If poetry is what you can’t translate, as
Robert Frost once suggested, then “art” is what you can’t define. Nevertheless
it is certainly worth a try. Art covers such a wide range of human endeavour that
it is almost more an attitude than an activity. With the passage of time, the
boundaries of the meaning of art have expanded, gradually yet inexorably. Raymond
Williams, the legendary cultural historian cited art as one of the ‘keywords’ –
one that must be understood in order to comprehend the interrelationships
between culture and society. As with ‘community’, ‘criticism’ and ‘science,’
for example, the history of the word “art” reveals a wealth of information about
how our civilisation works. A brief review of that history will help us to
understand how the relatively new art of film fits into the general pattern of
art.
The ancients recognized seven activities as
arts: History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance and Astronomy. Each was
governed by its own muse, each had its own rules and aims, but all seven were united
by a common motivation: they were tools, useful to describe the universe and
our place in it. They were methods of understanding the mysteries of existence
and as such, they themselves took on the aura of those mysteries. As a result
they were each somehow or the other related to religious activity. The
performing arts celebrated the rituals; history recorded the story of the race;
astronomy searched the heavens. In each of these seven classical arts we can
discover the roots of contemporary cultural and scientific categories.
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History for example, leads not only to the
modern social sciences but also to prose narrative. Astronomy on the other hand
represents the full range of modern science at the time as it suggests another
aspect of social sciences in its astrological functions of prediction and
interpretation. Under the rubric of poetry, the Greeks and Romans recognized
three approaches: Lyric, Dramatic and Epic. All have yielded modern literary
arts
By the thirteenth century however, the word
“art” had taken on a considerably more practical connotation. The Liberal Arts
curriculum of the medieval university still numbered seven components, but the
method of definition had shifted. The literary arts of the classical period –
History, Poetry, Comedy and Tragedy – had merged into a vaguely defined mix of
literature and philosophy and then had been recorded according to analytical
principles as Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic (the Trivium), structural elements of
the arts rather than qualities of them. Dance was dropped from the list and
replaced by Geometry, marking the growing importance of mathematics. Only Music
and Astronomy remained unchanged from the ancient categories.
By the late seventeenth century, the range of
the word had begun to narrow once again. It was increasingly applied to
activities that had never before been included – painting, sculpture, drawing,
architecture – what we now call the “Fine Arts”. The rise of the concept of
modern science as separate from and contradictory to the arts meant that
Astronomy and Geometry were no longer regarded in the same light as Poetry or
Music.
By the late eighteenth century, the Romantic
vision of the artist as specially endowed restored some of the religious aura
that had surrounded the word in classical times. A differentiation was now made
between “artist” and “artisan”. The former was creative and the latter simply a
skilled workman.
In the nineteenth century, as the concept of
science developed, the narrowing of the concept of art continued, as if in
response to that more rigorously logical activity. What had once been “natural
philosophy” was termed “natural science”; the art of alchemy became the science
of chemistry. The new sciences were precisely defined intellectual activities,
dependent on rigorous methods of operation. The arts were therefore also more
clearly defined. By the middle of this century, the word had more or less developed
the constellation of connotations we know today. It referred first to the
visual or ‘Fine’ arts, then more generally to literature and the musical arts.
It could, on occasion be stretched to include the performing arts and, although
in its broadest sense it still carried the medieval sense of skills, for most
part it was strictly used to refer to more sophisticated endeavours. The
romantic sense of the artist as a chosen one remained: “artists” were
distinguished from “artisans” but also from “artistes” (performing artists)
with lower social and intellectual standing.
With the establishment in the late nineteenth
century of the concept of “social sciences”, the spectrum of modern
intellectual activity was complete and the range of art had narrowed to its
present domain. Those phenomena that yielded to study by the scientific method
were ordered under the rubric of science and were strictly defined. Other
phenomena, less susceptible to laboratory techniques and experimentation, but
capable of being ordered with some logic and clarity, were established in the
gray area of the social sciences (economics, sociology, politics, psychology
and sometimes philosophy). The areas of intellectual endeavour that could not
be fit into either the physical or the social sciences were left to the domain
of art.
As the development of the social sciences
necessarily limited the practical, utilitarian relevance of the arts – and
probably in reaction to this phenomenon – theories of aestheticism evolved. With
roots in the Romantic theory of the artist as prophet and priest, the “art for
art’s sake” movement of the late Victorian age celebrated form over content and
once more changed the focus of the world; they were now ends in themselves. Walter
Pater declared that “all art aspires to the condition of music”. Abstraction –
pure form – became the touchstone of the work
of art and the main criterion by which works of art were judged in
twentieth century (A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams).
The rush to abstraction accelerated rapidly during
the first two–thirds of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century the
avant-garde movement had taken the concept of progress from the developing industrial
technologies and decided that some art must be more “advanced” than other art. The
theory of the avant-garde which was a dominating idea in the historical
development of the arts from the Romantic period until the late twentieth
century – expressed itself best in terms of abstraction. In this respect the
arts were mimicking the sciences and technology, searching the basic elements
of their languages – the ‘quanta’ of painting or poetry or drama: the more
abstract the work, the better it should reveal the basics.
The Dada movement of the 1920s parodied this
development. And the parody was echoed in the minimalist work of the mid
twentieth century. This marked the end point of the struggle of the avant-garde
toward abstraction. Having reduced art to its most basic quanta, the only
choice for artists was to begin over again to rebuild the structures of the
arts. This new synthesis began in earnest in the 1960s.
The end of the avant-garde fascination with
abstraction came at the same time that political and economic culture was, in
parallel, discovering the fallacy of progress and developing in its place a
‘steady-state’ theory of existence. From the vantage point of the twenty-first
century, we might say that art made the transition quicker and easier than
politics and economics.
The acceleration of abstraction, while it was
certainly the main factor in the historical development of the arts during the
twentieth century, was not the only one. The force that counters this
aestheticism is our continuing sense of the political dimension of the arts: that
is, both their roots in the community and their power to explain the structure
of society to us.
In Western culture, abstraction and
reductionism faded away by 1970s, the political dimension of art – its social
nature would increase in importance. Now, from the perspective of the twenty
first century, it appears that it hasn’t – at least not to the degree we had
expected. Instead, most of the arts, “film” chief among them, have settled into
a period of commercial calm. There is an evident increase in the political and
social quotient of most contemporary arts: you can see it in the mainstream
influence of Rap music, the flowering of non fiction film, dozens of reality
based TV channels, and even the YouTube revolution. However, the politics that
these arts reflect hasn’t progressed much beyond the stage it had reached by
1970: more or less the same issues concern us now as then, except in some 3rd
World and mid-eastern countries. “Don’t kill the messenger” (and don’t blame
the artist). And, while the artists have understood and accepted the passing of
the avant-garde, the politicians haven’t yet freed themselves from dependence
on the Left-Right dialectic that fed the logic of the avant-garde. So there is
more politics in art – it’s just unsophisticated politics. Moreover, the
explosion in the technology of arts since the mid 1970s has overshadowed and
often displaced the renewed relevance that we expected.
This technology is the 3rd basic
factor that has determined the history of the arts during the past 100 years.
Originally, the only way to produce art was in “real time”: the singer sang the
song, the storyteller told the tale, the actors acted the drama. The
development in prehistory of drawing and of writing represented a quantum jump
in systems of communication. Images could be stored, stories could be
preserved, later to be recalled exactly. For seven thousand years, the history
of the arts was, essentially, the history of these two representative media:
pictorial and literary.
References: Virginia Wexman
James Monaco
Satyajit Ray
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