PETTY-BOURGEOIS
ART
LIAM:
A
relative
civilization will always have two sides to it, viz. a material
and a
spiritual, and this no less so on the petty-bourgeois levels of, in the
main,
twentieth-century art than on the preceding bourgeois stage of relative
civilization.
ALAN: You
say 'levels',
which should be distinguished, I take it,
from sides?
LIAM:
Yes,
by
'levels' I refer to earlier and later phases, either of which will
have
materialist and spiritual sides which, to further complicate things,
constitute
a lower and a higher approach to art - materialist art always being
lower, in
any morally objective scale of values, than its spiritual or, to speak
in
grammatically parallel terms, spiritualist counterpart.
ALAN: And
how would you
define those levels?
LIAM:
In
regard
to petty-bourgeois civilization (which is the bourgeois part, as
it
were, of what, these days, one would call bourgeois/proletarian
civilization),
either as a stemming from the bourgeoisie on the earlier level or as an
aspiration towards the proletariat on the later level.
The former will be more representational than
abstract, the latter more abstract than representational.
Indeed, it may even be entirely abstract.
ALAN: And yet be materialist or spiritualist, depending
on the
type of art?
LIAM:
Yes,
on
whether, for example, the art in question is concerned with
distorting the
natural or, in the case of the spiritual approach, transcending it in a
kind of
painterly supernaturalism.
ALAN: Can
you give me
an example of each type of art, on whatever level?
LIAM:
Most
certainly! But first I would like to
point out that petty-bourgeois civilization is divisible into what may
be
termed a genuine and a pseudo camp, that is to say, a camp of
legitimately and
historically relevant petty-bourgeois nations on the one hand, and a
camp of
traditionally bourgeois nations on the other hand that, while to some
extent
changing with the times and embracing an authentic petty-bourgeois
element,
remain closer to their bourgeois roots, and this in spite of exposure
to
petty-bourgeois influences from without, i.e. from the more genuinely
petty-bourgeois nations.
ALAN: I
presume you are
alluding, within the traditional framework of civilized painterly art,
to
nations like
LIAM:
Yes,
I
am distinguishing between such quintessentially twentieth-century
nations as
Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USA in regard to the genuinely
petty-bourgeois
camp, and nations like Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland in regard
to what
may be called the pseudo-petty-bourgeois camp, which is largely
composed of
nations that came to world prominence in the seventeenth-nineteenth
centuries
but declined, like their respective Empires, in the twentieth century.
ALAN: I see. And would there be a kind of
materialist/spiritualist division between each of these camps?
LIAM:
No,
each
camp is itself divisible in that way.
For example, in the traditionally bourgeois camp,
ALAN: Would
one be
correct in contending that there exists, as by natural right, a
friction
between the materialistic nations and their, so to speak,
spiritualistic
counterparts?
LIAM:
Indeed,
such
a friction, occasionally degenerating into open hostilities, has
long existed between nations with an ideologically antithetical
constitution on
the basis of a sort of feminine/masculine distinction which is traceable, it seems to me, to the cosmic tension
between
stars and planets at the roots of evolution.
Hence the traditional rivalry between Great Britain and France
in the
bourgeois camp, and the more recent rivalry, which came to a head in
World War
Two, between Japan and the USA in the petty-bourgeois camp, not to
mention
between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy - Germany, though to some extent
spiritualized by Hitler, fundamentally aligned with the materialist
side of
things, a fact which had never escaped Italian attention!
However, not all friction between
materialists and spiritualists leads to war.
It is more likely to lead to competition in business or sport or
technology
or art.
ALAN: You
began by
mentioning art.
LIAM:
Well,
it
is my firm contention that the materialistic nations tend, as a
rule, to
produce a materialist art, spiritualistic nations being more given, by
contrast, to the production of a spiritualist art.
But this is relative, not absolute, since in
a relativistic civilization, on whichever class level, both types of
art will
be produced in any given country. It is
just that a nation will be predominantly dedicated to the production of
one or
other of the two types, according to its ideological integrity, which,
so I
maintain, is traceable to ethnic roots.
ALAN: So we
may expect
France and the USA, for example, to be predominantly concerned with
producing a
spiritualist art, Britain and, say, Germany more given, by contrast, to
the
production of a materialist art.
LIAM:
Yes,
but
one must distinguish between the pseudo-petty-bourgeois nations and
the
genuinely petty-bourgeois ones, since, as a rule, the exact type of
spiritualist or materialist art that each nation produces depends on
which camp
it is in, a distinction having arisen, in the course of time, between
what we
may term mainstream petty-bourgeois art, on whichever level and
irrespective of
which side, and subsidiary petty-bourgeois art - the former
appertaining to the
genuinely petty-bourgeois nations and the latter to those nations which
retain
some allegiance to their bourgeois traditions.
ALAN: Can we
take each
art one at a time, starting with the mainstream?
LIAM:
Of
course! And on the spiritualist side, as
mainly pertaining to the USA, we may note a progression from
Impressionism on
the earlier level to Abstract Impressionism or, as it is better known,
Post-Painterly Abstraction on the later level; a progression, in other
words,
from an Impressionism stemming from the natural in
semi-representational form
to an Impressionism aspiring towards the supernatural from an abstract
base - a
distinction between, for example, Whistler and Rothko.
