Deep Noir Pt. 1

What noir connotates, in popular culture, is an aesthetic condition of extreme stylization. Look at the elements which configure, say, the average Raymond Chandler novel, and which do not change from book to book; stylized elements- a hard-bitten detective (Marlowe) pursuing a treacherous villain, encountering a standard cast of characters. There's the coy femme fatale, attached somehow to a criminal underworld or with underworld connections; dirty and double-dealing cops, who may or may not be trustworthy, and in on certain hits; and innocent bystanders drawn into matrixes of crime and hustle against their will. What stylization implies, as a kind of mold for artistic forms to fit into, is homogeneity, and the solidity of homogeneity- we, as readers, never need to wonder what to expect from Raymond Chandler. To the extent that more serious artists develop individual and individualized aesthetic concerns and formal-thematic, consistent topoi, stylization in their work becomes inevitable- this is how we know Picasso from Manet, Manet from David; or, in literature, Milton from Byron, and Byron from Browning; etc. If I am interested in noir, and in poaching noir from American popular culture and granting it another context, it is because the stylistic elements of my Apparition Poems series shares, in the kinds of moods, impressions, and ambience generated, something with noir, and noir stylistic conventions. All three major Apparition Poems collections cohere around a set of imperatives, which lean towards the revelation of shadows rather than light, dark tones and hues rather than bright ones, and labyrinthine complexities rather than scintillating clarities. Levels of cognitive awareness, represented in texts which seek to boast some philosophical import, particularly in regards to ontological awareness in the midst of extreme (even pornographic) vulgarity, separate the Apparition Poems drastically from the rote, pop culture consonant facility of Chandler's books.

Indeed, the chiasmus between noir and serious, sustained intellection is, as far as I know, a novel mode of stylistic inquiry and exploration. My equivalent of Chandler's shocking plot-twists and peripeteias are linguistic innovations which multiply meanings and make key words and phrases serve dual, or triple, ends; so that these words and phrases are set in place, figuratively, to "split the heads" of their audience, towards recognitions of hidden semantic-thematic depth, and against surface ("surface-y") orientations and sensibilities. That's why I call my version of noir deep noir- the Apparition Poems are crafted, on some semantic levels, from similar molds- towards chiaroscuro and the enchantment of multiple meanings. It is also easy to notice that the Apparition Poems are, in fact, haunted by coy femme fatales, dirty-dealers, and an interrogating, interrogative protagonist ("I"), who attempts to sift his way through mazes of psycho-cognitive, and psycho-affective, complications. The poems shudder towards satori-like head-split semantic inversions; and whether any given satori ends its poem or not, the ultimate stylistic effect is to startle, unsettle, and re-wire the minds of the audience who reads them. Chandler, in a pop culture context sans intellectual heft, is far less unsettling. The Apparition Poems create mysteries and remain centered in them, in a negatively capable fashion, while Chandler's level of stylization insures easy, unchallenging comprehension. Still, I like noir as a stylistic formulation around the Apparition Poems nonetheless, because they do create and maintain a "shaded" ambience, which is recognizably itself from poem to poem and book to book. I have spoken of the "body heat" passed from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, in spite of the new century's reservations- and, as one level of inheritance which takes the Apparition Poems to a secure hermeneutic locale, noir and deep noir both work surprisingly well.

Enlightened Elitism, Enlightened Classicism Pt.2

The question arises, for myself and others of my ilk, whether our creations are made to subsist as "foster children of silence and slow time"; in other words, whether or not it will be a long, slow haul towards establishing ourselves and our art in a major way, and a way which would be satisfying and gratifying for us. How staunch, as a tightly knit collective, are the post-modernists in 2014? From the evidence my daily life has presented to me, I have induced the knowledge that post-modernity, as a capitalistic, profit-counting institution, has lost ground and momentum in our current Great Recession. My assumptions in this context must, of necessity, be modest- Philly Free School have demonstrably had a significant amount of space cleared for us, but we remain largely unknown to the general public, and no visible chiasmus exists between ourselves, our work, and the American or any other press corps. Yet if raw online numbers are any indication, there is certainly a receptive sector of the American and European public ready to greet our work with appropriately receptive hearts and minds. This is why the reference to Keats is both interesting and provocative- what we have written and painted must, owing to its depth, thoughtfulness, and formal-thematic richness, take on the sober, austere attire of "foster children of silence and slow time"- but it is intriguing, conversely, to consider that, with our current entropic zeitgeist, in which a populace are starved for authentic passion and intelligence in what they consume, Neo-Romanticism might attract some short-term success as well.

