24-29/03/13

The bifurcation of petty-bourgeois Western art between the alpha of abstract expressionism and the omega of abstract impressionism is akin to a distinction between materialism/fundamentalism and transcendentalism/idealism, though not, on that account, one between degeneration and decadence but, rather, a division between two types of decadence – metachemical and metaphysical, roughly equivalent to a distinction between the absolute rectilinear (square) and the absolute curvilinear (circular).

Degenerate Western art, as noted above, is distinctly bourgeois in character, i.e. a corruption or distortion of realism and/or naturalism, as opposed to a kind of atomic or nuclear split (fission) invoking materialism and idealism.

Proletarian 'art', with its global and barbarous/philistine connotations, contrasts with both degenerate bourgeois and decadent petty-bourgeois art in terms of its photographic and/or cinematic adherence to representationalism of a predominantly synthetically artificial order, as befitting an art of the big city, an art whose environmental mean – and inspiration – is urban and industrial and/or commercial. Even the appropriation of painting from the Western tradition is apt, as with Socialist Realism and Modern Realism, to take a representational, or solidly concrete, form, as befitting the prevalence of freedom conceived, under female domination, in predominantly somatic, or bodily, terms.

Thanks to America, Germany lost in two world wars. Were it not for the USA, Great Britain would have lost in two world wars. For America saved Britain from total defeat in both conflicts, as, indeed, it saved France from defeat in the First World War and assisted France in overturning defeat (and occupation) in the Second World War. Whether Russia, which effectively lost to Germany in World War I, would have lost, under the Soviet Communist regime ruled by Stalin, to Germany in World War II … without Anglo-American assistance … is a moot point. Though I, personally, have difficulty envisaging Nazi Germany subduing the whole of Russia, including Siberia and the rest of its Empire, when Japan was effectively tied-down in China and much of East Asia and not quite the assist that Hitler might have hoped for in relation to the Soviet Union's eastern-most provinces. Somehow the notion of Nazi Germany holding-on to European Russia whilst the greater expanse of it (by far) was still in Russian hands, and doing so, moreover, without either threat or, more probably, active intervention if not invasion from its eastern reaches, seems to me somewhat unlikely, even implausible.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union not from tactical nous or strategic advantage, but out of a combination of desperation in not being able to defeat Great Britain, fear as to the consequences of encroachments in Greece and the Balkans, a desire to exploit the momentum of recent military successes and keep the war machine rolling, ideological antipathy, anti-Semitism, and the prospect of securing vital oil, mineral, grain, and other resources in his continuing struggle with the British. Lebensraum may have served as an imperial pretext favouring the interests of the Germans themselves, but such a hackneyed concept cannot have figured as a prime motive for a country at ideological loggerheads with Communism which, besides seeking to placate and win the support of Finland, would not have been content to leave half of Poland in Soviet hands when it was determined to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirable elements whose continued existence in such vast numbers both in Poland and further east would have made Russia and its satellites even less attractive to colonize than it must have been anyway, given its chronic coldness and never-ending bleakness and emptiness, the almost infinite expanses of steppe and wilderness that were to prove so demoralizing to the German soldiery and their allies in the years ahead. The invasion of the Soviet Union was a desperate gamble that quickly backfired, with disastrous consequences for Nazi Germany.

If I remember correctly, I think I said goodbye to Christopher Isherwood (whom I particularly admired for his translation of Baudelaire's Intimate Journals) after reading Goodbye to Berlin, that collection of short stories and assorted autobiographical and polemical pieces by a Weimar Republic-slavering Cambridge lefty of – to put it mildly – homosexual tendency.

Brilliant programme (BBC4) on John Portman, whose buildings span the globe and appear to fuse architecture, sculpture, and painting into a synthetic not to say symbiotic whole that confirms the presence of a truly universal genius, probably the foremost architectural genius of the age.

No sooner had I got over (in a manner of speaking) the genius of John Portman, than a programme on Roy Lichtenstein ensued on BBC4, making me freshly aware of his influence on Pop Art - that more populist, sorry, folksy equivalent of Social Realism and Modern Realism in the appropriation of the painterly traditions of the West in an age of photographic and cinematographic synthetic artificiality more characteristically proletarian - and uniqueness as a draughtsman, a kind of stencil- and ruler-utilizing neo-pointillist (not that he had much in common with the likes of Seurat) and neo-plasticist (not that he was another Mondrian), what with his large dots and straight lines which, whether plastic or not, take his work closer to draughtsmanship and further from the art, or attempts at art, which preceded, with little success, his adoption ('conversion' would hardly be the word) of his particularly garish brand of Pop Art.

