Hampstead Authors' Society No. 76 Issue 12 December 2009
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 Art and the Human AdventureIllustrated HASTalk By Derek Allan Time 7:00 for 7:30 p.m. 9.00 p.m. Wrap up. Date Monday, January 4th, 2010 Place Hampstead Unitarian Chapel, Rosslyn Hill NW3 Cost £5 at the door. |
André Malraux (1901-1976) is perhaps best known as a novelist – especially for La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) and as a very active Minister for Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle. But he also wrote extensively on art. Two of his works on art have been translated into English as The Voices of Silence and The Metamorphosis of the Gods. Dr Allan’s talk will explore the theory of art developed in these works and in Malraux’s other writings.
Dr Derek Allan has published a number of articles on aspects of Malraux’s works, and on the theory of art and literature. His book Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art was published by Rodopi in November 2009. Dr Allan is a Visiting Scholar at the Australian National University, Canberra.
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Michael Arditti will talk about his life in writing, his journey from critic to novelist, his faith in fiction and, in particular, his fiction about faith, with reference to his three novels, The Celibate, Easter, and The Enemy of the Good, and his work-in-progress, Jubilate, which is set on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. He will discuss the rich source material tha religious ideas, institutions and personnel offer to the novelist and highlight the unique role in a world increasingly polarised along religious lines that he believes novelists can play in combating fundamentalism.
Michael Arditti is a novelist, short story writer and critic. He began his career writing plays for the stage and radio. He was for many years a theatre critic for the Evening Standard and is currently a regular book reviewer for the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent. His novels are The Celibate (1993), Pagan and her Parents (1996), Easter (2000), Unity (2005), A Sea Change (2006), and The Enemy of the Good (2009). His short story collection, Good Clean Fun, was published in 2004.
The Metamorphosis of Art
What is art? Not: what rules distinguish art from non-art?
There are still some writers in traditional academic aesthetics, who agonise over this hoary question – with scant sign of success. But that’s not the question here. I am asking “What is art?” in the sense of: what is its purpose? What point does art serve in human life? Why – to put the matter in concrete terms – do we spend large amounts of public money building and maintaining art museums, buying paintings to put in them, building concert halls, training musicians, building libraries, and generally encouraging the development of the arts in all their forms? Why, to put it bluntly, do we bother?
This – and not the traditional question about rules distinguishing art from non-art – is the question posed by André Malraux’s theory of art. And the answer he gives also breaks with tradition. Since the Enlightenment – since Kant, Hume and a host of others – the purpose of art has usually been explained in terms of the idea of “beauty”. Art, it is said, is a locus par excellence of beauty and gives rise to a particular form of experience called “aesthetic pleasure”.
We value art therefore because it is beautiful and because it gives us this particular form of pleasure”. That, according to the traditional theory, is why we bother.
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Watteau – Embarkation for Cythera
Malraux rejects this explanation. He certainly agrees that for some three centuries after the Renaissance there was a close link between art and beauty (he calls it a “harmonious imaginary world”) – a link that is plain to see in the paintings of, say, Raphael, Poussin or Watteau. And given this, it’s not surprising that Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Hume, for whom visual art meant painters such as Raphael, Poussin, and Watteau, would assume that the link between art and beauty was the key to an explanation of art. But our world of art today, as Malraux often reminds us, us very different. Our world of art contains works such as Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (ignored by the Enlightenment, along with all “Gothic” art), ceremonial masks from the Pacific, and the works of artists such as Picasso.
 Grünewald – Isenheim Altarpiece (detail) |
 Picasso - Woman Weeping |
Of course, we can, if we wish, continue applying the term “beauty” to images such as these as well. But if we do, the term simply turns into a kind of honorific we apply to art generally and giving us any purchase on the difference – the striking difference – between these images and, say, those of Watteau or a Poussin. We are probably happy enough to say that the Watteau, the Grünewald, and the Picasso shown here are all works of art because we sense that they all share a common power which, perhaps for lack of a better word, we identify by the term “art”; but describing them all as exemplars of “beauty” is possible only at the cost of emptying that term of its descriptive value. This, it seems to me, is one of the reasons why traditional aesthetic theories based on the idea of beauty, aesthetic pleasure etc, seem so hollow and unsatisfactory today: they simply don’t do justice to the world of art as we now know it. They render large parts of it unintelligible.
A key element of Malraux’s thinking is his exploration of the fundamental “power” of art I have just mentioned – a power which, he argues, is discernible in the art of all cultures not just that of our own. This brings me to another key feature of his theory of art.
For Kant, Hume, and their contemporaries, art – or the “fine arts” to use their own terminology – designated a clearly delimited body of works. It meant European art since the Renaissance (roughly, Raphael and after) plus selected Graeco-Roman works. Everything outside this boundary was not just “bad art”; it was not art at all: it was simply beyond the pale. As Malraux points out, we today are so thoroughly accustomed to the idea that art encompasses the works of all cultures that we often forget how recent this state of affairs is. We forget that, even as late as about 1900, there could be no question of admitting, say, African masks or pre-Columbian sculpture into an art museum under the same roof as a Raphael or a Rembrandt; and, indeed, ancient Egyptian and Medieval sculpture were only just beginning to gain acceptance. So the ambit of the category “art” – the range of objects included under that rubric – has changed radically over the past century. The process has occurred bit by bit so we have tended not to notice it. But as Malraux argues in a very interesting early section of The Metamorphosis of the Gods, if Baudelaire – whom Malraux regards as one of the most astute art critics of his time – were miraculously brought back to life and taken on a guided tour of one of today’s major art museums, he would undoubtedly conclude that large areas were now occupied by objects that had nothing to do with art.
