Late, Late Lecture; Jacques Barzun, The Arts in Search of New Substance

the aren't to do service other true thing when he mentioned the fact that there is a general or comprehensive interest in the arts was consonant with the the kind of pluralistic society we haven't which everyone is especially a dedicated to a profession and has to be stimulated by such a festival as this to observe or take pleasure in something outside his discipline

and that has relevance at the beginning of my few remarks because what i proposed to say is at every point a generalization from the elements of pop which we're surrounded and generalizations often strike or not as inadequate or excessive and one can always think of that particular case which violates the proposed the generality if you've taken a look at the pictures and found objects of art next door you can see at once that would be very difficult to make any statement that would apply equally to all of this is especially true in our modern very historical minded period when unlike previous ages we are content to it we're

happy to have more than one star lot going on with the same time i say this by way of moderating your anger and fury of some of the things that i'm about to say which may strike you as an unjust war and cautious or put another way wrong false i believe that artists nowadays in all the arts are looking for new materials and new materials in the sense that i take to mean to the thing is the literal meaning of working for news you stuff material stuff that you can touch with that is rather limited meaning the architects although principal uses of this kind of new material that accustomed to us to glass

brick and so that added a concrete port sculptures to their works and then sell new materials and the obvious or simple sex and possibly set in the other plastic pots the collaboratively the immobile are wonderful example next door to mobile made of older cans of campbell's soup and other things of that sort of those might be considered the new materials in the sense that the creator of the pee at taco would not normally have ten to them for self expression and possibly in poetry than new materials of of that sort we consider the scrambling those syllables and joyce says we're expected to freedom's wake to be something else in the material that the thomas hardy or william wordsworth's hadn't at his disposal

but the importance of the greater importance of new materials at the present time insists in the figurative meaning of new materials one might say and refreshed materials related materials though essentially in their physical years reality they are the same old materials that painters and poets and architects and every kind of artist has has always used the materials on you know or refresh the renovated when they reappeared in our consciousness without the old associations and the definition of the problem for the modern artist is that practically everything he touches everything he thinks

everything he sees is encrusted with associations of every cut this again is caused by arc historical mindedness which is made us aware of a repertory in each of the arts going back up nearly to the renaissance not merely to three times but to the sum total of the world or i don't say that we know the art of the world the equally well in our western civilization but in the last hundred years we have taken and so much from other cultures and other civilizations that we made by a slight exaggeration say that we have a total wreck and that almost every kind of style attitude of feeling of moral idea of even political purpose expressive truly awesome of a kind of religious association is

familiar to us and indeed overall familiar so the modern artist is trying to get back to some there are sensations in whatever the medium of his odd happens to be for this purpose he does a number of things which i will remind you of annual you'll see what i mean by the search for new material and the first place he tries to get written by some positive act of near violence to get rid of the aisle his own local traditions western a post renaissance traditions and the statements of some of the action painter isn't there an interpreter is a very useful and making us see what what the

point is they say that they do not want to do have aesthetic ideas moral ideas religious or political ideas in their painting that the purpose of their work is a purely active that's what action means there simply to paint the paid for something or muppet about something certainly that does just the page and changing the would paint to mean the actual substance that began when they say that what they're interested in is the re discovery a painter as a medium now that's such a tremendous effort to make within a continuing tradition it it is a lifting of oneself up owen's bootstraps which formerly was not to them and they were so difficult not merely drops on a set in the first place that was

the egotism of each period which said they are immediate and remote past does not interest as we have our own and there was no historical repertory that was only at the things being done at the time the rest was probably attic as old fashioned and possibly ugly silly silly we we've we've got over that through our reverence for whatever man has done in the same one that we're interested in it and so we're caught up and so louie the rejection that pushing away of all the associations that is is difficult more overt and a in our case the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing while the officer trying to affect this rejection all our teachers are teaching the young what the mother goddess astride reject by giving courses in the world of the renaissance the early eighteenth century the

options last week and saw that so that there is a kind of crest of two waves meeting here which own way that make it more difficult for them all in august if you add to this the dissemination which the mass media know make all the objects of all of the past the broadcasters with the music and drama the magazines and the public museums and libraries were the things that ought to be seen an exam and you see that we are at the center of a maelstrom of attention says if you the mosque at this point of why all the modern artist so determined to go back to simple gordon you materials new sensations in the medium of their particular op answer is that they

