From"Knowledge of Higher Worlds"by Rudolf Steiner (influenced Joseph Beuys) |
Chris Busa, in responding on Facebook to the issues brought
up in my article on Jed Perl’s new collection of essays “Magicians and Charlatans”, drew a parallel between Perl’s disenchantment with the current art
scene and that of Camille Paglia’s. He referenced an article she wrote for the “Wall Street Journal”, which made the odd claim that art would do well to look to capitalism
to refresh its roots, which she feels have always been capitalistic. Odd on the face of it as you would be hard put to find any artist of the 20thc who espoused the tenets
of capitalism; all claimed to be left-wing in their political allegiance. However,
when you think of the disruptive effect of say Cubism and Abstract Expressionism
on the visual language of Western Art, with which we shape our world and our
feelings, it has a lot in common with Schumpeter’s vision of Capitalism as “creative
destruction”: as perennially disruptive of any sort of status quo. What is truly
odd is that the Left in its embrace of Communism ignored that, as an economic
system, Communism is most susceptible to rigid social control; the very
things that the Avant-garde in art has always disdained. Much has been written
about how slow it was for the Left to realize the horrors of the Stalinist regime,
which loved humanity in theory but not in practice. Moreover, the money to
purchase the Avant-garde’s work came rarely from the state but more likely from
capitalists who felt their business acumen also applied to picking the art of
the future. And when it does come from the state, it tends toward the reactionary.
Is Paglia right? Is this the elephant in the room that no one wants to admit to: the avant-garde,
despite its protestations, has a lot in common with the capitalist system?
The art of today is more interested in describing the notion
of universal victimhood experienced by certain groups due to their perceived oppression
by the Capitalist establishment. I remember my last days of academic teaching
saw the marginalization of the traditional language of painting by the study of
oppression due to gender bias or that perpetrated by a consumerist culture’s push
toward commodification. It was anti-capitalistic in so far as capitalism is a synonym for patriarchal control. The teaching of a seemingly value neutral
course on seeing and perception was construed to be patriarchal, partaking
of the controlling gaze of the dominant male. Much of what passes for art
education is probably a repackaging of the ideas prevalent in the thirties
during the Great Depression when Capitalism was seen as bankrupt and incapable
of advancing the well being of the masses. Stalinist Russia appeared to be
the solution to the woes of the workers of the world. The art that grew out of
that sympathy for the masses was Social Realist and the artists in this country
best known for their politicization were Ben Shahn and Thomas Hart Benton. They pursued neither technical nor spiritual exploration. It was stylistically derivative of
other forms of realism. The difference is that then the battles they described took
place in the street; today they take place in the classroom.
I still recall the words of William Bailey: In
the Forties, when the Social Realists dominated the art scene, you would never have
imagined the Fifties would be dominated by the likes of de Kooning, Gorky and Pollock.
During the Thirties and Forties they were developing their art under the radar;
it was an art rooted in technical experimentation of the visual language of Cubism and Surrealism, which provided a vehicle for spiritual notions
of the self. When it finally burst on the scene it transformed not only art but
also the dynamics of the individual and society.
The youth of today, according to Paglia,
are indoctrinated in the tenets of the Left; from kindergarten on we are taught
to be political animals. Our identity comes solely from our function in the
social fabric. Our success always comes at the expense of someone else's’ loss. It is a zero sum game. Capitalism is disruptive
of an individual’s clear identity within this structure, since it fosters the movement
of money and privilege to those who are most successful at making money i.e.
the most innovative and hard working or to those who inherited it and invested
it well. Viewed from the point of view of the masses they achieved their riches
through exploitation of the less fortunate. The struggle, if you want to call
it that, of the individual in our society is to appear to be no better than
anyone else. It could be seen as the application of religious piety to the
social structure. There is always something ex nihilo in the capitalist enterprise,
the introduction of something totally unexpected and transformational. So instead
of a push and pull between social norms and the self, it is the social norms
that come first and last.
Paglia makes one comment in her essay about the spiritual
hollowness of Contemporary Art; I believe this is the direction she should be
pursuing if she wants to diagnose accuratly the malaise of the modern scene.
“Thus we live in a strange and
contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are
ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made
their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and
letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language
even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko is ignored or suppressed.”
This is a strange jump from praise for
capitalism to that of religion. Moreover, religion and capitalism are often antithetical in their ends. Christianity has always been the standard bearer of the oppressed. So how can she conflate the two? The religion of Mondrian and Pollock was not the religion of the Sunday worshipers of the fifties and sixties. It was hermetic and counter cultural. It was in its essence elitist.
