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Tuesday, 05 August 2008
Organum
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal.
I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my
ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly
educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried
inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the
entire heritage of the West. ...
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of
complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure
of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available." A
new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of
dense cultural inheritance ... spread wide and thin as we connect with
that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a
button.
Richard Foreman (2005)
The conception of the individual self as a cathedral, possessed of both
sacred and earthly objects, possessing its own self-constructed,
deliberate but profoundly intuitive and even visionary architectonic, was
Dante's achievement in the Comedy. The consciousness of the
individual, and the ability to reproduce this consciousness in the work of
art, emerged not from the Enlightenment but from the beginnings of the
Italian Renaissance, and it's no surprise that the great Italianate
architecture of the cathedrals of the era parallelled Dante's mission. But
once achieved, there's no going back: whatever follows will be accompanied
with an awareness of the loss of this architectonic consciousness of the
self. The English Renaissance followed late; in the collected work of
Shakespeare we find a greater, more Northern European conception of this
self, nearly contemporaneous with the painters of the Northern Renaissance
(so we talk of "Dante" or "Shakespeare" as these fictive cathedrals of
their collective work, rather than the Vita Nuova or As You Like
It, when coming to terms with this achievement). Like cathedrals,
these selves and works contain their grand naves and mausoleums, the
individual works, perhaps, their chapels.
All this under the design of a single architect, or artist: the self as
the plan, the structure as its aesthetic achievement. As the body of the
self contains and consists of flesh, blood, bone, the cathedral itself
contains and consists of light, stone, air. And art and theatre: body,
music, vision, language. (Wagner, with Bayreuth, insisted on all three
structures simultaneously.) But all are consciously constructed, all
consist of carefully contrived, disciplined architectonics. The great
works of art are profound, massive spaces for contemplation. (For example,
the extraordinary conception of The World as Will and
Representation, more appealing to artists than perhaps any other
philosophical work because the book itself is a grand work of art,
possessed of an aesthetic four-fold architectonic and intense
youthful passion – Schopenhauer was only 30 at the time of its first
publication – as brilliantly lyrical and poetic as Dante's or
Shakespeare's poems.) The artist's work as cathedral continues in our time
as well; from Joyce (the Catholic Baroque) to Beckett (the Protestant
simplicity and restraint); perhaps few others, because the creation of
such cathedrals is always self-conscious and complex, and we seek
simple and easily-acquired escapes from the darker corners of self in
the 21st century. Similar individual works of contemporary art, like
Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany, are endlessly fascinating,
like the most labyrinthine cathedrals.
What we shall have otherwise are minor structures that turn the soul to
the contemplation of the simple ground, rather than the vast darkness
that spreads above. The construction and the experience of a cathedral
require more than a lifetime. Our damnation, and our hope, is that a
cathedral is never finished.
Posted at 9.38 am in /Organum
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