[Reader-list] The Irrelevance of Art by Keshav Malik

[indersalim]

THE IRRELEVANCE OF ART
This subject has a desirable poetic ambiguity - - layers of possible
meaning. As it stands the sentence is incomplete; it waits for us to
give it what import we will. Some eminent artists however may take
fright, as though the carpet of their lives (or livelihood) was being
snatched from under their feet.
What is irrelevance? It can mean the inapplicable, the unessential,
the inapposite, that is, something that does not apply to the matter
in hand, that which is not to the point, so on and so forth.
And what of the overtones of the expression art? … this as we know
refers to that particular human skill which exploiting memory and
imagination creates both the beauty of pure science and the magic of
painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. etc.
The question is, whether in an age where the preponderant mental
activity of society is given over to practical scientific or
sociological research of high complexity as to industrial or related
developments, where do the fine arts come in? ……ergo what degree of
relevance can they have (or do have) in the prevailing directions of a
civilization driven to amass mechanical power?
Not long ago the relationship between the seemingly disparate
constituents of human culture was close. Functions and utility were
bound together to the intangibles of dream, if one may call it so. The
inner or private along with the social man, (i.e. the total lore of
culture) would then find life enhancement. The cloth, so to say, of
the conative, cognitive and the affective being of the individual
member of that culture was whole. It appears there was, then, little
split in these human faculties. Here was at once a simpler and yet
more unified kind of existence, a sharing by members of such a society
in mental or ideal pictures is probable. Art under such a cultural
existence would inform the total activity of the given society, and
not merely be a special occasion.  Art as noun (or made object) and
art as a verb (as activity) would not be easily found disjuncted. Art
and ethic, at the same time, must have been bound together, as much as
the functional and fine. Again, idea and sensation could have in all
probability been in unbroken wedlock without any total separation as
later on. Only thus could creative feeling be engendered.
These are conjectures, not of a past paradise (a world often of crass
social inequalities) but of a psychic unity however circumscribed
though it may have been in its conception. In such a cultural
situation nothing, in all likelihood, would have been undertaken
without some trace of art whether as in human relationships or in the
application on pen to paper. Dark Questions of self-doubt would
therefore not arise.
In our own time- - and as that time increasingly finds a distinct
profile - -  there appears a growing estrangement between the various
faculties in the human soul. There is, for one thing, an increasing
isolation. Many benefits would seem to accrue almost as a bonus to the
overall society, because of such isolation but also to lead to a kind
of mindlessness. What is the bonus I mention? …… a growing
plentifulness of things of use as well as an inexhaustible stock of
information which can be of social service. By and large, both things
of use and the information, which is fed into the mind …… are without
claims or pretensions to art. Both products are end products of
diligence; even though looking back into historical time there was
behind such productivity more than mere diligence - - there was, too,
a personal ethic as well as an imaginative insight which earnestly set
out to search for life-enhancing truth rather than to enrich physical
existence. But the latter day, vigorously and controlled organized
scientific research is another cultural story and it makes a different
kind of human being, a less spontaneous one. The question of art or
insight enters into the new sciences but merely as means than as the
delight of comprehension.
Thus, if such reading into cultural dynamics be anywhere near the
mark, one can say with fair accuracy that the place of whatever we
call art - -  active as verb - -  has become dubious, or at least that
it has become so insignificant that it now needs  must discover a new
role for itself to play i.e. in the remaking of the human image.
To my mind it is the quantities calculating intellect which is in
absolute command of the human situation. Allied to politics or state
power this it is which is bending a guileless or malleable man to its
imperious will, both for good and much evil. This intellect it is
which fires the imagination of the majority of mankind today no matter
under which system of governance. I believe this sort of vision (if it
may be termed that) has great powers of attraction over the larger
proportion of the youth of today (despite protesters in the western
world). To seem to believe in the absolute objectivity of scientific
measurement and reasoning endows confidence, certainty, definiteness
to its votaries, even as the practical consequences of that activity
(for citizen and state) are physical power (speed, movement, masterly
control). Then, also, there are those not inconsiderable creature (not
to be scoffed at) comforts - -  quite distinct i.e. from the
possibility of satisfying elementary human needs connected to the
pursuit of practical science. Need, comfort and luxury - -  all three
- -  can be satisfied by benevolent technic; if the first of these
three categories (need) caters well to the simple and demanding body,
so to speak, the second and third i.e. comfort and luxury are personal
choices dependent on mental culture, sensibility and so on.  One is
potentially free to accept them or reject them- -  on the basis of
ones scheme of core values.
