On Jun 6, 2009, at 8:47 PM, William Conger wrote:
If I understand you correctly, I agree. But it's so hard to know when one confronts the inevitable and resolved because it's always caught up in the transient stream of events. And my own efforts to attain the elusive permanence are contrasted by the evolving glut of popular culture which relishes the now, the dissolution of events, "cutting edge", and the "point of the avant-garde" It's been a difficult chore to live in an age that worships the transient but then maybe the antagonism it nurtures is good.
"Inevitable and resolved" implies completion and coherence, fittedness, proportion, all those things. (Yes, Cheerskep, that last phrase is very vague, indeed. And it has a certain Thomistic ring to it, too!)
It's my experience, and I suspect yours too, that I reach a point where I can't continue, and as I look around at a piece and examine it, very little beckons me to continue. Nothing, in fact. Sometimes, I know in that moment that it is finished, and well made, too; other times, I have doubts about it and think it's just stopped but not finished. Yet when I return to it after a long break, I still can't go any further and even begin to believe that it is completed, and pretty good, to boot. There are a few miscreants leaning against the walls, never to be taken out in public, poor products that exhibit many false efforts, fruitless tactics, incoherence.
I believe instinct honed over the years by experience can tell us when the stopping point, the completion, is reached. And, like "style," the instinct is personal, individual, very often correct, and very often yields a good judgment of the work's quality.
Transience and speed are for the young. They have to run fast, knock down the old predecessors in their way, claim their spots, and woo a stranger or two in the process. We've been in a perpetual state of avant-gardery probably since the 20s or 32s, and surely since the 50s. Cutting-edgism is de rigeur. "But what have you done lately?" is the sentry's challenge. But the pop culture version of the avant garde can't last longer than someone's memory, after which it becomes tradition, and within two decades is revived as "appropriating the past" or some such tactic. But the AG always did that, at least since its first appearance in the form of the Impressionists (or Courbet, whoever you peg as the progenitor of it all).
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