Art as History

If Heidegger is right, that Art creates society rather than society creating Art, then what would this be like?

Obviously, artefacts that are ‘favoured’ (approved of?) are, on a micro-level, passed down or passed around. Until recently, one’s taste in popular music was a shorthand for telling others who you were: you referenced bands as a way of indicating your emotional and moral dispositions. Allegiance to a particular band or pop/rock star indicated your attitude to the world. This kind of behaviour originated in the 1950s, when the rise of popular music – Elvis, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent – was coupled with the availability of cheap transistor radios, record players and a younger generation who were not going to war. The concept of “the teenager” was borne: an intermediate group, between children and adults, apparently rebellious – mods & rockers, hippies, punks – before “settling down” to the banalities and tedium of adult life. In passing, it’s worth mentioning here the Marlon Brando film, The Wild Ones, and that classic, depoliticising exchange, when the shopkeeper asks what he’s rebelling against…to which the Brando character replies “Whatdaya got?”. This is crucial: it transforms rebellion because of dissatisfaction with “the ways things are” into a simple, hormonal side-effect before the teenager “grows up” and accepts that “this is just the way things are”.

From this we can infer that, again on that micro-level, the liking for the band(s) of our youth that we “pass down” to, say, our children is based on nostalgia. Our memories transform our youth into halcyon days before our dreams and aspirations, often seen to be represented by and in our musical choices, were reeled in by responsibilities. When I play the Rolling Stones, the Clash or the Sex Pistols to our children I am trying to represent a past version of myself, one with a very different set of priorities to those I have now. It’s worth noting here that another factor has come into play in the past twenty or thirty years: the cult of youth. Becoming ‘old’ is no longer acceptable, it is to be feared (from a psychoanalytic perspective, as a precursor to death). Thus, what could be described as my ‘clinging’ to these bands, insisting that they are still relevant, is a way of asserting that I am still relevant, that I am still ‘youthful’. There are, of course, other factors involved here: how one dresses; the rise in cosmetic surgery (to maintain one’s “youthful looks”); house decor; who one associates with. In short, the creation of a public self – in much the same way as the concept of self appears post-Copernicus during the Renaissance – to dominate the world around one. I shall leave the development of this self, through Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Wilde’s idea of the mask, to one side for the moment. Suffice to say, that social media merely refines this public self: the smiling photographs; the ‘achievements’; the disclosing of “personal struggles”; the insistence on ‘happiness’. This is “self as advertisement”, a self conscious (or perhaps ‘unconscious’ is more accurate) of the need to have the events of one’s life validated by others. To be unseen is to cease to exist. I’m not suggesting that this desire to be seen is new, it isn’t: what is writing if not the desire to be seen by others? To communicate beyond death? Why build this, establish that foundation, carve your initials on a tree trunk? All of these are motivated by being seen (which, one might say, is a metric).

This leads us back to my original question though. Does Art create society? Why is it the case that certain artefacts are selected as being more valuable than others? Are seen as encapsulating certain values that should be perpetuated ad infinitum? There is also a related question, equally as important, “Who decides?”

What makes a work by Bach or Mozart valuable? Why have works by these composers been passed down to generations? Do we find their work appealing through some intrinsic sense or because we’ve been told they are ‘good’ (call it what you will)? Put another way, how have Bach and Mozart contributed to our contemporary culture? Which values do they encapsulate that we continue to value? For sure, in the canon of what we can call “classical music”, we can detect their influence in contemporary compositions – we can trace a ‘line’ of influence from their present to our present – but is there something else? The “something else” is difficult to discuss: I can say, by way of example, that the first time I heard Bach’s Cello Suites, I was struck by the thought that there was (is) something ‘right’ about them, that even though I had never heard them before I had an “inner sense” that I had. A stupid thing to say, but the right kind of thing to illustrate what I’m getting at. I could say much the same about Mozart and Mahler…and the Rolling Stones and the Clash. With the latter, I know it was because they articulated a political anger and frustration with way things were (Thatcher’s government; unemployment; poverty and so forth). Not so easy with Bach. Was it because of my upbringing? The person who first played them for me? The timing, in terms of experience and perception?

