Postmodern Baroque

One signature of the baroque is the folding together of perspectives. The points of view available in Las Meninas, unlike the planes of a cubist composition, suggest that the different positions available to the viewer correspond, embody alignments of corresponding positions. With Picasso, the mirror is broken, only on the canvas do points of view collide. The cubist composition does not place you before it. It is complete in itself “has a life of its own” independent of the various perspectives that might be brought to it. The coldness of its detachment resonates inversely with the unlocatedness or homelessness of the modern consciousness. The image displays no concern with the viewer’s confusions. In the postmodern world, certainty is fixed with respect to geosynchronous orbit, but also haunted by legend or myth, vestige of lost immanence.

It was a month ago that I planned to revise my essay Expression (and the transhistorical baroque). I have now done so.

Consider the marble quarry in Clarksburg,
how bits of Africa collide in a mélange
of continental plates.
Abutments and clefts of great depth.
Our host fabricates books “On Sex.”
His wife glazes salmon with honey,
Follow the shunted waterways
to a collision
with a Chinese fighter jet
Huang Yong Ping’s Neapolitan mastiff
pisses America on the wall.
Buddha upon Taishan
fishes in the maw of that Gonwandan trench.
Crucified Christ for bait (Beuys).
On a scrim within a compact jewel case,
a platoon of black children, hardly nine or ten years old,
crowds a corner of the desolate parade ground,
hardly wanting to come forward.
Hampton Institute 1900 (Carrie Mae Weems).
On the mountain road to Florida
unremitting curves, vistas
that swallow the onlooker whole.