Abstract Art
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Abstract Art
by Julius Evola
abstract artYour works are known to me, and how you have
fame alive, and you're dead.
JOHN Ap. 3-1.
We see the lightning in the light that is reflected on colored cardboard scenarios, and we do not conceive that lightning could exist otherwise, by itself, outside and unlike that light, in the pure infinite sky: the electric current is, for us, the tram that walks, the electric bulb that illuminates.
And we talk about conscience and depth.
What is fundamentally pure in the individual is not known, is not had ; and in the conscience and in the faith and in the will / of the practical form every real of the spirit is invariably resolved.
From the peaks, the living current pours into the plains: there it meets a series of transformers and users, so one part of it goes to move turbines, another to irrigate land, another to water the city, and finally to immobilize itself against huge dark dams. . For the plain, current means drinking water, hydraulic energy, electricity…
So in me the I is not the I, but I-practice, I-feeling, I-philosophy. Illness has built the transformers, and makes it so that it is never a question of feeling, of possessing the ego, the ego outside the categories, the ego meaning of the inner selfish freedom, the ego infinite wealth for which life of every day it appears strange and unreal bare, incomprehensible swelling and corruption of my nocturnal spheres,
Je est un autre . (1)
Virtually, the current of life exists at all times. But, given that everyday movements are determined by symbols, practical schemes, comfortable orientation conventions, it is not possessed, it is not thought, it is as if it did not exist.
Thus the whole life of humanity takes place on earth, on a cooled envelope of an enormous ocean of fire whose distant and pale warmth is not utilized; the fires which illuminate "humanity" and which it only needs are small, domesticated, artificial. For his non-life, the market man does not know what to do with the internal fire: all that he has built and on which he lives, is indolence, cowardice, corruption, a symbolically static element instead of a vital element, and the inner flame that lies abandoned at his feet , if possessed, it would unhinge all its lukewarm cities, it would destroy all its ridiculous ideals, comforts, voluptuous absences, idols: it would annihilate it. But he seeks oblivion, the absence of himself: that is, the practice, the phenomenon, the suffering: and in that of him he drowns, like the brute in the flesh of his female: desperately and Voluptuously.
In practice, there is no need. To affirm the opposite would be tantamount to saying that, due to the fact that all bodies are naturally subject to the force of inertia, it is not possible in the world other than uniform and rectilinear motion. Now the laws of practice / nature and feeling / represent the sole effect of a spiritual inertia . Every truth, in fact, is comfort, as well as every real and every necessary one. The foundation of the validity of fundamental logical principles, as of the postulates of the sciences, as of the ontological elements of morals, lies in their convenience: they accomplish a minimum in the necessary practical activity of the spirit. Wanting space to have ndimensions instead of three, that there is no God, that there is no truth, that the principles of identity and cause are not indispensable in logical reasoning, is an entry into another order of possibilities, where however the practical self will have to carry out an activity much larger; if it can be called an error, the preference of one who has a car to make a journey on foot is an error of the same degree.
The principle of convenience operates automatically, out of direct consciousness; and the will to believe , the basis of every reality, confirms its constructions and illuminates them with a passionate logic.
At this point some pragmatists / CALDERONI, partly POINCARE, VAILATI / finding this reality invariably behind the unconscious of every position, wanted to place it as a regulating principle to be assumed not only in direct consciousness, but also as a spiritual necessity. Now this is radically arbitrary. The law of inertia is always a negative property : "bodies move with uniform and rectilinear motion if there are no causes that modify their movement ". But without these causes the same principle of inertia could not have been perceived. And having enunciated the aforementioned theory is a demonstration of having obeyed once again, in a philosophical species, the sweet passivity ...
Now I do not want to remove the laws of practice: but I cannot tolerate the transcendental use of this ephemeral necessity in absolutely inadequate fields.
Indeed, all that is human and practical can be overcome ...
They do not see because they have eyes, they do not hear because they have ears.
Finding yourself.
It is necessary to feel above all the faculties distinct from psychologies and gnoseologies: it is necessary to feel beyond the atmosphere of humanity and instincts, to place oneself in the life of every day and every hour the indifferently wise engineer who goes among its great motionless machines on the feast day, the surveyor in front of the points, plans and figures of his science. (2)
This is to be found only in intimacy and in solitude, duty and power.
