Adventures in the Arts Part 11

I have heard these characteristic remarks among the so-called art writers who write the regular notices for the daily journals--"You see I really don't know anything about the subject, but I have to write!"

or--"I don't know anything about art, but I am reading up on it as much as possible so that I won't appear too stupid; for they send me out and I have to write something." Their att.i.tude is the same as if their subject were a fire or a murder: but either of the latter would be much more in their line, calling for nothing but a registration of the simplest of facts. Just why these people have to write upon art will never be clear. But because of this altogether trivial relationship to the theme of painting we find it difficult to take seriously at all what we read in our dailies, in every case the barest notation with heavily worded comment, having little or no reference to what is important in the particular pictures themselves. How can anyone take these individuals seriously when they actually have no opinion to offer, and must rely either upon humor or indignation to inspire them?

If we turn to the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of Ruskin on Giotto:--"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's _Fighting Temeraire_, he says: "Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted--no ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave."

Journalism of the first cla.s.s certainly, but at the farthest stretch of the imagination how can one possibly think of Gainsborough or Turner in connection with any special quality of Giotto? As for the pathos of an aged ship, that belongs to poetry, as Coleridge has shown; sentiment of this kind has never had any proper place in painting. A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be found, of course, in Pater's pa.s.sages on _La Gioconda_ and Botticelli's _Birth of Venus_. But these belong to a different realm, in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless description. We shall always dispute with the writer on art as to exactly what symbol is inherent in the presence of a rose in the hand or a tear upon the cheek, but we cannot quarrel when the matter is treated as sublimely as in the case of a literary artist like Pater.

It is in the sphere of professed critical judgment that the literary authorities so often go astray.

Thus between the entertaining type of writer like Meier-Graefe and the daily reporter there is no middle ground. The journalist is frank and says that he doesn't know but that he must write; the other writes books that are well suited for reference purposes, but have scant bearing upon the actual truth in relation to pictures. Are there any critics who attempt seriously to approach the modern theme, who find it worth their while to go into modern esthetics with anything like sincerity or real earnestness of att.i.tude? Only two that I am aware of. There is the intelligent Leo Stein, who seldom appears in print, but who makes an art of conversation on the subject; and there is Willard Huntingdon Wright, who has appeared extensively and certainly with intelligence also, both of these critical writers being very much at variance in theory, but both full of discernment whatever one may think of their individual ideas. We are sure of both as being thoroughly inside the subject, this theme of modern art, for they are somehow painter people. I even suspect them both of having once, like George Moore, painted seriously themselves.

Nevertheless there is a hopeful seriousness of interest developing in what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the artist and for art in general. It is having its p.r.o.nounced effect upon the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost obliging him to create his own impulse upon his own soil; it is making the artist see that if he is really to create he must create irrespective of all that exists as convention in the mind.

How will this affect the artist? He will learn first of all to be concerned with himself, and what he puts forth of personality and of personal research will receive its character from his strict adherence to this principle, whether he proceeds by means of prevailing theories or by departure from them. The public will thus have no choice but to rely upon what he produces seriously as coming clearly from himself, from his own desire and labor. He will realize that it is not a trick, not a habit, not a trade--this modernity--and that with fashions it has nothing to do; that it is explicitly a part of our modern urge toward expression quite as much as the art of Corot and Millet were of Barbizon, as the art of t.i.tian, Giorgione and Michelangelo were of Italy; that he and his time bear the strictest relationship to one another and that through this relationship he can best build up his own original power. Unable to depend therefore upon the confessedly untutored lay writer or even the better cla.s.s essayist to tell him his place, he will establish himself, and his place will be determined in the regime of his day by precisely those qualities which he contributes to it. He will not rely too insistently upon idiosyncrasy; the failure of this we have already seen, in the post-impressionists.

The truth is that painters must sooner or later learn to express themselves in terms of pure language, they must learn that creation is the thing most expected of them, and, if possible, invention as well.

Oddity in execution or idea is of the least importance. Artists have a more respectable service to perform than this dilettantist notion of beauty implies. Since the utter annihilation of sentimentality, of legend, of what we call poetry has taken place, a richer substance for expression has come to us by means of which the artist may express a larger, newer variety of matter, more relevant to our special need, our modernity.

The war disintegrated the _art habit_ and in this fact lies the hope of art. Fads have lost what slight interest they possessed, the folly of imitation has been exposed. As a result of this, I like to think that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer kind of personal quality. Every artist is his own maker, his own liberator; he it is that should be the first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct himself, he should find no mood convenient, no att.i.tude comfortable.

