Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

 
An interesting critique of modernist architecture:

"Nathan Glazer asks why modernism failed: "How did a socially concerned architecture come to be condemned, 50 years later, as soulless, bureaucratic and inhuman?"... In two ways, he is absolutely right. American consumers have decided by the tens of millions to shun modernist towers and to live instead in traditional single-family homes.

The first reason for modernism's failure is that America in 2007 looks nothing like inter-war Europe where modernism began. The modernist's world was one of poor, carelessly planned cities where cheap density was a real blessing. America ended up being rich and filled with cars. With all that wealth and all that mobility, Americans moved to car-based suburbs and chose to spend a little extra for ornamentation... Modernism moved from being a social movement into an elite style, and part of appealing to elites is being inaccessible to the rest. Self-referential buildings that require lots of inside knowledge to get the joke are a way of separating the cognoscenti from hoi polloi. Those who cared about such things came to control the production of public buildings, and the result was overly abstract monuments and drab towers that appeal to the artistic elite and no one else.

Why didn't this happen in the past? Perhaps because, historically, wealth and power, not aesthetic knowledge, determined what public buildings were erected. Wealth and power were often distributed among the artistically ignorant, whose tastes more accurately reflected those of the public as a whole. Royals - from Napoleon III to Prince Charles - have been blessed by a lack of artistic training that helped their aesthetic judgments better match public sensibilities.

Something odd and unexpected seems to have happened to modernism in architecture and planning: it had broken free from its origins and moorings, drifted away from the world of everyday life, which it had hoped to improve, into a world of its own. From a cause that intended to remake the world, it had become a style, or a family of styles. Modernism had, it is true, produced masterpieces, but it had been incapable of matching the complex urbanity that the history of building, despite its attachment to the historical styles decried by modernism, had been able to create in so many cities. As the older parts of cities were swept away in a wave of urban renewal, as nineteenth-century courthouses and city halls were demolished for modern replacements, more and more people wondered whether what they had lost was matched by the new world being created by modernism. "


Glazer says that Modernism was not simply a new style in architecture, succeeding neo-Gothicism, neoclassicism, Art Nouveau. It represented a rebellion against historicism, ornament, pandering to the great and rich as against serving the needs of a society's common people. There are some obvious points where one can quibble with the detail here; being relatively inexpensive, modernism has continued to exert an influence in some areas, especially corporate architecture and skyscrapers (although even there the more recent trend is to emphasise the organic rather than the rectilinear). Secondly, the point about aesthetics having historically been within the command of the artistically ignorant seems somewhat misplaced; architecture has rarely concerned itself with popular or folk traditions and this is as true of Hawksmoor and Gaudi as it was of Corbusier and Gropius.

As a point of personal preference, I invariably prefer the profuse and ornate to the spartan and constrained. The likes of Pugin, Wagner and Gaudi all figure prominently in my personal pantheon, which tends to account for the dislike I've always felt for the minimalist in art or the modernist in architecture. Instead, I think of the detail and ornamentation Gaudi built into the spires of the Sagrada Familia and Bazalgette into the London server system, neither of which would ever even be seen. Gaudi in particular, as well as architects like Montaner and Cadafalch, had revolted against the rigid uniformity of Cerda's socialist inspired grid layout for Barcelona's extension. Conversely modernism's credo that form followed function was unforgiving of ornament, banishing it to the realm of craft. As JG Ballard put it;

"Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety. Above all, there should be no ornamentation. "Less is more," was the war cry, to which Robert Venturi, avatar of the tricksy postmodernism that gave us the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, retorted: "Less is a bore."

But the modernists maintained that ornamentation concealed rather than embellished. Classical columns, pediments and pilasters defined a hierarchical order. Power and authority were separated from the common street by huge flights of steps that we were forced to climb on our way to law courts, parliaments and town halls. Gothic ornament, with all its spikes and barbs, expressed pain, Christ's crown of thorns and agony on the cross. The Gothic expressed our guilt, pointing to a heaven we could never reach. The Baroque was a defensive fantasy, architecture as aristocratic playpen, a set of conjuring tricks to ward off the Age of Reason...

[Nonetheless] its slow death can be seen, not only in the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall, but in the styling of Mercedes cars, at once paranoid and aggressive, like medieval German armour. We see its demise in 1960s kitchens and bathrooms, white-tiled laboratories that are above all clean and aseptic, as if human beings were some kind of disease. We see its death in motorways and autobahns, stone dreams that will never awake, and in the turbine hall at that middle-class disco, Tate Modern - a vast totalitarian space that Albert Speer would have admired, so authoritarian that it overwhelms any work of art inside it."


