IN HIS PAMPHLET, Le Processus Créatif, Marcel Duchamp asks us to consider the two poles of the creation of art, ‘the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.’ If the job of the editors of a magazine such as this is to join the dots not only between certain lines of discussion and various modes of creation, but also between the works they publish and their audience, then we have before us a difficult task.

There are some magazines which claim the virtue of presenting their contents without communicating to their readers the reasons behind their choices or the frameworks for their reasons. In such magazines, unless the selections are faultless, the difficult route to enjoyment or appreciation is by way of a hall of distractions: with each work claiming an equal part of what little attention the reader might be willing to give.

When we stated, in the comment which accompanied our last number, that art needs work, we were, as editors, calling on writers to meticulously deliberate every utterance, to studiously compose every sentence. Some have pointed out that it read like a plea to over-write. If that was the impression given then we can only apologise.

Our demand was for a writing that seeks to perfect the use of words in someway other than that familiar flow which reads like a transcription of the spoken word; with all its pauses, monologues, interruptions and vagaries left intact. Our demand was for a generation of readers whose expectations require more from their writers than those unobstrusive compositions which merely, like the films of Holywood, seek to suspend our disbelief. We were demanding words which, with every comma, draw attention to themselves, with every verb and adjective challenge us, as readers, in return.

Since the publication of our last number professor John Carey’s latest book, What Good are the Arts? has benefitted from the attentions of a number of cultural commentators. This peculiar book whose basic claim that the arts, in and of themselves, are not much good at all (all arts that is except, as he expounds in the book’s second part, literature) has been widely heralded as some kind of diamond edged clarion call from ‘one of the country’s most eminent reviewers and academics.’

When Terry Eagleton, echoing Duchamp, wrote, in his TLS. review of Carey’s book, ‘Art is not a special class of things, but a special way of relating to things,’ he was responding to the primary assumption of Carey’s thesis which holds that ‘art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it maybe a work of art only for that one person.’

We will not bore our readers with an exposition of the details of Carey’s arguments. The chapter titles of part one (‘What is a work of art?’ is followed by ‘Is ‘high’ art superior?’ – apparently in no discernible way, although the way in which you discern it may be different to the way in which we discern it, but that’s okay; ‘Can science help?’ – yes and no; ‘Do the arts make us better?’ – certainly not in a medicinal sense although it depends on how well you were feeling in the first place; and ‘Can art be a religion?’ – no) say it all. Carey is anti-elitist, purports to speak for the average man, believes in science not god and thinks the redemptive and instrumental benefits of art are far more worthy than – although he freely admits, nowhere near as interesting as, their æsthetic standing as objects.

It should be well known to professor Carey that popular opinion (as well as government policy) holds that there are two distinct types of value which can be applied to the arts. The first, its intrinsic value, focusses our attention on the object and the artist; whilst discussion of the instrumental value of the arts is dominated by a concern for the audience or spectator.

While Tessa Jowell, in that same document cited by Aaron Robertson’s ‘Notes on Invisible Art’ in our last issue, has expressed her intention to avoid falling to either side of the instrumental vs. intrinsic argument, the briefest of glances at a list of projects funded through Arts Council England will confirm where current policy stands – a large proportion are marked by an emphasis on ‘audience participation’, which is perfectly inline with a government policy which seems to want to get more people ‘taking part’ in art, as if the field of cultural production is akin to filling a sporting field with competing athletes – as if the number of participants is somehow more important than the quality of the competition.

In this kind of setting, to reject a discussion of the æsthetic is to fall in line with the government and other commentators such as John Holden, writing in the Demos pamphlet, ‘Capturing Cultural Value’, who argues that æsthetic discussion is ‘an embarrassment at best, contemptible at worst’.

Blake Morrison’s comments in a further review of Carey’s book show not only how out of touch Morrison is but also how the debate has managed to collapse in on itself in recent years: ‘How interesting it would be if Carey's anti-elitist values were adopted and put into practice. Next time the post of chair of the Arts Council becomes vacant, someone ought to nominate him.’

In stigmatising the intrinsic arguments for art, whether in the name of anti-elitism or accessibility, the cultural industries have allowed, perhaps welcomed, certainly invited a situation whereby the Artist remains a slave to his patron and Art a slave to society.

This age is one of immediate exchange. A great many in the western world are able to communicate, almost at will, with friends, family and colleagues through the use of a number of devices. Whilst the emergence of the postal services allowed personal missives to be transmitted across great distances in periods of time which had hitherto been unimaginable, the age of the letter was soon superseded by telegrams, telephones, radios and televisions which rapidly revolutionised the ways in which societies communicated between themselves. This bringing together of worlds may be directly related to both an unprecedented wave of creation which quickly spanned continents at the beginning of the last century, and also to global conflict, the scale of which had never before been seen.

The anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, who spent much of his life examining and discussing the nature of communication, opened his best known collection of writing with a series of metalogues – conversations about problematic subjects wherein the structure of the conversation is relevant to the subject.