However, the culture as it has come into being does still seem to need
the dream but which in its case is no more than an artful recreation
of reality as entertainment, not as personal ethic. The human routine
is increasingly desacrilized, dehusked of the nuances of sentiment, of
guiding symbol, of cultural memory. In other words, that particular
synthesizing power (which is another name for awareness of self as
person, and which entails inwardness - - the power to voluntarily stop
the purely ongoing outward activity, no matter how grand, which is not
related to a central scheme of values) is lost to human culture. The
inward self I speak of creates a quiet but deep resistance against
mere glitter (often only a reflection of power). Such inwardness is
ground for ethical as well as aesthetic experience, and both states of
being are one and in a vital sense inseparable, though one severs them
for the sake of analytic understanding.
In my opinion the essential trend in the presently obtaining ideal of
the human personality is such as goes against the grain of art i.e; of
that style or form of living which is self-conscious and
self-creating, even though only through the instrumentality of humble
craft or human dialogue.  The new man, it is possible, has been freed
of the need for a deeper or conscious realization of values, and is
now anchored in a carefree impulsive existence. This diagnosis
bristles with difficulties, but in a short essay it is all I can do to
debate my point. If you look around you, do you not observe the
diminishment of the arts in the scheme of things or rather of the
power of that personality which practices art as a life discipline?
Art may be a discipline as exacting as the military drill or, if you
will, as elevated as spiritual exercises. But in a society such as we
have become, or are becoming, the enchantments of a folk culture
vanish as those of the high cultural traditions of a developed
conscience or consciousness. These qualities are the first casualties
always and they can only be preserved by individual dedication much as
the monks in Europe preserved sweetness and light in the darkness of
the surrounding barbaric ages.
If however we will not be second fiddle to the culture of collectivity
and raw technology - - as designers, decorators or entertainers --
but be the creators of a different environment, a much more exacting
effort will have to be entailed; not satisfaction with an imaginary
self importance in the body-politic, it will amount to the task of
creating a self rooted in the human community,  a self  recreating a
fresh and luminous image of mankind; of the human remaking himself
through imaginative means.
I believe this is not really happening and indeed that human beings
are flying apart in contrary directions; there is a failure somewhere
in the technological mind's otherwise vast successes. What the artists
have to create is imaginative space in which the shackled human mind
may find humanity and mental freedom. Artists are judged by their
works, that is the test; but this is being a little too literal;
without the personal environment, without guarding his vertically
aspiring nature an artist could not give us the catalytic,
self-renewing art. Art is not only design and colour, it is plus and
much more; it is the inner environment of thought and feeling and life
urgency; one responds to it without quite being able to tell precisely
why. But one knows it when the thing happens to one. The experience is
transformative.
I believe there is a diminishment in our power to experience such
ideated or imaginative states of being, and that to this extent art
has become irrelevant to the larger purposes of collective human
existence. The sundering of the arts, one from the other, an end to
their interfusing and interpenetrating, has led to a grave loss in the
affects of art. No man is an island nor any art can be entirely so.
Art cannot be a specialism neither in form nor content, neither in
technique nor intention except at the cost of emasculation. The
'irrelevance' of art in our time follows logically from each of the
arts standing with back to the other.  They must instead stand equal
but linked, mutually influencing, collectively articulating the
aspirations and the deep struggling awarenesses of the humane society.
And of course, in an outward sense, a new world society is in the
process of being born.
But who will bring up this new child to maturity? …… this remains to
be seen. For the moment artists and savants exist only on sufferance,
or by dint of their political wits, less often by the courage of their
convictions. They are too often followers, not among the leaders of
the human mind. They have no too conscious a sense of their potential
spiritual role, that adventure of being architects of freedom of
spirit. Thus, their redundance; the world could very well go on
without them and their kith, whereas the world will certainly not do
without the professions which provide mankind with bread and medicine
and wonders.
How shall the artists make themselves indispensable, how lodge their
visions  in the eyes or soul of a  self-hypnotized society? This
remains to be seen. It is clear the mankind of today can do without
the so-called 'soul' or almost so; and that it can live by the fantasy
or political religion which State, factory made entertainment or
tailored ideology so easily dispense.