Ballard is unusual in that the motorways, tower blocks and cars that were the hallmarks of modernism form the essential constituents of his surrealist pantheon, playing the same role as Dali's soft watches or space elephants. But for myself, modernism seems a particularly unexpressive style. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos expressed this when he published a diatribe against decoration in 1908, titled "Ornament and Crime." Loos argued on utilitarian and financial grounds that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete, something that led him to see it as wasteful and profligate. Having seen the Looshaus in Vienna, profligacy and degeneracy have rarely seemed quite so appealing. The spirit of the present age has remained puritannical on such matters, seeing a profuse love of detail as a form of excess and preferring the minimal on aesthetic and economic grounds alike. Equally, I tend to see architecture in 'writerly' terms, of the relationship of its style to the spirit of the age, its symbolism and status as a single moment with a larger narrative, the choice of styles like gothic, classical and modernist frequently being charged with various political and social stances.

Nonetheless, I have to admit to some considerable ambivalence on this score. Modernism was after all loosely aligned with progressive causes. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a member of the November Group, named after the insurrection of 1918-9 that briefly put Berlin in the control of worker's councils (although, he also did some designs intended to persuade Hitler to choose him to design the German pavilion at the Brussels Expo of 1934, complete with swastika flags and Nazi eagles). The Bauhaus school was an attempt to adapt the design theories of William Morris to mass production (and was subsequently forced to close by the Nazi regime), encapsulated by Lenin’s dictum "socialism equals soviet power plus electrification." Ornament was seen as a dishonest attempt to hide labour and technology behind the styles of the past, while the reduced costs of modernist architecture made housing more affordable for more of the population. One should not express too much sympathy for the progressive aspects of modernist architecture though; the Bauhaus school for being originally founded by a socialist worker's council while Le Corbusier's dedicated his architectural manifestos "To Authority" as a way of illustrating the belief that government was to function as the master planner and allocator of a nation's resources in order to achieve utopian social goals. Modernism 's utopianism was certainly both coerceive and totalitarian in character.

Conversely, much of the architecture I admire the most in aesthetic terms was frequently reactionary in character, with Pugin and Gaudi being obvious examples. Contemporary advocates of traditional forms of architecture see it as a representing a continuity with the past that I'm not sure I find particularly congenial, as with Quinlan Terry's attempts to reconcile classical architecture with the christian heritage (by arguing that the classical orders of architecture were handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai after He finished delivering the Ten Commandments). I was especially struck by Jonathan Meades's observation that he had come to regard Gaudi's architecture as being essentially equivalent to Speer's grandiloquent architecture, Stalin's wedding cake skyscrapers or Ceausescu's palaces. Hitler deplored the Gothic as "Asiatic," had no taste for the Baroque and instead prescribed austere neo-classical architecture as the expression of Reich und Volk, albeit on a grandiose scale that would have dwarfed Berlin's existing architecture. Conversely, Stalin's "Asiatic" architecture was kitsch, akin to the Baroque of the counter-reformation in terms of its propaganda value. However, even there modernism exerted its influence on Russian architecture, as Moscow's Seven Sisters were built to rival American skyscrapers. The late WG Sebald expressed a view similar to Meades when describing the grandiose architecture of Antwerp in Austerlitz:

"When Belgium, a little patch of yellowish gray barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power-at that time, now so long ago although it determines our lives to this day, it was the personal wish of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would bring international renown to his aspiring state. One of the projects thus initiated by the highest authority in the land was the central station of the Flemish metropolis, where we were sitting now, said Austerlitz; designed by Louis Delacenserie, it was inaugurated in the summer of 1905, after ten years of planning and building, in the presence of the King himself. The model Leopold had recommended to his architects was the new railway station of Lucerne, where he had been particularly struck by the concept of the dome, so dramatically exceeding the usual modest height of railway buildings, a concept realized by Delacenserie in his own design, which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as the architect intended, when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade...

It would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than domestic size - the little cottage in the field, the hermitage... are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no-one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the Gallow Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder that is dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins."


