Nietzsche and the Future of Art

Page II

Kandinsky’s references to Nietzsche are made more for the sake of emphasizing the radical nature of the change he wished to bring to art and to civilization than for the purpose of helping to define the objectives of the new art of total abstraction. In his principal book and, in essence, manifesto, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written in 1911, Kandinsky cites Nietzsche to mark the fundamental change in civilization already underway in his time. “When religion, science and morality are shaken, the two last by the strong hand of Nietzsche, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt.”(16) In the same year, the artist wrote a paper, “Whither the ‘New’ Art?” in which he again compliments Nietzsche for being a causal agent in a groundbreaking change in cultural values and ideas: “Consciously or unconsciously, the genius of Nietzsche began the ‘transvaluation of values.’ What had stood firm was displaced—as if a great earthquake had erupted in the soul.”(17)

Despite this vagueness of stated affiliation, there are substantive similarities between Nietzsche’s thought and Kandinsky’s artistic program, as laid out in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In Kandinsky’s estimation, civilization, at least Western Civilization, had over the last several centuries passed through a period of what he called “materialism,” a time which was then only beginning to pass. The period was marked by a faith in material reality, a belief in only the things of physical presence, as a result of which, the sense of “the inner meaning of life”(18) had been lost. However, due to the shaking of “religion, science and morality,” the realization of inner meaning had just begun to return. “Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip. Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness.”(19) To respond to the renewed need and to spur the return to a sense of inner meaning, an art must be developed that would dispense with the reproduction of the appearances of the material world and that would evoke subtler, more refined emotions than had been elicited by the realistic painting of the past. As painting developed the means for initiating increasingly finer, subtler emotional responses, it would eventually gain the strength to convey the experience of “the spiritual life,”(20) the life “to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements.”(21) The majority of Kandinsky’s book makes clear that his new art, the art of pure abstraction, was devised to be just such an art, an art to evoke his “spiritual life,” and Nietzsche is one of the few extra-artistic thinkers, and the only philosopher, to whom Kandinsky is able to append commendation for contributing to his cause of broad cultural, spiritual evolution.

Kandinsky’s assault on materialism, carried out in his work through the complete break with fidelity to the representation of a world of objects, bears distinct similarities to Nietzsche’s criticism of the conception of the world as constituted of material, enduring, substantial objects, as well as to Nietzsche’s rejection of classical causality, which is rooted in a naïve materialism. Furthermore, there is a Nietzschean quality to Kandinsky’s assessment of the cultural, psychological inheritance of the time of materialism—his sense of the inner meaning of life as having been lost, leaving us “with the despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal,” leaving us in a spiritual vacuum, in which we ask, “Where is the meaning of life? Where lies the aim of life? And the surrounding silence answered: There is no aim in life.”(22) This sounds much like Nietzsche’s own critique of fatalism. Even more specifically, Kandinsky attributes the beliefs and the psychological implications of materialism to the positivistic worldview—in speaking of those who are “blind atheists” and who acknowledge the existence of nothing more than they can physically observe, Kandinsky wrote, “In science these men are positivists, only recognizing those things that can be weighed and measured.”(23) The roots of this assessment can be found in Nietzsche’s evaluation of the psychological weakness that positivism, and its secret motivation to establish a metaphysics, represents and evokes. In The Gay Science, he observed:

Metaphysics is still needed by some; but so is that impetuous demand for certainty that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form. . . . Actually, what is steaming around all of these positivistic systems is the vapor of a certain pessimistic gloom, something that smells of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, and fear of new disappointments—or else ostentatious wrath, a bad mood, the anarchism of indignation, and whatever other symptoms and masquerades of the feeling of weakness there may be.(24)