The competition therefore is stiff, with all the disadvantages to art,
that is, to the beating heart. Art cannot, I think, compete with other
mentalities, other sensibilities. It will have to stand its ground,
know what that ground is, so as to become relevant once again. It will
not do to be peevish, or practice the attitude of dog eat poor dog; to
touch the toes of untoppled idols. Undillettantish art ought not only
delight, it must cauterize the sores on the skin of the common mind;
chastise its illusions and make-believes. At least the still-in-making
art of this country has yet to fulfill this pressing task- - and that
not by looking down on the scientific professions and the wielders of
power but by digesting, masticating the changes in the world view and
by making a new, imaginative, meaning-fraught picture of human
existence presently in the doldrums. Then art may become relevant. It
may then answer to man's pressing anxieties, be the lodestar and
anchor of lost souls.

WHY ART?

Some of these notes on the life of art are from my notebooks, and
reading.  If, in some way, they are disconnected, I pray that at least
a few of them bear upon our current concerns, as artists, art lovers,
and above all as human beings.

Technique, as I would define it, involves an artist's way with paint
and brush or his management of textures etc; it involves also a
definition of his or her stance towards life. It involves a dynamic
alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and
experience, and the formal strategies that express these in a work of
art. It is that whole creative effort, to bring the meaning of
experience within the jurisdiction of foolproof form.
                              *
Everywhere today we are told by higher authority that our human
resources are to be used, that our nation itself means to use
everything it has: rockets, jets, the inventions, indeed every scrap
of fact for the well-being of the nation. But still, there is one kind
of knowledge, infinitely precious, time- resistant, and not to be
passed between generations, whose uses, if any, are its own: for it is
the goal of life itself - - intrinsic.  I mean that comes from the
arts. It seems to me that the power of this knowledge is currently
pooh-poohed.
And, also it seems to me, that we of the day cut ourselves off, that
we impoverish ourselves right here. I think that we are
underestimating our most vital source of personal power, one that we
precisely need in our formulized times. At a time when it is hard to
make sense of the giant clusters of events that the daily newspaper
treats us to, it is high time to remember this other kind of
knowledge, and love, which has forever been a way of reaching
complexes of emotions and relationships, the attitude that is like the
attitude of science, but with significant and beautiful distinctions
from it - - the attitude that equips our imagination to deal with our
inner lives - -  the attitude of art, for art is above all an approach
to the truth of feeling. But you may well ask, how do we use feelings,
how do we use truth?
Because it helps us face the confused scene of life with equanimity,
and so that we can remain whole instead of being fragments. Moment to
moment we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet these moments
with our full being.
Art of course does not answer all our needs. But still, art it is
which imagines and makes and gives us the distilled imaginings.
Because you have imagined love, you may well not have loved at all.
But still, we - - the viewers - - can use that imagining, that is, by
building it into ourselves, for otherwise we will be left with nothing
but illusions.
Art is action, but it does not cause action, it prepares us for thought
Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us.
Art is practiced by artist, and the sympathetic viewer. It is not, to
repeat, a means to an end, unless that end is the total imaginative
experience of life. That experience will have meaning. It will apply
to your life; and it is more likely to lead it to a particular kind of
action, that is, you are likely go most further into the world,
further into yourself, toward the further experiences of which life is
capable.
Art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of a third thing
- - both are images of the real, of that spectral and vivid reality
that employs all means to manifest it. If we fear it in art, we fear
it in nature, and our fear brings it on ourselves in the most
unanswerable ways.
The implications for society and for the individual are far reaching.
People want these communications, that are in the immediacy of art.
They need it. The fear of art is a complicated and civilized
repression of that need. We wish to be told, in the most memorable
way, what we have been meaning all along.
                              *
The moment of art is a ritual moment, a moment of proof.
There is, thus, strength in the true moment of art. And there is
thereby deep pride in art's meanings and in its truths.
But people still ask what is the use of art; let us ask instead what
is the use of truth. Is not truth the end, has it no human use? Does
it lead to nothing?
The uses of the truth of art is its communications. Great art is for a
vertically aspiring being. Hence its close connection with the
aristocracy of spirit. Only this aristocracy, even in a mass society
is a need to humanize mankind.
Art itself could point a way to leading a life as if it were a work of
art that we were creating, and thereby ourselves becoming in some
sense great works of the spirit. How is this to be done, by a great
refinement of passions.
