Page 13 - Studio International - January February 1975

Robyn Denny
And in their highest forms the two become, in ours, celebrated as a certain
blended together in such perfect unity fact. As specialized interests clamour for manifestations relate to each other — the
that succeeding generations marvel at the attention, the focus of art has blurred, its network of systems through which they
wonder of it. function neutralized, its dispersal a correspond and interact upon the
As I pondered on what to say in the condition accepted as the norm. No sensibilities of the state, shifting its focus,
first of these series of William Townsend longer part of a unified humanistic changing its direction, making
Memorial lectures, I was aware that culture, it has become many other things connections between things assumed
lurking on the edge of my consciousness instead — institutionalized, contained, unconnectable — which are the objects of
through all my conscious time as an isolated, protected, patronized, rejected, art. And the recognition that this aim can
artist was an equation that doesn't work or whatever responses the state and its only be realized through some
out. That the individual plus the state no institutions have made to the cultural rearrangement of the traditional equation
longer equals art in a natural connection. eruptions of the last one hundred and that I spoke of, imposes upon the artist in
And that the utopian view of art was fifty years. our society a special burden of
perhaps unrealizable in a state that But art cannot thrive in subjugation to responsibility that cannot be avoided.
assigns to art a status so separate from its the separate life of the state. Nor its own Indeed upon all those who make claims
central aims. The utopian view of the life prolonged beyond its natural span in for art and work within its sphere. To
function of art is one where it is nothing a kind of limbo of detachment. Though construct in the empty space that separates
in itself, and can only thrive in a unified originating in the consciousness of each them a kind of dynamic — an animated
relation of its inner life and that of the individual, art acquires significance only flow — whose vibrations are felt by all
external world; that the function of art is to the extent of its integration in the those who pass between. For in that
not simply to take the bits and pieces of an general culture, as a social factor. The space is art, each separate event like a
imperfect world and assemble them will of the individual and that of the transmitter, bouncing signals from one
together in some agreeable community replenishing each other, space to the next.
correspondence to the Tolstoyan ideal, shrinking the boundaries of time and As a child I had the habit, when
but rather it is to nave in mind a constant place, defining the space which separates leaving a place that I liked, of leaving
goal of integration. them. there something of myself. A coin, a
The reconciliation assumed, in our This legacy of alienation has been the piece of paper, something from my
culture, from the advance of knowledge subject of much discussion, and pocket concealed where no one else
and the access this gives us to its history, impinges heavily on the state of art in our would find it. A crack in a wall, a hole in a
its institutions, its global aspirations, has time. It has become to some extent the tree, or buried in a tin. I can remember
yielded a paradox: in the global village subject of art itself, renewing its systems the places now, and going back, if they
each man is an island. Its territory from its systems. Redefining itself from were still there, could find them without
sacred, its integrity cherished, its itself. But the aim of reconciliation difficulty. The present and the future
separateness a celebration in itself. The becoming real in the future cannot be blended in my mind for a moment in that
alienation of art from the central aims of realized by introspection and detachment, act — the space between a kind of
the state, gathering momentum each separate manifestation exclusive and sculpture out of time. For me, in art,
throughout the nineteenth century, has self-replenishing. It is the way these each work has some meaning of that
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