Frederick
Turner
The New Classicism and Culture
The
Philadelphia Society
Cleveland Regional Meeting
September 21, 2002
(Two Poems by Fred Turner at the end of the Speech)
Charles
Jencks, the postmodern critic, recently began an article with the words
"Beauty is back." It was
a belated comment, but better late than never.
There is a fresh wind sweeping through the arts.
It is happening across the globe and in a hundred different corners of
the arts and culture. This essay will look mainly at American and some European
examples, but with the internet a significant new element has been introduced,
and whereas it took the Renaissance perhaps three hundred years to diffuse
throughout Europe, and the Romantic movement a hundred years to diffuse through
the West, it need take only a decade or two for the whole world to wake up to
the change that is happening in the cultural climate.
What
makes this movement revolutionary is that it is a counter-revolution, a
revolution against the ugliness and moral chaos—and wretched intellectual
silliness—of the contemporary arts scene.
Everybody now knows of the sawn-up human heads and elephant dung and
genitalia and self-mutilation of the angry wing of contemporary art—the
Mapplethorpes, the Serranos, the Damien Hirsts, the Karen Finleys, the Annie
Sprinkles. We know also the blank
canvases, the slinkies dropped from pianos, the “installations,” the
meaningless scatterings of words and boxy architectural gulags of the silly wing
of it: the John Cages, the John Ashberys, the Jeff Koonses, the Mies van der
Rohes, the Warhols. But there was
purpose behind the anger and the flip irony—nothing less than the undermining
of western civilization. This was
the party line, and artists would not get their work hung in galleries, poets
would not be published, architects would not get commissions, and composers
would not get performed if they violated it.
The idea was to replace the support that artists got from the
“complacent” middle class with state support through grants and tax-based
patronage, and to that end a government arts bureaucracy would be created,
imbued with avant garde ideology, to ensure the orderly flow of money.
Rebellion would be institutionalized—there would be a continuous
cultural revolution, that would make the world safe for all the things—sexual
adventures, envy of the rich, violence, self-destructive hedonism, dishonest
personal and public behavior, intellectual snobbery, and moral superiority--that
one used to be ashamed of. Once the
moral, intellectual, and aesthetic structures of civil society were broken down,
the way would be open for the establishment of an immortal state cultural
bureaucracy, with secure livings for all its members.
The
one thing one was not allowed to rebel against in Modernist and Postmodernist
orthodoxy was the tradition of rebellion itself, the basic rule that whatever
art one makes must help to bring down the bourgeois market society that supports
the arts. The artist’s heroic
role was to insult the poor mugsies who go to galleries and read poetry and
attend concerts. And the new classicism has resolved to violate this Prime
Directive.
The
terrorist attacks of 9/11 have brought upon us all a realization that conceptual
art, incomprehensible "l.a.n.g.u.a.g.e.
p.o.e.t.r.y," avant-garde performance art, plotless fiction,
tuneless music, and inhuman postmodern architecture are not going to be able to
deal with the real evil of the world. Only
in the great artistic traditions of humankind will we find adequate means of
expression. The new movement in the
arts, as if it anticipated the need for them, has been busy recovering those
traditions.
Who
are the new classicists? A strange
clan of independent minds, often cheerfully in disagreement with each other,
without membership cards and sometimes with large reputations that they have put
on the line. As The Utne Reader (a leading avant garde journal) ruefully expressed
it, there is "a classical revival that threatens to bury the avant garde.”
To
understand what the new classicism is up to, we must first recognize the broad
outlines of what happened to the arts in the twentieth century, through a
hundred years of modernism followed by its postscript, postmodernism. In poetry, rhyme and meter were rejected, as well as the
power of storytelling and even the structure of argument and logic.
Even in fiction, plotting was demoted to popular entertainment, and for a
while the "plotless novel" of Alain Robbe-Grillet and William
Burroughs was all the rage. In painting and sculpture, any reference to the real human
figure and real landscapes was often discarded, together with the traditional
techniques of drawing, perspective, and so on that make possible that marvelous
imitation of the inner and outer worlds. In
music, melody and tonality became old-fashioned, and the twelve tone row and
atonality reigned supreme in "serious" composition.
In theater Brecht told playwrights to avoid the dear old corny devices of
acting, the conventions of comedy and tragedy that allow an audience to
recognize and identify with a character. Playwrights
aimed at the "alienation effect" and attacked the audience in the
theater of cruelty. In
architecture, as Tom Wolfe has pointed out, the Bauhaus aspired to a kind of
building that was functional for machines but not for human beings.
