Ideology, Romanticism, Neo-Romanticism, and Aughts Philly

How scholar Jerome McGann defines romanticism in his tome The Romantic Ideology— an unthinking, unquestioning belief in a certain circumscribed ideology/set of ideological assumptions, aesthetic and otherwise— does apply, in a more limited sense, to the Philly Free School and most of the other key players in the Aughts Philadelphia Renaissance. Yet, as I noticed while studying at Temple in the late Aughts, there is a double-bind and a contradiction built into McGann’s famous, and famously ambiguous, formulation— the entire gist of ideology (and ideologies) is that different groups and sub-groups expend cognitive effort to develop and establish ideologies, so that no worked-over ideology does not have cognitive effort built into it; in other words, developed ideologies presuppose thoughts and questions. What McGann seems to be suggesting about English Romanticism (first and second generation included) is this: once the ideological parameters around their artistic endeavors were set, no more earnest cognition was devoted to anything but ideological consolidation— the Romantic Ideology was taken to be axiomatic enough that ideological interrogations and revisions were deemed unnecessary. The Romantics were self-expressive, self-reflective, and self-determinative; they saw and toiled to manifest the explosive potentialities of the subjective. To be reductive (and cute), they put the “I” in ideology, and sought the indirect route to objective truths through subjective ones. They were consummate individuals.

Here’s another split between myself and most of Aughts Philly— if, as a collective, we have a patron saint among the English Romantics, it must, for a number of key reasons, be John Keats. One reason his Odes have aged so beautifully is that, despite (like his cronies) putting the “I” in ideology and developing his subjectivities in characteristic Romantic fashion (torch filched from Wordsworth/Coleridge by imaginative cunning), Keats presents himself and his visions in a prescient (anticipating not only Neo-Romanticism but countless strains of century XX culture before us) mode of noir or deep noir; the darkness and monotony of Regency London, in the midst of an impinging and strictly-speaking unnatural Industrial Revolution and factory-culture, and the place of a classical-minded (enlightened elitist/classicist) poet generating friction-sparks by struggling against it. My own early Aughts odal period borrowed Keats' sense of formality but moved in a direction more straightforwardly celebratory and (arguably) orgiastic.  Among the Odes, Nightingale and Grecian Urn create a gestalt-world not unlike The Lost Twins and The Skaters— all is shadowy, spectral, and obsessed with an evanescent past; and all manifest meanings are multiple, and create cognitive multiplications for their audience. The implicit split, for me personally, from Aughts Philly had come to fruition in Apparition Poems, and has to do with William Wordsworth, and an odd aesthetic attachment I had/have to him, even in the turbid depths of "noir"; a kind of compact I refused to break. Wordsworth’s aesthetic, much more so than Keats’, includes vistas suggestive of moral interests— that high art need not evade morality and moral issues, but take cognizance of them as an act of defiant, individualistic courage and courageous, passionate humanism.

I both do and do not mean to imply that Aughts Philly was characterized by immorality, or immoral impulses or amoral ones. It was not particularly questioned, in our collective ideology, that all of us were on a vision quest for personal socio-aesthetic and socio-sexual fulfillment, and did not very much mind applying a little elbow grease to ride roughshod over people and situations which stood in our way. The conflict of wills among us could be terrible— yet one thing we had going for us, also, was a streak of Romantic Sincerity, which guaranteed that, despite all the circumstantial twists and turns of our lives, we were (many of us) able to cut through the bullshit and commiserate with each other on profound levels. We embraced emotions, and passions, and lived in them without the thought of too much objectivity— in other words, we were authentically young. Whether McGann could align us successfully with the English Romantics is an interesting question— but the key weakness in McGann’s formulation, from the beginning, is that he never seems to stop and think how his Romantic Ideology paradigm applies to any artist or art-group worth their salt— for genuine artists, unsettling ideological assumptions is less important than remaining emotionally, sexually, socially, and creatively fluid and fluent, ideology and ideologies be damned.

