REPOST: The Art-Work of the Future - Part 3
Derrick Everett
because of propagation problems with the previous posting. Some
participants in the group have reported that they did not receive
all of the parts. I apologize to anyone who receives them twice.
Part III - Man Shaping Art from the Stuff of Nature
Chapter 1. Architectural Art
As man becomes the subject and the matter of his own art, in the
first and highest reference, so does he extend his longing for
artistic portrayal to the objects of surrounding, allied,
ministering nature. Exactly in proportion as man knows how to grasp
the reference of nature to himself in his portrayal of her, and to
set himself in the centre of his survey of the world as the
conscience-woken and the conscience- wakener, is he able to picture
nature to himself artistically; and thereafter to impart her to the
only beings for whom this portrait can be destined; to wit, to men.
In this he proceeds from a like, though not an equally imperative,
impulse to that which urged the art-work whose subject and whose
stuff he was himself. But only the man who has already brought forth
from and in himself the directly human artwork, and can thus both
comprehend and impart himself artistically, is also able to
represent nature to himself artistically; not the unawakened thrall
of nature. The Asiatic peoples, and even the Egyptians -- to whom
nature only showed herself as a self-willed, elementary, or brutish
force, to which man stood in the relation either of unconditioned
suffering or of grovelling self-debasement -- set nature up above
them as the object of their adoration, the graven symbol of their
worship; without, for that very reason, being able to exalt
themselves to free, artistic consciousness. Here, then, man could
never form the subject of his own artistic exposition; but seeing
that, whether he willed or no, he could only conceive all
personality -- such as the personified force of nature -- according
to a human standard, he made over his own image, although n horrible
distortion, to those objects of nature that he wanted to portray.
It was reserved for the Greeks to first evolve the purely-human
(rein menschliche) art-work in their own person, and from that to
expand it to the exposition of nature. But they could not be ripe
for this human art-work itself until they had conquered nature, in
the sense in which she presented herself to the Asiatic peoples, and
had so far set man on nature's pinnacle that they conceived those
personified nature-forces as clothed with the perfect shape of human
beauty, as Gods that bore themselves as men. First when Zeus
breathed life throughout the world from his Olympian height, when
Aphrodite rose from out the sea-foam, and Apollo proclaimed the
spirit and the form of his own being as the law of beauteous human
life, did the uncouth nature-deities of Asia vanish with their
idols, and fair artistic man, awakening to self-consciousness, apply
the laws of human beauty to his conception and his portraiture of
nature.
Before the God's-oak at Dodona the Pelasgian ("primal Greek") bowed
himself in waiting for the oracle; beneath the shady thatch of
leaves, and circled by the verdant pillars of the god's grove, the
Orpheist raised his voice; but under the fair-ceiled roof, and amid
the symmetry of marble columns of the god's temple, the art-glad
lyrist led the mazes of his dance, to strains of sounding hymns --
and in the theatre, which reared itself around the God's-altar -- as
its central point -- on the one hand to the message-giving stage, on
the other to the ample rows where sat the message-craving audience,
the tragedian brought to birth the living work of consummated art.
Thus did artistic man, of his longing for artistic commune with
himself rule nature to his own artistic needs and bid her serve his
highest purpose. Thus did the lyrist and tragedian command the
architect to build the artistic edifice which should answer to their
art in worthy manner.
It was basic natural need that led men to build homes and
strongholds: but in that land and mid that folk from which our whole
art originates, it was not this purely physical need, but the need
of men engaged in artistic presentation of themselves, that was
destined to convert the Handicraft of building into a genuine art.
Not the royal dwellings of Theseus and Agamemnon, not the rude
rock-built walls of Pelasgian citadels, have reached our physical or
even our mental field of vision -- but the temples of the gods, the
tragic theatres of the people. Every relic that has come to us of
architectural art applied to objects outside these, dates after the
decline of tragedy, i.e. of the completed Grecian art, and is
essentially of Asiatic origin.
As the Asiatic, that perpetual thrall of nature, could only show the
majesty of man in the one and absolute ruling despot, so did he heap
all pomp of circumstance around this "god on earth" alone: and all
this heaping-up was merely reckoned for the satisfaction of that
egoistic sensuous longing which, even to the pitch of brutish fury,
but wills itself but loves itself to madness, and in such
never-sated appetite piles object upon object, mass on mass, in
order to attain a final satisfaction of its prodigiously developed
physicality. Luxury, therefore, is the root of all the Asiatic
architecture: its monstrous, soulless sense-confounding outcrop we
witness in the city-seeming palaces of Asiatic despots.
Sweet repose and noble charm breathe on us, on the other hand, from
the radiant aspect of Hellenic temples; in which we recognise the
form of nature, but spiritualised by human art. The broadening of
the temple of the gods to the assembled people's show-place of the
highest human art, was the theatre; where art, and verily that
common-nurtured art which communed with a commonwealth, was a law
and standard to herself; proceeding by her own necessity and
answering that necessity to the fullest; indeed, bringing forth from
it the boldest and most marvellous creations.
Meanwhile the dwellings of the individual units but answered to the
need from which they sprang. Originally carpentered of wooden logs,
and fitted -- like the pavilion of Achilles -- in accordance with
the simplest laws of usefulness: in the heyday of Hellenic culture
they were indeed adorned with walls of polished stone, and duly
broadened out to give free space for hospitality; but they never
stretched themselves beyond the natural needs of private persons,
and neither in nor by them did the individual seek to satisfy a
longing, which he found appeased in noblest fashion in the common
polity; from which alone, at bottom, it can spring.
