works of art?
WHAT is an Art Museum for?
As the word "Curator" implies, the first and most essential function of such a Museum is to take care of ancient or unique works of art which are no longer in their original places or no longer used as was originally intended, and are therefore in danger of destruction by neglect or otherwise. This care of works of art does not necessarily involve their exhibition. If we ask, why should the protected works of art be exhibited and made accessible and explained to the public, the answer will be made, that this is to be done with an educational purpose. But before we proceed to a consideration of this purpose, before we ask, Education in or for what? a distinction must be made between the exhibition of the works of living artists and that of ancient or relatively ancient or exotic works of art. It is unnecessary for Museums to exhibit the works of living artists, which are not in imminent danger of destruction; or at least, if such works are exhibited, it should be clearly understood that the Museum is really advertising the artist and acting on behalf of the art dealer or middleman whose business it is to find a market for the artist; the only difference being that while the Museum does the same sort of work as the dealer, it makes no profit. On the other hand, that a living artist should wish to be "hung" or "shown" in a Museum can be only due to his need or his vanity. For things are made normally for certain purposes and certain places to which they are appropriate, and not simply "for exhibition"; and because whatever is thus custom-made, i.e., made by an artist for a consumer, is controlled by certain requirements and kept in order. Whereas, as Mr. Steinfels has recently remarked, "Art which is only intended to be hung on the walls of a Museum is one kind of art that need not consider its relationship to its ultimate surroundings. The artist can paint anything he wishes, any way he wishes, and if the Curator and Trustees like it well enough they will line it up on the wall with all the other curiosities."
We
are left with the real problem, Why exhibit? as it applies to the relatively
ancient or foreign works of art which, because of their fragility and because
they no longer correspond to any needs of our own of which we are actively
conscious, are preserved in our Museums, where they form the bulk of the
collections. If we are to exhibit these objects for educational reasons, and
not as mere curios, it is evident that we are proposing to make such use of
them as is possible without an actual handling. It will be imaginatively and
not actually that we must use the mediaeval reliquary, or lie on the Egyptian
bed, or make our offering to some ancient deity. The educational ends that an
exhibition can serve demand, accordingly, the services not of a Curator only,
who prepares the exhibition, but of a Docent who explains the original patron’s
needs and the original artists' methods; for it is because of what these
patrons and artists were that the works before us are what they are. If the
exhibition is to be anything more than a show of curiosities and an
entertaining spectacle it will not suffice to be satisfied with our own reactions
to the objects; to know why they are what they are we must know the men that
made them. It will not be "educational" to interpret such objects by
our likes or dislikes, or to assume that these men thought of art in our
fashion, or that they had aesthetic motives, or were "expressing
themselves." We must examine their theory of art, first of all in order to
understand the things that they made by art, and secondly in order to ask
whether their view of art, if it is found to differ from ours, may not have
been a truer one.
Let
us assume that we are considering an exhibition of Greek objects, and call upon
Plato to act as our Docent. He knows nothing of our distinction of fine from
applied arts. For him painting and agriculture, music and carpentry and pottery
are all equally kinds of poetry or making. And as Plotinus, following Plato,
tells us, the arts such as music and carpentry are not based on human wisdom
but on the thinking "there."
Whenever
Plato speaks disparagingly of the "base mechanical arts" and of mere
"labor" as distinguished from the "fine work" of making
things, it is with reference to kinds of manufacture that provide for the needs
of the body alone. The kind of art that he calls wholesome and will admit to
his ideal state must be not only useful but also true to rightly chosen models
and therefore beautiful, and this art, he says, will provide at the same time
"for the souls and bodies of your citizens." His "music"
stands for all that we mean by "culture," and his
"gymnastics" for all that we mean by physical training and
well-being; he insists that these ends of culture and physique must never be
separately pursued; the tender artist and the brutal athlete are equally
contemptible. We, on the other hand are accustomed to think of music, and
culture in general, as useless, but still valuable. We forget that music,
traditionally, is never something only for the ear, something only to be heard,
but always the accompaniment of some kind of action. Our own conceptions of
culture are typically negative. I believe that Professor Dewey is right in
calling our cultural values snobbish. The lessons of the Museum must be applied
to our life.
