DYNAMIC ANATONY distilled essence of perception and experience,art needs its adherence to life.But the work of art of today needs,more than ever before,the energizing transfusion ofcm monly shared experiences.It needs a conscious agreement with the cross-fertilizing,wider empirical objective. Artists of today stand at the crossroads of immense opportunities and possi- bilities.What they have discarded earlier in the scientific discipline of art as academic inhibitory.and repressive of free expression they now substitute,strangely,with science!In their search for a new basis of art without restraints,they lay hold on the world's storehouse of art,which they now have at their command.They feel the impact of new scientific fields and attempt to resolve these in visual terms.Virtually the entire gamut of human and social discovery.scientific and technical advances have found their place in the free interplay of the design structure.Never in the entire history of art have so many variations of art expression occurred in a single given era.The range of concepts and movements is truly enormous:even as this is being written,new ones are being born.The listing of a few at random is to indicate the multiplicity of reactions to the technical-scientific-analytical age. Thus,starting with impressionism,we have:pointillism,neoimpressionism. postimpressionism,fauvism,cubism (analytical and synthetic),expressionism (three schools,perhaps more).Orphism,surrealism,abstraction,dadaism,futurism,nonob jectivism,neoplasticism,constructivism,purism,Bauhaus,primitivism,social realism, dynamism,abstract expressionism,abstract surrealism,mobiles,stabiles-and on and on,et cetera.The list eems endless.In these definitions can be seen some of the descriptive leads to the larger environment of the age,where the art form has attempt ed to embrace psychology and psychoanalysis,natural history,biology,chemistry,physics kinetics.mechanics.engineering,archacology,anthropology,microscopy,telescopy,etc.In the fission and fusion of two-dimensional space,the artist uses science pragmatically,expe rientially,without whole concepts.Nevertheless.it forms the basis of his art.But it is not a complete art.For,in the practice of it,the artist simultaneously rejects the existence and influence of any scientific rigor,control,criterion,or standard.His art,perforce,withou objective direction.releases a welter of exquisitely personal,eclectic minutiae. If we quickly scan the art horizon and examine the amazing output of art today,we find endless experiments in textures;inconclusive shapes,masses,forms;posi tive and negative space;tensions of line and mass;contrasts in color;line variations; eclectic working together of art old and new;cell structure:automatic writing-endless. precious,purist variations,powerless to come to grips with itself,to proclaim any 13
TOWARD THE LIBERATING CRITERIA OF ART direction or value judgment for others.The figure in art-always the touchstone of the art of any era-has become the visual admission of the artist's failure to cope with the ethical- moral,social-human needs of our time.It is a symbol of dislocation and depersonalization; the ideograph of the alienated man,insecure.lonely.without fiber:the portrait of the artist the autograph of the author. Probably the most disturbing phenomenon in the art of the current century,a result of the dislocation in the dualism of art and science,is the profoundly pervasive indif- ference of the whole contemporary generation of artists to formulate a clear-cut definition of art itself.The obscurantism,the evasive arguments and denials,the lack of any direct. forthright statement,is evidence of a deep-going crisis in art.With the exception of a few scholars,nowhere in the field of art has there appeared a challenging assertion to say what art is in our time. In the social arena of modern living,the most engaging diversion is the exten sive practice of generalized and personal analysis.Because we live in a technical- scientific-analytical age of calculating machines and statistical truths,we respond to the powerful pressures of analytical behavior-to define,to clarify,to identify.It is a great game of analysis;dissection and decortication of the underlying mechanisms in every egment of the social structure,from psychoanalysis to social surgery.We practice the ana lytical game everywhere except in the fine arts.Here,in the arts,the emotional fog rolls in,intellectual inertia overtakes us,and the cultural swamp remains undefined,unex plored.Words like syle and aste have no clear meaning except,perhaps,in commercial usage.And the special caste terminology-feeling.intuition.insbiration.bercebtion. nial expre sions of artists,undefiled by simple definitions except in the laboratories of clinical psychologists. The special word art is a sacred temple,a mysterious inner sanctum of artistic pursuit,where magical intellectual powers interact with primordial outpourings of the irra- tional subconscious.Paraphrasing Thucydides,who has put it abruptly:When common, everyday words lose their definitions and meanings,there is given field. To go further,when art terminology has lost its power to convey sense,idea,or meaning of art expression.then the artist.the art field.the whole cultural endeavor.is conflicted. confused,and disordered;it becomes a chaotic wasteland,a lost continent of the culture The net result has been to let loose a carnival of art dilettantism and chi-chi art sophistication concealed behind an imposing front of synthetic rhetoric,aesthetic lyricism. and emotional bathos.The state of art today is such that it can now be performed by tyros and amateurs with virtually no study.preparation,or training.In galleries and exhibitions. 35
DYNAMIC ANATOMY GIRL WITH DOLL CARRIAGE 0) COLLECTION MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
