I’m sick of irony.
“It’s the hardest addiction of all,’ said Patrick.
“Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning”
From ‘At Last’ a novel by Edward St Aubyn
The older I get, and the more weights and joys I accumulate, the urgency for seriousness and sincerity quickens. We don’t have long here. We need to make it count. Commit to the ‘catastrophe of a fixed meaning’ . Mean what we say. In the words of the late great Bill Hicks, ‘play from your f***ing heart’
Sincerity, generosity, gift. I have had a preocupation with these ideas for some time, both personally and within my art practice. I aspire to them, I wish to practice them, but what do they really mean?
This blog will document my research and practice-based investigations.
I’m casting the net wide, and plan to look at a wide range of material, from philosophical, theoretical and political texts to art and non art practices and projects which investigate these ideas.
My starting point are the writings of the late US writer David Foster Wallace. Sincerity and gift are crucial, thematically, and structurally, to his work. Much of his fiction and non fictional is essentially concerned with the need for, and the difficulty of transcending our ‘default setitngs’ of narcissism and solipsism, to try to ‘jump over the wall of self and inhabit someone else’. These concerns have made me an active and avid reader of both his fiction and non fiction for almost 20 years.
Following re-readings of ‘The Devil is A Busy Man’ and ‘Suicide as a Sort of Present’ from short story collection ‘Brief Interviews With Hideous Men’, I stumbled upon an excellent critical essay, “David Foster Wallace and The New Sincerity’ by Adam Kelly (found in ‘Consider David Foster Wallace’) which has signposted me to other writings on sincerity and gift: Lionel Trilling, Derrida, Lewis Hyde, Simone Weil…
I plan to investigate these, starting with Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift’ which is described as ‘a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities’ http://www.lewishyde.com/publications/the-gift
Adam Kelly’s essay “David Foster Wallace and The New Sincerity” can be viewed and downloaded here, free
http://www.academia.edu/1041012/David_Foster_Walla…
