(Preface to) an Intellectual Grasp of the Meaningfulness of Art

Artists in the contemporary world, who are serious with their profession, are most confused and bewildered by the meaningfulness of their profession, since the metaphysico-cosmological order that perpetuated the gradual evolution of the arts of the previous ages had disintegrated, with Art being increasingly manifestly subordinated to various crudely political ideologies, consciouslly or unconsciouslly, after numerous failure of utopian ideologies which assigned meaning to Art by embedding it inside a historical framework so that artists can become the prophets of the future who regulates and forms the reality. The problem is how to locate this future, or, in the case of art being embedded inside a static metaphysico-cosmological order, how to locate the symbol that Art concretizes. I shall not discuss how and why are the naively held beliefs, such as aestheticism, delusional, but by analyzing the difficulties faced by contemporary artists of this so-called technological civilization, summarize a general strategy to tackle the problem of the meaningfulness of Art intellectually.

Hitchcock & Johnson quoted Salomon Reinach in the opening of their The International Style, the exhibition catalog that defined the eponymous architectural style:

The light and airy systems of construction of the Gothic cathedrals, the freedom and slenderness of their supporting skeleton, afford, as it were, a presage of a style that began to develop in the nineteenth century, that of metallic architecture. With the use of metal, and of concrete reinforced by metal bars, modern builders could equal the most daring feats of Gothic architects without endangering the solidity of the structure. In the conflict that obtains between the two elements of construction, solidity and open space, everything seems to show that the principle of free spaces will prevail, that the palaces and houses of the future will be flooded with air and light. Thus the formula popularized by Gothic architecture has a great future before it. Following on the revival of Graeco-Roman architecture which prevailed from the sixteenth century to our own day, we shall see, with the full application of different materials, a yet more enduring rebirth of the Gothic style. (Salomon Reinach, Apollo, 1904)

And moreover, to clarify, they stressed that:

Yet it should be stressed that the relation of the modern style to the Gothic is ideological rather than visual, a matter of principle rather than a matter of practice. In design, indeed, the leading modern architects aim at Greek serenity rather than Gothic aspiration. (Hitchcock & Johnson, The International Style, 1932)

Hence what is meant should be understood to be that the style should be thus developed so that it becomes in conformity with the technological & material situations, which is to say, take into account the characteristics of the materials newly available, such as reinforced concrete and steel, which are capable of inducing the light and airy systems of construction similar to that of the Gothic cathedrals. As such, what is indicated is that technological advancements determine, in a cause-and-effect manner, the general form and shape of the architectural style. Hence what can be deduced from the line of thought thus presented is that there is no autonomy in the evolution of architectural style, and furthermore, art follows technology and is determined and shaped by technology. And in turn this leads to another cleavage between the so-called 'pure art' that is associated to aesthetics and 'Beauty' (with a capital 'B') and pure engineering.

This type of dichotomy is still prevalent in contemporary society, with the marjority of its population, particularly those with a conservative stance in politics, advocating for certain types of neo-classicism as one of the representatives of 'Beauty' and denouncing the modernist ugliness. The attitude is also seen in the aforementioned volume:

The doctrine of the contemporary anti-aesthetic functionalists is much more stringent. Its basis is economic rather than ethical or archaological. Leading European critics, particularly Siegfried Giedion, claim with some justice that architecture has such immense practical problems to deal with in the modern world that asthetic questions must take a secondary place in architectural criticism. Architects like Hannes Meyer go further. They claim that interest in proportions or in problems of design for their own sake is still an unfortunate remnant of nineteenth century ideology. (Hitchcock & Johnson, The International Style, 1932)

And it is precisely this split between aesthetics and engineering that perplexes working artists. The symbolic order that gave meaning to Art is gone, and Art is now subjugated to a principle, the principle of utility, that is, at least on look of it, the antithesis of the principle of poetry. In functionalism refuge can be taken temporarily, but since there's no ethical ground that bestows a telos to the very function, and functionalism with an economical ground amounts to the subjugation of art to engineering, the doctrine of functionalism is an unstable one that only adapts but cannot result in further progress, while Art, at least as it is conceived by serious artists, should always be that which creates and regulates the future and the reality, or express and incarnate some eternal symbol so that the meaning inherent in it can be concretely realized and comprehended - the problem, again, is how to locate this future or how to locate this symbol.

