The Descent of Geometry

Steve Armstrong, The Descent of Geometry, oil, brass and fibreglass resin on particle board, 50″ x 50″, 1981-85.

Metaphorical thinking is like using a funnel the wrong way round.

It’s time for a third voice to consider the issues raised in Self Expression and Conceptual Painting and Repressed Anger. The former was a sincere attempt to understand beauty, the latter, an attempt to apply raw self-analysis to my understanding of art. Lately, I’ve been studying Hunter S. Thompson to get an angle on his amazing talent for digression and hyperbole. Then I thought, what if this technique were directed inwards instead of out. But enough of that, down to business:

I have a friend who is an art critic and in a newspaper review around 2001 he used the term ‘conceptual painting’. I coined this term in the title of a painting in 1999, and no doubt, it would have been part of our occasional conversations. I then used the idea, but not the term itself, in a review published in Lola magazine in 2000.

This is all extremely unimportant, especially since my friend used the term to refer to a different idea altogether, but it has revealed something relevant about my character: I had a very strong compulsion to write this because I hope that the term “conceptual painting” might catch on, and if someone else received credit for it, I would feel a sense of loss. This is somewhat ridiculous of course: Was I going to miss out on sex, money, and power perhaps, not to mention the high life on the lecture circuit? No, what I want is credit, respect or even congratulations. This is probably why a discussion of conceptual painting showed up in my first blog post.

I have to wonder why these things matter to me. I remember reading about the conflict between Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara over the provenance of the word “dada” and thinking as I read, “this dispute is of no importance, I don’t know them and they don’t know me, they are no more than words on a page, and even if I were acquainted with them, it still wouldn’t make much difference and it would, in fact, only be a problem if I wanted to stay on friendly terms with both of them”. Besides that, they’re dead. I am sure that Huelsenbeck and Tzara experienced righteous anger over their issue, and that is unfortunate. Fame creates resentful new wounds.

What is important is what is done, not who did it. Why should I care about what a bunch of people I have never met, and might never meet, think of some deed I allegedly performed? Since Shakespeare’s not around to enjoy the recognition, why does it matter who wrote those plays? Although there would be a reason for Shakespeare and me to demand recognition if we were in it for the money. And naturally enough, that has been a component for both of us, but not a terribly important one, because he’s dead and can’t collect, and I’ve always had a good day job. As I wrote in 1995, if we face the facts, “we would tell the world that its money belongs in hell. If art is real, then it is serious.”

It should be obvious that we only desire credit for a deed when it is not sufficiently satisfying simply as a deed done. But this becomes less obvious once the euphoria from viewing a completed work starts to fade – when the cash gets scarce, the cheaper wines look better. The Descent of Geometry was fully satisfying as a deed done for almost fifteen years, then the desire to justify and explain it crept in, as evidenced by my writings from around 1999. Those writings have been edited and incorporated in these three related posts.

Ockham’s Razor would guide us to the explanation with the fewest assumed entities but Armstrong’s Bin provides us with the most flattering explanation for anything that puzzles us. Schopenhauer knows why this would be the case – he said that self-interest is the strongest argument, and I’m sure he said this because he had a great sense of humour. The Bin tells me that my painting demands a beautiful aetiology, and most people who see it, seem fond of it, so I guess I could do worse than load it up with meaning. I’m going to indulge myself.

From 1981 until 1985 I occasionally worked on this very stubborn painting. When I felt reasonably satisfied with it (that being the point when I realized that anything else I did would only make it worse), I signed the back and wrote, “Beyond Böcklin’s Island: an arbitrary geometry seeking a meaning in Romance while Franz Schubert has the poignancy of death”. Shortly afterwards this title embarrassed me. I crossed it out and wrote, “The Descent of Geometry”.

 Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, third version (of many), oil on wood, 150 x 80 cm, 1883.

I have noticed a particular trope that has turned up regularly in my work. I have frequently made illusory space on a celestial scale and then interrupted the picture plane and made it difficult to see coherently. I have done this by adding bits of metal, drilling holes, working on peg- board, adding painted shapes to pencil drawings, or by other means that force a difficulty into the act of coherent perception.

