TALKING TO KANDINSKY
Making Art, Money & the Meaning Of Life in the 21st Century
Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” was first published in 1911.
The copy that I borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library in 2008 was obviously well-read. It was full of pencil marks where someone – at least 70 years after the original was first published – had circled or underlined text and made notations in the margins. Was this the handiwork of a paranoid schizophrenic reading between the lines, or merely the minor vandalism of some aging artist looking for pointers?
We can only guess.
In 2008 you can still buy a new copy of Kandinsky`s book online at Chapters or Amazon. In spite of its rather quaint language, the book is still being read. Kandinsky was born 30 years before my grandfather, and this year my daughter graduated from university. By my count that makes four generations of artists who have read his theories. So how does he continue to speak to us?
TALKING TO KANDINSKY began as I was putting together an exhibit of the artist’s work for the Vancouver International Visual Arts Corp. (“VIVA”), a non-profit involved in the promotion of the arts. It took shape slowly as a kind of conversation between us.
Since Wassily Kandinsky died in 1944 – eight years before I was born, communication was difficult. As the discussion heated up, other (mostly dead) poets and artists started showing up to help me prove my points. With their help I was almost always able to get the last word.
It was originally conceived of as a late-night television talk show complete with tacky theme music and a wisecracking – and omniscient – host a la Johnny Carson. Ms. Wiki is the computer-generated voice that plays counterpoint to the host, somewhat like Ed McMahon played to Johnny Carson.
With the exception of the host’s lines, all of the speaking parts are – or closely resemble – quotations attributed to the characters in real life.
List of Characters:
Wassily Kandinsky – Mr. Kandinsky
Pablo Picasso – Picasso
William Carlos Williams – Bill
Joe Rosenblatt – Joe
Michael T H Sadler – Michael (Mr. Kandinsky`s English translator for “Concerning the Spiritual in Art“)
Flossie Williams – Flossie (Bill`s wife)
Georgia O’Keefe – Georgia
Dylan Thomas – Dylan Thomas
Wikipedia – Ms. Wiki
and a talk show host – aka “Reallybigcheese“
TALKING TO KANDINSKY
Making Art, Money & the Meaning Of Life
in the 21st Century
a one act play
by Rob Farrow
Reallybigcheese:
Ms. Wiki can you introduce our first guest?
Ms. Wikipedia:
Wassily Kandinsky
Reallybigcheese:
Mr. Kandinsky you are credited with painting the first modern abstract works and are one of the most famous 20th century artists. I believe though that your rival – Picasso has surpassed you, at least in terms of a popular recognition.
Kandinsky:
Ahh…Picasso leaps boldly and is found continually by his bewildered crowd of followers standing at a point very different from that at which they saw him last. No sooner do they think that they have reached him again than he has changed once more. In this way there arose Cubism, the latest of the French movements…. Picasso is trying to arrive at constructiveness by way of proportion. In his latest works (1911) he has achieved the logical destruction of matter, not, however, by dissolution but rather by a kind of a parcelling out of its various divisions and a constructive scattering of these divisions about the canvas. But he seems in this most recent work distinctly desirous of keeping an appearance of matter. He shrinks from no innovation, and if colour seems likely to balk him in his search for a pure artistic form, he throws it overboard and paints a picture in brown and white; and the problem of purely artistic form is the real problem of his life.
In their pursuit of the same supreme end Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing colour and Picasso form.
Michael:
Wassily you are too generous to the spaniard.
It seems to me that Picasso shares a Futurist error when he endeavours to harmonize one item of reality–a number, a button, a few capital letters–with a surrounding aura of angular projections. There must be a conflict of impressions, which differ essentially in quality. One trend of modern music is towards realism of sound. Children cry, dogs bark, plates are broken. Picasso approaches the same goal from the opposite direction. It is as though he were trying to work from realism to music. The waste of time is, to my mind, equally complete in both cases. The power of music to give expression without the help of representation is its noblest possession. No painting has ever had such a precious power.
