From: shannon stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 09/18/01-06:42:36 AM Z
Katherine wrote:
>
>On last Tuesday, I spent the afternoon photographing a row of pears in a
>kitchen windowsill as I listened to unfolding events on the radio, and
>on Wednesday I made a gum print from one of those negatives. It came out
>lovely, golden-brown with a soft light, peaceful and quiet, but looking
>at it I was almost overwhelmed with a sense of futility and despair,
>thinking that art is simply irrelevant in a situation like this, and as
>such has no power to console.
I was having some of the same feelings. What's the point of making a
few pretty prints, I thought. I should go back to my farm in TN, keep
as close as possible to the ground, and mindlessly weed and knit and
weave and forget about this fine art business. Then I went to a
lecture at U of H about the art that the Dadaists made during WWI and
its immediate aftermath. Specifically we were looking at Grocz
(spelling?) and Kurt Schwitters. I am glad they made those things.
While the work of Grocz is hard to look at, it still bears witness to
a terrible time, while Schwitters' work is more about the Keats idea
of making something beautiful to counter all the bad things. Also he
made it out of bits and pieces of junk and scraps of paper he found,
proving that trash and detritus , like horrible events, can be made
into art.
Also I have an idea for a video project. I walked down my street
early yesterday morning taping people leaving for work, dropping kids
off at daycare, talking to neighbors, and cats playing in yards, and
pigeons strutting. Also I taped every flag I saw, and there was one
on every other house it seemed. The upshot of it was that the peace
we take for granted every day--the peace that allows us to drop kids
off at daycare without fear, go to work, let animals play in the
yard, etc--is extremely precious, and we realize that when we realize
how fragile it also is. The flags kept reminding me that maybe this
peace is temporary, that we might be going to war soon. So, in
addition to making beautiful things, we can also make more overtly
political art that has to do directly with the events of sept 11.
Also, here is a quote from Rebecca West that I found the other day at
the New Republic web site. I deleted some of it that was about HG
Wells, as it wasn't relevant to this discussion. It was written in
the first months of WWI.
--shannon
The Duty of Harsh Criticism
by Rebecca West
Post date 03.13.00 | Issue date 11.07.1914
[Ed. note: In his review of a new collection of Rebecca West's
letters in the March 20, 2000, issue of The New Republic, Frank
Kermode wrote, "if ever a writer so young demonstrated what
Shakespeare called 'the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind,' it was
she." While still in her twenties, Rebecca West began penning reviews
that were perceptive, eloquent, and, more often than not,
devastating. In this essay, the twenty-three year old West castigates
her fellow critics for their soft-headedness and failure to live up
to their responsibilities. The critic, she argues, has a duty to keep
clear "the path of letters," thereby making it possible for art to
save people's souls. Setting an example for her fellow critics to
follow, she then lays into George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells for
certain heretofore overlooked failings. And let it not be said that
West played favorites: When this essay appeared--in volume one,
number one of The New Republic--H.G. Wells had been her lover for
more than a year--and would remain so until 1923.]
To-day in England we think as little of art as though we had been
caught up from earth and set in some windy side street of the
universe among the stars. Disgust at the daily deathbed which is
Europe has made us hunger and thirst for the kindly ways of
righteousness, and we want to save our souls. And the immediate
result of this desire will probably be a devastating reaction towards
conservatism of thought and intellectual stagnation. Not unnaturally
we shall scuttle for safety towards militarism and orthodoxy. Life
will be lived as it might be in some white village among English
elms; while the boys are drilling on the green we shall look up at
the church spire and take it as proven that it is pointing to God
with final accuracy.
And so we might go on very placidly, just as we were doing three
months ago, until the undrained marshes of human thought stirred
again and emitted some other monstrous beast, ugly with primal slime
and belligerent with obscene greeds. Decidedly we shall not be safe
if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our
souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done
before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in
art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with
inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a
ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the
soul.
......
Now, when every day the souls of men go up from France like smoke,
we feel that humanity is the flimsiest thing, easily divided into
nothingness and rotting flesh. We must lash down humanity to the
world with thongs of wisdom. We must give her an unsurprisable mind.
And that will never be done while affairs of art and learning are
decided without passion, and individual dulnesses are allowed to dim
the brightness of the collective mind. We must weepingly leave the
library if we are stupid, just as in the middle ages we left the home
if we were lepers. If we can offer the mind of the world nothing else
we can offer it our silence.
Santayana on Shakespeare
To the movies with Virginia Woolf
H.G. Wells defends James Joyce
Shaw responds to a young critic
RELATED LINKS
Three Clowns
Gilbert Seldes on the Marx Brothers in their natural habitat: on stage (1926).
Eugene O'Neill
Stark Young, a true homme du théâtre, discerns genuis in his young
contemporary (1922).
A Short View of Proust
Edmund Wilson on the posthumous masterpiece Remembrance of Things
Past, complete at last (1928).
A Radical and a Patriot
Henry Fairlie gives Randolph Bourne, "The last man who believed in
America," his due (1983).
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