have come to the conclusion explicit i'm not in their minds that since the renaissance and since the acceptance of flow the whole world pass caught the exhaustion has overcome all the jars in all forms or to put it differently so what they experience is the incapacity to do anything very much without falling into something that has been done before and dunn well without imitating unconsciously but they're kind of a us most is making their minds previous do everything that has been done in the past and i'm conscious imitation strikes them as the futility as indeed it has always struck all artists

so they have done the radical past could have undertaken the radical task of getting back to simple sensations or what i call the search for raw materials they walk to be rid of all ideas and of all styles they want the staff knew plastic capable of taking any shape for future ideas or fought the elaboration of future stars if we think that that's artificial are on stage we have only to remind ourselves that that's the way we deal with the architecture on the large scale wheat tear down the old building we level the ground and we put up a new building a levy process up to the point where we decide to undertake this radical task is the lean to process we have a building and we had

this to add a wing facade portico and that goes on for as long as as a it seems possible to do so and we call a tradition and since the renaissance the tradition has added one lean to after another that we have them neo classical school only dramatic school and then the realistic school and impressionist and post impressionist whichever ought to take up its roughly the same with different adjectives and urban mass of leaned use has dropped so expensive and therefore incoherent but now leveling is called for you if you us now from these rather abstract and there are considerations to think you ought to

see that the the general says is borne out by individual examples why have we become excited the last few months about the novel are originating in in france well it's because of the novel has given out when it's in its old for some other must be something presented to us which shone the gate not really a way of writing the way save virginia woolf negated the way of writing of arnold bennett but certainly getting the whole idea of the novel the chant look or feel or taste or resemble little it must be something new and it is impossible i think to achieve that novelty without the period of total destruction that's why it's an anti novel

that's why many of the plastic artists today say that they are striving for anti art that is one thing where musicians were fathers to head into the next period the electronic music composers other composers of music for cat aw though without any foss indicating that what they do is anti music in the old sense this is definitely new unmistakably new the electronic or concrete music composer goes to the sounds around them or if he uses a result says of modern technology to make new sounds out of a synthesizer sounds that are made up of elements of old sound literature entirely new out of range of

the ordinary registers ok short of range of the ordinary possibilities of rhythm produced by human lips so human fingers and we have again the same thing in the attempts made in portraying it doesn't sleep surrealist to develop the materials out of a man's unconscious either through automatic writing all through the taking of drugs and and then recording on tape recorder is what comes out of the liberated self heard of of the person who had it been fully conscious setting up an automatic go drug would have reproduced the cadences of tennyson no john donne or somebody else not because he wanted to but because he was so conditioned by five hundred years of

tradition and an excessive education in the set up oh the happening is an attempt began to go back to life or to look like life by a habit denying the canons of construction movie the submission to logical or psychological and and by the juxtaposition of what seems meaningless or accidental to recreate new stuff it may seem at times as if are these were desperate expedience but i think that we should be encouraged both by the fact that more martyrs so engaging in this kind of destructive self destructive or art destructive activity and by the fact that the public seems delayed to understand what they're doing and to respond and to cheer from the

sidelines at this kind of of performance we should even i think the torrent though i confess that i often get impatient with this aspect myself that we should perhaps be tolerant of those who invoked the machine in order to help them through this destructive period in the office that is this this destruction for construction which the arts or going through i have in mind for example the top ten days of in the painting machine which will turn out two hundred in an abstract paintings and one afternoon just was attending of outcry allen line also the people who use the corresponding divisive the finishing cranking little cylinder is that have words on them and saying what comes up on a number of those

cylinders are in line and and if this can be read with no hands touching or again the composers of both music and prose who preferred to compose if that's the word but by a scattering of random botts and shops upon the paper scene where that would lead them that don't totally abdicate their mind or their purpose is simply making room for a greater amount of the giver but the nature of matter or material but i think we must put in the same order of of activity in the visual studies that go back to laundry on even props before which are designed to make us appreciate with no fault whatever the

conjunction of colors the variety of nuances the relation of lines in shapes squares the elders is an homage to the square series of paintings of you know which are just squares of different sizes and colors within one another superimposed on one another or the paintings of roscoe which say to the bondholder this just took a shot up stop thinking just luck and as you look to see whether something doesn't get reborn with a new about the nature of visual experience sure nominee go into this aspect of it because i have done so in front of it to repeat myself on that so i could be sure when a certain kind of consciousness the company's these efforts when

