My response to Greenberg's essay calls for an essay in itself, but right now, depression makes this impossible for me. Instead, I offer my apology, and these notes.
We do what we can with what we are.
- - - - - -
In 1939, for PARTISAN REVIEW, Clement Greenberg wrote:
"A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences.... All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works."
I agree; this clearly happens.
"In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting, neo-republican architecture."
This, too, can happen, but is it the only result? Why must technical virtuosity in details of form be considered "motionless?" Is it not also possible for artists who work in traditional forms to reflect upon the perplexities and challenges of their day, and to present a subjective, living response through art?
"In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture. [...] It developed that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to 'experiment,' but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. 'Art for art's sake' and 'pure poetry' appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague."
Indeed, this is one direction that art can take in a time of crisis, but why should it be considered the only way "to keep culture moving?" And what does it mean, "to keep culture moving"? Must culture have a direction? Could it not be, instead, a multiplicity of human responses?
"It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at 'abstract' or 'nonobjective' art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself."
Again, I agree that art can take this direction. But why must it be considered the only valid direction? Is a concern for content always a dead end?
"But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God -- and here I use 'imitate' in its Aristotelian sense -- but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the 'abstract.' In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or 'abstract,' if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating."
I agree that abstraction is a valid response, but I cannot see it as the only valid response.
"From the point of view of this formulation, Surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore 'outside' subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium."
But this can only seem "reactionary" if you assume that art must take one direction only, and that this one direction must lead, inevitably, to one preoccupation: "the processes of a medium."
"That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating -- the fact itself -- calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome... but there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is what justifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary. The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order."
There are too many unjustified assumptions, here. What does it mean for culture to "move"? Culture is an expression of human meaning, and this in itself implies many directions, many possible approaches. Avant-garde culture is one approach, but I see no valid reason to call it "the only means available today to create art and literature of a high order." (The question of what it means for art and literature to be of a high order is worth a separate discussion.)
This is where things become complicated:
"Simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West... Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc. [...] Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. [...] Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in addition to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes. [...] The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. [...] Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time."
I agree.
"The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience."
Indeed. But --
"Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that's academic is kitsch."
This does not follow, neither in formal logic, nor in life.
The assumption, here, seems to be that the use of traditional, formal techniques in art and literature is necessarily academic, necessarily dead. I disagree, because techniques can be used in service of personal perspective, personal vision.
"What is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt 'front' for kitsch. The methods of industrialism displace the handicrafts."
Yes, but personal expression is not industrialism.
Consider the case of music. In the 20th Century, avant-garde priorities included atonality, serialism, aleatory music, and so on, all of them valid, all of them interesting, but none of them, in my opinion, necessarily more valid, more interesting, than personal expression in traditional forms. Composers who worked in traditional forms and used traditional (albeit extended and often extreme) harmonic language were not always "industrial" or "academic" artists. Vaughan Williams, Rubbra, Simpson, Brian, Finzi, Bliss, Wordsworth, Roussel, Nielsen, Mahler, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, Saygun, Martinu, Freitas Branco, Braga Santos, and so on, wrote living music in traditional forms. Why should they be considered any less valid, any less committed to art and culture, than the avant-garde composers?
"It is not a question of a choice between merely the old and merely the new... but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch."
Again, assumption unjustified. Greenberg offers a false choice between the avant-garde and kitsch, but readers and art lovers have easy access to art and literature of the past; they also have access to writers and artists who use the methods of the past to convey personal impressions of the modern day. They might do this well or badly, and their efforts can be criticized, but they remain living creators, not machine assembly lines.
The question remains: is kitsch easy to recognize when it moves beyond its corporate, assembly-line origins? Is it not possible, instead, that too broad a definition for kitsch might cloud the issue, and lead us to make arbitrary value judgements?
For example, Greenberg argues that the paintings of Repin are kitsch:
"In Repin's picture the [Russian] peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures -- there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man. That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator -- that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: 'it tells a story.'"
Why is immediate recognition of physical forms a limitation? Why is a response to the narrative potential of art an invalid response?
I believe that people can respond to art in many ways, from an appreciation of aesthetic technique (art for the sake of art), to emotional and imaginative engagement with what the art seems to imply. This variety of response can make critical evaluations difficult, but then again, people have argued about standards of art for thousands of years; why should they stop now? The argument itself is worthwhile; it forces us to think, to evaluate our own impressions, to communicate the substance of our inner lives.
"It can be said that the cultivated spectator derives the same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from Repin, since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on however low a scale --"
But who determines that scale, and, given the variety of possible responses, how?
"-- And he is sent to look at pictures by the same instincts that send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the 'reflected' effect. In Repin, on the other hand, the 'reflected' effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator's unreflective enjoyment."
Again, I have to ask: is imaginative and emotional engagement with the narrative implications of art an invalid, "unreflective" response? Or is it merely one of many valid responses?
"Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art."
I agree that some art works are more difficult, more challenging to process than others, but Greenberg seems to imply that only abstraction can lead to this challenge. What about tonal ambiguity? What about thematic or emotional complexity? These demand effort as well. HAMLET is hardly a work of abstraction, but people have argued about its implications for centuries, now, and the arguments continue.
"The Romantics can be considered the original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited. They showed kitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effect of poetry upon himself?"
Why is this invalid? Why is a human response to art less worthy of expression than a response to a tree, or to the sky, or to the looming threat of death? To write about the effect of poetry on yourself is not an act of predigestion, not a short cut, if the result is also poetry.
Is art one thing, or many? Does it have one valid pathway to follow, or many? Is only one type of response valid, or can people respond in many ways?
I can accept several points that Greenberg raises, especially about the dangers and limitations of kitsch, which I prefer to call corporate product, and which has driven art into the shadows of marginalization. Where Greenberg and I differ is that I see art, and the responses to art, as a living world, and not as a conceptual monolith.
No comments:
Post a Comment