Malraux describes this radical change in the world of art as the emergence of the “first universal world of art”. And once we grasp what he is saying, it is little short of astonishing how little has been said about this development in modern aesthetics and the history of art. The prevailing school of modern aesthetics tends, in any case, to have an ahistorical approach to the world of art, and to the limited extent it discusses individual works, tends to focus heavily on modern and contemporary art, ignoring the preceding several thousand years. And the history of art, oddly enough, seems to suffer from a kind of historical amnesia where the development in question is concerned. It is quite happy to accept that our modern world of art is now a universal world of art, but very few art historians seem conscious of how relatively recent this state of affairs is, and how sudden the change was. In neither discipline, needless to say, is there any serious attempt to explain why the change took place and why it took when it did. So a key feature of our modern world of art is passed over in silence.
Malraux’s account of this development is linked to another aspect of his theory of art which I will mention briefly. One of the deeply puzzling facts about our modern world of art is that large numbers of the objects it contains come from cultures in which the idea of art was quite unknown – that is, non-existent. An ancient Egyptian did not see a statue of the Pharaoh Djoser as a “work of art”; it was an object of religious significance, an image of the God-King, and Egypt had no word for art in its language.
 Pharaoh Djoser c. 2600 BC |
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Similarly the devout Christian in the year 1200 did not admire the tympanum at Moissac as a work of art, as a tourist does today; in 1200 it was a symbol of a sacred Other World more real in many respects that this world here-below; and Romanesque Europe had no more use for the word “art” than ancient Egypt 1500 years before. So when we today admire the statue of Djoser or the tympanum at Moissac as “art”, and when we assimilate them to our world of art museums or our wider musée imaginaire (encompassing objects that cannot be moved into museums), we are responding to them in a way which is quite different from the way they were responded to by the peoples for whom they were created. Their amazement at our response would be akin to Baudelaire’s in today’s Louvre – only, one imagines, much more so: for an ancient Egyptian, placing a statue of one of their God-Kings in something called an “art museum” alongside objects from other cultures would not be just incomprehensible; it would, in all probability, be an act of sacrilege.
You will read very little about this problem in textbooks on aesthetics or, amazingly, even in books on the history of art. Generally speaking, aesthetics is – to use a colloquialism – “in denial” about the issue. The standard response (I encountered it only a few weeks ago at a major aesthetics conference in the US) is to say that no matter what ancient cultures may have said or done, they “really” responded to the objects we now call art in the same way we do today. Thus, while they may have worshipped these objects as gods, and while the notion of art did not exist in their languages, and while the institution of an art museum was non-existent, and while we put the objects in question on public display and they often hid them from view or sealed them up in tombs, and while they often placed no importance on preserving the objects (as in many African tribal cultures) while we preserve them with great care, despite all this, we are, apparently, entitled to say, nevertheless, that they “really” responded to these objects as we do – as “art” (which is usually taken to mean as exemplars of beauty designed to provide “aesthetic pleasure”).
The ancient Egyptian is of course not here to defend himself, but if he were one would think that, on the same logic, he would have a perfect right to say: “Well, you claim that the objects you place in your art museums are objects you admire as art; but I know that “really” you worship them all as gods and that these buildings you call art museums are “really” temples in which those gods are worshipped!
Of course this immediately poses the problem of how objects which began their lives as gods, spirits, or ancestor figures have been transformed today into what we call works of art. This is a crucial element of Malraux’s theory of art. In essence, it is the question of the relationship between art and time, the relationship between those objects that we today call art and the passage of time, perhaps over centuries or even millennia – the effect on those objects of the world of changing circumstance. The issue is too large to deal with here, but a few brief comments are worth making.
First, the relationship between art and time – or the temporal nature of art – has been a major theme in Western culture since the Renaissance and the prevailing view has been that art is timeless or “eternal”. We are all familiar with those lines in Shakespeare’s sonnets in which he speaks, for example, about “eternal lines to time”. This is not just a Shakespearean idiosyncrasy or something to be lightly dismissed as a “poet’s conceit”. The view that art defied the passage of time – that, unlike so many other things, it was immune to the vicissitudes of time – was as much part of the Renaissance intellectual background as, say, Marxist and post-Marxist thinking is in ours today. And, though somewhat watered down, it is still part of our world today, as when, for example, we speak of art having a special power to “last” or “endure”.
Today, however, there is a thorny problem. The strongly historical bent of modern thought – the influence of Marxist and post-Marxist theory, for example – clashes head on with notions of timelessness. Historical theory characteristically wants to link art as closely as possible to a particular moment in history and locate it within an “historical context”. (Much of art history is written from this perspective.) But how do we reconcile that idea with the proposition that art is “immune” from time, that it is eternal? Finesse the matter how we will, we cannot argue that something is, at one and the same time, essentially immune from the vicissitudes of time and yet a full participant in the world of historical change.
Modern aesthetics has mostly ignored this issue. One will search in vain in modern textbooks on aesthetics for anything more than a passing reference to the question of the temporal nature of art – a state of affairs that seems to me quite deplorable. Malraux, as I have said, places the question at the very heart of his thinking and he develops a response which rejects both the approaches outlined above (that art is “eternal;” or that it is a creature of history), replacing it with the concept of “metamorphosis” which among other things provides an excellent explanation of the puzzling transformations I referred to above – the metamorphosis of images of the gods (for example) into works of art. He thus gives us a means of understanding one of the key features of the world of art as we know it today – the strong presence of objects in our art museums and our musée imaginaire of objects from cultures in which the notion of art was non-existent.
© Derek Allan and HASNotes 2009
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