Myth of Arrival

Today I find a German word and write it down. Art Brut, Rough Art, which influenced Neo-Expressionists in Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-Expressionists grew out of a resistance to the tendency of abstraction in modern paintings. Heavily influenced by Carl Jung, their aim was to reconnect to the psyche; that is, they were seeking for images and words and lay behind cognitive thinking. Strip away knowledge and what is laying in small pools is the truth they were trying for. Thus, a response to the Sufi mystic poet Rumi's: Only those who have felt the knife can understand the wound might look like this:

here is
the knife.

those who
stare

But it is more than just a state of unknowing the artists looked for. "It's leading figures advocated a figurative art that reflected the artist's often violent feelings" (Little, 136) So Art Brut thus created by the Neo-Expressionists came about as a fascination with the "primitive [nature] of the soul." A point we must make here, however, is that unlike earlier artist movements, such as the Modernists, who turned to other cultures to find the "primitive in the Other" (usually endorsing prevalent racist assumptions as they went along) the Rough Art sought by the Neo-Expressionists was a primitive truth produced by one's own sick soul, a soul usually in a state of terrible depression, stress or madness. The works of Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, Sandro Chia and Julian Schnabel, while perhaps not consciously endorsing Art Brut certainly reflect these ideas.

The poem I present here tries to reflect this philosophy; the Other is the Self. It is hard to try to achieve an "I am not I but Another," or "The Self as Alien," but try is what I am doing.

Nectar of others I love
the idea we manufacture
nectar inside I love
the idea there is a wave
breaking inside us waves
that break not a wave but
brine salt on the tongue
not salt but the way the sun
breaks not the sun but
hydrogen you will ask
me one day to ignite the
edge of the city not
the city but the salt
window glass car
buildings stoops streets
objects that die raining
down like the idea of
the wave after
all of this is
swept away.

Work Cited

Little, Stephen. -isms: understanding art. New York: Universe. (2004)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 10:46 am and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.