Religion was rejected by Marx as the
opiate of the ignorant masses. But the core of his ideas is best seen as a sort of social piety without the higher metaphysical
realm. He posited that we couldn’t escape our identity in terms of our status
within the class structure. Ignorance of this condition is a kind of state of sin that is referred
to by Marxists as “false consciousness”. These egalitarian ideas that go back
to Rousseau have bedeviled many a revolution and society as a whole. How far do
you have to go to inculcate the sense of social awareness? Today the left finds
fault with even the American Revolution as having its origin in the rich
bourgeois slave owners and thus not reflecting the needs of those left out of the
Social Contract. The French Revolution, the Bourgeoisie’s revolt against the aristocracy,
tried to extend the ideas of
egalitarianism to all levels of society with increasing violence.
According to the insightful book about the history of egalitarianism by MalcolmBull, ”Anti-Nietzsche”, there were several political thinkers in 18thc France
who thought of ingenious ways of leveling society so that no accumulation of
capital would allow any one group to distinguish itself from another. Quoting Simone
Weill as well as Nietzsche, he perceives these thoughts to be dominated by gravity.
Their tendency is to pull everything down to the same level. What happens to
the transcendent values? As the limbo song says: how low can you go? It is a
sort of anti-transcendence, where to be truly human is to become more animal
and by animal they mean to accept being part of a herd.In the end Bull
identifies with this leveling out.
Besant and Ledbetter:"Music of Gounod"from "Thought Forms" |
Besant and Ledbetter "Vague Religious Feeling" |
Boghosian"Within the Iris" |
Is there any room for the magician in
our modern culture? In an essay I wrote on “Berkshire Fine Arts” on the
occasion of a show of Lester Johnson’s work at the Acme Gallery in Boston, I
described the current art scene as made up of the same exhibition spread out
over thousands of galleries world wide: a found object on the floor, photos on
the wall and a manifesto about groups that have not benefited from recognition by society. The ultimate routinization of Duchamp’s charisma.
The work is of such predictability that I am bewildered that the name of
Duchamp is at all evoked as an inspiration.
I suspect that the culprit behind this
state of the current art scene can be found in the triumph of science as an ultimate
tool that can control nature. On the one hand it can be disruptive of norms but
its overall goal is toward routiniization so as to make everything risk free. I
always marvel at the expansion of the office mentality in Microsoft Works. It
is a wonder of pure efficiency and order. No longer do we sit dumbly in front
of a TV but now in front of the computer screen which creates a false sense of
community via facegook and a false sense of order when Bill Gates auto corrects
my horrible typing.
The sorcerer with his wand or baton
could bring the world to a halt, calm the waters and bring peace between
animals and mankind. Today Harmony can be engineered or legislated.
The magus’s rarity is implied in the
title of Jed Perl’s latest book. “Magicians and Charlatans”. He does a good job
of nailing the charlatans but for the life of me except for the usual characters
of Picasso and Matisse, I can’t find any true magicians in these essays.
Steiner's Goetheanum 1924-1928 influenced Le Corbusier |
I recall Rudolph Steiner’s observation
that the highest level of materiality in Western Civilization came around the
time of Christ’s birth. He pointed to the extreme level to which the individual social
persona was pushed as evinced in the amazing detail present in portrait busts
of the time. In law he observed the development of wills and deeds,
which allowed these personalities to control the material goods they
accumulated during this life from the grave. According to Steiner, Christ's birth had the cosmic purpose of pulling mankind up from the material abyss. Are we in a similar spot historically?. Never has human control over the natural elements been so complete? The message
of the Gospel spoke of other realms that each
individual must struggle with if they are to be truly human. Today we no longer even hear the howl of Allen Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters looking for the ancient
heavenly connection” but the braying of the compliant beasts looking to be at
one with the herd.
William Irwin Thompson, the culture critic, thinks that the explosion of interest in spirituality in the 60’s and
70’s was comparable to the American Indians of the 19thc who, in order to empower themselves in their battle against the Europeans, underwent self mortification in delirious “ghost dances”. It was a burst of spirituality in the face of Western rationality, a glorious
sunset to be followed by the dark night of reason. Are we finally going trough
an absolute extirpation of the spiritual type, has it become irrelevant? The
question to be asked is Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is?”
In the art schools of today, in the
galleries it has been answered. An emphatic Yes: That is all there is.
Today,
the PC cops will not even let you “break out the booze.” Or as they say in France to all references to alcohol: Drink with moderation.