REPOST: The Art-Work of the Future - Part 4
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 IV. Outlines of the Art-Work of the Future
If we consider the relation of modern art -- so far as it is truly
art -- to public life, we shall recognise at once its complete
inability to affect this public life in the sense of its own noblest
endeavour. The reason for this is, that our modern art is a mere
product of culture and has not sprung from life itself; therefore,
being nothing but a hot-house plant, it cannot strike root in the
natural soil, or flourish in the natural climate of the present. Art
has become the private property of an artist-caste; its taste it
offers to those alone who understand it; and for its understanding
it demands a special study, aloof from actual life, the study of art
theory. This study, and the understanding to be attained from it,
each individual who has acquired the gold wherewith to pay the
proffered delicacies of art conceives to-day that he has made his
own: if, however, we were to ask the artist whether the great
majority of art's amateurs are able to understand him in his best
endeavours, he could only answer with a deep-drawn sigh. But if he
ponder on the infinitely greater mass of those who are perforce shut
out on every side by the evils of our present social system from
both the understanding and the tasting of the sweets of modern art,
then must the artist of to-day grow conscious that his artistic
endeavours are, at bottom, but an egoistic, self-centred business;
that his art, in the light of public life, is nothing else than
luxury and superfluity, a self-amusing pastime. The daily
emphasised, and bitterly deplored abyss between so-called culture
and un-culture is so enormous; a bridge between the two so
inconceivable; a reconcilement so impossible; that, had it any
candour, our modern art, which grounds itself on this unnatural
culture, would be forced to admit, to its deepest shame, that it
owes its existence to a life-element which in turn can only base its
own existence on the utter dearth of culture among the real masses
of mankind.
The only thing which, in the position thus assigned to her, our
modern art should be able to effect -- and among honest folk,
indeed, endeavours -- namely, the spreading abroad of culture, she
cannot do; and simply for the reason that, for art to operate on
life, she must be herself the blossom of a natural culture, i.e.,
such an one as has grown up from below, for she can never hope to
rain down culture from above. Therefore, taken at its best, our
"cultured" art resembles an orator who should seek to address
himself in a foreign tongue to a people which does not understand
it: his highest flights of rhetoric can only lead to the most absurd
misunderstandings and confusion.
Let us first attempt to trace the theoretic path upon which modern
art must march forward to redemption from her present lonely, sad
station, and toward the widest understanding of general public life.
That this redemption can only become possible by the practical
intermediation of public life, will then appear self-evident.
---------------------------------------
We have seen that plastic art can only attain creative strength by
going to her work in unison with artistic man, and not with men who
purpose mere utility.
Artistic man can only fully content himself by uniting every branch
of art into the common artwork: in every segregation of his artistic
faculties he is unfree, not fully that which he has power to be;
whereas in the common art-work he is free, and fully that which he
has power to be.
The true endeavour of art is therefore all-embracing: each
individual who is inspired with a true instinct for art develops to
the highest his own particular faculties, not for the glory of these
special faculties, but for the glory of general manhood in art.
The highest conjoint work of art is the drama: it can only be at
hand in all its possible fullness, when in it each separate branch of
art is at hand in its own utmost fullness.
The true drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common
urging of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common
public. In this drama, each separate art can only bare its utmost
secret to their common public through negotiation with the other
arts; for the purpose of each separate branch of art can only be
fully attained by the reciprocal agreement and co-operation of all
the branches in their common message.
Architecture can set before herself no higher task than to frame for
a fellowship of artists, who in their own persons portray the life
of man, the special surroundings necessary for the display of the
Human art-work. Only that edifice is built according to necessity,
which answers most befittingly an aim of man: the highest aim of man
is the artistic aim, and the highest artistic aim: the drama. In
buildings reared for daily use, the builder has only to answer to
the lowest aim of men: beauty is therein a luxury. In buildings
reared for luxury, he has to satisfy an unnecessary and unnatural
need: his fashioning therefore is capricious, unproductive, and
unlovely. On the other hand, in the construction of that edifice
whose every part shall answer to a common and artistic aim alone;
thus in the building of the theatre, the master-builder needs only
to comport himself as artist, to keep a single eye upon the
art-work. In a perfect theatrical edifice, art's need alone gives
law and measure, down even to the smallest detail. This need is
twofold, that of giving and that of receiving, which reciprocally
pervade and condition one another. The stage has firstly to comply
with all the conditions of "space" imposed by the joint (gemeinsam)
dramatic action to be displayed thereon: but secondly, it has to
fulfil those conditions in the sense of bringing this dramatic
action to the eye and ear of the spectator in intelligible fashion.