i've heard a mystical or a scientific or even a representative idea is convicted for treason god only knows when these them perfectly intelligible and sensible attempts than than one has a perhaps a right to but the saudis to be impatient but let's forget evenly the failings of the very fallible artist and see what he's actually doing is doing but i think i've described which is to rediscover my main strength the wrongness of of the gift to get back to the state in which showed presumably the chrome i'd known painter was when he had a wall of a lovely cave and handsome big windows on the instrument that would make a mark and he said here goes i am

starting the tradition of the plastic parts it is a lot of a schedule that this effort that simplicity at and originality at in the other meaning of the word or regional it is not only being new wood being at the origin of something that the that is consonant with the other attitudes that prevail in a world of mid twentieth century but as primitive as in simplicity trying to cut through the sake of custom of the crusts of of habits and love knowledge all these things go together and that has worked and titles the students like myself and many others do to make these general statements it isn't an effort to box

everything in and try to work impose upon artists something that they themselves the occasion may disavow it's rather to understand where we are and to gain from an awareness of one set of activities the knowledge of what other activities are up to no the carriage of activism has raised more than all of us and a strong and proportion as we are regimented chorus so constrained by modern industrial life one hand that that other familiar abstraction but also as we are constrained in khost by the mere know a lot of people doing things around us the number of contacts the number of ideas the massive of worries remember then hemingway's novel they are remarkable and famous bit of

dialogue in which one character says to another would you please please please please please please please please please please stop talking another nominee the times he uses the word please but he uses it that's enough to show you that the number of a book jesus is the objection to though the number of words no words were over stimulated that's the simplest way to put it and the remedy is is a simplification of the all stimuli and is nothing simple in color or shape psalms that particular way if it is divorced from associations now that that is the suggestion naming a perhaps to organize some of the sensations at you get some impressions you wear when you look at the

at an exhibition of paintings or when you're subjected to a festival of the arts in now the next question that that unfortunately a kid is since we are conditioned to think about the arts in this way is a progress have we made towards this total destruction through the abandonment of it as han er wait to the new materials and what's going to happen to them when we get well it seems to me at that point one must differentiate among the arts i think that in painting in the plastic pots we've gone a considerable distance towards the achievement of a totally doesn't affected materials we we are now able to

receive a sudden i've read it to enjoy the kind of painting the kind of sculpture that and it is the pure data something just plopped in front of us that we look at and we do all wrong a free association as if we like sometimes we were given the still not by a word or already that statement or some critics interpretation but by and large we just stand there and a and take it in a weaving forgotten that looks awful as we do that which shows that we are the attaining that primal curators the child's candid a glass over all the saints a total acceptance of what is and it's easiest to do of course in in the painting

and sculpture and architecture we still played by the unfortunate necessity that the architecture has to be of some use to somebody her the roofers got to keep out the rain and some purpose the is necessary to the building and architecture is not independent like painting and sculpture because it's expensive he can just do something architectural in the studio with cheap materials and say there it is you know all sorts of operators in the cooperation of hundreds of men therefore architecture is still plagued with utility on the one hand and with with ideas up if you ask where the fifth attempt in architecture is now found two to break up ready made associations i think you discover a portly side i discovered that you can judge it is you like in

in the attempt to detach architecture from kind of seriousness but they are making extraordinary shakes somebody else the architect through of build a church and he's just as likely to construct something of poured concrete which looks like a huge turtles and what he's saying is don't think the church owes looks one way i don't think the total is incapable of being seen as the church that's that's an extreme but many of leo buildings that are growing up today are whimsical in a very real sense david express france they and the fancy is is going through accepted architectural ideas what the

breakup of synthetics they had quite a while ago to the line of poetry or all the piece of dialogue or a narrative in and novels that destruction of syntax could be taken as does the fundamental principle of the simplification i refer to it appeared first in in poetry i think for an accidental so accidental but for an understandable extraneous reason about it dean's seventies and eighties it was felt although western europe by the boats and prose writers that they must absolutely differentiate themselves in the very stuff of her art from what was to be found in the newspapers by newspapers i mean almost every kind of public and useful communication this was a

