Post-Truth Society by Arpad Szakolczai

Author:Arpad Szakolczai [Szakolczai, Arpad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9781000506112
Google: 4nJKEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-29T01:01:25+00:00

Demonic painting

For the Greeks, artists have a special inspiration, which they attributed to the Muses. According to Plato, such inspiration is daimonic, implying mediation between the human and divine realms. For Picasso, such inspiration was rather demonic, as he conceived of painting as an inner struggle against the very features of painting (121–2, 262).

This is revealed in his attitude to beauty. While occasionally he laments the loss of that tradition (68–9), he rather conceives himself as its very destroyer: there is no such thing as beauty, that is just a matter of preference (257), part of those imposed limits he tries to break out (118–9). While painting is all about form, and not the object (35), this form itself must be destroyed (Richardson 1996: 165), conceiving of his aim as the fracturing of form (2007: 14), a main reason why he had of himself the self-image as the ‘rebel leader of modern art’ (18). Art must be subversive (Gilot and Lake 1966: 193), audacious and unique: ‘not simply new, but stripped down and lacerating’, as ‘painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart’ (51). The issue at stake was not simply to go beyond realism, but to secure an equal standing for the painting in reality (71), an undertaking at the point of intersection between art according to Gell and trickster logic: ‘[w]e didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind’ (72), by escalating the experience of strangeness and alienation. In the same spirit Picasso emphasised the arbitrary character of painting, the need to transcend and not obey nature, thus focusing on contrast and not on beauty (264). A crucial part of this is to confuse proportions or ratio, e.g., by a gigantism emphasising the disproportionality of parts (Richardson 2007: 29).4 In sum, the task he brought on himself was ‘to wrestle the whole tradition of European art to the ground’ (1992: 474), in particular with Maids. And even this is not enough, as the aim is to destroy the Mediterranean – to destroy ‘everything we are today’ (Gilot and Lake 1966: 192) – only to continue with the destruction of modern art itself, once the old has already been destroyed (Richardson 2007: 307–8).

The sources of such destructive art are the most extreme forms of negativity: a painting must be made ‘ “out of nothing” ’ (Gilot and Lake 1966: 216). This is because art is sacred, though not in the sense of beauty, grace or religion, rather in the sense of ‘a magic purpose’, best revealed – in his own words – by ‘ “Negro art” ’, which he defines through an astonishing parallel between the ancient tribal African and modern Gnostic world visions: ‘ “as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them, in order to overcome their fear and horror” ’, or ‘ “between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires” ’ (257).

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