Page 14 - Studio International - January February 1975

Hampton Court Maze
order too. Each piece a mark in space, a premises — are determined by the flow us ? Its context and its institutions ? Are
moment preserved, a thought enclosed in between them. In China, as we know, in we in fact still a kind of village culture
time. Thus whatever their function as ancient times, Emperors sought within whose repose there rests a natural
separate things, wherever they are distinction in art, poetry, and writing. life for art, along with everything else,
located in this time or another, their role And for thirteen hundred years success at with its own momentum, its own inner
is only properly realized if the psychic the literary examinations was the only life ? Complacency may sometimes lull
link between them remains intact. For way to official position. Scholarship — the one into thinking so. Or are we a culture
that is where the art lies, not in the things creative intellect — were honoured above so in conflict with itself, so utterly
themselves. all things in a society whose scale of disrupted by factors beyond the reach of
Thus in thinking of the subject of this values has no exact equivalent elsewhere. art, that there is no life for it other than
lecture, I was conscious of having always In Russia, on the other hand, in the early as the instrument or the victim of the
held a view of art that aims for something period of the revolution, intellectuals and state ? That is sometimes how it seems.
more than just unity within the confines artists were harassed, tried and purged. Is not everyone an artist, and a quirk of
of each work. An instinct for something Lenin advised Gorky' not to 'waste his our specialized society assigning that role
difficult to pin down — more difficult to energy whimpering over rotten only to those who submit to its
explain. But where the making of intellectuals', his mockery and contempt institutionalized status — its role
separate things is just a part. Where the becoming absorbed into the flow of circumscribed, its reach foreshortened,
real problems are not only formalist ones everyday life, even in the end accepted the possibility of threat contained ? The
within an ephemeral framework of by those who were his victims. questions asked, the problems they
aesthetics. Rather the form is just the Two cultures. In one a kind of union embody in the context of our wider
means whereby the artist shows his hand— of the inner and outer worlds, which culture. The way we live out the urge we
declares his interest. Matching, with a embraced the belief that man is only part sometimes share to ensure for art a
kind of shorthand, a symbolic language of a universal order, to which all must context, a role more substantial than an
that's constantly re-invented— his inner conform as a price of their survival. ephemeral and decorative adjunct to its
responses to an outer state, and putting it Survival, in the other, depending on time which sometimes it seems in peril of
into some kind of order for himself. For conformity to the political will of the becoming, that is our state of art and
unity within that space defined by marks state. One in which the belief that the central to our culture — the way it is
and moments of time. For an art that is a creative intellect, if not an instrument of defined.
social factor — even a means for change — the state, must by necessity be a threat,
above all for a context. became so deeply engrained that four In the summer of 1914 the famous
decades later, after the Hungarian manifesto of Nevinson and Marinetti was
Within the arteries of any state there revolution of 1956, Kruschev is reported' published in The Times, the Observer and
is a network of factors — institutions, to have complained that if only they'd the Daily Mail, declaring war on the
states of mind — which shape the condition shot ten writers at the right time there state of art in England then. The battle
of art in its own time, governing the would not have been an uprising. to be fought was against the 'worship of
relation between art and the state. The Two cultures. Repose and continuity — tradition and the conservatism of
status of art — its social role and its moral conflict and change. What of ours and academies, the commercial acquiesence
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