The War on Art and Zero Dark Thirty
2013; Issue: 91 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoWhat gives a film its power, grandeur, and beauty is not on the screen. It breaks through the screen. It is the desire, the love carried by the film, which is precisely what allows one to speak of the film otherwise than as an object, a work, or a production. --Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration (1) I like it. It's got layers ... you know? lots of layers. --Hans/Christopher Walken, Seven Psychopaths (Martin McDonagh 2012) Americans love their wars. Given the opportunity, they will declare war on just about anything that moves. You've got your war on poverty, which some people might mistakenly confuse with the Occupy Movement, but which actually was a government sponsored war back in the dim recesses of history when the government still pretended people were more important than banks. You've got your war on drugs, now in its 62nd glorious year--and counting. You've got your war on terror, now in its 12th glorious year. You've got your war on Iraq, which is best left forgotten (along with the War on Viet Nam). You've got your war on the family--well, at least according to the Tea Baggers. And the list goes on: the war on crime, the war on women, the war on cancer, the war on gangs, and even the war on Christmas. And lurking around the edges of all these other declared and undeclared wars is their hidden, bastard sibling, the war on art. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The war on art is constant, but unlike other wars, it is mostly undeclared and often invisible. It lurks in the dark corners of the culture waiting for some 'elitist' artist to cross a line before bursting into full scale hostilities. It's an old American tradition. As long as art stays confined to scenes of the sun setting over the Pacific or clever, ironic poems about broken hearts, or even clear moral declarations on the evil of, well, whatever--homophobia, gay marriage, slavery, crazy Iranian militants--all is peaceful. But offend someone, challenge the status quo, put a crucifix in a jar of urine, or write a realistic book about the stupidity of racism and slavery, and howls rip through the nation. Committee meetings are called, investigations launched, budgets threatened, grants cancelled--until morality triumphs, and everyone goes back to feeling secure and smug. For some reason, a lot of artists seem drawn to cross that line, even to set up camp on the other side. Not out of perversity, and often not even on purpose, but simply because that's what art demands, to be outside and further so the work can happen. It's not a grudge against morality; it's just that morality is not that relevant to the work which, if it is real work, tends to find itself in an encounter with the world's excessive sense. Art raises questions that propel the mind not toward answers but towards questions, into a bewildered awe, and the tight boundaries moralism imposes are antagonistic to that. That's why what is art and what isn't will always be the stuff of unresolvable fights. While the war sometimes may seem to be specific to this issue or that (e.g. sacrilege, torture, sex, violence), behind those issues it has to do with art's excess because that excess is what is always beyond control, what overflows the given, what unsettles: Michelangelo's nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; Mark Twain's dialogue accurately reflecting the voices of his world; Stravinsky's dissonance and bizarre instrumentation; Duchamp's--well, pretty much anything Duchamp did. And art is certainly not a passive victim of these contests. It is often art's own war with a culture of universal equivalence which demands that it legitimize itself through politics or economics, or that it confirm the 'given'. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The outrage over art's insistence on unsettling the world is part of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a horizon of subtraction. In a world where everything is equivalent to a price, where exchange value is all the value left us, the mind closes in on itself shutting down any sense beyond the immediately, materially present. …
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