a word from claus

Last night, on the advice of my spiritual direction group (no kidding) rachael and i went on a date. We later figured out that it was the first time we went out to dinner (just the two of us) in over a year. Too long.

Anyway, first we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was great. If you live in Chicago: it's free til November 14th, and after that you can get a pass from the Chicago Public Library. I suppose you could even pay, if you had to.

The thing I want to post is a quote from Claus Oldenberg, which was the body of one of the descriptive plates by a work of his in the museum.

Here goes:

"I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance to have a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists, and extends, and accumulates, and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."

So: swap "theology" for "art", and that's pretty much how I'm feeling these days.

Below: Rachael with my favorite Oldenberg piece. Oberlin, Ohio.

fanon on storytelling

Hey, I think that this quote from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth has something to say to us liberationist artist types. Which is to say, everybody who reads this blog.

here's something awesome from frantz fanon's the wretched of the earth: (he's talking about culture and national liberation movements)
"On another level, the oral tradition- stories, epics, and songs of the people- which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stoires evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula "This all happened long ago" is substituted with that of "What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow." The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-3 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completley over0turned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically.
The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even happens that the characters, which are barely ready for such a transformation- highway robbers or more or less anti-social vagabonds- are taken up and remodeled. The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs and epic stories of a colonized country is worth following. The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, toward the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns. Comedy and farce disappeal, or lose their attraction. As for dramatization, it is no longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented conscience. By losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people and forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress."

love,
David