Russian Visual Arts Project

TITLE: Heresies in Art (i)

AUTHOR: A. Benois

I

Can we speak of heresies in art? Such a question may seem strange in our era of exceptional emancipation. Is not everything permitted in the sphere of artistic activity? Is it not the case that individualism - that cornerstone of contemporary artistic life - teaches us that the only thing of value is that which has arisen freely in the artist's soul, and is freely distilled into the work of art? Were we to renounce this would we not return to the propagation of spiritual enslavement, scholasticism, and dead formulae?

Nevertheless the consistent implementation of the very principle of individualism ('freedom of choice') leads to an extremely strange sort of artistic enslavement. After all, human desire may manifest itself just as much in the form of a thirst for slavery or a need for subjugation as it may as a craving for emancipation. This is not a paradox. Where does freedom end and slavery begin? Why should enforced freedom be more worthy of humankind than free self-coercion (voluntary enlistment into servitude)?

The result is that individualism permits all freedoms apart from those free actions which entail a conscious submission of one individual to another, or even of the individual to a principle: 'Do what you want, as you want, but do not dare to do as others do, and do not dare to depart from your "own" path'.

Severe coercion hides within such a freedom, like those civil obligations in 'free', state-constructed utopias from which one wishes to escape to a more ancient and more 'unrestricted' enslavement, or wants to hurl oneself from a window and return to anarchy, to absolute civic non-existence.

If we examine the state of modern art as a whole we see, on the one hand, the proclamation and cult of this fine principle of the individual's absolute freedom, and on the other, we see all the sombre consequences which fatally ensue from the application of this principle. Artists have straggled away back to their lodgings, where they keep themselves amused by admiring themselves, where they shy away from influencing each other, and where they try with all their might to be 'themselves'. A sombre, valueless, and, strangest of all, featureless chaos reigns. True art survives only where there still exists a certain mass of 'subordinating factors' (frequently unbeknownst to the artists themselves), only where artists gather to serve around a familiar dogma: only, in a word, where individualism is sacrificed to what used to be called a 'school'.

I did not expect the words 'true art' to escape my lips. But let them remain. With them I have answered the question of whether there can be heretics in art. Clearly, there can: as soon as I speak of 'true' art I assume the existence of 'untrue' art as well, and hence I also presuppose that which occasions the existence of both: i.e., the orthodoxy of certain principles, and the heresy of others.

I confess I have barely the heart to express myself so freely, but I shall not begin to retract these words. I know that by recognising orthodoxy, even in principle, I am flaunting the most ingrained ideas, and enlisting in the ranks of the 'old men', the lovers of routine, the scholastics. But I am lured by precisely this danger, since nothing seems more dull to me than to enjoy the reputation of a warrior while protected by an array of already-accepted theories. Furthermore, I know all too well that I am not joining the old men (whom I respect, incidentally), and neither am I turning towards routine, but I am merely saying what it is high time to say in praise of that same 'free art'.

Taken to its logical conclusions individualism is a heresy, since it deflects art from freedom and light. By 'freedom' I mean that mystical source of inspiration, that is, a 'free subordination' to a higher, superhuman principle. And by 'light' I mean everything that thought and the joy of creation comprises - the quest for and divination of beauty, insight into the innermost meaning of things, the revelation of what we usually call poetry. Without these principles, artistic creation assumes a mechanical bearing, turning into scientific analysis and, ultimately, a form of chaotic dilettantism.

Individualism is a heresy because, above all, it denies communion. Operating through the insanity of diabolical pride, it isolates people from each other, and concentrates all its efforts on a discrete expression of each individual 'I'. But at the same time, this 'I', stripped of everything that is 'extraneous' to it, is of barely any value. A crude yet striking example of this instructs that a man left on a desert island will fatally return to an animal state, even losing all self-awareness in his subjugation to natural forces (which lie both within and outside him).

On the other hand, everything in both spiritual and material life is contained within and built upon unity and subordination, rather than disunity and rebellion. Even the 'celestial armies' gather in hosts, and surround the Lord God in well-ordered ranks. Satan alone did not submit to this discipline, and introduced the distemper of his pride into the world. But the Messiah was victorious over the prince of the world when he subordinated himself to the dictates of God the Father and refused to follow the one who promised him absolute freedom and power as payment for betrayal of the prescribed dictates.

Herein lies the great Mystery, the great joy of life and of the world. Everyone must support each other, enter into communication with each other, love each other, and depend on one another.