Kandinsky, you are striving to give it that power, and prove what is at least the logical analogy between colour and sound, between line and rhythm of beat.
Ms. Wikipedia:
Michael Sadler
Reallybigcheese:
Picasso is certainly one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art…
Ms. Wikipedia:
Picasso
Picasso:
My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Reallybigcheese:
Today, 35 years after your death, the name ‘Picasso’ still resonates. How is it that the persona you built – as carefully & deliberately as any other of your works I would guess, captured the public’s imagination in the second half of the 20th century?
How do you explain it?
Was it the exuberance and vitality of your work? Or was it just that your life was such a soap opera that the world couldn’t take their eyes off you? It seems that your relationships with women were tempestuous. How did you feel about the women in your life?
Picasso:
There are only two types of women – goddesses and doormats.
Flossie:
I can see why your life was so tempestuous!
Georgia:
Reluctantly I have had to go to men as sources in my painting because the past has left us so small an inheritance of woman’s painting that had widened life…. Before I put a brush to canvas I question, “Is this mine? Is it all intrinsically of myself? Is it influenced by some idea or some photograph of an idea which I have acquired from some man?”
Ms. Wikipedia:
About Georgia
Reallybigcheese:
Georgia, when I look at your work I don’t particularly see the work of a woman -
But perhaps my first wife was right to call me insensitive, maybe my masculinity blinds me to the ‘feminine aspects’ of what you tried to paint…
Reallybigcheese:
Mr. Kandinsky, while Picasso seemed to be in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, I believe that you evolved more or less gradually from the representational to purely abstract forms. Do you see this as the evolution of a superior – and timeless – approach to painting?
Kandinsky:
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born.
So art cannot be `timeless`.
Do I believe that we must abandon utterly all material objects and paint solely in abstractions? The problem of harmonizing the appeal of the material and the non-material shows us the answer to this question. As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so likewise does every object represented. To deprive oneself of this possibility is to limit one’s powers of expression. That is at any rate the case at present. But besides this answer to the question, there is another, and one which art can always employ to any question beginning with “must”: There is no “must” in art, because art is free.
Picasso:
…and there is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Georgia:
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Reallybigcheese:
Mr. Kandinsky, in the book you speak of a relationship with music…
Michael Sadler:
Kandinsky is painting music. That is to say, he has broken down the barrier between music and painting, and has isolated the pure emotion which, for want of a better name, we call the artistic emotion. Anyone who has listened to good music with any enjoyment will admit to an unmistakable but quite indefinable thrill. He will not be able, with sincerity, to say that such a passage gave him such visual impressions, or such a harmony roused in him such emotions. The effect of music is too subtle for words. And the same with this painting of Kandinsky’s.
Reallybigcheese:
You talk about the abstract nature of music and how, in contrast, the visual arts have been forced to mimic objects from the ‘real world’.
Mr. Kandinsky:
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life,cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.
This borrowing of method by one art from another, can only be truly successful when the application of the borrowed methods is not superficial but fundamental. One art must learn first how another uses its methods, so that the methods may afterwards be applied to the borrower’s art from the beginning, and suitably. The artist must not forget that in him lies the power of true application of every method, but that that power must be developed.
Reallybigcheese:
You make an interesting comparison between music with its duration and painting which communicates the entire image at once to the audience.
Mr. Kandinsky:
Yes.
In manipulation of form music can achieve results which are beyond the reach of painting. On the other hand, painting is ahead of music in several particulars. Music, for example, has at its disposal duration of time; while painting can present to the spectator the whole content of its message at one moment.
Reallybigcheese:
In 1911 you painted Impression III (Concert). I believe this was in response to a concert by Arnold Schoenberg. In your book you describe three different types of work that have their roots in musical forms.
Mr. Kandinsky:
Yes I was very fond of Mr. Schoenberg`s work.
These three forms represent three different sources of inspiration:
-
A direct impression of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form. This I call an “Impression.”
-
A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the non-material nature. This I call an “Improvisation.”
