"Revisiting The Spiritual In Art", by Donald Kuspit
Presented at Ball State University, January 21st, 2004.
It is almost a century since Wassily Kandinsky wrote On the Spiritual in Art.
Why reconsider it now? Not simply because of historical reasons--not simply
because it is time to take a fresh look at a text that had profound influence
on twentieth century art--but because art faces the same problem now that it
did then: how to generate and articulate what Kandinsky called “the all-important
spark of inner life,” or, as he also called it, of “inner necessity.”(1)
It is the core of “spiritual experience.” The problem is even greater
today than it was in Kandinsky’s day: what he meant by the spiritual was
self-evident to his audience. Today it is not. Its meaning was anchored in religious
tradition. Today there is no religious tradition to sustain it. Thus, in describing
how he came to the idea of the spiritual in art--realized that “the sensations
of colors on the palette” could be “spiritual experiences,”
as Kandinsky said--he described how he felt as though he was taking a “‘stroll’
within [a] picture,” that he was “surrounded on all sides by painting,”(2)
whenever he entered a church.
It didn’t matter whether it was a Russian Orthodox Church or a Catholic
Chapel. The experience was the same whether it was in the Moscow churches or
the Bavarian and Tyrolean chapels: it was an artistic experience of religion
and a religious experience of art--a sense of the easy and seamless merger of
religious and artistic experience, their inevitable reciprocity. The interiors
of the churches and chapels that Kandinsky visited are brightly and intricately
colored, as he was quick to appreciate, so that the excitement of color and
of inner life converged. Color and feeling were inextricable: sense experience
was spiritual experience and spiritual experience took sensuous form. That is,
the external, visible phenomenon of color seemed to be a spontaneous manifestation
of the internal, invisible phenomenon of feeling. Feeling needed color to become
consummate, and color needed feeling to have inner meaning--to be more than
a chemical matter of fact. Kandinsky insisted that certain colors and certain
emotions necessarily went together. They were not simply arbitrarily or culturally
associated but essentially connected, as he argued in the chapter on the “psychological
working” or emotional “Effects of Color” in On the Spiritual
in Art.
The public who read On the Spiritual in Art when it first appeared in 1911,
and also the Blaue Reiter Almanac when it appeared a year later--the second
and last edition appeared in 1914--thus understood what Kandinsky meant when
he declared that “their principal aim [was] to awaken [the] capacity for
experiencing the spiritual in material and in abstract phenomena.”(3)
It was a religious experience--an experience of inner life. Church-going induced
it--forced one back on one’s inner life, in forgetfulness of the outer
world--and Kandinsky thought that abstract painting induced it, if only because
in entering an abstract painting one turned away from “the external aspect
of phenomena,” as he said, toward what he called “feelings of a
finer nature.” What mattered was the “mood” or “spiritual
atmosphere” of the work, not its material or outward aspect. The work
had to be seen with “spiritual eyes”--eyes that could intuit inner
necessity--not eyes that could see only physical material or outer necessity.
When Kandinsky spoke of “my tendency toward the ‘hidden,’
the concealed,” he was talking about his ability to see the spiritual
concealed in the material--the unfamiliar emotional reality behind familiar
material appearances. As he famously wrote to Will Grohman in 1925, “I
want people to see finally what lies behind my paintings.”
On the Spiritual in Art begins with a long diatribe against “the long
reign of materialism, the whole nightmare of the materialistic attitude, which
has turned the life of the universe into an evil, purposeless game.” Another
reason for reconsidering, and, as I hope to show, the necessity of re-affirming
the spiritual in art, is that we have not only not awakened from the nightmare
of the materialistic attitude in art as well as society, but materialism has
become a plague, indeed, the reigning ideology in both. Kandinsky thought that
Impressionism was materialism’s climactic statement in art, but then he
never saw Pop art, which began the ascendency, not to say dominance, of media-derived
art. The attitude of Pop art is so materialistic, however ironical its materialism
is supposed to be, that it is virtually impossible to find any spark of inner
life in it. (There is certainly none in Andy Warhol’s media mannequins.)
One of the reasons that Kandinsky was concerned with inner life is that it registers
the pernicious emotional effects of outer materialistic life, affording a kind
of critical perspective on materialism that becomes the springboard for emotional
transcendence of it. The inability of Pop art to convey inner life, which is
a consequence of its materialistic disbelief in interiority, and especially
spirituality, which is the deepest interiority, indicates that Pop art’s
irony is at best nominally critical. Irony in fact mocks belief, even as it
spices up materialism, making it seem less banal, that is, populist, thus giving
Pop art the look of deviance characteristic of avant-garde art. In Pop art it
is no more than a simulated effect. I dwell on irony because it is opposed to
spirituality, not to say incommensurate with it, and also its supposedly more
knowing alternative, and because irony has become the ruling desideratum of
contemporary art, apparently redeeming its materialism. This itself is ironical,
for contemporary materialistic society and its media have discovered the advantage
of being ironical about themselves, namely, it spares them the serious trouble
of having to change. This suggests that irony has become a form of frivolity.
