des bonaces,
Et les lointains vers les gouffres cataractant !

Glaciers, soleils d’argent, flots nacreux, cieux de braises !
Échouages hideux au fond des golfes bruns
Où les serpents géants dévorés des punaises
Choient, des arbres tordus avec de noirs parfums !

J’aurais voulu montrer aux enfants ces dorades
Du flot bleu, ces poissons d’or, ces poissons chantants.
— Des écumes de fleurs ont bercé mes dérades
Et d’ineffables vents m’ont ailé par instants.

Parfois, martyr lassé des pôles et des zones,
La mer dont le sanglot faisait mon roulis doux
Montait vers moi ses fleurs d’ombre aux ventouses jaunes
Et je restais, ainsi qu’une femme à genoux...

Presque île, ballottant sur mes bords les querelles
Et les fientes d’oiseaux clabaudeurs aux yeux blonds.
Et je voguais, lorsqu’à travers mes liens frêles
Des noyés descendaient dormir, à reculons !

Or moi, bateau perdu sous les cheveux des anses,
Jeté par l’ouragan dans l’éther sans oiseau,
Moi dont les Monitors et les voiliers des Hanses
N’auraient pas repêché la carcasse ivre d’eau ;

Libre, fumant, monté de brumes violettes,
Moi qui trouais le ciel rougeoyant comme un mur
Qui porte, confiture exquise aux bons poètes,
Des lichens de soleil et des morves d’azur ;

Qui courais, taché de lunules électriques,
Planche folle, escorté des hippocampes noirs,
Quand les juillets faisaient crouler à coups de triques
Les cieux ultramarins aux ardents entonnoirs ;

Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues
Le rut des Béhémots et des Maelstroms épais,
Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets !

J’ai vu des archipels sidéraux ! et des îles
Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur :
— Est-ce en ces nuits sans fonds que tu dors et t’exiles,
Millions d’oiseaux d’or, ô future Vigueur ?

Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes.
Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer :
L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.
Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j’aille à la mer !

Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache
Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé
Un enfant accroupi, plein de tristesse, lâche
Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.

Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames,
Enlever leur sillage aux porteurs de cotons,
Ni traverser l’orgueil des drapeaux et des flammes,
Ni nager sous les yeux horribles des pontons !

After a hundred years, nobody knows the place...

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace...

Yannis Stavrou, Sunset on Acropolis, oil on canvas

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

After a hundred years

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place,--
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.

Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.

Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way,--
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.


Water, is taught by thirst

Water, is taught by thirst.
Land—by the Oceans passed.
Transport—by throe—
Peace—by its battles told—
Love, by Memorial Mold—
Birds, by the Snow.

I'm nobody! Who are you?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish -- you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Sign to save ERT

The Greek government has just brutally pulled the plug on our public radio and TV services, dealing a terrible blow to our democracy.Let´s stop the Great Greek Switch-off --click to sign this petition and share it widely until we build an outcry impossible to ignore:

The Greek government has just brutally pulled the plug on our public radio and TV services, dealing a terrible blow to our democracy. But if enough of us fight back now, we can force PM Samaras to give us our ERT back.

State media is normally the first target in any coup but now our democratically elected government has decided to shut it down, firing all its 2,700 employees. They say ERT is inefficient and lacks transparency, but rather than reform it to make it better, they’ve decided to kill it. Right now protests are spreading across the country and if we turn the heat on Samaras now, we can still save the TV and radio we all grew up with.

We don’t have much time left. Greece is in crisis and and decisions being made now will last for generations. Only a public, impartial media can help us scrutinise the austerity autocrats and hold our democratically elected politicians to account. Let´s stop the Great Greek Switch-off --click to sign this petition and share it widely until we build an outcry impossible to ignore:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/greece_ert/

With hope and determination,

Luis, Sam, Marie, Carol and the whole Avaaz team

PS: this campaign was originally created by Sophia K.. Start yours now and win on any issue - local, national or global: http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/start_a_petition/?bgMYedb&v=23917

MORE INFORMATION

ERT closure: Greek unions stage 24-hour protest strike (BBC)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22883236

The loss of ERT, the 'Greek BBC', is a cultural calamity (The Guardian)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/ert-greek-state-broadcaster-cultural-calamity

Closure of Greek state-run broadcaster ERT triggers political crisis (The Independent)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/closure-of-greek-staterun-broadcaster-ert-triggers-political-crisis-as-unions-call-24hour-general-strike-8654484.html

Greeks protest in Brussels over ERT shutdown (Euronews)
http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/12/greeks-protest-in-brussels-over-ert-shutdown/

An introduction to Panajotis Kondylis mass democracy...