For example, a small piece of brass in a painted sky has to be unseen as an extraneous thing for the painting to become a picture of an odd flying object. The geometrical object in the Descent is made of brass strips arranged like cloisonné. It’s fun to un-see things, it’s a childish and playful thing to do like imaginatively turning your bedroom ceiling into an ocean with the ceiling fixture as a strange boat. I’ve done that.

That’s what we do with all pictures anyway, although we are mostly unaware of doing it. We studiously overlook the means of image delivery in magazines films and photographs to get straight to the picture. I hesitate to mention paintings as well, because as a painter, I never overlook the means, I look for the means. I have done this to the extent that, on occasion, I haven’t noticed the picture, and instead, merely seen the painting. It’s startling to suddenly notice the picture.

Steve Armstrong, A Small Redemption of the Machine Age, acrylic on pegboard, 40″ x 52″, 1993.

I think facts are poetic, and it’s facts, much more so than pictures, that are there to be seen in paintings – especially straightforward, non-conceptual paintings. A painting is like a new spoon triumphantly raising vegetables to the surface of your soup. It is a shroud of conviction, a moist daubing that brings relief, and a television carved from a single block of wood. When you get by the technical stuff (the professional looking that a painter engages in), the leftovers are metaphorical.

In The Descent, the brass insert is the emissary of science that emerges as our savior from Romantic darkness – this grandiose affair depicts the story of Modernism. Science and technology have pushed past all the protests of a Luddite Romanticism.

The Descent of Geometry offers mythological events to explain the origins of science envy in Modernism. There are scientific airs in various Modernist practices – Impressionism with its theories of perception (a defensive posture against photography), Surrealism with its thoughts on intentionality and coincidence versus cause, or Minimalism and Earthworks with their musings about ontology and an Industrial Sublime. The idea of an Avant-garde itself, holds the concept of progress.

Vladimir Tatlin, model for Monument to the Third International, 1919.

I’m left with the feeling that Modernism carried aspects of Romanticism with it into the Twentieth Century. Modernism has a streak of the Romantic “Sublime” through it, although it had become industrial and technological. The Eiffel Tower and its child, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, Malevich’s White Square, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and countless other things all attest to this fact. Baudelaire for instance, preferred harbours over natural coastlines. I understand this feeling. In spite of Böcklin, Turner’s steam engines haven’t been shaken off.

J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, Speed, oil on Canvas, 90.8 x 121.9 cm., 1844. National Gallery, London

With The Descent of Geometry I wanted to make the picture plane a figure and have the world as its ground. I chose the “L” shape because it looks arbitrary and has as many sides as a cube. Hopefully this suggests that the painting is a thing as much as it is a picture.

Steve Armstrong, Zocor, oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 6.5″ x 7.5″, 2006.

This same preoccupation returned with the box paintings. With all my art I want to make the picture plane a figure, and that’s a statement so strong I hesitate to make it, but at the moment I can’t think of any exceptions. It explains why my pencil drawings never go to the edge of the paper and why I make painted sculpture (free standing picture planes in the round). I cannot justify any of this for one very important reason – we do not get to choose our desires.

Steve Armstrong, Rodchenko’s Column, acrylic on douglas fir, 12″ x 12″ x 63″, 1997.

I also see the desire to make the picture plane a figure in the work of Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella. I think that is why their lines do not make figures. I may be wrong about them, but that does not really matter because regardless of what they are up to, picture plane reification is what I want to do anyway. It is not necessary for me to know why. It is also not necessary for me to know whether I have any predecessors with this goal. Desire simply dips into my life like a rudder. Thus a painting is a Rosetta Stone that translates decisions.

The Rosetta Stone, granodiorite, 114.4 x 72.3 x 27.93 cm, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek script, 196 BCE.

The Descent of Geometry concerns our nasty habit of looking for simple answers to complicated questions. It is no excuse that we fail to notice how complicated the questions are. The Descent also concerns how we situate our desires in unattainable places, as Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out way before Freud and me (projection).

I suppose the Descent concerns how an art object might be indiscernible from an ordinary object. If one were to think otherwise, it is plainly obvious that Romanticism never really went away because for an art-thing to be different from an ordinary thing, it needs to have a mysterious component – something Sublime perhaps. Fortunately, the issue whether any particular thing is art or not, is of no interest whatsoever, especially to artists. Some things are interesting because of their intentional way of being the way they are, and that makes them artish things. Some things are interesting because of failed intentions, or qualities that are irrelevant to their intentional way of being the way they are. These sorts of things are not artish at all.