It is no longer the revolutionary debunking understanding it once claimed to
be, e.g., in Jasper Johns’s American flag paintings, but an expression
of frustration.
For Kandinsky modern materialism was evident in the “turbulent flood of
technological inventions [that] has poured forth,” as he noted in “Whither
the ‘New” Art?,” published the same year as On the Spiritual
in Art, and the obsession with “the accumulation of material blessings.”(4)
But he never experienced the blind faith in technology as the solution to all
human problems nor the wealth, however unequally distributed, of our business
society. It is possible to argue that in art, which is what we are concerned
with, materialism has completely swept the field, so that searching for the
inner life of a work of art or expecting any art to have spiritual significance
is like searching for the rare needle in a haystack. There is usually no concealed
spiritual point in most contemporary art--nothing unexpected that would sting
the spectator’s spirit into self-awareness. To put this another way, there
is little that is sublime--another idea that Kandinsky used--about contemporary
materialistic art, that is, little that would awaken the capacity for experiencing
the spiritual.
Materialism has increased exponentially in art and society since Kandinsky’s
day, as the business ideology of today makes clear. Business materialism is
evident in the eagerness for corporate sponsorship of art--one may say corporate
legitimation of its significance. Business materialism is also evident in the
implicit belief that the work of art is a commodity before it is anything else,
that is, its commodity identity is its primary identity, or to put this another
way, its marketplace value is its primary value. It seems more and more foolish
and farcical to speak of a work of art’s internal necessity when it seems
designed to cater to external necessity. It is harder and harder to know what
one is talking about when one does so. It is harder and harder to claim that
a work of art can be a spiritual experience, however much such artists as Mark
Rothko and Barnett Newman insisted that one was missing the point of their abstract
art if one viewed it materially. They were not mere technicians of color, to
use a term that has been applied to Rothko, but spiritual provocateurs.
Ironically, marketing materialism has given art more visibility and prestige
than it had when it served religion and the aristocracy. It is a two way street:
business’s enthusiastic endorsement of avant-garde art’s professed
autonomy is business’s covert way of asserting its own autonomy, that
is, its belief that, like art, it is answerable and responsible only to itself.
By supporting art business appropriates art’s supposedly intrinsic value
and claims to advanced consciousness. Ours is a business culture not a religious
culture, and it is impossible to find spiritual significance in what Warhol
called business art. I submit to you that his art is a celebration of business,
which is in part why it sells. It is certainly a long way from the color mysticism
of the interiors of the churches that Kandinsky visited and that his early abstract
works struggled to emulate. Corporate headquarters are not churches, even though
their decoration with works of art are attempts to give them spiritual significance.
Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, for me the emblematic icon of our
artistic materialism, is also irreconcilable with Kasimir Malevich’s abstract
icons, which he compared to spiritual experiences in a desert. In contrast,
Warhol’s work epitomizes the business materialism of the crowd. Ironically,
Warhol’s cynical attempt to turn the dead actress into a sacred presence--she
was very good business--reinforces her profaneness and spiritual insignificance.
Gold is either filthy lucre or, alchemically speaking, ultima materia--the ultimate
sacred substance--and Warhol’s perverse fusion of its opposed meanings
in the socio-cosmetic construction of Marilyn Monroe is the ultimate materialistic
nihilism. It is the exemplary case of the confusion of values that occurs in
a business society, and that Kandinsky fought against.
What I am arguing is that the spiritual crisis of the contemporary artist is
greater than Kandinsky’s. Kandinsky knew art was in spiritual crisis,
whereas today’s materialistic artist doesn’t see any spiritual crisis.
All that matters is materialistic success. The spiritual crisis in art today
is more comprehensive than it was in Kandinsky’s time, all the more so
because what Jacques Barzun called the modern religion of art--however private
a religion it was, and thus more of a cult--is defunct today, however much its
vestige lives on in the pseudo-sacred space of the modern museum. Kandinsky
could fall back on the religion of art, and contributed to its growth, but today
it seems quaint and simplistic, which is why many contemporary scholars and
interpreters ignore the spiritual writings of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian,
regarding them as so much claptrap beside the point of the actual works they
produced. The last religious works of art--the so-called purist works that Clement
Greenberg advocated and analyzed--have become history--marketplace as well as
art history. Even more crucially, Kandinsky’s assumption that color transmitted
and “translated” emotion--that inner life had a necessary material
medium, universally accessible and instantly expressive--has fallen by the wayside.
