Overview

As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmodern theory both reacted to and helped create the forces that eroded reason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of a postmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form was inscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, the reality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discourse in such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronic platforms, all radical, all working class or under class voices are pre vetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financialized kitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators, following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the lost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesia about the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination. The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imagination of the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by its 'otherness', by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories, all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness. And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose can the artwork posit the direction to which society must look to create an 'other' or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promise that is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. The Utopian promise is not kept.

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John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua hills Playwrights festival, a two-time NEA recipient, rockefeller fellow in theatre, and PEN-west winner for playwriting. his plays have been produced in lA, NyC, Sf, louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in warsaw, lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. he taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National film School in Lodz. Plays include The Shaper, dream Coast, Standard of the Breed, The Thrill, wheel of fortune, dogmouth, and Phantom luck. film credits include 52 Pick-up (directed by John frankenheimer, 1985) and Animal factory (directed by Steve Buscemi, 1999).

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