Water Ambient Through Water

Page II

Those who have taken proper drawing classes will know that the objective of the exercise of drawing is not to produce the replication, not to accrue the facility for simulating appearances. Plato was right in this, and, without an increment of true irony possible, Nietzsche agreed. The reproduction of appearances is nothing of value in itself and not the point of art—it is mere scaffolding, a means to an end. The objective is to hone the facility for line—to learn to produce a living line, a line that is not just capable of configuring a seemingly living presence, but a line that itself seems sinuously alive, that can configure a seemingly living presence because it is itself seemingly alive. Of course, there is no learning this. Some just can, and most cannot. Most merely scratch away at the paper, evidently hoping that a compounding of many tiny lines, aligned, will produce the smooth cut of something like living tissue—what Blake means by hesitance. It is a talent, if you will. But there is the honing of the talent, the mastery of it, like learning to ride a horse: one does not dominate the line, or succumb to it. One goes the third way: one becomes the line.

Seurat was not adept at the line. There is no smooth sinuosity to his stroke; there is none of that intangible tangibility, none of that living presence in the way he strikes the paper. He has no velocity to his hit. He is frankly ham-handed and hesitant. He scours the sheet. He does not dance the image he makes; he manufactures it. Even his most intricate, photographically convictional executions of light and dark do not swim on the paper, do not swirl and pulse; they are not fluid. They are staid and serene; they are structures rather than fleeting observations captured. They are architectonic. They are designed, which is not quite the same thing as being drawn.

The quality is oft noted, and it is attributed to his geometricizing his figures. This is of course the case—it would have to be, for the quality is too easy to miss, and thus too hard to claim in its absence. (Perhaps the only major artist who could simultaneously emphasize and bury his geometry was the still master of the mode: Piero. Perhaps the only one who could do geometry subtly.) It is the majority of his renditions: stiff, angular, ultimately boxy figures, unconvincingly set in scenarios similarly simplified and awkwardly rendered. Consider Nurse, c. 1882: the wall plaque in the exhibition states “Seurat simplified the figure, rendering it as a series of geometric forms,” and characterizes the nurse’s cloak as “trapezoidal.” Woman with a Dog, c. 1882-82, is almost perfectly symmetrical. Square House, c. 1882-84, is entirely so, with the overall composition being geometrically regularized, meaning simplified down to uncomplicated forms of plane and volumetric geometry. The road sweeps up to the house as a fanning set of regular curves. Except for the sloping roof, the lines of the house are all parallels and perpendiculars. It is thoroughly unlifelike, not because the lines of life are not geometrically regular, but they, and the line Blake wanted, are more complex, subtler, more writhing. For all the smooth regularity of this work, the smooth lines are scratched together out of small clumsy ones, and there is no rapidity here. This composition just sits—the sure sign of a wanting of draughtsmanship. And it is not quite an irony that Seurat’s smooth lines composed of a multitude of far smaller lines are geometrically less complex than the single python stroke of a Blake or, better, a Michelangelo. As in all the important things, the sureness is all.

Seurat is complimented for his geometric regularity, his geometric simplicity, as a move toward the abstracting of the figure, a move toward the invention of, ultimately, non-representational abstraction. But, taking conviction from the complete lack of evidence to the contrary, one is drawn to say that Seurat did not cut his figures, or anything else, with a living, snake-like sinuosity because he could not. His drawing prowess was simply insufficient. And so it would seem, making a virtue of necessity, he found his way through innovation, through invention of means. Much the same could be true, much the same would seem to be true, of a number of the progenitors of abstraction, because, in the sense of drawing being propounded here, they could not very well. The matter becomes clearer if one takes the rendering of the human figure, insignificant as that is aesthetically, as a measure of the ability to cast the line. Cézanne was clumsy with the figure. Monet was far worse, and after a certain point relatively early in his career, he never attempted it again—though in his case, his poor draughtsmanship is compensated by the fact that he had possibly the largest arsenal of distinct brush strokes in the history of Western painting. Van Gogh had a quiver full of means for rendering in ink, but his handling of the figure was little better than that of Cézanne. There are similar weaknesses with Gauguin, Dove, Malevich, Pollock, and others. With the possible exception of Picasso, it is difficult to think of a major artist who was masterful in the way he could draw and chose, at least on occasions, not to—like a pianist forsaking virtuosity.

There is a self-evident problem with this. While it is certainly possible to transform a necessity into a virtue (to the redemption of us all), it is not quite the same thing to attempt to transform a weakness into a strength. To move away from one’s weaknesses is not necessarily to move toward one’s strengths. The motion directly away from weakness follows the vector of fear, and capability is accrued by embracing fear, not fleeing it. Emerson: “Always do what you are afraid to do,” or, as Nietzsche never quite put it but came close to and would have endowed us all had he: Inability is not an argument.

