THE
EVOLUTION OF ART
I believe it was
Winklemann who once wrote that the moderns had failed to attain to the perfect
aesthetic beauty of the ancients; that the Christian civilization of the West
had not equalled, let alone surpassed, the ideal beauty achieved by the ancient
Greeks in their, for the most part, sculptural traditions. Now if I am not mistaken, it was with a
critical and not altogether sympathetic eye that the great German aesthetician
looked upon this fact. And looked upon
it even with regard to the Renaissance, when, as we all know, ancient values
were resurrected and geniuses of the stature of da Vinci and Michelangelo
endeavoured to equal, if not surpass, what was regarded as an art superior in
beauty to the Christian.
I shall not attempt to disagree with Winklemann's assertion
concerning the aesthetic pre-eminence of Greek sculpture. But I do see reason to question the
contention that because Christian sculpture, even in its neo-pagan guise, was
less beautiful than the finest works of ancient
No, contrary to Herr Winklemann's assumption, the Christians did
not fail to emulate or surpass the ancient Greeks. On the contrary, they concentrated, if not
exclusively then at any rate partly, on a creative dimension and objective,
namely truth, for which the Greeks not only had little respect ... but no real
understanding, and precisely because it would have been alien to their level of
civilization, a level that required unbroken fidelity to pagan criteria. Morally considered, the Christians were
somewhat superior to the ancient Greeks; for the sculpture half-beautiful and
half-truthful can only arise at a later juncture in evolutionary time than the
sculpture exclusively or predominantly concerned with beauty - evolution being
a struggle from appearance to essence, which is to say, from the absolute
beauty of the stars to the absolute truth of transcendent spirit. Even with the Renaissance - a half-hearted
attempt to rival the ancient Greeks - the leading sculptors, not excepting
Michelangelo and da Vinci, managed to avoid producing works as beautiful as
their pagan prototypes, and this largely in spite of themselves and because
they, no less than everyone else, were inheritors of a thousand or so years of
Christian civilization, in which truth had come to supplant beauty in the scale
of moral worth. Admittedly, they were
Italians, and thus arguably part-descendants of the ancient Romans. So one could to some extent speak of a
recrudescence of pagan civilization in defiance of Christian values and the
(compared with certain other European countries) relatively thin veneer of
Christianity that had been imposed on a traditionally pagan people from
without. Certainly, the fact that the
Renaissance broke out primarily in Italy and in rebellion against the Gothic
ideal (to truth) of Northern Europe, suggests that a vein of paganism remained
firmly embedded in the Italian psyche and only required the relaxation of
cultural pressure ... for it to bubble-up, like molten lava, and gush forth in
the neo-pagan effusions of the Renaissance - a movement mistakenly identified,
in my opinion, with one of the greatest periods in the history of Western
civilization!
Yet, much as they sought to rival the ancients, the leading
sculptors of the Renaissance were no ancient Greeks or Romans but modern
Italians, the inheritors of Christian values.
Their sculptures, detached from Christian iconography and free-standing,
were very often beautiful, but by no means as beautiful, fortunately, as the
works upon which they had been partly modelled.
The human soul had made some progress in the meantime, and neither da
Vinci nor Michelangelo were content to carve sculptures the faces of which
resembled soulless masks! After all, the
closer one approximates to Absolute Beauty with the use of the human form - a
form which, by definition, will preclude all but a relative approximation to it
- the greater the emphasis one must place on appearance alone, and the more
lifeless the facial features of the sculpture in question will become, since
expression is a concession to soul and thus to essence, albeit, in its
emotional manifestation, to the lower essence of the subconscious rather than,
as with spirit, to the higher essence of the superconscious. Such higher essence would, however, be beyond
appearance altogether, and so could never be defined in terms of the Greek
ideal of mask-like vacuity, which, by contrast, is necessarily beneath essence
conceived as soul. It could be defined,
as I hope to demonstrate presently, in terms of biomorphic or abstract
sculpture, such as one encounters in the twentieth
century. But the men of the Renaissance
had no desire to completely forsake the soul, which is why their works, though
morally inferior to much Gothic and subsequent Baroque sculpture, remained
morally superior to the pagan masterpieces they sought to emulate and, if
possible, excel. Unadulterated
appearance appertains to the Diabolic Alpha!
In tracing the history of art's development, we find that the
ancients preferred sculpture to anything else - indeed, were predominantly and
for long periods almost solely concerned with sculpture. Why was this?
