The Palakkad Lecture on Modernist Art and Poetry


Rajiv C Krishnan


The best insights of the comparatist gaze are often the prize for successfully running the risk of being blind to difference. The dialectic of blindness and insight is a relentless one. The comparatist promises to respect difference without reneging on the commitment to dialogue. And yet, no approach to the proper can prosper without paying the octroi of generalization, the coin of metaphysical and ontological assumptions. And nowhere is this ‘epistemic circle’ more active than in the relationships between the different arts. Ekphrasis—where one art describes or imitates another—is perhaps as old as any or all of the arts themselves: the comparatist, it follows, has always been the oldest artist. Please notice that I haven’t said: the oldest artist was always comparatist! Nor indeed, that the first artist was always already comparatist! For that would be to pretend that these terms and their significances are not in and of history.

The term ‘art’ itself includes a historically changing set of particular arts and practices. But there have always been some ‘permanent members’—members whose procedures and conditions of production are somehow paradigmatic of the whole field. Thus the ‘poetic’ is as much a part of a painting or sculpture as of poetry itself—indeed, poetry may not in fact be poetic at all! And of course, poetry has always been an ‘art’—it has always had a pre-eminent place in the hierarchy of the arts. But this, once again, is historically specific. The ease with which what belongs properly to a particular art can then become representative of the arts in general is therefore a good indication not only of its standing in the field as such, but also of the changing nature of aesthetic self-understanding and desire. This is not the result of a ‘mere’ metaphorical catachresis, but implies deeper affinities, struggles and differences. Each art needs supplements as well as ideals to work towards. In the nineteenth century, music was such a supplement for the art of poetry—Pater was merely summing up an implicit assumption when he wrote that all arts approach the condition of music. In the twentieth, it was the visual arts, especially painting, that performed such a role for poetry.

The (arguably) most interesting aspect of nineteenth century art is its (notice that I have bundled all the arts together) preoccupation with work: the biblical description of labour as the consequence of original sin contends with the protestant-capitalist valorisation of work to create ambiguous contexts for the production of art. If realism (taken as a historically specific mode of art, and therefore distinct from mere verisimilitude) is the aesthetic counterpart of purposive rationality and verisimilitude that of scientific description, it follows that late eighteenth century art and a lot of nineteenth century art take their task to be that of effacing or hiding the workliness of the work of art. For its new, bourgeois patrons, this art is the equivalent of leisure and excess. Thus we have the paradoxical situation of an art (realism) that must depict work (the workaday world) in order to be able to work without appearing to work.

Impressionism shocked its bourgeois viewers by its unwillingness to hide its brushstrokes and by refusing to remove the evidence of (the artist’s) labour from the picture surface. This newfound reconciliation with artistic labour is in fact the point of departure for modern, even Modernist, art. Nineteenth century art had first to come to terms with labour before being able to come to terms with artistic labour. We can now go back to Kant and understand his attempt to describe the processes by which human perception happens as an attempt to redescribe perception itself as the product of (human) labour: experience itself is already labour. Marx, and socialist thinkers after him, in effect historicize Kant and are able to think of reason itself—which is identical in every human agent for Kant—historically and more often than not as unreason, as ideology. And ideology will last as long as exploitation lasts.

We must therefore learn to understand the nineteenth century’s curious fascination with sensations, with children, with the primitive, and with the exotic as the expression of a desire for freedom from want and labour. When Impressionist art went out of doors, away from a revolutionary and dangerous Paris, it met haystacks, poplars (soon to be cut down), mountains, and of course, people having a good time. Above all, it met a mercilessly frank sunlight. Long before Pointillism became a school, the reduction of perception to its component parts had begun as an analogue to social critique. Gauguin’s South Sea Islanders, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, cornfields, and peasant shoes, Monet’s waterlilies, and Cezanne’s mountains, were all able to interrogate the social before it became fact and fiction. The Romantics of course, had already named the need to overcome an unsatisfactory present when they spoke about the Imagination. But the Imagination was also the promise of recompense without work, and the value of the work of art accordingly far exceeded the labour spent in creating it. It was this (fictive) economy of excess that enabled Romantic irony to become an instance of aesthetic self-reflexivity. This irony and this self-reflexivity resurfaces again in the brokenness and the divisionism of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvas, loosening by stages the dependence of art upon the unity and integrity of the natural object, finally leading to the conception of the autonomous, autotelic work of art as evidenced in Modernist and Postmodernist abstract art.

Why then did music become the ideal for poetry in the nineteenth century? It was of course a century of great music. Of all the arts, music is the least ‘contaminated’ by subject matter. It is free from mimesis, and as such satisfied the century’s need for its own concept of a ‘pure’ art, a concept that artists at the beginning of the twentieth century are beginning alternatively to find in non-objective abstract painting. The intentional structure of desire grants every desire an adequate object of desire; it also grants for every intentional object of desire a corresponding subject of desire. What is the desire for which the abstract canvas can become an adequate object of desire? Who might be the subject whose desire can intend the abstract canvas? In presenting for the satisfaction of desire a representation for which no original exists in the world but itself, Modernist art calls for subjects who desire such unique objects. In other words, by creating objects for which no known desire exists, in effect, Modernism creates the subjects who might then experience such desire. This radical self-fashioning, at once expressive of the bourgeois demand for unique and ‘designer’ experiences, and of the bourgeois self’s dissatisfaction with the inauthenticity of its desires, designates the paradoxical nature of Modernism’s commitment to change.

Why did the visual arts become the ideal for poetry in the twentieth century? We have seen that developments in Modernist art satisfy the need for alternative subjectivities. As a temporal art, poetry experiences a finitude for which a spatial art is the natural supplement. With the advent of photography, it was no longer necessary for paintings to achieve reference; it was easy for the visual arts therefore to jettison referentiality: thus, abstract art could be the most concrete, generating ‘pure’ sensation. For poetry on the other hand, reference was ineradicably part of any performance which did not slide into mere sound. The Imagist emphasis on concreteness of presentation pines for a poetry of pure sensations, for uninterpreted experiences, for Edenic suchness. Through directness of presentation, it is labour that is saved and avoided; terseness of language bespeaks effort. But Modernism is not always kind to its viewers or readers. The famous Modernist texts are still being explicated: Ulysses, The Cantos. The difficulty of these texts lies in the opaqueness of their references and contexts, and it is a difficulty that calls for active, participatory readers. The Modernist text therefore calls for a reading that is figured as a labour for which it can itself constitute the appropriate reward.

Modernist art and poetry render illegible the distinction between space and time, between the real and the imaginary, between the text and human subjectivity. In contemplating their differences we embark upon a task that enjoins us to bring to the labour of knowing the urgency of desire without the desire for urgency.