Heralding one’s inability to draw is an excuse, and finding another way is not necessarily to obtain to a better option. Picasso puts it to us: if you can draw, would you, and could you profitably, decompose figuration?

So what have we got with Seurat’s drawings? What do they achieve beyond the eschewing of the embarrassment? What more is here beyond the apology they inevitably are?

What we clearly have is an idea, although it may not be the caliber of idea that Blake required, which is to say the drawings may not be art in the sense Blake understood—which is much to say. But the idea here is nothing insignificant, nothing pallid or banal, and that, too, is much to say. It may well make the matter of aesthetics a mere aside, or itself insignificant, or open to redefinition in a meaningful manner, because the intelligence of the idea is a foundational standard. In any field, if the thought is intelligent enough, no other consideration is of significance. If Seurat has changed the rules of the game and thereby said something it is imperative to hear, said something that could be said in no other way, or has not been, then he has implicitly established the standards of judgment by which he can be evaluated, for in the life of the mind, the worth of intelligence cannot be doubted—it is simply the thing done, and done to a higher degree. And all that aside, if he has been intelligent enough, then clearly, on the kind of common sense grounds it is merely ignorant to question, like asking why two plus two makes four, he has done enough. Sooner or later, something must go without question, and in that matter, intelligence trumps aesthetics.

And the thought in these works, the meaning of the vision they invoke, is a substantial one, for it is a vision of an alternate conception of existence, a different conditionality of the extant, of what it means to be, and makes it possible to be, present. In this, as in all matters of essential conception, of the determining of founding conditions for the thought of anything beyond the essential conception—that which must be thought in terms of essential conceptions, which thereby serve as background conditions out of which all further thought arises as a chemical product of the first conditions or as an emergent property conditioned by them—there is a choice of two. There is always a fundamental decision between clean alternatives, a decision that determines all else for all else will follow from it, and the choice in the question of the nature of the extant is between particle and field. Either all that exists is a collection of particles, of whatever nature in themselves, distributed over an extension, a field—space—or all that exists is a set of configurations of the extension, of the field, composed of the field in some manner of distortion of its extensiveness and composed of nothing else. Either what exists is a rock in water, or it is a whirlpool—of the water, with there being, therefore, nothing but water.

It should be noted immediately—because this is where thought on this matter tends to run off the rails—that such coupled pairs, paired alternatives between which one must choose, can never be uncoupled, not merely as alternatives for the skeletal construction of theory but as components of any theory then constructed. Every theory of the real must contain both particle and field, or else neither, if that is conceivable, because, conceptually, there can be no particles without a field in which they are distributed—otherwise, they would all be in the same place and it would be meaningless to talk of more than one particle, and if that particle has density, extension, then we have just re-created the field and there are no particles—and there can be no field without particles, or at least localizations, points in space (whether occupied or not, but identifiable)—a difference between “here” and “there”—otherwise, everything would collapse down to a point and we would have just re-created the particle in the only meaningful sense in which it is not a field: dimensionless, a mathematical point.

What is at question in all foundational conception is never which of the coupled pair of alternatives to accept and which to reject, but which to make foundational to the other—what is to be explained in terms of what. In the theory of the real, the question is whether particles, or identifiable localizations, exist because the field must be marked in its extension, in order to be a field at all, or whether the field exists because there are, and in order for there to be, particles in distribution, separated by “here” and “there”? The choice regarding the theory of the real, and the determining of the essential nature of the real in theory, is between particle theory and field theory, and we have been battling over it all along—whether we are objects aswim in the universe, or configurations of water, ambient in water. In fact, the alternative can be said to mark one of the “basic” differences between Plato and Aristotle.

What Seurat renders through his absence of the bounding line, and through the density of the figures and settings he is able to evoke in and yet out of the continuum of his modulating shadow, is the visual realization of field theory. Everything that is apparent in his drawings, everything that seems to arise as distinct object, is of a piece, and the piece is the continuing reiteration of the tooth of the paper. It is everywhere, and it is the substance of everything, and every “thing” appears by way of a densification or rarefication of the inescapable inkling of the texture. All is texture to varying degrees of collection. All is as much the continuum as it is a foreground set against the continuum. And every edge of every apparent object is only, and all the less, apparent—the closer one stands to the surface, the less easily one can determine exactly where any edge is supposed to be, for “in fact,” the edges aren’t there.

