Written for an exhibition in 1934, this is one of the most succinct expressions of the attitude that underlies a lot of attacks on the fine arts. Ernst was a member of the Dada group and later a central figure in the surrealist movement.
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I know this is a bit far from the usual topics, but have a look anyway: Yesterday’s Men
One day in the autumn of 1980, during my first semester of graduate school, I was making my way to the English department when I came across a classmate. He was sitting on a bench, holding papers in his hand, and staring at nothing. When I asked him what was up, he told me that one of his professors had just returned a graded paper to him—the first paper he had written as a graduate student—and told him that he had inappropriately relied on the ideas of a literary critic named Northrop Frye. The professor had written that Frye was “yesterday’s man.” “Yesterday’s man,” my classmate repeated. “What does that even mean?”
Not so many years earlier, Frye had been the most important literary critic in the English-speaking world. But now he was increasingly being overshadowed by figures with strange names like Barthes and Derrida. A few weeks before my college graduation, a professor took me aside and whispered those names into my ear; feeling myself welcomed into some new freemasonry, I fetched an index card and wrote Bart, Derry Da. Only that initiation had prevented me from suffering a fate like that of my befuddled classmate. I tried to be sympathetic, not smug.
The whole thing is interesting if you have the time. Northrop Frye has stuck in my mind more than any other literary critic, especially folks like Barthes and Derrida. All this makes me recall again that there are definitely passing fashions in academia and also in the fine arts. That's why what endures and what doesn't is important.
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Review of a new book: ‘Women and the Piano’ Review: Lives at the Keys
Nobody laughed when an 11-year-old Mozart sat down at the keyboard to play what one critic described as “the longest and most difficult pieces with impressive precision.” Performing next, her younger brother, Wolfgang Amadeus, was not too shabby either.
As Susan Tomes, a Scottish concert pianist and author, reminds us in her delightfully provocative and consistently informative account “Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives,” it was Maria Anna Mozart who initially received top billing at the European courts where her father, Leopold, took his two child prodigies on tour.
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This clip talks about a topic that is pretty frequent around here:
Mention of the Vision rouses feelings that seasoned concertgoers should have felt something brewing even from the start of the current season, with the stark rebranding of each concert’s programme-book cover as “CBSO Remastered”, with perhaps a subliminal message of new brooms sweeping clean. The prospectus for the forthcoming 2024-25 season is equally unsettling. For the first time in decades the editorial blurb has not been written by an accredited writer on music, and speaks about toe-tapping to joyous works such as Bruckner Nine and Mahler Nine (music-lovers will understand that anomaly).
When management decides to update our concert experience, complainers are not welcome:
Another furore developed when one of the CBSO’s most loyal attendees, well-known to concert audiences throughout Birmingham, complained about the distractions of a photographer snapping away behind his seat. Eventually the CBSO management saw fit to issue a directive that people who continued to complain might be barred from attending concerts, or indeed any involvement with the orchestra. As recently revealed, the Arts Council of England has such a policy of threatening disgruntled clients.
Also:
There is a disturbing subtext to the entire situation, and that is the implication that the performances in the auditorium aren’t enough to attract audiences. What does this do to the morale of the players? Some anonymous contributions to Slipped Disc from within the ranks suggest that the players are disheartened and fearful, and that they feel the management should be thinking more about recouping financial shortfalls due to Birmingham City Council’s bankruptcy, and not wasting money on all the theatrical and lighting gimmicks.
You will be entertained!
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Interview with an up and coming opera composer: Composer Gregory Spears Makes an Operatic Journey West
Sometimes we associate the word “operatic” with big, extreme feelings. But I think mixed emotions — ambivalence — are what opera does best. [Opera] conveys the complexity of emotions that might be hard to hear in everyday speech. The book had a lot of that. I liked the realness of this story and how complicated the characters were. They felt very real to me in their charm and in their flaws.
Also, I wanted to write a tragic love story — not tragic in the sense of gay oppression, but tragic in the sense that [these characters are] not a great match. Tragic in the sense that their love doesn’t last.
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Our first envoi is the Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It's just a great, great piece and I've loved it from the first time I heard it:
Here is a non-operatic piece by Gregory Spears:
Back in their glory days, here is the CBSO with Mahler Symphony No. 2. If you want people to know you are serious, just start with a double-bass solo.
16 comments:
You quote Ernst but how that statement could be actually be construed as an attack on the fine arts seems assumed rather than explained. for instance, to take the most obvious historical point, Dada and Surrealism, as movements within the fine arts, don't immediately come to mind as movements that would be ripe fields for attacks on the fine arts. IF you're preparing something about how you think Dada and Surrealism constitute attacks on the fine arts, okay, but the connection you make between the Ernst quote and your general observation seems unclear.