In all the arts there was a rejection of transcendental morality, a
hostility to any reference to a spiritual world, an angry denigration of
American and European history, and a contempt for the classical Western values.
New
classical artists realized that Ezra Pound's modernist slogan "make it
new" had led to an artistic arms race in which each new shocking novelty
could only bounce the rubble of an already devastated culture; the only new
thing left to do was, of course, the good old thing.
New classicists are aiming to restore the pleasure of the arts.
One
way of defining the new movement is in terms of a return to traditional forms,
genres, and techniques in the arts. In
"serious" music there is a recovery of the deep pan-human roots of
melody, a renewed interest in worldwide folk music, a focus on the immediacy of
performance, improvisation, and the context of audience and performer, and a
disillusionment with Schoenberg’s theories of seriality and the twelve tone
row, with the atonality of Stockhausen and his followers.
In architecture and landscape design there is a renewed attention to the
classical languages of building, ornament, fittingness to the environment, and
humane proportions.
In
visual arts there is a return to representation, to landscape and the figure, a
rejection of the modernist authority of abstraction, and a turn away from the
idea of art as the ideological enemy of ordinary human life.
In poetry there is a wave of renewed interest in poetic meter, rhyme, and
clear storytelling, a questioning of the role of poetry as therapeutic private
expression, and a return to the great public themes of enduring human interest.
In theater there is a renewal of the audience's ability to feel concern
about the fate of the characters. In
fiction there has been a swing toward storytelling and "moral
fiction," identifiable characters and plot and theme and setting.
In
painting and sculpture the new art has been dubbed "visionary
realism." The new art does not
make a fetish of exactly representing gritty reality, although many of its
landscapes, portraits and still-lifes are exquisitely detailed.
The realism is rather a revelation of the psychological, spiritual, and
cultural meanings that burn beneath the surface of the world.
A central term associated with the new movement is
"classicism". But the
movement is not simply a return to ancient European ideas.
It has learnt from the extraordinary advances in the sciences that have
happened in the last few hundred years; it recognizes that classicism is not an
exclusively European property, but a miracle that has happened many times
throughout the world in a variety of societies.
Ancient classicisms have proposed fixed and perfect ideals that never
change; the new classicism sees the world as evolving into a richer and richer
mix of physical and spiritual complexity. I
have proposed the term "natural classicism" for the movement as a
whole; our capacity for making and experiencing beauty is part of our nature,
beauty is a real property of the universe, and our ability to feel and create it
is founded on identifiable brain functions that are as universal as human
speech. Thus beauty is not a mere
convention but a fundamental human capacity and human need.
Even
postmodern art critics like David Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl have started
singing the praises of beauty, and the word is returning in movies like American Beauty and Stealing
Beauty. What pomo critics and
film makers mean by “beauty” is unclear—the best they can come up with is
“jouissance”, a sort of mental orgasm about the destruction of some past
convention or expectation—but it is significant that they find a need to
co-opt the word itself.
In
poetry there are two highly vigorous movements that represent at least part of
the new paradigm. They are known as
"the new narrative" and "the new formalism"--named by its
enemies, as often in the past. The
former is self-explanatory: the new poetry breaks modernist rules established
since Edgar Allan Poe condemned the long narrative poem, and dares to tell
stories--often gripping and fascinating ones--in verse.
The latter term, new formalism, refers to the revival of poetic meter,
verse, and rhyme that is going on in poetry.
Modernist critics of the new formalism have suggested that versification
is elitist, but have been staggered by the rejoinder that it is free verse that
is confined to a small group of academic cognoscenti, while meter and rhyme are
the normal forms for blues and jazz lyrics, country and western songs, Cole
Porter songs, rap, and Broadway musicals.
Several
poets are practitioners of both meter and narrative, and the two movements are
often lumped together as "expansive poetry," a phrase coined by the
poet Wade Newman. Expansive poetry
is expansive in the sense that it attempts to widen the scope of poetry beyond
the short, free verse, imagist, private, existentialist lyric poem that has
become the norm in late modernist letters.
It is also expansive in that it feels free to recover past modes and
genres of poetry, and presupposes an expanding and open-ended universe, in which
new forms of order can grow out of the old, and where freedom can consist not
just in wrecking traditional kinds of order, but in creating new ones.
For
this movement is not simply reactionary, nor is it a brand of
"postmodernism." As the
renaissance taught us, and we have forgotten, the truly traditional and the
truly original are not opposites, but are the precondition for each other.
The movement is parallel with developments in the natural and human
sciences, especially in the new models of the brain and mind, and in chaos
theory--the study of nonlinear dynamical processes and their strange attractors.
