1. IAIN BAXTER&: Identity and Environment

Posted: August 25, 2011 | Author: David Bellman

“Real Art is real Art. There is no ancient and modern. The difference between the two is not in art itself, but lies in environment, in our point of view, and in the angle from which we see life.

The greatness of an artist’s work is measured by the depth and intensity of his feelings and emotions towards it, and towards life, and how much of these he has been able to implant and express in that work.”

Emily Carr, “The Something Plus in a Work of Art,” [1935], in Fresh Seeing: Two Addresses by Emily Carr (Toronto, 1972).

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University of British Columbia, Vancouver [5^th Festival of Contemporary Arts], February 1 – 10, 1965:

2 Tons of Ice Sculpture: Beauty through Destruction, Disintegtration and Disappearance

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THE GROUNDWORK THEORY OF HISTORY

It is too early in human history to determine whether any idea has been a failure or a success. If ideas are not accepted , they have not necessarily failed. Nor have they necessarily succeeded because they are widely taught and circulated. This explains why all revolutions have failed: the word has never been ready for any revolution. The proper groundwork for a revolution has never been done. No revolution can succeed until the ground has been made ready for it. Once that has been done there will be no need for the particular revolution: it will already have occurred — quietly.

The principal element in the groundwork is the cultivation of the right atmosphere. This is work that can be done only by individuals in their personal lives. Their work can never be evaluated until the revolution has occurred. It is impossible to say that it never will occur. For atmosphere is a most elusive presence. Atmosphere is very easily evaporated; but it is never lost or destroyed, unless all those who shared it and all evidence of their feeling is eliminated.

Others are with you only to the extent they share your moods. A person who disagrees with you about ninety-five per cent of the things in life cannot be written off as lost. Cultivate and nurture the five per cent of that person which is capable of meeting you. You cannot predict what may spring from that soil. Your influence may not make itself felt for years, or until it is reinforced by the influence of others. But for that very reason you cannot write it off as non-existent.

Thus to speak of the insignificance of the individual in today’s complex and huge world is misleading. The profound achievements of any individual cannot be definitely stated; they are usually intangible if not hidden. An individual’s principal significance lies in the modifications he effects in the atmosphere immediately about him. Effects on large masses are superficial. Only when individuals choose to become mass-men do they surrender their chance to improve the world. The individual cannot expect to see the results of his work. It is a waste of energy to worry about the size of the numbers who are enlisted in the causes one supports.

All change in history is a by-product. It is self-defeating to set out to change history by direct methods. Rather one must work within history. The only thing of value is the communication, development, initiation, revelation, strengthening of individual impulses. The ultimately victorious forces are those made up of the little, unremembered acts of gesture and of mood.

Murray K. Morton, in Limbo: Its Manifesto (Vancouver: The Neo-Surrealist Research Foundation), 1963.

Two logs, each 8’ x 8” x 8”.

“Things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929.

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“We want exhilaration. We want incentive to push further on, we want to make thoughts and longings that will set us wondering, that will make us desirous to explore higher and deeper and wider, to see more, to understand more.”

“Do you know which stars are which and what bird is flying over your head and what flower is blooming? If you don’t the anguish of not knowing is a very valid field for the artist. Moreover when you learn something it’s a good thing to repossess the position of your original ignorance.”

Wallace Stevens has defined “the philosopher’s” and “the poet’s world” (respectively) as “this present world plus thought” and “this present world plus imagination.” By extension from these capacious, concentric relations, we can locate non-objective art in a specific way: in such a domain the artist’s world is this present world plus concentrative potentiality.

Already understanding himself to be what he called “the primitive of the way I discovered,” Paul Cézanne clarifies this original position by revealing an aim that is particular to it: writing in 1905, he remarks: “we must render the image of what we see, forgetting everything that existed before us.” The sense of this aim is to be found in what he himself defined as being “the comprehension of nature from the point of view of expression.” The specifiable conclusion of Cézanne’s pursuit, is, logically, “the realization of that part of nature, which, coming into our line of vision, gives us the picture.” Based as it is on a continuous unification of the external and the immanent in nature, Cézanne’s approach to painting is a dialectical orientation that segregates, as more than merely two points of view, the descriptive from the demonstrative expression. In this sense, we understand the artist when he states: “To paint is not to make a servile copy of the object, but to grasp the harmony between a number of relations, transpose them into one’s own scale and develop them according to a new, original logic.”