Because
we are not going to handle the exhibited objects, we shall take their aptitude
for use, that is to say their efficiency, for granted, and rather ask in what
sense they are also true or significant; for if these objects can no longer
serve our bodily needs, perhaps they can still serve those of our soul, or if
you prefer the word, our reason. What Plato means by "true" is
"iconographically correct." For all the arts, without exception, are
representations or likenesses of a model; which does not mean that they are
such as to tell us what the model looks like, which would be impossible seeing
that the forms of traditional art are typically imitative of invisible things,
which have no looks, but that they are such adequate analogies as to be able to
remind us, i.e., put us in mind again, of their archetypes. Works of art are
reminders; in other words, supports of contemplation. Now since the
contemplation and understanding of these works is to serve the needs of the
soul, that is to say in Plato's own words, to attune our own distorted modes of
thought to cosmic harmonies, "so that by an assimilation of the knower to
the to-be-known, the archetypal nature, and coming to be in that likeness, we
may attain at last to a part in that ‘life’s best’ that has been appointed by
the Gods to man for this time being and hereafter," or stated in Indian
terms, to effect our own metrical reintegration through the imitation of divine
forms; and because, as the Upanishad reminds us, "one comes to be of just
such stuff as that on which the mind is set," it follows that it is not
only requisite that the shapes of art should be adequate reminders of their
paradigms, but that the nature of these paradigms themselves must be of the
utmost importance, if we are thinking of a cultural value of art in any serious
sense of the word "culture". The what of art is far more important
than the how; it should, indeed, be the what that determines the how, as form
determines shape.
Plato
has always in view the representation of invisible and intelligible forms. The
imitation of anything and everything is despicable; it is the actions of Gods
and Heroes, not the artist's feelings or the natures of men who are all too
human like himself, that are the legitimate theme of art. If a poet cannot
imitate the eternal realities, but only the vagaries of human character, there
can be no place for him in an ideal society, however true or intriguing his
representations may be. The Assyriologist Andres is speaking in perfect accord
with Plato when he says, in connection with pottery, that "It is the
business of art to grasp the primordial truth, to make the inaudible audible,
to enunciate the primordial word, to reproduce the primordial images—or it is
not art." In other words, a real art is one of symbolic and significant
representation; a representation of things that cannot be seen except by the intellect.
In this sense art is the antithesis of what we mean by visual education, for
this has in view to tell us what things that we do not see, but might see, look
like. It is the natural instinct of a child to work from within outwards;
"First I think, and then I draw my think." What wasted efforts we
make to teach the child to stop thinking, and only to observe! Instead of
training the child to think, and how to think and of what, we make him
"correct" his drawing by what he sees. It is clear that the Museum at
its best must be the sworn enemy of the methods of instruction currently
prevailing in our Schools of Art.
It
was anything but "the Greek miracle" in art that Plato admired; what
he praised was the canonical art of Egypt in which "these modes (of representation)
that are by nature correct had been held for ever sacred." The point of
view is identical with that of the Scholastic philosophers, for whom "art
has fixed ends and ascertained means of operation." New songs, yes; but
never new kinds of music, for these may destroy our whole civilization. It is
the irrational impulses that yearn for innovation. Our sentimental or aesthetic
culture—sentimental, aesthetic and materialistic are virtually synonyms—prefers
instinctive expression to the formal beauty of rational art. But Plato could
not have seen any difference between the mathematician thrilled by a
"beautiful equation" and the artist thrilled by his formal vision.
