The Aardvark Blog

Denial is not a river in Egypt
28/01/2024

After a fairly boozy Xmas Ethel has joined the herd and sworn off all health granting and life-affirming tinctures for January. This morning the Observer had a piece on how Ethel and her Cohort were dooming public houses as people were using their virtue signalling to stay at home and coddle their December credit card bills.

Then also in the Observer there was a piece about how Bernadine Evaristo was using her presidency of the Royal Society of Literature to shake things up, and some of the older white liberal writers were getting antsy and either resigning ( as is the English way), or saying that they were staying on to fight - in a suitably decorous and enervated fashion - for the non-exclusion of writers on the grounds of their age and class.

And this all got me thinking about denial in general, and about the decision to invite in or exclude from the canon, or even from modern public discourse. It is a sad fact that in an age of stretched public support for the arts and of declining private patronage, to include say a Clara Schumann or Fanny Mendelssohn piece - will lead to the deprogramming of a Bruch or a Bruchner work.

And to some extent this process is inevitable and natural. It is simply the case that the palette and pictoral choices of Monet or Manet seem to fit much better with our modern aesthetic than those of say Renoir. We are embarrassed by all that rubenesque flesh and the chubby cheeks of Renoirian children. We connect to the dark blacks of Manet and his post-lapserian world, or the ethereal beauty of Monet's garden.

But what about the choices that are not the result of the slow accretions of taste and come about due to our embarrassment at the non-aesthetic elements surrounding a particular artist or writer. Let us think of say Picasso with his messy and abusive private life and his wholesale cultural appropriation. Already in his centenary year in 2023 the marleyian chains were clanking and counter exhibitions were being mounted.  And yes it is true that Rodin's relationships with women were exploitative, that say Camille Claudel was a talented sculptor and Gwen John likewise an excellent painter. But neither of them created a work with anything like the power and political and cultural longevity of the 'Burghers of Calais'. To stand in front of that extraordinary group sculpture in any of its many editions, is to get a swift and brutal lesson in what it means to be human. And back to Picasso, can we not forgive him at least some of his many failings given his creation of Guernica - a work which at the moment with our screens filled each night with death and destruction, seems more relevant than anything other than Goya to our present situation. For I genuinely believe that the process of making art is messy and not unlike the process of making sausages, and if one looks too closely one will always find things that one does not like or approve of.

As one of the characters points out to Grady Tripp in the greatest film of the last 50 years ( the Wonder Boys since you ask), writers have to make choices, but does the same tyranny apply to we their audience. Well given the lack of time and attention we all have, I guess it does, but I resent that tyranny and I am made uncomfortable by the cultural politics in which we are invited  to signal our own morality by reading Langston Hughes ahead of Robert Frost, or listening to Lili Boulanger before Aaron Copeland. Yes time is cruel to many talents who deserved greater appreciation, and yes all rediscoveries - look at Amy Lowell and modern interest in her sexuality - are often driven by factors outside the work itself. We can still marvel at the few remaining fragments of the works of Phidias, even though we know nothing of his moral character - beyond the fact that he like most of his class almost certainly owned and employed slaves in his work.

Ultimately although we can and should put a finger upon the cultural balance, I truly believe it needs to be only the lightest of touches. Not all rediscoveries will come to be as beloved as say Vivaldi - whose works and reputation were almost entirely reinvigorated by Olga Rudge after the war. Most will see their moment in the sun and then sink back into the eternal shades. And that is how it must be, and as they leave us we will be unaware of their passing as our ears are serenaded by Bach and Beethoven, our eyes blinded by the colours of Matisse and Titian and our imaginations haunted by Keats and Wordsworth. That is not to say that the canon can't or shouldn't be altered, but to say that to gain purchase in the cultural landscape is hard, that the winds of entropy blow stronger with every season, and that to truly earn a foot hold in Parnassus takes more than political sympathy, wishful thinking or moral convenience.