In the last Baroqueify! meeting, we spent a bit of time discussing Adolf Loos’ notorious “Ornament and Crime,” and then set about the task of articulating a working definition of the baroque.
We brainstormed our own associations with the term. Mine is transcribed here. It is informed a bit by the background reading I’ve been doing:
lushness
nestedness
intricacy
organic/natural forms
“taste” (highlighted as either “good” or “bad”)
manneredness: archaisms, coyness:
conceit (concettismo): in particular of love, the boweer, pastorality
meraviglia: the marvelous/horrible
“exotica”
the feminine [although I rethought that, later, in discussion – the baroque is not so simply gendered]
extremes of scale and relative scale
apocalypse
excess (“too many notes”)
flaw/distortion/ the bizarre
rhythm: what do I want to say about rhythm? a sense of abandoning to it – pre-psychedelic – loops, looping, curling, irregularity
grottos and dioramas
trompe l’oeil
labyrinths
complexity of pattern
We looked into Vernon Hyde Minor’s “Baroque & Rococo: Art & Culture, and lingered over some choice passages:
I was especially struck by the relationship of baroque-ness to flaw and irregularity.
Here, then, is the second assignment for Baroqueify!:
Take a poem that you have written previously. Seed it with flaws and distortions.
(I didn’t say this in the actual workshop, but I might append to that: “…to make it, in your mind, even more beautiful [awkward].”)
Otohime 