In the arrangement of the space for the spectators, the need for
optical and acoustical understanding of the art-work will give the
necessary law, which can only be observed by a union of beauty and
fitness in the proportions; for the demand of the collective
(gemeinsam) audience is the demand for the art-work, to whose
comprehension it must be distinctly led by everything that meets the
eye. Thus the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means
of all his visual and aural faculties; while the performer becomes
an artist only by complete absorption into the public. Everything,
that breathes and moves upon the stage, thus breathes and moves
alone from eloquent desire to impart, to be seen and heard within
those walls which, however circumscribed their space, seem to the
actor from his scenic standpoint to embrace the whole of humankind;
whereas the public, that representative of daily life, forgets the
confines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the
art-work which seems to it as life itself, and on the stage which
seems the wide expanse of the whole world.
Such marvels blossom from the fabric of the architect, to such
enchantments can he give a solid base, when he takes the purpose of
the highest human art-work for his own, when he summons forth the
terms of its enlivening from the individual resources of his art. On
the other hand, how rigid, cold, and dead does his handiwork appear
when, without a higher assistant than the aim of luxury, without the
artistic necessity which leads him, in the theatre, to invent and
range each detail with the greatest sense of fitness, he is forced
to follow every speculative whim of his self-glorifying caprice; to
heap his masses and trick out his ornament, in order to stereotype
to-day the vanity of some boastful plutocrat, tomorrow the honours
of a modernised Jehovah!
But not the fairest form, the richest masonry, can alone suffice the
dramatic art-work for the perfectly befitting spatial terms of its
appearance. The stage which is to mount the picture of Human life
must, for a thorough understanding of this life, have power to also
show the lively counterfeit of nature, in which alone artistic man
can render up a speaking likeness of himself. The casings of this
stage, which look down chill and vacantly upon the artist and the
public, must deck themselves with the fresh tints of nature, with
the warm light of heaven's æther, to be worthy to take their share
in the human art-work. Plastic architecture here feels her bounds,
her own unfreedom, and casts herself, athirst for love, into the
arms of Painting, who shall work out her redemption into fairest
nature.
Here landscape painting enters, summoned by a common need which she
alone can satisfy. What the painter's expert eye has seen in nature,
what he now, as artist, would fain display for the artistic pleasure
of the full commonwealth, he dovetails into the separated work of
all the arts, as his own abundant share. Through him the scene takes
on complete artistic truth: his drawing, his colour, his glowing
breadths of light, compel Dame Nature to serve the highest claims of
art. That which the landscape painter, in his struggle to impart
what he had seen and fathomed, had already forced into the narrow
frames of panel-pictures, what he had hung up on the egoist's
secluded chamber-walls, or had made away to the inconsequent,
distracting medley of a picture-barn; with it will he henceforth
fill the ample framework of the tragic stage, calling the whole
expanse of scene as witness to his power of recreating nature. The
illusion which his brush and finest blend of colours could only hint
at, could only distantly approach, he will here bring to its
consummation by artistic practice of every known device of optics,
by use of all the art of lighting. The apparent roughness of his
tools and the seeming grotesqueness of the method of so-called
'scene-painting' will not offend him; for he will reflect that even
the finest camel's-hair brush is but a humiliating instrument, when
compared with the perfect art-work; and the artist has no right to
pride until he is free, i.e., until his art-work is completed and
alive, and he, with all his helping tools, has been absorbed into
it. But the finished art-work that greets him from the stage will,
set within this frame and held before the common gaze of full
publicity, immeasurably more content him than did his earlier work,
accomplished with more delicate tools. He will not, forsooth, repent
the right to use this scenic space to the benefit of such an art-
work, for sake of his earlier disposition of a flat-laid scrap of
canvas! For as, at the very worst, his work remains the same no
matter what the frame from which it looks, provided only it bring
its subject to intelligible show: so will his art-work, in this
framing, at any rate effect a livelier impression, a greater and
more universal understanding, than the previous landscape picture.
The organ for all understanding of nature, is man: the landscape
painter had not only to impart to men this understanding, but to
make it for the first time plain to them by depicting man in the
midst of nature. Now by setting his art-work in the frame of the
tragic stage, he will expand the individual man, to whom he would
address himself, to the associate manhood of full publicity, and
reap the satisfaction of having spread his understanding out to
that, and made it partner in his joy. But he cannot fully bring
about this public understanding until he allies his work to a joint
and all-intelligible aim of loftiest art; while this aim itself will
be disclosed to the common understanding, past all mistaking, by the
actual bodily man with all his warmth of life. Of all artistic
things, the most directly understandable is the dramatic action
(Handlung), for reason that its art is not complete until every
helping artifice be cast behind it, as it were, and genuine life
attain the most faithful and most intelligible show. And thus each
branch of art can only address itself to the understanding in
proportion as its core -- whose relation to man, or derivation from
him, alone can animate and justify the art-work -- is ripening
toward the drama. In proportion as it passes over into drama, as it
pulses with the drama's light, will each domain of art grow fully
intelligible, completely understood and justified.