                              *
Real art never has, nor should represent, but present. And this art is
based on actuality, but exists independently, without looking to the
springboard from which it launches itself into the ocean of what is.
Real art is an IT, and so may well be in line with what our ancient
seers have perceived.
But, alas, all arts once used to be aspirational only a few now are so.
                              *
I'm of the view, that the currently popular art works of the day are
often a derivation from the more professional individual creators, and
not a spontaneous up-surging. Genuine art is a new way of feeling,
seeing, and expressing (with whatever means) hermetical truth.
But by popular art it is not meant the arts of a rural or tribal
society. Their arts are fully genuine, but like under-bush to the
forest with tall trees of individual arts.
                              *
Once upon a time a great work of art entranced one for a moment no
matter how brief, into accepting it as a complete world in which one
could live and be oneself completely and which one left only because
ecstasy is timeless, and we being the creatures of time, time sweeps
us on and does not allow us to remain ecstatic for more than one
moment. But that moment may mark us for life with the vision as the
promise of a happiness that fills us with sweet yearnings for its
realization.
                              *
Oh no longer so. A masterpiece is now no longer the object of an
abandoned contemplation but mechanism interesting only to the extent
that it reveals how it is done, where it is done, when it was done,
and why it was done; It is no longer a garden enclosed, a paradise of
the spirit and the senses but a springboard for leaps away from the
work of art. That being so, interest in the art object has ceased to
be intrinsic. Its inspiring, illuminating, transporting, life
enhancing properties no longer seem to affect the urban spectator. The
commentary furnished by us critics of art no longer refers to the
visible object but interprets the strictly private life of the artist.
This surely is a kind of slaughter of things of the spirit.
                              *
The artist of the day likes to believe that his one ambition is to
exercise his creative functions by expressing what is most essential
in himself. Would it were so!
In reality he may want to sell himself to the public and so go to
market with his wares. But if none will acquiesce in those wares he
curses and becomes a discontented member of society, or else a sullen
solitary. This fact is proof of how little we are out and out
individual, how much members of a group and how much our happiness and
way of life depends on the values the group puts on our output. The
post-humus game of recognition, even if believed in by a hardy few, is
cold comfort and apt to be an expression of the individual's rebellion
against his group. The artist's worst bitterness is directed against
the critic who does not accept his product as the star of the hour but
insists on evaluating it with the standards he, the critic, applies to
the art of all ages, and that which has always been regarded as
worthiest of surviving.
There may be no absolutes in art, but so long as we stand, gasp,
breathe and react to temperature, for so long there will be fixed,
although oscillating relations and the demand they make on works of
art. There is in fact a relative absolute in art, which is determined
by our psycho-physiological conditions and our mental preparation.
                              *
Everything we are aware of, every faint change within us that reaches
consciousness and affects us, is of the mind, is mental. The business
of art is to extend the horizon of consciousness in width, depth but
in height as well. Art lies in that very mental region for it is based
on processes. What is under the threshold of consciousness belongs to
physiology and to aesthetics, art theory or art history; Art is
ideated life, well, if not life itself, but perhaps as equally
important.
                        *
Every individual who feels the need for human society must learn his
or her responsibility towards art, almost as towards life. He must
avoid encouraging the undesirable, let alone the bestializing forms,
not only of life, but of art as well. This he can do, if he takes the
trouble to educate himself for the ideated quite as he does the actual
world. For art can offer the surest escape from the threatening forces
of a world suicidally at war with itself. Therefore art must not be
reckless, freakish, fantastic, but must console and ennoble and
transport us from the workday world to the realm of ideated joy, that
is, the joy of the deeply experiencing mind.
Works of art, in other words, act on us as living entities do.
                              *
In visual art, the aesthetic moment is the fitting instant so brief as
to be almost timeless. When the spectator is at one with the work of
art he is looking at, or with actuality of any kind that the spectator
himself sees in terms of art, as form and colour, he ceases to be his
ordinary self, and the picture, sculpture, or whatever, is no longer
outside him. The two become one, and the spectator is possessed of a
much richer awareness. This is the moment of supreme vision.
And that vision is the core of culture, and which is what helps ensure it.
All arts then must work together in order to create the most
comprehensive art of all, a humanized society and its glory - - the
humanized person.
                                                              *****


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