Philosophy can do nothing. It is the method of unconscious superficiality; it, moving in the shape of the market, thinks it is reaching something profound. At best he says how a locomotive could work, and with this he thinks he has also explained the essence of thermal energy. It takes more! But it denies thermal energy itself, it says that it cannot be said that what it said: (3) put the measures, philosophy contradicts the very attitude that lays a foundation of validity in Kritik der reinen Vernunft , by KANT, in the Wissenschaftslehre , by FICHTE, in the logic of HEGEL, in all metaphysics, in short: it denies itself.
Philosophers present the I, they aspire to it, but they have never succeeded and will never be able to challenge it, to possess it, because they are hallucinating about the forms of coherence and the market. It is necessary to have much more blood in the veins: very different means of knowledge ...
As for the constructions of science, they have the same importance in the doctrine of the ego as the researches of the automatic razor and the fountain pen may have had.
Art, as it is understood generically / as feeling or naturalness; as an expression of what is universal and eternal in men /, it is not that it has higher possibilities. Yet, only for an art will perhaps the sign of higher existence be possible. But art is all to be redone, then; in the whole past art there has never been anything really spiritual ... Sentiment and market ... infinite aspiritity of spiritual things .
A method of the spirit, in art as elsewhere, if one abstracts the few mystical lights stirred here and there in the dark and illusory story of history and myth, it is still all to be invented: an abstract method , an impractical method , of purity and freedom. (4)
But all research is disease. Those who do not have, look for: hysterical and vain convulsion of the surface that in the consciousness of being such aspires to something outside of itself. Each method is a sign of decadence and corruption: in vain the mad brutes will break their nails against the inexorable smoothness of the tall white granite that holds them.
Freedom, property, is a mystical moment of illumination: a grace : it is, as soon as it is thought of, as soon as it is pronounced , it is already a dead thing, it falls dirty and foreign rind into the land of brutes and merchants.
And here, on the threshold, the words fade, incomprehensibly ...
The mystical method in itself contradicts itself: but precisely for this reason, because in contradiction with the higher consciousness, and as a method it must necessarily be a practical thing, it does not contradict itself: it is useful, that is, real and because of existence / if accepted / of the representation.
Human, all too human
NIETZSCHE
Art is selfishness and freedom.
I feel art as a disinterested elaboration, posed by a higher consciousness of the individual, transcendent and therefore alien to the crystallizations of passion and vulgar experience.
Aesthetic sentiment must be possessed as a mystical shadow; on the other hand, as a vital Weltschauung : philosophy, art, morals, vulgar experience, science, all of these must be merged and resolved into one in the indeterminate property of the aesthetic moment . It will be based on the fundamental will / pure will to live / rather than on form and phenomenal agitation.
Sincerity / passionate egoism, humanity or brutality: LEOPARDI, DANTE, DIONISIO / is a category for which art becomes an inferior and practical form; that is non-art. Who is sincere is not original, nor creator; who is sincere is objective , and unreasonable automaton of an unleashed force / inertia / of which he knows nothing. The human value that can derive from it is, implicitly or explicitly, conventional.
Thus genius is a conventionality: genius is a function of sentimental culture and education, both practical / passionate and utilitarian /; that otherwise the author of the FANTÔMAS and PONSON DU TERRAIL should be genius at the place of MICHELANGELO and WAGNER. Necessity !: to be able to affirm after the practical determinations posed by culture, that DANTE is not a genius, is as absurd as to affirm that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is different from 180 degrees, after having accepted Euclid's postulate. The universality of the understanding of genius reflects the universality of generic culture, unconsciously passionate and utilitarian: that is, a calcareous encrustation, without any mention of real spiritual necessity.
But non-Euclidean geometries may exist with equal legitimacy. For me, for example, SCHÖNBERG and TZARA are geniuses instead of WAGNER and DANTE.
To be honest, it's cheap: yes! All the effort is to express: that is virtuosity, technical skill. Fatigue and the flag is very waved by the wind!
But it is necessary instead to know not to see, not to find, not to have: to place oneself in nothingness, coldly, under a very lucid and surgical will. And this is creation
for the first time : selfishness and freedom!
The new in art!
My friend MARINETTI has the feeling of him, and he expresses it to me in free words . An academic had another impression, from the human side quite identical to the first, but he expresses it in rhetoric and mythological images. Finally, a realist thinks instead of adequately giving this episode of humanity by means of an objective - conventional fidelity.