Needless to add, Sebald's joining of Tolstoy's theory of art with Speer's theory of ruin value here only truly serves to accentuate my interest in architecture of that kind. With that said, Sebald's argument applies rather better to modernist architecture than to its predecessors; there are few things as desolate as a ruined image of a future that never arrived. Gothic and classical buildings do at least retain a gentle dignity as they return to nature. Nonetheless, there is an alternative view to that being expressed here. To William Morris, a building like Great Coxwell Tithe Barn was a masterpiece of world literature, a product of folk architecture rather than of the gentry or aristocracy but still painstakingly constructed on a giant scale. Morris advocated decoration and beauty as a means of social improvement and perfectly justifiable on socialist grounds, the product of a form of economic activity that did not alienate the craftsman from the means of production. Mass production was seen as inherently capitalist, a view that resulted in Arts & Crafts being a decidedly expensive commodity. Similarly, the likes of Ruskin elided the brutalism of labour when they advocated a form of society that emphasised craftmanship and the connection to the soil. Ruskin's advocacy of gothic was partly predicated on his belief that gothic architecture was best suited to his idea of the craftsman as artist in his depiction of natural detail rather than simply implementing coldly geometrical classical designs that left no scope for the individual talent. Nonetheless, it is the form of architecture that seems to best express my own aesthetic and political preferences. There is something rather reassuring about the English love of the pastoral rather than the urban, about English Arts & Crafts being connected with ideas of ruralism and hand-crafted cottage industries or as with the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic connected to ideas of distributism, while it became a form of mass production in countries like Germany. In short, Arts & Crafts was frequently the consequence of a typically bungled and naive utopianism. As a form of architecture, it expresses England's wariness of capitalist expansion and yearning for an arcadian rural society of the kind denounced by Martin Wiener's Thatcherite tract English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980. This quotation from Wilde on the same theme seems to best express my own views:

"People often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed on it... That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few people would venture to assert. And yet most civilised people act as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves and those that are to come after them. For that beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men."
(Wilde, Art and the Handicraftsman)

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posted by Richard 3:07 pm

Friday, February 23, 2007

 
An interesting article from Cabinet Magazine on the history of shadows:

"The prisoners in Plato's cave were incapable of gazing directly into the light of knowledge. They had their backs to this bright light and saw only the shadows cast on the cave walls. Plato's point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself. The image had a tremendously negative charge for Plato and he linked the image with the shadow—both were copies of reality. And so, from the beginning on, to attain true knowledge one had to renounce the shadow stage and progress out of the cave, into the sun... I was struck by the strange parallels between the Platonic story of the origins of knowledge and Pliny's story about the origin of painting. Maybe one of the most important differences between them is that, in Pliny's story about the origin of representation, the shadow wasn’t charged with a negative aspect: the story of the maid of Corinth tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall and thereby giving birth to painting is a wonderful story, a love story, and not at all negative.

Leonardo, and others after him, said that the representation of shadows had to be correct but was not obligatory in painting. The painter was free to choose whether to represent them or not, because to represent all cast shadows would be too much."


The dichotomy between light and shadow is one that places Plato in the same moral hierarchy as the opposition of the light to the outer darkness in christianity. Clearly, the view taken by Pliny was nonetheless also to persist (most obviously through the tracing of a subject's profile as delineated by their shadow in the eighteenth century), the Western painter most noted for his interplay of light and shadow is after all the amoralist Caravaggio, with his sexualised and dissident saints. The shadow was also seen as a metaphor for the inner life in German fairy tales and expressionist cinema. One thing I am surprised the article doesn't mention is an essay by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki entitled In Praise of Shadows:

"Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold; but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value; for gold, in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Their use of gold leaf and gold dust was not mere extravagance. Its reflective properties were put to use as a source of illumination. Silver and other metals quickly lose their gloss, but gold retains its brilliance indefinitely to light the darkness of the room. This is why gold was held in such incredibly high esteem... In most of our city temples, catering to the masses as they do, the main hall will be brightly lit, and these garments of gold will seem merely gaudy. No matter how venerable a man the priest may be, his robes will convey no sense of his dignity. But when you attend a service at an old temple, conducted after the ancient ritual, you see how perfectly the gold harmonizes with the wrinkled skin of the old priest and the flickering light of the altar lamps, and how much it contributes to the solemnity of the occasion."


Tanizaki suggests that Oriental aesthetics valued shadow above light, therefore preferring wood and lacquerware to tiles and ceramics. For example, a Tudor building like Hardwick Hall was constructed with much of its walls consisting of windows to cast light on the bright tapestries within and to overcome the darkness of the wood. Later, rococco buildings such as Versailles or Sanssouci were decorated in bright colours with  large windows on one side of a room and mirrors on the other. In each case, the goal was to banish shadow and darkness.

