What next? It’s a question I often ask myself. How can we improve, develop, create new? A big issue I feel artists suffer from now, in an age of over-saturation, over-information, over-choice, is deciding what to be, or become, without measuring against others that came before, and particularly, in an age of vanity and narcissism, what is expected of them now.
In terms of movements, Post-modernism self-consciously merged what came before. Our current Metamodernist age, an internet by-product, seems to hold us in an anxious, hyper-aware state, feeling torn and confused. It’s easy for us to feel forced to analyse rather then naively engage and feel anymore. Irony and cynicism – an age of desconstructivism is what we were left with due to post-modernism. Now we need a time of reconstructivism. Lost are the dreams of a utopia. Lost is hope (and you could argue rightly so given our cataclysmic effect on the planet and others, usually thanks to those who “represent us”). Lost is art for art’s sake. We’re now too self-aware to be sincere. Something we long to get back to, consciously or not. We are in the early stages of a transition of values. Art and culture want to be, and need to be, more hopeful. Unfortunately we’ve moved from pastiche to occasionally-nihilistic realism. Again, we need hope.
In the form of remodernism (see: other trends such as Reconstructivism, the New Sincerity and Stuckism), we can aim to attain “some form of genuine selfhood and authentic, sincere point of view, an attempt to create something on its own right” as David Foster Wallace articulated extremely well (ahead of the cultural shift actually happening). As mentioned, we have too much choice at present, and it leads us to apathy, detachment. I believe we need to break from that. In our time of being hyper-aware, returning to the ideals of modernism seems not only logical, but essential. By this I don’t mean to repeat the past, but return to those ideals and develop from there. Kevin Radley, an art professor at the University of California, Berkeley said, “Remodernism isn’t about going backwards, but about surging forward.”
To simplify what I’m saying I’ll point you toward a line that I can’t shake from the film we aim to shoot next year – “I wanted to make something that could ease people’s suffering. There’s too much.” The goal, in short, is to be sincere, emotional, honest. Each character in the next feature film will be an approach to art itself. The Philistine wanting to destroy it. The hip, cynical journalist wanting to deride it. The creator of said “it” (which is a thing, and will make sense in the synopsis below), who will embody the old-school principles of modernity, and art for art’s sake. And finally the protagonist, representing this new time, and ideal – sincere in his actions, empathetic, sure of himself, and unafraid of being a romantic.
‘CARRION’ [working title] is the story of haggard musician Kino Warren, who upon hearing of his mentor’s impending death, decides to walk across the country to him, believing wholeheartedly that the mentor cannot die until he arrives. On his journey Kino is unaware several people are on his tail – varyingly malicious and politically involved – in search of the only-known recording of the greatest piece of music/art ever made, which supposedly puts the listener in a state of catatonic bliss – created by his mentor, and which he has in his possession, completely unbeknownst to him. ‘CARRION’ will be a maximalist (stylistically, reflecting our time of excess and redundancy) metaphysical thriller about Art’s relationship to suffering. And as pretentious as that may no doubt sound to you, I am sincere… So, watch this space!