 
Panajotis Kondylis (1943-1998)

By Ch. Van Eecke
A light introduction to Kondylian mass democracy by an artistically minded author

Kondylian Combinations

[...] Bürger’s history of the avant-garde is corroborated in an interesting way in Panajotis Kondylis’ history of the decay of the bourgeois way of life and the emergence of mass democracy. Kondylis argues that every culture looks at reality from a specific perspective or worldview. Such a worldview is created to cope with the world: it is a means of survival in a hostile environment. By imposing a certain view upon the world, a culture establishes an identity that allows it to control the world. Through this control a culture and its inhabitants are able to keep themselves alive.

This means that every worldview is designed in relation to whatever may threaten a culture’s survival. These threats are the culture’s enemies. In primitive cultures the enemy may be wild animals or poisonous plants, but in our more developed societies the worldview is usually designed to identify and do battle with ideological enemies, namely groups of people or cultures that live by another and usually conflicting worldview. This means that for Kondylis ‘es gibt keinen anderen methodischen Zugang zur Erfassung des Charakters einer Epoche oder einer Gesellschaftsformation als ihre Abgrenzung gegen eine frühere oder eine andere’. To understand a culture or epoch one must understand against what or whom it was constructed. For instance, the worldview of the Enlightenment was developed as a strategic answer to the Christian worldview of the Middle ages. The Christian worldview saw everything from the perspective of religion and salvation, with the main focus of attention lying in the afterworld. It was a world of disembodiment and spirituality. The Enlightenment was a strategic answer to the challenge of gaining victory over this worldview by trying to rethink the relationship between mind and body.

A specific way in which this strategic answer took form can be seen in modern aesthetics, notably in the works of Schiller and Kant. As we saw before, Kant’s aesthetic theory was an attempt to bridge the gap between body and mind. This means that he was trying to undo the bifurcation of body and mind that was at the heart of Christianity, where the body had to be mortified and only the immortal soul would be saved. A similar tactic is at work in Schiller’s work, where the arts, and notably the theatre, are engaged in a didactic process: the theatre can be used as a stage for attractively packaged moral messages. However, Schiller argued for the autonomy of art: whatever moral message a work of art may present, it could only be successfully conveyed if the work of art was not subservient to morality. There had to be harmony of form and content and neither of the two should dominate the other. Kondylis has called the mechanism at work in modern aesthetics ‘the rehabilitation of the sensual’ (‘die Rehabilitation der Sinnlichkeit’): Both Kant’s and Schiller’s works (but the works of many others too, and not merely in aesthetics) can be seen as attempts to re-enfranchise the physical realm in view of the traditional hostility towards it. One way of doing this was to stress the moral potential of art: aesthetic enjoyment (which is sinful in a Christian perspective) could serve higher moral ends. But both Kant and Schiller stress the autonomy of art in this process, which chimes with Bürger’s claim that bourgeois culture evolved towards an emancipation of the aesthetic into an autonomous realm. In Kant this trend towards autonomy of the aesthetic is most clear in the element of disinterestedness which we have already discussed.

Kondylis has sketched bourgeois culture as ‘synthetic-harmonising’ (‘synthetisch-harmonisierend’): it is a worldview that is well-ordered and scientific and aims at a harmonic synthesis of opposites. It tries to bring everything together in what can be called le juste milieu. This term is borrowed from the arts, but we find it equally at work in the other aspects of culture. For example, deism seeks to harmonise the existence of a superior being with the findings of modern science, thus saving both traditional morality and modern science from mutual embarrassment (and philosophical writers from possible prosecution by church or state). In the case of Kant, the harmonising middle ground lies in his attempt to bridge the gap between body and mind, whereas Schiller epitomised the rehabilitation of the sensual in his moral mission for the theatre. But apart from harmonising, the modern bourgeois worldview is also organic in structure. This is expressed in the idea of Bildung: man has an essential nature which must be nurtured to bring it to fruition. The prime metaphor to understand modern culture, according to Kondylis, is therefore time: there is a trend towards harmony that develops through time. Modernity is the culture of perfectibility. History is a process of progress. In the arts bourgeois culture is expressed in Classicism, where there is a symmetrical relation between the whole and its parts and a perfect union of form and content, as in Schiller’s proposals for the theatre. In the modern view, art is included in the history of organic progress for it is usually seen as the highest triumph of nature: it is in art that mankind achieves the highest expression of himself. It is no coincidence that this idea was also at the heart of schiller’s aesthetics, where it is art that allows man to bind together his sensual and his moral self (Kant’s body and mind) in a greater harmony that is his highest human calling.

