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Murray Turnbull

Where are we going? We have been busy - even frantic­about getting there. But, where is there? We are exceedingly clever about concentrating on the journey and how it can be made. But, where is the journey taking us?

The question of ten neglected when discussing the idea of progress, is, progress toward what? There may not only be improvement, but also degeneration or decline; a definition of sanity presumes its opposite, insanity. If progress can be made toward the one, then can it not, too, be made toward the other?

The arts have always lain outside and beyond progress. They are durable in the sense that no one kind from no one place or time is better than another - just different. This is why every artist always begins at the beginning and not where someone else left off. Artists and art, by their very natures, resisted progress. They acknowledge that it is the quality of existence which matters most, and that qualities of existence occur everywhere always and not just somewhere sometimes. If it could be charged that this idea stood in the way of progress - being contrary to it- it was as often a barrier to downward decline as to upward progress. Wh~n change became the central fact of existence, it was

quickly associated with the bon mot of the mechanical· industrial age, and, in turn, with nuclear-age progress. The two, though, are not synonymous. If they are to be defined interchangeably, then change must then, like progress, be recognized as capable of movement downward as well as upward.

Art as an avant-garde took over, uncritically, the optimism of the nineteenth-century idea of progress; assuming the inevitability of improvement as long as change occurred. Whatever stimulus and excitement there was in the notion, it represented a co-opting of art and its transformation into a progressive instrument, and of necessity opened the way as much to its decline as to its betterment.

The tip of the conceptual pyramid constructed by the time of the nineteenth century, wherefrom every person looked down upon every other being as lesser, was far more precarious than many could imagine. By its implication, every individual was discardable for a later

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and presumably better model, and each was thus denied existence possessed of any inherent value. It was a basis for the notion of winners and losers, in which most (indeed in ideal form all others) must be losers, and only a few winners. A more monstrous social doctrine would be hard to conceive, but it was so potent and pervasive an idea that it still determines most decisions in the societies in which we exist. The pyramid was merely an invention for describing a universe in the most comfortable and flattering way for a few; a convenient device upon which to build empires. As an ethereal structure, it could as readily be assumed to have its wide base at the other end. In many respects, it has been left to us now to become aware that the imagined pyramid is at least as likely in one position as the other: if anyone can be on top, everyone can also be at the bottom.

It is the essence of progress for one thing or one stage to supersede another. Everything is but a step on the way to somewhere else. If art is to be defined only in terms of an avant-garde, or as a means, it is always immediately obsolete. Progress legitimized changes in style and form. What it also made possible was the obsolesence of art itself. Given the mania of people for self-destruction - in this century - this was both expressive and understandable. Like the possible demise of peoplekind it was not necessarily desirable.

Art, in concurrence with the premises of a society in which property forms the basis of values and in which people become objects to be used and manipulated in its favor, became what people were becoming, a commodity. As consumers, people serve as ideal instruments for progress, and function themselves as commodities. Commodities have no inherent value, and exist only to be used.

An idea of progress based on things and their change denied that living - all life - had qualitative characteristics which were the essence of its being. It denied that these had value in themselves. Such characteristics differ in configuration from one place, one time, one people to another. This does not mean that they do not exist.

Art often became, as some artists have insisted, the same as life, and with concepts of life anchored in the idea of

Man as a progressive instrument; art like life began to lose its focus on qualities, on ends, and became a mere tool. Tying art to progress was a death warrant which many artists signed willingly without reading.

That means are, by their nature, progressive (both generative and degenerative), may be indisputable. That ends are progressive is another matter, about which for almost two hundred years there has been too little dispute. Of all the functions of art, of all of its natures, the most significant has been precisely that, to assert and make evident the existence of people as ends and to shape visibly the qualitative characteristics of those ends. Art identified and celebrated those very things that could not conceivably progress and could not demonstrably be measured. When means superseded ends as primary values, art could have held out as a principal force attending to the quality of life, at worst a reminder of those qualities which make of life an end, and at best a constructive force for redirecting and reshaping a value structure which had become oppressive and destructive.