There is a relationship between the new movement and the profound
political changes that have been occurring on the international scene, and the
grand contemporary rethinking of economics and social philosophy.
There has been a transformation in the environmental movement and in our
view of nature, which has replaced the purist avant-garde alternatives of
wilderness and ruined urban landscape with the idea of the garden and the
cultivated and abundant countryside--a transformation that is deeply connected
to developments in the arts.
The
movement is still a minority element within the arts establishments, and is
subject to various degrees of formal, informal or covert censorship by the
academy, the public and private foundations, and some museums, publishers,
critical periodicals, galleries, and the like.
But in poetry the new movement is now recognized throughout the academy,
and university and college creative writing classes have started teaching the
techniques of meter and rhyme again. Several
new periodicals, such as The Edge City
Review, Light, and Pivot, together
with a rush of online magazines like Expansive
Poetry and Music, cater to the new literary taste.
The
Derriere Guard, an artistic group named tongue-in-cheek by its founder, the
musical composer Stefania de Kenessey, is one of the most prominent
representatives of the movement as a whole, bringing together parallel
developments in architecture, music, sculpture, painting, poetry, and city
planning in a cheeky and insouciant riposte to the avant garde.
The Derriere Guard has already staged major arts events in New York,
Chicago, and San Francisco, and on December 7th-8th 2001 initiated the first of
a series of salons at its headquarters in the upper west side of Manhattan.
The
American Arts Quarterly
is not only a major voice in America for new classicism in the visual arts, but
also an important venue for new classical theory throughout the other arts as
well. Dozens of vital, fresh-faced
young painters, refugees from the grim cloisters of the Politically Correct arts
schools, throng Jacob Collins’s atelier in New York.
The Art Renewal website (http://www.artrenewal.org/)
gets thousands of hits every month. Fort
Worth’s beautiful Bass symphony hall, the cities of Celebration and Seaside in
Florida, and Prince Charles’ village of Poundbury, together with many new
building projects in cities and universities, exemplify the New Urbanism
movement in architecture and planning. Robert
Stern, the neotraditionalist architect, is getting major commissions.
The
arrival of NewKlassical, the website, directory, and nascent multimedia arts
group, is a major milestone in the emergence of the new movement.
In bringing together ideas, people, and artworks from all the arts and in
a thoroughgoing international context, it marks the coming-of-age of the
movement. Essentially there is now
a global new classical coffee-house where artists of all kinds can find out
about each other, look at each others’ work, argue, collaborate, and prepare
exhibitions, conferences, and performances.
And, perhaps even more important, a place where the public can go to find
the very best of the new work and learn about and contribute to its ideas.
The
driving force of the whole movement is a desire to return to the ideal of
beauty. As James Cooper, editor of
the American Arts Quarterly, one of
the movement's leading periodicals, has said, "Beauty is not simply an
optional aspect of art: it is the object and purpose of art."
For new classicists, beauty cannot be detached from either moral beauty
or from what Shelley called intellectual beauty.
Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, argued that the
fundamental characteristic of the divine was its beauty.
One does not have to buy his theology to find inspiration in the idea
that beauty might be what we need to draw us out of the despair of the twentieth
century.
At a weekend retreat at the Blue Ridge home of the sculptor Frederick Hart (creator of the Washington Cathedral "Creation" sculptures and the Vietnam Memorial "Three Soldiers" sculpture) some of the founding members of the movement put together a manifesto:
Art
Recentered
A Manifesto
We
stand for:
1.
The reunion of artist with public.
Art
should grow from and speak to the common roots and universal principles of human
nature in all cultures.
Art
should direct itself to the general public.
Those
members of the general public who do not have the time, training, or inclination
to craft and express its higher yearnings and intuitions, rightly demand an
artistic elite to be the culture's prophetic mouthpiece and mirror.
Art
should deny the simplifications of the political left and right, and should
refine and deepen the radical center.
The
use of art, and of cheap praise, to create self-esteem, is a cynical betrayal of
all human cultures.
Excellence
and standards are as real and universal in the arts as in competitive sports,
even if they take more time and refined judgement to appreciate.
2.
The reunion of beauty with morality.
The
function of art is to create beauty.
Beauty
is incomplete without moral beauty.
There
should be a renewal of the moral foundations of art as an instrument to
civilize, ennoble, and inspire.
True
beauty is the condition of civilized society.
Art
recognizes the tragic and terrible costs of human civilization, but does not
abandon hope and faith in the civilizing process.
Art
must recover its connection with religion and ethics without becoming the
propagandist of any dogmatic system.
