Art should Be (?)

The professor's talk on the reason why artists/writers were creating this new form made the attempts of the artists more 'sensible' to me. It makes sense to me to try to find a new way to relate to poeople when you felt as if the world had ceased to work right. And it makes sense that a universal reactionw ould be sought for instead of signification, because the more subjective a work is, the the more possible meanings it has and the more devisive it is, instead of uniting.

Ok, this was tough, but the central underlying theme that was being drilled into me was that artists experimenting with type and line were interested not in imitating whatever their subject was, but in making the viewer/reader experience something, for the art to BE.

Admittedly, that's pretty general. What is meant when someone says, "The art must not mimic experience or theme or idea, not signify something, but BE?" Sheesh, that's going to be tough to put into plain words, to be definite and concrete. I think that in order to accomplish defining, "Art must BE," I will have to rely on the opposite approach that the artists mentioned seemed to use. I will have to rely on content (the word) as opposed to form.

Experiencing art should be an act that requires some effort of the viewer. This effort uses the emotions, preconceptions, and rhetoric of both the artist and viewer, as well as the material used to create the work, to evoke something from the viewer. The intention is not for the viewer to go, "Oh, I get it! Workers of the world unite!" Instead, the viewer should feel the pain of the proletariat, or know what it is to be alienated from your fellow man, or to feel free from the bounds of gravity. The art should not signify and idea, but make the viewer FEEL for someone or for themselves. Art should be a process by which one learns to experience the feelings of others, not to identify some idea or cause.

I like that idea, but I find it hard to accomplish with form alone. I would really have to change my approach to art and literature (two separate media, to me) in order to create a piece that relied upon form instead of the word. to me, content is always the word, not the horizontal arrangement of letters into words, then sentences, then paragraphs. While long paragraphs can be boring (around page 18 I began to zone BAAAD), it is the word that could hold my attention, not the look of it all on the page.

I think it would have been more illuminating and illustrating if Drucker would have attempted to use the ideas of the artists to convey their intent or purpose or style. For being a work on experimentation with writing, the writing was itself quite typical and "boring" when evaluated against the standards of its own subject. What would Mallarme have thought of this staid evaluation? (Lemme guess-YAWN.)