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Note:
this is the second of a three-part series of articles published in Art
Collector/Art Connoisseur magazine in 1999.
Art in the Past
by Miles Mathis
In my last
essay I closed with the assertion that the art connoisseur may recognize
genuine art "by the good it does him." This rather broad statement
demands refinement. Probably no
subject in art has caused more contention, or generated more opinions, than
this one. And rightly, for it is
central to the definition of art. The
questions What good does art do? or What is art good for? both
lead to the question What is the proper content of art? 
The painter James Whistler and the poet
Algernon Swinburne*, once friends and collaborators in art, parted ways over
this very question. In his famous
"Ten O'Clock Lecture," Whistler claimed that art purposed "in
no way to better others," that art had "no desire to teach."
It
is indeed high time that we cast aside the weary weight of responsibilty and
co-partnership, and know that, in no way do our virtues minister to [art's]
worth, in no way do our vices impede its triumph!
Swinburne
disagreed. He noted, specifically, Whistler's portraits of his mother and of
Thomas Carlyle as appealing to "the intelligence and the emotions, to
the mind and the heart of the spectator." Swinburne, who did not share Whistler's taste for Japanese art,
argued that great art required more than a pleasing form:
Japanese
art is not merely the incomparable achievement of certain harmonies in color;
it is the negation, the immolation, the annihilation of everything else.
Art requires
content, he implied, and any enriching or ennobling content, no matter how
circumstantial or uncontrived, might be called moral. Whistler complained of
an aggressive misreading and publicly broke off the friendship. But between
the agenda of Whistler and that of Swinburne may reside an artistic constant,
and it is in this gap where we should look for their reconciliation 111 years
later.
First,
though, a few other historical opinions on what good art might do. For
Charles Baudelaire (a contemporary of Whistler and Swinburne) beauty in art
is not what is pleasing to the eye, but what is pleasing to the spirit.
Baudelaire knew first hand the latitude of the spirit—how far it might stray
from the good and the beautiful, and yet inform itself. Baudelaire influenced
Rodin, who put it this way when speaking of his The Helmet Maker's
Beautiful Wife (which was not beautiful): "There is only one beauty,
the beauty of truth revealing itself."
For others
in the late 19th century, truth was never the realm of art. For artists as
different as Puvis de Chavannes and Van Gogh, art was the painted dream, a
transcendence of "real" life, a personal place of redemption for
existing absurdities. Vincent, to be sure, loved Millet and his peasants,
even preached an early form of solidarity. But well before his seizures it
was already clear that he would never consider art to be a sermon. His
painting did not cry out for the dispossessed, rather it connected them to a
perceived order: the swirling stars, the curling fruit trees, the muddy
brogans made insignificant the propaganda of the "possessed." This
order might be linked to the order sought by El Greco, Michelangelo, and the
Greeks (whose idealizations concerned their own painted dreams). Even Rodin's
"truth" is closer to this idea of order than it is to any social or
political reality. Remember, he chose to mold the Gates of Hell, not the
doors of the Republic. It also has much in common with the transcendentalism
of Carlyle and Thoreau: Van Gogh was in search not of a political solution,
but of a spiritual one. And it is also linked to Nietzsche, who went insane
in the same year as Van Gogh. Both believed in an aesthetic justification of
the world. Vincent never would have thought of art as politics; Nietzsche
thought of it, and considered nothing more contemptible.
The idea of order was mostly jettisoned in the early 20th century, as all
faith, pagan as well as Christian, dissipated. Existentialism was born, and
temporal questions became all-important. Art as diminishing form and art as
politics have battled it out: politics has won, but minimalism and
deconstruction have also left a deep mark. The pre-modern virtues in
art—beauty, subtlety, elevation, craftsmanship—have suffered a setback
unknown since the dark ages. And order has been replaced by relevance.
In some cases, politics was the cause, formalism the tool. Clement Greenberg,
most famous for espousing the greatness of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman,
was seen to be continuing Whistler's argument for purity. Greenberg and
Whistler have both been called formalists, jettisoning all thematic content.
But Greenberg argued far beyond Swinburne's conception of Japanese art—he
desired the immolation of all content (including beauty) and the distillation
of painting into a sort of "absolute." Hence Newman's gigantic
monotone canvases with, perhaps, a single line.
Much art and
criticism since the 1960's has argued the opposite. Content is everything,
form nothing. This is why painting and sculpture are rarely taught anymore.
Beuys, following Duchamp, made art into a political or philosophical action,
an action that may or may not require the production of a "thing,"
an artifact. Artists in this camp argue for content while turning Baudelaire
and Rodin on their heads. Art must be displeasing to both eye and spirit,
otherwise it has no power to change.
In the 20th
century, form and content have affected a complete separation.
Form-without-content is now mostly passe, because it is less in need of
criticism. Content-without-form remains ascendant within the avant-garde; and
the antics of Bruce Naumann or Damien Hirst are promoted because they advance
the deconstructivist agenda. For the critics, any form is now as good as any
other, and even figurative painting is re-accepted as long as it conforms to
the requirement for social commentary, if not subversion (think of Lucian
Freud or Francis Bacon).
But the
reconciliation of Whistler and Swinburne might also be, in many ways, the
reconciliation of these two main branches of Modernism. Art is the necessary
conjunction of form and content, and Whistler knew this all along. Whistler
was no formalist. It was not content in general that he wished to dispense
with, it was literary content. He said:
Apart
from a few technical terms, for the display of which he [the critic] finds an
occasion, the work is considered absolutely from a literary point of view;
indeed, from what other can he consider it? And in his essays he deals with
it as with a novel, a history, or an anecdote.
Substitute
"political" for "literary" in this quote and it is
updated for our time. Many will ask, once political and literary content are
dismissed, what is left? Psychologism? Self-indulgent murmurings? Emotional
hiccups? Whistler was fond of musical analogies, and he might ask, once such
content is dismissed from music, what do you have? The answer? Music! Is
Debussy "self-indulgent murmurings"? Is Mozart
"psychologism"? Were Bach's Cantatas just "emotional
hiccups"? Or, more to the point, is Michelangelo's David,
stripped of his biblical and Florentine content, just a naked boy? The
perverted wish fulfillment of the artist's mind? Is Starry Night just
the product of too much absinthe? There are many in the upper echelons of art
who would say so: the ones who are so au courant that they are past the
naivete of being "done good" by art. Yet it is just this sort of
good that art is fitted for: not agitprop or allegory, but the otherwise
formless conviction that we are not all, or always, "A little, wretched,
despicable creature; a worm, a mere nothing, and less than nothing."
*Swinburne
wrote a poem, Before the Mirror, for Whistler's painting Symphony
in White no. 2—the poem was mounted on the frame of the painting for its
first showing in 1865.
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