. A Lot of Nothing SIR HERBERT READ refers to
his book as 'un- dogmatic musings.' This is quite a fair descrip- tion. It is a collection of essays, and Read pursues his familiar themes, of the significance of art, its meaning for the individual and its role in society, through fourteen rambling chapters of intellectually self-indulgent reflections, which reveal little in the way of coherent argumentative intention. The book has a certain rough shape, in moving from considerations about artistic creation and the nature of art, through the psychology of the artist and the psychological content of artistic images, to some social and moral questions. It also has, in a very general sense, an overall purpose: to insist on the importance of art to any rounded and healthy life, both personal and social, and to give an account, philosophical and psychological, of both .art and life, which will make clear this importance.
This has been Read's purpose through many years; against Philistinism and indifference, he has continued to ask important questions, to encourage the appreciation of modern art, in particular, and to give his voice to humanitarian social ends. It is his own view, however, that to do these admirable things is not enough; what we need is also some answers to the important questions, some understanding of the nature of art which will make it clear why it is an essential ',element in human life, and not merely a decora- tive indulgence of a sufficiently advanced society. Yet when we look in Read's work for some answers, we find in the end none at all.
Consider, for instance, what Read says that art is. Read holds that art is a kind of language, an objective system of communication. This says little, unless we are told what kind of communi- cation art is and what it communicates. About what Read says on this—and it is a good deal— the only certain thing is that it cannot all be true. Near the beginning, he suggests that art tells us about a special realm of truth: 'it is a unique mode of discourse, giving access to areas of knowledge that are closed to other types of discourse.' Later on he says, 'Modern art—art such as Picasso's and Moore's—is significant but not significant of any expressible ideas. It gives concrete existence to what is numinous, what is beyond the limits of rational discourse. . . This seems to make the same point, except that it mysteriously makes it as a special point about modern art. Still later, however, he says that all art is 'an objective symbol for a feeling or emotion.' But feelings and emotions are not-
surely—themselves numinous, nor closed to other sorts of discourse. So far, the reader may be encouraged to attempt to reconcile these, and other, conflicting remarks into some more coherent argument. He may be excused if his enthusiasm wanes when, after another seventy pages, Read confronts him with the blank assertion that 'reason depends on an agreed system of signs, whereas in art every image, until it becomes a cliché and therefore dead, is individual and arbitrary.' which undermines the entire thesis of the objective artistic 'language' which has been canvassed before.
This last passage indeed raises another problem for Read's views. In the psychological part of the book, he shows himself much attached to the Jungian theory of the collective unconscious and the presence in it of certain 'archetypal images,' to which the artist inevitably turns as sources of power and significance. It is very obscure how such images can become clichés, or (to put it another way) how it can matter if they do; since the whole idea is that we have in these a stock of fairly determinate images which constitute the fundamental raw material of the artist's communication. It is odd and significant that the only particular work of art to whose imagery Read tries to apply the theory in detail is Picasso's Guernica, a painting which he rather guardedly tells us he now rates lower than he used to—because, apparently, its symbols have become clichés. What it is for one of these symbols to become a cliché, and how this pos- sibility is related to the theory of the collective unconscious and the artistic language, are things that Read never tries to explain.
Yet this is what he must try to explain, if his theory is to be of the slightest use for criticism or the understanding of art. Here, I think, is the fundamental criticism of Read's musings. If they did assist, however obliquely and associatively, in the appreciation of actual works of art, their incoherence would not be totally fatal: one would ignore the book's claim to contain 'Essays towards the Aesthetic Philosophy,' and look out hopefully for pieces of critical help. But the momentum of ungoverned muddle is too strong, and distinctions of critical sensibility collapse into the same confusion as distinctions of reason. It emerges from this book, for instance, that in Read's view surrealism and conte nporary tachisme or action painting are very r• uch the same sort of thing, both attempts to t ,p more directly than earlier art the forces of the un- conscious. Yet he himself says in the same breath of certain paintings of the latter type that 'they are produced by arbitrary methods . . . colours tossed on to the canvas very much in the same way as one tosses dice in a game of chance. . . .1
How does the unconscious influence the tossing of dice? Here, as elsewhere, Read seems aston- ishingly to confuse the idea of allowing random chance to shape a work of art (or, as it has been called in other cases, anti-art) with the quite different activity, characteristic of much sur- realism, of the meticulous delineation of images supposedly emergent from the unconscious. It may be that there are connections to be drawn between the two; but Read does not draw con- nections, he merely obliterates distinctions. Much the same can be said of most of the criticism in the book; everywhere the same limp and foggy gesture. For all its good intent, it is just a lot of nothing.
BERNARD WILLIAMS
Previous page
