Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice (2)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel.

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888, oil on canvas (source)

I’ve read through Chapter Four of J.F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, and I’m impressed with it. The premise is Wildean, and I’m a confirmed Wildean by way of Walter Darby Bannard, who cites Wilde four times in the one-hundred Aphorisms for Artists. I doubt that there’s another digest so effective for so many deep art and art-adjacent topics. Eighty pages in, Martel has already hit Wilde, Kant, Jung, Northrop Frye, Solzhenitsyn, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Coleridge, Richard Dawkins, Dhiaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Edgar Allen Poe, Plato, Shakespeare, Rothko, Joyce, Paul Klee, Neil Young, Torah, Greek myth, and more. Nevertheless, Martel is making a spare argument and all of the references feel necessary.

Martel distinguishes art, which he defines, following Wilde, as things whose only purpose is to be perceived, and artifice, which he defines, following Joyce, as a mispurposing of creativity. Artifice he divides into two kinds, again after Joyce: pornography, artifice meant to entice the viewer in a particular direction, and propaganda, artifice meant to induce the viewer’s revulsion. At one point he describes propaganda as pornography in a minor key, which is an interesting angle. At another he describes pornography and propaganda as dual Golden Calves.

On pages 19-20 Martel distinguishes between aesthetic subjectivity, which Kant regarded as nevertheless universal, and aesthetic relativism, which he labels an enervating dogma. Admitting the prevalence of the latter, he concedes:

From this point of view, to speak of art as a universal aspect of the human ethos could only be construed as naive. Be that as it may, that is exactly the view that I want to entertain here. From the position I adopt in this book, art is an objective pursuit with the same claim to truth as science, albeit truth of a different order.

I salute the effort. Darby:

Science adjusts language to explain reality. Art adjusts reality to understand life. One generates proof. The other generates pleasure.

Both are utterly dependent on imagination.

I came close to choosing Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the ASBC summer fiction read instead of Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard, and now I’m tempted to put Portrait on the list for later in the year. The titular young man, recalls Martel, has the theory that art reveals quidditas, “suchness.” The claim, as is the entirety of the last book we read for the club, is Thomist. “Suchness” is the usual English rendering of Tathātā, the Buddhist term for the essence of all things, perceivable only through direct, non-conceptual insight. The commonality is intriguing.

There’s likewise something of a Buddhist scent upon Joyce’s threefold “phases” of art described on page 47 and after: integritas, consonantia, and claritas, or wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Martel’s discussion of that last item is gripping (p. 49):

[Art] incorporates the act of observing into the form of the thing observed, such that what manifests on Van Gogh’s canvas isn’t any vase of flowers but this vase of flowers as it appears to this embodied mind at this moment.

That connects to what he terms “radical” beauty, to distinguish it from mere prettiness (p. 52):

Radical beauty is the resplendence of novelty in the deepest sense of the term, the sudden emergence of the strange that lay concealed in the familiar until now.

Martel also refers repeatedly to the Imaginal, a coinage by Henry Corbin, a 20th-century French scholar, to describe (on p. 13) the “intermediate realm… between the rational mind of Man and the inscrutable mind of God.” Corbin was an extraordinary synthesizer of religious thought, having authored Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, a posthumous volume titled Jung, Buddhism, and the Incarnation of Sophia, and Mundus Imaginalis, or The imaginary and the Imaginal, a 1965 treatise which has been preserved in its entirety here and says:

We observe immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology limited to the empirical world and the world of abstract understanding. Between the two is placed an intermediate world, which our authors designate as 'alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition.

The Muslims, it turns out, were sitting on a potentially fascinating art theory. Martel has done something major by uncovering it and employing it in the way that he has. If much of the book thus far is a restatement of worthy principles, his use of the Imaginal is potentially groundbreaking, philosophically comparable to what Joyce did with Thomas Aquinas.

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“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia,” an exhibition at THERE in New York City, runs June 1-8, with an opening on June 1. Hope to see you there.

The current entry of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel. For more information see the ASBC calendar.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.