-
An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. This I call a “Composition.” In this, reason, consciousness, purpose, play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears, only the feeling. Which kind of construction, whether conscious or unconscious, really underlies my work, the patient reader will readily understand.
Reallybigcheese:
I have managed to come up with an archival radio broadcast featuring Arnold Schoenberg discussing his painting, as well as some of his musical influences.
Arnold Schoenberg
Reallybigcheese:
It`s interesting that in Europe, while visual artists were abandoning representational forms and were moving towards abstraction and comparing the visual arts to music, poets in America – at least the pre-eminent one in my mind – William Carlos Wiliams, was moving away from the abstractions of language and representing objects with words. In a way he was painting with words. What’s more, he was pointing to an affinity between modern painting and poetry.
Ms. Wikipedia:
William Carlos Williams
Bill:
I think you`re referring to the notion of “no ideas but in things”?
Picasso:
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
Bill:
In an interview with Walter Sutton, I once said “I’ve attempted to fuse the poetry and painting to make it the same thing.”
Reallybigcheese:
Canadian poet Joe Rosenblatt moves readily between words and images…
Ms. Wikipedia:
Joe Rosenblatt
Joe:
For my part I make no distinction between creating visual art and writing poetry; for me, painting and drawing are just other ways of writing poetry.
My aim is to make people laugh at danger, the world, and themselves; not as a way of escaping the frightful reality of life but rather as a way of confronting it directly. If concern with the human condition is difficult to find in my art, it is because of the comic elements, and because my subjects (cats, birds, snakes, avaricious plants, insects, amphibians, bats) wear masks.
Reallybigcheese:
Like both of you, I was drawn to poetry early – probably because my obvious lack of talent for drawing or music. I remember trying to impress Josée, (my heartthrob at the time) that I wasn’t just another pretty anglo face.
The overwhelming teenage angst I felt at her rejection resulted in a poem which – unfortunately for me – was published by one of the myriad ‘literary magazines’ filled with self-indulgent poet wannabes. I found it a curious world where visionaries, misfits and ‘non-conformists’ and railed together against the ‘military-industrial complex’ and against conspicuous consumption.
But eventually I found my way into the visual arts – with the advent of digital photography. And of course I`ve always had a fascination for the way poems look on the page.
Bill:
I remember once giving a lecture to students at Harvard, describing the process of writing a poem in terms that a modernist painter might describe painting on a canvas:
“There is no subject; it’s what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the difference. Poems aren’t made of thoughts — they’re made of words, pigments put on”
Reallybigcheese:
Bill, you were a doctor. As a youth that always impressed me. You wrote this ground-breaking poetry, but couldn`t make a living at it. So you did the sensible thing and did something that people found useful.
And I think it helped to connect you to your audience.
Flossie:
What audience?
There were no literary connections in Rutherford, where we lived. I asked him not to read his poetry in Rutherford where he was misunderstood and parodied. I told him to cut it out…They don`t know what it`s about…I said it`s insulting to you and me.
Joe:
I think all poets feel alienated, because they write for a small audience and are goaded by commercially sucessful writers to give up poetry and write some serious fiction which can earn their publishers money, and themselves respect.
A director of a prestigious academic publishing house, and a fan of my poetry, laughed cruelly when I innocently mentioned a market for poetry. “What market?” he roared, palpably fixated on the word….
Reallybigcheese:
From pretty early on I figured out that there is no market for poetry. That`s why I make my living as an accountant today.
And I think it`s appropriate that poets use the words money and poetry in the same sentence. Most artists need a job to support their art “habit”. But for poets it`s a universal truth.
So why then do we make art?
Mr. Kandinsky:
Veiled in obscurity are the causes of this need to move ever upwards and forwards, by sweat of the brow, through sufferings and fears. When one stage has been accomplished, and many evil stones cleared from the road, some unseen and wicked hand scatters new obstacles in the way, so that the path often seems blocked and totally obliterated. But there never fails to come to the rescue some human being, like ourselves in everything except that he has in him a secret power of vision.
