Maximalism
Posted: August 7, 2011 Filed under: art, wierd stuff 5 Comments
A sad day. I found out ‘maximalism,’ as a word, has already existed and was used as a negative term for novels by Pynchon and David Foster Wallace by some tight assed English guy. Here I thought a friend of mine and I had invented the term years ago while we were bullshitting about an art exhibit where every sense of the visitor would be employed… i.e.: you would simultaneously smell a rotting carcass, look at a painting or photo or video, listen to someone pounding on a sheet of metal with a live cat as someone else beat you on the ass with a hairbrush as you ate gummy worms dipped in yoghurt and hot sauce — smell, touch, taste, sight and sound all rolled into one motherfucking brain beating experience. Add strobe lights and a fog machine. Guaranteed to turn your brain to shit from over stimulation. Turns out some writer beat us to the punch.
Let that be a lesson to me. Never hesitate to pull the trigger and get it documented as soon as possible.
I was going to use ‘maximalism’ as the title for a comic book I was working on — a tongue in cheek acknowledgement of art school pretensions and too many hours in art history lectures. Now I find out it is old hat.
“Motherfucking brain beating experience … strobe lights and a fog machine … turn your brain to shit from overstimulation” – Sounds like the pitch for Hawkwind's “Space Ritual” tour! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Ritual
Anyway, don't be sad. An old hat can be a good hat. You just need to wear it at a jaunty new angle.
P.S. Word verification: arkslap – a magical attack that melts the faces off Nazis.
Yeah, there's a reason wiki has 'disambiguation' for each word. Use it however you want.
Just the other day I was drunk and out eating sushi with my wife, gesturing like a composer, singing The Grand Wazoo “bum bum bum” style, and trying to convince her to take maximalism seriously.
Seriously.
Yeah, well, I'll probably use 'Maximalism' or 'Maximalist' anyway… and, honestly, once I learned about 'minimalism' where people get all excited over a single brushstroke in off-white on a white canvas, 'Maximalism' seems pretty much a given.
But we live in pretty 'Maximal' times… so, ze bullette, your wife should pay more attention.
I just followed Claw Carver's link where I discovered that Lemmy from Motorhead was once in Hawkwind. I did not see that coming, but I think both Hawkwind and Motorhead are fertilizing the field of 'Maximalism.'
Well done!
If you're interested, in the first couple of minutes here you get Lemmy, Michael Moorcock and others waxing maximal about the Space Ritual tour: