AESTHETICS – MARXISM’S ACHILLES HEEL?
Or:
some questions and problems in Marxist aesthetics
Beauty: […] a combination of qualities that delights
the aesthetic sense.
Aesthetic […] concerned with beauty or the appreciation
of beauty. Of pleasing appearance […]; denoting a literary and artistic
movement in England during the 1880s, devoted to ‘art for art’s sake’ and
rejecting the notion that art should have a social or moral purpose.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary
I
Aesthetics, or the philosophy of
beauty, is a curious branch of philosophy since these days it seems almost an
anachronism.
Branches
of philosophy have doings with their parallel sciences; aesthetics, however
‘anachronistic’, is no exception. Thus it is brought into play in tracing the
provenance of erstwhile valuable paintings on behalf of auction houses and
galleries and in the creation of exhibitions, but it is not itself concerned
with microscopic analysis of particles or substances in the paint that betray
the century or even decade in which the work was produced. Art history and
social background are much more relevant to strictly aesthetic judgment: indeed
aesthetics would be helpless without these, but even they are secondary to the
primary concern of aesthetics: What is Beauty? And how does art in all its
manifestations – plastic, musical, literary, poetic and dramatic, dance – make
beauty?
But
how does a self-respecting Marxian dialectical materialist get to grips with
‘the Beautiful’? It seems awfully diaphanous and out of date. Nobody in the 21st
century talks about ‘the beautiful’ any more. Is that because it is such an
ugly century?
Beauty,
loveliness. What on earth are they?
…But the
loveliness we find in a lot of art…is another story. We don’t talk about it, or
at best only talk contemptuously of it, but hardly any forms of painting don’t
have it. It seems to be a property or a quality that can never be wholly got
rid of. However much we may stop mentioning it and try to shame it into
leaving, it just keeps on hanging around.
- Matthew Collings, This Is Modern Art (1999) 106
And the
reason it goes on ‘hanging around’ is – according to Collings – ‘because the
human nervous system is tuned to seek out loveliness and beauty and to crave
them’. (Ibid., 108) How useful is this comment? Does it foster a belief in a
kind of spiritual ‘inner light’ that forms the basis also for religious
doctrine and practice? In the hard, material world, there is no such
‘instinct’. The whole concept is Idealist.
Except that it is not. Some kind of
‘instinct’ for beauty is grounded in nature, in evolution:
Sir David
Attenborough has proposed there is evidence animals and birds have “an
aesthetic sense” as he delivered the Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize
lecture. The Blue Planet star said:
“Birds appreciate beauty, complexity or colour, just as much as we do.” (i newspaper, 22.5.18)
As he is a
seasoned naturalist and broadcaster Sir David’s opinion must be respected. In
his time he has shown us the bower-bird, who spends much of his waking life
creating nests of flowers and all things beautiful to attract a mate. Or – in
the bird of paradise – one who adorns himself in order to achieve the same
result. These creatures are hard-wired by evolution to do just this; Sir David
glides over the difference between what is unconsciously and what is
consciously wrought: a distinction Marx makes clear when comparing bees with
architects in Capital I. But the fact
that the ‘beauty’ is unconsciously and instinctively created only strengthens
the argument for the materiality of
beauty: especially since it is usually successful in attracting the eye of the
female or the species would have died out long ago. Indeed the idea is no more
astounding than the fact that migratory birds navigate by the stars. In any
case our knowledge of the consciousness of animals and birds is still in its
relative infancy. It is not too much of a leap to suggest that humans,
themselves evolved from the animal kingdom, might well be ‘tuned to seek out
loveliness and beauty and to crave them’. This is traceable through studies of
prehistoric times:
Art…enriched
the spiritual culture of upper Palaeolithic societies. The engravings and paintings in the French
caves are admired as beautiful by artists today. If they were executed for
prosaically utilitarian magical purposes, that did not debar the artist from an
aesthetic satisfaction in making his drawings beautiful, even though he could
see it no more than Beethoven could hear the Ninth Symphony. Music, as in graphic arts may have played a
part in Magdalenian magic, since bone pipes and whistles have been found in the
caves.
- Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (1952) 42
In
another passage from the same chapter, Prof. Childe (himself a Marxian
socialist) writes:
Finally,
many of the later tools, particularly of the hand-axe class, display
extraordinary care and delicacy of workmanship. One feels that more trouble has
been expended on their production than was needed just to make them work. Their
authors were trying to make something not only useful, but also beautiful. If
so, the tools in question are really works of art, expressions of aesthetic
feeling.
- Ibid. 32
And,
incidentally, the cave paintings mentioned in the first quote go back some
30,000 years: quite recent in terms of the entire stretch of human existence as
hunter-gatherers, but some twenty millennia before the coming of farming and
animal husbandry. Art, however conceived and executed, is in our terms ancient
indeed. It may have extended also to the Neanderthals, whose graves have revealed
decorative aspects. The Materialist basis for beauty, from the
natural-instinctive to the humanly-wrought, is established beyond doubt.
II
Istvan
Meszaros (1930-2017) in his ground-breaking work Marx’s Theory of Alienation (4th edition 1979) deals
extensively with Marx’s earlier writings, centring on human alienation (a term
Marx used less as time went by but never abandoned as a fundamental concept) in
its concrete forms: political, economic, ‘ontological and moral’ and aesthetic.
Closing his aesthetics chapter, Meszaros sums up Marx’s view on art
comprehensively:
Artistic
creation, under suitable conditions, is considered by Marx as a free activity,
as an adequate fulfilment of the rich human being. Only in relation to a natural
being can the question of freedom be raised as fulfilment which is in harmony
with this being’s inner determination, and only in this relation can freedom be
defined in positive terms.
Art, in this
sense, is an “end in itself” and not a means to an end external to it. But art,
conceived in such terms, is not one of the specialities among the many,
preserved for the fortunate few, but an essential dimension of human life in
general. In the form in which we know it, art is deeply affected by alienation,
because the “exclusive concentration of artistic talent in some” is inseparably
bound up with “its suppression in the masses as a result of the division of
labour…” (211)
So
there’s no suggestion that art in future socialist society will be abolished;
‘But just as [Marx] insisted that alienated
science must be transformed into a “human science”, so he insists that art
too must lose its “alienated character.”’
(212)
Meanwhile, what of art, music, poetry,
fiction, etc. today? We can hardly down tools knowing that our aesthetic
activities are ‘alienated’ and thus ineluctably compromised by our misfortune
of continuing to live under a capitalism which, however morally desiccated and in
throes of long-term decline, still rules the world. Many artists, those who are
great, outstanding or fairly average, have been or are socialists and
communists, including such as Picasso and Neruda, for example. Many or most
came from nonprivileged backgrounds that failed in the end to hold them back.
Much of art today invokes a language of protest. The upper-crust scene is
dominated, of course, by money in search of art as a capital asset with obscene
figures reached at the auction houses. But the world of art taken as a whole is
too varied, socially and artistically, to be characterised in any very easy
way. We could certainly put forward a case for saying that by virtue of the age
it is in, all of it is ‘alienated’, and this may indeed form a starting-point
for one incursion into Marxist aesthetics, but starting-point is all it could possibly be.
All
in all, the recorded remarks by Marx and Engels are somewhat scrappy on art as
such, but there may be sufficient here on which to build a Marxist—Materialist
theory. Marx’s German Idealist
philosophical predecessor, GWF Hegel, has a great deal more to say about
aesthetics, full of illumination for the budding aesthetician. In fact I will
now intermingle the three following quotations as between Meszaros and Hegel
(the latter in this case considering the relationship of art to religion).
Istvan
Meszaros has important things to say that relate directly to the possibility of
a Marxist aesthetics. But he also draws from a (rather thin) heritage that
which is questionable. I have to take you through some philosophical excerpts
to get to my point on the aesthetic implications. First, Meszaros:
If
utilitarianism is a trivial and shallow philosophy, its artistic counterpart,
“naturalism”, is a graphic embodiment of disconnected triviality and utter
shallowness. This is so because nature depicted by naturalistic artists, often
in the most tediously detailed “faithful” manner, is dehumanised nature.
- Ibid., 195-96
Unexpectedly,
we find some similarity in this ‘Materialist’ Marxist passage on art to
passages in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind such
as this one:
[T]hough art
[as] the sole organ in which the abstract and radically-indistinct content – a
mixture from natural and spiritual sources – can try to bring itself to
consciousness […] its form is defective because its subject-matter and theme is
so – for the defect in subject-matter comes from the form not being immanent in
it. The representations of this symbolic art keep a certain tastelessness and
stolidity – for the principle it embodies is itself stolid and dull, and hence
has not the power to transmute the external to significance and shape.
- GWF Hegel,
Philosophy of Mind section 562,
(1830) transl. William Wallace, (Oxford
edn. 1978) 296
Back to Meszaros:
There is but
one sense in which “faithfulness” is relevant to art: it is a faithfulness in
representing the reality of man [sic]…Man’s
reality, however, is not given in a direct natural (phenomenal) immediacy, but
only in an immensely complex dialectically structured, human totality.
Consequently, there is a world of difference between the faithfulness of
shallow naturalism and that of realism which
aims at the comprehension of this dialectical totality of man. … Realism, with
regard to its means, methods, formal and stylistic elements, is necessarily
subject to change, because it reflects a constantly changing, and not a static,
reality.
- Op.cit., 195-96
I am
holding on to Meszaros’ equation of the real with the total, of totality. But
in the meantime he associates alienated ‘anti-naturalism’ with alienated modern
art:
Thus the
various “isms” (imagism, expressionism, Dadaism, analytic and synthetic cubism,
futurism, surrealism, constructivism, etc.), just like the anti-naturalistic
philosophical schools, do not make the situation one whit better. They fail to
distinguish between humanised and dehumanised nature and thus reject nature
altogether, only to be compelled in the end to readapt it in an equally
dehumanised abstract form.
- Ibid., 195-96
It is a
tragic irony that all of the schools of art he mentions above, and more
besides, were banned in both the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Nazi Germany
as ‘degenerate art’, their artists denied exhibition (except the infamous mock
‘exhibitions’ of ‘degenerate art’ organised under the Nazis to show good Germans
what ‘degenerates’ the artists were). Istvan Meszaros, who fled from the Soviet
invasion of his native Hungary in 1956, was certainly no Stalinist, but in this
last quotation he finds himself historically in bad company.
Meszaros shows little knowledge or
understanding of artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Pollock,
Rothko and just about any other major artistic figure in the West and elsewhere
in the 20th century. His
despised Dadaists were at war with a bourgeois Western art they considered
culturally responsible for the carnage of a World War going on all around them
in 1916. What works of ‘realism’ by the Dadaists would have sufficed at a time
when the world appeared to have gone mad? Then there were the Expressionists
like Grosz and Dix showing their hatred for the corruption of all values in the
bourgeoisie of the Weimar period.
And how
did Meszaros respond to ‘Guernica’ by Picasso (1937): the great semi-abstract black-and-white
imagery of war, violence and death which brings tears to the eyes of spectators
in its Spanish museum today? Not to speak of emotions invoked in viewers of
Rothko’s ‘abstract’ massive glowing forms in their American gallery settings?
Yet in Meszaros’ terminology, these amongst others must be viewed as
‘dehumanising’ artists. Is this not a classic case of the messengers being
blamed for the message? And have they really
made things ‘not one whit better’?
But worse is to follow – in another
book. Drawing upon a quote from Marx, that capital is ‘hostile to art and poetry’, Meszaros writes of hostile capitalism ‘rather than taking
[art and poetry] to a higher degree of development in line with the productive
achievements of the material base, frustrating thus the attempts of Voltaire
and others to produce great epic poetry on the soil of a social formation that objectively oppresses such attempts,
whoever might be the artist involved.’ (Social
Structure and Forms of Consciousness II 2011, 148.)
We might pass over Voltaire’s
contemporary Alexander Pope who amongst his great ‘mock’ epics rather freely and
brilliantly translated Homer’s Iliad, published
to acclaim in that most capitalist of countries England and remaining a living
work of our literature. And pass over others who were so ‘oppressed’ that
they failed to produce Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Don Juan, Pushkin’s Eugene
Onegin, plus Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth, Longfellow and Whitman, all of
whom wrote epics or epic-scale poems that continue to be read today.
We might pass over all these because
Meszaros, in writing of the literary scene from the 18th century
onwards, somehow fails to mention the novel,
a form that effectively dethroned epic poetry at the centrality of literature
from thenceforward, commencing with Don
Quixote and later Robinson Crusoe
in 1719 and taking in Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos,
Goethe, Scott, Austen and on to Stendhal, the Brontes, etc. Mostly bourgeois to the core
and still going strong. Yes, the epic poems were still being written and often
successfully, but Meszaros’ whole line of argument is shown up for what it is
in what seems the odd exclusion of the novel form from literature in the 17th
and 18th centuries and onwards. ‘Oppression’ neither killed off the
epic poem nor thrust the novel down a luckless public’s throat. If anyone
commenced the process of killing-off heroic epic poems it was Miguel de
Cervantes.
These lapses in aesthetics are serious
faults in a writer of unparalleled acuity and penetration in contemporary
Marxism. It is the reverse of Ben Bernanke’s famous statement about
Quantitative Easing: that it works in practice but not in theory. Meszaros’
remarks on aesthetics work in theory but not in practice, and unintentionally
give theoretical Marxism a bad name.
And if art has been so ‘alienated’ all
these centuries, why do we have any great art and literature at all? Has
anything beautiful ever come from a beautiful society? This is not to say that
beauty will be not produced in its own way with socialism, hugely enhanced with
the freeing of the capacities of the many to make beauty and to enjoy it and
communicate it. The only thing wrong with the art of the past (and much of the
present) is that it is or was denied the many whether deliberately or purely
because of the ruling system’s demands (including demands on time and energy)
on the souls of those it exploited in the past or continues to exploit. But in
discussing the beauty of art as such, it is irrelevant (to us) as to whether it
was produced under barbarism, slavery, serfdom or industrial exploitation.
Except that much of its beauty is and was a direct beneficiary of class
oppression and exploitation.
I also think we have to be very
careful in how we treat the subject of aesthetics as an ‘ideology’ in the sense
of Marx’s 1859 Preface, listing it in the ideological superstructure alongside
politics, economics, philosophy, religion and law. No doubt ‘aesthetics’ as
embedded in bourgeois art and literary criticism is for the chop in any future
socialist society, but ‘art’ itself is not in the same league as law, politics,
economics, religion (or indeed contemporary social science) as an unequivocally
coeval oppressor tied to the dominating material base. For one thing it is much
older than any of these; it pre-dates them all, for a start, from long before
there was or could be such a thing as a class-society necessitating an
ideological superstructure formed through the evolution of a material base.
‘Ideology’ is to do with class conflict: it has no meaning outside it. Art in
that sense existed before class
conflict, whatever aesthetics made of it thereafter.
Long before even the rudiments of
science and philosophy, human social production and reproduction in a lengthy
period of barbarism found a ‘shortcut’, as we might call it, to truth. That is,
a grasp of a sort of the reality of the workings of the seen and the unseen
world. This ‘direct route’ to knowledge and wisdom lay in magic, and in a
ritual reinforced or ‘authorised’ by tribal mythology, while art (music, dance,
decoration) was both a natural impulse and the instrumentality for the other
three – magic, ritual and myth. It was these
that negotiated with fear and with the spirits of game animals, put courage
and patience into hunters and warriors and (apparently) cured ailments and
brought babies: the essence of hunter-gatherer social production and
reproduction. Although all these remain facets of aboriginal life today, art
alone has grown well beyond its aboriginal origins as it has kept open the
‘direct route’ or ‘shortcut’ to understanding, power and mastery. Magic long
ago reached a dead end, except as entertainment. But the practice of and
engagement with art in all its forms continues to sustain us and in doing so is
not illusory in terms of ‘results’.
Art continues to manifest powerful effects on us. (I mention in passing a
caricature of my argument in the stories brought up by the news from time to
time of hens apparently laying better when Mozart is played to them, or cows
being milked to Beethoven!)
II
It was
GWF Hegel (1770-1831) in his Science of
Logic (1812) who draws our attention to the fact that Being is not quite
the ‘be-all-and-end-all’:
Being and
nothing in their unity, which is determinate being, are no longer being and
nothing – these they are only outside their unity – thus their unstable unity,
in becoming, they are coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.
Science
of Logic, transl. AV Miller (1998) 119
[…] positive
and negative, cause and effect, however much they may be taken as isolated from
each other, are at the same time meaningless one without the other. There is present in them their showing or
reflection in each other, the showing or reflection in each of its other.
Ibid., 122
The
object or person you see before you is in a process of change from past to
future even as you look at them. Everything contains elements or traces of what
it was in the process of becoming and in process of becoming what it will be. Reality in the sense indicated by
Meszaros, above, is not the present but the totality of
past-present-future. (Even ‘the present’
is open to doubt, since once one contemplates the present, it has become the
past.) A rock has more ‘present’ than a waterfall, in a manner of speaking, but
it is changing all the same, if at a slower rate than the waterfall. Our solid
earth is in fact unstable with shifting continents, travelling at eighteen
thousand miles per hour through space. Our moon is moving away from us and in a
future time will no longer be in our sky. Our sun is commencing a lengthy process
of dying, like other stars. An infant child is changing almost before our eyes
so that we almost need to capture its little presence on camera before it’s too
late. Transition and movement are all around us, so that ‘reality’ cannot be
grasped as something in stasis. We are always in a state of transition, and this is indicative of the totality we both live in and make real. Hamlet is the archetypal man-in-transition. You can pin him down within moments and specific sayings and actions and reactions but you can't pin him down overall at all because he's on the move: we all are, whatever our type or personality. One of the reasons I admire the novels of Willa Cather (1883-1947) is that she depicts her characters dynamically as they go through life's changes down through the decades: she creates an intensely moving effect by doing this. If you determine to trace back to the origins of an action or event, you would literally have to go back to the origin of the universe and its material totality. Thus novels (for example) can be unbelievably complex, and even then can only indicate arbitrary limits to the inquiry at hand.
The social totality – that is, the
human and humanised nature – is an outgrowth from the vastly huger material
totality of all of nature and finally of the universe, perhaps ultimately a
multiverse of which as yet we know nothing. The religious Idealist-abstract
totality is a false one, but that doesn’t mean that there is no totality, for without totality and all the individuals and
materials that together give it existence, there is nothing: no space, no time,
no motion, which is logically and physically impossible. As Spinoza says, from
nothing, nothing comes. The spiritually-minded will say that all was caused by
God. But who or what caused God? So even the religious rely on cause and
effect, but by an uncaused cause and an effect which is not possible without
space, time and motion.
What the artist conveys in all forms
is the totality that is manifested by each object of artistic scrutiny
(including sounds) as part of the greater whole. Thus there is in good and
great art a sense in which we are seeing or hearing ‘more’ than meets the eye
or ear from the visual or musical or verbal object before us. That object
indeed, partakes in the totality, which is the true reality, just as we and
everything around us are what make the totality exist.
The
dialectical conception of totality seems to have put a great distance between
itself and reality, it appears to construct reality very “unscientifically”.
But it is the only method capable of understanding and reproducing reality.
- Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (1923) transl. Rodney Livingstone (1971) 10
The radical,
materialist rethinking of [Hegel’s] logic (dialectics) carried through by Marx,
Engels and Lenin, was linked with affirmation of the objective reality of the universal, not at all in the spirit of
Plato or Hegel [Idealism], but rather in the sense of a law-governed connexion
of material phenomena, in the sense of the law of their being joined together
in the composition of some whole, in the context of a self-developing totality
or aggregate, all the components of which were related as a matter of fact not
by virtue of their possessing one and the same identical attribute, but by
virtue of a unity of genesis, by virtue of their having one and the same common
ancestor, or to put it more exactly, by virtue of their arising as diverse
modifications of one and the same substance of a quite material character (i.e. independent of thought and word).
EV Ilyenkov,
Dialectical Logic, transl. H.
Campbell Creighton (2008) 334
In other
words, the real is the total and the total is the real. There would be no
totality without concrete existences: an ‘empty totality’ is no more than a
phantom of abstraction. But the true reality of the concrete existence is
inconceivable except as part of a, or of the
wholeness. A playing-card – to function as such - requires both a suit and
a deck; a suit is nothing and a deck is nothing without the cards making them
up.
All this is a very broad description
of realism, but for art this means that the subject, character or musical theme
is never without some implication or connection as being part of more than
itself, is never real if lacking universal reference – in one way or another:
perhaps this will become clearer as I continue.
‘Whenever
we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else
in the universe.’ (Attributed to naturalist John Muir by JH Nichols, Natural History, November 1992.)
Meanwhile,
in graphic art, what concrete forms has this taken in art history?
In traditional painting various genres
of subject emerged: religious iconography, landscapes, still-life, portraits,
nudes, historical episodes, social settings. And in the meantime more directly
symbolic, imagist, impressionist, pastiche, imitations of commercial art (Pop
Art, for example), surrealism, fauvism, etc. etc. In our time things become
more radical: severely abstract art, Performance Art (a work being ‘performed’
rather than being made or in which the action of the making is the art itself,
as with drama to an extent), down to Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In the
latter the ‘art’ resides in the concept rather than in anything manifested as
an artefact: it might involve no artefact at all, but instead written-out
messages on gallery walls suggesting what would
be created if it could be. Art
without being made or performed. A
number of these manifestations are indicative of a perpetual struggle (going
back at least to the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement in Britain in the 19th
century) of artists to combat a seemingly inevitable commodification of their
work – its social transformation of artwork into commercial product with a
money value on the market. By striving to create an art that cannot be sold, artists may well feel
that they have saved their effort from going through a commercialising
degradation. One response is to create nothing at all. John Cage’s notorious
work for piano of 1948, 4’33”,
consists of not a single note: the pianist sits before the grand piano and
plays nothing for this precise length of time. Not a work that lends itself,
say, to reproduction on records or CDs! (Spectators
of this in performance soon realise that ‘silence’ during 4’33” is by no means the result. One might start with coughs,
distant traffic-noise, ventilators - and find oneself before halfway through in
a state of meditation!)
Our
so-called ‘way-out’ art would not be realisable (which means pertinent) unless
arising out of the society we live in, a society seeming itself vast,
amorphous, impossible to comprehend or take in except in cerebral contemplation
– a threatening society because of its power to overtake and swamp each of us.
It is quite possible to put a Marxist construction on Conceptual art,
Minimalist art and so on without condemning them even when condemning the
society through which they are conceived: the wrong path down which Meszaros
trod. But Istvan Meszaros’ fundamental approach overall is the right one.
Meszaros,
drawing from Marx and from Lukacs, stresses the reality of humankind as
exemplary subjects for characterising the realism
of humankind, and this sums up the true value of what Meszaros says about
aesthetic alienation.
As
both Meszaros and Lukacs knew well, and as I reiterate, the beauty of an
artist’s depiction of humanity and nature lies in a grasp of the totality in the subject. A great novel
or work of art is about the subject as
exemplifying everything there is. Hence the appeal of transcendent religion
as subject-matter over so many centuries, the symbolism allowing for meanings
to be read into depictions of (say) Medieval gardens or saintly figures encompassing
the religious totality much greater in implication than the pure realism of the
physical subjects. As Mahler once told Sibelius: ‘The symphony must be like the
world. It must be all-embracing.’ But one does not have to compose gigantic
symphonies to make beauty in totalistic realism nor write huge novelistic sagas
like Balzac’s Human Comedy. Totality
need not be physically grasped or visualised solely through quantification.
Here is William Blake:
To see a World
in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven
in a wild flower,
Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity
in an hour.
- Auguries of Innocence
Consider
Albrecht Durer’s tuft of grasses watercolour of 1502: rendered with intricate
and perceptive realism yet symbolic in the sense that this tuft alone has been
singled out against a neutral background as the artist’s rendering of creation:
the format itself provides the significance of the subject. If I were
responsible for contributing to a time-capsule to be sent to other systems and
galaxies, I might well choose this one Durer, as if to say: ‘This is our earth!’ Consider, say, the bare simplicities of a
Raymond Carver short-story and try to escape its universal human relevance.
With regard to subject-matter, Charles Fort says somewhere: ‘One may draw a
circle, beginning anywhere.’
Courbet’s Origin
of the World, (above, 1872) shows what is the universal in the particular,
as it is deliberately entitled. Van Gogh’s Chair
(as instanced by Meszaros), a portrayal if not a portrait of Van Gogh
himself
is about
all of human life: its poverty, its loneliness, its comfort in humble things:
look at it long enough and you will discover many more things besides.
Totality in its material whole as such
is impossible to depict, but resonances of it in the this, the here-and-now,
are possible. Artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian turned to abstraction to
convey the whole as directly as possible without an intervening
representationalism. Malevich’s various Black Squares are meant to be
indications of what the Black Square is suggesting: points of reference and
direction to the infinite.
The difference between a Sunday
painter and an artist of course lies immediately in the latter’s greater skill.
But while the Sunday painter considers that he or she is succeeding if he or
she can render an adequate likeness of a flower or a tree, the greater painters
give through the medium of their subjects a glimpse into the totality which
forms the true ‘realism’ of their depiction. The art fulfils the totality the
more an artist/composer/writer/dancer/actor etc. throws more of themselves into the work; the less good
the art, amongst other things the less of the self has gone into it, for it is
the self that is the conduit for a totalising apprehension and commission.
Totality itself includes personal responses to it, for the self is as much a
part of the totality as everything else around it. If everyone saw things the
same way as each other, there would be no possibility of artistic creativity.
Art is indispensable because human
totality incorporates more than verbalised thought. It includes bursting into
tears, feeling lust, stamping one’s foot in frustration, suffering
indescribable fear or pain, suckling, smiling, winking – all that cannot be
‘said’ in so many words. Ask an artist to respond to, say, the question ‘What
is the meaning of life?’ and the response might well be to seize a paintbrush
or sketching pencil, as a composer might start improvising on the piano or
guitar. A poet knows that words are the enemy and so must warily pursue them
like a squaddie crossing a section of minefield. (Words are the natural friends of politicians and salesmen.)
When poets realise that words are not their friends they are on their way to
becoming artists – in words. Lives can be saved by noxious poisons but only once you've identified them as poisons. And so it is also no wonder that novelists slave over
their chapters. We read of Raymond Carver’s editor ruthlessly expunging words
and phrases from the manuscripts – indeed as if words were the enemy – to produce the finely-honed stories as we know
them. (Some readers of the ‘unexpurgated’ Carver might demur.) Everything is significant by dint of what it is signifying. It is the portrayal of the significance which brings beauty to the work, makes the work 'more' than what it seems.