VERDI wants to give, let's say, a scene of love: he uses the peasant note melody; DEBUSSY, for the same intention uses the most refined harmony; a savage, still for this purpose, will perhaps find convenient gongs and woods instead. Now all these people are all in good faith, they all agree: it could not be better: they think that a certain expressive medium is worth, better than another, to give that element / need / that is in them, and which is common in them: and even in this sincere belief I agree: on that immobile background which has not varied from APELLE to BOCCIONI, from HOMER to RIMBAUD, from ORFEO to STRAWINSKY, and which will affirm all the more its ironic immobility for the more, in good faith, new / more suitable / means of expression will be sought.
The impulse to the new, in this sense, is a demonstration of humanity, of greater self-denial: drowning of the personality to infinity. As long as there is inspiration, sentiment, good faith and sincerity, no one has come out, and never will come out of that circle in which the brute and the hallucinated are also enclosed.
For the new / the individual / it is necessary to agitate the content, the substratum, beyond the illusory waves of the surfaces: that is, the will is needed at the basis of the aesthetic feeling. Beyond man, create the sense of the One . Where art can save itself, and let see - as through silent night flashes, immense and unsuspected white cities - the flow of higher consciousness, it is where art is above naturalness, sentiment, humanity:au dessus de la melée : where it is selfish and consciously arbitrary expression and, in one, coldly willed, of a state of extraneousness, of living death .
MARINO is more spiritual than DANTE.
Expression:
1) Necessities of expression.
2) Possibility of expression.
1) There is no logical reason in expressing: if you do it, you are hoaxes and prostitutes in the dirty exhibition of your nakedness for the foia of the passion of others. The sincere artist who, shipwrecked in the "divine instant", of inspiration, almost prey to an indomitable fever, creates the "true" work of art, and the dog that jumps on the bitch and mounts her, are the same thing .
Obeying the sweet invitation of the "spirit of nature", the torrid irruption of one's own forces in contrast with external contingencies, the detumescent exhalation of one's pathosmore or less voluptuously plagued, to the brutal rhythms of "external reality" matter / I speak of naturalists: GOETHE; of the romantics: HUGO; of the heroics: WAGNER, DANTE; of the pathetic: BEETHOVEN, KEATS; of the sensors; DIONISIO, MATISSE / is obeying a material need - urinating, sweating and eating that paints the illusion of passionate spirituality in gold - with invariable production, in addition to the best disguises / the artist makes art for himself, and of comedians, and horizontals that are often not even paid.
2) Only elements of an inferior art can be expressed: the expressive, symbolic and determined means in any case serve for the market, for the BERGSON practice and are absolutely incapable of translating pure and intimate movements of the individual. Expression would be the transformation of the pure element into a conventional and human element: of electricity into electric light.
Express and kill.
Therefore it cannot and must not be expressed.
That is to say that the work of art can only be conceived as a luxury , as a whim of the will: it will feel dry and dirty crust fallen indifferently and without passion from the live trunk.
Making art as you take a tea ...
It is evident that the number of people I can shake and convince with my art is inversely proportional to the degree of purity and originality of this art itself.
It is necessary not to be understood.
Schematizing, a spiritual art must overcome:
1) The state of the conceptual conception of the world / forms of vulgar experience /. Two ways:
a) Mystical aesthetics: making practice a spectacle, an object of contemplation: becoming a stranger, disinterested. The personality must be split into a practical self that acts in inertia, and into the other self that, apathetic spectator, unenthusiastically attends an unreal comedy on which, at a nod from him, the immense black velvet curtain can fall. Thus the bridge leaves the monotonous and colorless passage of the current beneath it.
b) Brutal / anti-spiritual aesthetics /: total abandonment of the practical self to the intensive element inherent in pure / subjective sensation /; thus the determinations of practical experience must be dissolved in the dynamic life of an orgiastic and incoherent rhythm.
Hints of the two methods are: (1) for a) aestheticism and ecstatic mysticism ; for b) sensorism , futurism , RIMBAUD. (2)
2) The state of generic spirituality : overcoming all "superior" feelings, all that is "delicate to feel", "noble passion", "greatness" and "heroism"; in short, everything that in high school, in school of fine arts and among romantic ladies is thought to constitute the fine fleurof internal life and which instead is dirty secretion of disease, cowardice, spiritual femininity; and above all, of unconsciousness. Laughing at the sentimentality and the spirit of nature from German provincials like Werther, at the voluptuous heart blenorrhages like SHELLEY and LEOPARDI, at the clumsy sweaty heroisms like Hugo and BARBUSSE. Feeling away any romanticism, from the classic to the brand new NIETZSCHE or IBSEN type, eternal consequence of the exhaustion of the personality in a lower and superficial consciousness. Finally, to place the aspiration of spiritual things : superior, divine, human, which will see themselves irremediably overcome and which will feel dirty scabs of disease that have fallen forever from the pure body of light.
