Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice (3)

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.

Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus,1827, Philadelphia Museum of Art (source)

I’ve corresponded a bit with the gracious author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, and he told me that he wanted to avoid the usual pitfall of nonfiction, front-loading the most important material. That paid off. The book increases in astuteness and originality as it proceeds.

“Rift and Prophecy” (p. 79) is a veritable antidote to the Intentional Fallacy. Martel distinguishes between masterworks and classics. Masterworks are “perfect examples of form, flawless aesthetic products whose every detail is exquisitely rendered at the technical level. Classics, in contrast, “use the aesthetic as a springboard to something else.” That something else is a realm of aesthetic experience newly revealed by the work. Classics often entail, and perhaps even require, misalignments and flaws. I’m a little sorry about the terminology, as I think of a master in visual art as someone whose shortcomings transform into the vehicle of profound expression. Braque, for instance, said that cubism was his way of bringing painting into the realm of what he could accomplish. Too, Martel’s prototype of the creator of masterworks is Ingres, whose work is missing the “monstrous power” of Delacroix. This is a fair point, but Ingres’ refrigeration is compelling in its own way, and that too was a transcendent limitation of his abilities. I would have picked a more minor contemporary, such as Zoffany or Gérard. But the basic premise is defensible. With that established:

Classics consistently weave worlds where dream-life and waking-life are shown to be one and the same. These are synchronistic worlds where there is no such thing as a mistake or a chance occurrence.… Synchronicity implies a kind of panpsychism that views consciousness as a dimension of the universe itself rather than an isolable feature of the human brain. The psyche becomes the dynamic field in which the material universe itself acquires its form and substance.

Consequently, the technical upsets in the work create breaks through which inspiration and sometimes prescience flow. “There is a crack in everything,” wrote Leonard Cohen. “That's how the light gets in.” (I remember but can’t confirm that someone remarked about Blake, “Of course he’s cracked, that’s how the light gets in.”) The idea has an unimpeachable pedigree (p. 101):

To prophesy in art, Forster muses, is to raise emotions above the human pitch so that they reconnect with the generative powers of the universe. It is to raise “human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer control them.”… This amplification and saturation of reality reach down to the psychic forces or gods that swim like strange deep-sea fish beneath the surface world, revealing the essential in the situation.

“Idiology: Art and Politics” achieves that level of foresight. The book, published in 2015, makes this claim on page 125:

When a political body forgets its own imaginal underpinnings, thereby reducing myth to ideology, it quickly convinces itself that its version of the story is an exact representation of the global situation. In a universe comprising infinite possibilities, the odds that such an attitude will sooner or later lead to disaster are about one hundred percent. Only when it has completely collapsed into ideology in this way does politics become the enemy of art.

That’s an astute observation to put on the record, eight years before “It’s Pablo-Matic.” But it gets better:

Against the oppressive delusions of such malignant ideology, however, art responds with idiology, the sacred science of trusting direct experience in order to break the consensus trance imposed by a one-sided mentality that would reduce the infinite to a partisan slogan or a moral judgment.

Idio, here, is from Greek idios, “one’s own.” It’s the root of idiot, true, but Martel pivots to this point from an invocation of the holy fool as exemplified by Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin (p. 120-121):

Where others perceive a world driven by pride and envy, Myshkin sees only beauty. the world will be saved by beauty, he says at one point, spelling out the prophecy that underlies Dostoyevsky’s entire body of work. the character of Ganya is right to call Myshkin an “idiot’ in the novel, just as he is right to specify the meaning of that term by saying, “You always notice what others overlook.” The spirit of play is the spirit of the Idiot or Fool who does not belong to this world and can therefore see it for what it is.

Later (p. 126):

To create is to free oneself from the dialectical binds that keep the ideological in place. Thus, every act of creation is an act of resistance. Through its occurrence in a communal setting it materializes, however temporarily, the ideal polity that humans have always dreamed of bringing about. Creativity is freedom’s most primal expression, though no the freedom we were sold under the banner of democracy. True freedom is less a license to do as one pleases than the power to be what one has no choice to be, the capacity to follow one’s inmost desire.

Compare this to Susan Stewart in The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making, 2011 (p. 197):

[O]ur freedom is not only immanent: we also exemplify or manifest our freedom, judging it as a state that can be more or less, always seeking to expand its power. In thinking about the philosophy of art and aesthetics, my concern has been with a positive freedom. The volitional and underdetermined qualities of making that I have emphasized heighten the fundamental condition of the free act as that which could have been otherwise, including left undone. Projecting reception when composing, reflecting on intention when receiving, giving over to rhythm and coincidence, imagining worlds, overcoming received habits of perception, reframing categories and frames of understanding—such practices emerge from the interface between a desiring body and a willing intellect.

The last chapter, “Postmortem,” summarizes the book’s prior claims about prophecy, politics, and play. On pages 134-135 Martel issues a dire warning:

The reign of artifice constitutes the greatest danger that art has ever faced—even greater in the long run than the outright suppression of artistic freedom in totalitarian regimes. Why? Because the eclipsing of art in contemporary society threatens much more than those scattered communities that explicitly call themselves artistic. It threatens all forms of imaginality, all true creation, all that is most singular and different in human beings.

With equal urgency, he indicates the way toward redemption (p. 154):

Before we can even think of ecological rescue, global disarmament, or economic reform, we must find a way back to what science fiction writers call our homeworld. The term encompasses more than the biosphere; it also includes our homes, our places of work, our communities, families, friends, and lovers. It includes our technologies and tools, the physical body, the sensible soul, and the unconscious psyche. We need a faith to restore our capacity to feel, to affect and be affected with the same passionate intensity as our forebears, whose powers of feeling astound us so in the records and art of the past.

It may not be excessive to declare this book a classic by its own definition. Not only is it erudite and wise, but it has maintained a long life after its first appearance in the world nearly a decade ago. An audiobook version narrated with a new introduction by novelist Donna Tartt just appeared a few weeks ago. It’s easy to conclude from current events that everything is breaking down, and obviously much is. But as Robert Hughes said of artists, art will push through like weeds through the sidewalk. Martel captures its unkillable spirit in this compelling and smart little book.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia,” an exhibition at THERE in New York City, runs through tomorrow. Hope to see you.

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, which is kind of toast at the moment, but it will give you an idea of what typically goes on.

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.