A
PRIVATE INTRODUCTION
We had gone along, Mary
and I, to hear Mr. Kells expatiate on modern art,
which he had arranged to do for the benefit of a select gathering of students,
one Thursday evening, in the privacy of his suburban home. Ordinarily his lectures were confined to the
rather stuffy lecture theatre at
We had expected, on arrival, to be introduced to the former
before the latter but, as things turned out, found ourselves being escorted
round the drawing room, in which the greater part of his art collection
happened to be hung, and introduced to the paintings almost as soon as we had
removed our coats. It appeared that none
of the other students, of which there were to be about ten, had as yet turned
up, and that, since we ourselves were late in arriving, the host had decided to
proceed with his lecture irrespective of whether to a small gathering or to a
mere couple of students. His wife, he
assured us, would bring some refreshment at a later hour, though to sustain us
in the meantime he kindly offered us a glass of sherry, which we thankfully
accepted.
There were some fifty paintings of unequal size and diverse
technique on display in what was, by ordinary standards, a fairly large room,
and they had been arranged in closely-packed order, occasionally in tiers of
four, all around the walls, so that scarcely any space remained between them,
suggesting the possibility that they had come to represent, in their owner's
eyes, a substitute for wallpaper. The effect
was at first somewhat confusing, especially since some of the larger and
brighter works on display tended to smother the smaller and duller ones beneath
the dazzle of their overbearing effulgence.
I remarked on this impression to Mr. Kells,
during the course of our slow perambulation around the room, and he surprised
me by replying that the apparent confusion was only an illusion introduced by
the mind unaccustomed to such profusion and that, after a while, things would
begin to sort themselves out, as they had long ago done in his own mind.
"By the way," he added, as if in parentheses,
"the emphasis in this particular part of my collection, which means the
majority of paintings on these walls, is on mindlessness, though
to varying extents, depending on the type of art in question."
Mary, who was always the more courageous where owning-up to
ignorance is concerned, asked: "In what way are they mindless?"
A gleam of triumphant satisfaction came into Mr. Kells' cold eyes, and he replied: "Ah, that's what I
had hoped you'd ask, since I was intending to explain it to you!"
We stopped suddenly in front of a number of various-sized
surrealist paintings, one or two of which were immediately recognizable to me
as works by famous masters, British and Irish as well as Continental, and
waited for him to continue, which of course he was to do with his tongue.
"The chief impression one gets from Surrealism," he
announced, with apparent gusto, "is that mind has been left in abeyance
whilst objects, people, nature, or whatever, are juxtaposed in incongruous
contexts: a horse standing with a football on its head, a man nearby with a
fishing rod between his teeth, the intrusion of a skyscraper into a swimming
pool, and so on, being examples of this seemingly arbitrary positioning of
diverse phenomena. But, in point of
fact, that is an illusion, because no matter how seemingly incongruous the
juxtaposition, the phenomena in question have been painted, as a rule, with
fastidious application. The impression
of mindlessness, of the selective mind's having been withdrawn from service, is
merely on the surface of the painting.
For underneath, in its technical depths, the application of mind to the
structuring and colouring of phenomena is no less vigorous - and in some cases
even more so - than in so-called conventional or realistic paintings. Thus Surrealism is a kind of hoax or, at
best, transitional painting between Realism and Abstract Expressionism. The interesting paradox is that the artist's
mind has been applied to the work in such a way as to create an impression that
mind is absent from it, that these incongruous juxtapositions one sees are
really the product of mindlessness."
I looked more carefully at the nearest paintings, one after
another, and saw that there was indeed some truth in what he was saying, though
it had never occurred to me to consider Surrealism in such a mindless light
before! Presumably automatic writing, as
practised at one time by André Breton and a number of his surrealist
colleagues, was designed to give a similar impression, not simply to reveal the
subconscious mind but to by-pass the conscious mind altogether, in an attempt
to record mindless thought - the nadir of psychic materialism in response to
merely physiological promptings. I
savoured these conjectures while we moved on a little way and Mary took up the
theme of Abstract Expressionism from the reference Mr. Kells
had earlier made to it, inquiring of him whether such abstract-expressionist
canvases as he possessed were the truly mindless ones.