In the realization of his art, Cézanne establishes a new association of the literal and the pictorial. Through his experimental method of painting, any definite presence (the material and temporal characteristics of the observable) would come to be known as something immediate being made real in its expression of the persistent present. The artist understood observation to be a process by which experiences get made. His paintings themselves are developed in the reflexive relation that exists between a field of consciousness and its particular focus of attention. As Cézanne notes in 1904: “The man of letters expresses himself in abstractions, whereas a painter, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete form to his sensations and perceptions.” Through Cézanne, a clarity of language informs visual art without the art itself becoming literary; being aware of the artist’s need to “avoid literature in art,” he knew also that he “wrote in painting what had never yet been painted and turned it into a painting once and for all.” It is the language of comprehending observervation that Cézanne so precisely employs, for, as Henri Bergson reminds us, “only the understanding has a language.” Though developed in relation to nature, Cézanne’s realization of a motif is achieved without objective reference to it model. For here, in its non-objective constitution, the expression of what exists is no mere description of existing things; it is a demonstration of how the potential communicates with the actual. And it is from this perspective that Cézanne can write: “An intelligence which organizes powerfully is a sensibility’s most precious collaborator in the realization of a work of art.”

From Cézanne’s conception of art, to organize is to concretize and individualize “the emotional experience of nature” by expressing its identity in the present indicative mode. In this regard, we derive the context for a summation that he himself gave to his own achievement by remarking, “I am a pointer, others will follow….” Cézanne points directly to the present moment through his efforts to make painting the manifestation of a process at work – that of art enlarging our experience of being actively inflected in the world, here and now. His work succeeds with the logic of its own assumption: a form of expression which does not illustrate natural appearances or recognizable subjects can become, alternatively, a means to both establish and identify the particular nature of its own concrete (expanding) reality.

In studies of what he termed “the manifold picture of nature,” Cézanne develops his means of expression at a common boundary between the referential and the self-contained. In works that are brought to resolution as “merely constructions after nature, based on method, sensations, and developments suggested by the model.” Cézanne gives a concrete form to his perception of the model (and its realization) by demonstrating that art can be, as he says, “a harmony that runs parallel with nature.” For Cézanne, to paint was to follow reality in its generation and growth.

For Cézanne, experimental visual art had only one task, which he defined for himself as being the “logical development of everything we see and feel through the study of nature.” As a pioneer practitioner, he could comment that “technical questions are for us only the simple means of making the public feel what we feel ourselves and of making ourselves understood”; but he understood as well that an artist’s technique requires, in his words, both “a language and a logic.” With an insight appropriate to the assertion of Cézanne’s aims, Henri Bergson has observed of oral and written language that it “furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to incarnate itself and thus exempts it from dwelling exclusively on material bodies, whose flux would soon drag it along and finally swallow it up.” Furthermore, to clarify the contemporaneity of Cézanne’s unfinished research, William James observes: “What really exists is not things made but things in the making.”

David Bellman

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Yellow Rope Space, 1966-68, Mount Seymour, North Vancouver, B. C.

200 feet of polyethylene rope, ¼” diam., two heavy guage turnbuckles,

two heavy guage eye screws.

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Under Water Thing, 1968.

Suspended inflated thing drifting in Japanese current.

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“What we have to find … is some touchstone outside the individual peculiarities of human beings, and the only touchstone which exists is nature. And by nature we mean the whole organic process of life and movement which goes on in the universe, a process which includes man, but which is indifferent to his generic idiosyncracies.”

Herbert Read, Education Through Art, 1945.

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¼ Mile Landscape, 1968.

When driving along the highway the driver sees a sign that says,

                YOU WILL SOON

                PASS BY A ¼ MILE

                N. E. THING CO.

                LANDSCAPE.

Shortly he sees

                START

                VIEWING,

and for the next ¼ mile he is driving along-side a ¼ mile designated “N. E. Thing Co. Landscape.”

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PAUL CEZANNE: REVIVIFYING THE OBJECT OF ART

As a questioning, forward-thinking artist, Cézanne shares with Gaugin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat a notional, conceptually ill-defined relationship to so-called Post-Impressionism. If there is a sense to be made of Cézanne’s conceptual position it can be best summarized in a disclosure made by the artist himself. Writing in 1904, he observes:

            This is true, without any possible doubt ― I am quite positive: an optical sensation
            Is produced in our visual organs which allows us to clarify the planes represented
            by colour sensation as light, half tone or quarter tone. Light, therefore, does not
            exist for the painter. As long as we are forced to proceed from black to white, with
            the first of these abstractions providing something like a point of support for the
            eye as much as for the brain, we flounder, we do not succeed in becoming masters
            of ourselves.