I want to offer some analysis of just
two paintings, the first by the Impressionist Camille Pissaro; the second by a
progenitor of Pop Art Andy Warhol. Both
provide instances of what, as a Marxist, I would call the concrete, material
totality. And, in such a way, offer us both beauty as significance and
significance as beauty….
Camille Pissaro: Portrait
of Jeanne (1872)
Pissaro rarely painted
portraits; he rarely obtained commissions for them. His portrait of Jeanne, his
daughter, is of a little girl of seven, sitting slightly forward in an
armchair, facing the artist directly. One would hope for a note of gaiety in an
intimate study of such an enchanting child but here there is none. The upper
half of her face with her large, expressive brown eyes is cast in the shadow of
the brim of her wide yellow straw hat. The source of natural light, from the
left, is out of view, leaving us with a dullish, lustreless light that casts a
pall over the room with its beige wall behind her. Her long, flowing hair is
also brown, her dress brownish; only her pink apron offers a lighter contrast
but the pink is muted, also dull. In her lap is a bouquet of flowers which she
holds loosely but without interest. Her posture is tense. One senses an
apprehension, even a fear, perhaps? We will know from the caption material that
Jeanne died two years after this portrait was painted, and we know from the
date that it would have been unlikely that the medical science of her day could
have saved her from whatever the cause was. Was it already suspected that she
had not long to live? Pissaro at any rate seems to have had a premonition.
Otherwise why paint one’s little girl seemingly struggling with some
instinctive fear? Here is a tender, tactfully reticent painting of all of life:
birth (her childhood reminds us that she was born not so long ago), her
childish helplessness and apprehension in the present, the premonition of death
in her expressiveness in shadow, in the overall brown-ness of the painting: black
may be the colour of death, but brown is near enough. Hence the totality of a
life past, present and future, captured in a moment (or a few hours) of it. The
totality of existence in one subject. Quite simply, Pissaro has painted it all.
There is nothing more to be said.
Andy
Warhol: 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)
The subject
is just what it says: an aggressively frontal view of rows of photographically
pristine cans of Campbell’s Soup and nothing else. Except that it is not quite
what it seems. Each can was painstakingly hand-painted by the artist, so that
although they may look uniform they are not – not quite. It is as if there was
an individuality here somewhere but it is overwhelmed by the monumental
uniformity: like repressed individuals made insignificant in a vast factory or
open-plan office. The positioning is indeed awesomely monumental, even
threatening, just as redolent of capitalist production-power as the massive
winged chimera in stone in the British Museum is of Assyrian power and crushing
might. This wall of soup cans shows us that capital, if banal, is both
impersonal and invincible. Or is it? It might take only a child to knock them
all down.
Of the forms of ideological superstructure
enumerated by Marx in the 1859 Preface, the content of aesthetics is the one
that will not only be retained under socialism, but enhanced by wider practice,
wider aesthetic teaching of a human-only sense for art. All the others – the
legal, religious, political, economic –
will be transformed and perhaps turned inside out with the ending of
class-conflict and classes themselves. The nature of aesthetics will certainly
change with the popular practice of the arts but –like science – and for
reasons already given here – art will go on being indispensable. There is hope
for it even today:
Modern art
generally is not that unpopular any more because it is more connected to ordinary life now. And
even its most radically blank manifestations are probably not all that
unpopular either.
-
Collings
Op cit., 144
Art after
all had a share in inventing the idea of socialism, and it wants to have a
share of its own now in moulding socialist society.
-
VG
Kiernan, Socialist Register 1965, 234
‘Beauty is
truth and truth beauty’ – that is all
Ye know, and
all ye need to know.
-
John
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
