Dennis Hollingsworth

Gateway

(Published on Twitter on October 13, 2017)

1. Submitted for your feedback, 1 of 40 tweets: We are still within the Modernism/Postmodernism MO/POMO envelope...
2. ...and we can't leave it until we tear it wide open.
3. MO/POMO were born as one but diverged in name when they issued forth.
4. I came to this conclusion after reading Shattuck's "The Banquet Years", linking Alfred Jarry to Duchamp.
5. Painting is the sun and it had to be occluded so that we could see -give justice to- the stars -aka the alternate media (other suns).
6. Duchamp's urinal occluded the sun, was the progenitor to POMO, which laid dormant for 50 years until the later emergence of Pop.
7. What crystalized at the high point of NYC AbEx (MO) was the effort to touch G-d (transcendence) via material means.
8. The POMO turn at its flowering was to flip the script: 2 point 2 (not touch) everyday life (not G-d) via conceptual (not material) means.
9. What followed in train was the exposition of POMO.
10. First, Pop pointed to everyday life, but was still ensnarled in the painterly facture of their MO antecedents.
11. Minimalism turned down the dial of materialism in artwork until the conceptual remained in view.
12. Sol LeWitt was the fruit of the POMO tree, he clairvoyantly anticipated the information age, focusing on art as a series of instructions.
13. POMO continued past its prime, elaborating alternative means of pointing to everyday life: Crit Theory, Decon, the personal = political
14. As a river begins as a crisp and cold stream, widens into a slowing dirty course and fans into a stinking silted delta... so too POMO.
15. We are living in the delta phase, we can only hope we are the ones evaporating into clouds that will later form dew in the mountaintops.
16. What must be distilled: the lessons learned, a critique of both MO/POMO, especially POMO since it is implicitly a critique of its twin.
17. We are prevented from doing this since the majority of the artworld refuses to be concise in the definition of POMO.
18. We insist on seeing only trees and no forest, the forest for us as yet does not exist.
19. We whistled past the graveyard when the Berlin Wall fell, clinging to Fukiyama's "End of History" thesis.
20. Evidence that the creed persists: MoMA's "Forever Now".
21. We whistled past the graveyard when the Twin Towers fell...
22. ...deaf to the atavist's reminder that utopia will always be in a future that never arrives.
23. We are told that history is over and new chapters cannot be legitimately written.
24. Recognizable possibilities are restricted to writing endnotes and bibliography.
25. And now the zombies have arisen, hungry to eat brains.
26. Still, we are defenseless, bereft of resources to arm us via the critique of the MO/POMO epoch that brought us to this place.
27. We are 21st century creatures, yet mentally trapped in the framework of the 20th.
28. It will do us well to be reminded that we are not bound by the strictures of the previous era.
29. We should shake it down in critique, cast off what no longer pertains.
30. We should keep what yet pertains and add that which is relevant to our time and of our horizon.
31. Every artist has a responsibility to provide their own answer, to throw the dice and let tomorrow's artists decide who the winner is.
32. My throw: defy the narratives of death and nihilism;
33. ...recognize the intensification that the information age bestows on us and refuse the hamster wheel;
34. ...realize that we must write our own programming code;
35. ...reject the puppet show of combatting MO/POMO;
36. ...celebrate the Janus faced MO/POMO, guardian of doorways and gates looking forward and backward;
37. ...recognize that our hands are on the steering wheel, we are not helpless;
38. ...acknowledge that the world possesses a grain to it and strive for the wisdom to know when to go against it...
39. (Invoking the Tao Te Ching) MO/POMO are the same / But diverge in name as they issue forth...
40. ...Being the same, they are called mysteries / Mystery upon mystery - / Gateway to the manifold secrets.