Light resides in celestial harmony, the harmonious procession of the stars, the hierarchy of the angelic hosts, 'universal love', the unity of spirit and flesh - and forces the universe to resist the 'immanent threat of the future lout', the destructive principle of atomism and chaos. (1) It is in universal 'unification' that the force of everything resides: light and glory, life and beauty. On the contrary, it is in dislocation, separation, and in the folly of isolated individuals' striving for independent existence that systemic destruction, death, darkness, and chaos reside.

The trouble with contemporary art lies precisely in the fact that it is isolated, that it has wandered off. Or, it would be more accurate to say, has until now only attempted to wander off, since in reality this is just an illusion. Lesser talents, notwithstanding all their efforts, have failed to grow as a result of their isolation, and our artistic life is more monotonous and colourless than that of any bygone era, when the basis of art lay in both imitation and (principled) plagiarism, as well as in schools and traditional formulae. (ii) On the other hand when greater talents are deprived of beneficial interaction with lesser talents and are left to their own devices, they lose their connection with life and become fatally monotonous, failing to endow their work with that amplitude and clarity which illuminates the work of the old masters, who were like immense reservoirs into which flowed all the ideas of their contemporaries, all artistic discoveries, and the constantly maturing conception of beauty.

In the past the artist lived in communion with all society, and was the clearest exponent of the ideals of his time. Today's artist inevitably remains a dilettante, struggling to isolate himself from others, dispensing only the petty crumbs of what he considers to be 'his personal self' - and which, unknown to him, is nevertheless a reflection of external influences, although a weak and hazy reflection. The monad of the 'I' can create nothing without influences, and it is for this reason that a doctrine which opposes these influences (without which art cannot exist) must be called heresy, since it leads to the atrophy of artistic receptiveness, and thence to the destruction of art. A strictly implemented individualism is an absurdity, and results not in the evolution of the human individual, but in his running wild.

II

I do not know if there is a way out of this situation. The experience of history cannot teach us, for the situation in which art currently finds itself is without precedent. (iii) Neither can logic, on the other hand, teach us anything in this matter, since art in its development (pace the Taines of this world (2) ) too frequently defies logic. Nevertheless, it is important right now to begin to speak, to raise the first alarm. Whether anyone responds now is unimportant.

It is important to recognise one's error, at least to suspect it, to doubt whether one is right. This is the first step towards rectifying it. The generation which is currently maturing and which will take our place is infatuated with individualism, and despises canons, schools and traditions. It is not long ago that such an attitude was an appropriate reaction against other 'heresies': against the oppression of the Academy's stereotypes and the still worse oppression of tendentiousness. Artists wanted to break free then, to abandon art's dull-witted functionaries as well as the circumscribed populists and 'Wanderers'. Any sort of expanse, even a desert, will seem like paradise after stifling confinement. But now the question arises of whether to remain in the desert and die of boredom, or whether, after all, to seek out the Promised Land, which everyone will enter in order to undertake work together.

These questions are particularly important at the present time. Despite the proclamations of freedom made by all parties there is no true spirit of freedom in the air, but, on the contrary, a sense of enforced 'enlistment in the ranks'. We are no longer faced with mystic communion, but rather with orders from all sorts of 'Committees of Public Salvation' to sign up for one militia or another. It is precisely at such a point that it is so important to remember that the artist's salvation lies in mystic communion alone, and that an artist must not join the militia and occupy himself with empty questions of how life should be organised. Other, higher tasks call to him, which he alone is capable of achieving.

The artist is by nature an anarchist. Of the two principles - Caesar and God - he can and must choose God alone. History appears to teach us differently, showing that art - specifically at the most significant moments of its development - has been 'court art', has served Caesar. This, however, only appeared to be servitude.

Louis XIV was proud of the fact that he turned the attention of his entire state away from God and towards himself, and that he wholly dominated the best people of his time, the artists. In fact this, however, was not the case. By a strange irony, it was the artists (and French culture in general) who made the King a God, and who imparted an aura of divinity to the principle of caesarism.

It goes without saying that this substitution of one principle for another included a compromise, and that this compromise had its effect on art. For all its power and beauty, art was tainted with shades of caprice and pomposity, and was false. Nevertheless, it was not driven by the banalities of courtly servitude or utilitarian ideas of the state, but was inspired precisely by this fiction of god in human form. They believed in this, and gave up their souls to serving this.

It is specifically owing to this sincerely-held cult of god in human form that not just Versailles, but all the 'little Versailleses' (in all the places where there were semi-divine monarchs - and these were practically ubiquitous in the eighteenth century), acquired that aura, that strange, inimitable beauty, which disconcerts and even vexes people of 'independent views'. Whatever else one may say about it, humanity has not expressed itself with such brilliance, so perfectly and with such clarity since that time.