PFS and Exclusivity

Organized culture certainly has some obnoxious aspects, one of which is the clannish instinct by which groups of artists segregate themselves in an exclusive fashion, creating charmed circles bound together by closed circuits. When Gaetan Spurgin and I were doing the This Charming Lab shows in 2000, which we both found disappointing, Gaetan complained (and I agreed at the time) that the Philadelphia cultural mentality had to do with establishing a clan and then huddling together for warmth in a corner; Philly artists, and art-groups, were lousy at self-transcending and working together towards shared goals. This Charming Lab, in retrospect, was a warm-up for and way-station towards PFS and the Highwire Gallery shows of the mid-Aughts— I was learning effective, competent event-planning piece by piece, and also gaining competence skills at juggling artists’ demands and egos. That having been said, most of the This Charming Lab shows, though staged at decent venues (Khyber, Dobbs, Killtime Warehouse), were pretty tepid, and felt hollow to me (the TCL readings at the Kelly Writers House were exceptions). By the time PFS established itself in the mid-Aughts, some individuals remained the same (Matt Stevenson and Gaetan were still around), but most of the TCL crew had to be dropped. The price I paid for making This Charming Lab non-exclusive is that everyone signed on to pursue their own agenda, rather than enacting the co-op set-up I hoped would manifest; and, rather than huddling in a corner for warmth, everyone claimed our corner for their own and went out of their way to thwart, hoodwink, and one-up everyone else.

Fast-forward four years— the Philly Free School shows are underway at the Highwire Gallery, Matt Stevenson having been our in. The four-person management system in place was unique; but, on a day-to-day basis, it was really myself and Mike Land exerting the most strenuous efforts and pulling the boldest, foxiest moves to make the shows (and the general PFS scene) happen. My management skills by then were well-honed; and, because I’d gained the requisite skill in ego-juggling, the shows often took the form of hyper-aesthetic three-ring circuses. Were we exclusive? The weird riff on this form of PFS and exclusivity is that Mike and I especially went out of our way to demonstrate an expansive sensibility in our Philly Free School-related dealings; nevertheless, the four of us together on the bar circuit (with Hannah Miller as a constant add-on for a while) was so unique an admixture of looks and temperaments, that our very collective magnetism could be off-putting. Thus, we, as a social nexus, wound up effortlessly excluding anyone in our path who couldn’t deal with four highly educated, tall, brown haired, brown eyed, highly sexed, promiscuous aesthetes with a penchant for seduction, fast action, bacchanalian reverie, and general impetuous combustibility.

P.S. Worth noting about the three ring circus aspect of the Highwire shows to even reach the Highwire Gallery in the Gilbert Building was its own kind of circus experience. One would walk into a brief lobby, get on an elevator, and ride seven floors up. Ok. But upon leaving the elevator, one would be forced to spin around in another small lobby area. Hopefully, someone would be there to guide you into a narrow, starkly white-painted tunnel (not the only path available from that lobby area). Progress another twenty yards, and the tunnel would bend; then twenty yards, then bend again. Finally, one would find one's self home free, into a door into the main gallery space on the left and a door into the warehouse/factory space straight ahead. The perfect, clandestine locale to achieve Interstellar Overdrive...

****Learning to Dance by Abby Heller-Burnham****

P.F.S. and Thug-ism

For the Philly Free School, as a collective, to cut through all the blarneying levels of post-modernity as a construct, we chose a tack of extremity, extreme disobedience. We embraced what we felt was enlightened elitism/classicism, expressed with edges left in of doubt, foreboding, and the ghostly/apparitional presences, historical and contemporary, which accrued to all of us as we ploughed through the Aughts in Philadelphia. It's not just that, as has previously been stated, and as would require extraordinary strength, we skipped intermediate steps from post-modern comic auto-destruct modes to our own version of centuries-encompassed-from-America apotheosis. The lot of us, individually and together, were little thugs, and, in an ironic fashion, the "thug" image of Philadelphia in the American press (derived, mainly, from the press's derisive desire to cover the whole city and environs with or in South Philly) does work for P.F.S. Elitist/classicist/thug-ism— that's a new one for the American art scene to deal with, and one which (to my knowledge) has never been seen in America before, wide safety nets be damned. Some of the resultant work started from the avant-garde, some did not, at a time when post-modern art was itself becoming traditional and conservative. 

Dovetailing with this, it needs to be said, for those who care— despite the motherload of second-world consonant, socio-sexual and socio-aesthetic freedoms bestowed on us in Aughts Philly, the landscape we inhabited was not without violence. That's one constituent level of the P.F.S. aesthetic which should make New York cringe, whether they then opt to turn away ("lock-down") or not— the edge expressed around carnality, where sex and death manifest simultaneously, and the urgency around carnality and its contexts carries with it darkling undercurrents of physical violence, murder, mayhem, and the dissolution of boundaries which renders these things discrete. The razor's edge approach to sex, and drugs, was one not unfamiliar to all of us, including Mary, Matt, Abby, and Jenny too, from PAFA to the Highwire and back. Not a daffodil in the pack. And academic entanglements, which were real, be damned nonetheless. 