"In a certain sense they are," he duly replied,
positioning himself, and therefore us, in front of a
selection of radically abstract works which appeared about as chaotic-looking
as such art could do. "In these
examples, the artist has simply allowed the paint to drip onto the canvas and
form its own patterns, or lack of them, while keeping most of his creative mind
in abeyance. They are the nearest one
can get to mindless art, though, naturally, a degree of conscious mind had to
be applied to them in order to ensure that the paint actually got onto the
canvas and didn't completely smother it.
One might say that mind has been applied in a tenuous way, a good deal
less fastidiously or vigorously than in most of the examples of Surrealism just
viewed."
I had to agree with that assumption and responded with a curt
nod for our host's psychological benefit.
But it was clear to me that no matter how seemingly tenuous the
connection between mind and art, a connection still existed and couldn't, in
the nature of things, be completely negated.
A totally mindless art was impossible, even in a materialistic age like
the twentieth century. For art reflected
mind, was, in a sense, mind objectivized, and never
more so than in the case of truly modern art, as represented, on a variety of levels,
by the paintings in Mr. Kells' private collection.
Meanwhile Mary was asking our exhibitionist host whether the
application of paint to canvas didn't resemble the application of mind to
thought, that is to say, whether there wasn't a direct correlation between a
brain and its thought and a paintbrush and its paint. "For if mind arranges thoughts in such a
way as to form coherent sentences, then surely the arrangement of paints on a
canvas to form coherent patterns is an analogous process?" she added.
"Oh, indeed!" he concurred. "Though if there is very little
arrangement of paints on a canvas, then it must follow that there will be very
little mind there.
This is why I describe these works as virtually mindless. And, for that reason, they're very
superficial, very ..." he scratched his head while searching for the right
word ... "extrovert. They reflect
an extreme form of romanticism and are accordingly rather materialistic, the
sort of art one might associate with Socialism."
"But isn't Socialist Realism the sort of art one usually
associates with that?" Mary naively objected, as we moved on again to a
different wall, where some minimalist paintings were hung.
"To be sure," our host admitted, smiling
shrewdly. "But such art is created
on bourgeois/proletarian representational terms, whereas these abstract works
were created, it seems to me, on petty-bourgeois avant-garde terms, such as are
only permissible or truly intelligible within the confines of Western
civilization. They signify the
materialist side of this civilization, in contrast to those works which
emphasize mind on levels suggesting a superconscious
affiliation or influence."
I wondered for a moment exactly what such levels could be, and
was about to air my uncertainty when Mr. Kells
graciously continued by informing us that Mondrian's
mature work, which involved grids and squares, afforded us perfect examples of
the opposite, or spiritual, kind of petty-bourgeois art, of which, alas, only
one example was available in this room, and that an incomplete one. However, there were some neo-plastic and
kindred works on display in another room of the house, and this he promised to
introduce us to in due course.
Apparently, the mindless and the mindful couldn't be hung in the same
room, and so, for reasons of propriety, he had arranged to divide his
collection into two main parts - the bigger, or secular, part in the drawing
room, the smaller, or religious, part in the sitting room opposite. The narrow hallway in between he described as a kind of intermediate, composite realm of
conflicting influences, with one or two examples from each side on display
there. But we had started our tour of
his collection on the lower, or romantic, level, and would duly proceed to the
higher, classical one. Not until we had
run the gamut of petty-bourgeois art from bottom to top, as it were, would we
be in a position to properly appreciate the creative scope of contemporary
Western civilization, which, so he contended, was anathema to both Western
bourgeoisie and Eastern proletariat alike - the one because beneath it, the
other because potentially above it and, in any case, outside the existing
confines of bourgeois/proletarian civilization.
I was surprised that he knew so much and told him, as we made
for the door to exit ourselves from the materialist part of his collection, that my bias had always been for the spiritual,
which I considered an apt reflection of my temperament.
"But the trouble with you,
"That isn't true!" I responded, blushing
violently. For I
realized that Mr. Kells was a better mind-reader than
I had suspected. Nevertheless, I
received Mary's ironic smile with grace and was relieved to behold Mrs. Kells suddenly entering the room, followed by her daughter
and son, with a tea tray in her hands.
Our visit to the smaller collection would now be postponed for a few
minutes while we sipped hot tea, paid one another a few gratuitous compliments,
and wondered to ourselves just where the other students had got to this
evening. At least, Mary and I would.