Nowadays people have ceased to believe in this fiction of old, and all attempts by monarchs of the nineteenth century to revive this fiction have been in vain. As before, artists circle around sovereigns' courts and create for them that which tradition demands they create. But these creations no longer bear either the vitality or the clarity of the previous 'courtly' art, and have assumed a dreary tone of servility. There is no better place in which to trace the decline of the idea of monarchy than in works of 'court' art of the nineteenth century.

The idea of a monarch as God's absolute representative on earth has now been replaced by the idea of the people, and, in this way, an abstract fiction has been substituted for the concrete. Let us allow that this abstraction has a great significance. But the idea of God within it has waned, replaced wholly by an idea of organisation on earth. At the present time the people-state is precisely that 'Caesar' as described by the Gospel. And it seems to me that the indifference that is seen in artists towards this abstraction must therefore be explained by their natural anarchism, their instinctive indifference to any sort of idea of earthly organisation. So long as they believed in the fiction of the Pope as God, or the King as God, then they created with sincerity and complete respect, lifting their eyes above the Pope and the King to the celestial spheres of the true God, and imparting the aura of these revelations to their closest objects, the Pope and the King. However, as soon as the place of 'divine monarchy' was taken by a 'convenient constitution', artists turned away and began to seek revelations in other spheres.

Now in Russia too the mystic fiction of an infallible, divine monarch has had its day and delights no one, and has been replaced by a 'constitution': that is, by a convenient utopia of organisation on earth. No doubt artists too will be required to express themselves - and will be required to act in the service of the great business of the regeneration of Russian civic life.

I do not speak of the near future. There is too much struggle at present, too much noise and commotion. Now artists too are confused, and spin this way and that, while others believe themselves to be citizens and so join the police, devoting their sacred gift to the utilitarian goals of battles against the negative aspects of present-day life. But calm will be restored, life in Russia will return to its usual level, culture will sober up and recover. Then will artists have to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and turn once more wholly towards God - towards Apollo.

It is impossible to say at present whether sufficient strength will be found in this regenerated Russian culture to be sensitive to the need for beauty, for there is too much confusion to be able to discern the definitive solution beyond. If, however, the Russian revolution leads not only to socialist experiments (and is not cynically crushed by forces of reaction), then we will still see the long-awaited dawn of Russian life: then, clearly, the dawn of art, that most clear and free form of expression of human ideals, will also be seen.

I may be reproached for the fact that my words have no foundation, that this is all rhetoric. And it does in fact appear that, in finding myself on the threshold of the promised land, and ignorant of what awaits us beyond that threshold, I seem to be proposing a toast 'to freedom, beauty, ideals!' Everyone has had enough of such clamorous words. But the point does not at all lie in what we will be given to do beyond that threshold - and when I began this article it was with far from the 'promised land' in mind. What interests me is not the question of what we will do beyond the threshold, but the question of what sort of people we will be when we get there, and what we will take there with us of what we now possess. And it is from this that the wish arises to bid farewell to those possessions which could damage our future new life.

I will also be told that one cannot speak of 'heresies' from which one must 'be saved', without professing some 'true' faith or other. At this point the weak spot of our entire era will be indicated: the fact that in general faith does not exist now, and therefore, that there is no point in arming oneself against heresy with a faith that is wanting. I think, however, that such an indication is unfounded: it is precisely among artists that faith exists, but in a latent, twilight condition, barely understood and almost indefinable.

In general, it is difficult to have faith in our time. We have taken on all religious teachings that have accumulated throughout history, and, craving a final conclusion, or even the 'next revelation', have then outgrown them. We find ourselves in an incomparably more acute crisis of human consciousness than that encountered by the Athenians during the time of St Paul the Apostle, when, desolate, they raised a temple to 'the Unknown God'. We too need to raise a temple to 'the Unknown God', and wait for a new revelation of the Messiah, and for the cult of the vague and incorporeal to be replaced by the real and clear.

But of all humanity languishing in faithlessness or 'doubt', it is least of all artists who should despair. The art of antiquity was great and beautiful, but it did not possess then that 'authority' (may I be forgiven for the triviality of the expression) which it now possesses. Apollo and Dionysus have become mature, more clearly defined figures, and we feel that at the present time it is specifically from them that we must expect salvation. The absence of the aesthetic in the Gospel is surprising, as is, in contrast, the deeply aesthetic spirit that penetrates all the subsequent development of Christianity. We might say that at present Catholicism rests exclusively on aestheticism, and that beauty is its last (but most powerful) stronghold.