CHAPTER H TOWARD THE LIBERATING CRITERIA OF ART the amateur aesthete can now compete on equal terms with the seasoned,knowledgeable master with such facility that hardly anyone,frequently not even art connoisseurs and crit- ics,can tell good art from bad art,amateur art from professional art.When the quest fo brevity and simplicity has been reduced to infantile primitivism,we have lost the validity of concepts;when the creative urge to reveal life has been distorted into a wayward surge of undirected energy,we have lost control of direction and experimentation;when the search for clarity and order has been diverted to piecing out a meaningless jargon of amateur misbehavior,we have lost our artistic heritage;when the need for definitions,standards and criteria has been seduced by vacuous emotional mumblings,we have seen the perver- sion of the philosophy of art and aesthetics.When the artist has surrendered his status,his authority,his principles,his professionalism,then the amateur has taken over,and the jungle is upon us. The problem of the amateur in art is really the problem of the artist in society. To say that the amateur has invaded the arts,and that the fine arts are becoming an ama- teurart,is to say that the artist has defaulted in his obligation to the social environment. But this view alone does not face the issue squarely,for it would force the conclusion that the artist alone is responsible for the neglect and deterioration of art.To say that the artist has rejected the norms of living,has removed himself from society,has turned away from reality to promote his inner personal image of life and art-for-art'ssake isolationism,is to say the exile prefers the desert,the suicide enjoys cuting his veins,the tortured man relishes his anguished cries for help.In truth,these are but the pathetic attempts of the withered.truncated man to become a whole man.The issue at hand is really a dual problem;it is not only the artist's inbreeding and involution-it is also society's forced estrangement and neglect of the artist If there is a crisis in art,a disintegration of its moral fiber,a decay of its historical precepts and philosophical it is because society firt ha disavowed and disabled it as an intellectal resource,a cultural necessity,a social and educa tive force.It has refused its permission to be integrated with the technological,scientific advances in our time,except as a utilitarian,commercial.ancillary art.To engage a solution on this basis needs a moral reawakening of society and a conceptual reworking of art. The reestablishment of selfcontrol in the artist and social respect for art devolves on creating again a new dualism of art and science in the twentieth century.The obscure terminology must be clarified and attached to commonly shared associations;per sonal values must be defined according to generalized experience;the personal subjective purpose must be widened to embrace the broader social goal.The immediate and urgent necessity.the first order of the dav.is to redefine the old word art.The cliches,the
DYNAMIC ANATOMY nonsense,must be stripped off.Art must have a new interpretation,infused with new meanings and values,in order to find its equal place with other positive cultural pursuits in our time.It must mean as much to the population as medicine,surgery,bacteriology- or physics,engineering,architecture-or steak,mashed potatoes,apple pie.It must be executed so ably and understood so well that it will stand strong and firm as a skyscraper does when it is done well-or it will collapse in ruins when it is not.Art must be refined into a critical intellectual tool to meet these challenges.New cutting edges must be given to the old"saw,"fine-honed and sharp.diamond-hard and tough,to stand up under the friction and abrasion of life.To be"art,"it should be made responsible for communication of its ideas and concepts;it should reflect the life and times of the artist.his integrity,his ethics,his democratic ideals in the progress of man:it should show his developed skill and judgment in projecting significant,expressive form;it should reveal invention and origi- nality in transmitting the aesthetic experience;and,above all,it should ronment,the social-human-scientific culture base as the controlling factor in its creation. This does not mean that strictures or rigid conventions must be placed on the artist;nor does it say that experimentation or freedom in personal expression should be curtailed or abrogated:nor does it propose that there is only one way of seeing the world around us,one ouook,one style or method of approach.It does not ask the artist to obey or be subservient to any fixed rule,regulation,dogma,or tradition.It does not set up absolutes of impose conditioned reflexes of conformism.However.it does ask the artist to respect and rely on the positive norms,values,and traditions that still operate and still function in the study and preparation of the artist,that still apply in the cultural background of modern art creation.These should be seen as the educative resource,the imperative precondition for the survival and growth of art. Socrates,we are told,attempting to probe into the nature of law,speaks of the laws of men as a response to the social pressures that arise out of human conditions in the natural environment.And therefore,he argues with penetrating insight,to understand the nature of aw we must first understand the law of nature.The liberating principle of art lie precisely here,in the Socratic approach to the conjoined relationship of two mutually attracted,interacting forces-man and nature,nature and man.This synergistic principle,if we can refer to it as such,argues for a relationship of ideas,in Toynbee's words,in a con text of challenge and response,response and challenge.It seizes upon diverse attitudes of thought,probing for intrinsic attributes of contraction and expansion,refinement and the field of refines the area of criticaljudgment it tends to limit subjective bias and mental myopia. 38