.jpeg)
No, we do not want to "engage" painting, sculpture,and music "too/
5
or at least not in the same way. And whywould we want to? When a writer of past
centuries expressed an opinion about his craft, was he immediatelyasked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thingto do to "talk painting
55
in the argot
of the musician orthe literary man and to "talk literature
55
in the argot ofthe painter, as if at bottom there were only one art whichexpressed itself indifferently in one or the other of theselanguages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes.
Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic
calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circumstances, education, and contact with the world particularized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts
of a period mutually influence each other and are conditioned by the same social factors. But those who wantto expose the absurdity
of a literary theory by showingthat it is inapplicable to music must first prove that thearts are parallel.
Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere,it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter as well. And it is one thing to work with color and sound,and another to express
oneself by means of words. Notes,colors, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothingexterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossibleto reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of apure sound, for example, is an abstraction. As MerleauPonty has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception, there is no quality
of sensation so bare that it is
not penetrated with signification. But the dim little meaning which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness,remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist;it is color or sound. Who can distinguish the green applefrom its tart gaiety? And aren't we already saying
toomuch in naming "the tart gaiety
of the green apple?"There is green, there is red, and that is all. They arethings, they exist by themselves.
It is true that one might, by convention, confer thevalue of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the languageof flowers. But if, after the agreement, white roses signify"fidelity
55
to me, the fact is that I have stopped seeingthem as roses. My attention cuts through them to aimbeyond them at this abstract virtue. I forget them. I nolonger pay attention to their mossy abundance, to theirsweet stagnant odor. I have not even perceived them.That means that I have not behaved like an artist. Forthe artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoonon the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stopsat the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it
constantly and is enchanted with it. It is this color-objectthat he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the onlymodification he will make it undergo is that he will
8 transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore asfar as he can be from considering colors and signs as alanguage.
1
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is
also valid for their combinations. The painter does notwant to create a thing.
2 And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason for the ensemble tohave a definable signification, that is, to refer particularlyto another object. Doubtless this ensemble is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives,even hidden ones, for the painter
to have chosen yellowrather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thuscreated reflect his deepest
tendencies. However, they neverexpress his anger,
his anguish, or his joy
as do words orthe expression
of the face; they
are impregnated withthese emotions; and in order for them to have crept
intothese colors, which by themselves already had somethinglike a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and growobscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the skyabove Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke
it. It
is anguish and yellow sky
at the same time. Not sky
ofanguish or anguished sky;
it is an anguish become thing,an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, andwhich thereby is submerged and impasted by the properqualities of things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and thatinfinity of relations which they maintain with other things.
That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immenseand vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps themfrom expressing.
Similarly, the signification of a melody if one canstill speak of signification
is nothing outside of the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately renderedin several ways.
Call it joyous
or somber. It will alwaysbe over and above anything you can say about it. Not because its passions, which are perhaps
at the origin
of theinvented theme, have, by being incorporated
into notes,undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. Acry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it,
but a song of grief
is both grief
itself and something
otherthan grief. Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist
vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more,which is. But, you will say, suppose the painter doeshouses? That's just
it. He makes them, that is, he createsan imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign
of ahouse. And the house which thus appears preserves
all
the ambiguity of real houses.
The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel,
make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provokeyour indignation. The painter
is mute. He presents youwith a hovel, thatV all. You are free to see in it whatyou like. That attic window will never be the symbol of
misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is
a thing. The bad painter
looks for the type. He paints
the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knowsthat neither the Arab nor the proletarian
exists either in
reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain
workman. And what are we to think about a workman?An infinity of contradictory things. All thoughts and all feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state ofprofound undifferentiation. It is up to you to choose.Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. Theypaint long lines of workmen waiting
in the snow to behired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, battlefields. They affect us no more than does Greuze withhis "Prodigal Son.
53 And that masterpiece, "The Massacre of Guernica,
55 does any one think that it won over asingle heart to the Spanish cause? And yet somethingis said that can never quite be heard and that would takean infinity of words to express. And Picasso
5
s long harlequins, ambiguous and eternal, haunted with inexplicablemeaning, inseparable from their stooping
leanness andtheir pale diamond-shaped tights, are emotion becomeflesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the blotter
absorbs ink, and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost,
strange to itself, scattered to the four corners of spaceand yet present to itself.