There exists no material or tool or form which is inherently improper for the artist to use except as it is inherently inimical to the existence of the qualities of life itself and destructive of it or its ecology. The very character of change itself is, as always, a proper concern of the artist. No one now need echo or repeat means just because they have existed before, or avoid means because they have not existed before. Nor need anyone reject or deprecate previous means.

But, if art continues much longer or extends much further the role it has taken on as a means, it will be destroyed as surely as people who have let themselves become objects continue to be. This can be illustrated by the manner in which many artists (naturally highly honored and rewarded) have accepted the techniques and adopted the methods of the mass media and contemporary technology by which they, like people who are shaped by the media and the technology into objects, are emasculated. One possible role for art attending to the quality of life would be to contest the mass media and the dominance of a technocracy, rather than permit itself to be pre-empted. Art may be the best means left to us to counter the uncritical absorption and destructive effect of images invented by systems of mass communication and decisions determined cybernetically; but to do so, art will have to reassert its focus on its functions as ends and not as means.

The only prospect which people have for survival, and for the survival of a supporting ecology, is to invert the prevailing value system in which property is primary and

people are secondary. Nothing more clearly symbolizes that value structure than the present effort to produce a "clean" nuclear weapon which will destroy people while leaving property relatively undamaged. It is a sign of our progress, downward indeed, that any such evil and insane instrument is even a topic for discussion.

Unless we establish the primary value as life itself - and the placing of people above things - we shall certainly destroy ourselves and this earth. It is to attend to, to care about the qualities of life, that art exists. Attention to how we care must always be preceded by whether we care. The shape of that caring must change; unless we can recover the caring we are doomed.

The essential questions to be asked by the artist, as by anyone else, are these: Who are we? why are we? what is it like to be? what do we know about feeling? what is the nature of knowing? what is the nature of life when valued as an end in itself? what are the qualities of being which will sustain that nature, and encourage us to best value ourselves and our supporting environment? what qualities can best nurture our necessary sense of community in which all selves have value as ends? And, more important, these questions: Where have we been? where are we now? where are we going? and, why?

While these questions remain definitively unanswerable - which is exactly why they are the most necessary questions of all - it is through the struggle to answer them that we are each born and do we each live. It is in the intense and necessarily profound and agonizing contest with such questions that we gain in the breadth and depth of understanding of our own consciousness of being; it is out of that experience that art, like life, must be created.

homage to don marquis by a descendant arm tweall

for those too young to remember or too uninformed to know the artists who preceded them archy one of the best wrote his poems fifty years ago by throwing himself head down upon the keys of the typewriter one at a time save the shift key for capitals which he couldn t operate

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all this because as he put it quotation marks expression is the need of my soul i was once a vers libre bard but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach quotation marks

archy was a serious artist and one h double dash 1 of a good one he complained even then that his readers quotation marks are always interested in technical details when the main question is whether the stuff is literature or not quotation marks

i m not so dumb as to forget my ancestors destroying the past is a sure way to destroy the present which becomes the past quicker than you can say jack robinson and i can t think of any lines more relevant than those of archys and relevance is the big thing except that as i eat my way around through the crumbs on gallery floors at openings these days i m not sure that many artists have got the message well as archys friend mehitabel was wont to say quotation marks i have had my ups and downs but wotthehell wotthehell quotation marks

but the question which seldom falls from lips wagging in the galleries or among the jet set where the aftebu rners give off a lot of hot air mostly pollutants is whether the stuff is art or not i find it hard to tell and i msober maybe imbibing helps but whether before or after i don I know i suppose some would say during

its not that i mold fashioned h double dash Ii ma child of my time the medium is the message and i say to h double dash I with it but wotthehell wotthehell anyhow there s no dismissing picasso and matisse and klee and mondrian and dekooning and calder and cubism and abstractionism etcetera because they shaped and were shaped by a changed and changing world though it took you long enough to find out what we cockroaches knew all along you can teat off the floor without knowing about change the food has gotten so filled with additives that even roach powder is healthier the tv dinner ain t like mom s apple pie either i m all for change as long as its healthy and the ecology can take it provided it ain I just to add stuff it s the quality of life not the quantity that counts in fact i think art has suffered like everything else from too much affluence the highest standard of living ever which unfortunately is not the same as a high standard of !if e gluttons die from overeating just as readily as the hungry from starvation

