Page 33 - Studio International - April 1965

†

R. B. Kitaj
London by night Part 1 1964
Oil on canvas 53 x 73 in.
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery,
New York

sequence of all we have striven for in the past fifty an object, and the moment of disclosure is our aware-
years ? Does the movement that began with Cezanne ness of the logos incorporated in the work of art.*
and his resolve to wrest the secret of being from the This great enterprise has been betrayed by the permis-
visible universe lead logically and inevitably to the sive art of today, the art which 'abandons the philo-
present disintegration of the visual image? I would sophic guides'. This art without concentration, without
wear sackcloth and ashes if I thought so. On the con- relationship, this art which boasts of its inconsequence
trary, the great enterprise that was initiated by Cezanne and incoherence, is not art at all, and though some of its
has often gone astray and some of its outriders have practitioners are undoubtedly sensitive, they are like
been lost in the desert. But the main line of advance has delinquent children who destroy a beautiful object
been clear and consistent. Whether as an extension of shamelessly because they are not loved, because they
perceptual experience or as a realisation of inner feeling, resent the world they did not make, a darkening world, a
the main purpose of the modern artist has been to world characterised, in Heidegger's words, by 'the
establish being. He has redeemed vision from its merely flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the
reproductive task (the obsession of the degenerate mediocre'. standardisation of man, the pre-eminence of the
Renaissance tradition) and has dared to be creative,
that is to say, to transcend the accepted level of exist- I have spent too much time on the criticism of a phase
ence. I speak in somewhat Heideggerian terms, but of modern art which is admittedly ephemeral, and may
Heidegger is the only modern philosopher who has have gone out of fashion before these words can have
seen that art has this vital and predominant purpose, any effect. But the social conditions that determine the
namely, that it is an act of violence that discloses being. emergence of such a kind of anti-art are not ephemeral :
Art is what most immediately brings being to stand, they are with us in increasing and frightening intensity.
stabilises it in something present, that is to say, in the Until we can halt these processes of destruction and
work of art. Art for this reason must always be revolu- standardisation, of materialism and mass communica-
tionary, for we cannot remain inactive in our existential tion, art will always be subject to the threat of disintegra-
situation (inactivity in this sense is a living death). We tion. The genuine arts of today are engaged in a heroic
continually struggle with appearance, and against the struggle against mediocrity and mass values, and if they
nothingness that is death. We are always threatened by lose, then art, in any meaningful sense, is dead. If art
spiritual and mental disintegration, the prelude to dies, then the spirit of man becomes impotent and the
physical disintegration and death, and art is the effort world relapses into barbarism.
n
to resist disintegration, 'to recapture oneself out of con-
fusion in appearance'. We cannot do this by thought, by Cf. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (trans. Ralph Man-
heim). Yale Univ. Press, 1959, passim.
intellection of any kind. Being can be disclosed only in Op. cit. p. 45.