One of the problems of this thesis is that it can be better described as polemical than descriptive. After all dark woods were a favoured building material for much of Western history and ceramics were largely imported from the East. The axonometric perspectives used in Oriental art commonly lacked an explicit light source and often tended to omit shadow altogether. When Tanizaki attributes the importance of gold to being a reflector in subdued light that will not easily lose its lustre, he forgets that this is precisely why it was popular in the West as well). The polemic springs from a backlash against the Westernization of Japan that followed the 1867 Meiji restoration; much of the essay consists of invective against the unconscious Western assumptions in many modern conveniences, recalling Camille Paglia's assertion that cinema had always been an implicit concept in the Western visual imagination (e.g. electric lighting where Tanizaki undermines some of his case by noting that the Japanese were more enthused by electric lighting than any other nation save the United States; in contrasting cultures it becomes clear that the cultures in question are far from being monolithic entities. Not to mention his own refusal to inhabit a house as uncomfortable as his aesthetics advocated) which veers between pleading for recognition of Japanese identity as being 'separate but equal' and denouncing Western civilisation as being tasteless and uncouth (since it is the origin and otherness of many of these conveniences which seems to trouble Tanizaki at least as much as the unwelcome nature of the changes).

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posted by Richard 10:01 pm

Sunday, November 19, 2006

 
This article by Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank does rather make me want to reread both writers:

"By making the novel a structure of bright fragments, Firbank had aestheticized it, and in the aesthetic realm the normative claims of morality are relaxed. Firbank’s difficult inconsequential manner is part of a bigger subversion of the novel, and what is in many ways a homosexualization of the novel. Characteristically, he didn’t do this by writing a "gay novel" of the kind that E. M. Forster had struggled with in Maurice, or of the kind that James Baldwin or Gore Vidal would later write in Giovanni’s Room and The City and the Pillar – novels in which the homosexual condition is itself the subject, with an unusual dominance of maleness. For Forster, the crisis which led him to abandon the novel form altogether was the impossibility of writing about the one thing which most determined his view of life. "


Although one of the striking facts about the novel in the twentieth century is that it easily adapted to producing gay novels like a A Boy's Own Story as readily as it had adapted to women's writing in the previous century, the notion of fragments as a gay aesthetic is interesting idea, particularly when one considers parallels between the fragmentary approach described here and the Burroughsian cut-up technique (or Gertrude Stein's verbal collage). EM Forster's dictum, only connect, may have largely been applied to a conventional interpretation of the novel but it was nonetheless applied to a context of alienation as much as Genet's novels or John Rechy's City of the Night (and goes some way to explain why modernism, with its emphasis on epiphany and fragment proved a fertile ground for gay writers like Proust and Gide). With that said, the most interesting example in this regard is Hollinghurst himself, given the influence of the Victorian novel on The Line of Beauty (the first post-gay novel, as Edmund White called it and very far from being concerned with outcasts and outsiders in the way Rechy, Baldwin or Vidal were), where the main character certainly does allude to Trollope's The Way We Live Now and the novel depicts a broad swathe of nineteen eighties society and depicts the transition of conservatism from being a party of the landed gentry to being a party of upstart magnates. Where a Victorian social novel would have shown how different parts of society were inextricably joined, Hollinghurst deliberately emphasises the divisions of an increasingly atomised society, as the main character's homosexuality clashes with both his middle-class background and the upper-class milieu he has become accustomed to.

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posted by Richard 10:51 am

Sunday, October 01, 2006

 
I've just been reading this interview with Joseph Koerner about his work on the reformation of the image. Amongst many other things, it raises the question of whether the iconoclastic tradition within Protestantism was to undermine art by severing its link with faith.

"The dispiriting didacticism of this Lutheran art has often been commented on. Nineteenth-century Romantics blamed Luther for the death of art for art's sake, and its replacement with mere propaganda. Hegel thought that the Reformation inaugurated a tragic but necessary shift towards interiority which had robbed art of its intrinsic holiness, a disjunction between the beautiful and the true. The material world, fetishised by medieval Christianity in the cult of relics, the eucharist and holy images, was now disenchanted, and from that point onwards, however skilfully God, Christ or the saints might be portrayed by painters, 'it is no help, we bow the knee no longer.' Art was no longer sacred, immediate, an encounter with the ultimate: instead, it offered an alternative form of textuality, mere food for thought...

The Lutheran aesthetic, Koerner believes, broke decisively with the past in transforming art from a direct encounter with the sacred into a cognitive instrument, a didactic device in which understanding was everything, veneration banished. He therefore insists on the corresponding absence of this cognitive priority in medieval religion... Koerner here effectively articulates a modern version of an accusation often made by Lutherans at the time of the Reformation: Catholicism was external, magical and mechanical, Protestantism was interior and rooted in personal responsibility."


