Discussion/Notes: Art Contra Art

"Concerning poor style: This becomes most apparent in moral contexts, such as when a bad writer tries to justify the shooting of hostages. That is far worse—far more flagrant—than any mere aesthetic offense.
Style is essentially based on justice. Only the just man can know how he must weigh each word, each sentence. For this reason, we never see the best writers serving a bad cause."
- Junger

I think your remarks on style are more important than people realise. Nietzsche's own analysis of Wagner arises almost entirely from a point of emotional reaction. And while it may be extreme to make such a comparison - the standard reading certainly does not support this and I would need a lot more space to argue it fully - there is an element in Nietzsche's aesthetics that are equivalent to Malevich's pure feeling. The total horizon of art which in Bataille becomes nothing more than the sacrificial act, the will towards the impossible. This is useful in situating Nietzsche within the history of aesthetics, and amidst the death of romanticism. Here he appears closer to the moderns, and even Kant, than to the Greeks.

Nietzsche had a poor sense of justice, one may even say that he stood completely in opposition to it. Comparisons to Callicles and Thrasymachus are good enough for a basic understanding, but it is worth noting his dismissal of the masses, the will to have them carried off by the devil or statistics. A man equal to the processes of democratisation and centralisation which mark every moment of the modern era. And in this same writing on History his introductory remarks ruthlessly attack the historicised man incapable of action, and then in the very next paragraph he descends into individualist phantasiespiel and a repressive defense. This suggests not only a lack of a sense of justice, but also an inability to control himself, much like his weakness before drink.

Plato holds an opposite character. He is happy to be an entirely willless figure, to give over to his opponents the central column of Greek philosophy to which he will only decorate with paint or weave with ribbons. This is a true understanding of art, it is an antiphon quality that runs through the history of Greek art like the chasm which gave birth to the universe. Nietzsche had no interest in antiphone qualities, such weakness would prevent him from becoming an idol. He despised opera, and yet if there was an antiphone quality in his work it was that idyllic voice. This is only hidden beneath a machinic brutality, a dying romanticism, and it becomes difficult to tell whether his brief appearance held the character of an Echo or an Orestes.

Hesiod and Homer are equal in their willless sacrifice to the antiphone, all of their poetry is nothing more than a gift of the Muses. This means of art is so significant to the Greeks that it becomes a ritual: the song of the strophe and antistrophe, an echo from east to west and back, formed of the world ocean and its pillars. Again, an autochtonous quality rising from the earth as a chasm.

This is difficult for us to imagine, our understanding of art is almost completely determined by the technical aspects. But setting this aside for a moment, one might contrast a work of Bach to the great waltzes of Brahms: one overwhelms us with a world of contemplation, the other the compulsion towards the most intricate dances. Even in technical art there remains a relation to the infinite and the numinous, so our questioning should not lead down the predetermined path in which the technical appears as the catalyst for the destruction of art. Doing so would also be a historical reading, confined to nothing more than reaction.

Instead, one should be reminded that art is itself a means, the relation of being to the greatest forces. Technical and irrational art, the realist and the dynamic, are equal in their potential for ascent or decline, how they force us to relate to the highest or the lowest. Instead, as Junger suggests, our movement towards the numinous or the mundane is determined as in the forces of gravity. One must weigh every decision against the mass and its relation to the territory: a monument must not be merely beautiful, its placement also has to guide citizens as if they had entered a portal. The Janus figure so central to the Romans. Otherwise, one may understand this in the sense of Zeno's paradoxes: perfect art apprehends us, forces us into another world where movement is absolute yet petrified. The Gorgon Pediment, Laocoon and his Sons, The Battle of Anghiari.

The tragic exists in historical time, a subversion of the laws of movement in which the audience is petrified within a collective memory. The Muses cannot be understood on their own, theatrocracy leads to a division of the Muses as in that of a division of powers - and then the descent into monotheistic worship of a symbolic god. They are born of memory but through their songs intend to return us to time. Set against the Hours we may understand them as though equivalent in force to the opposition of Epimetheus and Prometheus. Memory and forgetting are only a means to a greater relation with time.

Song, occasion, and memory, the forces which run through all great forms of art: the festival, the military parade, the mystery, and the prophetic rite. Each has a specific relation to time, the collision of worlds, a portal-like character of call and return necessary to prevent becoming lost in unfamiliar and dangerous territory. The antiphon of dominion. Art cannot be of a single direction, simple forgetting and return to the moment, this is where we see the technical means of the modern era applied through the irrational. It is equally the forgetting of the moment, and abandonment of the world as need arises.