The first of these conversations, ‘Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?’ features a daughter posing the following problem:

To which her father responds: ‘it’s just because there are more ways which you call “untidy” than there are ways which you call “tidy.”’ His answer at first seems facile, but when we consider one of the best known myths of language, as expressed, for example, in book XII of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, we realise the extent of a problem which has faced humankind since the earliest of times.

The resulting babble remains evident everywhere. At times it seems as if we are groping our way to understanding through a thick mist and the more light we shine to illuminate our way, the more fog we see. If we extend the significance of the ‘metalogue’ quoted earlier it could be said that the more communication there is, the greater will be the potential for muddle. Bateson expressed something like this with his analogy of reversing a truck with one or more trailers attached:

We need only look to the various misunderstandings that occur in the exchange of quickly and lazily composed email correspondence or sms messaging to begin to comprehend how all our communications, though ‘easier’ than ever, are prone to jack-knife.

Nevertheless there are those who argue that the artist’s attempts to create are, when successful, the perfection of the seemingly simple task of communication; that the artist, often unconsciously, is preaching to a fractured society from the world of ideas. I.A. Richard’s, for example, wrote in his seminal work, ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’:

If art alone is to stand towering above the rubble of Babel then the artist must take a few steps back from the confusion and find a way, as Duchamp suggested, whereby art can be as much a creation for the spectator as it is for he who initiates the process.

The great theatre director, Peter Brook, famously wrote: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.’ It could be similarly said that an empty canvas, an unexposed film, or a blank sheet of paper each provide the necessary essentials with which an artist – be he a painter, a photographer, or a writer – must perform his art.

It is perhaps not too bold to suggest that all artists must be performers. On these pages we are proud to present Patricia de Montfort’s discussion of Whistler’s ‘Ten o’Clock’ lecture as a performance; likewise, Weldon Kees’s appearances in the photographs offered here are those of a performer – enacting an idea or expressing a gesture. Just as the impeccability of Whistler’s appearance was punctuated by his famous tuft of white hair, so all artists must accent their work with epigrams, metaphors and other more subtle stylistic devices. By way of these conceits of ‘performance’ the artist can draw attention, highlight and underscore those aspects of his work that must be communicated successfully. The only way he can overcome the hurdle of confusion is by marking the course of his intent with the brightest of beacons; so that light is not shone on the fog but rather, the fog shines from within.

The performance can and should manifest itself in many ways. Whistler seemed peculiarly aware of the problem of communicating complex ideas and overcame them, with varying success, by the meticulous positioning of his trademark butterflies on his letters and pamphlets. These butterflies, having emerged with increasing flamboyance from the composition of the artist’s initials, often wear stings in their tales; are found in the process of taking elaborate bows; or are sprawled across the page, comedically defying the mannered prose of their creator’s barbed attacks. These designs, accenting his communiqués, carefully placed to balance his layout, might easily be seen as the forebear of today’s ‘emoticons’ or ‘smileys’ which serve to punctuate the inefficency of lazy usage. Where there was irony, joy and playfulness in Whistler’s designs there is now only a failure to use words in such a way as their meanings and intentions are opaque.

There will always be ambiguity where art is involved, but where communication fails and we default to muddle, art forces us to interact with it, to question its every assumption, to find beneath the layers and the articulations, a force of thought filled with possibility even when everything about it crumbles.

In repeating our previous maxim: Art needs work – we do not mean that the effort exerted should be exclusive to the artist. While it is the artist’s job, as Whistler explains, to select those elements of nature which will form harmonies in his work, so it is his audience’s task to identify and respond to the performance of his synthesis, the enaction of this artifice.

Bateson, in a further example of the difficulties of communication, explains the following in relation to the play fighting of monkeys:

An interest in the arts was never far from Bateson’s writing and while it might be overstating our case to suggest the relevance of this discussion of denotation to the interaction between artist and audience the questions posed are well worth considering.

If the spectator is to commend any work to posterity then his most difficult task will be to isolate the varying aspects of performance (or play) and communication so as to treat them in due proportion.

Martin Buber, the theologian and philosopher, whose insights have had a major and noted influence on social scientists such as Bateson, describes man’s relation with nature as swaying ‘in gloom, beneath the level of speech. Creatures live and move over against us, but cannot come to us, and when we address them as Thou, our words cling to the threshold of speech.’

It is this threshold of speech, when formalised and made public, which must be both the subject and object for all art. It is that which cannot be said directly. It is that which sometimes can not be said at all.

Art must be approached and considered as an instrument of communication, not as something holy nor as a tool of social change – as has been variously suggested. This is not to say that the artist is to be regarded as a seer whose communications should be ranked in a higher order to the mumblings of the rest of us. Each example must be judged, by its audience, according to its own merits and successes.

Considered thus, each piece of art can become an entity of intricate, intimate, self-contained, self-referencing suggestion. An æsthetic universe unto itself.