I’m reading intermittently ’s Diary, which was part of a wedding gift that consisted of several Polish classics. I’ve been wading through it for about two months now. I read a day here, a day there, an entry or two in a single day, then nothing for a couple of weeks.
It’s hard going because there’s only so much self-congratulatory discussion on Art (and that capital “A” is critical) that I can handle in one sitting. Gombrowicz was a self-exiled Polish writer who seemed constantly to be growling and grumbling against “timid Polish Art” and such. He’s an Artist with the Capital A because he regards Art (again, that “A” must be there) as something as critical as Air (an equally important “A”), and thinks Disastrous Art will lead to the Downfall of Civilization as surely as bad monetary policy. He does admit once that Art (or even lowly art) is a luxury, but only in a fever of humility that quickly passes.
It reminds me of what Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes in #15 from A Coney Island of the Mind of the adventures, difficulties, and responsibilities of a poet. It’s the ever-popular poem about poetry, in other words. It seems to be a bit of self-flattery, the knight looking at himself in a mirror, admiring his own armor and coming heroism. And taking himself entirely too seriously, the
super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut
truth
before the taking of each stance or step
As if the right words will save the world, and the wrong ones, destroy. The whole poem, for those interested (without F’s beat-poet line indentions):
the
poet like acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above aof his audience
sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and slight-of-footabove the heads
tricks
and other high theatrics
all without mistaking
any thing
for what might not be.
For he’swhenever he performs
the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truthConstantly risking absurdity
start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charliechaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fairwith gravity to in
eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existencebefore the taking of each stance or step
and death
his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
I don’t know why it annoys me so much for an Artist to think of himself so seriously. He spends quite a bit talking about how no one understands him, how no one can comprehend what he’s been doing in his various novels that might appear to be unreadable, but in fact are only difficult because we’re not accustomed to such radically different Art.
“What I’m trying to do . . .”
Tom Wolfe commented on this thirty years ago:
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! Phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed for me for the first time. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many-thousand Pollacks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer — waiting, waiting, forever waiting for … it … for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there — waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well — how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other words exist only to illustrate the text (quoted in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate).
We have to have it explained to us. And what exactly are they explaining? Back to Pinker:
The political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like “racism is bad.” But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.
This is true not only by the artists, but by the critics as well. Try reading a college textbook on film criticism. You’ll find yourself wondering how someone could write something so contorted, so warped — how someone could use so many words to say so comparatively little.
And so where does it leave us in this blog-invested world, where now everyone is an artist and everyone is trying to say something?
He writes with a grin.