The relentless materialization and mediafication of art, if I am allowed the
use of a clumsy but I hope comprehensible neologism, which are accessories to
its commodification, has stripped it of the sense of subjective presence so
basic to Kandinsky’s belief in spiritual experience, leaving us with what
from Kandinsky’s point of view is the shell of art rather than its spiritual
substance. The point I am trying to make is that there is no longer anything
hidden or concealed or behind art, as Kandinsky expected there to be. It is
all upfront: what you see is what you get, as has been famously said by Andy
Warhol and Frank Stella. If what you see is what you get, then art has lost
its internal necessity, that is, its subjective reason for being, and become
completely objective or external. One no longer experiences it, but theorizes
about its material structure and social meaning. In other words, belief in the
spiritual has been completely uprooted and destroyed in most contemporary art--the
idea of the spiritual as such has become meaningless--thus completing the process
of the despiritualization or demystification of art that began with Cubism and
climaxed in post-painterly abstraction, as Greenberg thinks.
Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting is in fact the final intellectual
stage of the modern process of despiritualizing art, which in the last analysis
is reduced entirely to the terms of its material medium. Such materialistic
reductionism, involving the complete objectification of art--it is a case of
what Alfred North Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness”--is
evident in Greenberg’s assertion that “the great masters of the
past achieved their art by virtue of combinations of pigment whose real effectiveness
was ‘abstract,’ and...their greatness is not owed to the spirituality
with which they conceived the things they illustrated so much as it is to the
success with which they ennobled raw matter to the point where it could function
as art.”(5) Greenberg, Stella, and Warhol have more in common than one
might imagine: they are all radical materialists. For them the spiritual effect
of art--the sense of spiritual intimacy it can achieve--is a case of misplaced
materialism, that is, a naive misreading of art’s physicality. For them
the spiritual is an epiphenomenon of art’s manipulation of matter, and
as such a misapprehension of art. They ultimately want to eliminate the idea
that there is something spiritual about art as dishonesty. Honest art involves
the attempt to master matter, including, for many artists, social matter. At
best, to say that an art is “spiritual” is simply a way of saying
that its mastery of matter is successful, or at least convincing to the viewer.
This makes the artist a kind of chef who knows how to cook the material medium
so that it is tasty and looks appealing, which gives it all the presence it
will ever have and need to be credible--simply as art. The idea that the artist
might invest his or her subjectivity in the material medium, which is what brings
it alive--indeed, the idea that the artist might have a profound subjectivity,
that is, experience the inner necessity of spiritual aspiration, and that the
only person who can legitimately call himself or herself an artist is the person
who experiences art as part of a personal spiritual process--is discarded as
absurd and beside the artistic point. Thus the apparently revolutionary materialistic
conception of art is emotionally reactionary.
There is another factor that makes art’s situation today more difficult
and desperate than it was in Kandinsky’s day: the avant-garde has been
conventionalized, not to say banalized. This is more than a matter of its institutionalization:
it is a matter of its bankruptcy. It has run out of creative steam--the age
of artistic revolution and innovation is over--and become redundant, feeding
on itself, and not always to refine its principles and methods. A good part
of what motivated Kandinsky was defiance of convention, as is evident in his
pursuit of “unrestained freedom,” as he said in the essay “On
the Question of Form” that appeared in the Blaue Reiter Almanac. This
begins, as he wrote, “in the effort toward liberation from forms that
have already reached their fulfillment, i.e., liberation from old forms in the
effort to create new and infinitely varied forms.”(6) It climaxes in a
sense of “unbridled freedom” fraught with “active spirit,”
that is, feeling. “The ‘feeling’ that speaks aloud will sooner
or later correctly guide the artist as well as the viewer.”(7) The problem
is that what was once unripe new form has become overripe old form and no longer
seems so infinitely varied, and what once seemed like emotional liberation--fresh
and unique and revolutionary feeling--has now become stale and pro forma. The
avant-garde has reached its fulfillment, to use Kandinsky’s language,
and become decadent.