For he asked us to stand up like men against our instinctive reactions to what
is pleasant or unpleasant, and to admire in works of art, not their aesthetic
surfaces but the logic or right reason of their composition. And so naturally
he points out that "The beauty of the straight line and the circle, and
the plane and the solid figures formed from these... is not, like other things,
relative, but always absolutely beautiful." Taken together with all that
he has to say elsewhere of the humanistic art that was coming into fashion in
his own time and with what he has to say of Egyptian art, this amounts to an
endorsement of Greek Archaic and Greek Geometric Art the arts that really
correspond to the content of those myths and fairy tales that he held in such
high respect and so often quotes. Translated into more familiar terms, this
means that from this intellectual point of view the art of the American Indian
sand-painting is superior in kind to any painting that has been done in Europe
or white America within the last several centuries. As the Director of one of
the five greatest museums in our Eastern States has more than once remarked to
me, From the Stone Age until now, what a decline! He meant, of course, a
decline in intellectuality, not in comfort. It should be one of the functions
of a well organized Museum exhibition to deflate the illusion of progress.
At
this point I must digress to correct a widespread confusion. There exists a
general impression that modern abstract art is in some way like and related to,
or even "inspired" by the formality of primitive art. The likeness is
altogether superficial. Our abstraction is nothing but a mannerism. Neolithic
art is abstract, or rather algebraic, because it is only an algebraical form
that can be the single form of very different things. The forms of early Greek
are what they are because it is only in such forms that the polar balance of
physical and metaphysical can be maintained. "To have forgotten", as
Bernheimer recently said, "this purpose before the mirage of absolute
patterns and designs is perhaps the fundamental fallacy of the abstract movement
in art." The modern abstractionist forgets that the Neolithic formalist
was not an interior decorator, but a metaphysical man who saw life whole and
had to live by his wits; one who did not, as we seek to, live by bread alone,
for as the anthropologists assure us, primitive cultures provided for the needs
of the soul and the body at one and the same time. The Museum exhibition should
amount to an exhortation to return to these savage levels of culture.
A
natural effect of the Museum exhibition will be to lead the public to enquire
why it is that objects of "museum quality" are to be found only in
Museums and are not in daily use and readily obtainable. For the Museum
objects, on the whole, were not originally “treasures” made to be seen in glass
cases, but rather common objects of the market place that could have been
bought and used by anyone. What underlies the deterioration in the quality of
our environment? Why should we have to depend as much as we do upon “antiques”?
The only possible answer will again reveal the essential opposition of the
Museum to the world. For this answer will be that the Museum objects were
custom made and made for use, while the things that are made in our factories
are made primarily for sale. The word "manufacturer" itself, meaning
one who makes things by hand, has come to mean a salesman who gets things made
for him by machinery. The museum objects were humanly made by responsible men,
for whom their means of livelihood was a vocation and a profession. The museum
objects were made by free men. Have those in our department stores been made by
free men? Let us not take the answer for granted.
When
Plato lays it down that the arts shall "care for the bodies and souls of
your citizens," and that only things that are sane and free, and not any
shameful things unbecoming free men, are to be made, it is as much as to say
that the artist in whatever material must be a free man; not meaning thereby an
“emancipated artist” in the vulgar sense of one having no obligation or commitment
of any kind, but a man emancipated from the despotism of the salesman. If the
artist is to represent the eternal realities, he must have known them as they
are. In other words an act of imagination in which the idea to be represented
is first clothed in an imitable form must have preceded the operation in which
this form is to be embodied in the actual material. The first of these acts is
called "free," the latter "servile." But it is only if the
first be omitted that the word servile acquires a dishonorable connotation. It
hardly needs demonstration that our methods of manufacture are, in this
shameful sense, servile, or can be denied that the industrial system, for which
these methods are indispensable, is unfit for free men. A system of "manufacture,"
or rather of quantity production dominated by money values, pre-supposes that
there shall be two different kinds of makers, privileged "artists"
who may be "inspired", and under-privileged laborers, unimaginative
by hypothesis, since they are asked only to make what other men have imagined.