But Lichtenstein's work, though often deriving from comic books, or co-mags, as we say these days, has a two-dimensional quality about it which suggests an affinity with space and time in a not-untypically American vein that is fundamentally somatic concretion of an absolute rather than relative character, kind of glamorous and superficially beautiful, to be sure, but assuredly not abstract, like the abstract expressionism (Pollack and de Kooning) that Lichtenstein repudiated after having tried his hand at abstraction and decided that it wasn't for him, or, in other words, that modern art in that vein was beyond his capacities.

Neither, as it turned out, was the comic-book sublimations involving Superman quite to Andy Wahol's advantage after it transpired that Lichtenstein, his creative contemporary, was the guy receiving all the plaudits for such art instead of him. So what did Wahol do? Quite logically, he switched from Superman to soup cans (notice the poetic similarity?), and the rest, as they say, is history.

But that, too, was a species of draughtsmanship which, when one adds craftsmanship, is what, after all, most Pop Art tends to be, since the inner realm is absent from a creativity fixated on commercial externals in the world as we know it under contemporary American domination.

Yet what these people – and others like them – lack in genius, in that inner spark of inspiration leading to creative originality, they more than make up for through hard graft, mirroring, with their factory-like industriousness, the industrial society in love with the machine and all things mass-produced. Soulless it may be, but nobody could accuse it of lacking willpower!

The first duty of a responsible government is to keep the lower orders in their place.

The second duty is to combat and, if possible, thwart criminal governments who allow the masses to dominate society to the detriment of society in general.

Delivering the masses from 'the world', on the other hand, whether in terms of salvation (males) or counter-damnation (females) is the responsibility not of governments but of an ideological elite inspired and motivated by messianic leadership of the kind which would have the ability to utilize the methods of democracy to supersede democracy in the interests of an ultimate theocracy, a religion, if you will, not only beyond 'the world', but completely independent of Creator-ism and thus of God as traditionally conceived and worshipped. Such a religion I identify, ideologically, with Social Theocracy and the possibility thereafter of Social Transcendentalism.

Sex, the consequence of lust, is good for men at women's expense.

Being with child, the consequence of sex, is good for women at men's expense.

Having a family, the consequence of reproduction, is good for the child and/or children at the parents' expense.

Growing up, the consequence of childhood, is simply awful!

The leading principle of the Bauhaus (Barehouse?) school of architecture, which flourished in Weimar (that eminently cultural city that was briefly capital of the short-lived Weimar Republic), was allegedly that form should follow function, so that one would get a pared-down style relative to the use to which the building was to be put. But, I ask myself, isn't that generally the way architecture pans out? After all, who – apart from average Sunday School types of a Protestant disposition – wants a church that looks like a school, or a factory that looks like a church, or a hospital that looks like a barracks? Form does usually tend to follow function, though there are, alas, exceptions to the general rule, as when certain churches – usually of a Nonconformist tendency – tend to resemble warehouses or public halls, and certain hospitals remind one uncomfortably of factories or even prisons.

Form following function, although long associated with the Bauhaus school, was not new to architecture in the early-twentieth century, nor was it a particularly revolutionary concept since, as noted above, function normally determines form, and courthouses look like courthouses, schools like schools, and churches like churches. What was comparatively new about Bauhaus architecture was its minimalist and almost neo-Plasticist approach to building design, with little or no (superfluous) decoration or 'cultural' embellishments. In that respect, it was not only the opposite of the rococo style of ornate and sumptuous formal extravagance, worthy of eighteenth-century aristocratic patronage, but, if we except the bombastic imperial pretensions of the nineteenth century, a decidedly twentieth-century approach to design which pared everything back and down to its basics, as though beginning from scratch in a conscious repudiation of past excesses, both ornate and ostentatious.

Bareness, as I facetiously implied above, is what most characterizes the Bauhaus style of architectural design, a style which does little or nothing for the soul but, in typically twentieth-century fashion, reflects the soul-denying egalitarianism and utilitarianism of an age besotted with the machine and with the production, for the masses on a mass-produced basis, of so-called mass culture, which, in reality, defies culture in its philistine concession to the barbarous, whether in relation to egalitarianism or to utilitarianism or to anything else likely to reduce life – and 'culture' – to the lowest-common-democratic-denominator.

In overall terms, Bauhaus design would appear to signify a logical progression or, more correctly, regression from Protestant bareness (of ecclesiastical buildings both internally and externally) to commercial and industrial bareness (of secular buildings both internally and externally), as germane to a general degeneration of Western civilization in its modern guise (Protestant-derived) towards a somatic nadir commensurate with Socialism and/or Communism, not to say all forms of Social Democracy.

In this world, and the modern age not least, what is good and right often stands out like a sore thumb in a society dominated by what is bad and wrong (left). But you have to have the courage of your convictions and lend some form of support to it wherever and whenever possible. Otherwise you would be no better than the common herd, whose acquiescence in 'wrongness' stems from ignorance rather than sophistication, but whose 'badness' is still less culpable, on that account, than that of the wilfully sophisticated.