The Descent of Geometry is about how our use of the Sublime to flatter ourselves is ludicrous and shameful. Taking pleasure in such mysteries is unworthy and I suspect that mystery, being the genus that contains the species patriotism, is, besides the hiding place of scoundrels, the weapon of the baffled as well. Hegel, that Romantic old fellow, provides a fine example of using mystery to cloak vacuity. Oscar Wilde said something about the mystery being in the visible and a corollary of Wilde’s observation would be, “the invisible has greater clarity for us”. And in fact, invisibility has greater clarity than even glass. Invisible pictures reveal visible paintings.

I can only add that I don’t believe in ghosts but they scare me, and I conclude from this that when an idea is fundamental, it is not necessarily true, but it nonetheless stimulates my glands. A good argument has a cheap elegance about it, but beauty is found more easily in ideas that can’t be proven.

I have some advice: Never use things in the manner they were intended, and always use the wrong tool for the job unless, of course, your ambition is to thrill the shopkeepers of the world. In conclusion, consider an artist’s career: As a rule, critics and gallery operators are not terribly visual, most artists are too busy trying to figure out how their work is independent of yours (including me), and the public can be very vexing. At least people like big geometry in the sky, which explains the popularity of air shows and fire works.

Writing Between the Lines

How can our writing do justice to the things we wish to say, assuming we’re even clear in advance on what those things are? Genetic Fractals posted on the subject of our habitual dualistic thinking, and how that limits our understanding and ability to communicate. That was the impetus for this post.

Carl Jung borrowed the word syzygy from gnosticism to describe the self. It means a union of irreconcilable opposites. I tend to agree with the idea that my “self” is such a union, and I would include with this the irreconcilable thought that the self both does, and does not exist. An organism with the power to observe itself and its environment is prone to draw some common-sense conclusions such as the existence of a self, but I’m unaware of any compelling reason to believe it. Besides that,there is evidence to suggest that there is no self – our continuous mental and physical change over time, obsessions, addictions, habits, and so on.

Thus, I don’t actually have any strong beliefs in the existence of the self, and the possible fact that it may consist of the union of irreconcilable opposites might just bolster that position. But in spite of my opinion on the subject, it’s also obvious to me that I behave as if I believe in a self.

Also, the language I’m obliged to use seems to presume the existence of a self. The ‘belief’ sentence above for instance, contains two “I’s”, a “my”, and a “me”. Jung didn’t make any such claims about the existence of the self either, “The Self is not a philosophical idea, since it does not predicate its own existence, i.e., does not hypostatize itself. From the intellectual point of view, it is only a working hypothesis”. (Psychological Types, Collected Works Vol. 6, para. 789.)

My working hypotheses include: there is no self without opposites, contraries, contradictions and dualities, but additionally, there is no self at all. My thinking and my experiences all arise from this strange state of affairs. How then, can I write anything that I approve of?

I want to be liked, so one motivation for my prose style is to be charming. And not just for the reader – I want to charm myself. But there’s more to it as well. As a former magazine publisher and editor, I view not being interesting as a fatal flaw and the desire to be interesting leads to wanting charm. This as an invitation to beauty.

Truth and beauty can be understood as opposites, not opposites, or both at the same time. Oscar Wilde’s, “The Decay of Lying” makes the point that truth and beauty are opposed, and John Keats in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. I agree with both of them, but it’s difficult to say this in a sensible or useful way. I also suspect that Wilde is telling us something true in a beautiful way, but he would never admit such a faux pas because the beauty would be damaged.

As an irrelevant aside, the word “charming” became important to me when I read Tristan Tzara’s dada manifestoes as a young man. I found the quote I wanted to share after a search through my piles of books, which feels pretentious to call a library although that’s what it is (I also cringe internally when asked what I do, and I say I’m an artist). The quote is at the end of this post.