And, in truth, beauty is the most striking, most categorical revelation of the divine principle in our era. Beauty is the Mystery which is least of all explicable and at the same time most of all clear. Beauty is the lodestar in the gloom through which the soul of modern humanity roams. Religions are shaken, philosophical systems collide, and, in the midst of this monstrous confusion we retain one absolute, one unconditional divine revelation - and that is beauty. It is beauty which must lead humankind towards the light, and which will not allow it to perish in despair. Beauty somehow implies the connectedness 'of everything with everything', and it promises that we shall receive the solution to everything that still opposes all the contradictions in the revelations of the past.

Beauty has a terrible enemy, however, which is loutishness, petty bourgeois Philistinism. This enemy cannot threaten the very principle of beauty itself, which is unattainable and untouchable. But it presents a threat to its manifestations, to all the beauty that already exists, and to that which is still to be born.

I will not talk now of the sacrilegious infringements that have been made on existing revelations of beauty, of all that which is described by the fairly absurd word 'vandalism' - the monstrous expression of the boorishness which currently reigns. What is far more significant for beauty are those obstacles which presently interfere with new embodiments of beauty, and here I return to my fundamental theme, and to individualism once more.

What seems most terrible to me is not the loss of all the beauty that surrounds us and that was created by our predecessors, nor the destruction of irreplaceable objects of beauty - what is more terrible than this is the fact that now we are incapable of creating anything which could replace all that has perished, and which would illuminate and adorn our lives. We are dying in ugliness.

Wherein lies the reason for this? In an insufficiency of inspiration, or an inability to make use of it? Has grace vanished, or are we unworthy of it?

To this question, I, as a believer, can only reply that the reason lies in us, in the fact that 'we do not want to', we do not give ourselves wholly to divine action, and that we forget that the main strength of any cult (and art is a cult, as anyone who has given even the slightest consideration to these questions will not doubt), lies in union, communion, the church.

All art in the past was specifically 'ecclesiastical' (ecclesia = church = community, gathering), i.e. it was communal, homogenous, and subordinated to general canons and formulae. art in our time, however, has renounced canons and formulae. It was, however, correct to repudiate the old canons and formulae, since one must not serve gods in which one does not believe. But in taking a stand against the very principle of canons and formulae the art of our time was absolutely incorrect, and has rendered itself 'heretical'. In place of that principle, it proclaimed another of complete discord, and announced the total liquidation of any sort of ecclesiasticism.

Individualism, which is based on the diabolical ('boorish') spirit of pride, leads us, in each new mode of creation, towards the same desert, the same 'loathsome desolation', as all today's 'vandalism', which is also predicated on boorish pride, on the grandeur of 'Americanism', on crude utilitarian theories, and which serves the same diabolical aims of creating a tabula rasa and of hounding humanity into the dark impasse of utter bestialism.

Individualism leads with fatal logic to such an impasse, since it preaches the conservation of one's own personality and alienation from others (deep down, individualism teaches both). Each new generation becomes more and more helpless, and looks increasingly lightly upon the task before it; increasingly, it forgets the old means of expression, and is less and less capable of creating new ones, since these demand collective human efforts and not isolated attempts. (iv)

Again I will be asked what I suggest should be erected in place of today's 'enslavement to individualism'. Surely we should not return to school-based formulae or yoke ourselves to unification when everyone has fallen out of the practice of doing so? I will not answer that question, but I strongly trust in the mystic force of the revelation of beauty. I know that this revelation can appear only via the church, in 'communion', and that, before I construct anything, it is important for me, specifically, to declare that now is the time for artists to throw off that yoke which stops them pursuing the new dictates of the Godhead, and which leads them into a boundless wilderness.

We must cast doubt upon the usefulness of the doctrine of the self-contained significance of the individual in art, and perhaps then we will be honoured with the revelations of the new church, in which separate individuals will come together in one cult, and which will bring to us a new and necessary art.

Aleksandr Benua [Alexandre Benois]

Versailles, October 1905 - January 1906.

Notes

(i) The ideas expounded in this article fundamentally diverge from the views of the Editorial Board. We have found room for this article, however, because we consider it interesting to give a definitive representation of A. Benois's beliefs.

(ii) This colourlessness is of a particular sort. It arises from too large a diversity of colours used in details, which in general gives a grey and muddy tone to the work of art overall.

(iii) Our era is closest of all to the decline of ancient Rome, to 'Byzantism', but this analogy is far from complete.

(iv) The possibility of the emergence of 'genius' becomes less and less probable, since a genius is a person who lives on a large amount of 'sacrifices', and by a large amount of enthusiasms. These are, in their way, 'mediums', who are capable of acting only thanks to the endless accumulation of immense capacities of will directed to a single goal.