The moment of unpredictability and improvisation that was so important to Kandinsky,
and that he struggles to achieve in the abstract works produced under the auspices
of On the Spiritual in Art--as Richard Stratton has pointed out, it has a unique
place in the history of avant-garde thinking, for Kandinsky’s ideas were
developed before the art that exemplifies them were made, that is, On the Spiritual
in Art is prospective and prophetic rather than retrospective and rationalizing--has
passed and vanished, never to return. It is incidentally worth noting that the
root word of “improvisation” is “not to foresee,” which
is not the same as accidental or spontaneous, by chance or by impulse, and why
improvisation is more enlivening than either--and Kandinsky’s whole point
is that art has to be inwardly alive or it is not worth the creative trouble--since
the results of chance and impulse can be foreseen, however not precisely predicted.
As Franz Marc, Kandinsky’s close friend and colleague, wrote in the Preface
to the second edition of the Blaue Reiter Almanac: “With a divining rod
we searched through the art of the past and the present. We showed only what
was alive, and what was not touched by the tone of convention. We gave our ardent
devotion to everything in art that was born out of itself, lived in itself,
did not walk on crutches of habit. We pointed to each crack in the crust of
convention only because we hoped to find there an underlying force that would
one day come to light....It has always been the great consolation of history
that nature continuously thrusts up new forces through outlived rubbish.”(8)
Well, nature itself seems like outlived rubbish in modernity and especially
postmodernity, and no new spiritual forces have come to light in art. Avant-garde
art has become habitual--a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however
materially refined. Are there any works of art made today that do not walk on
the crutches of avant-garde habit, that do not have the tone of avant-garde
convention, that one can return to again and again as a resource of inner life?
There are no doubt works that seem emotionally powerful, and even deep, but
rarely does one find a work in which the emotion and the medium seem one and
the same. I am perhaps overstating my point, but the fact remains that the problem
that motivated Kandinsky to write On the Spiritual in Art has grown greater
and seems unsolvable, and that his idea of an improvisational art seems naive
and inadequate in the current sophisticated situation of art. Kandinsky began
“Whither the ‘New’ Art?” with a cynical statement from
a famous scientist, Rudolf Virchow: “I have opened up thousands of corpses,
but I never managed to see a soul.”(9) Kandinsky attacked Virchow’s
remark as an example of scientific and materialistic philistinism--in a sense,
Greenberg is the Virchow of art criticism and theory, just as the works of Stella
and Warhol tend to be Frankenstein monsters, that is, technologically animated
corpses--but it raises the important question: if one opened up thousands of
works of art made today, how many souls would one see? Behind this question
lurks another one: what state would they be in, if they were there?
One might ask, incidentally, how Kandinsky’s improvisations, in practice,
avoid the fate of Stella’s and Warhol’s works, that is, avoid becoming
materialistic corpses or Frankenstein monsters. In what does the radical unconventionality
of the improvisations consist? If the core of scientific and materialistic philistinism
consists in the power to measure and quantify, as has been argued, then Kandinsky’s
improvisations resist measure and quantification, to the extent that they seem
inherently unmeasurable and unquantifiable--altogether beyond scientifically
control and analysis. They come to suggest the immeasurable, that is, the spiritual
in contrast to the material. The ancients were terrified of the immeasurable--the
uncontrollable beyond, as it were, which was rationalized as sublime--and their
art, which has been the model for so much subsequent art, is about measure and
the sense of control and mastery measure brings. In contrast, one might say
that Kandinsky’s improvisations deliberately construct the unmeasurable
in order to suggest the same sense of immeasurability that the churches and
chapels he admired conveyed by way of color.
He too uses color, which is experienced as unmeasurable, and thus suggests the
immeasurable--the inherently unmeasurable, as it were. Color seems to transcend
the environment in which it appears. It is materially the case even as it seems
ungraspable and thus peculiarly immaterial. Color is constitutive of space but
because its appeal is entirely to the optic sense, leaving the haptic sense
unengaged, to use Bernard Berenson’s terms, it seems boundless and intangible.
In The Measure of Reality Alfred W. Crosby has shown that the segmentation of
space and time into measurable, self-contained modular units is the basis of
Western scientific materialism. Kandinsky’s improvisations achieve their
spiritual effect by presenting unsegmented color--going altogether against the
quantification of color we find in Seurat--and thus seemingly spaceless and
timeless color, that is, non-objective color. Such color is not firmly attached
to or contained by objects, and in visual fact seems to float free of them,
to the extent of existing independently, becoming, as it were, an amorphous
subjective gesture which can never be seen in perspective, that is, measured
and fixed in its place. Kandinsky’s rebellion against measure, order,
quantification, number may look psychotic--utterly unrealistic and irrational--from
a scientific materialistic point of view, which in fact is epitomized by the
rational perspective construction of the traditional picture--but it opens up
the possibility of a new vision of vision. Indeed, his improvisations return
to a prelapsarian vision of reality--reality with which one is in spontaneous
spiritual harmony, that is, with which one has an inner relationship rather
than a measurable materialistic and thus contrived relationship. It is the difference
between the way reality appears when it is freely engaged--when it seems abstractly
and spontaneously expressive--and the clear and distinct way it begins to appear
as one brings it under control by measuring it. I am suggesting that Kandinsky’s
improvisations, in overthrowing the quantified picture, are inherently more
revolutionary than Cubism’s quantifiable pictures, which still hold on
to measure, however mischievously and equivocally. Ironically, Kandinsky’s
improvisations show that one way of being modern is by rebelling against the
modern vision of reality as measurable and quantifiable, that is, one way of
making avant-garde progress is by regressing to a vision of reality that scientific
materialism has discredited.
