Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know
precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the
world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be
the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of
other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why
worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that
idolatry is a past virtue and can have no further place with
intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only
era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore--to ride away
with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the
arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that
I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the
consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything
to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am
only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific
principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what
yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it
occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which
is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of
magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am
capable of, from the patterns I encounter.
The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse,
when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save
the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us
yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may
release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art
its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion,
pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a
phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of
little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopus-like
worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism
within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon
the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously
pernicious effect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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