The First Amendment; David Aronson

The First Amendment and the Free People Weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s produced by WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Ruben. In the art of every society you see its images of freedom one way or another. Just as we see the RAF the remnants of the art of Nazi Germany a pretty good reflection of the bizarre attitudes toward individual dignity and freedom. And as we see it in other societies in our own society. It reflects our tremendous vb. our desire to be as expansive as possible into was to let as many ideas as possible circulate. I'm delighted to have as my guest a. I consider him a great artist. David Aronson the chairman of the painting department at Boston University. David was educated in the high schools of Dorchester Hebrew teachers college in Boston and the school of the Museum

of Fine Arts of Boston. He is a painter who since the early 1940s from the time of his teens dealt with the New Testament and Old Testament themes and beginning in the 1960s with a commission from the Container Corporation of America began the more meaningful phase of his activity as a sculptor in addition to being a painter. In that particular instance the Container Corporation of America was doing a series of magazine magazine ads which appeared in great magazines of the United States over a long period of time illustrating the themes that made our society live the eye great ideas of freedom and they asked him to illustrate. A theme of Edmund Burke on elections. Here's part of his speech to the electors of Bristol

where he said your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgment and he betrays you instead of serving you. If he sacrifices it to your opinion and for that purpose David created a a delicate bronzed image of a figure almost embossed into a flat surface a very light relief with the hands coming out of the figure and various face almost gray call Roman to the inexperienced artistic observer like myself. David you had the commission. Why did you interpret it that way. It was the only way I knew how to interpret it. At that stage of my career and my development I had brought together a manner of working

characterizations certain color and design and formal sensibilities which became my language. I was in the first place delighted to be able to perform my commission which really never happened to me before for several reasons the main one was that I never wanted to do one. They turned out so unhappily. However in this case contain a coporation given it's a marvelous history with this particular project told me that I could do anything I wished. And. With this exhortation I was able to really put in the energy and the time happily using the images that I understood.

Well well since that time your sculptures have appeared along with your paintings at the great museums of this country and other countries and you're recognized interpreter. And if I may say. As I told you before the program art is in the eye of the beholder no matter what the artist's intents. The reason I ask you on this program is that I went to see your show at The Rose Art Museum this retrospective collection of most of your major works over the last 35 years. Your great paintings and your sculptures. And as I wandered there was no intention of relating it to this program. Wandered from one work to another. I felt that there was a great display a testimonial over a great long period of time about human freedom. Why did I feel that David is there any intention on your part to to

demonstrate this great surge of man to be free to speak what he wants and do what he wants. I demonstrated only in the sense that I am allowed to do things my way as a painter and a sculptor. Let me be a little bit more explicit. Your program deals with with freedoms. And I would like to hear with proclaim my freedom to be irrational. To work with fantasies rather than facts to present my own time sequences. To really work in a manner that suits me at the moment and that suits the ideas that I wish to

work with. You know society must protect that and must enhance that. I think this is very important because a society will more often than not find the works very obscure and abstruse. And extremely difficult to read when I re in reading your paintings. Most of your paintings through your career are in separate tones Holker shadings and the faces have a certain similarity. They seem to be of one family throughout. They are whether they're Old Testament or New Testament that your people are delicate people. They are longer finger long of limb.

Poetic in Face it seems to me that maybe that's why I got this view that what you are interested in is what lies inside the cranium and not the muscular atrophied background to society. Yes. This may well be the case and if you wish to read it that way I think this is fine. However I will say that what happens on the surface very much reflects what goes on inside. And when I bend and crush and disfigured my faces and my hands and my bodies I do this for a reason. I'm compelled to somehow reflect in their appearance what they face as as men and as women who are alive in a in a very

difficult and confused world in a very difficult and a curious state of circumstance you know that you're saying that your characters in the stories you tell are somewhat of an endangered species. Is that correct. I think they're danger and in the sense that art for one thing cannot be considered to have an effect on the on the morality of man. I think we've learned that. That man cannot make make serious changes in his destiny he hasn't been able to. When we look at the state of affairs now when our hold on on our

own survival is so tenuous and fragile and yet this seems to be two two phases of David Aaronson because while that is true of one thing there is another case which you have contradicted and that phase exists very much in the same paintings and with the same figures because I will always maintain that the highest thing that art can do is to set before you the true image of man in all his nobility. Now in that in that context some of the great poems about human freedom have been hands of praise to the spirit behind freedom. I see that this other aspect is very pronounced in your in your sculptures you have a number of equestrian. Sculptures and they're not Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square.