Dada was much more compelling when I was an adolescent than it is now, and Tzara’s “great” writing has become a little tarnished. The love I had then has become somewhat nostalgic and wistful. Nonetheless, he loaded a lot into the word charming, and as I write this I remember my mother who would use “charming” dipped in acid after witnessing something particularly gauche. Some words are bigger buckets than others.

As another irrelevant aside, I generally find Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement agreeable, but he certainly seemed to have a strong bias against sensuousness. Thus, he overlooked the metaphorical potential of colour, “The colours which give brilliancy to the sketch are part of the charm. They may no doubt, in their own way, enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, J. C. Meredith trans. p. 67.

The profundity of charm escaped him, and more than likely, he wouldn’t see much in Oscar Wilde. He’d be baffled, like Russell on Nietzsche.

But to leave charm aside, if we suppose that the truth is useful, which seems like a pretty reasonable thing to suppose, Charles Baudelaire could enter the fray, “The idea of utility … is the most hostile of all to the idea of beauty”. (Charles Baudelaire “Further Notes on Edgar Poe” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, J. Mayne trans. and ed., Da Capo Press Inc., 233 Spring St. N.Y., p. 102.)

And while we’re at it, here’s Schopenhauer, “The beauty of a work of art consists in the fact that it holds up a clear mirror to certain ideas inherent in the world in general … Beauty, however, in its general aspect, is the inseparable characteristic of the idea when it becomes known. In other words, everything is beautiful in which an idea is revealed; for to be beautiful means no more than clearly to express an idea. Thus we perceive that beauty is always an affair of knowledge, and that it appeals to the knowing subject”. (Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Comparative Place of Interest and Beauty in Works of Art” in The Pessimist’s Handbook, A Collection of Popular Essays, T. Bailey Saunders (trans.), Hazel E. Barnes (ed.), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964, p. 593)

Schopenhauer was squaring off against Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and he also seems to be closer to Keats, while Baudelaire’s early Modernist viewpoint is in agreement with Kant and perhaps with Wilde as well. In a previous post I said, “Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetics, his Critique of Judgement, says that an aesthetic judgement is taking either delight in, or aversion to, something in a completely disinterested way – don’t want to have it, don’t even care whether it actually exists or not.” This is the lack of utility that Baudelaire praises and Schopenhauer disparages. Once again, I don’t have a problem agreeing with both of them (all five of them in fact). Art is useful, art is not useful. Beauty is truth, beauty is a lie.

I’m also inclined to agree with Carl Jung who was of the opinion that the more easily an idea can be clearly expressed, the less likely that it will be true. I’m sorry to say, I can’t pull up a footnote or an original quote for that one. You’ll just have to trust me. I read his entire collected works and letters between 40 and 30 years ago and I didn’t make note of it. Obviously though, he wasn’t intending tautologies or things true by definition to be included in this. It has to do with descriptions about the way things are, ontological claims. Jung neither agrees nor disagrees with the others mentioned above. It’s a meta-claim about claiming. But I have to say, he causes me to quibble about Schopenhauer’s claim that beauty is the clear expression of an idea and how that claim may have a vague connection with Keats’ truth/beauty idea. This connection has become more tenuous, unless I’m willing to revise my understanding of clarity. I’d actually be fine with that.

This brings me to ambiguity, which has nothing to do with being difficult to understand, that being mostly a matter of poor communication, and no doubt, I’m I’m guilty of this. Ambiguity however, does have something to do with complexity and that can be challenging. Sometimes the matter under consideration is quite complicated, but on the other hand, sometimes things just aren’t clearly apprehended.

Complexity and fuzziness are both ambiguous and I believe that ambiguity is the engine of beauty, truth, charm, utility and knowledge.
Ambiguous, fuzzy concepts soon pick up a context of metaphor and the resultant loss of conventional meaning can be exhilarating. I find ambiguous ideas and presentations to be beautiful and useful, true and false. Ambiguity is like a caress.

Here’s an example of the fuzzy and ambiguous: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from Pictures of the Gone World, San Francisco: City Lights Books, poem 5 (which is all caps in the original),

“A POEM IS A MIRROR WALKING DOWN A STRANGE STREET”

Mirrors are ambiguous. The fact that we can look at them and in them at the same time should be ample proof of that. Fancy European philosophers and psychoanalysts have written entire books about mirrors. I needn’t say more. Except that Ferlinghetti’s mirror may be connected with Schopenhauer’s, above. And also except there might be some uncertainty about what exactly is fuzzy: mirrors, mirrors with legs, or the statement that a poem is a mirror walking down a strange street. It’s mostly the last one.