direct result of the spreading literacy in an illiterate community why the strange phenomenon the language of prose and poetry can remained distinct from from leah follett gate of the street as soon as as though you have large powerful newspaper press in advertising ends on those a public media began to crawl into themselves the devices and the tone and the merits but the balance of the great prose writers for example if you are at all sensitive to the varieties of advertisement is advertising copy you see that after an interval perhaps a village or ten years copyright is copy poets and novelists in the tricks of language

that they use and that it's oh facto makes those tricks and available for the purposes of poetry and unfrozen and was as a tremendous attrition and an immediate kill almost immediate obsolescence in the resources of of language and that's what poetry was driven earliest able to him get as far away from what people say all right to one another when they're concerned with that the daily business of life and when they have an ulterior motive that was you can create an object was contemplating out of the same stuff the jew create a means of action or bridges or something of that of that sort the the misfortune is that we've already reached in poetry be the end of the of alteration syntax of semantics grama diction

roald dahl won one can see very well up there is to do next after the after finnigan is like i suppose one could take each each letter separately and throw it into a pot and a dish up some of the residue four for the electrician of for the reader but term at the point we would've gone too far in achieving simplicity would have not so much material as a as a modest material and that again is an extraordinarily difficult predicament for the modern office because he's doing things as i've said before my main strength and he may overshoot is not i think that if one picks up what happens in music what is happening in music now in

connection with this predicament of poetry when one sees he is suggestive difference music i've said the materials on the meds and sectarian war they're gathered up from ordinary life thanks to the recording devices and then on the slate complex materials really bought the phones in which they're now being cast by the composers are enormously simple we have not yet been able to devise a lot of the raw materials of sound new structures of the show catch the formal imagination the way over the centuries was done with the different sounds that the instruments produced that's perfectly logical we get the raw stuff and we put it together and rather crude

large blocs we're waiting in other words for what might be called an emotional scenario because it's perfectly obvious that we can go on just being simple we kept as simply pass matter in front of art our allies or posterity as or through our brain in the form of lives without asking ourselves well but what does a job in ten ultimately not necessarily a conclusion says memorable and words but what is this for and what i am stating here is simple psychological fact that purpose was this is very hard for the human being to sustain very long and the bridge was listless of much of the destruction of modern art by artist has obviously an ulterior purpose which is to get beyond the empress which we find ourselves

the music as a given us by the electronic composers has plenty of time to develop forms to associate sentiments with certain kinds of sounds very strange now on it and which only strangeness as a result but poetry is still banging his head its head against the fact that ordinary mean because we haven't yet in ordinary life the given up that being that intelligible sometimes we really do think we've reached that point in talking to one another about the faint meaning the usually survives and we have a problem of communication week we still heard in the main know what what the other fellows about poetry therefore we'll have to go back to the opposite

extreme not of simplification by breaking up but a simplification by feeling simple and this is perhaps where i won't leave this sketchy indication of what maybe around us and what may be ahead of us that we are we have undertaken this amplification insurgent materials in a period in which subtlety knew was complexity the sense that we knew the great deal more than any of a precipitous ss of non dominated our minds we we are we are the conditions analysis and complex and we are passionate about you lost all these things into fit really will be taking full advantage of the simplicity which through another

part of activity we are gaining in the several parts and how leader cheever emotional simplest is so that we can start harry passed do with simple materials and simple feelings and simple thought that is the enigma for the artists of tomorrow meantime we go on seeing before us and having carried on raids against the effort to detach the memory and the will from all that we have known has not forget the idea is that in four not to be as little that committed to appointing to be rather like a child to recapture the freshness of the dawning world so that new ideas and new styles will rise out of this

and there will rise for one reason alone which is the fundamental definition was really the struggle between matter as such and mind as such but what makes a semi are what makes us gasp of admiration on seeing as a masterpiece but the words on the stage or stone in the museum is that we all instinctively realize that the material that not give up easily but it had demands of its own that it wanted to go this way and that man with a little chiseled imagination made of goat the other way and that tension that that fight between the resistance of matter and the imperious demand of mind is

what makes art great and here we can see that to whether i'm right or wrong my notion is at least consistent because when i said the past styles were exhausted in that artist could not repeat any more what i meant was that they no longer feel the resistance they know how to do everything in the traditions and the styles that we have enjoyed for five hundred years or more and when that resistance goes then they'd be understandable magic demeaning goes to it's been the point for