https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5evKZFPazzA
I have sort of a three-part question. Sorry to bring us back to modernism. My first part of the question is do you think modernism is inevitable? And the second part you sort of already touched on when you talked about beauty and you also talked a little bit more I feel on the criticisms and detriments of modernism but I would like you to talk all about what you think is productive within it and the third part of the question is what do you think is coming next if we continue the way we’re headed? It gave me an apocalyptic mode here. It’s not good for you. All right so yes I do think modernism is inevitable. I think the best way to understand it’s always there so the thing that’s the problem is like it’s a fractal pattern so what modernism is has always been there let’s say but as a spice or as an excess or as a movement towards something which is a little too much so that’s how I think that that’s kind of how tradition works so if you so like and there’s cycles like that so for example if you listen to 13th century you know high music in France I mean it is crazy it is wild it is wild it it’s like the mathematical patterns are extremely complex you know there’s like there’s rhythmic they’re like different rhythms and so and when you listen to it you know it’s almost like it’s so difficult to listen to because you have you have you have like text you have someone singing melodies and then other people singing and there seems to be no relation but there’s like this strange mathematical relationship between the different voices and it’s like but then that it’s like it so what I mean is that these things happen and then and at some point it it kind of let’s say it breaks and then it feeds into a more a more embodied world and it’s always kind of there there’s there’s going to be a little bit of that experimentation I always kind of think of um you know if you look at uh church architecture again like middle-aged church church architecture so you’d have the saints and you’d have you know the biblical images and then in the fringes in the margins then you’d have all the crazy stuff like you’d have you’d have like lewd images and you know monsters and things eating their own tails and and like just all this kind of there’s kind of experimental space which was held in the margin and so the same with manuscripts for example so you had the main image in the center and then you had an experimental space in the border where you would you could go you could go wild like do any do all whatever it is like you know knights fighting snails or scatological imagery all kinds of stuff that is that is usually not explored in everyday life so I think that what modernism did is it basically took that and just like put it out there it’s like that’s what the world is about now it’s about it’s kind of about the extremes um and so in some ways I do think that in big cycles will will come to moments where these extremes will manifest themselves um so you know we saw that we saw the same happening in the late roman empire for example you know they were like let’s say the the the late roman republic and early roman like at that transition there was some really wild things like there were mosaics that made um they would make mosaics of crumbs and so they they would make like a mosaic where it looked like someone had eaten the day before and had left crumbs on the table and like that was their decorative element uh and so they would they would have like images of yeah like decomposed things and there was this this this experimental space that was opening up that was becoming really uh really intense um and I think that you could even argue that ovid’s metamorphosis is a very modern text you know uh and that’s why augustus hated it so much she’s like it’s like he hated of it he’s like just talking about sex all the time and then talking about so it’s like these moments have happened before you know so I think so so what is its use so one of the things that that it does is that it does it exposes the pattern in some ways because you could say that in a normal traditional world um things are just natural like people don’t necessarily think about these these questions they just live them right it’s like animals like animals don’t ask themselves about the patterns that they that they inhabit but when things start to go awry and things kind of start to go into extremes where you actually see extremely extremely like difficult obtuse patterns up here and then you kind of see idiosyncrasy down here you’re like oh wait a minute like you can you can kind of see what’s going on uh and I think that that scene can then be fed back into a more embodied world and so that sounds abstract what I’m saying but so I I do believe that I do believe that let’s say the future will be an integration between embodied you know kind of incarnate art with enough understanding about what modernism proposed to be able to integrate it in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself completely and so a good example if you’re interested there’s a there’s an iconographer his name is Father Silouan Justiniano I think he’s one of the best icon painters in America he was an abstract postmodern kind of postmodern abstract painter in the 90s and you know he had all these scholarships in New York he was doing great like he was he was on that on that path and and then he became a monk so he began painting icons and what he’s been doing is integrating let’s say extremely sophisticated color field theory and let’s say the principles that were developed by the abstract expressionists into his painting and so the way in which like in the 70s the theories about color like that they came up with were crazy about that they went really deep into so they would make these paintings that no one could ever care about right just a bunch of squares like a bunch of squares of color but it was the the theory that went behind it was an extremely sophisticated understanding of color relationships and vibration and how colors affect each other and so it’s like you can take that and put it back into something great you can think the same about literature it’s like the modern writers if you think of Beckett or you think of Joyce you know they’re deep understanding for example of both like pattern and abstraction and also of idiosyncrasy at the same time like that kind of relationship that extreme relationship they’re able to create can feed back I think into the modern world so if you a good example of that I don’t know if you know there’s an author his name is Paul Kingsnorth and he does that like he writes something like Beckett meets Tolkien I mean it’s crazy he wrote a novel called Beast it’s like it’s an astounding novel but he actually grammatically he actually trends he actually changes the grammar of the words as he’s so his character as he’s losing his mind like the grammar the grammar of the the sentences starts to break down in the story so he uses modern tropes of actually playing with grammar and playing with punctuation and this is like really avant-garde stuff but he’s ultimately telling a story that follows the the the mythological pattern so um so I think there are ways to do it I don’t know in music I’m afraid I don’t know enough about music that’ll be you guys people point to Arvo Perret a bit like I know people point to Arvo Perret as a possible solution to the conundrum as someone who is integrating you know avant-garde into a more kind of embodied and celebratory music so