For an example of the second thing (loss of conventional meaning), I turn to Albert Einstein, the ultimate in positive ad hominem persuasiveness, “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead”.
Taken from the abridged edition of The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949. The essay appears on pages 1 to 5.

If we assume that conventional meaning is not mysterious, and the mysterious is both ambiguous and exhilarating, then it makes sense that Ferlinghetti and Einstein belong together. The two quotes illustrate my claim that ambiguity is the vehicle of metaphor, given that the desire to understand a mystery drives a person to metaphorical thinking. I highly recommend believing that and here’s why: When confronted with something new and strange, I think about what it’s like and what it’s not like, a refining process to try to see it as it is. By the way, the use of the term vehicle is a bit of a reference to Ogden and Richard’s analysis of metaphor into vehicle and tenor found in The Meaning of Meaning. That’s different though, and extremely irrelevant at the moment.

So how can I write something I approve of? I attempt it with metaphors, complicated and sometimes unnecessary syllogisms, meta-text, ambiguity, fuzziness, prevarication, parentheses, mendacity (in moderation of course), charm, qualifiers, caveats, and writing between the lines. I attempt the same things in my visual art. What else would a syzygy do? I’m one of Tristan’s people.

Tristan Tzara (written sometime between 1916 and 1920. Motherwell’s book doesn’t specify, and good luck finding out online):

“A few days ago I attended a gathering of imbiciles. There were lots of people. Everybody was charming. Tristan Tzara, a small, idiotic and insignificant individual, delivered a lecture on the art of becoming charming. And incidentally, he was charming. And witty. Isn’t that delicious? Incidentally, everybody is delicious. 9 below zero. Isn’t that charming? No, it’s not charming. God can’t make the grade. He isn’t even in the phone book. But he’s charming just the same. Ambassadors, poets, counts, princes, musicians, journalists, actors, writers, diplomats, directors, dressmakers, socialists, princesses and baronesses – all charming. All of you are charming, utterly subtle, witty and delicious.” Tristan Tzara, “Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love, Supplement: How I became charming, delightful and delicious”, in The Dada Painters and Poets, Robert Motherwell ed., New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1951, p. 97.

Nine below zero – early in his career, Bob Dylan sang, “And it’s nine below zero, at three o’clock in the afternoon.” Coincidence?

IMAGE: Steve Armstrong, untitled, acrylic on paper with brass nails, 2000.

The Communist Manifesto without Nouns

It’s time to let some other members of the Institute have their say.

André Questcequecest finished a book in 2010 after ten years of occasional work. Wm. F. Krendall provided the introduction and I added a preface. It will probably find its way into the Institute’s giant omnibus – working title, The Documents of the Institute for the Separation of Theory from Practice, which is still on a drawing board somewhere.

I’m pleased to present Questcequecest’s book here in its entirety, a small portion in this post and the balance on a linked page. This is a world premiere. Very exciting. Yes.

And by the way,

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Communist Manifesto in English
With All Words Functioning as Nouns Removed
Except for the Title, Preface and Introduction
In order to Make It Formally Consistent
With the Theory of Dialectical Materialism

Short Title: The Communist
by
André Questcequecest 2001-2010

with a preface by
Stephen Eric Armstrong

and introduction by
Wm. F. Krendall

Preface

For the most part I don’t find conceptual art very interesting.

The idea that generates a conceptual artwork is the salient part, and once that idea is understood, the experience of the resultant work often feels redundant, unnecessary or even a bit “hot”, to use that word in Marshall McLuhan’s sense. I also suspect that on occasion, the exhibited objects of conceptual art are for the most part, ingenuous commodities. Naturally enough, we all have to make a living, but to paraphrase Marx, commercial relations falsify human relations, and as he said of paid journalists, himself included, writing for money is its own punishment.

Years ago, as I became aware of “Postmodernism”, I had an idea to make scaled down copies of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as table lamps. They were to be called The Lamp of Postmodernism and I wanted them to be cast in bronze, as this would suggest a formal repudiation, perhaps through feigned ignorance, of the constructivist ideas involved in Tatlin’s work. I still might do it someday if I find the gumption and the money.