The basic question that haunts On the Spiritual in Art is what Kandinsky means
by spiritual experience. He never exactly defines it, beyond associating it
with religion, and declaring it to be at the center of inner life. The German
scholar Klaus Lankheit thinks that for Kandinsky spirituality refers to “the
subjective ‘freedom’ of creative man,”(10) and another German
expert, Wieland Schmied, thinks that Kandinsky wanted to raise “the problem
of the purpose of art”(11) by introducing the possibility of its spirituality.
I think they are both correct, if incomplete in their understanding of what
Kandinsky meant by the spiritual. As I hope to show, they miss what is fundamental
to spirituality for him, and in general. Nonetheless, Lankheit and Schmied make
it clear that the crisis that led Kandinsky to attempt to create a modern spiritual
art--an art that would unequivocally express a spiritual attitude--had two aspects.
It was a crisis of creativity, that is, it involved the question as to just
how much subjective freedom there is in creativity, implying that if creativity
is not completely free subjectively--if it is in any way bound by objective
necessity--it is not really creativity. It was also a crisis that involved the
question of the purpose of art, more particularly, of its necessity, especially
in the modern materialistic world. In other words, Kandinsky’s spiritual
crisis involved self-doubt, that is, doubts about his creativity, and, implicitly,
originality, which correlated with his doubts about his subjective or inner
freedom, and also uncertainty about art’s raison d’etre. The latter
is in part an extension of Kandinsky’s uncertainty about the purpose of
his own art. Broadly speaking, Kandinsky’s spiritual crisis was haunted
by the unresolvable question of the relationship of freedom and necessity in
the creation and significance of art.
Perhaps the immediate issue for Kandinsky was whether artistic creativity could
hold its own against scientific and technological creativity. They contributed
a great deal to human welfare. What did art contribute? Science understood the
workings of nature, technological inventions facilitated human life. What did
art understand? How facilitative of life are its inventions? We know how life
serves art, that is, how life finds its way into art. The desperate modern question
is how art serves life, that is, what place art has in modern life. These questions
forced Kandinsky to rethink the basis of creativity and the purpose of art.
The problem for him was to give art a sense of creative purpose that would confirm
that it was humanly transformative not simply socially routine, and, equally
important, that would make it convincing and compelling in a materialistic world
that was, as he repeatedly stated, indifferent to it except to the extent that
it mimicked the materialism of the times.
His desperate answer to all these questions was to conceive of art as the repository
and refuge of the spirituality the material world repudiated and shunned. What
both Lankheit and Schmied miss in their important interpretations of Kandinsky’s
insistence on the spirituality of art is the combative, polemical way in which
Kandinsky presents his views. I have always been struck by the sheer force of
will animating On the Spiritual in Art. The spiritual is a force to be reckoned
with. For Kandinsky, the spiritual attitude exists in and through its opposition
to the materialistic attitude, with which it is at war, just as the internal
necessity that informs--indeed, drives--the spiritual attitude exists in and
through its opposition to the external necessity that motivates the materialistic
attitude. Spirituality comes into its own--becomes deeply meaningful and transformative
of art and life--only as resistance to and transcendence of materialism. Such
resistance and transcendence are clearly religious in character.
The ultimate religious ambition--the ambition realized by the saints, and I
believe that Kandinsky thought he was a kind of saint, the holy man of modern
art, or at least a prophet announced its potential holiness--involves transcendental
resistance to the everyday world in order to enter a more extraordinary, higher
world of experience. It is a world that seems fresher and more alive than the
everyday world--a world that seems to have been just created--just come into
being. Kandinsky’s abstract improvisations are meant to be as otherworldly
as traditional religious renderings of otherworldly beings and experience. They
are meant to show the creative forces--the creative conflict between spirit
and matter, light and darkness, as Kandinsky says, using gnostic language--that
brought the world into being, and remain alive and active in the inner world.
