Envelopment
'Nor even those who detest art will be averse to the presence of picture galleries near luxurious shops.' From the very first sentence of Mr. Stokes's new book, we are made aware that we are in the presence of a highly original mind. Originality in our day has come to mean a reach- ing. or straining after novelty. It is not in this Pejorative sense that Mr. Stokes is an original thinker: on the contrary, he.is someone to whom novel ideas come perfectly naturally, as naturally as ordinary or banal ones do to must of us.
The subject of these Three. Essays is what might be called the 'extremeness' of modern art. For to Mr. Stokes art, though the repository of many varied feelings and compulsions or, as he Puts it, the succulent potage of different object- relationships and methods of symbolisation,' can be defined by reference to two competing aims which it characteristically endeavours to recon- cile. The ideal of an aesthetic whole combines, on the one hand, the experience of singleness in the sense of a unitary enveloping substance in which we are enfolded and, on the other hand, the recognition of an intact and integrated object, which is independent of us and resists our approaches. Both ideals relate, of course, to very primitive feelings: they symbolise the two ways in which goodness or unspoilt pleasure can enter into the infantile consciousness—as the good breast that feeds us, or as the mother or loved parent who survives our ambivalence. Now, it is Mr. Stokes's contention that what is distinctive about modern art is that it has increasingly abandoned the ideal of independence or 'object- otherness' and that it has concentrated heavily Upon the ideal of envelopment. Indeed, in avant- garde art this latter ideal is, in Mr. Stokes's words, 'put on view in semi-isolation.' We see this in several ways
First of all, it is characteristic of a modern work of art not to have parts or details which, abstracted from the whole, could themselves serve as objects of :esthetic admiration : on the .contrary, it aims at the 'over-allness' reminiscent at certain visionary states. Again, a modern work of art tends not to contain illustrative symbols here there is a clear-cut distinction between the tYmbol and its reference: it prefers 'symbolic equations' where the two terms to the symbolic relation have become fused. Thirdly, it is heavy with a sense of its physicality: of 'is-ness.' That these are the values, the accepted aims, of niodern art, is revealed—Mr. Stokes points out --in what we no longer demand of art or the artist. We no longer demand 'beauty; and more significantly—we no longer demand
imagination.' For imagination is connected with the active putting-together of parts: whereas a Modern work of art comes to us more like a 112mogeneous vision. squeezed in through the eyelids
One of the most suggestive ideas in the book the association that the author seeks to estab- lish between this 'crisis' of modern art and the way in which architecture has become vulgarised and failed us. Because we can no longer gain tile simple pleasures of envelopment from walk- ing through our cities, from a daily acquaintance with the beauties of texture, of rough and smooth, we have come to demand these comforts from graphic art. 'Titian was adorning, not creat- ing. the stone Venice, and Rembrandt the new knisterdam.' The modern artist by contrast has 'a create the metropolis he inhabits, in sculpture 0, on the canvas.
I hope I have given some idea of the richness subtlety of Mr. Stokes's writing: for I regard it as amongst the most original and rewarding Sour day. I like to think of it as becoming the itiree of a whole new literature, one in %,% hich essay form is retained and which brings to- gether the two fields in which modern sensibility most typically displays itself—the visual arts and PSYchoanalysis.
ItItIlAltD W01.1111 IM
Previous page