I think my idea is conceptual art, and I actually find it pretty interesting, so it might be worth making. But I may only feel this way because I thought of it. Hopefully the lamp, besides actually being useful as a lamp, is sufficiently pointed or poetic to be worthy of existence. It’s a serious decision after all. There’s already a lot of art in the world – no need to fill it to the brim.

At the least, I think the lamp communicates my take on post Modernism fairly well: Like all nihilism, post Modernism as an art practice, is unhealthy. Nietzsche said that (the part about nihilism and ill health). The desire for a better world becomes just so much grist for the mill.

And besides this, the dark times in twentieth century Europe that lead to the thought that poetry is no longer possible, also gave us horrific connotations concerning lampshades. I hope the callousness is apparent.

I have yet to make the lamps but I did make a rubber stamp image of the lamp in 1995 and produced an edition of “prints” in 1999. No one has ever accused me of being diligent. Yes, I’m a dawdler.

The Communist Manifesto with all words functioning as nouns removed is pretty much unreadable and I would recommend that you don’t even bother trying. Well, maybe a page or two to get the general idea, but that would be more than enough because it won’t get any better further along. It’s a meaningless text that isn’t meant to be read. It is only meant to exist. It’s basically a joke about a particular absurdity I think André Questcequecest found in Marxist theory and it’s an unreadable waste of paper except to the extent that the gesture has been made visible.

Unlike The Communist, “The Magnetic Fields” (1919) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault is enjoyable to read. This is probably because of its failure as strict automatism. Breton and Soupault wrote quickly in order to access their “unconscious” and they did not revise or edit the text – they wished to avoid any stylistic and aesthetic considerations in the writing. I don’t think anyone has ever called it Fauve Literature, but I’m happy to do so.

Of course, it is not entirely possible to avoid all stylistic and aesthetic considerations. One’s taste will be an unseen guide and the decisions that generated the text can be imaginatively guessed. In the case of Breton and Soupault, I find their thinking charming. I feel acquainted with their working minds just as Blake welcomed Milton into his home. The Communist, on the other hand is merely the product of a process, a case of complete automatism. The result is much less charming. As a rule, conceptual art isn’t much to look at.

To illustrate the failure-success of “The Immaculate Conception”, here is a quote:

A perfect odour bathed the shadow and a thousand little scents ran up and down. They were thick circles, ravaged rags. Millimetres away, the endless adventures of microbes were perceptible. Style of cleansed cries and tamed visions. The brief puffs of smoke fell furiously and in disorder. Only the wind could absorb this living peat, these paralysed contrivances. The wild races, the bridge of delays, the instantaneous brutalizations were found to be joined together again and mixed with the blue sands of modernized pleasures, with sensational sacrifices, with the fleet flock of elect narcotics. There were the serious songs of sickly street alters, the prayers of merchants, the afflictions of swine, the eternal agonies of librarians.FN1

As an “executive summary” then, this book needed to exist and never be read, as it hints at the difference between practical things and art things. In Zurich, Lenin was acquainted with the dada artists at Cabaret Voltaire, and when he left for revolution in Russia, he chided them for not doing something useful. I’d like to write a play about that.

Stephen Eric Armstrong

FN1 Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, “The Magnetic Fields,” The Automatic Message, David Gascoyne, Antony Melville, and Jon Graham trans., (London: Atlas Press, 1997), p. 83.

Introduction

In his book, Marxist Esthetics, Henri Arvon explains Marxist doctrine with quotes from V. I. Lenin and George Lukács. I would like to reproduce two of his paragraphs and insert my own commentary. The quoted words appear in bolder type. The quote is continuous, without breaks or changes of order, thus Arvon can be read without my interruptions by reading only the bold type.

According to Marxist doctrine, essence is the sum total of the principal internal aspects of a process, whereas phenomena are the immediate outward expression of this process. The essence and phenomena are thus both related to the same process, and in this respect they are interdependent and indissociable. Lenin compares the essence to a deep current, and phenomena to waves and swirls of foam that disturb its surface. “The foam [is] on top and the deep currents below. But the foam is also the expression of the essence,” he states in his Philosophical Notebooks.