As Eric Gill put it, "On the one hand we have the artist concerned solely
to express himself; on the other is the workman deprived of any self to
express." It has often been claimed that the productions of "fine"
art are useless; it would seem to be a mockery to speak of a society as free,
where it is only the makers of useless things, and not the makers of utilities,
that can be called free, except in the sense that we are all free to work or
starve.
It
is, then, by the notion of a vocational making, as distinguished from earning
one's living by working at a job, regardless of what it may be, that the
difference between the museum objects and those in the department store can be
best explained. Under these conditions, which have been those of all
non-industrial societies, that is to say when each man makes one kind of thing,
doing only that kind of work for which he is fitted by his own nature and for
which he is therefore destined, Plato reminds us that "more will be done,
and better done than in any other way." Under these conditions a man at
work is doing what he likes best, and the pleasure that he takes in his work
perfects the operation. We see the evidence of this pleasure in the Museum
objects, but not in the products of chain-belt operation, which are more like
those of the chain-gang than like those of men who enjoy their work. Our
hankering for a state of leisure or leisure state is the proof of the fact that
most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by
anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional
craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work,
and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.
We
have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as
something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can be only a hothouse
and unreal culture where work itself is not its means; if culture does not show
itself in all we make we are not cultured. We ourselves have lost this
vocational way of living, the way that Plato made his type of Justice; and
there can be no better proof of the depth of our loss than the fact that we
have destroyed the cultures of all other peoples whom the withering touch of
our civilization has reached.
In
order to understand the works of art that we are asked to look at it will not
do to explain them in the terms of our own psychology and our aesthetics; to do
so would be a pathetic fallacy. We shall not have understood these arts until
we can think about them as their authors did. The Docent will have to instruct
us in the elements of what will seem a strange language; though we know its
terms, it is with very different meanings that we nowadays employ them. The meaning
of such terms as art, nature, inspiration, form, ornament and aesthetic will
have to be explained to our public in words of two syllables. For none of these
terms are used in the traditional philosophy as we use them today.
We
shall have to begin by discarding the term aesthetic altogether. For these arts
were not produced for the delectation of the senses. The Greek original of this
modern word means nothing but sensation or reaction to external stimuli; the
sensibility implied by the word aisthesis is present in plants, animals, and
man; it is what the biologist calls "irritability." These sensations,
which are the passions or emotions of the psychologist, are the driving forces
of instinct. Plato asks us to stand up like men against the pulls of pleasure
and pain. For these, as the word passion implies, are pleasant and unpleasant
experiences to which we are subjected; they are not acts on our part, but
things done to us; only the judgment and appreciation of art is an activity.
Aesthetic experience is of the skin you love to touch, or the fruit you love to
taste. "Disinterested aesthetic contemplation" is a contradiction in
terms and a pure non-sense. Art is an intellectual, not a physical virtue;
beauty has to do with knowledge and goodness, of which it is precisely the
attractive aspect; and since it is by its beauty that we are attracted to a
work, its beauty is evidently a means to an end, and not itself the end of art;
the purpose of art is always one of effective communication. The man of action,
then, will not be content to substitute the knowledge of what he likes for an
understanding judgment; he will not merely enjoy what he should use (those who
merely enjoy we call ‘aesthetes’ rightly); it is not the aesthetic surfaces of
works of art but the right reason or logic of the composition that will concern
him. Now the composition of such works as we are exhibiting is not for
aesthetic but for expressive reasons. The fundamental judgment is of the degree
of the artist's success in giving clear expression to the theme of his work. In
order to answer the question, Has the thing been well said? it will evidently
be necessary for us to know what it was that was to be said. It is for this
reason that in every discussion of works of art we must begin with their
subject matter.
