eyes wide shut (i)

(Note: I've been trying to write about Peter Fuller's Aesthetics After Modernism for a couple of weeks now.  Generally when I take that long on a post, it means it's going to be very long and not very good.  Since I haven't even gotten through half of what I intended to write, I'm putting up what I do have as part one, with, I hope, something better to follow.)

A while back, I mentioned that I had read Peter Fuller's lecture Aesthetics After Modernism, and promised to discuss it in more detail.  In particular I wrote that it reminded me of Erazim Kohák's The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, and that I'd try to explain why in a future post.  Kohák will still have to wait until part two; here's some of what I found in the lecture.

Fuller wrote in the early 1980's, and he makes clear his ambivalence regarding the art of that moment.  The reaction against modernism, when it expressed itself as a return to interest in ornament, craft, traditional forms, narrative, depiction of the human body, and so on, he gladly welcomed; his one reservation, hanging heavy in the balance, was that most of this work wasn't much good.  The problem wasn't merely a lack of skill; modern society had lost contact, to a large degree, with what Fuller calls the "aesthetic dimension" of life.  The efforts to draw upon it seen in various kinds of neo-traditional art offered results as off-key as music written by the tone deaf.

As he admits, Fuller paints with a broad brush in just a few pages; I will be painting even more broadly.  The aesthetic dimension of life, he argues, lies rooted first in the basic perceptual capabilities that we share with a variety of animals, but gains its greater meaning and importance through the deep psychological fulfillment it offers.  The combination of evolutionary theory and psychoanalytic thought Fuller draws upon need not detain us here--as so often happens in such efforts, it places decisive importance on breastfeeding--rather, the important point lies in his view of art as a sort of compensation, a realm of freedom and independence not threatened by the limits of our experience or the demands of the outer world.  It is the realm of play, of imagination, of symbols created to buffer between our individual being and external reality.

As art belongs to this realm, so does religion, which carries some of the same burdens.  Fuller posits aboriginal cultures (partly in acknowledgement of his Australian hosts) with their spiritualism and decorative exuberance as aesthetically healthy societies, where the aesthetic dimension is given free play throughout the group, and not treated as the province of artists as a distinct subsection (medieval society would no doubt fit his Ruskinian ideal as well.)  In these societies, the symbolic order is shared and unified, with all playing a role within it and all dignified thereby.

What comes next is no surprise: the history of economic differentiation and the demystification of the world spins art off away from religion.  Art continues to play its role through creating another world, one that comes to feature landscape as a reminder, a figuration of divine presence in nature.  Modernism begins the elimination of even this tenuous connection with the past by denying the mimetic and revelatory aspects of art.  While Fuller doesn't invoke it, Frank Stella's famous remark about his paintings--"What you see is what you see"--might serve as describing the endpoint of the trajectory the critic describes.  The painting is just a thing, refusing access to any other imaginative world outside its optical and physical fact.

Our aesthetic dimension, in Fuller's eyes, has withered; and this is not only tragic but dangerous.  As he writes,

I agree with Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, who once said that the passing of belief in the immanence of God within nature was leading men to see the world as mindless, and hence as unworthy of moral, ethical or aesthetic consideration.  Although like Bateson himself, I am an atheist, I think he got it right when he said that when combined this alienation from nature with an advanced technology then 'your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.'  Bateson spoke of the need for a new aesthetics, rooted, as he put it, in 'an ecology of mind'--or the recognition that if nature is not the product of mind, then mind itself is in some sense the product of nature--and is therefore immanent with the evolutionary structure, and objectively discernible outside of ourselves.  In the 'grammar' of the genetic instructions which inform the leaf how to grow, or the 'beauty' of the patterns on the wings of a butterfly, we see prototypes of man's highest endeavors--even if we do not believe in God.

Heavy. OK, that's wrong; the urge towards an easy smirk and ironic distance, as tempting as it is in light of Fuller's tortured denials of religious feeling, doesn't successfully push away his point.  "We must love one another or die"?  Well, not quite that, either.  I remain impressed by Fuller's seriousness, by his insistance on not so much the importance of art but of aesthetic feeling as a necessary component of life.

Given the Marxist pedigree of some of Fuller's inspirations, it's appropriate to ask: What is to be done?  If the vital "aesthetically healthy" society is something on the model of aboriginal culture, after all, we're doomed.  He holds that

. . . there are at least grounds for hoping that the future may [give] rise to a two-tiered ecomony in which, as it were, automated industrial production will continue to develop alongside aesthetic production: although, of course, for the potential space to be held open in any significant way, the latter will have to be incorporated into our productive life in a much more radical way than that permitted by leisure, hobbies, or the Fine Art enclave itself.