It's an interesting argument, albeit one perhaps more familiar from TS Eliot's theories concerning the dissociation of sensibility (where such writers as the metaphysical poets felt "their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose"). In The Open Work Umberto Eco commented that "the order of a work of art in this period is a mirror of an imperfect and theocratic society." Medieval literature is a place where every single sign was remorselessly subjugated to serving a transcendental order. As Thomas a Kempis wrote in his The Imitation of Christ; "Stand without choice and without all manner of self and thou shalt win ever; for anon, as thou hast resigned thyself and not taken thyself again, then shall be thrown to thee more grace." In other words, from the retraction that concludes the Canterbury Tales to the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich, art was inseparable from religion. This is an old argument, shared by Bloom in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human and originating with Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy; "their powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters, altogether subjective... and markedly worldly... we are individually developed, we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion." The idea of subjectivity as a renaissance development is one that was later to be disavowed by Burckhardt and challenged by medievalists, but it has nonetheless persisted and does indeed seem to account for much of the difference we might find in the autobiographies of Abelard and Cellini. The lack of a sense of subjectivity in medieval art makes it especially difficult for an atheist like myself to appreciate it; there are simply very few naturalistic, non-religious, reasons to do so.

Medieval art and literature are things I can bring myself to admire but not something I can often bring myself to actually like. Reading the above comment from Eco, I find it very difficult not to think of Czeslaw Milosz's study of how writers were prepared to deform and contort their views to fit the prevailing ideology of communist states. The term Milosz uses to describe this is one derived from religion, ketman, a concept that seems highly applicable to the medieval worldview; "If one penetrates into the minds of these people, one discovers utter nonsense. They are totally unaware of the fact that nothing is their own, that everything is part of their historical formation - their occupations, their clothes, their gestures and expressions, their beliefs and ideas... The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts." This tension is perhaps best observed in what is, to my mind, the most interesting work of medieval literature, Langland's Piers Plowman. This is one of the few medieval works where theological conformity is not a given, with Langland being deeply concerned with the relation of his radical social views to heterodox theological positions like Lollardy for the relationship between art and religion to be an unproblematic one.

For myself, art begins with the likes of Cranach and Holbein where the intermingling of the spiritual and the temporal is perhaps rather more uneasy than in their predecessors. Similarly, in literature characters in Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit a world where god and the knowledge of god are no longer certain (as with Shakespeare's "as flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport"). The infinite variety of a Cleopatra or a Falstaff is something quite different to the trompe l'oeil effect Chaucer gives to characters like the Wife of Bath who at first sight appear fully rounded but to my mind never quite escape the taint of allgeory.

Update: Nigel Warburton quotes Richard Norman on the question of whether atheists can apreciate religious art:

"Haldane does however pose a genuine problem for the atheist when he turns to the specific case of religious art, and I want to consider this in more detail. He argues that any serious work of art is ‘a presentation of the reality and values in which the work seeks to participate’, and that in evaluating the work ‘we are judging the credibility of what it proclaims’ (pp.171-2). It would seem to follow that if a work presents religious beliefs and values, the atheist is bound to reject those beliefs and values and is therefore committed to judging the work less highly. And this appears to exclude the atheist from fully appreciating and valuing religious works of art. One of Haldane’s examples is Piero della Francesca’s painting The Resurrection in Borgo San Sepolcro. The atheist might try to take refuge in praise of the formal qualities of the work, but as Haldane rightly says, its form and content are inseparable. The arrangement of the figures, with the sleeping soldiers in their poses of disarray ‘contrasting with the simple sweeping contour of Christ’, who divides the background landscape between the deadness of winter and the new life of spring - all of this serves to point up the content of the painting, and the painting seems to be inescapably religious."


From a personal perspective, I do find appreciation of religious art to be far from straightforward. To continue to take medieval art as an example, I love the pigments and styles probably more than I do their Renaissance equivalents but do tend to find that art altogether impossible to relate to in a way that I don't for art after the Renaissance. Art is about content as much as form and the two are not easily separable. The aesthetics of art depend on its propositional elements to a very large extent; I doubt any art can be deflated down to such content but I'm equally inclined to doubt that it can exist independently of it. I've never really liked the idea that is some sort of all transcending concept rather than a product of specific cultures. It seems to me that it is more difficult to apprecicate a lot of religious art for much the same reason that the Victorians saw something in Little Nell's death that we can't. Certainly there are authors and artists that depict or propound viewpoints of such extremity that is very difficult to be other than revolted by them (the depiction of saints being tortured and killed in medieval art, some of the bloodthirstier parts of the Bible, Hitler's writings or Riefenstahl's films); pure aestheticism seems to me a position that very few people will actually hold in practice even while they happen to evince it in theory.