I've read enough Swiss Reformed, Puritan and Catholic polemics against patronage systems and the USES of the fine arts that I know actual attacks on the fine arts when I read them. Boilerplate zingers from the days of art manifesto mania doesn't come off the same way. :)
Actually, it seems perfectly clear.
A quip without a context is not as clear as you seem to think it is. Which exhibition, for instance. An art exhibition with such a quote could distill an attitude that underlies a lot of attacks on the fine arts but Dada and Surrealism were two of the more significant and substantial movements in the fine arts of the last 150 years. You might want to explain how a succinct expression of the attitude that underlies a lot of attacks on the fine arts emerged from within two of the more significant fine arts movements in trans-Atlantic Euro-American arts movements in the last two centuries.
I've read Alan Jacobs for a few years now and he's written a bunch on Wole Soyinka I have to get to. Frye's work seems to have been part of an academic fad that has since been replaced by others. Generations of generational loyalties. Some people swear by the Beatles but I recall that in the last twenty years Kyle Gann mentioned he'd hit a moment where he realized every student in a new music theory course he was teaching had no idea who The Beatles were and had never heard any of their songs. He found it exciting.
You haven't really addressed what you think "should" endure. Systematic attacks on museum culture and the idea of the invention of fine art in Eurocentric concepts are, believe it or not, not intrinsically or necessarily attacks on the arts themselves. That is the biggest question begged in your approach to the arts, much as I like reading your blog. For the countless writers, musicians and artists whose works will never get enough attention to get noticed to begin with, much less "endure" what's the reason to make the song or poem or film? Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" depends on cultural accumulation of the sort that didn't happen (at all?) or in the same way as it has in the age of mechanical reproduction (at the risk of invoking the cliche from Walter Benjamin).
I could take or leave both Caroline Shaw AND Taylor Swift it you want top lay with either/or's. :) The Swifties have the cult that will more probably ensure her songs endure than Caroline Shaw's works seem likely to manage at the moment.
I have to agree with The Hatchet here. When I read the quote I thought Ernst was just railing against The Academy. Max Ernst painted some very polished surrealistic works despite lack of formal art training. Some of them are certainly a continuation of sorts of the Western Art tradition even as they deconstruct and rearrange its elements. Shades of Schoenberg and Stravinsky! The abstract art of Kandinsky is more of a break with the established sequence of European art from 1000 to 1900 even though some of JMW Turner's later paintings in the 1840s start to verge on the abstract in a more diffuse way.
In his autobiography Ernst notes his horror and alienation from 4 years as a WW1 German soldier. The shattering effects of WW1 and then WW2 on German and Central European art cultures have been mentioned by Bryan himself here a number of times. Actually Henri Rousseau was the first major Outsider artist as it is now termed but his emotional devotion to the established order obscures that since he did not rail against the Academy. There was also Cheval's Le Palais Ideal. Using out-of-full-context historical quotes as whipping posts for current issues is always problematic since the terms of reference are different and often obscurely so.
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As for Frye I think his most enduring work is The Anatomy of Criticism where his organizing and systematizing bent is most interestingly presented. His writing is at the 10,000 foot level so he is more into generalizing than analysis. His work on William Blake's poetry had a decided obscuring effect on its evaluation and analysis for decades and I have a rather negative view of it. Again the issue is that he rarely delved into sustained analysis of specifics.
The Hatchet: I had to laugh at your juxtaposition of The Taylor with Caroline Shaw. Maybe Caroline Shaw is the Taylor Swift of current US classical music. That perfectly encapsulates the difference in earnings and notoriety between the pop world and the NY- Boston - NPR current classical music world too.
I'm not particularly anti-Swift or anti-Shaw, they just don't stick with me. :)
I have managed to go my whole life without having read Frye or even being aware he had any significant influence on literary criticism. Learning he wrote about Blake helps me understand why and also why I won't have any use for him. I've never really been a fan of Blake.
I have actually read M. H. Abrams, who was regarded as one of Frye's rivals in literary criticism and theory. Abrams' demonstration that the Romantic imagination was in many respects parasitically dependent on Christian eschatology and hermeneutics in western Europe seems pretty on point. The Mirror and The Lamp has proven useful as a way to explore metacritical taxonomies of approach and I suspect that in the last seventy years academic approaches to the arts shifted away from the arch_Romantic metaphor of the illuminating Lamp to the post-Marxist re-embrace of the arts as the Mirror. Guy Beck did a fine job explaining that the Mirror (rather than the Window) is the prevalent view in musicology in sociological/constructivist perspectives. Romanticism was more about the Window (Schleiermacher and all his offshoots in Christian theology and Euro-pantheistic ideas). Beck suggests we need to stop treating The Window and The Mirror as opposed views and I'm inclined to agree.
