rode hard and put up wet becomes rode wet and put up hard

We all want to change the world

So, you want to be a member of the avant garde?  You want to create shit that’s new and exciting and revolutionary that’s going to blow everyone’s mind?  Yeah, it sounds all great and luxurious, and who knows, maybe you might actually produce something that someone, somewhere, will call art.  Chances are, though, you’ll just get a bunch of responses from friends saying, “wow, that was really cool.”  Then you’ll get all excited and think that you’ve succeeded in creating something really wonderful and ground breaking and all that.  The fact of the matter is that you’ve done no such thing.  Or, maybe you have, but like hell if it’ll be realized by anyone in this lifetime.  The best you can hope for is someone staring quizzically at your art and saying, “huh, I don’t get it.”

Where’s all this negativity coming from, you ask?  Happy fucking new year, I say.  I don’t know what it is about resolutions, but we seem to expect them to fail before we even make them, and then some people have the audacity to get mad when they fail.  I think that the only way for a resolution to work is for us to place it in the negative.  To resolve to fail and fail and fail and fail, over and over and over again.  We need to want to fail, and that is what it means to be avant garde.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  This is not to say that to be avant garde is simply to create something that no one will understand.  No, to be avant garde means taking on projects that are impossible and to work with every fiber of your being to make them possible.

As the great theatre director and producer, Jerzy Grotowski once said, the work of the avant garde is never to go towards any other specific end than the perfection of one’s craft:

The Constant Prince

“The actor will never possess a permanently ‘closed’ technique, for at each stage of his self-scrutiny, each challenge, each excess, each breaking down of hidden barriers he will encounter new technical problems on a higher level.  He must learn to overcome these too.”

For example, it is one thing to expect to fail at a diet: I can easily see myself failing at a diet, but I can just as easily see myself succeeding.  When both options are there, nothing really interesting is going on.  I could say that I’m going to write such and such a blog and hope that it will bring people to tears, or anger, or whatever, and I could very easily fail or succeed.  Who cares?  On the other hand, I could say that I will continue to write in an effort to shock myself, and then something interesting might happen.  What could I possibly do or say that would shock myself?  I have no earthly fucking idea!

You might say that you’re doing something revolutionary, and who knows, some people might actually believe it to be revolutionary.  And that’s great, but if after the revolution you can say that one way or another it succeeded or failed, then you know that you have failed at your attempt to be avant garde.  The true avant guardian embraces the revolution as the standard.  She lives in the midst of explosions and wrong turns and friends turned enemies.  Unless you’re willing to fail at this magnitude, you might want to go read another blog.

Photo Credit: The Tate; Mike Ely

Tags: jerzy grotowski, resolutions, revolutions