In my opinion, Marxist essence, “the sum total of the principal internal aspects of a process,” is merely a different way to refer to the potential explanation of a process. The essence of a process is what that process is doing. In addition, a preceding essence is similar to a cause which is, of course, just a different kind of explanation. Lenin’s interpretation differs – essence and phenomenon have equal status as actual things in the world. Ontologically speaking, internal aspects are not much different from external aspects (phenomena) – as Lenin says, deep currents versus disturbances on the surface – they’re both made out of water. I am left to wonder though, how an internal aspect can be an aspect at all, because it is concealed, invisible.

The prime task of Marxist esthetics, therefore, is to re-establish the dialectical unity of the essence and the phenomena, in contradistinction to the tendencies of bourgeois esthetics, which disregards human totality and makes of the essence and phenomena two different levels of consciousness.

Waves and foam are visible but deep currents are not. A bourgeois aesthetics might regard these deep currents as something that is theorized, surmised, supposed or deduced, whereas the phenomena of waves and foam are the things that are seen or perceived. These are quite rightly “two different levels of consciousness,” in spite of the fact they both concern the same process. The process is indeed a totality but the consciousness of it requires division by mental function – for instance sensation, perception, and cognition. The “human totality” to be presented in a work of art will be experienced by a total human who will, no doubt, be tempted to divide his consciousness in order to understand what is being experienced.

According to George Lukacs, art must “provide an image of reality in which the counterpointing of phenomenon and essence, the exception and the rule, immediacy and the concept, etc., is so intimate a blend of the two opposites that they totally intermingle and form a spontaneous unity in the immediate impression we have of a work of art, constituting for the person experiencing them an indivisible unity.” FN1

This is, of course, what Bertolt Brecht was attempting to do in works such as The Three Penny Opera. If internal aspects become something that is experienced like the phenomena they are associated with, and thus form a “spontaneous unity”, then there could well be internal aspects of internal aspects, and so on, an infinite regress, which at some point, I suspect, encounters an agenda for social engineering. As Tristan Tzara says, “Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any case”FN2. One thing is clear: Nouns can be misleading in that a rigorous application of Marxist theory leads to the conclusion that they all refer to an infinite regress of some sort.

André Questcequecest has decided to rewrite The Communist Manifesto to make it formally consistent with the theory behind it, a theory that seems to imply that all things are a process and thus more like verbs than nouns. But even verbs imply a thing performing the action, or having it performed on them.

Nietzsche sums the whole thing up rather well, “The ‘thing in itself’ is nonsensical. If I remove all the ‘relationships’, all the ‘properties’, all the ‘activities’, of a thing, the thing does not remain over; because thingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic, thus with the aim of defining communication (to bind together the multiplicity of relationships, properties, activities)”FN3

Interestingly, removing the contradiction between form and content has mostly served to cause sense and nonsense to exchange places. This demonstrates that The Communist Manifesto is politics and not art or science, but I think we all knew that already. More importantly, art requires a fairly tight relation between what it wants to say and how it says it – content and form. But naturally enough, that’s what I thought in the first place.

Wm. F. Krendall

FN1 Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, Helen R. Lane, trans., (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 50

FN2 Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto, 1918,” Dada Almanach, Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., M. Green, D. Wynand, T. Hale, B. Wright, A. Melville, and S. Barnett trans., (London: Atlas Press, 1993) p.127.

FN3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale trans., (New York: Random House, 1967), section 555, p. 302.

The Communist

A is haunting — the of. All the of old have entered into a holy to hunt down and exorcise: and and French and German.

Where is the in that has not been denounced as communistic by its in? Where the that has not hurled back the branding of against the more advanced, as well as against its reactionary?

Two result from this:
I. Is already acknowledged by all European to be a.
II. Is high that should openly, in the of the whole, publish their, their, their, and meet this nursery of the of with a of the.

To this, of various have assembled in and sketched the following, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish, and Danish.

I.
and

The of all hitherto existing is the of class.

And, , and, and, in a, and, stood in constant to, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open, a that each ended, either in a revolutionary of at large, or in the common of the contending.