It as though Kandinsky has projected himself into the moment of origination,
as Schmied says, and witnessed the creation of the world from the inside. What
Schmied calls his “cosmic landscapes” are microcosms of primordial
process--of the creative process, which inevitably involves the processing of
emotions, indeed, one’s deepest emotions about existence.
For Kandinsky, the basic formal elements of art are otherworldly in import,
however thisworldly their properties. Non-objectivity, then, means otherworldliness
for him, and otherworldliness means recovering a sense of the freshness of being,
which is embodied in the formal dynamics of the work of art. For Kandinsky,
non-objective art is the only means of transcendence of the objective, practical
modern world. In other words, it has a higher purpose than art that objectively
reflects that world, or that takes objectivity and practicality for granted.
One might say that where modernity involves extending the sway of the scientific
objectivity that discovers and conveys material necessity, non-objective art
affirms subjective freedom in defiance of it. The tone of lyric defiance in
Kandinsky’s writing--it is happily a long way from the pseudo-epic theories
of conceptual artists--in and of itself suggests the transcendence inherent
in subjective freedom.
Thus, ironically, Kandinsky’s non-objective art, which has been understood
as a revolutionary modern art, is anti-modern in spirit. Clement Greenberg once
said that abstract art reflected the materialistic positivism of modernity,
but Kandinsky’s abstract art refuses to do so, which is no doubt why Greenberg
did not care for it. He did not believe in the possibility of transcending the
basic attitude of one’s times. Greenberg accepted what Kandinsky called
“the harsh tyranny of the materialistic philosophy,” even in art.
For Greenberg, “spirituality” was simply an effect of the manipulation
of the material medium, as I have noted--the result of complete submission to
it rather than transcendental use of it. I am suggesting that the spiritual
crisis motivating On the Spiritual in Art is at bottom a crisis of transcendence
and ultimately of religious faith--faith in the self’s ability to transcend
the objectively material world through its own subjective creativity.
Kandinsky had in effect come to doubt that art was a vehicle for creative transcendence--that
it could transmit a sense of transcendence of what it represented in the act
of representing it, indicating the artist’s spiritual superiority to it,
that is, implying that the artist’s creative subjectivity is more to the
human point than materially given objective reality. The artist’s fundamental
act of creativity consists in projecting his or her subjectivity, with all its
problems, into objective reality--creating into it, as D. W. Winnicott eloquently
says--making it seem humanly meaningful as distinct from merely materially the
case.
The appropriation of some aspect of objective reality as the temporary sensuous
form for the artist’s subjectivity imbues objective reality with a spiritual
consequence it otherwise lacks. It was Kandinsky’s spiritual crisis, involving
doubt of his own creativity, as noted, generalized into the disturbing feeling
that art had no purpose--this art that he had given up a promising career as
a lawyer and professor to pursue, and that now seemed to be abandoning him--that
led him to abandon the representation of objective reality for the direct presentation,
as it were, of his subjectivity, which he had in effect lost contact with. In
a sense, Kandinsky re-asserted art’s divine right to creative transcendence
in order to rediscover and renew his own subjectivity--to heal himself, as it
were. To put this the other way round, he in effect subjectified art to regain
faith in himself and his own creativity, giving art a sense of transcendental
or spiritual purpose in the process. If “crisis” is understood in
the sense in which Hippocratic medicine understands it, namely, as the critical
moment when the outcome of an acute sickness is in suspense--when it is about
to change dramatically for the better or the worse--then we can say that Kandinsky
emerged from the sickness of his own subjectivity with a new sense of his personal
significance and creative power, that is, the power to endure and transcend
his objective situation in the material world.
I am suggesting that Kandinsky experienced what Viktor Frankl calls an existential
neurosis, that is, “frustration of the will-to-meaning,”(12) indeed,
a sense that human life, especially inner life, had become meaningless in the
modern scientific-technological materialistic world, and with it art, the keeper
of inner life, as it were. As Frankl says, such a crisis is spiritual because
it involves loss of belief in the possibility and even reality of spiritual
experience. According to Frankl, spirituality means “freedom in the face
of three things: (1)the instincts; (2)inherited disposition; and (3)environment.”(13)
Spiritual experience declares “the freedom of the spirit in spite of nature.”(14)
To use Ernest Becker’s words, spirituality involves “the problem
of personal freedom versus species determinism,”(15) or, as Silvano Arieti
writes, the attempt to “increase [the] capacity for choice and to decrease
determinism in every possible way, to move away from physical necessity and
toward free will.”(16) In other words, spiritual or subjective freedom
involves the transcendence of natural and social determinism, in whatever form
they take.