For Kandinsky, of course, the antidote to this state of affairs, to the cultural legacy of materialism, is to be found in art—in the dark times of such fatalistic, positivistic despair, “nobody needs art.”(25) Or so it seems, for in the final analysis, the entire universe acts to refine and sensitize the human soul, touching it with subtle implications and sensitivities that are like unorganized musical sounds. “A force is required to put these fortuitous sounds of the universe into systematic combinations for systematic effect on the soul. This force is art. . . . Art is spiritual bread.”(26) Despite the artist’s references to a spirituality that Nietzsche would never have acknowledged (and it is worth noting that nowhere does Kandinsky define what he means by “spirituality”), there is a clear alignment between his belief in art as the antidote to an age of materialistic illusions and Nietzsche’s thought, as there is between Kandinsky’s sense of the universe as necessarily tuning the human senses and Nietzsche’s conception of an art necessarily and perennially of the future. For neither of them can art become obsolete.

It is specifically Nietzsche’s idea of the world as a confluence of opposing, interdependent forces that influences and is reflected in the work of many of the subsequent innovators of abstraction in the visual arts. In the space available here, only a few can be mentioned. Various commentators have observed the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy on, most notably, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the Futurist painters such as Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo, and the inventor of Constructivist sculpture, Naum Gabo.(27)

Gaudier-Brzeska, a young sculptor who died on the battlefield in World War I, was the principal figure in the Vorticist movement, which was defined by the poet Ezra Pound as heralding an art that depended on an image more determined by an intrinsic dynamism than by a stabilized and static meaning, an image that “is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”(28) The Futurists, among whom Boccioni and Russolo are exemplary instances, sought to create between the two world wars an art that celebrated the rush and sheer force of the new machine age, an art of the future in their sense of what was to come, and they found their inspiration as much in Mussolini’s dubious and tendentious misreading of Nietzsche as in Nietzsche’s own texts. In the new Constructivist art movement, based on the Suprematist movement of Kasimir Malevich, Gabo sought to explore and reveal the new conceptions of space and time that “are reborn to us today,” as he explained in his statement of artistic purpose, The Realistic Manifesto, written in 1920. To do so, Gabo observed that the artist must recognize that all things are “entire worlds with their own rhythms, their own orbits,” and to reveal them in their true nature, the artist must work so as to leave “only the reality of the constant rhythm of the forces in them.”(29)

It can be argued readily that the last significant period of development and achievement in abstract painting was that of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York from the 1940s to, at the latest, the early 1960s. All the most recognizable names in the movement wrote sufficiently to make their artistic intentions verbally clear, and the commitment to an art of truth-telling, an art of an ontological claim, was general and unmistakable. The most overt assertions came in an article written by three of the Abstract Expressionist artists—Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman—published in 1943, in which they argued that this new art, for them, “is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks,”(30) and that they painted “flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”(31) The issue of formalism—of the exploration of painted form for its own sake—was addressed, and they claimed a presence and importance of subject matter in their work: “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”(32) In another essay, “The Sublime is Now,” published in 1948, Newman goes so far as to raise the issue of “the desire for sublimity” in the new art, opposes it to beauty, and claims that the objectives of the sublime are being reasserted: “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”(33) Despite the fact that no confessions are made regarding an influence of Nietzsche or an alignment with his thought, the Nietzschean cast of these ideas is clear.

That Nietzschean cast in Modernism was not ghettoized to the visual arts. In music, Arnold Schönberg, who devised the mode of atonal music, claimed that the unique qualities of music eluded verbal expression or explanation. Like Nietzsche’s art of the future, which makes its ontological claim in forms that are, ultimately, inexplicable, conveying a sense of the mystery of the Dionysian insight, for Schönberg music is “the language of the world, which perhaps has to remain unintelligible, only perceptible.”(34) In any attempt to translate the details of musical language “into concepts, into the language of man, which is abstraction, reduction to the visible, the essence is lost.”(35)