They are rather delicate horses and perched on the top of them in a kind of a gay way. Let's take a kneeling ride with the violin. There is at a precarious angle to the to the horse which seems to be a kind of a smiling horse to me at least is a joyous not a fiddler on the roof with a fiddler on the horse which is a theme a really deep theme of your work and a lot of your work deals with music. Perhaps you might explain that to me. Yes. Whether I deal with music or with angels who really populate many of my pictures and my sculptural groups. I am very much interested and very anxious that we are

allowed to enter a world we would not otherwise experience and these entities the angels in the music make us believe things we would not otherwise have believed. As for the Angels they are not bound by the laws that we are bound. You can begin but that of. What have you. They are able to rise right then and this to me is one way of pulling man away from the literal and rational and every day world a world in which he somehow feels perhaps too deeply. His fears and his cares and his his concerns and he is allowed to come into one where these no longer exist. It is a spiritual world where he can face himself and what he

means without the trammels of sensuous materials. The First Amendment among other things says The Congress shall make no law interfering with freedom of religion freedom of speech freedom of the press. It doesn't say that Congress will do anything to encourage the expression of these freedoms all it does is put it in the negative in some of your freedom of expression works for example. You have a series of three heads bronze and one is a you call the teacher and students one is a and older man with a beard but a very young face. And then you have parts of the heads but most of the features of two young boys are what appears to be young boys. It's interesting to me that they're all looking in the same direction without the reverence of the students. Now perhaps you didn't do this deliberately but the natural instinct would be to have something called teacher and students with somebody looking at somebody else.

But they all appeared to be looking at the teacher and the students must join in the search. That seemed to be the message I get from it. I think that's very good I mean they're looking at you obviously at the same time. I have a reason for choosing a teacher and students that teacher is the one who has. Found the secret through mystical means or whatever means of why we are here and how we should behave when we are here. And he transmits this and imparts this to his students who in turn carry on. I'm very much interested in certain transcendental and speculative systems which have found their way into my works. The cabalistic concerns of mediæval Jews for

example and these were secrets about the universe that the teachers would give to their chosen students not just to any student. There's another piece I'd like to turn to notes a heroic sized bronze standing figure called avenging angel which you did comparatively recently. And it's like so many of your figures dressed in what appears to be dressed in medieval clothing. And it has in its right hand a sawed off and on its shoulders there is a an outstretched little figure on one shoulder with his arms pouring out. It is the most on avenging the avenging angel of the most kindly avenging angel I have ever seen. It seems to me that the little figure

on the shoulder of this very tall figure the the tiny little man or person on the shoulder is perhaps one fiftieth the height of the total figure and his arms are outstretched and his head is back. He seems to be imploring him benching angel to get to work. The Avenging Abel Angel seems to be as I see it reluctant to be reluctant. Is that any kind of an interpretation based upon your own senses of as well. No. But you say I do. But I think it's fine that you find what your interpretation as you look at your own your own work. Well the way I see it is that a man is beset by the choices he has to make between good and evil at all times and these little beings on the back of the angel

perhaps represent the demons which plague him at all times. The facial expression of the angel makes it clear that he is feeling something that is not earthly and something that is not usual. And I think this particular photograph gives him a more puzzled look. Then and then the piece itself would convey is that interesting because you see if I would put something with the title of avenging angel would have some sort of the visage of John Brown or the Ayatollah Khomeini looking more stern and I think that is the the we discussed a moment or two before the program that the artist may convey messages about especially in your case about human freedom which he never intended. But I think this is the spirit in the work so that your message about human freedom might be.

Nothing exact to the viewers. But the viewer never loses what your purpose is. And that remains embedded in the art is that this is that this trick of the only artist. Let me take just a couple of minutes to maybe reconstruct how I saw one particular piece of work it was a very early painting that I that I must have been all of 19 years old still in art school. And I remember one day I was greatly shocked when I was walking up Bromfield Street in Boston to soothe it to see these these slight black figures leading from one side of the street to the other frantically. Shoving handbills into the unsuspecting hands of the pedestrians.