Easier with film. I was struck (“…like I was shot by a diamond bullet” as Kurtz says in Apocalypse Now) by Godard’s films because here was someone who didn’t treat me as an idiot, who demanded as much effort from me in interpreting the meaning of his work as he exercised in making it. His films have a complexity that standard pattern narratives do not possess. His work is film as philosophical treatise, artefacts one can (must) return to again and again. There is no closure and “on to the next one”. The camera stops filming the people onscreen, but their concerns, the issues they wrestle with, continue in the spectator/reader. Again though, I can argue that his work is political: he deals with how persons are formed by ideology; how this causes contradictions in their lives; how one might confront the dilemmas of one’s contemporary present. In these ‘themes’ his work is timeless – anchored in his present but relevant to one’s own (unlike, say, the poetry of John Dryden which requires us to “read around” the history of the time to male sense of his meaning). Whatever historical background is required is built into his films.

I’m not going to run through examples of each art form. Suffice to say, when we read the novels of, say, Eliza Heywood, Fanny Burney or Jane Austen, the issues stand out to us, ask us to compare our contemporary present with the time of writing (and, it has to be said, reach depressing conclusions.

I cite these novelists, Godard (I’d also include Resnais and Antonioni) and popular music (the Rolling Stones were, before they became their own tribute band, overtly political) because they rather contradict Heidegger’s idea. If Art creates society, then why haven’t we learnt lessons from these and moved on – progressed? Why aren’t these artefacts of merely historical interest, representations of “the way things were”?

Part of the reason, it seems to me, lies in the formalisation of Art through the school and then the university. At a young age, we are taught that “X is good”, “Y is a master/genius”, thus, composers, authors, painters are held up to us as figures we should aspire to. Their work is something we should study in order to be seen as ‘serious’ or ‘proper’. The timeline plays a crucial role in this: we can trace Bach through to Stockhausen; Defoe to Amis; Rembrandt to Rothko. Our ‘education’ can be gauged by adherence to metrics – which are seen as being ‘neutral’ when, in fact, they are anything but. You will probably have heard of all the males I refer to one sentence ago, but what if we replace these with women?

From this perspective, usually called ‘tradition’ (a word which carries with it all kinds of other phrases whose meanings are assumed, such as “common sense, “human nature”, “that just the way things are” and “any decent person…”), what we do is perpetuate historical sexism, racism, homophobia etc. etc., all apparently in the name of ‘education’. An insistence on ‘tradition’ is actually an insistence on stagnation, on the maintenance of traditional power structures. It is worth remarking here that social media – a product of the internet which, initially, promised a “new world” of community and co-operation – works as ‘enabler’ for this perpetuation; the limitations and stereotypes of our culture(s) are reproduced and reinforced. They merely become easier to engage in.

However, to return to metrics, which originate in feudal society, develop in proto-capitalist society and become sacred in the capitalist society of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Metrics demand that we measure ‘output’. In feudal society, the poet is measured by his (and it is ‘his’) knowledge of the designated classics in Latin and Greek. This metric continues into the proto-capitalist societies of the Renaissance and the early modern period (look at Oxford and Cambridge. N.B. I went to Abderdeen University, only narrowly avoiding the requirement that all first year students study Latin and Greek), but the “great leap forward” comes in the twentieth century, when universities establish timelines, therefore, curricula, for subjects, thus, enshrining metrics in the fabric of “third level education”. We should also note that who is included in these timelines is a reflex of patriarchy. Few, if any women merit inclusion – glaringly obvious in histories of the novel, histories of painting and philosophy per se.

This is important because these timelines instanciate the interests of the ruling class. As Marx argues, they allow the control of ideas. The metric becomes an effective mechanism for the control, and limiting, of thinking itself. Art as metric dooms society after society to simply reproduce the prejudices of the past – we might not forget history, but we do repeat it endlessly.

I have deliberately kept film out of the discussion of metrics because, unlike the other arts, it has arrived late to education (even in the 80s, when I was a student, ‘film’ was folded into English Depts as a “special subject”…not quite respectable) . The European directors who moved film from simple ‘entertainment’ to artefacts that challenged and critiqued had no formal training. They experimented with techniques, defied pattern narrative, inhabited a liminal space between the other arts. The other distinguishing feature of film is that it came from popular culture, the fairground shadow show, a marvel that required the spectator to simply marvel. It also ‘evolved’ on two continents, America and Europe: one chose pattern narrative (in itself a metric), the other saw a liberation of form and thought. Of course, what we have now come to see is that “Arthouse cinema” is measured against “Mainstream cinema”, categorised as ‘elitist’, a vehicle for “left-wing idealism” or, in the current vernacular, “woke ideas”.