More broadly, spirituality involves the general experience of transcendence,
that is, what Erich Fromm calls the X or mystical experience that is the “substratum”
of the “religious attitude.” It involves the negation of the world
and history and the self that is their expression, and, at the same time, the
liberation of the all-embracing love latent in the selfless self that survives
the negation. The X experience “is expressible only in poetic and visual
symbols,” and underlies or stands behind “the most widely differing
systems of [religious] orientation.” They are “various conceptualizations”
of the way to realize the X experience. However, transcendence does not mean
“a movement toward a transcendent God but refers rather to the transcendence
of a narcissistic ego--that is, to a goal within man himself.”(17) That
is, transcendence means inner liberation from authority, divine or human. Spirituality
separates human beings from animals, who find transcendence incomprehensible,
indeed, unthinkable, for it is beyond the ken of their existence, which submits
to the authority of instinct. The less instinct rules one’s existence,
the more one feels able to transcend it, and enjoy the experience of transcendence
in general.
At its core, the feeling of transcendence involves the experience of inseparability
from the cosmos at large, and with that a renewal of integrity. David Bohm describes
it in terms that seem especially appropriate to Kandinsky’s art. They
resemble those I have used to understand it. He regards mystical experience
as an attempt “to reach the immeasurable, i.e., a state of mind in which
[one] ceases to sense a separation between [oneself] and the whole of reality.”(18)
It is a state of mind in which one no longer feels determined and measured by
ordinary reality. Freud regards this “oceanic experience” as regressive
and narcissistic, which is accurate but misses the reason--indeed, necessity--for
such narcissistic regression in a society that seems alien and indifferent,
that is, lacking in empathy. In such an emotionally unfacilitative world, which
brings with it the threat of psychic disintegration and annihilation, oceanic
experience--the moment of transcendence or cosmic merger implicit in healthy
narcissistic regression--affords a sense of insular union with the whole of
reality beyond one’s immediate reality. One is ordinarily forced to comply
to it in order to materially survive. Oceanic experience also transports one
beyond the socially ugly world at large. One tends to submit to it because one
realizes that every attempt to revolutionize it is likely to end in failure,
that is, the construction of what calls itself a new world order but that demands
old-fashioned compliance. Thus mystical experience becomes an important way
of remaining emotionally healthy in an emotionally unhealthy world. More particularly,
it becomes the major means of preserving, securing, and protecting the core
self in defiance of an intimidating and debilitating social reality. It becomes
a way of sustaining a sense of authenticity or true selfhood, or at least keep
from becoming inwardly contaminated by one’s compliant dealings with society.
It is also a way to avoid becoming one of society’s scapegoats. The creativity
of mysticism is a weapon and protest against society’s destructive scapegoating--insidious
sacrifice--of any creative individual it cannot find a collective use for, that
is, misappropriate for its own glory.
Kandinsky’s early abstractions are attempts to convey the X or mystical
experience, that is, to realize it through transcendence of the social determinism
implicit in representation of the world. Initially he found suggestions of transcendence
in nature. It is a familiar romantic discovery, involving the transformation
of the inevitability implicit in nature--that inevitability we call instinct--into
the sense of freedom called transcendence, ultimately freedom from or transcendence
of nature itself. In a sense, Kandinsky’s early abstractions improvise
spirituality out of instinctively felt sensations of nature, more particularly,
out of primordial sensations of naturally given colors. For Kandinsky, vivid
color is not only a sign of natural vitality, but also evidence of eternal life,
even a trace of it, for color is the earthly catalyst and carrier of the X experience,
that is, it is the transcendence immanent in nature. Thus Kandinsky’s
improvisations are mystical experiences--more familiarly, perceptual epiphanies--of
color. They pay homage to its transcendental power. Transcendental experience
is there for the asking in even the most familiar color, if one knows how to
ask. Kandinsky conveys this inherent transcendence by liberating color from
confining line. In his improvisations color is uncontainable and infinitely
expansive, indeed, an expanding, boundless cosmos of mystical experience.
The basic question for Kandinsky is whether art is inherently transcendental--whether
it conveys freedom from objectively given nature and society--or whether it
is determined by and as such a reiteration and reification of various aspects
of them. His final conviction that art expresses the will to transcendence that
differentiates human beings from animals had to do with his discovery of his
own personal power of transcendence. Internal necessity means the discovery
that there is something in inner life that resists and transcends the external
necessities of existence. Marc called them conventions, and his and Kandinsky’s
deliberate pursuit of unconventionality signals their defiant assertion of freedom
from external necessities or determinisms. Thus, Kandinsky’s improvisations
are in effect spiritual exercises, that is, artistic exercises meant to generate
a sense of personal freedom and transcendence.