Since I never really warmed to Blake Frye's work wouldn't seem especially salient to me, kind of like I respect Schoenberg for historical influence but regard his approach as mainly a self-contained hermetic dead end and prefer Scott Joplin ... although the fun thing I discovered is that in all sorts of ways dodecaphonic ways of treating materials lend themselves to expanding ragtime vocabulary (tons of retrogradeable and invertible materials in what are frequently symmetrical rhythmic patterns in ragtime).
Jacob's pieces remind me of two things, of Ted Gioia's quest for a quest for universals in music and Guy L Beck's observation that a quest for universals based on social practices has been undertaken in musicology over the last forty years. Gioia may not be up to speed enough on these efforts if he thinks musicologists and ethnomusicologists are against the quest for universals. Guy Beck did a decent job of pointing out that the quest is not for musical universals in MUSIC ITSELF but in musical universals through the social practices to which music is ritually and socially used. It is on this front that Beck proposes a trans-disciplinary synergy between musicology and scholarship on religion could be particularly useful.
The difference between a Frazer and a Jung Jacobs mentioned is interesting. Contesting that universality would be predicated on external circumstances is a point worth pondering. Objecting that assuming that myths and rituals emerge out of shared material circumstances because, for instance, not all human societies even practice "agriculture" is a pretty significant objection to Frazer's approach (and, by extension, Ted Gioia's would be quest for universals that appeal to overlapping or parallel material circumstances or practices). For instance, none of the tribes in the Pacific Northwest bothered to have agriculture and were nomadic hunter-gatherers, so Frazer's variations on the sacrificial king/priest wouldn't emerge "if" the emergence of such a myth were predicated on myths emerging out of norms. But if a monomythic impulse emerge psychologically then that would be different.
To this a post-structuralist objection would be that if languages condition our thoughts and not the other way around (a Chomsky style contention that our brains are hardwired for language or there are language compartments that inform how we are capable of thinking things through) then earlier structuralist approaches would get shunted aside.
Since you have no interest in Blake I won't belabor this, but the problem is precisely what you mention about the over reliance or dependence on established religious tropes. Frye's Blake took that approach in discussing Blake's poetry. Blake was much more radical than that but Frye's Christian centered approach made that the rigid framework to discuss Blake for decades and even to some extent to recent times. Blake did make use of Christian symbols but in an inverted and radical way.
I haven't had time to consider and reply to the comments on this post, but I hope to do so very soon. Sorry for the delay.
Bryan,
While I agree with The Hatchet's comments about the Ernst quote, my own point was a bit murkily expressed above. Specifically my issue with the quote was based on The Hatchet's observation of Ernst's role in developing Dada and Surrealism in visual art. There is a severe disconnect between the quote's sentiments and his artistic oeuvre. If say John Cage makes a statement like that we understand where he is coming from on the evidence of some (but by no means all) of his works. When Ernst says that, I can do no better than to quote Frye: "In current parlance we are clueless."
Thanks, Maury. My hesitation to reply had a couple of sources: first, I was very busy with other things and second, I was a bit surprised at the negative comments so I wanted to really dig into the issue. Which I am about to do.
I wouldn't say my comments were negative, or intended to be negative, but I do still think you assumed whatever it was you set out to prove without actually proving it.
Agreed that if the quote was from John Cage it would be clearer what was meant, plus I read Kyle Gann's book on 4'3" that substantially expounds on Cage's approach and philosophical development (which is one of the reasons why I don't regard him as a charlatan the way Scruton did).
There are a variety of approaches to what people think the arts "do" and what they "should" do. People who are more art ascetics will not appreciate art mystics, for instance. If a person's idea of the arts is "fine" or "highbrow" then group frenzy of the most Dionysian sort isn't their thing. But this gets back to the idea of what Art supposedly does for Religion that Religion doesn't do anymore (also supposedly), the problem is what "kind" of religion is being given a surrogate by what kind of art? There are a ton of often unexamined presumptions about ethnicity, race, sex, gender and class that really have a long history of being crammed into these topics. At his worst Ted Gioia's dualistic history pits white science man against black magic woman as if that were the history of music the world over. I push back pretty constantly against that kind of reductive dualism. As a parallel movement, I don't regard the high/low distinctions as being nearly as firm as other people might.