We
take account, in other words, of the form of the work. "Form" in the
traditional philosophy does not mean tangible shape, but is synonymous with
idea and even with soul; the soul, for example, is called the form of the
body.[1] If there be a real unity of form and matter such as we expect in a
work of art, the shape of its body will express its form, which is that of the
pattern in the artist's mind, to which pattern or image he moulds the material
shape. The degree of his success in this imitative operation is the measure of
the work's perfection. So God is said to have called his creation good because
it conformed to the intelligible pattern according to which he had worked; it
is in the same way that the human workman still speaks of "truing"
his work. The formality of a work is its beauty, its informality its ugliness.
If it is uninformed it will be shapeless. Everything must be in good form.
In
the same way art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting
"art". As the words "artifact" and "artificial"
imply, the thing made is a work of art, made by art, but not itself art; the
art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made. What
is made according to the art is correct; what one makes as one likes may very
well be awkward. We must not confuse taste with judgment, or loveliness with
beauty, for as Augustine says, some people like deformities.
Works
of art are generally ornamental or in some way ornamented. The Docent will
sometimes discuss the history of ornament. In doing so he will explain that all
the words that mean ornament or decoration in the four languages with which we
are chiefly concerned, and probably in all languages, originally meant
equipment; just as furnishing originally meant tables and chairs for use and not
an interior decoration designed to keep up with the Joneses or to display our
connoisseurship. We must not think of ornament as something added to an object
which might have been ugly without it. The beauty of anything unadorned is not
increased by ornament but made more effective by it. Ornament is
characterization; ornaments are attributes. We are often told, and not quite
incorrectly, that primitive ornament had a magical value; it would be truer to
say a metaphysical value, since it is generally by means of what we now call
its decoration that a thing is ritually transformed and made to function
spiritually as well as physically. The use of solar symbols in harness, for
example, makes the steed the Sun in a likeness; solar patterns are appropriate
to buttons because the Sun himself is the primordial fastening to which all
things are attached by the thread of the Spirit; the egg and dart pattern was
originally what it still is in India, a lotus petal molding symbolic of a solid
foundation. It is only when the symbolic values of ornament have been lost,
that decoration becomes a sophistry, irresponsible to the content of the work.
For Socrates, the distinction of beauty from use is logical, but not real, not
objective; a thing can only be beautiful in the context for which it is
designed.
Critics
nowadays speak of an artist as inspired by external objects, or even by his
material. This is a misuse of language that makes it impossible for the student
to understand the earlier literature or art. "Inspiration" can never
mean anything but the working of some spiritual force within you; the word is
properly defined by Webster as a "supernatural divine influence." The
Docent, if a rationalist, may wish to deny the possibility of inspiration; but
he must not obscure the fact that from Homer onwards the word has been used
always with one exact meaning, that of Dante, when he says that Love, that is
to say the Holy Ghost, "inspires" him, and that he goes "setting
the matter forth even as He dictates within me."
Nature,
for example in the statement "Art imitates nature in her manner of
operation," does not refer to any visible part of our environment; and
when Plato says "according to nature," he does not mean "as
things behave," but as they should behave, not "sinning against
nature." The traditional Nature is Mother Nature, that principle by which
things are "natured," by which, for example, a horse is horsy and by
which a man is human. Art is an imitation of the nature of things, not of their
appearances.
In
these ways we shall prepare our public to understand the pertinence of ancient
works of art. If, on the other hand, we ignore the evidence and decide that the
appreciation of art is merely an aesthetic experience, we shall evidently
arrange our exhibition to appeal to the public's sensibilities. This is to
assume that the public must be taught to feel. But the view that the public is
a hard-hearted animal is strangely at variance with the evidence afforded by
the kind of art that the public chooses for itself, without the help of
museums. For we perceive that this public already knows what it likes. It likes
fine colors and sounds and whatever is spectacular or personal or anecdotal or
that flatters its faith in progress. This public loves it’s comfort. If we believe
that the appreciation of art is an aesthetic experience we shall give the
public what it wants.
