I started this blog because, in the Hirshhorn Gallery, I got into a conversation about Gombrowicz and couldn’t explain what I saw in him. I recently went back, and was delighted (and inspired) to see some of my favorite Magrittes back on display–which of course reminded me of G.
G. wrote about art fairly cynically. Art, culture, is something people use to get others to obey, to dominate and control them, he said. His image is of one person grabbing another by the scruff of the neck and forcing him to bow down before High Culture. And what happens, inevitably, is that everyone winds up obeying each other—everyone bows down out of fear, or anxiety, or insecurity—and no one is left in charge (except perhaps the individual artist). Art ends up ridiculing us, humiliating us, almost like a dominatrix in some private fetishistic scenario.
G. was partly using art to tell a story about relations among people. But he also wanted to change this inauthentic relationship to Art, and remind us of Art’s possibilities to make us free.
We always need to ask of Art, or of Culture—does it open doors? Can we use to it expand or improve ourselves, or to love each other better? This is one way, indeed, to use Gombrowicz—the way he would have wanted to be used.
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