I think the answer must be: because sculpture, besides being the most
materialistic mode of artistic endeavour and therefore the one most suited to a
pagan age, is the art form that permits the closest possible approximation to
nature and, by implication, to Absolute Beauty, irrespective of the limitations
inherent in the (anthropomorphic) medium itself. A civilization the ideal of which is 'the
Beautiful' will find, in sculpture, its appropriate medium of expression, and
the ancients took this medium to unprecedented and, as we now know, unsurpassed
levels of aesthetic perfection - a truly diabolical perfection of pagan
classicism.
Painting, on the other hand, is less well-suited to the
emulation of nature because it is inherently two-dimensional and partly
transcendental, which is to say, detached from the material, utilitarian world
in a creative realm unique to itself. Of
course, painting in the sense that we generally understand the term, i.e. oils
on canvas, did not arise and could not have arisen in the pre-atomic age of the
ancient Greeks, for the simple reason that the degree of spiritual evolution
necessary to the adoption of such a partly transcendental medium didn't exist
in pagan times. Even the Romans, late
pagans though they were, never took painting beyond the wall, where it existed
in conjunction with utilitarian ends and reflected a largely materialistic
bias. The mural and the mosaic, which
the Romans took to a very high level indeed, are the precursors of painting as
we generally understand it and, to a significant extent, the successors to sculpture
and amphora painting, both of which particularly appealed to the Greeks. For the evolution of art is from the
materialistic to the spiritualistic, from the mundane to the transcendent, and
although the co-existence of sculpture and painting over a given period of time
- never more consistently so than in a Christian, or atomic, age - may lead one
to infer equal though separate status to each medium of expression,
nevertheless the sculptural must eventually be transcended by an art form
stemming from painting and, to a greater extent, light art, which yet
transcends both painting and light art at the same time.
Such an art form will, I believe, be holography, and it should
become the principal and, ultimately, sole mode of artistic expression in the
future transcendental, or post-atomic, civilization. For what light art was to painting and
painting to murals, namely a step away from the mundane in the direction of
greater transcendentalism, holography must one day become to light art, as
connections with the mundane are entirely severed in a wholly transcendental
art form or, at any rate, in one which gives the impression of being wholly
transcendental, such as should bring the evolution of art to completion in
maximum spiritualization.
Thus what began in three-dimensional sculpture as the closest
possible approximation, using representational means, to Absolute Beauty, will
culminate in three-dimensional holography ... as the closest possible
intimation, using abstract means, of Absolute Truth. The development of vase painting at a later
stage than sculpture, of murals at a later stage than vase painting, of canvas
painting at a later stage than murals, of light art at a later stage than
canvas painting, signify but intermediate realms of creative evolution between
the two extremes - that of pagan sculpture on the one hand, and of
transcendental holography on the other.
What, then, of modern sculpture, considered in its biomorphic or
largely abstract guises? Surely there
exists an antithesis of sorts between, say, a Phidias and a Henry Moore,
between a Greek youth or warrior and a nondescript biomorphic shape? Yes, of course there does! And such an antithesis appertains solely to
sculpture, that is to say, to extremes of sculptural development rather than to
extremes of artistic development per se.
At its best, modern sculpture intimates of truth - a thing,
incidentally, which Moore doesn't always do; for, like Barbara Hepworth, he
also inclines to a form of extreme naturalism, and thus approximates to varying
degrees of natural beauty, not, of course, to anything like the same extent as
the ancient Greeks (which is just as well), but certainly to an extent which
makes one conscious of a particular work being partly beautiful rather than
simply profound or true (though some intimation of truth there will probably
be, if for no other reason than that the overall semi-abstract or
non-representational shape of the work will suggest transcendental
implications). For what transcends
nature, by going beyond it, necessarily intimates of truth. The disadvantage with sculpture doing so is
that it can never transcend its own materiality and is thus limited, to the
degree that it is material, as a medium for intimating of
spiritual truth. Admittedly, there have
been experiments with extremely lightweight sculpture, not least of all by Naum
Gabo, and such experiments undoubtedly mark a progression in the evolution of
sculpture from its crudely material beginnings.
But no matter how lightweight sculpture becomes, it cannot transcend its
basic materiality or cease to have a tactile appeal, the sort of appeal which
sculpture must retain if it is to do proper justice to itself as sculpture.