i like my crumbs and a good sandwich now and then even a ragout to jump in for a treat and a bath but eating to live is one thing and living to eat another there s an aspiration for you to be a consumer the new hero making over of people from ends to means so that everyone becomes an object to be used

i resent that but i m only a cockroach lacking your civilization

which archy quote said always results in deserts man is never on the square he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches unquote archys a bit long winded on the subject so i II skip a bit quote it won t be long now it won t be long till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone end of quotation

i see a lot of artists willing like most everyone else to be used and to use fame like money gets in the way and fame like people like art has also become a commodity everything s for sale the devil has bought for development purposes the soul of the artist which ought to be free to all takers including the devil dam his eyes but archy knew all that long ago quotation marks how often that happens when a man becomes conspicuous he has used all his best stuff winning fame in small type or some other inconspicuous way and in poverty and obscurity has put his soul into his work suddenly fame and success come and he gets promoted to big type on account of his merits and lo and behold his great thoughts desert him quotation marks

there s been a lot of talk about great thoughts by artists recently but it won t stick to the ribs artists aren t paid to think and were never much good at it and bad thinking is no substitute for literature or painting or singing i also notice that everyone invents his own art these days from any old stuff lying around h double dash I we cockroaches have been doing that for millenia andy says that anyone who thinks

he s an artist is one which is one way to make sure that no one is because if art like love or a good beer is not something special then it is not distinguishable from anything else and art is the same as life which is what some of the boys have been saying as they sashay around the ateliers though i notice they manage to peddle it as if it were more special than life not many of you would fetch a hundred thou or half that on the market they ve forgotten what the great lady of the arts mehitabel said quote to the artist the eternal struggle between art and life archy is something fierce unquote and she might have added necessary

well variety abounds and variety is the spice of life and i like my quota even if it makes me sneeze but wotthehell wotthehell give me a good beer anytime or as archy himself said quotation marks it is a good thing not to be too aristocratic the oldest and most pedigreed families in this country are the occupants of various sarcophagi in the museums but it is dull associating with mummies no matter how royal their blood used to be when they had blood it is like living in philadelphia quotation marks

when the church and the state got tired of feeding artists who just got the floor messed up with paint or chipped all the furniture

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practicing with their chisels the landed gentry took over and the new industrial rich and made art into good taste but they never asked me because good taste is like pablum no flavor at all id rather dip my head in a beaker of gin wotthehell wotthehell well they made it into a tax toy or did i mean ploy for the rich a tool for status inflatus like the super automatic gas guzzler flatulating over what was once the countryside i m all for the artist being paid a decent wage like anyone else archy often complained of the lack of reward of his occupation but who needs the taj mahal for a studio or the ritz to get a bit of shuteye or maxims to fill the stomach quoting archy i heard a couple of fleas talking the other day says one come to lunch with me i can lead you to a pedigreed dog says the other one ido not care what a dogs pedigree may be safety first is my motto what i want to know is whether he has got a muzzle on millionaires and bums taste about alike to me unquote

well they made art into an in thing and it got fashionable openings became more important

than what they opened the food is pretty snazzy but i ve never made do with such an unbalanced diet it gives a body indigestion and makes my legs ache all of them but everyone got to doing his own thing who says you re an artist says andy i say so and self expression and self indulgence broke out all over like the measles richly rewarded instead of quarantined by people who had no selves to express and felt good as a result full of moral uplift i like mehitabel saying quote i never claimed i had any morals she has always regarded morals as an unnecessary complication in life her theory is that they take up room that might better be devoted to something more interesting live while you are alive she says and postpone morality to the hereafter unquote it got so bad that it even became avant garde not to be avant garde like a dog chasing it s tail and fashions died faster than flies in the winter even when artists had temper tantrums against the establishment the establishment was charmed which comes from leading such jaded lives and co opted them right and left and sometimes center you cant even throw mud with any pleasure when throwing mud will get you a show at the guggenheim and a fat book with color plates and that ain t mud in your eye either the corporate state devours all and all i hear as the artists go down the gullet is the refrain from an old song called deposit it to my account