He sees and points the way. The power to do this he would sometimes fain lay aside, for it is a bitter cross to bear. But he cannot do so. Scorned and hated, he drags after him over the stones the heavy chariot of a divided humanity, ever forwards and upwards.
Often, many years after his body has vanished from the earth, men try by every means to recreate this body in marble, iron, bronze, or stone, on an enormous scale. As if there were any intrinsic value in the bodily existence of such divine martyrs and servants of humanity, who despised the flesh and lived only for the spirit! But at least such setting up of marble is a proof that a great number of men have reached the point where once the being they would now honour, stood alone.
Reallybigcheese:
So what you`re saying is that artists are some kind of spiritual crusaders saving the world from crass materialism?
As the result of this kind of thinking the world is littered with fifty-something political artists still sporting body piercings and pony tails or army boots and peasant skirts, who can`t interest anyone in their work and now subsist on a diet of petty crime, welfare and government grants, mixed with a soupçon of mental illness.
Or are these people truly visionaries?
Mr. Kandinsky, you may have despised the flesh, but you did have your inheritance to fall back on. I don`t think making art is heroic – it`s self-indulgent. I make art because I need to.
I believe we need an audience to breathe life into our creations. The fundamental problem all artists have is to engage an audience without capitulating to them. We need to keep them interested, while still being true to our “innerer klang”.
Ms. Wiki I see that Dylan Thomas would like to speak.
Ms. Wikipedia:
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas:
If you think that you don’t need to be read, you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need to read your work because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.
Reallybigcheese:
I think if poets are going to connect to their audiences, they should avoid reading their work. I agree with Flossie, Most audiences just don`t understand it. For the most part I find readings to be an embarrassment.
At first reading the best that I can hope for is a single image or a line that strikes home. I rarely can connect much beyond that. I prefer to be left alone with the work and re-read it if it catches my interest. More often than not the poet`s persona gets in the way – and I`m usually too polite to leave when the poet is reading if the work doesn`t move me. Instead I just stick around with characteristic Canadian politeness, and feel uncomfortable.
The most notable exception is Dylan Thomas – whose work is just so damned musical.
Dylan Thomas:
One year I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.
So I don`t know how much I actually connected to the audience.
Reallybigcheese:
Maybe that musical voice was deeply-rooted in your “welshness” – while it still moves me, there wasn`t much that I could steal from you. It wasn`t part of the North American now that I needed to express.
Bill:
Certainly I came to look at poetry from a local viewpoint; I had to find out for myself; I’d had no instruction beyond high school literature. When I was inclined to write poems I was definitely an American kid, confident of himself but also independent. From the beginning I felt I was NOT English. If poetry had to be written, I had to do it my own way. It all happened very quickly. Somehow poetry and the female sex were allied in my brain.
Reallybigcheese:
So there is a common thread – in their youth poets write poetry out of an overriding need to connect to women!
Or is it just that puberty simply hijacks the brain of all young males, so that every activity is allied to females?
Mr. Kandinsky, you talk in the book of the of a triangle and of a movement or progression forwards and upwards.
Mr. Kandinsky:
The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.
The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment.
At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted.
Reallybigcheese:
Certainly there is a progression in life. And an artist`s work evolves over time. In your case it had a direction towards abstraction. But I think we have to be careful not to confuse progression with progress.
In your own words “Every work of art is the child of its age”.
Your work is fixed in time – never to be surpassed. It seems to me the concept of progress is irrelevant in the arts. We merely do our best to express what we have to express. If we are lucky we take some joy in it.
Kandinsky:
I ask you to understand that my painting does not try to reveal ’secrets’ to you, that I (as many people think) have not found a special language that has to be learned and without which my painting cannot be read. This should not be made more complicated than it really is….The content of painting is painting. Nothing has to be deciphered. The content, filled with happiness, speaks to that person to whom each form is alive, i.e. has content.
Reallybigcheese:
Enough said!
