Andrew's Wiki
Art Future (changes)

Showing changes from revision #1 to #2: Added | Removed | Changed

The Art of the Future, The New Freewoman, 1913

Content

• Artists on Art
  • “There is, about artists when asked to define their business, a coyness which would be exquisitely ludicrous if it were evinced by chemists or mathematicians, by carpenters or brick-layers. This coyness, and the vague waving of hands to give the expression of helplessness in-a-sort, in the grip of some high force, which if not divine, is at least too much above the common level…”
    • The cruelty of Huxley’s early work
  • Artists don’t really know what they’re doing: they are the astrologists compared to astronomers, alchemists compared to chemists
    • Really they need a more laborer-like attitude towards their job: “come to their tasks with as much sense of purpose as the carpenter who lays down a floor, or puts in window-frames”
• Marsden’s Def of Art: Science not Interpretation
  • “we make bold to define the sphere of Art, as the complement of Science. If science is the knowledge gained by applying to non-vital phenomena, the method of accurate description as opposed to that of imaginative interpretation, art is the product of the same method applied to vital (and mainly humanly vital) phenomena.”
    • anti-Romantic
    • echoes Hulme
  • “unprejudiced observation of the ‘thing.’” instead of “the ‘interest’ of the verbal treatment”
• Why should art care to be scientific?
  • “there exists a reality by faithfulness to which their works will be judged”
    • interesting side note: rhetorically she seems to equate or define reality by the “thing”
  • the conventional folks are happy with what they’ve received regardless of reality, while the people whose imaginations are free also don’t care about reality
    • thus existing art is “charlatanry,” only with ideas and guesses (happens in philosophy, theosophy, ethics, sociology, psychology)
• Modern Art
  • Seen as “progress” b/c of the “freethinking” it involves
  • But they’re only pushing WORDS around, “verbalities” instead of “living forces;” it’s only “fancy” without “reality”
• Marinetti guilty of this: “a healthy revolt which might have alighted on reality, is swung off into the folly of ideas”
  • AND THEN FASCINATING CONNEX W/FASCISM: “No wonder that the pendulum starts off again, as a writer in this issue points out (“Discipline and the New Beauty”) on its return swing towards Authority-the continual swing between mutually negating alternatives of tradition and freethought, stupidity and fancy, authority and ideas, discipline and individual whim. It seems to occur to no one that the one alternative is as bad as the other, and that both avoid the reality with which it is art’s sole business to be concerned.”
    • Follows this up w/crazy image: an accountant told he can “cook the books” to his liking will of course think that means Anything Goes and “hatches” the whole thing out of his imagination…whereas the better thing is to kind if improvise BASED on the “real” accounts, that is, off reality
    • I’d say this reminds us that the debate about representationalism actually happens in two different realms: of style (that it seems not to be “transparent”) and content (that it relates to real life)
• Art’s Job: Delineate the Soul
  • “the at-present hidden, but discoverable, the at-present unknown, but knowable, capable of being observed.”
  • You CAN represent the soul: “The most superficial observation makes it clear that the soul breaks into evidence as readily as pain breaks into a cry, and the work of genius has been just the delineation of the manner how.”
  • “The line of true delineation of the soul is the direction which all progress in Art must take.”
  • Its Love, Hate, God, Sex, Good, Evil, Hope, Anger etc
    • on Love: “The interpretation of spirit with spirit, are genuine phenomena and not verbalities.”
    • defuses the mystery of the intellect: “the matter of intellect, so much debated, and likely to prove no matter at all, to be merged and explained in the bale of the emotions; likely to be proved that it is instinct, well served by senses”
      • In the end, feelings are everything: “are all in all, and knowledge but the coordination of feeling repeated in experience; that all the senses are senses of touch, i.e., contact-the impinging of organised life upon the things foreign to itself; the shiver of difference, and the shrinking where the ‘I’ is touched by the ‘not I’”
• Seems like a contradiction: how can you be scientific and yet have a soul?
  • Well, you can have “evidence” for the soul
    • “begin humbly with the matter which lies to hand: as Archimedes began with the physics observable in his bath, or Newton watching an apple fall, or Watts the spluttering of a tea-kettle.”
    • reveals that the separation of art and science isn’t as obvious as we think
  • Diff between method of representation (which is scientific) and object of representation (which is soul)