Bourgeois culture in its pure form only existed for a very brief period of time. It soon started to erode from within. This process becomes especially visible in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the emancipation of the several spheres of action becomes clearly visible. The decline of bourgeois culture is in many ways a parallel process to the division of labour, as Bürger also claimed. the nineteenth century saw the gradual emancipation of the labourer in the emergence of social movements. This started a process of atomisation of society: as the twentieth century progresses, the individual comes more and more to the fore and egalitarian ideals gain ground. This is an effect of the process of emancipation of bourgeois culture. Artistically, this process came to an end with aestheticism, art for art’s sake. This means that the autonomy of art, which we saw emerge in Kant’s idea of disinterestedness, had finally run its course. On this point, Kondylis’ analysis merges with Bürger’s: the avant-garde (or what Bürger calls the historical avant-garde) demands the end of art in the sense that art and life must merge. On a more general level, the synthetic-harmonising culture of bourgeois modernity makes way for a new culture that will evolve into the postmodern. The postmodern is no longer aimed at synthesis or harmony and is described by Kondylis as ‘analytical-combinatory’ (‘analytisch-kombinatorisch’). Society is no longer harmonised but analysed into its constituent parts. This means that the process of emancipation started in bourgeois culture is taken to its logical extreme: every individual becomes important in its unique individuality. This is the emergence of the atomised society that we call mass democracy. In a 1961 lecture Langer has referred to this as a process of individuation; a process that she felt had ‘all but reached its limit. Society is breaking up into its ultimate units – single individuals, persons’. Langer looked at this process with some concern because ‘the fact is that in our Western culture [...] each individual really stands alone’ and many people ‘feel, but cannot understand, their loss of the sense of involvement, which makes the world seem like a meaningless rat race in which they are reduced to nothingness, alone in life and in death’. A parallel process can be seen in the arts of what we now call Modernism: artists seek the primary elements of art, be it pure colours or shapes, basic forms, or the basic elements of perception (Kondylis points out that modernism in history and Modernism in the arts do not coincide: artistic Modernism is in fact the kind of art developed in the postmodern era). This is what Danto calls the age of Manifestos. The guiding metaphor of postmodernity is not time but space. Mass democracy can be represented as a huge plane or space in which all individuals, lifestyles, values, or objects are simply at hand. There is no hierarchy. There is no individual more valuable than any other, no lifestyle more favourable than any other. Everything is equal. Which means that things are simply at hand in space as in a huge window display or on a counter. This is the analytical aspect: everything is broken down into its most basic constituents. The combinatory aspect next says that all these elements can be combined in whatever combinations we please. This means that personality is no longer seen as a temporal thing, as in the ideal of Bildung. People construct their personality: they make choices, identify themselves as belonging to specific subcultures, they choose their gender roles, their jobs, their dress, everything. And no choice is ever final: there are no essences and every choice can always be traded for another styling of the self and its mercurial identities. We no longer accumulate our personality through time but assemble it as a work of art. For the arts this means that artists can use whatever they want in whatever combination they want. The prime example of postmodern or analytical-combinatory art is the collage, or the collection of perspectives in a Cubist painting. In fact, Bürger maintains that montage should be considered ‘the basic principle of avant-garde art’, partly because its explicitly constructed nature is the exact opposite of the organic concept of art found in bourgeois culture (Robert Rauschenberg tellingly referred to some of his works as “combines”). This again means that what Danto has called the Post-Historical condition in art, namely the fact that anything can become art or be integrated in art, is in fact a feature of artistic Modernism. Both Bürger and Kondylis show that Danto is at least fifty years behind when he defines 1964 as the point in time where the Post-Historical era emerges [...]

Source: Christophe Van Eecke, ONLY CONNECT – five exercises in aesthetics (2011)