And, back to the Ernst quote, I don't think it's been made clear why it should be construed as a distillation of attacks on the fine arts. It could be read first as a quip against "superstition" but then we'd have to define superstition and in anthropological, philosophical, sociological and even theological terms that could keep us busy til we all dropped dead. :)
I wasn't trying to be negative but I did (and do) consider one of the basic claims unproven about the Ernst quote and what you attribute to it. It may be an occasion for providing more background for the quote.
I agree with Maury that if the quote from John Cage, for instance, it would be easier to gauge what was meant by it since Cage said, for instance, "Beethoven was wrong". But Ernst's role in Dada and Surrealism necessitates a further explanation of how and why or even, really, if, what he said could even be construed as an attack on fine art.
I think an earlier comment kinda vanished in the either via captcha.
Again, sorry for the delay! Terribly busy week. You were asking for context. The quote is the first sentence in Max Ernst's essay "Was ist Surrealismus?" published in the catalogue of an exhibition o the same title held at the Kunsthaus, Zurich in October-November 1934. The translation is by Nicholas Walker. My source is Art in Theory 1900-2000 (New Edition) pub. 2003, pp 491-493. Here is the whole first paragraph:
"The fairy-tale of artistic creativity, this pitiful relic of the myth of divine creation, has remained the last delusion of Western culture. One of the most crucial revolutionary acts of Surrealism was passionately to have attacked this myth on well-considered grounds, and thus to have dispatched it once and for all. It did so by insisting emphatically upon the purely passive role of the 'author' as far as the mechanism of poetic inspiration is concerned, by unmasking the notion of 'active control' through reason, morality or aesthetic deliberation as inimical to inspiration. As a viewer like anyone else, the 'author' can witness the emergence of the work, can follow the unfolding phases of its development with indifference or passion. Just as the poet listens to the automatic processes of thought and jots down their result, so too the painter projects what his optical inspiration suggests to him directly onto paper and canvas."
So, I think that it is pretty clear what he is saying. Max Ernst served in the German Army from 1914 to 1918--for all of WWI that is. Subsequently he was a member of the German Dada group in Cologne. After moving to Paris in 1922 he was a central member of the Surrealist movement. Both Dada and Surrealism were, in my view, entirely justified reactions to the horrors of the First World War and a rejection of the whole supposedly rational way it unfolded and was managed.
I think what caused the response in the comments was my claim that it was an attack on the fine arts. Well so it was, but on a specific period in the fine arts, that which was prevalent towards the end of the 19th century. He was seeing the romantic approach as being a fairy-tale and a myth of divine creation. One can certainly see his point. By the 1920s and 1930s the traditions of Western culture were seen in many quarters as moribund and indeed, toxic. After all, look what they led to! The Dada and Surrealist movements were also an attack on and disparagement of reason itself. Again, look what it led to.
For quite a while the answer was seen as revolutionary communism and indeed it seems the majority of artists and arts critics in Europe at the time were associated with one variety or another of Marxism. That that didn't turn out quite as successfully as hoped is another story.
I must say that this is about what I expected. Artists of whatever type engage in all kinds of wild assertions about art in general and about their art in particular. They are also merchants after all. Much of what Ernst said in the passage is pretty much nonsense. As for untrammeled Surrealistic subjectivity what was Romanticism, Impressionism, Cubism? Wasn't Bosch rather surrealistic?Wagner set the ball rolling with his published rants and it became a landslide among all kinds of 20th C artists. Now composers and artists spend more time talking about their art than actually doing it. Again almost all of it is polemical or self justifying farragos.
My point is still the same. There in no relationship between what Ernst said and what he was doing artistically. His very polished art does not break with the trajectory of Western painting; it just extends it. Yes Germano-Austrian artists in this era were despairing due to their nation's defeats and subsequent chaos. This was much less true of artists outside of central Europe I might add. Kandinsky and Henri Rousseau were far more disruptive in their art and influence and yet spoke in more positive terms about Art and their own works.
Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word remains one of the best satires of art criticism and visual artists turning into psuedo-literary posers of the last fifty years. It does seem that there a few artists who write more about their visual creations than they can possibly say within those visual creations. The Wittenburg Door long ago had a satirical cartoon where a Christian singer-songwriter is shown holding his guitar and says "Let me spend fifteen minutes talking about the biographical and theological circumstances and significance of this three minute song".
So it's not just in classical music, the impulse to talk more about an art than actually doing it shows up in certain subsets of popular music, too.
One of my ongoing reading projects is the mammoth volume Art in Theory 1900 - 2000 (1,200 pages!). I have to confess that this is the first time I have set out to read a significant amount of discussion of the (primarily) visual arts and it is illuminating to say the least. Yes, I read with great enjoyment the Tom Wolfe book.
After this, I intend to re-read John Cage's writings.
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