In a contradictory sense, it both is and is not immaterial to me whether this short-term success transpires- to the extent that our work is dealt with seriously, and we are not trivialized, it could be a positive development; yet all of us have enough education in the higher arts to understand that what achieves the most profound impact tends to do so slowly, incrementally, and often imperceptibly, over decades and centuries. This is one salient reason that post-modernity insults our collective intelligence- by reducing the higher arts to a mere adjunct and an underling to the popular arts, it so attempts to erase, in a brutish and militaristic fashion, the entire history of the higher arts beyond its tiny, crabbed purview, that the entire post-modern endeavor amounts to a sustained assault of anti-art and anti-culture on entrenched, yet often powerless, adversaries. In a very real sense, all PFS's elitism and classicism entail is a deep-set appreciation of the entire history of the higher arts, which we have refused to conceal or elide in an attempt to achieve short-term, ephemeral, and extremely hypocritical success. Why it is that aesthetic progress has to come at the expense of a reviled, demeaned, and somehow naive past is something I've never understood- now, as the new century coalesces, I've been led to the conclusion that auto-destruction of the history of the higher arts, as both a stated and a surreptitious post-modern intention/ambition, has had nothing to do with anything but fear and greed, set lecherously and coercively into motion to homogenize an already blasted Western cultural landscape. The commonplace, known to art-world insiders, that post-modern artists have more invested in pop culture imbecility and business ventures than in their own work (which may or may not sell for enormous sums of money), is shorthand for post-modernisty's rejection of both passion and intellect, and for anything humanistically expressive at all. Confounding this, our Philadelphia was Edenic for us. What Philly Free School pursued here was very unique, as we found a way to progress while conserving, and vice versa; and the twist in the tale is that our myth of what Philadelphia is may be the keeper for the entire length of the century to come.

Enlightened Elitism, Enlightened Classicism Pt. 1

Living with the remnants of the twentieth century, and twentieth century culture, still around us (in the press, art press and otherwise, and even online to an extent), it is easy to see in what manner my art (and the work of the other Philly Free School artists) can and will be dismissed. For reinstating a demarcation between low and high art, against the imposed confines of post-modern theory, thought, and practice, and radically against the grain of what is acceptable to the American press corps; and for reinstating, also, a historical sense which deals with art century by century, rather than living in a radically circumscribed, perpetually "present" moment; the Philly Free School/Neo-Romantics must needs be attacked by accusations of extreme/extremist classicism and extreme elitism simultaneously. I would like to opine, however, that what we have built into our body of work is a highly advanced, thoughtful, scrupulous, and one might say "enlightened" form of elitism and classicism. Neither I nor my friends had any problem looking the twentieth century, and twentieth century culture, dead in the face; its just that we were catholic enough in our tastes not to limit ourselves. Not working at the behest of spurious, frivolous motives, directed in our tastes by authentic impulses, proclivities, and sympathies, it was obvious to us that the high/"haute" art in century XX seemed constricted, narrow, and vulgarized in its essence into tiny forms and expressions. Maintaining a historical sense, and an ability to make choices owing not to circumstances but to our individual temperaments, we migrated back to the nineteenth century over the twentieth and tended to stay there, judging century XX to be mostly a cultural regression, while having, by sheer proximity and "body heat" (like ekphrasis), to allow some twentieth century influence in regardless.

Thus, the language of our symbolizations and significations is polyglot; and if I am forced to answer accusations of elitism and classicism, simply owing to historical depth and diversity of influence, I will state that we made our aesthetic choices very carefully, and had the courage of our convictions to assimilate what moved us the most, from the inside out, rather than acquiescing to internalize what was presented to us as what was most contemporary, representative, and praiseworthy. The pejorative connotations of "classicism" and "elitism" have to do with retrograde, reactionary attitudes, bent into stuffy dismissiveness of anything new; what Neo-Romanticism has to offer is set at a perpendicular angle to those definitions. We, all of us, have lived and created under intense, group-centered pressure to conform, if conventional, substantial rewards (publication, sales) were to be ours; always with the knowledge that the adjacent post-modern group norm, to stay grounded in a twentieth century ethos at all costs, against any form of historical sense which would challenge this group norm, was configured to delineate what was and what was not acceptable, either theoretically or in practice; and our collective response, from Philadelphia in the Aughts, was to rebel, and to do so publicly, which we did, with panache. As of the initiation of our practice, enlightened classicism and enlightened elitism were both (and largely remain) rebellious stances; and the tyranny of the "present-minded," the vulgar, the thoughtless, the formless, the formulaic, and the insubstantial (to our eyes/ears) has been both a terrible weight for us to bear and heavy shackles for us to attempt to cast off. In the realm of the post-modern, what's "new" is never really new anyway- just as Koons reprises Warhol reprising Duchamp, it is a fraudulent simulacrum of the "new," which disguises the essential nature of genuine artistic innovation (that which creates new formal-thematic contexts, nexuses, and matrixes) in order to advertise its own inversion-heavy (nothing into something) paucity.

