New Sincerity
by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
There is much I do not comprehend. There is much I feel and that much is enough for me, that much I’ll labour to say and say clearly. This is sincerity. In an age of irony, despondency, ennui, to be sincere is an eye-rolling event. Yes, in an age of detachment and simulation, sincerity can seem all the more suspicious. To be sincere here is a discomfort, a too-close-ness, an unexpected intimacy.
In 1995, filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg started Dogme 95. A manifesto of film-making: strip away superficial technology, focus on the acting, the story. No big budget needed, limit or do away with post-production. Vinterberg’s Festen is perhaps the greatest fruition, with Von Trier’s Idiotern close by. The barest conceit separates us from the characters in these films. It is tempting to think about these films as closer to the stage. Von Trier actually used the idea of the stage to incredible effect in his later film Dogville. But the camera necessitates the distance, and yet it is the flimsy distance of a home video. You know you could be there.
Festen received the Jury Prize at Cannes film festival, and a lengthy standing ovation. So much so, Vinterberg was embarrassed. The limitations of Dogme 95 showed a new sincerity. An increased budget is like the escape velocity needed to surmount the earth’s gravitation, but it doesn’t mean this budget can bring it back down. A manifesto is always a response, a reaction, to any status quo. Von Trier and Vinterberg felt what many in the 1990s were feeling. A strong will to overturn a superficial strain in the arts, a haughty irony.
A little later in the decade, and a little more north, the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, along with his students, began the Kitsch movement. A re-defining or appropriation of the term… kitsch: excessive sentimentality, vulgarity, mass-produced, originally meaning, in German, trash. The Kitsch movement painted like the old Masters, incorporated the narrative form in painting, and composed emotionally charged images in the vein of a Romanticist. The Kitsch painters attempted to breakaway from the contemporary painting world; if art was what was being painted, then what they were doing was not art, it was a philosophical movement apart.
But, of course, they were painting, in the old style, enigmatically. See Odd Nerdrum’s Dawn and The Cloud. The lessons of classicism highlighted that nostalgia can be visually meaningful. The familiarity of seen masterful technique, of refined composition that is appealing, instead of relying on conceptual abstruseness that is all very good to those in the know but alienating otherwise. A somewhat universal trust in a visual code of understanding, as a plaintive cry, an angry face, is understood and felt immediately.
The Kitsch movement reminds me of New Wave Sci-Fi. Sci-Fi as pulp fiction, as consumed by adolescents, as quick throw away after reading. The pulp narrative is obvious, mass-produced… until you understand that a narrative format, a language, can be elevated. Philip K. Dick often used the pulp narrative to explore identity, issues of ethics, and consciousness. Musicians from the 70s onwards were looking to do the same thing with traditional rock n roll: how can this music be purged of sentimentality, easy rhymes, easy expectation, and brought to a poetic pitch to explore deeper meanings.
Again, in the late 90s, in the UK, the art movement Stuckism was born out of an instinctive distrust of high conceptual art. Instead, figurative painting was (is) pursued in a quest for authenticity, of authentically expressing the human condition, against nihilism, against superficial novelty. Stuckism, originating from a comment by artist Tracey Emin, gives the key: “your Art is stuck, stuck, stuck.” There is a desperation, an un-nourished tap, a deliberate turning away that we see in the 90s. The age of post-modernist art has been drunk to its dregs. We can consider this similar to a mood that swept through U.S. film in the late 90s: Fight Club, American Psycho, Ice Storm, and perhaps the pinnacle: American Beauty. The trail to authenticity is fought for, or has gone cold, floundering in empty space where things merely happen.
Language like art is prone to the curse of becoming cliché, superficial…a place where once electric meaning now hangs its head. This is only natural, but it does not necessarily mean that the electricity is gone forever. Think about this. If you’re like me sayings like the Golden Rule, cliches like education is a job of a lifetime etc. empty themselves out under the expressionless guise of ennui; they do not inspire unless you are willing to take them seriously. There are times when it is an insult to feel humbled before a saying any school boy knows. It is because sincerity changes little and we change much. Post-Modernism wore Kitsch, wore cliché, to make a larger point about mass-produced culture, but even this has its limit, has its natural course.
David Foster Wallace, who really thought about ‘New Sincerity’ was painfully aware of the trouble of irony and its attrition of sincerity. In the 90s, he wrote about the detached emptiness, self-congratulatory shallowness he found in U.S culture, especially in Post-Modern literature. In his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, he speaks of a new literary rebel who would ‘dare to back away from ironic watching…who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in [U.S.] life with reverence and conviction.’ Wallace wants a writer to have a ‘willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law’.
Wallace is an interesting case. There is a slight irony in his tome Infinite Jest becoming typecast for a certain kind of reader… instead for the values that he writes on again and again, about literature being fun, worth paying attention to, capable of instructing a deeper way of contemplating one’s culture. As his commencement speech at Kenyon college typifies: This is Water. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. This is not meant to be a moralism, but an offering of sincerity in navigating an uncertainty, life; an uncertainty that irony forgoes in order to maintain a spectacle.
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The Carl Kruse Blog Homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include Religio Artificio, Reflections on Classical Music, My Failure To Write Anything About The Music I Hear.
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