By contrast, light art, although often mistaken for or
identified with sculpture, has no tactile appeal but stems from painting in the
overall evolution of art, being a better intimation of truth to the extent that
it is even more detached from materiality, i.e. canvas, oils, walls, frames,
etc., and consequently suggestive of spirit by dint of the impalpability of
electric or neon light. Of course, the
use of artificial light to intimate of truth is inherently unsatisfactory,
because transcendent spirit would not, when it eventually emerged from matter,
i.e. collectivized new brains, be glaringly bright and therefore aligned with
appearance. On the contrary, it would be
an entirely essential emanation.
Artificial light differs from natural light as an electric fire from an
open fire - in degree rather than kind.
This is especially true of electric light, though the electron
bombardment of phosphor (which is the metaphysical principle underlining
fluorescent lighting) bespeaks a considerable evolutionary progression in the
development of artificial light and is, by definition, better suited to
intimate of pure spirit. Yet, even then,
art must necessarily fall short of that which it is intended to be an
intimation; for the use of apparent means, no matter how refined upon, can
never be anything more than a loose guide to essential ends. If, judged objectively, art is inevitably a failure, it is nevertheless a necessary failure,
inextricably linked to man's destiny.
And this is no less so at the pagan end of the spectrum of human
evolution, where approximations to Absolute Beauty were never less than crude.
Returning to sculpture, it should be possible for us to clearly
distinguish between extreme petty-bourgeois sculpture, whether lightweight or
biomorphic, and light art, which stems not from sculpture (as a higher
manifestation of sculptural development) but from painting and, needless to
say, a particular kind of painting - namely, that which one would associate, in
its abstraction, with the most extreme form of petty-bourgeois
transcendentalism. Now whereas even the
most radically biomorphic or lightweight modern sculpture stems from the
fundamentally pagan tradition of sculptural development, and thus signifies the
tail-end, as it were, of this art form's evolution, light art marks a fresh
creative development in the overall evolution of art and may be defined as a
post-atomic medium of expression, a medium forming an antithetical equivalent
with the vase painting of the pre-atomic Greeks, and being but one evolutionary
stage from the ultimate transcendental art ... in the abstract holography of
the future post-atomic civilization.
Thus sculpture cannot actually extend beyond a
bourgeois/proletarian phase of evolutionary development, for its materiality
would be incompatible with an exclusively transcendental age, an age free of
the pagan root and of any art form, including painting, which stemmed from that
root in fidelity to natural beauty. Even
art that was purposely ugly, as much modern art in the West certainly appears
to be when judged by traditional standards, would be irrelevant to a
civilization solely concerned with truth.
For while such art may be relevant to and even, by a curious paradox,
meritorious in a bourgeois/proletarian (transitional) age or society, it would
be quite unnecessary in a society that had ceased to concern itself with
aesthetics or their anti-beauty negation, having gravitated to higher concerns
in loyalty to transcendental criteria.
Whether it would be acceptable, from the historical standpoint, in a
post-atomic age ... must remain open to debate.
But it certainly wouldn't be created in such an age. For, as I hope to have demonstrated, creative
endeavour would have progressed to a positive and altogether superior level -
one diametrically antithetical to that of the ancient Greeks.
As for the culmination of the sculptural tradition in the two
main types of petty-bourgeois sculpture we have witnessed this century, it is
doubtful that Winklemann, if he could return from the grave to witness certain
typical examples of it, would appreciably modify his opinion concerning the
failure of Western art to attain to the high level of beauty achieved by the
ancients. Confronted by a Giacometti,
which, to my mind, aptly signifies the negative or anti-beauty side of this
culmination, he would probably be appalled by the extreme slenderness and
knobbliness of the figure, the facial expression of which was far too redolent
of soul to satisfy even a crude approximation to human, let alone absolute,
beauty. Confronted, on the other hand,
by an Arp, which, as biomorphic sculpture, seems to aptly signify its positive
or pro-truth side, he would be at a loss to establish any formal connections
between such sculpture and nature, and would have to confess that Arp, no less
than Giacometti, was an abysmal failure by ancient Greek standards, as well as
a further example of the lamentable decline in aesthetic merit which Western
sculpture appeared to signify. Ah, poor
Winklemann! He could never have
understood the truth. He died facing
Hell. His spirit, fortunately, cannot be
resurrected!