Having helped to bring about the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, Cézanne was also to be counted as a contributing artist to the third of such exhibitions, held in 1877; yet he alone, having subsequently abandoned the idea of exhibiting collectively, is to be identified as both a successor, and, more importantly, a forerunner who worked distinctly and with force so as to locate his creative practice in a field of continuous perceptual research. From his social awareness, he locates a new social function for the artist: a responsibility for constructive (continuous) research and sustained (critical) intervention.

“To my mind,” Cézanne comments in 1905, “one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.” Having succeeded in his attempt to render perspective by only the “modulation” of colour, Cézanne was able to verify his conviction that “light does not exist for the painter.” As both a Post-Impressionist and a direct precursor of non-objective art, this discovery sustains his own new link.

The “new original logic” of Cézanne’s art is conclusively expressed about 1900, when, in the painting of landscape, “the understanding of the model and its realization” become fully accomplished. Constructing an internal “general harmony” from contrasts that only an attentiveness to colour can give, he demonstrates, in the movement of reality, that a thing really is where it acts. As Cézanne asserts, “To paint from nature is not to copy the object, it is to realize one’s sensations.” With reference to the perpetual realization of a painting in relation to a contemporary viewer, Cézanne summarizes his own “logic of organized sensations” as follows:

            To read nature is to see it, as through a veil, in terms of the interpretation in patches
            of colour which follow each other according to a law of harmony…. Modelling results
            from the exact relationship of colours. When they are harmoniously juxtaposed and
            complete, the picture develops modelling of its own accord.

A new congruity of the demonstrative and the descriptive is formulated by Cézanne through his concentrative interpretation of nature: as individuated, non-imitative constructions, his landscape paintings refer to both their realization and revivification by becoming this present place at this present time. Writing in 1904, he summarizes the conceptual orientation of his art (in relation to his own incarnation of consciousness through language) by way of the following dictum (written in 1904):

Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into perspective so that each side of an object or a place is directed towards a central point.

In the fullest sense of this aphoristic statement, the words “cylinder” / “sphere” / “cone” do not become objectified as mere metaphors. Through Cézanne’s adaptation of them, these geometric figures function as intermediary forms ― they connect a focus of attention and its periphery to a means of construction and its conception. “For the artist.” he tells us, “to see is to conceive; and to conceive is to compose.” In the motif of Cézanne’s most fully resolved paintings we discover two correlated prospects. From his forward-looking perspective, to conceive Is to individualize an observation ― and to compose is to concretize it. To clarify this standpoint, three statements (made by the artist himself) are of particular importance.

Concerning the cylinder, Cézanne comments:

            I am intent upon expressing the cylindrical side of objects.

From Cézanne’s vantage point, the mere spatial appearance of objects with reference to distance and relative position is subsumed by something more expansively temporal: the evaluation of incidents according to a particular way of looking at them. By concentrating on surface other than front and back, Cézanne’s pictorial point of view is an essential rejection of both the illusion of depth and the suggestion of fixed points in time.

In relation to the sphere, the artist points out:

            Between the painter and his model is an interposing plane, atmosphere.

According to Cézanne’s understanding of the term, atmosphere “constitutes the envelope of the picture in contributing to its synthesis and to its general harmony.” This interposing plane is the empirical reality of immediate experience; co-extensive with both the artist’s construction and its current observeration, it tells of reality itself. In its expression of immediacy, Cézanne’s original but self-evident perspective makes representation more generous by expanding it to function in relation to the conflux of discernable reality.

Finally, by way of the cone as intermediary form, Cézanne explains:

            In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is trained through contact
            with her. It becomes concentric through looking and working. I mean to say that in an
            orange, an apple, or a ball, a head, there is a culminating point; and this point is always
            the closest to our eye; the edges of the objects flee towards a centre on our horizon ….

By means of the cone, Cézanne’s contact with nature becomes concentric by being both proximate to, and subsequently co-extensive with, an immediate point of view. “The fact of incompatible alternatives is the ultimate fact in virtue of which there is definite character,” states Alfred North Whitehead. In its empirical realization, Cézanne’s treatment of nature abandons the vanishing point of abstract perspective to obtain definite character in the concrete particulars of a culminating point that is the source of its own origination.

“Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply,” writes Cézanne, now working, in 1906, on what would become his final picture, “the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I thin I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by now turning more to the right, now more to the left.” As potential intermediaries, the cylinder, the sphere and the cone are used by Cézanne to locate this present world, in place, between words and things.

David Bellman

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