3) The state of the naturalness of the expression , according to what has been said. The aesthetic feeling will be conceived as a sense of intimate activity, hence the need for expression will fall.
Art will be conceived only as a luxury, as a clear whim of the individual who has found and realized himself, the One, for the first time; and who has everyday life as a single spectator, in the audience, has an immense and yet fragile spectacle that at any moment has the possibility of sinking and melting forever in the ineffable ardent coldness of the superior conscience.
Art must be in bad faith. It is more moral to polish one's nails than to do art; the expression of art, among the healthy individual, can never be as interesting as the choice of silk stockings or a tie.
Obviously, because it is disinterested, art must be devoid of any usual content: as it expresses everything, it must mean nothing: there must be nothing to understand in art ...
Art, pure expression ... When art has a content, it is a tool: hoe, lathe, fan ...
The pure aesthetic feeling is an inner and inexpressible feeling and of the expressive means taken in their infinite abstract possibilities, in their absolute disinterested value / without content or purpose /.
Art is one: to be pure poets, pure painters ... Superficiality and poverty of the crystal that feels face, edge, and not substance, crystal ... For those who possess the aesthetic feeling, the means of expression is nothing but an accident. SCHOPENHAUER and NIETZSCHE, in exalting the superiority of music, have shown that they are incapable of understanding the other arts: therefore art itself, perhaps…
Who has only one means of expression, is not an artist….
The very modern art is the closest, although it has hardly been aware of it, to something spiritual. Art, perhaps, begins today.
Psychological elementaries of modern art:
1 ° Insensitivity to the human: despite the deleterious work of culture, today the possibilities of abandonment and exhaustion of the universal meaning have become rarer; it may have been due, in part, to the immediate increase in practice, positive knowledge and artificial refinement / modernity, science and corruption / in today's vulgar life.
2 ° Now the classical work of art, stripped of the human element, remains a formal scheme connected to time: therefore it was natural that it was denied, as an out-of-fashion passion, and the elements that claimed to keep it out of fashion were also denied. time / academism, criticism, theory of absolute values, etc./. If we leave the universal, we are in vulgar practice: in practice, for coherence, we have no reason to exhaust ourselves except in the current elements: here is modernolatry / futurism /.
3 ° To this is added an egoistic withdrawal: subjectivism and individualism; with the birth of a naked, cold, desolate conscience: twilight of idols. In the spirit, agony of feeling; in practice, translation of the center to the priority element of the senses / sensorial idealism, orgiastic subjectivism /.
The Sturm und Drang began with a dive into the brutal by way of purification: after which it would be possible to rise again to a new ideal. The chronological contiguity of the realists with the symbolists is significant in this regard.
This beginning is characteristically carried out by painting: impressionism, primitivism, post-impressionism, futurism: humanity moved to the flickering of light around things has implicitly killed all the classical tradition; a little less from music / MUSSORGSKY, up to DEBUSSY, RAVEL, CASELLA, STRAWINSKY /. Here, therefore, the theme of art is placed in the pure reality of the senses / sensorial idealism. Then came the methodical destroyers: in this field, Italian Futurism distinguished itself for audacity and for the violence of the purifying motif; after RIMBAUD, MARINETTI, with the theory of words in freedom / substitution of the brute forces of matter for the literary "I": lyrical session of matter /, STRAWINSKY and BOCCIONI brought the solution of sanityof the problem, abandoned by DIONISIO until today.
The only thing is that, in order to do something truly decisive, humanity had to be overcome also, and first; this is something that the first of these very new Romans did not care at all: now the car instead of the Nike samotrace is evidently one humanity instead of another; and humanity is not to be overcome , but humanity .
But sometimes, in the work, the artist, rather than being interested in the element of new humanity to be expressed, went to become intoxicated by the means of expression taken in himself. Thus, miraculously, he found himself outside the circle, and the new path towards pure art began: because in the absolute sense of form the pure necessity that posits the artist as such is possessed, and therefore the same primary aesthetic. .
This evolution took place clearly among the analogists: first the image extends its relationship with the content, and there is analogism proper, expression by means of vague sympathies / VERLAINE, KAHN, GIDE, LAFORGUE, MOSCARDELLI /; then it breaks it and closes its reality in itself. From that point the last two elaborations start.