On to the stage, prepared by architect and painter, now steps
artistic man, as natural man steps on the stage of nature. What the
statuary and the historical painter endeavoured to limn on stone or
canvas, they now limn upon themselves, their form, their body's
limbs, the features of their visage, and raise it to the
consciousness of full artistic life. The same sense that led the
sculptor in his grasp and rendering of the human figure, now leads
the mime in the handling and demeanour of his actual body. The same
eye which taught the historical painter, in drawing and in colour,
in arrangement of his drapery and composition of his groups, to find
the beautiful, the graceful and the characteristic, now orders the
whole breadth of actual human show. Sculptor and painter once freed
the Greek tragedian from his cothurnus and his mask, upon and under
which the real man could only move according to a certain religious
convention. With justice, did this pair of plastic artists
annihilate the last disfigurement of pure artistic man, and thus
prefigure in their stone and canvas the tragic actor of the future.
As they once descried him in his undistorted truth, they now shall
let him pass into reality and bring his form, in a measure sketched
by them, to bodily portrayal with all its wealth of movement.
Thus the illusion of plastic art will turn to truth in drama: the
plastic artist will reach out hands to the dancer, to the mime, will
lose himself in them, and thus become himself both mime and dancer.
So far as lies within his power, he will have to impart the inner
man his feeling and his will-ing, to the eye. The breadth and depth
of scenic space belong to him for the plastic message of his stature
and his motion, as a single individual or in union with his fellows.
But where his power ends, where the fullness of his will and feeling
impels him to the uttering of the inner man by means of speech,
there will the word proclaim his plain and conscious purpose: he
becomes a poet and, to be poet, a tone-artist (Tonkünstler). But as
dancer, tone-artist, and poet, he still is one and the same thing:
nothing other than executant, artistic man, who, in the fullest
measure of his faculties, imparts himself to the highest expression
of receptive power,
It is in him, the immediate executant, that the three sister-arts
gather their forces in one collective operation, in which the
highest faculty of each comes to its highest unfolding. By working
in common, each one of them attains the power to be and do the very
thing which, of her own and inmost essence, she longs to do and be.
Thus: that each, where her own power ends, can be absorbed within
the other, whose power commences where hers ends, she maintains her
own purity and freedom, her independence as that which she is. The
mimetic dancer is stripped of his impotence, so soon as he can sing
and speak; the creations of Tone win all-explaining meaning through
the mime, as well as through the poet's word, and that exactly in
degree as Tone itself is able to transcend into the motion of the
mime and the word of the poet; while the poet first becomes a man
through his translation to the flesh and blood of the performer: for
though he metes to each artistic factor the guiding purpose which
binds them all into a common whole, yet this purpose is first
changed from "will" to "can" by the poet's will descending to the
actor's can.
Not one rich faculty of the separate arts will remain unused in the
united Art-Work of the Future; in it will each attain its first
complete realization. Thus, especially, will the manifold
developments of Tone, so peculiar to our instrumental music, unfold
their utmost wealth within this art-work; indeed, Tone will incite
the mimetic art of Dance to entirely new discoveries, and no less
swell the breath of Poetry to unimagined fill. For music, in her
solitude, has fashioned for herself an organ which is capable of the
highest reaches of expression. This organ is the orchestra. The
tone-speech of Beethoven, introduced into drama by the orchestra,
marks an entirely fresh departure for the dramatic art-work. While
Architecture and, more especially, scenic landscape painting have
power to set the executant dramatic artist in the surroundings of
physical nature, and to dower him from the exhaustless stores of
natural phenomena with an ample and significant background; so in
the orchestra, that pulsing body of many-coloured harmony, the
personating individual man is given, for his support, a stanchless
elemental spring, at once artistic, natural, and human.
