Grisewood Harman - Epoch and artist: selected writings

F or a number of easily appreciated and quite authentic reasons we none of us much relish the prospect of our past opinions (expressed, maybe, with regard to a particular occasion) being given a new lease of life in changed conditions and we ourselves changed also. So that a measure of distaste, perhaps of embarrassment, is of necessity tied up with the re-publication, in collected form, of a selection of what an older generation would, with exactness, have described as occasional papers.

If that is so, it may well be asked why allow the selection to be made and published? It is, in large part, the need to indicate an answer to that reasonable question that I write this covering note, or short preface.

These selections vary in date from 1937 to 1958, they vary in kind from a preface written for a work of my own to a review of a book dealing with the work of Christopher Smart and they vary in length from a letter of forty lines to an essay of forty pages.

The first named of these variations (that of date) should not, in my opinion, be disregarded and for this reason: What we say at such and such a time we would not necessarily say at a later time, indeed the likelihood is all the other way, and even if we say in 1958 what we said in 1950 what is connoted will, in some fashion, be other. On which account in reading any one of these selections it is desirable that readers should, if they would, note the date of what is written.

I have seen myself described as A visual artist first and a writer second. Well, I make no objection to that, which is certainly very true in the chronological sense, for whereas I was thirty before I made a written work I cannot recall a time when drawing was not a preoccupation.

However, a day came (at Portslade in Sussex) when I found myself trying my hand at the making of a writing. These last dozen words may sound self-conscious and precious, but I shall stick to them as they do faithfully describe my feelings about, and my intentions and attitude toward, the work in question. Eventually, ten years later, this beginning was completed and published as InParenthesis, but that is looking ahead.

When first I came to a contactual, practive, immediate relationship with this (for me) new sort of making, I found myself faced with the same problems, inaboutthesameproportion, that were familiar to me in such visual arts as I had any previous, experiential and day by day knowledge of. But it took me some while to recognize these in their new modes of operation.

I think we may give a very convinced notional assent to the truth that in the creative arts the relationship between form and content is the crux of the matter, and we may understand, from the inside, a good bit about this relationship, by having already practised certain arts, and yet we may be wide of the mark in our understanding of the same relationship in a changed guise in some art of which we have no work-a-day experience. In short, and partly because the arts belong (as the ancients said) to the practical and not the speculative intelligence, there is no surrogate for being on the job.

What I have now said indicates some part of the answer to why I allowed these occasional papers to be published, for, throughout a proportion of them, the differing arts that I have practised are discussed in relation to each other, and on that account, may provide some data. One does not have to fancy oneself as an artist to say this, one believes only that evidence from practice has its own contribution, just as in another connection the information provided by a combat soldier, however inferior, from such and such a sector, may happen to provide the kind of data not easily got from any other source, however superior.

A further reason is that some of these papers raise the question of what is involved forallof us in the notion of sacrament and the sign-world in its multifarious aspects.

The technocracy in which we live, and which conditions us all, tends, in all sorts of contexts and at every level, to draw away from this sign-world. I feel that almost all of us, indeed all of us, duck this issue. People speak of sacraments with a capital S without seeming to notice that sign and sacrament with a small s are everywhere eroded and in some contexts non-existent. Such dichotomies are not healthy.

Again, on the one hand people practise arts, such as painting, a sign-making activity if ever there was one, yet are quite alienated from the notion of sign.

Again, unless man is of his essential nature a poeta, one who makes things that are signs of something, then the central act of the Christian religion is totally without meaning. How can there be a manual act that makes anamnesis unless man is man-the-maker , and thus poiesis his native and authentic mode of apperception and in the end his only mode?

Someone will be painting abstracts, manual contrivances of the greatest subtlety, which when made are lifted up, and, in proper measure, adored. That is right and admirable and as it should be, but it remains an activity that belongs, properly, to the cultures rather than to the technological present. They give the show away by speaking of cultural activities just as they speak of religious activities. And there are those who think of both as folksy. To what extent is there a rightness behind their detestable opinion?

These are some of the matters touched upon in parts of this collection, and I do think that even a bewildered and perhaps misconceived attempt to probe some of these matters may have its uses.

At the opening of the present century the then Master of Balliol wrote a little book on Hegel and in it there are passages, too long for quotation here, that indicate in an unruffled manner the nature of the dichotomy which we now are experiencing in full, but not I fear in its fullest, development.

Perhaps a brief quotation from the beginning of one of the chapters may suffice. Certainly the serene confidence of the style, considering the disastrous implications of what is said, is comic as well as frightening. I quote:

It is the peculiar strength of the modern time that it has reached a clear perception of the finite world as finite; that in science it is positivei.e. that it takes particular facts for no more than they are; and that in practice it is unembarrassed by superstition i.e. by the tendency to treat particular things and persons as mysteriously sacred. The first immediate awe and reverence which arose out of a confusion of the absolute and universal with the relative and particular, or, in simpler language, of the divine and human, the ideal and the real, has passed away from the world.

The passage then goes on to say how only artists and poets any longer keep up this confusion or identification, and then, by implication, that the works of poiesis can still be taken as pleasing illusions but little more, or, as one might say, this art gaff is blown.

Well, the citation speaks for itself and it is the general feeling that matters, but what made me especially to take notice was the passage about accepting particular facts for no more than they are and of being unembarrassed by the tendency to treat as sacred particular things.