In Modernist literature, the most salient example of an evident practice of the Nietzschean aesthetic is in the work of Robert Musil, for Musil does acknowledge Nietzsche’s influence via the philosopher’s criticism of material substance and discrete enduring objects and his valorization of the world as Becoming. Musil makes the influence on his work evident in the figure of Ulrich, the protagonist of his novel Man Without Qualities, who, following the insight, inspired by Nietzsche, into the “ungroundedness of the world and the self,”(36) into the absence of any eternal, unchanging foundation underlying the world of incessant change, develops a radical skepticism towards an understanding of time in which the present is a punctual “now.” Such a skepticism has its foundation in Nietzsche’s conception of the eternal recurrence of the same, which under a rigorous logical analysis renders the Moment of ontological temporality as not a point in flowing time but as the source of the phenomenon of linear time. Musil’s skepticism of the conventional conception of time leads to the rejection of the punctual present as “nothing but a hypothesis, which one hasn’t gotten beyond yet.”(37)

Musil puts his rejection of present and substantive presence into literary practice, in what he calls “essayism,” meaning thereby the literary essay as “momentary snapshot” that “grasps” the contingent, non-teleological moments that constitute the world. The art of “essayism” is performative in that it is like a sheer event in “not striving towards a goal if one understands by the term ‘goal’ a judgment with a claim of truth. For in this domain there is no truth.”(38) In short, there is no possible final answer regarding the meaning or nature of the world—there are only changing, experimental postulations, reflecting the endlessly changing nature of the real. It is a truth of a different order.

Musil practices “essayism” via the form of Man Without Qualities by breaking radically with the principle of teleologically oriented development. In the novel, he abandons the continuum of classical narrative in favor of discontinuous, nomadic fragments that serve as parts of a non-totalizable “whole,” one which allows no determinate meaning or closure but only infinite allusion. In this way, the referential function of language is suspended, a suspension that gives way to what Musil calls the “sense for potentiality” (Möglichkeitsssinn),(39) which enables the author to render the nonteleological structure of the real by allowing the discovery of “ever new solutions, connections, constellations, variables.”(40)

The moment that exists apart from the flow of linear time is an often-ignored trope of literary Modernism. It is a central motif in T. S. Eliot’s final poetic work “Four Quartets,” which opens with as close to a direct presentation of its nature as one would think is possible: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.”(41) What Eliot elsewhere in the work calls “the moment in and out of time”(42) can be taken to be unredeemable in the very sense Nietzsche would recognize—that it is not a mere illusion behind which stands a different, metaphysical, changeless reality. Such a moment that is the fountain of time but is not subjected to the flow of time can be recognized also in the epiphanies that occur in James Joyce’s stories in Dubliners and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as in Virginia Woolf’s moments of being, Marcel Proust’s memory, and William Faulkner’s moments of heightened perception, particularly in The Sound and the Fury.

The Nietzschean profile of thought can be found throughout key works of Modernism in the arts, and Modernist Art can be and has been characterized as art that makes the ontological claim. Yet, it is generally accepted that the Modernist Period in the arts extended only through the early 1960s, and that we now inhabit a time in art history that follows a different protocol. Evident most clearly in the field of the visual arts, we are presumed now to be in a time in which the Modernist formalities, and in particular abstract art, have been exhausted or have been transformed into mere formalisms; the “art” of the artwork is located in the idea behind the work and not in the accomplished execution; and Conceptual Art, Installation Art, and New Media Art all orient on issues less ambitious (or, it is argued, pretentious) than ontological insight. What constitutes art is taken to be defined by contextualization, by the cultural conventions that determine what is seen as art and what is not, rather than by an intrinsic and indispensable function that can be fulfilled in no other way, and artistic experimentation is concerned with pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a work of art. Art’s issue is not with the truth of the world but with the “truth” of art—under a Duchampian protocol of thought, artists seek ever new possibilities of what can be viewed as acceptable within a gallery space.

Within such an intellectual environment, it is possible to argue the case for the end of art. That case is made nowhere so powerfully or influentially as in the writings of Arthur C. Danto, the principal proponent of the idea. Danto makes clear his source for the thought: Hegel, the philosopher of the end of history, the philosopher of the culmination of the world in an ultimate synthesis and of a cessation of Becoming that Nietzsche could not countenance. There is a key sense in which no two philosophers could be as opposed as Nietzsche and Hegel.

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