If I stand like a thug behind our collective thug-ism, it's because the elitism/classicism built into our creations' formality and formal renderings in general lends the entire P.F.S. enterprise a solid, hard-won surface of elegance and starkly imaginative gorgeousness. Gorgeousness, it would have to be said, in a new mode, unseen in the United States before. Gorgeousness, also, that may prove to be crucial for the survival of the cultural United States, especially on the Continent. We are, in fact, the pioneers (pioneering thugs) who took indigenous American art to a higher plateau, competitive & commensurate with classicist Europe for the first time. Po-mo, in theory & practice, is a third-world dungeon (killer of the individual) in comparison. So, whoever here elects to butt their heads against our brick walls will probably lose a substantial amount of blood. The whole broke-down would-be alienation of P.F.S. on the East Coast might be a joke, too (and on us), if we weren't also funnier, more human than the semi-serious po-mo joke anti-art/junk-art crew, who (their master narrative runs) make us laugh to ourselves in our despair, or make us laugh now to despair later. They may have to face a long-term socio-historical prognosis of cat-calls and thrown tomatoes, from a Campbell's soup can (an eternity of nothing special) or not. We were, and remain, classicists with pistols; a terrible, and necessary, breach of the American art status quo. A status quo which, it must be remarked, has remained delimited, provincially, by the country's borders. Europe has not, up to this point, noticed much. This group are the right, well-rounded catalysts to change all that, and Philadelphia the right city, from its architecture on out.   

Another important level of awareness, for those interested in P.F.S., and the unique congeries of contexts around us, socially and sexually— P.F.S., and, in fact, all the major Philadelphia Renaissance sectors, were as completely and totally street as we could possibly be. We weren't watching Philly street-life from the sidelines and taking notes— most of us spent most of the Aughts on the front-lines. By the time I wrote Apparition Poems, the vitality of Aughts Philly street-life was receding into entropy and atrophy— this was particularly true for Abby— but the book, nonetheless, is a reaction to a decade spent living in the street, as it were— and doing so by maintaining at least some thug-level street-smart survival skills, against the dealers, impostors, and clowns who perpetually threatened me, and us. Not to say that Jenny and Abby, in particular, were not forced to compromise themselves and their work to stay street-solvent. The ecstasy we caught in the early-Aughts Philly streets turned bitter by the close of the decade. Street-life can be stingy on ways out, while solid work takes its sweet time to manifest in the world. 

In fact, given how tight some selected restraints can be on Philly street-life, it is amazing to me that we were granted a solid decade to play around in. I did feel, especially in the early Aughts, a sense of being personally charmed— that when I walked and rode the Philly streets, a beneficent cosmic force was covering me, encasing me in a kind of shield— nothing could hurt me or touch me unless I wanted it to. I was young, of course, and (possibly) wrong— but standing at the corner of 13th and Ellsworth in South Philly at 2 am, or walking home at dawn from Nemon Buckery's Halloween party on 49th Street to 21st and Race, that sense of being guarded was acute. Abs, Mary, Matt, Jeremy, Jenny (not to mention Mike Land) all seemed to feel the same way— and we would hit the streets, go anywhere and do anything. Had we not been thugs, or at least partly carried ourselves as such, I'm sure someone would've killed us, before we began; and there's nothing soft about our body of work, either.

Fit Audience Though Strange: Skipping Steps, Sublimity, and PFS

The manner in which Schopenhauer defines "sublimity"— an aesthetic object which simultaneously seduces and threatens the human will— is as good a starting point as any for attempting to come to grips with the body of artistic work left by the Philly Free School. In the paradigm shift from post-modernity to new modes of self-consciously high art, we skipped several steps—  the most obvious step skipped being representations of the merely beautiful or charming, as (again) defined by Schopenhauer. By building sublimity into The Lost Twins, here shown, Apparition Poems and the rest, we assured ourselves a reaction from beleaguered post-modernists, of extreme fear, mistrust, and loathing.

The Lost Twins, in particular, manifests so many levels of sublimity that it seems impossible that Abby should've painted it, even in Aughts Philadelphia, against an aesthetic back-drop which not only devalued (and devalues) painting, but one strictly focused on what I might call, as a legitimate inversion, the anti-sublime (as a branch of anti-art)— ironic conceptual jokes, cloying politically correct installation art which aims to press all the most facile, cozy PC-consonant buttons; video art, fanciful and Dada-esque in its execution, which, underneath a patina of artistic daring, plays to the self-congratulatory peanut galleries of curators, investors, and art press bound by a play by the post-modern rules mentality, and series of formulas; not to mention deliberately underdone raw painting. 