It's hard to get a grasp on twenty-plus year old visions of the future.  But to take this statement seriously, I see either the sort of impulse, found in precincts from John Cage's aesthetics to the quirkier sort of Marxist and psychoanalytic thought, of the union of life and art, or a really bad idea for a possible economic future that looks horrible to democratic, republican eyes.  I've no answers to these questions; but I'll be offering some more comments on Fuller, Kohák, and looking, in a future post.

Comments

[Bunny Smedley]

What an absolutely excellent post. Further instalments will doubtless be worth the wait.

Those who haven't read Fuller 'in the orginal' may need something footnoted for them here, which is that whatever his other qualities might have been - and one has to wonder whether this isn't, to some extent, a sort of Freudian assault on Berger - he was often an almost painfully clunky prose stylist. And not in a good way, either, as in Greenberg's prose, where the simplicity, even where it looks laboured, is making a worthwhile statement in its own right. With Fuller, it's often just - well, clunky. And yours isn't.

Not that the intelligence, sensitity, genial sense of humour and kindness present in your reading aren't something Fuller deserves - I feel sure they are. It's hard to think of anyone else, in Britain anyway, who was writing anything so fresh and important about art in recent memory. But - well, there are certainly advantages, aesthetic as well as otherwise, to reading your account of Fuller, rather than the real thing!

[Bunny Smedley]

Actually, while we're on the subject, do you have any idea what on earth Fuller was on about in the final paragraph you quote? I mean,

the latter will have to be incorporated into our productive life in a much more radical way than that permitted by leisure, hobbies, or the Fine Art enclave itself

- what does that look like when it's at home?

I only ask because Fuller's stated views on politics, like his understanding of religion, were all over the place. The influences are often all too clear - but his distinctive take on them, often less so, in part due to the problems with his prose outlined above.

The 1983 gestation is worth highlighting. This was three-plus years after Mrs Thatcher was elected, but only a few months before the Miners' Strike. If there was ever a time when, here at least, it seemed possible to create a new [fiscal] heaven and a new [microeconomic] earth, especially for a semi-recovering Marxist, those were the days! You, JL, have Billy Bragg, if not Mr Cowling, to tell you this, but I fear that others may not realise what this date meant in the UK. There really was all to play for, and whatever the future may have looked like, it wasn't exactly beautiful.

Only a couple of years before, sane people in all parties in Britain had worried that some sort of revolution might be at hand. No, really! This is worth noting, if only because otherwise, one might not realise how possible other ways of living may have seemed. But what I don't quite see is exactly what Fuller imagined. A sort of post-industrial feudalism? But how would that have worked without religion? What did he want, really? Genuinely, this is something about late-phase Fuller that I have never understood. The main point, though, is this - that whatever he wrote, he probably meant it more literally than we might credit in these bland, consensual, milk-and-water hours.

Direct rule by the Prince of Wales would certainly have struck a chord with me, but I do recognise that this is a minority taste.

[JL]

Wow, thanks. A couple of quick responses before I have to run: I remember picking up the newspaper in 1981 and seeing a picture of a black London sky filled with smoke, below the headline, "Britain's Agony". All to play for indeed.

As for that particular line, that's what I'm wondering. One thing I thought of, hence the reference to Cage and others, was that he was imagining that art could be freed from the narrow area of leisure, the art world, etc., and become integrated into all aspects of life. Perhaps here it might be better to follow Huizinga and speak of the "play element" of art--Fuller also connects art to play, and it seems to be what he's after.

But really, I have no idea. And when even a lapsed Marxist starts to talk about the need to do anything more radically, especially if it involves some vague notion of economic reoganization leading to a new society, I get a little uneasy.

[Bunny Smedley]

Cut the poor thing a bit of slack, JL ... Fuller was a lapsed Marxist who'd spent three years at Peterhouse. feasting with Maurice Cowling. I rest my case.

(Seriously, though, I am sure you are right about Cage etc., and even Huizinga and all sorts of haptic fun. That one line just sounds way too political to me, and I'd love to see it unpicked in full.)

Apropos of very little, it worries me that the distance separating my toddler son from 'Reaching to the Converted' is not that far removed from the distance that once separated me from my mother's Spanish Civil War fundraising LPs. I feel a bit old.