But
it is not the function of a museum or of any educator to flatter and amuse the
public. If the exhibition of works of art, like the reading of books, is to
have a cultural value, i.e., if it is to nourish and make the best part of us
grow, as plants are nourished and grow in suitable soils, it is to the
understanding and not to fine feelings that an appeal must be made. In one
respect the public is right; it always wants to know what a work of art is
"about." "About what," as Plato asked, "does the
sophist make us so eloquent?" Let us tell them what these works of art are
about and not merely tell them things about these works of art. Let us tell
them the painful truth, that most of these works of art are about God, whom we
never mention in polite society. Let us admit that if we are to offer an
education in agreement with the innermost nature and eloquence of the exhibits
themselves, that this will not be an education in sensibility, but an education
in philosophy, in Plato's and Aristotle's sense of the word, for whom it means
ontology and theology and the map of life, and a wisdom to be applied to
everyday matters. Let us recognize that nothing will have been accomplished
unless men's lives are affected and their values changed by what we have to
show. Taking this point of view, we shall break down the social and economic
distinction of fine from applied art; we shall no longer divorce anthropology
from art, but recognize that the anthropological approach to art is a much
closer approach than the esthetician's; we shall no longer pretend that the
content of the folk arts is anything but metaphysical. We shall teach our
public to demand above all things lucidity in works of art.
For
example, we shall place a painted Neolithic potsherd or Indian punch-marked
coin side by side with a Medieval representation of the Seven gifts of the
Spirit, and make it clear by means of labels or Docents or both that the reason
of all these compositions is to state the universal doctrine of the "Seven
Rays of the Sun." We shall put together an Egyptian representation of the
Sundoor guarded by the Sun himself and the figure of the Pantokrator in the
oculus of a Byzantine dome, and explain that these doors by which one breaks
out of the universe are the same as the hole in the roof by which an American
Indian enters or leaves his hogan, the same as the hole in the center of a
Chinese pi, the same as the luffer of the Siberian Shaman's yurt, and the same
as the foramen of the roof above the altar of Jupiter Terminus; explaining that
all these constructions are reminders of the Door-god, of One who could say
"I am the door". Our study of the history of architecture will make
it clear that "harmony" was first of all a carpenter's word meaning
"joinery," and that it was inevitable, equally in the Greek and the
Indian traditions that the Father and the Son should have been
"carpenters," and show that this must have been a doctrine of Neolithic,
or rather "Hylic," antiquity. We shall sharply distinguish the
"visual education" that only tells us what things look like (leaving
us to react as we must) from the iconograph of things that are themselves
invisible (but by which we can be guided how to act).
It
may be that the understanding of the ancient works of art and of the conditions
under which they were produced will undermine our loyalty to contemporary art
and contemporary methods of manufacture. This will be the proof of our success
as educators; we must not shrink from the truth that all education implies
revaluation. Whatever is made only to give pleasure is, as Plato put it, a toy,
for the delectation of that part of us that passively submits to emotional
storms; whereas the education to be derived from works of art should be an
education in the love of what is ordered and the dislike of what is disordered.
We have proposed to educate the public to ask first of all these two questions
of a work of art, is it true? or beautiful? (whichever word you prefer) and
what good use does it serve? We shall hope to have demonstrated by our
exhibition that the human value of anything made is determined by the
coincidence in it of beauty and utility, significance and aptitude; that
artifacts of this sort can only be made by free and responsible workmen, free
to consider only the good of the work to be done and individually responsible
for its quality: and that the manufacture of "art" in studios coupled
with an artless "manufacture" in factories represents a reduction of
the standard of living to subhuman levels.
These
are not personal opinions, but only the logical deductions of a lifetime spent
in the handling of works of art, the observation of men at work, and the study
of the universal philosophy of art from which philosophy our own
"aesthetic" is only a temporally provincial aberration. It is for the
museum militant to maintain with Plato that "we cannot give the name of
art to anything irrational."
Source:
Studies in
Comparative Religion,
Vol. 5, No. 3. (Summer, 1971).
© World Wisdom, Inc.
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