In the earlier of, we find almost a complicated of into various, a manifold of social. In ancient we have, , , ; in the Middle, feudal, , , , , ; and in almost all of these particular, again, other – subordinate.

The modern bourgeois that has sprouted from the of feudal has not done away with class. Has only established new, new of, new of in of the old.

If you’re interested, the rest is here, proof positive André Questcequecest actually completed the task. You’ll probably recognise the last paragraph.

The actual work by Marx and Engels can be found here.

SELF-SERVING ADDENDUM

In 1978 I made a pencil drawing called, Under Construction: The Gardiner Expressway looking East Towards Jameson.
Here was something that could put Toronto on the map.

Futility and the Art Machine

When a machine is invented, metaphors follow. For instance, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont (1553 – 1613) invented a steam-powered water pump for draining mines. It was patented in 1606. One day it occurred to William Harvey that the heart is a pump, he published his findings in 1628. These dates from Wikipedia support what I’m saying – I’m going to trust Wikipedia on this one. I like machines and metaphors.

The image at the top is Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960. It was a machine designed to destroy itself. Intentional futility is poignant, and if the futility suggests something about ourselves, I’d call it art.

What follows are some quotes from artists who emerged in the early 20th century:

Jean Cocteau, “The case of the gramophone convinces me that poetry is moving into an unknown world. The subordinate role of machines is going to end. We shall have to collaborate with them”.fn1

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “We are developing and proclaiming a great new idea that runs through modern life: the idea of mechanical beauty. We therefore exalt love for the machine, that love we notice flaming on the cheeks of mechanics scorched and smeared with coal. Have you never seen a mechanic lovingly at work on the great powerful body of his locomotive?”.fn2

Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin, “I am waiting for well-equipped artistic ‘depots’ where an artist’s psychic machine might be repaired as necessary”.fn3

Tristan Tzara, “Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any case”.fn4

Paul Valery, “A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words”.fn5

In the last couple of years, two other art machines have come to my attention. Both have Tinguely’s poignant futility.

The Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has made a number of machines that manufacture feces – put food in the top and wait. His Disney themed website is also worth a look. http://www.wimdelvoye.be/

Arthur Ganson made a machine that consists of interconnected gears driven by an electric motor at 200 rpm with each of its twelve stages reducing speed and increasing torque by a factor of 50. The final gear in the series is encased in concrete and will take two trillion years to make one rotation.

The futility of all these examples is pretty obvious and I see them as metaphors of our hopes and bodily realities.

But enough about machines. there’s also a beautiful futility in the following two works:

In 1982 Agnes Denes planted a field of wheat in the Battery Park landfill, New York.

In 1970 Robert Smithson constructed Spiral Jetty on the shore of Great Salt Lake, near Rozel Point, Utah. It’s 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide.

Oh what strange and wondrous things there are.

fn1 Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema, André Bernard and Claude Gauteur eds., Robin Buss trans., New York: Marion Boyars, 1992, “A Wonderful and Dangerous Weapon in a Poet’s Hands”, p. 31.

fn2 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Marinetti Selected Writings, R. W. Flint ed., R. W. Flint and A. A. Coppotelli trans., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972, “War, the World’s only Hygiene” (1911-1915), p. 90.

fn3 Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin, Tatlin, Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova ed., P. Filotas, M. Julian, E. Lockwood, D. Macknight, E Polgar, C. Wright trans., London: Thames and Hudson, 1988, “My answer to “Letter to the Futurists”” p. 185.

fn4 Tristan Tzara, Dada Almanach, Richard Huelsenbeck ed., M. Green, D. Wynand, T. Hale, B. Wright, A. Melville and S. Barnett trans., London: Atlas Press, 1993, “Dada Manifesto, 1918” p.127.

fn5 Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, Denise Folliot trans., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958, “Poetry and Abstract Thought” p. 79

PHOTO CREDITS: Cloaca from http://www.wimdelvoye.be/ ; Arthur Ganson’s machine from http://www.arthurganson.com/ ; Wheat field photo, Agnes Denes ; The photo of Cocteau looks like a Man Ray kind of thing. I wish I knew who to credit for the others. It’s easier to find things on the internet than it is to find out who created them when. If anyone has advice on this subject, it would be greatly appreciated. I’m a stickler for footnotes.