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worth repeating |
On Sept. 30, under the auspices of the English Department’s Lanier Speakers Series, art historian Mark Antliff of Duke University spoke on the interrelationship between avant-garde aesthetics and the development of Fascism in France. Excerpted from his talk: “Phillipe Lamour was unique among the followers of political theorist Georges Sorel in allying a machine aesthetic to a call for generational renewal. Drawing on Sorel’s theory, Lamour not only posited a mythic divide between generations; he developed a theory of art premised on Sorel’s precepts. To inspire revolution, the Sorelian did not appeal to our rational faculties, but instead utilized the power of mythic images to activate a ‘dynamic’ or creative state of mind. Lamour then conjoined this theory of creativity to Sorel’s analysis of the aesthetics of industrial production. “Indeed, modes of artistic production themselves should spring from industrial innovation, and for this reason Lamour lauded the camera and cinema as the two art forms best able to express the -sensations of technological dynamism experienced by this postwar generation. The photographs produced by Germaine Krull, the urban designs of Le Corbusier, or the automobiles developed by artist-engineers were the artistic forerunners of an emerging society of producers. . . . As historian Robert Wohl has argued, generational consciousness was ‘one of the side effects of the coming of mass society,’ but ‘unlike concepts of class or other forms of determinism’ generational collectivism ‘emphasized temporal rather than [only] socio-economic location.’ Lamour’s fascist doctrine of l’art mécanique gave an aesthetic as well as temporal dimension to that generational revolt.” |
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| —Suzi
Wong |
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