Indecency

Sometimes Shostakovich is unbearable. The last quartet, every movement marked adagio. You listen to Telemann instead, or Rossini. Sometimes the easy flow of Telemann is unbearable and anything other than the best Shostakovich (and a few other composers) seems indecent.

Indecent – why this word? Because of what happened, because the music that made Himmler weep belongs to a culture to which the Nazis could ally themselves. Is it the innocence of art that was sullied? Innocent art belongs to another time. A time before the genocides that were accomplished with the same technology that was supposed to liberate humankind. When culture was secure, when it was a flowering of the spirit.

The first world war already saw a great sense of the implausibility of culture. What was it all for? – The upsurge of avant-gardes, among them, Dada, Surrealism. Now the great attempt to escape art through art – to create another kind of work – to transform existence, to change life. The interruption of art – art as the interruption of the continuity of culture. Art had lost its innocence – or it had rediscovered its innocence as a mode of research, a voyage into the unconscious alongside the efforts of the analysts. Either way, it was no longer a question of the prestige of art, of the work that would lend itself to the unfolding of human potential celebrating the marvels of humanism.

But hasn’t the history of which Surrealism is a part simply run its course? Where are the avant-gardes? What are the political stakes of the existence of art, of literature? This question seems anachronistic. As if culture could matter in that way. As if it wasn’t debased, corrupted, indecent.

Levinas suspects that to enjoy art is to enjoy feasting during a famine. It is indecent…. It is that, or it is insignificant. And Celan? Blanchot? The latter wrote in 1945, ‘no more stories’. No more – the time of the work of art has passed. Innocence or indecency – is it so simple? Blanchot, after the war, no longer ascribes a specific genre to his fictions. They are works which come after, posthumously. But then Blanchot was a contemporary of the worst… What about those who come after?

Can art be as innocent again for us (who is this ‘us’)? Is it a question of a classicism – a return to the age of Telemann or Haydn, the age of politesse, the restraint of the passions? Then Romanticism, the time of the artist-creator, Beethoven, who thought of himself greater than kings and aristocrats. Not far from him to Berlioz, the artist who no longer believes in God or Bach – and Wagner, universal artist, artist-evangel, creator of the unified artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk which would restore the original, vital relations of the mythos…

Now think of the broken artists – Beckett, Giacometti, Van Velde – artists who were born into a world that broke, and who work with fragments. But then wasn’t Avigdor Arhika one of that generation, rescued from Auschwitz, abstract painter? – He gave up abstraction. What does he paint? I remember a glorious still life of stacked towels in an airing cupboard.

I must stop these vague ramblings. Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz: these are ghosts, however much I like to listen to excerpts from The Ring in my office. Ghosts – they are not present, living, for us (who is this ‘us’?). Depart from them entirely? No. Shostakovich quotes Rossini then breaks the tune, plays with it and smashes as if to say: it is not ours anymore. Breton wanders in Paris with Nadja. Ghosts everywhere. Bataille breaks up the novel into The Impossible. Then I think to myself: there are no new forms, only the ruins of old ones, like the ruined cathedral Gorchakov wanders around in Nostalghia.

From The Writing of the Disaster:
… sometimes concerts were organised. The power of music seems, momentarily, to bring forgetfulness and dangerously causes the distance between the murderers and victims to disappear. But, Langbein adds, for the pariahs there was neither sport nor music. There is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction. Let us not forget this.