The attitude of Architecture was entirely reversed, when the common
bonds of public life dissolved, and the self-indulgence of the unit
laid down her laws. When the private person no longer sacrificed to
gods in common, to Zeus and to Apollo, but solely to the lonely
bliss-purveyor Plutus, the god of riches -- when each would be for
his particular self what he had erstwhile only been amid the general
community -- then did he take the architect also into his pay, and
bade him build a temple for his idol, egoism. But the slender temple
of chaste Athene sufficed not the rich egoist for his private
pleasures: his household goddess was Voluptuousness, with her
all-devouring, never sated maw. To her must Asiatic piles be reared,
for her consumption; and only bizarre curves and flourishes could
seek to stanch her whim. Thus we see the despotism of Asia
stretching out its beauty-crushing arms into the very heart of
Europe -- as though in vengeance for Alexander's conquest -- and
exercising its might to such effect beneath the imperial rule of
Rome, that beauty, having fled completely from the living conscience
of mankind, was only known from memory of the past.
The most prosperous centuries of the Roman era present us,
therefore, with the repugnant spectacle of pomp swelled up to a
monstrosity in the palaces of the Emperors and richer classes, and
utilitarianism -- however colossal in its proportions -- stalking
naked through the public buildings.
Public life, having sunk to a mere general expression of the
universal egoism, had no longer any care for the beautiful; it now
knew naught but practical utility. The beautiful had withdrawn in
favour of the absolutely useful; for the delight in man had
contracted to the exclusive lust of the belly. To speak plainly, it
is to the satisfaction of the belly that all this public
utilitarianism leads back, especially in our modern time with its
boasted practical inventions, this time which -- characteristically
enough! -- the more it invents, in this sense, the less is able to
really fill the stomachs of the hungry classes. But where men had
forgotten that the truly beautiful is likewise the highest
expression of the useful, in so much as it can only manifest itself
in life when the needs of life are secured a natural satisfaction,
and not made harder, or interdicted, by useless prescripts of
utility -- where the public care was concentrated on the catering
for food and drink, and the utmost stilling of this care proclaimed
itself as the vital condition of the rule of Cæsars and of
plutocrats alike; and that in such gigantic measure as during the
Roman mastery of the world -- there arose those astounding causeways
and aqueducts which we seek to-day to rival by our railway-tracks;
there did nature become a milch-cow, and Architecture a
milking-pail; the wanton splendour of the rich lived on the skilful
skimming of the cream from off the gathered milk, which then was
taken, blue and watery, along those aqueducts to the beloved rabble.
Yet with the Romans this utilitarian toil and moil, this
ostentation, put on imposing forms: the radiant world of Greece lay
not so far from them but that, for all their practical stolidity and
all their Asiatic gaudiness, they still could cast an ogling glance
towards her; so that our eyes discern, and rightly, outspread over
all the buildings of the Roman world a majestic charm which almost
seems to us a beauty. But whatever has accrued to us from that same
world, across the steeples of the Middle Ages, lacks both the charm
of beauty and of majesty; for where we still may trace a gloomy
shade of undelighting majesty, as in the colossal domes of our
cathedrals, we see alas! no longer any drop of beauty. The genuine
temples of our modern religion, the buildings of the Stock Exchange,
are certainly most ingenuously propped by Grecian columns; Greek
tympana invite us to our railroad journeys; and from under the
Athenian Parthenon the military guard is marched towards us, on its
'relief'; but however elevating these exceptions may be, they are
still only exceptions, and as a rule our utilitarian architecture is
desperately vile and trivial. Let the modern art of building bring
forth the gracefullest and most imposing edifice she can, she still
can never keep from sight her shameful want of independence: for our
public, as our private, needs are of such a kind that, in order to
supply them, Architecture can never produce, but forever merely
copy, merely piece together. Only a real need makes man inventive:
while the real need of our present era asserts itself in the
language of the rankest utilitarianism; therefore it can only get
its answer from mechanical contrivances, and not from art's
creations. That which lies beyond this actual need, however, is with
us the need of luxury, of the unneeded; and it is only by the
superfluous and unneeded that Architecture can serve it; i.e. she
reproduces the buildings which earlier epochs had produced from
their felt need of beauty; she pieces together the individual
details of these works, according to her wanton fancy; out of a
restless longing for alteration, she stitches every national style
of building throughout the world into her motley, disconnected
botches; in short, she follows the caprice of fashion, whose
frivolous laws she needs must make her own because she nowhere hears
the call of inner, beautiful necessity.
Architecture has thus to share in all the humbling destiny of the
divided purely-human arts; to the extent that she can only be
incited to a true formative process by the need of men who manifest,
or long to manifest, their own inborn beauty. In step with the
withering of Grecian tragedy, her fall began; that is, her own
peculiar productive power commenced to weaken. The most lavish of
the monuments which she was forced to rear to the glory of the
colossal egoism of later times -- even of that of the Christian
faith -- seem, when set beside the lofty simplicity and pregnant
meaning of Grecian buildings at the flowering-time of tragedy, like
the rank, luxuriant parasites of some midnight dream, against the
radiant progeny of the cleansing, all- enlivening light of day.
Only together with the redemption of the egoistically severed,
purely- human arts into the collective Art-Work of the Future, and
with the redemption of utilitarian man himself into the artistic
manhood of the future, will Architecture also be redeemed from the
bond of serfdom, from the curse of barrenness, into the freest,
inexhaustible fertility of art-resource.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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