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The Negation of Art
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Program Notes:
"Do self-generative patterns have a cosmic origin? Sometimes it seems like fate when a system ends up prescribing itself. Or perhaps it is the perceiver that generates a proscription on meaninglessness in those patterns. This implicit ban on absurdity emphasizes seriousness in a way that promotes severity and
hopelessness. The recognition of arbitrary paradigms, on the other hand, leads to wit and mirth in a way that lends support to the last hope we cling to: that life is beautiful. We derive the statement that suffering is beautiful from this because life and suffering are synonyms. And as seriously as we take our algorithms, perhaps there is the quality of play in our need to follow them to their conclusion, to look back on that path, and to declare a beginning, middle, and end out of this inordinately simple narrative.
Have we lost our ability for utopia? A better question would be, have we lost our ability to maintain delusion without becoming divorced from the present moment? Ultimately the agenda of modernism is to deify patterns without invoking deism. Would we still believe, on the other hand, in modernism if there were nonsuperficial social progress? The very fact of life denies this suppostion, however, because there is no life without suffering: the ineluctable pain of death and birth, no matter how much we defy them with self-medicating, self-sedating conventionalities.
Ultimately the "project of modernity" that is talked about so frequently in the philosophical tracts of the postwar period must be reprimanded because the idea of modernity was thus attached to a specific place, time, aesthetic, and group of people, in defiance of the simple definition of its meaning, that of supreme
contemporaneousness, that of the current moment, that of modified humanism.
It is this hijacked singularity of the term which has been so not only derided but also manipulated by agents of conservatism and capitalism. Let us, the people, take back this language from the clutches of its self-interested and destructive captors; and how better to do that through the defiant absurdity of art?
-Maya Miro Johnson
June 6th, 2020"
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