And if one looks hard enough, if one looks closely enough, one can see the tragic import in all this. If all is the configuration of the field, and the field is all that is, then nothing exists “in itself”—the square house is not there, not in itself, nor is the woman walking with a parasol, nor Pierrot and Colombine, nor the woman with her embroidery, nor any of the figures, nor any of us. If the field is all that is, then we are not, for we are merely chemical combinations of it or its aspects, or emergent properties dependent on chemical combinations of it (for that is why emergent properties emerge under some conditions and not others), we are molecular agencies rather than atoms, and when the molecular components disperse, as they once began to cohere, and rearrange themselves into other molecular dispensations, everything continues just as it was—except us. And if the aesthetic status of Seurat’s drawings is to be under question, it should be noted that this vision is precisely what Nietzsche informed us in The Birth of Tragedy.

And this is precisely the vision that Blake cannot enclose because of his insistence on the bounding line, whereby everything rendered is rendered distinct from everything else—whereby everything rendered is, in fact, rendered. This is precisely the vision Blake wished to rule out through the insistence on the bounding line: “the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.” And so, evidently, man and beast must exist, and so there must be a bounding line to distinguish them, or else “all is chaos again.” That chaos is what Seurat embraced—that chaos is what he saw. That chaos is what he makes us see.

What Blake found absent, the absence that Blake found brings on “chaos again,” is what “man or beast” is: “life itself.” It is life that is his concern; it is the conception that brings about the implicit absence of life, for life is found only in living forms, that is his concern. And thus Blake’s concern is similar to Goethe’s when Goethe opposed Newton’s conception of the world for rendering a vision of the real that omitted life, and unwisely attempted to devise scientific principles that would root the truth of the world in the fact of life, or at least the facts of human observation—a set of principles meant to generate an alternative to the Newtonian conception. Blake, as well, takes his issue with the Newtonian vision.

I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite which they Measure by Newtons Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom. A Thing that does not Exist. These are Politicians & think that Republican Art is Inimical to their Atom. For a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else.

But there is something of a mash here. Newton’s “fluxions” was his mathematical method, now called the calculus, which was the name Leibniz gave to it when he devised it at roughly the same time, and the calculus, or fluxions, is the math for calculating “the minutest subdivisions” of any extension—for Newton, the path of an orbiting sphere, broken down by the math to a vector analysis of its precise acceleration at any one, precise moment. In short, the calculus is the math that gives a “slice” of that which is continuous, of a continuum—of a field. The calculus is pertinent to, and thus is about, the mathematical point, and so about infinite divisibility, and it has nothing to do with the indivisible atom—with the particle. And so, Blake and Newton are on the same page on this, a fact that Blake may have better acknowledged with his engraving of Newton. Or, better—Newton and Seurat are on the same page with their unbroken continua, and Blake, with his continuous, infinitely divisible line for separating out the indivisibles of life (man or beast), differently distributed indivisibility and infinite divisibility—another coupled pair.

Which is to say that there is something of a mash whenever we attempt to confront or combine the issues of life—of experience and perception and thought—with the issues of what Seurat can better be said to have been after: truth, what is, regardless of what we perceive. For there is a category confusion here: life and truth are incommensurables. When the microscope of contemplation is focused for the examination of life, the focal length is wrong for truth and truth swims out of definition, out of all evidence—it is nowhere to be seen. And when the focal length of thought is set for truth, the opposite results. The two are never in the same field of mental vision. Truth and life preclude each other.

And so it may well be that Blake is right—when there is only the tint, only the loosely distinguishable configurations of the continuous field, there is no life, for life depends on the distinguishment, on the line between this and that. And Seurat may be right—that the truth of the matter is that there is only the continuum, that we, seen by eyes other than ours, are not to be seen, that water ambient through water leaves merely water. And thus life, and all of us with it, can be said not to exist, and not to be in evidence, however illusory the evidence, except when perceived by that which lives, which is a perfect Möbius strip of a thought, or perhaps just a mystery. Life is then the beautiful illusion, the intellectual beauty, and it is nothing more. And there too is a tragedy, or perhaps it is the same tragedy—perhaps there is only and always one tragedy, and it is life.

And that leaves us with the question of art, and of Seurat as an artist, and whether Seurat defined himself out of the game. Take a look at Seurat’s Woman Reading in the Studio, c. 1887-88. She is at study in the studio, the studio that seems something of a laboratory, a situation of investigation and inquiry, where secrets are delved and revealed through the instrumentation of the means of art. Perhaps Blake was right—art is where and how we conjure the illusion of life, and intellectual beauty is a fantasy, and the line indispensable to pure art, the line that is art drawn down to its essential, is the means of art’s alchemy. And then Seurat was no artist—to his benefit, to ours, for he was a teller of truth. And the woman is a seeker of knowledge. But then, she is in an art studio, and she is reading.

THE AWFUL shadow of some unseen Power
   Floats though unseen among us,—visiting
   This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
   It visits with inconstant glance
   Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
   Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
   Like memory of music fled,—
   Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

© Mark Daniel Cohen—Nietzsche Circle, 2007

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007)

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