App for my 38th B-Day

#717

On why it has to be that writing
comfortable garbage is the inevitable
byproduct of living comfortably, with
each fresh hell I wonder why the hooks
towards artful utterance are set this
way, & why I must become such an oyster
just to confer into a leaking bucket,
insecurely hung from abraded cables,
a blue droplet not even of blood but
of nectar, or wine, or whiskey—

The End of Our Troils

What Mary, Abby, and I had going for a while was a form/manner of troilism; a fully consummated love triangle. What happened between the three of us was rather riotish, but the entire series of scenes was buoyed up by a good deal of love and affection we had for each other. Leading lives unsullied by social inhibitions, we were free to become emotionally and sexually entangled. Staged twentieth century cultural romances look stilted in comparison because, in retrospect, they were obviously just that (staged), and put in motion only to initiate and perpetuate appearances. Historians who will track the movements of P.F.S. are not going to have to steer around a matrix of obvious, embarrassing discrepancies— both the eye-witness and documentation levels exist right there on the surface. And since Mary's portraits are both titillating and substantial works of art, P.F.S. has a way of fulfilling the sense of well-rounded and consummate artistry, on every level, which was our implicit, Creatrix/Creator ideal.

Century Defining Image Pt. 2

If Abby Heller-Burnham's The Skaters shares some thematic ground with her Lost Twins, it has to do at least partly with inheritance- with what the twentieth century bequeathed to the twenty-first. The allegory presented by The Skaters is centered on urban decay, specifically the urban decay of fin de siecle Philadelphia, and how a higher artistic sense of the visionary can be both transformative and redemptive. Part of a serious artist's potential brilliance is the fashioning of beauty (especially new modes of formal/thematic beauty) out of unpromising or abased materials- The Skaters achieves this by creating a hauntingly desolate ambiance, which also comments on the nature of the spectral or spectrality, extending its allegory to include levels and layers of signification around the ineluctable quality of the "meta" in the higher arts to begin with. And she does this, literally and metaphorically, without leaving North Philadelphia.

The superior achievement of Abs against the tiny, crabbed hermeticism of post-modern visual art is this- her circles of signification include theirs' (i.e. she "walks the square" like Bruce Nauman and is as conceptually sound as Nauman or the Neo-Expressionists), but also expands to include narratives of form and formal mastery to create superbly well-rounded ("whole," organic) constructs which chafe against the confines of post-modernism's motivating ethos- easy, anti-humanistic, yearned-for and achieved, nihilistic aesthetic obsolescence. Abby Heller-Burnham's best paintings, despite their shared ambiance of desolation and eerie time-suspension, are essentially affirmative, and humanistic, both in their formal/thematic dynamism and in their labyrinthine complexities- and The Skaters affirms that a worthy eye ("I") can always fashion something out of nothing (ex nihilo), in any context or socio-aesthetic time-zone.

Century Defining Image

One of the levels which can be read into Abby Heller-Burnham's The Lost Twins is a sense of menace and/or foreboding around the pursuit of major high art consonance. If the twins are lost, its because high art appears, in this context, to be frozen into place, ossified into rigid formality, and shrouded in large, long shadows. As of later in the twenty-first century now begun, this may be what art-oriented audiences remember about Abs and I- an age which compelled us to live and create under impinging shadows of hatred, indifference, and supreme mistrust; an age, in fact, so virulently corrupt in relation to the higher arts that many had given them up for dead or drastically, permanently impaired.

The closed circle of twentieth century art significations was, I suspect, set in place to maim/discredit attempts at major high art consonance; yet Abs has the guts here to place those shadows right where they belong- at the center of a composition so tricky, labyrinthine, and thematically rich that it is worth a century's perusal. As a potent symbol of transition between drastically different centuries, Lost Twins is par excellence enough to be, and remain, as definitive an art-moment as this century will produce. Abs was a pretty heavy Scorpion when she wanted to be.