In the first the detached image becomes intoxicated in its sentimental evocative power, so that the poem becomes a pure symphony of the second terms of the analogies, and therefore has reached the abstract passionate spirituality proper to music. This trend started from pre-Raphaelism, then, passing through WILDE, it was totally realized in MAETERLINCK. MAETERLINCK 's Seras chaudu represent the highest degree to which passionate purity in poetry has so far reached. In painting, at the same time, we moved on to expressionism KANDINSKY, BAUER /. Similarly in music it is the harmonic value or sense that takes over until a gradual suppression of all sentimental elements; thus, in part, SCHONBERG, CASELLA, SATIE; less, STRAUSS.
Finally, in the last elaboration, the image / the means of expression / breaks up into the elementary single ones, becomes incoherent and illogical, and, also abandoning its vague sentimental evocative power, is exhausted in its arbitrary necessity. Thus poetry becomes disinterested, non-sentimental, and even in part, inhuman. The element of realistic-conceptual correspondence that, implicitly, remains, is resolved in a total inversion of the classical relationship: “ the content is the expression of the form, not the form and expression of the content “.
And so, after RIMBAUD's hysterical convulsion of humanity, / alchimie du verbe/, MALLARMÉ and APOLLINAIRE go to ajar the doors of this new world; immediately afterwards the light breaks out with TRISTAN TZARA and with the school, which he founded, of Dadaism. And here art has, finally and for the first time, found its spiritual solution: (7) illogical and arbitrary rhythms of lines, colors, sounds and signs that are only a sign of inner freedom and of the deep egoism achieved; that I know no means but to themselves; who do not want to express anything, completely. (8) Here and there the same need for expression is also surpassed. The will and the whim are realized: MARCEL DUCHAMP paints a Dada painting with a reproduction of the Mona Lisa plus a pair of mustaches and a chemical formula; FRANCESCO PICABIA makes a Sainte Viergewith the ink stain of an overturned inkwell; another makes a poem with the show of the 24 letters of the alphabet.
The " Manifeste Dada 1918 ", and the " 25 poèmes ", by TRISTAN TZARA, the woods of HANS ARP represent the expression of the highest state of purity, conscience and ownership of the intimate and profound self, which has ever been had from the beginning of time until today.
Today, after the war / and this also proves the sentimental and practical cause /, on the side, there is the fashion of the return: PICASSO, CARRA, SOFFICI ... People incurably intoxicated with humanity, that modern art could only live as a new academy as was necessitated by their fundamental inferiority, he loves to see the Sturm und Drangof the last decades as a merely transitory state, and gives you a value only insofar as it thinks that it has served to lead back to a new humanity, wider and richer for the various experiences acquired.
There is a sense of pity when you hear them say: - Oh, but these "attempts", these "sentimental experiences" have already passed, we have already exhausted and overcome them ... -
One is called spiritual when he comes to understand the humanity of DANTE, MICHELANGELO, WAGNER. Oh, if you have some bread to eat before you get to where we are ...
Abstract art cannot be historically eternal and universal: this, a priori - PLOTINO, ECHKHART, MAETERLINCK, NOVALIS, RUYSBROECK, SVENDEMBORG, TZARA, RIMBAUD…. All this is but a brief, rare and uncertain flash through the great death, the great nocturnal reality of corruption and disease. Likewise, the rarity of the unspeakable gems among the enormous muddy ganges.
Exceptional art, art out of time ...
Modern art will soon fall: precisely this will be the sign of its purity; it will fall more than anything else, for having been realized with a method from the outside / for a gradual elevation from the disease on partly passionate reasons / rather than from the inside / mystical /.
But, even today, for an instant, the eternal vault of dark lead and plagued with pure blue infinity has opened.
Note
(1) Rimbaud.
(2) See SPINOZA.
(3) KANT: "The same I is thought of only as an affection".
(4) NOVALIS: “Poetry is the great art of building transcendental health. The poet is therefore a transcendental physician. The end of the poet's ends is the raising of man above himself.
(5) Cf. Dionysian and Apollonian sentiment in NIETZSCHE's Die Geburt der Tragödie .
(6) “Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raìsonné dérèglement de tous les sens”.
(7) Strictly speaking, an imperfection of conscience still remains in current Dadaism / 1920 /: the Dada think they have achieved a vital purity while, for the abolition of categories and humanity, they actually went much further beyond. Dadaism lacks mystical interpretation.
(8) ”Vous ne comprenez pas, n'est-ce, ce que nous faisons. Eh bien, chers amis nous le comprenons encore moins ”. / Dada 920 posters /.