The issue today is that spiritual freedom seems more and more improvised, and
as such uncertain and even untenable. This is no doubt because it is no longer
anchored in religion, which has been discredited, bringing the idea of spiritual
freedom into intellectual disrepute. But it is an emotional matter not an intellectual
matter, and the question is whether contemporary artists have the emotional
capacity that Kandinsky had--whether they are willing to go through the emotional
struggle he went through. Like Kandinsky, the contemporary artist stands at
the beginning of a new century, but it is a different century. Kandinsky’s
century is over, and the artist today no longer knows what it means to “make
it new,” as Ezra Pound said the twentieth century artist should do. It
is not even clear that he or she realizes, as Kandinsky did, that sometimes
one can only make art new by returning to old ideas. Kandinsky’s belief
that the artist must live for the spirit the way, as he said, “the divine
martyrs and servants of humanity did,” and through his or her art re-awaken
“spiritual life,” seems absurd. The third chapter of On the Spiritual
in Art is called “Spiritual Revolution,” but the spiritual revolution
of art that Kandinsky started--and I think he is much more of a revolutionary
than Picasso ever thought of being--seems to have failed. It is doubtful that
modern art ever made anyone spiritual--changed his or her lifestyle and attitude
to a spiritual lifestyle and attitude--however much one may continue to believe,
as Kandinsky did, that art is “one of the mightiest elements” of
“the spiritual life,” and as such a major weapon against the “modern
sense of insecurity,” that is, a source of spiritual security. Nor is
it clear that art is the best way of discovering what Kandinsky called the “internal
truth” about oneself.
Perhaps the biggest problem facing artists today is that they no longer believe
that art is an element of the spiritual life, let alone a mighty element--no
longer believe that to make art is a spiritual activity, however much some may
still believe that it can be a vehicle of the internal truth. But one wonders
how much their inner life involves the internal necessity that drove Kandinsky
to make his art.
I am suggesting that the future for a spiritual art looks bleak, but then again,
as Kandinsky and Marc demonstrate, only a few artists are needed to affirm its
possibility, and it was never meant for more than the happy few, despite Kandinsky’s
utopian, not to say delusional, belief that it would lead everybody out of the
materialistic wilderness. The question today is where are the few artists who
are ready and willing to reaffirm the spiritual, and, more crucially, who can
convince us that their art does so--that it is a beacon of transcendence in
dark materialistic times. How is an artist to keep alive the idea of transcendence
in a world in which it has become trivial, passé, incomprehensible? Kandinsky
had a messianic complex, behind which lurked a martyr complex, but neither is
any guarantee of transcendence today. It is a difficult task to think of transcendence,
let alone assume the reality of mystical experience, in a world that seems to
have usurped and manipulated our subjectivity and whose deterministic hold on
our lives seem more complete than ever. It is a world in which it is hard to
gain a critical distance from the determinisms which shape our existence--to
take a critical stand against the external forces that seem to determine even
our inner lives. Every critical analysis of some determinism, personal or social--every
effort to transcend it by analyzing its structure and effect, for such analysis
affords transcendence when it is made out of internal necessity not simply out
of intellectual curiosity, as Spinoza argued--quickly becomes another deterministic
theory. I think it is more difficult than ever to be a spiritual artist, but
it is the only kind of heroic artist that makes sense in threatening modern
times, as Kandinsky makes clear.
Notes
(1)Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977),
p. 1
(2)“Reminiscences/Three Pictures,” Kandinsky, Complete Writings
on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994),
p. 369
(3)Ibid., p. 381
(4)“Whither the ‘New’ Art?,” ibid., p. 98
(5)Clement Greenberg, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, The Collected Essays and
Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, vol. 2, p.
233
(6)Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds. The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Klaus
Lankheit (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 154
(7)Ibid., p. 157
(8)Ibid., p. 258
(9)Ibid., p. 98
(10)Ibid., p. 47
(11)Wieland Schmied, “Points of Departure and Transformations in German
Art 1905-1985,” German Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture
1905-1985 (London: Royal Academy of Art and Munich: Prestel, 1985), p. 34
(12)Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Bantam Books, 1967),
p. xi
(13)Ibid., p. xvi
(14)Ibid., p. 16
(15)Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 230
(16)Silvano Arieti, The Will to Be Human (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972),
p. 48
(17)Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm: The Courage to be Human (New York: Continuum,
1982), pp. 112-13
(18)David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Ark, 1983), p. 24