What the lay-writer says of him in praise or blame will not matter so much in the future; he will respect first and last only those who have found the time to share his theme, at least in mind, if not in experience, and the discerning public will free itself from the temporary influences of the confessedly untutored critic. The artist will gain its confidence by reason of his own sincerity and intelligence. It is probable, too, that in time criticism in the mode of Ruskin will utterly disappear and the Meier-Graefe type of critic will have found a fitter and true successor, someone who, when he calls himself a critic, will prove a fairly clear t.i.tle to the distinction and will not have to apologize for himself or for his occupation.

AFTERWORD

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"

We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his followers for the newest and perhaps the most important doctrinary insistence as applied to art which has appeared in a long time. Dada-ism is the latest phase of modernism in painting as well as in literature, and carries with it all the pa.s.sion for freedom of expression which Marinetti sponsored so loudly in his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an exhilarating quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, directly from the author of Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the doc.u.mentary statement of Dada-ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in the fact that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of commonplaceness which is typical of and peculiar to it.

Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the Dada believes, and this is the first sign of hope the artist at least can discover in the meaningless importance which has been invested in the term ART. It shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its own way blandly, despite the wish of its so ardent supporters and suppressors. I am greatly relieved as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can hold to in my experience as a useful or a useless human being. I have always said for myself, I have no office, no obligations, no other "mission", dread-fullest of all words, than to find out the quality of humor that exists in experience, or life as we think we are ent.i.tled to call it. I have always felt the underlying fatality of habit in appreciation, because I have felt, and now actually more than ever in my existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the artist. The artist has made a kind of subtle crime of his habitual expression, his emotional monotonies, and his intellectual inabilities.

If I announce on this bright morning that I am a "Dada-ist" it is not because I find the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of any sort, it is only for convenience of myself and a few others that I take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one who expresses himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him.

A dada-ist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other one thing, and so I turn from my place in the scheme from expressionist to dada-ist with the easy grace that becomes any self-respecting humorist.

Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average stupidity over the various dogmatic aspects of human experience such as art, religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my vision, which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery that life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be treated other than with the spirit of comedy in comprehension. It is cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to laugh at oneself in conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries, concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the best anodyne I can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take to impress ourselves and the world with the importance of anything more than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is thrilling, therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma of habit for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of the "A" in art, to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches of its worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the commercialists of art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence for art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the commercialists I mean those who prey upon the ignorance of the unsophisticated, with pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through the ba.n.a.lity of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at present a species of vice in America, and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition or interference.

It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit toward art should be apprised of the danger they are in in a.s.suming of course that they hold vital interest in the development of intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit excepting repet.i.tive imitation. I should, for the benefit of you as reader, interpose here a little information from the mind of Francis Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the cubists, upon the subject of dada-ism.

"Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing.

It is like your hopes: nothing.

Like your paradise: nothing.

Like your idols: nothing.

Like your politicians: nothing.

Like your heroes: nothing.

Like your artists: nothing.

Like your religions: nothing."

A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dada-ists of the day, is too edifying for proper expression. It is like a window opened upon a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted being may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For the present, we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark.

What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that idolatry is a past virtue and can have no further place with intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore--to ride away with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am capable of, from the patterns I encounter.

The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse, when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion, pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopus-like worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously pernicious effect.

"Dada is a fundamentally religious att.i.tude, a.n.a.logous to that of the scientist with his eyegla.s.s glued to the microscope." Dada is irritated by those who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital letters, and who make of them ent.i.ties superior to man. "Dada scoffs at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada ruining the authority of constraints, tends to set free the natural play of our activities."

"Dada therefore leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is expressed in a thousand ways of life." "Dada sc.r.a.pes from us the thick layers of filth deposited on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, and stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a complete clearance, then each of us rebuild a modern house with central heating, and everything to the drain, Dadas of 1920."

Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the invitation to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented experience over the subject of ART with its now reduced front letter.

It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of art in that it offers at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can ride away to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find that life and art are one and the same thing, resembling each other so closely in reality, that it is never a question of whether it shall or must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an ordinary rest in the sunlight.

Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any means a matter of how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race has shown it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If art was necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now, therefore it is free to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in that you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity of sensation through experience, and that you are one more satisfactory vaudevillian among the mult.i.tudes of dancing legs and flying wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their frisky approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest offender in matters of judgment and taste; and the next greatest offender is the dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who so glibly contributes effete values to our present day conceptions.

We must all learn what art really is, learn to relieve it from the surrounding stupidities and from the pa.s.sionate and useless admiration of the horde of false idolaters, as well as the money changers in the temple of success. Dada-ism offers the first joyous dogma I have encountered which has been invented for the release and true freedom of art. It is therefore most welcome since it will put out of use all heavy hands and light fingers in the business of art and set them to playing a more honourable and sportsmanlike game. We shall learn through dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining pastime, and not to be accepted as our ever present and stultifying affliction.