Page 205
Noren:
In theory I'm interested in almost everyone. I simply don't have enough time to see nearly as much as I would like to. A lot of what I do see is discouraging because it's silly.
There's a fashion right now for work that is allegedly "transgressive," which is supposed to be liberating, but it's really middle-class adolescent petulance, art as an arena for revenge against parents. This is okay in kindergarten, but doesn't do much good elsewhere. A lot of work I see seems to revel in pathology, which isn't especially useful either. Monumentalizing alienation and personal misery and grievance is a waste of everyone's time. There's also a lot of "clever" work from victims of art schools, which is depressing indeed. I do see good things from time to time, but as I've said, getting to see them more than once is a major effort.
The absolute best thing I've seen recently and certainly the most avant-garde was a lightning storm over southern New Jersey. It was so spectacular and sophisticated and surely one of the all-time great movies. It was incredibly powerful and intricate and intelligent and terrifying. It blasted us awake at two
A.M.
, and we watched it through the black frame of the back door: vivid, intense, electric presentation of every last single detail of each bush, tree, leaf of grass. Vibrating out of absolute blackness in blinding, blue-white light, figure and ground switching places several times a second. Violent dimensional collisions, macroscopic magnification of the smallest things. Then everything vanishing into blackness so intense that the after-images were almost as strong as the original. And sound! Earth-shattering contrapuntal booms and blasts of such power I was sure the house would be blown away. I wish I could begin to describe it. It was wonderful, and as avant-garde as it gets. We were enchanted.