Within the visual arts one way of understanding modernism is to view it as progressing largely via deconstruction. In this view, the avant-garde developed by exploring the limits of the individual components of what had previously been the whole work of art. So, Impressionism explored effects of light, Cubism experimented with perspective, Expressionism set colour free, Futurism was driven by movement and so on. Each successive movement identified a new individual element of what had originally been a whole work of art and explored that fragment to its limits. Eventually, there were no component parts in the artist’s paint box left to play with.
Tom Wolfe has identified an art work produced by Lawrence Weiner in 1970 that he sees as representing the dead end of Modernism. This work read as follows:
"1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of
the artist the decision as to condition rests with
the receiver upon the occasion of receivership."
Wolfe says, "there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colours, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a 'receiver' that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just 'the artist', in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded of him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode."[i]
In terms of Art, this could be the place that T.S. Eliot mapped out so clearly at the beginning of the modernist period. The place of "stony rubbish" and of:
"A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water"[ii],
it is the waste land.
But The Waste Land, as a poem, does not accept the waste land that it describes. The narrative movement of the poem is towards escape, the finding of the water that will renew life. Eliot's intention was to "shore up" fragments against the ruins; in other words, to the extent to which he was able, to reconstruct. His seemingly disparate fragments include the Bible, the Grail legend, the 'Golden Bough', Tarot cards, Shakespeare, Dante, Buddha's Fire Sermon and many more. All are linked, all are reconciled, in the structure and content of a poem whose narrative thread articulates a rejection of and movement away from the sterility of twentieth century life.
The same impulse can be found in the poetry and paintings of David Jones. Jones said that he regarded his poem, The Anathemata: "as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me and which I see as perhaps making a kind of coat of many colours, such as belonged to 'that dreamer' in the Hebrew myth."[iii]
Jones believed that objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form. Recessive signs which re-present multiple signification are what Jones aims to create in works such as The Anathemata and Aphrodite in Aulis. Jacques Maritain suggested that such multiple signification is what creates joy or delight in a work of art as “the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.[iv]
Aphrodite in Aulis is full of Jones’ preoccupations: “the Grail, the Lamb, the soldiers (Greek and Roman, Tommy and Jerry), Doric, Ionic and Corinthian architecture, the moon, the stars and the dove.”[v] These disparate ideas and images are held together firstly by Jones’ composition with the whole painting revolving around the central figure of Aphrodite and secondly by his line which meanders over the whole composition literally linking every image. By holding these images and what they signify together in this way, Jones is able to create an image that both laments the way in which love is sacrificed by the violence and aggression of macho civilisations and also, through his crucifixion imagery, to hold out the hope that love may overcome that same violence and aggression.
[i] T. Wolfe, The Painted Word
[ii] T S Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber & Faber, 1974, p.63.
[iii] D. Jones, ‘Preface’ to The Anathemata, Faber & Faber, 1990, p.34.
[iv] J. Maritain, The Philosophy of Art (trans. The Revd J. O’Connor, Ditchling, Sussex, 1923) cited in J. Miles, Backgrounds to David Jones: a Study in Sources and Drafts, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990, p.14.
[v] Ibid, p.44.
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Maria McKee - Opelousas (Sweet Relief)
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