Western critics, as I noted or rather implied in last week’s piece, seem preoccupied with the absoluteness of the way in which a specific work of art is communicated and disseminated among its audiences. But what is often forgotten is that such works depend on the mode of communication used at a particular time. In this sense, the three stages they tend to go through (use, excavation, examination) is an enduring testament to the multifariousness of a film, a play, a book, or even a poem. We impute fresh nuances to an art form because it survives the ravages of time. Art forms are never immune from their evolution; that is the source of their strength and their richness. It is archaeology that, at the end of the day, transforms objects of utility to objects of extrinsic study. This does not mean, nor should it mean, that we must forget where those objects came from and for which purposes they were originally used.
One critic who understood this, without resorting to differentiating between lowbrow and highbrow as Dwight Macdonald did, was Clement Greenberg. Greenberg is not widely read today because of the same reason why any critic isn’t read for long: changing aesthetic tastes. It was during his time that distinctions between art and non art began to be made on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States, during the interwar period. His seminal essay on the subject, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, was first published in 1939, at the time Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia; many of the ideas explored in that essay derive from what Greenberg felt to be the lure of kitsch in totalitarian states. But before delving into the specifics of these ideas, we need to understand what Greenberg felt to be the dividing line between art and kitsch. For now the premise for such a distinction is this: art is largely extrinsic, kitsch is intrinsic.
Art in contemporary society, particularly with the completion of the three seminal stages of Western aesthetics from the preceding century (realism and its offshoot naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism), becomes more externalised with each passing epoch. Since the one art form that can be talked about with respect to all those three epochs is literature, I will for the most limit my ideas to novels and poems. In the shift from realism and naturalism (with their emphasis on representation, their regard for unearthing what lies beneath through observations and depictions of what lies on the surface) to modernism (with its emphasis on individuality and subjective consciousness, particularly in the novel), we infer a transition from one worldview to another. It is a transition that externalises the workings and the techniques of an art form, even in painting, and out of this tendency we see disparate art movements at work, including the Cubists, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and the Formalists.
By separating art from its own workings, the artist achieves something of a distinction between art as it is conceived and art as it is felt. The latter is what promotes academicism, what transforms an objet d’art into an object of careful scrutiny. This is vastly different from the folk culture which, in the early days, dabbled in weaving, handicraft, embroidery, and design, and for completely different and utilitarian purposes. From that folk culture, to be seen in Sri Lanka most sharply for me in the mask culture of Ambalangoda, we come to the formal culture, of the 20th century, and here we see a shattering of art forms and categorisation of those forms into an absolute catalogue. Much of the reason for this was, of course, the Industrial Revolution; despite the mythical image of that revolution as a promoter of shoddy, commercialised art today, the truth is that it helped the folk culture evolve into the formal, and that through the historical eventuality compelled by industrialisation, universal literacy.
Of course, “literacy” back then wasn’t the “literacy” we toss around so carelessly today. M. J. Bowman and C. A. Anderson, the American economists, surmised that a rate of 30 to 40 percent was needed for a country to make significant progress in per capita incomes. Whether it was growth that enabled this sort of literacy or literacy that enabled growth during the Revolution is another debate altogether, and it is still being debated on by European and American scholars. Moreover, the literacy which was promoted in those centuries of sustained exploitation and ruthless mechanisation and specialisation wasn’t the literacy which entails, say, a flourishing, widespread critical culture; it was the sort that compelled workers and their families to be able to count and recite their letters for the sake of economic efficiency. The factory and conveyor belt required for their endurance the systematic limitation of the worker’s needs. Literacy was largely empowered by the Church and charities and money earned by the breadwinner. The results were striking: as E. G. West notes in his essay “Literacy and the Industrial Revolution”, the majority of the people were far more literate at the end of the revolution (1840) than they were at its beginning (1760).
Art was mostly limited before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism to the refined tastes of an esoteric, sophisticated elite. It was cut off from the masses because the political systems which existed at that time, feudalism and absolutist monarchies, legitimised a separation of the elite from the people. Vases, urns, masks, and other artefacts, excavated if not looted from our part of the world, then transformed into objects of study and examination, belonged to an earlier, archaic epoch. When Keats wrote of the Grecian urn, that the unheard melodies therein were sweeter than heard ones, he was inadvertently referring to the esotericism of the study of arts in his day, privileging as it did a culture of reading between and into the lines that was cut off from the vast majority. The masses clamoured for plasticity, the apparentness of those heard melodies; they could simply not be bothered with the unheard melodies, which needed a sharp-edged, refined aesthetic sense to be inferred.
Dissatisfied, disgruntled, but nevertheless complacent, a section of this pre-capitalist bourgeoisie aspired to be vagrants and uncommitted rebels in the arts. Thus flourished a culture of bohemianism, which was BOTH a direct repudiation of and a subtle, indirect affirmation of the bourgeoisie its representatives yearned to cut themselves from. Like the romantic noblemen of pre-Revolutionary Russia, whose mythical idealisations of peasants were shattered once they confronted the living conditions of those peasants in flesh and blood, the new bohemians could not survive for long without patronage and funds, the same symbols of bourgeois apathy they wanted to be rid of. They went after utopias, and in the arts they found those utopias with a sort of avant-garde culture which was as opposed to revolutionary politics as it was to the propertied class. It is from this sensibility that we can trace contemporary avant-garde culture, the Andy Warhols and the Picassos and the John Cassaveteses. The most potent signature of this sensibility is its emphasis on flaunting its own refinement and its awareness of its own forms and techniques:
“Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colours, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. The attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Éluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centred on the effort to create poetry and on the ‘moments’ themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry.”
Form as opposed to experience, and technique converted into poetry: this demarcates the bohemianism which existed during, and even before, the Industrial Revolution. It finds its way in the 20th century through the modernist novel and the Cubist painting. But inasmuch as this was borne out of a need, an explicit one, to reject the propertied class and their affirmation of art as an esoteric activity detached from the masses, it resulted in a culture which promoted art in another, as esoteric way, only this time the works of art in question were made esoteric and difficult to everyone. The thread that weaves Picasso and Matisse together, with André Gide and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, is that the difficultness of their works and poems is not dependent on the yardsticks of a particular milieu; it is difficult for both the landed and the landless. But while this sensibility thrives on a bohemian culture, art as was understood before (i.e. an activity enhancing the tastes of a detached elite) continued to flourish too. There was no real dividing line between the one and the other, since the proponents of both schools came from the bourgeoisie. The conflict between the two thus necessitated the emergence of a third sensibility. Kitsch.
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 28 2018
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