We no longer have festivals, nonetheless a quality of the ancient antiphons can be sensed in folk songs - which may also explain why its songs have endured where classical music could not, despite its greater material force. This is particularly striking when the antiphon is set as a refrain or in rounding. In the song "Hilla Lilla" there are two lines repeated throughout:

"...
Ingen vet min sorg utan Gud
...
Den lever aldrig till som jag kan klaga mina sorger"

("...
No one knows my sorrow but God"
...
"He who could share my pain is gone")

These lines form a column of time through the song, and as it progresses there is an opposite effect to that of the story which merely unfolds. Instead, all other lines of the story appear as if being stripped away, revealing the full force of the repeated lines. With each repetition the pain deepens like a scar upon time.  And then the refrain disappears for a single moment, in the climax the antiphon is repeated, only with completely other words. Here we sense the column forcing itself into being, fate rising as if the mark which gives every moment its intimate character. Turning as if its own rotational axis against the world and time. This is the deep law within art, the "Cyclopean portal" through which we wander through new worlds.

Another example appears in the work song, the sea shanty "Roll the Old Chariot". In it we sense the martial quality of work, the beauty of repeated rhythms which drive us to exhaustion and then carry us on through an overcoming of the will. Again, one is driven on, carried forth by the forces of fate. And in Veljo Tormis, "Käsikivimäng", the grinding mills of heaven which wear upon the heart and drive humanity onwards into the force of worked iron. The peasant works remind us that the highest is of a wellspring, and like the distinction of the rational and irrational there is no certainty in which type will carry us towards the numinous. Often enough, the greatest works are of the peasantry, the simple relation to nature, to the earth forces, apprehends its qualities and releases them without the overwrought techniques of the overly civilised and domesticated. Nietzsche contra the Shield of Achilles.

Simplicity has a wonderful genealogy in the myths, in heroism and even the simple cursed figure who transcends both tragedy and the catastrophic. Arachne, Narcissus, Actaeon, figures equal to the gods in their relation to the laws of dominion. In Ovid we feel the overwhelming power of this simplicity, a force entirely lost to the moderns. In comparison, Nietzsche's overwrought and unromantic individual is forged of an iron realm unworthy of even Hephaestus, despite his protests he is a machined being paralyzed by his fear of death and equal to a transitional territory which would inspire Achilles' gratitude for the underworld.

In Orff's "Catulli Carmina" a reminder that the numinous resides even within the most mundane. "Tu es Venus, Tu es Venus, Tu es Venus. Venus es!" Even the stomping of the Cyclops may return us to happiness. The law of Meno's Slave also applies to art.

Plato's method encapsulates all of the force of the antiphon. In short, the return to Cronus, the Golden Age so reviled by Nietzsche and the moderns. Even after Holderlin the relation to the Titans cannot be understood, there remains a great fear of the primordial ages, even for the godless. What is interesting in our modern works is the repetitive and derivative quality, and yet the technicity demands to be recognised as totally unique, individual, freed completely from the willless quality of the antiphon. Plato's method is similarly technical, but of a completely other type, one as foreign to us as the works of Holderlin or Pindar. Even those who worship the gods fear the Titans, and this may be the source of Plato's greatest work - a turning of that which paralyzes us before the force of evil into a good. This is of an anti-Christian character that Nietzsche could never even approach.

If Socrates and Plato were of a greater technical school than Daedalus then we must imagine what cult they were a part of, and the mysteries of which they held sovereignty over the labyrinth. The Cyclopes would be a certainty, and a cult which, if named, would certainly contribute to calls for capital punishment. Hephaestus certainly, and Ares. Cronus, and perhaps Menoetius. Dike and Themis without question. Any knowledge of the cults and mysteries are lost to us, but the legend of Archimedes is revealing:

"Marcellus, however, got away; and, mocking the technicians and mechanics with him, he said, “Shall we not cease making war upon this geometrical Briareus, who uses our ships as ladles in respect to the sea but has beaten and driven off our harpists in disgrace and, casting many missiles against us all at once, outdoes the hundred-handed monsters of mythology."

The war of the physical world against the formal, even the Sub specie aeternitatis may be overwhelmed by many hands. And in the civil war between the technical and the sensual we are reminded of that which is of a greater force than any art. After the death of the artistic form there can be nothing other than return to the highest, or an endless dance with the deathless - the figure of time which exists as a chasm for modernity, and to which the technical only appears as a revealing figure.


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Mussorgsky, "Songs and Dances of Death"- 2. Serenade

https://youtu.be/P-RHZKCfPf4

Orff: Catulli Carmina - No. 1 Eis aiona!

https://youtu.be/lS12KiVV32Q

Veljo Tormis KÄSIKIVIMÄNG . Esitab ELLERHEIN

https://youtu.be/OUIhkrSmSmE

David Coffin - "Roll the Old Chariot"

https://youtu.be/49FWp7WLYKw

Hilla Lilla

https://youtu.be/LlWtt06mmC4