Beauty
is the opposite of coercive political power.
Art
should lead but not follow political morality.
We
should restore reverence for the grace and beauty of human beings and of the
rest of nature.
3.
The reunion of high with low art.
Popular
and commercial art forms are the soil in which high art grows.
Theory
describes art; art does not illustrate theory.
Art
is how a whole culture speaks to itself.
Art
is how cultures communicate with and marry each other.
4.
The reunion of art with craft.
Certain
forms, genres, and techniques of art are culturally universal, natural, and
classical.
Those
forms are innate but require a cultural tradition to awaken them.
They
include such things as visual representation, melody, storytelling, poetic
meter, and dramatic mimesis.
These
forms, genres, and techniques are not limitations or constraints but
enfranchising instruments and infinitely generative feedback systems.
High
standards of craftsmanship and mastery of the instrument should be restored.
5.
The reunion of passion with intelligence.
Art
should come from and speak to what is whole in human beings.
Art
is the product of passionate imaginative intelligence, not of psychological
sickness and damage.
Even
when it deals, as it often should and must, with the terrifying, tragic, and
grotesque, art should help heal the lesions within the self and the rifts in the
self's relation to the world.
The
symbols of art are connected to the embodiment of the human person in a physical
and social environment.
6.
The reunion of art with science.
Art
extends the creative evolution of nature on this planet and in the universe.
Art
is the natural ally, interpreter, and guide of the sciences.
The
experience of truth is beautiful.
Art
is the missing element in environmentalism.
Art
can be reunited with physical science through such ideas as evolution and chaos
theory.
The
reflectiveness of art can be partly understood through the study of nonlinear
dynamical systems and their strange attractors in nature and mathematics.
The
human species emerged from the mutual interaction of biological and cultural
evolution.
Thus
our bodies and brains are adapted to and demand artistic performance and
creation.
We
have a nature; that nature is cultural; that culture is classical.
Cultural
evolution was partly driven by inventive play in artistic handicrafts and
performance.
The
order of the universe is neither deterministic nor on the road to irreversible
decay; instead the universe is self-renewing, self-ordering, unpredictable,
creative, and free.
Thus
human beings do not need to labor miserably to despoil the world of its
diminishing stockpile of order, and struggle with one another for possession of
it, only to find that they have bound themselves into a mechanical and
deterministic way of life.
Instead
they can cooperate with nature's own artistic process and with each other in a
free and open-ended play of value-creation.
Art
looks with hope to the future and seeks a closer union with the true progress of
technology.
7.
The reunion of past with future.
Art
evokes the shared past of all human beings, that is the moral foundation of
civilization.
Sometimes
the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past; but
sometimes the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present.
The
enlightenment and modernism are examples of the former; the renaissance, and
perhaps our time, are examples of the latter.
No
artist has completed his or her artistic journey until he or she has sojourned
with and learned the wisdom of the dead artists who came before.
The
future will be more, not less, aware of and indebted to the past than we are;
just as we are more aware of and indebted to the past than were our ancestors.
The
immortality of art goes both ways in time.
In the light of these principles we challenge contemporary thinking and urge the reform of existing institutions.
Basic Training Graduation Day, Fort
Leonard Wood, 7/11/02 1.
(on my son's graduation from Army Basic Training)
Young soldiers' faces open as the sky
Bark out the army songs they learned by heart--
Lost boys and girls who promised they would die
If the republic called them to their part:
After nine weeks of ritual suffering
Under the ruthless discipline and drill
All of their former lives become a thing
Lost like a dream in the cold morning chill;
The mothers in the crowd can't recognize
Which of these shaved heads lay once on their breast;
Those tall young giants will not turn their eyes
To smile upon the one who loves them best;
And all the colors in this Ozark dawn
Glow now as if the world had been reborn.
First Base
This ancient thing that must be done
Requires the death of one man's time,
A prayer before it is begun,
The island quiet of rhyme.
Just as twelve years ago we fell
To madness that begot a son
And broke all caution in the spell
Of conjugation,
So now the fire must be set,
The dishes put away, the door
Locked fast that nothing hoarse might fret
The birth of metaphor.
Am I a fool to solemnize
With invocations to the muses
These mere suburban alibis,
Confessions, or excuses?
Come, lady, then, and lead the fool
Across the freeway by the mall,
And past the public swimming-pool
Left of the city hall,
And out through naked tracts and parks,
To where the sunlit streets are bare,
To outfields where the meadowlarks
Tweedle upon the air.
2.
Honor forbids my son to notice me,
Setting his baseball cap against the glare.
