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yeah, in this respect i'm towing a bit more conservative a line than art is...i agree that the past is largely dead weight and more oppressive than inspirational, particularly to the extent that it provides a repertoire of already assimilated objects and cliches based on them that functions to defang most newer work, enabling it to get pulled right past the phase(s) during which it might be able to shock or provoke or immerse or enable an experience of fashioning meanings in a space of emergence (as over against one dominated by objects, by the given, by the past)...
if you make new stuff, particularly if you make more radical new stuff (radical at the level of content, at the level of form, at the level of politics or aspirations or all that or at some other level i can't think of or dont know about) you're apt to have an antagonistic relation to if not the past if not the objects that populate the past as it is fashioned by historians and art-historians (who are particularly egregious in this respect--one damned thing after another) then at least to the bourgeois uses of the past as accumulation of objects. because they foreclose the space of the new, the experience of the new.
at the same time, both the ways of working and the capacity to process what those ways of working generate seem to presuppose a familiarity with the past, with traditions, with the objects that stand in for them.
so it's a bit of a bind for me. i'm entirely sympathetic to the burn-it-all approach. but i wonder about the degree to which that is conditioned by a saturation exposure to exactly the materials that burning it all would erase, and without which burning it all makes no sense as a gesture. know what i mean?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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