I received one and by the time I had read it they were gone. I did read it and it told me that the Jews were taking over America. These apparently were acolytes of Father Feeny and I was greatly disturbed by this. Just as I was disturbed by certain notions that one religion is the chosen religion. I felt that I had to make my statement about that. I did a painting as painting I did I was still living at home I did it in my bedroom. And I made for it a cardboard carton into which I slept. The painting because the dust in the lint would get on the the still wet oil and disfigure the surface. In any event the painting consisted of this. There were three personages I call the painting Trinity which is one of your better known works. Yes it's an

early one a very important and pivotal one for me. I chose the title because it had religious connotations not because it depicted one particular religion. But because somehow Trinitarian concepts I think were involved in many religions these three figures were Serai sitting at a table they were surrounded by a frame frame within a frame so to speak in that frame there were windows and windows contained figures and skulls and helmets from war and all the goodies and baddies that man is confronted with. And these three central actors in the in the painting were disfigured and distorted their faces contorted into rather unlikely poses. And when I put that away at night

and it was put under my bad this box I knew that here I was lying on that weapon that would castigate every religious bigot for Apple with all the enthusiasm and exuberance of youth. I really believed it at the same time. And I think this enters into your concerns. I spoke out against something evil. I felt that somehow the religious concepts were being just as disfigured. But through religious concepts being just as disfigured as the faces in these people who sat at the table then to just at the same time I was terribly taken with a fragment from a Funtime blood the relief of a 15th century carving where the scroll work and the little curlicues that were carved into the marble were beautifully meticulously done and they caught

the light in a dazzling gorgeous manner. The frame that I had around my three figures was painted this way. The quality of light in the entire picture was a terrific concern to me. Just as was the the color that I used to mention disappears in the numbers. The Browns pervading the entire moody affair. This was important to me at the time and in the center of the the cloak. Each of the figures had a brilliant almost primary color against this rather neutral almost look Goober as background. That and then I was terribly interested in detail. I would work with it to hair brush to bring in a degree of focus which would stop us short in the belief that. A very high and almost

unreal focus and realism would make more believable. The rather vague thing that I was dealing with so that all these things came together to for me create a painting that meant something and one of the aspects was my concern with man's freedom. Well in your in your work it's unusual for a well I perhaps not unusual I don't know that much about art but at least it was striking to me that you turn to sculpture. At a certain phase of your life you do it all of your life I'm sure. But turn to sculpture at a certain phase of your life and then produce this enormous volume of work great heads like your head of Spinoza not just a head but one that you get transfixed by as you pass you must you must stop. And these are beckoning musicians and beckoning angels and and standing

figures and reliefs and violinists and trumpeters and also these these tremendous pieces like your piece the door which you did in the late 1960s which one of those things that seems a mural without end in your sculpture. You seem to be much more. I don't even want to say this because you're going to say that's not how it is but more optimistic. You have a more optimistic is it is it maturity that I see in these sculptors. I think you're right I'm going to say that I don't think this is quite the way I see it in the first place you mention my moving into sculpture at a particular stage in my career as an artist. I did this for a variety of reasons but the main one was that that the sculpture dealt with an actual presence while painting

dealt with with illusion. This was a fact that was very well known by my monitor back in the 12th century when he approved of the utilization of paintings in the temple. This business of the graven image of a figuration which was quite a shocking concept in his day. This was a Biblical prescription which still has a mark in the Muslim world is still forbidden. Exact water docks people the use of the watches. Exactly but he made it clear that the three dimensional image was to be kept out of the temple because of his deference to the power of the effigy the power of the fetish to the power of the idol which threatened his concept of what God was. My wife has a wonderful way of talking about painting versus sculptures she says that when you put the light out the painting is gone. But when

it's out that sculpture is still there. So you don't agree with me when I see you as a Jefferson with a hammer and a chisel. Well well let me say this that I do perhaps express more hope in my later works for two reasons perhaps the the the need to rebel is no longer there. And I'm getting older and and I have to hope more is this is the situation for the artist in your view better or worse now than it was a decade or two decades ago insofar as your own feeling of intellectual atmospheric pressures. I would say that it always has been pretty much the same except there there are some dangers that are peculiar to this time. Is there anything in your work that requires a free society for you to express

it. Could you do this is an underground kind of art. And I think to say that it is underground in one sense that other things are popular. More popular a certain kind of non figurative thing is more popular so that it is underground in that sense it. But I don't worry too much about that. Well I must say that I'm still convinced that I'm right and you're wrong. And that that you have given us a great body of work which will be more and more recognized as a statement perhaps a subconscious statement you have told me all about your conscious feelings. Perhaps I'm reading into my own psyche or perhaps into yours and perhaps into what I hope. But it's very hopeful work especially the sculpture and very intense work about the human situation especially in the in the paintings together.

It's magnificent and thank you for joining me. David Aronson for this edition Bernard Reuben. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties and the media into 1970 the program was produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. I w GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its content. This is the station program exchange.