This split is a shadow casted by the increasingly prominent Marxist and socialogical position that regards material conditions and class struggles as the driving forces of history, and that regards History as the movement of the Spirit a la Hegel. Similarly there's a current, prevalent in various far-right ideologies, that holds that the Spirit manifests itself as transformation of Ideas which is further manifested as the transformation of culture disembodied from the material conditions, the source of which being some sort of primordial, mystical, irrational intuitions. Hence it turns out that the dichotomy is essentially the classical, even cliched, opposition between materialism and idealism. In politics, the dichotomy mainly manifests itself in the form of the opposition between internationalism, or globalism, and nationalism or regionalism, since the essentially Enlightenment ideology underlying the former is built upon the material integration of the modern world derived from the colonial age, while the latter is the political manifestation of the romanticism of the 19th century.

The dichotomy, the split, is certainly an unfortunate one, not only because of the confusion it brought to artists, but also can be seen in various confusions arising in contemporary ideological debates. Right-wingers claiming to have set the preservation of the achivements of the Western civilization as their goal are vehemently attacking modern arts, especially modernist architectures, as a sin of globalization, neglecting the fact that the unrelenting rationalism inherent therein is one of the hallmarks of the Western civilization, even to the extent of proposing to superficially replace the modern style with the classical style while retaining the use of reinforced concrete in architectural constructions. Left-wingers, completely disregarding the cultural facets that underly the material civilization, pushing agendas that when put into actuality can lead and have only led to catastrophes. Roughly following Hegel, historians of sciences, in particular those from or being the descendents of the French historical epistemological school, cultural historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, have been for nearly a century trying to cast the separated categories together with limited success. I have previously remarked, and moreover written essays, on the concordances between Art & Technology & Science & Philosophy (in particular Metaphysics) in the style of Geistesgeschichte. E.g. Historical Concordance of Music and Metaphysical Cosmology , On Collective Unconscious (in Chinese), gesturing that there are concordances between the manifested forms of these not-necessarily separate and to some degree arbitrarily delegated categories in their historical evolution.

Now these are not enough, for any concordance can be interpreted internal to a cause-and-effect model that hermenuetically assigns an order to the categories in terms of their importance, so that a classical, metaphysical order can be established to justify their corresponding one-sided political ideology. A synthesis can be given, aside from various revivalisms which are oftentimes illusionary solutions to any problem whatsoever,

(resolving the tension by means of dialectics) in the form of presenting an interlocking, dialectic movement between idea and matter,
(metaphysical-theological restructuring) or in a complete reformulation of the categories which originated in, roughly speaking, the 12th centuries, e.g. in the work of St.Bonaventure (De Redcutione Artium ad Theologiam), that may possibly in a structural manner resolve the tension that maintains the cleavage,
(teleological harmony) or in the form of an absolute parallelism that while retains the autonomies of the given categories subjugate them to an all-encompassing historical entity with its own purpose and its own end so that the categories become the entity seen in particular perspectives but not the whole,

or certain combination of them. Artists need to be thinkers, and serious thinkers at that, in order to solve the problem of the meaninfulness of their own professions. Narrow-mindedness and 'stick to the own lane' is no longer viable. The Modern is still poorly understood, and after a post-modern detour, a head-on confrontation with the problem of modern needs to be taken.

Regardless, philosophical speculations tend to become unrealistic when decoupled from the actual, concrete situations and history. A point of departure, a reference point, an example, that is concrete and well-studied, relatively well-understood but hermenuetically flexible, needs to be given. Now taken into account the fact that this split between idealism and materialism manifested itself most radically in the emergence of modernism, and that the most concrete manifestation of the split is in the transformation of the everyday world, and that the most artistically significant transformation of style emerged in the field of architecture, the meeting point of technology and art, it is advisable to study the emergence of architectural modernism, and in particular the aforementioned International Style, the most general style that emerged without a strictly set doctrine, that

has become evident and definable only gradually as different innovators throughout the world have successfully carried out parallel experiments. (Hitchcock & Johnson, The International Style, 1932)

2024-01-27