First baseman, he must watch the catcher's sign,
Intimidate the batter with his stare,
Anchor the fielding into one design,
And be the very animal and form
Of his position in the baseball team,
As bulls and meadowlarks fulfill the norm
Designate for them by the chromosome.
These cardinals, these cubs, these senators,
How perfectly professional they seem,
Eleven-year-old gum-chewing matadors!
Wordsworth thought such a theater would come
Between the boy and his eternal home,
But what if we must all invent our being?
Is then the "master-light of all our seeing"
The actor's concentration on his part?
Then why this pain that brushes at my heart?
3.
I am a stranger from another universe;
This is as strange to me as the horse-games of Turkestan,--
Carcass of lamb that is torn among bridegiving tribesmen.
I am from Marx's Europe, the England of slums and the Beatles,
I am from Arthur's table, from the France of Cezanne and Courbet,
I am the last colonial, the sun went down on my childhood
In Northern Rhodesia, the drums rumbled all night and
My father read to me Shakespeare in the roar of the pressure-lamp;
I am from Virgil's Campania, from Homer's Peloponnese;
My mind was formed by the Huxleys, by Einstein and Wittgenstein,
Eliot, Yeats, and the songs of the English Renaissance;
I am the heir of Hegel, of Nietzsche, of Freud,
Born and raised in the throb of the flying bomb.
My weather's the fitful rain of Europe,
The smoky taste of the last of the Industrial Revolution,
The ambiguous cloudlands and definite soil of the Old World,
The damp snow on the bus-stop bench that seeped through my
Trouser pocket and soaked my packet of Woodbines,
My wadded handkerchief, my pink ten-shilling note.
And what am I doing in Plano, Texas, on this hot after-
Noon in summer, the thunderclouds clear on the horizon like
Grotesque pieces of matte sunlit china, like
Stuffed toys to be given to baby dinosaurs, like the
Sound of a big rock band tuning up in a stadium?
What am I doing in Plano, with its malls and pyramids?
4.
But what have they been doing there in Europe?
My brave son Ben, watching the pitch come down,
Must teach impossible progenitors
How to be parents to a Texan child;
And over there in Warsaw, Budapest,
And East Berlin they wash the bloody hands
Of Beethoven and Sartre, and gently show
Their blood-drunk parents just how to be free.
All that I know of baseball comes from Ben.
How is it I am roooted now in him?
Where did he get that authenticity
That makes him pluck with fine unconsciousness
The wrinkle from his pants, and crack his gum?
Raised in a laundry in the Pennine Hills,
His mother is Chinese and loves Racine.
At school they teach him (in the best modern way)
How Hannibal's elephants crossed the Alps,
How to bow smoothly between bridge and thumb,
Of the white ratios of geometry:
But what is it makes him a Texican?
5.
The new world being born, I helped it come.
Out of its mother's belly,
of all its ancestors
the fruit, of many seeds, mine being one,
it turned its head and smiled.
Do I betray it now, with this private consciousness,
this slacker form, designed
to opt out of the game?--
thus wars and holocausts too cruel to name--?
I fall into the rhyme,
betray the betrayal.
Evening's coming. Under the stormcloud
the tired sunlight on the bleachers turns to orange
the white logos on the parents' tee-shirts,
the white parabolas of their Nike Airs.
6.
Now already the knotted concepts I shaped to stagger
The cruel march of historicism, the smooth slide I polished
At the edge between word and world to trap the haters of humankind,
My carillons of mental bells poured in their melodious foundries,
All these are owned by younger men and women, scholars,
Poets, and they know them and use them better than I ever could,
Being accustomed, as I was not, to my newfangled landscape.
The birds and animals are no longer shy around my constructions.
Their masters, the shepherds and shepherdesses, sing them my songs.
Happy, I pass my possessions on to them; now I prepare for my
Metamorphosis into another being, smelling of
Evening, of thunderstorms over the horizon, of darkening grass.
7.
But soon the floodlights are turned on,
As Plano tilts against the sky,
And endless time piles up above
The ballfield's little lighted octagon;
An orange skin of evening glows
Beneath the bluelit towers of cloud;
A few drops fall, the game goes on;
The warm, coyote-smelling wind still blows;
The crackle of an utterance
Above the curvature of plain
Echoes in rumbles from the ground
And holds the players in a moment's trance;
The batter hits a loaded fly,
Ben edges under it, elbows
His baseball cap out of his eye,
And takes it quickly, fires it home, as I
Marvel how second nature grows
Its subtle graft upon the first;
And now another lightning-burst
Has turned the clouds into a purple rose.