ABSTRACT
The artists of the trans-avant-garde realize that cultural growth may extend downward as well as upward; that anthropological roots, while independent of each other, all tend to affirm the biology of art, the necessity of a kind of creativity aimed at extending its own experience as an instance of seduction and mutation. The trans-avant-garde rejects the idea of an artistic process aimed entirely at conceptual abstraction. A healthy historical breakdown has purified language of all symbolic or ideological valency, in favor of free-flowing and interchangeable usage. The artist employs the image as the solidification of numerous currents, as the agent of a thousand factors that guide the creative impulse. The mythic force of art deliberately loses its monolithic tension in favor of an image that is both intense and, at the same time, deconcentrated, sliding across the surface of style and of recovered languages. The new art draws on an endless reserve where abstract and figurative, avant-garde and tradition coexist.