Make no mistake— Schopenhauer's sublime is menacing— and, by daring to be a menace, and one not to be lightly dismissed on any level, Abs guaranteed herself an indefinite media/gallery/museum quarantine. That is, perhaps, one reason Abs sees her twins as "lost"— they dare to engage painting in all its primal and primordial (sublime) splendor— and, as voyeurs to their voyeurism, we overhear their overhearing what the illustrious past of painting has been, and how stranded in the darkness of ignorance it has become— devalued by charlatans, perpetuated by quacks, shrouded in the chiaroscuro of an uncertain future. By now, the po-mo stooges have their own hoary cliches to preserve, and traditional rules to enforce. Sublimity returns as a zinger. 

The Lost Twins, in fact, may be taken as a dazzlingly complex self-portrait, of an artist not menaced into silence by depth, shadow, and thematic complexity. If anything in the 20th century compares, including Picasso, I am not aware of it and have not seen it. Abby's sublimity has a brick wall quality, the implacable quality of a work of resolutely high art, which compromises nothing to a desire to please or sell. Interstitially, it's also a revolution in queer theory and queer history. 

The parallelism between myself and Abby is profound— in terms of pendulum-swinging, from the dross of thoughtlessness and post-modern cliche to the loftiest, most cognitively challenging form of high art, Apparition Poems enacts the same kind of internal drama that The Lost Twins does. Apparition Poems has received reviews, but none which evince any critical authority— if the book is to be reviewed by critics with no thorough knowledge of Keats and Shelley, or even Yeats and Eliot, then it is easy to get the feeling of what the losses imposed by post-modernity on literature are. A typical literary critic, from this context, can't put Apparition Poems in any perspective, can't see it clearly or begin to define its parameters in an original way, formally or thematically. Dixie gets whistled. 

One thinks of Milton's "fit audience though few" paradigm, and us, and is then hit on the other side of it by the fact that we do have some visibility and popularity. It's an awkward situation, man...very awkward indeed. By pole-vaulting over the ridiculous and into the sublime, and not making any concessions to the ridiculous, Philly Free School and Neo-Romanticism has created an extended moment and a socio-aesthetic context so stark and challenging that, for the time being, only the venturesome may approach us in good faith. Or, let the po-mo bumpkins eat cake. 

Notes on Subsistent Matter as a Triadic Number Sequence (1-2-0)

Regarding subsistent matter: note that the number sequence 1-2-0 is capable of representing how cognitions, conditioned by the constraints of existence (time/space/causality), must attempt to represent to themselves what is subsistence/subsistent matter, which cannot be completely represented within these constraints-

In this context, any copula becomes "subsistent matter is (1)- subsistent matter is not (2)- fall past representational limits (0), which potentially erases 1-2 (1-2), or may not erase it (1-2-0), etc.

Ontology and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life Pt. 1

Middle Pillar notes:

In ontological terms, Kether can be designated as Idea or Idealism, in its pure state; Malkuth as Will; both within the formal parameters of existence (space, time, causality); Tiphareth and Yesod are both within the formal parameters of (mere) subsistence; void-space matter, causality, substance; Tiphareth as matter stable-within-subsistence; Yesod as matter unstable within subsistence.

As for formulated paths, Kether-Tiphareth as a chiasmus- Kether down to Tiphareth is the path of philosophy; Tiphareth up to Kether the path of science; Yesod-Malkuth as a chiasmus- both paths, up and down, express degradation, decomposition and decay; Yesod-Tiphareth as a chiasmus- from Tiphareth down to Yesod is the path of damnation; from Yesod up to Tiphareth the path of redemption.

Tiphareth and Yesod, which represent subsistence past existence, are the two most protected stations on the Tree of Life; the formal parameters of existence (space, time, causality) which bind the other stations subject their energies to deluges of distraction and impurity; Tiphareth, also, represents unimaginable harmony, while Yesod represents unimaginable discord; neither form/un-form of energy is directly accessible to human consciousness.

A postulate derived from a reading of Schopenhauer

Substance, causality, that-which-is, can be represented from two sides- as abstract object for a perceiving subject, who projects the a priori forms of time and space onto it; that is, from the side of existence, the posited existence of substance, matter, causality; and, represented from the side of existence, matter extends infinitely (or into infinity) for a perceiving subject into an infinite past and future, and through an infinite present moment; or then as a non-object, perceived by no perceiving subject, not subject to the a priori formal imposition of time and space; that is, from the side of pure subsistence, the posited pure subsistence of subtance, matter, causality; and represented from an imagination of pure subsistence, matter takes on a "void form," as self-subsistent, or as an unimaginable void, subsistence within a void state; or as merely subsistent matter; so that matter, substance, causality, without a subject's imposition, both is and is not, must be and must not be.