.jpeg)
No, we do not want to "engage" painting, sculpture,and music "too/
5
or at least not in the same way. And whywould we want to? When a writer of past
centuries expressed an opinion about his craft, was he immediatelyasked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thingto do to "talk painting
55
in the argot
of the musician orthe literary man and to "talk literature
55
in the argot ofthe painter, as if at bottom there were only one art whichexpressed itself indifferently in one or the other of theselanguages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes.
Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic
calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circumstances, education, and contact with the world particularized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts
of a period mutually influence each other and are conditioned by the same social factors. But those who wantto expose the absurdity
of a literary theory by showingthat it is inapplicable to music must first prove that thearts are parallel.
Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere,it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter as well. And it is one thing to work with color and sound,and another to express
oneself by means of words. Notes,colors, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothingexterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossibleto reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of apure sound, for example, is an abstraction. As MerleauPonty has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception, there is no quality
of sensation so bare that it is
not penetrated with signification. But the dim little meaning which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness,remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist;it is color or sound. Who can distinguish the green applefrom its tart gaiety? And aren't we already saying
toomuch in naming "the tart gaiety
of the green apple?"There is green, there is red, and that is all. They arethings, they exist by themselves.
It is true that one might, by convention, confer thevalue of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the languageof flowers. But if, after the agreement, white roses signify"fidelity
55
to me, the fact is that I have stopped seeingthem as roses. My attention cuts through them to aimbeyond them at this abstract virtue. I forget them. I nolonger pay attention to their mossy abundance, to theirsweet stagnant odor. I have not even perceived them.That means that I have not behaved like an artist. Forthe artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoonon the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stopsat the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it
constantly and is enchanted with it. It is this color-objectthat he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the onlymodification he will make it undergo is that he will
8 transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore asfar as he can be from considering colors and signs as alanguage.
1
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is
also valid for their combinations. The painter does notwant to create a thing.
2 And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason for the ensemble tohave a definable signification, that is, to refer particularlyto another object. Doubtless this ensemble is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives,even hidden ones, for the painter
to have chosen yellowrather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thuscreated reflect his deepest
tendencies. However, they neverexpress his anger,
his anguish, or his joy
as do words orthe expression
of the face; they
are impregnated withthese emotions; and in order for them to have crept
intothese colors, which by themselves already had somethinglike a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and growobscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the skyabove Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke
it. It
is anguish and yellow sky
at the same time. Not sky
ofanguish or anguished sky;
it is an anguish become thing,an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, andwhich thereby is submerged and impasted by the properqualities of things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and thatinfinity of relations which they maintain with other things.
That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immenseand vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps themfrom expressing.
Similarly, the signification of a melody if one canstill speak of signification
is nothing outside of the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately renderedin several ways.
Call it joyous
or somber. It will alwaysbe over and above anything you can say about it. Not because its passions, which are perhaps
at the origin
of theinvented theme, have, by being incorporated
into notes,undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. Acry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it,
but a song of grief
is both grief
itself and something
otherthan grief. Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist
vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more,which is. But, you will say, suppose the painter doeshouses? That's just
it. He makes them, that is, he createsan imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign
of ahouse. And the house which thus appears preserves
all
the ambiguity of real houses.
The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel,
make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provokeyour indignation. The painter
is mute. He presents youwith a hovel, thatV all. You are free to see in it whatyou like. That attic window will never be the symbol of
misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is
a thing. The bad painter
looks for the type. He paints
the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knowsthat neither the Arab nor the proletarian
exists either in
reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain
workman. And what are we to think about a workman?An infinity of contradictory things. All thoughts and all feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state ofprofound undifferentiation. It is up to you to choose.Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. Theypaint long lines of workmen waiting
in the snow to behired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, battlefields. They affect us no more than does Greuze withhis "Prodigal Son.
53 And that masterpiece, "The Massacre of Guernica,
55 does any one think that it won over asingle heart to the Spanish cause? And yet somethingis said that can never quite be heard and that would takean infinity of words to express. And Picasso
5
s long harlequins, ambiguous and eternal, haunted with inexplicablemeaning, inseparable from their stooping
leanness andtheir pale diamond-shaped tights, are emotion becomeflesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the blotter
absorbs ink, and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost,
strange to itself, scattered to the four corners of spaceand yet present to itself.
.webp)
Comments
Post a Comment