The essence of Impressionism, on whichever
level, is to transcend the natural, to create an impression that,
negating
optical focus on the earlier level and transcending it on the later
one,
relates to awareness and thus to the visionary.
The earlier Impressionism, stemming from the bourgeois stage of
relativistic
civilization, will be apparent, as reflecting an external impression;
the later
Impressionism, aspiring towards a proletarian absolutism, will be
essential, as
reflecting an internal impression.
ALAN: You
mention the
USA, and yet most of the earlier kind of Impressionism, the concrete
kind, so
to speak, was created in spiritualistic France, apparently beneath the
orbit of
mainstream petty-bourgeois civilization.
LIAM:
That
is
true, though it was created by petty-bourgeois artists who, like
Monet and Pissarro, existed within the
confines of an essentially
bourgeois civilization. Hence
the
opposition among traditional and naturalist painters
which Impressionism initially aroused in
ALAN: An art
which
presumably had a mainstream materialist counterpart in
...?
LIAM:
Expressionism,
as
pioneered by the Dutchman Van Gogh,
and its offspring Abstract Expressionism, the progression from the one
to the
other largely taking place in
ALAN: In
what way is
Expressionism materialist?
LIAM:
By
distorting
the natural world rather than transcending it on the earlier
level,
in accordance with subjective expression of the artist's emotions
vis-à-vis his
external environment, and by taking the same distorting process to a
point
where it turns in upon itself, so to speak, and expresses distorted
emotions
independently of external stimuli on the later level.
Expressionism is the subconscious expression
of the external natural world, Abstract Expressionism the subconscious
expression of itself - the former being the converse of Impressionism,
which is
the impression of the external natural world on the superconscious,
the latter being the converse of Abstract Impressionism, which is the superconscious impression of itself. Just as Van Gogh and Monet are largely
painting the external environment from different minds - the emotional
mind and
the awareness mind respectively, the one extrovert and the other
introvert, so
Pollock and Rothko are delineating, in their separate abstract
approaches to
the internal environment of the psyche, different minds - the distorted
subconscious and the transcendent superconscious
respectively. Although they are both
late petty-bourgeois artists, the one is romantic, the other classic.
ALAN: Thus
Abstract
Expressionism is romantic petty-bourgeois art, Abstract Impressionism
its
classical counterpart.
LIAM:
Precisely! Though one
shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that romanticism is necessarily
materialist and classicism, by contrast, always spiritual - as I hope
to
demonstrate shortly. To be sure,
there is certainly a romantic approach to the spiritual life or art....
However, now that we have discussed mainstream petty-bourgeois art, we
can
proceed to the subsidiary variety, which will mainly pertain to the
traditionally more bourgeois nations like
ALAN: A
distinction, no
doubt, between classical order and romantic disorder, the strictly
governed and
the anarchic - as between Braque and Nolde
on the
earlier level, and Mondrian and Pollock on
the later
one.
LIAM:
Precisely! A distinction which is
reversed on the spiritual side of this subsidiary petty-bourgeois art,
where we
find Pre-Raphaelitism and Symbolism on the earlier level, but
Metaphysical
Painting and Surrealism on the later one, both levels romantic to the
extent
that they rely heavily on appearance, which is taken from concrete
representational symbolism to abstract representational symbolism with
the
development from the one to the other, particularly from Symbolism to
Surrealism, as from Redon to Dali. The use of appearance necessarily limits the
transcendental potential of each level, since Symbolism is the result,
in many
ways unfortunate, of applying a romantic technique to a spiritual art,
or what
is intended to be so, and such a contradictory use of appearances
toward
essential ends simply mirrors the limitations of a bourgeois or
pseudo-petty-bourgeois approach to this art, just as the contradictory
application of a classical technique to a materialist art, rigid and
abstract
... such as one finds in Cubism, paradoxically enhances its
materialistic
integrity. And this is the main reason
why such art as has been produced by the pseudo-petty-bourgeois nations
like
Britain and France is subsidiary to mainstream petty-bourgeois art,
since the
latter, whether on its material or spiritual sides, employs the best
possible
technique for the art in question. In the case of (materialistic) Expressionism and
Abstract
Expressionism - a subjective romantic technique.
In the case of
(spiritualistic) Impressionism and Abstract Impressionism - an
objective
classical technique. Thus the
approach to materialist art is negative, the approach to spiritualist
art
positive, appropriately so in each case, since the contraction of
materialism
and the expansion of spirituality is particularly relevant to a
petty-bourgeois
age and civilization. Where, however,
the traditionally bourgeois nations are concerned, we find a positive,
or
classical, approach to materialist art and, by contrast, a negative, or
romantic, approach to its spiritualist counterpart, approaches which
mirror a
relativistic duality favouring the materialistic, in accordance with
bourgeois
criteria. Only with genuine
petty-bourgeois art does dualism lean towards the absolute, as
technique and
subject matter interrelate on a homogeneous plane - one necessarily
favouring
the spiritual.