The orchestra is, so to speak, the loam of endless, universal
feeling, from which the individual feeling of the separate actor
draws power to shoot aloft to fullest height of growth: it, in a
sense, dissolves the hard fixed ground of the actual scene into a
fluent, elastic, impressionable æther, whose unmeasured bottom is
the great sea of Feeling itself. Thus the orchestra is like the
Earth from which Antæus, so soon as ever his foot had grazed it,
drew new immortal life-force. By its essence diametrically opposed
to the scenic landscape which surrounds the actor, and therefore, as
to locality, most rightly placed in the deepened foreground outside
the scenic frame, it at like time forms the perfect complement of
these surroundings; inasmuch as it broadens out the exhaustless
physical element of nature to the equally exhaustless emotional
element of artistic man. These elements, thus knit together, enclose
the performer as with an atmospheric ring of art and nature, in
which, hitched to the heavenly bodies, he moves secure in fullest
orbit, and whence, withal, he is free to radiate on every side his
feelings and his views of life, broadened to infinity, and showered,
as it were, on distances as measureless as those on which the stars
of heaven cast their rays of light.
Thus supplementing one another in their varying dance, the separated
sister-arts will show themselves and make good their claim; now all
together, now in pairs, and again in solitary splendour, according
to the momentary need of the only rule- and purpose-giver, the
dramatic action. Now plastic mimicry will listen to the passionate
plaint of thought; now resolute thought will pour itself into the
expressive mould of gesture; now Tone must vent alone the stream of
Feeling, the shudder of alarm; and now, in mutual embrace, all three
will raise the will of drama to immediate and potent deed. For one
thing there is that all the three separated arts must will, in order
to be free: and that one thing is the drama: the reaching of the
drama's aim must be their common goal. Are they conscious of this
aim, do they put forth all their will to work out that alone: so
will they also gain the power to lop off from their several stems
the egoistic offshoots of their own peculiar being; that by this
means the tree may not spread out in formless mass to every wind of
heaven, but proudly lift its wreath of branches, boughs and leaves,
into its lofty crown.
The nature of man, like that of every branch of art, is manifold and
over-fruitful: but one thing alone is the soul of every individual,
its most necessary urge (Nothwendigster Trieb), its strongest
impulse from need. When this one thing is recognised by man as his
fundamental essence, then, to reach this one and indispensable, he
has power to ward off every weaker, subordinated appetite, each
feeble wish, whose satisfaction might stand between him and its
attainment. Only the weak and impotent knows no imperious, no
mightiest longing of the soul: for him each instant is ruled by
accidental, externally incited appetites which, for reason that they
are but appetites, he never can allay; and therefore, hurled
capriciously from one upon another, to and fro, he never can attain
a real enjoyment. But should this need-bereft one have strength to
obstinately follow the appeasement of his accidental appetite, there
then crop up in life and art those hideous, unnatural apparitions,
the parasites of headlong egoistic frenzy, which fill us with such
untold loathing in the murderous lust of despots, or in the
wantonness of: modern operatic music. If the individual, however,
feel in himself a mighty longing, an impulse that forces back all
other desires, and forms the necessary inner urgence which
constitutes his soul and being; and if he put forth all his force to
satisfy it: he thus will also lift aloft his own peculiar force, and
all his special faculties, to the fullest strength and height that
ever can lie within his reach.
But the individual man, in full possession of health of body, heart,
and mind, can experience no higher need than that which is common to
all his kind; for, to be a true need, it can only be such an one as
he can satisfy in fellowship. The most imperious and strongest need
of full-fledged artist-man, however, is to impart himself in highest
compass of his being to the fullest expression of fellowship; and
this he only reaches with the necessary breadth of general
understanding in the drama. In drama he broadens out his own
particular being, by the portrayal of an individual personality not
his own, to the universally human. He must completely step outside
himself, to grasp the inner nature of an alien personality with that
completeness which is needful before he can portray it. This he will
only attain when he so exhaustively analyses this individual in his
contact with and penetration and completion by other individuals
-- and therefore also the nature of these other individuals
themselves -- when he forms of this so lively a conception, that he
gains a sympathetic feeling of this complementary influence on his
own interior being. The perfectly artistic performer is, therefore,
the individual man expanded to the essence of the human species by
the utmost evolution of his own particular nature.
The place in which this wondrous process comes to pass, is the
theatrical stage; the collective art-work which it brings to light
of day, the drama. But to force his own specific nature to the
highest blossoming of its contents in this united and highest
art-work, the separate artist, like each several art, must quell
each selfish, arbitrary bent toward untimely bushing into outgrowths
of no benefit to the whole; the better then to put forth all his
strength for reaching of the highest common purpose, which cannot
indeed be realised without the individual, nor, on the other hand,
without the individual's recurrent limitation.
This purpose of the drama, is the only true artistic purpose that
ever can be fully realised; any other purpose must necessarily lose
itself in the sea of things indefinite, obscure, unfree. This
purpose, however, the separated art-branch will never reach alone,
but only all of them together; and therefore the most universal is
at the same time the only real, free, the only universally
intelligible art-work.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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