As a final point, it does seem somewhat unreasonable to me that atheists are incessantly questioned on their ability to appreciate gothic architecture or Bach cantatas, when the question of whether the same applies in reverse is never raised. A committed christian could well have a cap on their appreciation of DH Lawrence, Gide, Genet, Bataille, Pasolini, Burroughs, or Bunuel given that all of those have marked divergences from a christian worldview in their work. Or even to Victorian writers like Hardy, Arnold and George Eliot, whose work takes the death of god as essentially a given. My own objection to christianity is mostly that it seems a very cramped worldview that would exclude a great deal if I were to adhere to it.

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posted by Richard 12:17 pm

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

 
Daniel Green has taken upon himself the not especially enviable task of spending time with Steven Pinker:

"Pinker comes close to suggesting that any art that does not confirm the hypothesis that art originates in other human attributes--adaptations that helped us to navigate and control what Pinker and the evolutionary psychologists he cites like to call our “ancestral environment”--is perforce bad and irresponsible art. But how could this be? Why should otherwise serious and creative works and art or literature be disparaged because they allegedly do not reflect the use of faculties developed to confront conditions our ancestors confronted hundreds of thousands of years ago?

Pinker has elsewhere discussed the fallacy of thinking we cannot in some cases overcome or simply ignore the prescriptions issued to us by our genetic inheritance. Referring specifically to the biological command to bear children, Pinker advises that it is possible for us to metaphorically inform our imperious genes to “go jump in the lake” (How the Mind Works)... At the very least, it seems worth asking why, if we are capable of redirecting “drives” as powerful as these, we cannot also similarly modify, even ignore, the effects of those biological prompts Pinker considers the ultimate sources of art: “hunger for status,” the “pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments,” as well as “the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends.” "


It always seems to me that the problems of Darwinian aesthetics are not dissimilar to those of an earlier school of literary theory. In Freudian analysis, the difficulty is presented that there is no consistent and accurate methodology for determining whether aspects of a text are the product of the author's unonscious mind, their conscious mind or whether their presence is largely coincidental or even illusory. The same problem manifests itself for Darwinian approaches, whereby no equivalent methodology exists for determining whether aspects of an artwork are consistent with the principles of evolutionary pyschology or are some form of cultural aberration. Neither our genes nor our unconscious are likely to be especially forthcoming on this subject; just-so stories are less than helpful in either case.

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posted by Richard 6:52 pm

Saturday, October 09, 2004

 
Umberto Eco has been pondering changing notions of beauty through the twentieth century, drawing a division between the avant-garde art of provocation and the popular art of mass-consumption:

"Avant-garde art does not itself pose the problem of beauty. And while it is implicitly accepted that the new images are artistically "beautiful", and must give us the same pleasure that Giotto's frescoes or Raphael's paintings gave to their own contemporaries, it is important to realise that this is so precisely because the avant garde has provocatively flouted all aesthetic canons respected until now. Art is no longer interested in providing an image of natural beauty, nor does it aim to procure the pleasure ensuing from the contemplation of harmonious forms. On the contrary, its aim is to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes...

Visitors to an exhibition of avant-garde art who purchase an "incomprehensible" sculpture, or those who take part in a "happening", are dressed and made up in accordance with the canons of fashion. They wear jeans or designer clothes, wear their hair or make-up according to the model of beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television, in other words by the mass media. These people follow the ideals of beauty as suggested by the world of commercial consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been battling against for over 50 years."


In many respects, this is similar to the type of thesis Camille Paglia has been presenting for several years, wherein elite forms of art became increasingly moribund during the course of the twentieth century and declined in favour of popular music and film. With the advent of pop-art the eclipse of old forms of artistic expression was complete. But on the whole, it seems to me that Eco is nearer the mark in describing a fragmented world where there is no monopoly on any form of artistic expression; even in the mass culture it is difficult to find anything that resembles a popular movement in the way that the sixties and punk music did. Instead, all forms of artistic expression seem more like micro-cultures, an expression of lifestyle in an individualistic age.

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posted by Richard 8:45 pm