Chapter 2
Comment on the Opposites in Art
The grandeur of things and their triviality both show what things are. In art—which is like things—there can be the grand approach, accompanied by theoretical drums, and there can be the approach of strategic lesserness or triviality.
Oneness and Manyness is a central situation in reality and in art. You can find them or it in reality itself—as Heraclitus, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, and Samuel Alexander have interestingly exemplified or shown. But you can, too, find Oneness and Manyness in all the arts: in Music, Painting, the Novel, the Play, the Dance, Architecture.
And stepping aside a bit, are Oneness and Manyness that which brings or bring together in sculpture the Apollo Belvedere and Giacometti, the Laocoön and Lachaise? Is there the manyness of painful expression, one may ask, in the Laocoön along with the oneness of the work itself; is there the manyness of feminine fleshly ripple in Lachaise along with the imposing Lachaise singleness?
Again, does the ancient and also ever so contemporary notion of Oneness and Manyness, or Sameness and Difference provide a mode of junction for all the arts?
It does, but it has been difficult to use the philosophic aspect of art and the technical aspect in a graceful, accurate way. Yet something philosophic is buzzing in every technical aspect of art: the eternities are busy within the moment’s artistic choice.
And so, it is necessary to see that Art as Oneness and Manyness is present somehow and surely in every technical artistic choice, process, or result.
I present an example which is a compound of art as grand and art as related to the significant “trivial” or lesser.
There is an essay by Somers Clarke on stained glass in a book of 1893, Arts and Crafts Essays, with a preface by William Morris. This book is decidedly out of fashion, as William Morris more or less is. Yet the problem brought up by Somers Clarke writing on stained glass, looked at closely, is desperately contemporary:
A visit to one of our mediaeval churches, such as York Minster, Gloucester Cathedral, or Malvern Priory, church buildings, which still retain much of their ancient glass, and a comparison of the unity of effect there experienced with the internecine struggle exhibited in most buildings furnished by the glass painters of to-day, will surely convince the most indifferent that there is yet much to be learned. [1] Arts and Crafts Essays by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, with a Preface by William Morris (New York, 1893), p. 101.
I am using this quotation to show that the problem of Oneness and Manyness, or Sameness and Difference, is not just a grand, conceptual problem given over to the philosophic generalizers, the outrageously spacious theoreticians.
The problem of Oneness and Manyness has in it how things go with each other. Mr. Clarke says that the stained glass of the 1890s didn’t go with the buildings it was put in. There was an “internecine struggle.” Mr. Clarke thinks this “internecine struggle” was not good. He wasn’t for, apparently, busy sewing machines in a cathedral or trotting horses in a staid museum.
The Idea of Struggle
However it was, the idea of “struggle” cannot be separated from the idea of Oneness and Manyness, or Sameness and Difference; because as soon as we have manyness we have things having to do with each other, which means they are either blending with each other or fighting each other, or both.
Oneness and Manyness are in a fight themselves; and in Manyness—in any manyness—there is a Fight, a Struggle, an Asymmetry, an Imbalance.
The technical problem arising from Oneness and Manyness is how to get the Fighting and Blending, the Contrast and Similarity to go for one artistic purpose.
There is, then, in good stained glass a struggle, however decorous. Details anywhere don’t go with each other meekly. Stained glass is like Beethoven: in the same way that Beethoven had to make sounds go together, a worker in stained glass had to make segments of glass, colors, intensities and quietnesses of color, shapes to go together.
Stained glass and a large symphony are both profound. [2] That stained glass has its profound side—as profound as anything—can be seen in these notable lines from Shelley’s Adonais: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” They have beautiful quarrels within themselves and they both look to be in place. Even today, a symphony shouldn’t go on, in Johnstown, Pa., at the same time as a boxing match; nor should stained glass be exhibited in a moving rowboat.
A contemporary notion, then, is that of struggle, tension, imbalance in the arts. Is this contained within that immemorial pair of opposites, Many and One? —Yes.
The Insistent Question
The passage I have quoted from the forgotten Somers Clarke concerns the insistent question of the artistic hour: the timelessness and immediacy of contemporary sculpture are concerned; the wanderingness and tightness of Miró; the rigidity and ambience of Picasso.
Oneness and Manyness, Sameness and Difference are philosophic opposites containing wriggling, screaming, riveting, bolting, hitting, making, seeing. They are as fresh as the newest darting thing in entomology.
Notes
¹ Arts and Crafts Essays by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, with a Preface by William Morris (New York, 1893), p. 101.
² That stained glass has its profound side—as profound as anything—can be seen in these notable lines from Shelley’s Adonais: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.”