you ve had hollywood and press agents

and gossip columnists and critics for hire and dealers on the make and artists in the know until it all looks like another talk show and slick enough at that for johnny carson or to make you reach for an aspirin give me a good beer anytime and you ve had museums becoming artists andy said they could and they said they should it adds up the body count at the gate and only art suffers

you ve had op which dazzled your eyes with tricks from the 17th century you d forgotten and you had pop like a discovery though mostly by the culturally deprived millionaires kitsch which coney island and waikiki and the local garbagecollectors have been surrounded by since year one and which was after all what stretched from one end of the 19th century to the other

there was minimal and they weren t kidding the artist did t want any handwriting to show and backed clear out of the picture and then out of life the logical development of minimal was death the idea of art subtracting from life rather than adding to it was most original and introduced the artist as mortician

then you got conceptual where the thought is enough try that out for love sometime artists who can t read suddenly discovered what we poets have been using since before the year one

i mean words but you have to be a poet to use them but then words have been dying off like people archy said quote again i am sorry to see the human race go for it was in some respects almost as interesting as several species of insects but if it wants to die off i shall not worry about it i shall merely conclude it knows what it wants end of quotation

then there was hard edge which is difficult to sit on and doesn t do much for the mind either and something new like body art which was what used to belong to savages before you progressed so far in savagery and then came new realism i find it hard to think of reality as being new different yes but new no but i suppose if you are brought up in an ersatz society where everything including the food is artificial it is a discovery to find something real

and then you got technocratic diagrammatic programmatic and computerized as if art were so simple or so dumb i wish you would turn the dam computer off once in a while down the hall i have the same trouble you have its hum makes it hard for me to think and i notice it also lulls you to sleep like a lullaby while it operates the death factories you keep on building while you talk of saving civilization one way or another everybody gets into art these days but people you value property more than persons anyway and on the whole i can t complain because i think you give us cockroaches

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a better deal than you give yourselves

everything gets in but feelings which are emasculated by the mass media which your artists have preempted instead of contested it would be reassuring to see and i mean see as in art that the quality of life mattered to you it sure does to me i quote archy there is neither mastery nor slavery except as it exists in the attitude of the soul toward the world unquote give me a good beer anytime but i don t see that art is going to be around much longer nor you unless you can remember

that the artist has got to be one and everybody else had better be one who cares about caring knows about feeling and shapes caring and knowing into a visible reality which identifies the spirit and its qualities and you can teat that but you II die without it

out there somewhere is life too much in fact due to overpopulation and transportation s lousy too and the bomb gets bigger and better if you believe in insanity nothing works when the planet mars interviewed archy and asked

Photo by Terri D. Morris

what are the conditions of life on your planet archysaid they practically don t exist any more

although mehitabel speaking on behalf of all artists who haven t given up sang blow wind out of the north to hell with being a pet my left front foot is brittle but theres life in the old dame yet

oh i say theres life out there to be attended to and worried about and celebrated but it ain t in the swank galleries or the sleek pages of the trade journals which peddle art like you know whose hamburgers it ain t in the padded living rooms of the macho successes with the skins of their women lining the walls and making bare rugs on the floors i ve looked around a good bit which is more than i can say for a lot of artists these days and i can tell you that there is a lot of life out there which is where art always was although nobody ever pretended it was the same thing as maybe you don t need art but if not then not life either

but what am i saying i m only a cockroach hoping you might crawl up to my level but archy put it better quote man the universiJI simp follows lagging with a limp treading on his neighbors toes the way the little insect goes in a million years or more man may learn the simple lore of how the bees are organized and why the ants are civilized may even hope for to approach the culture of an average roach if he is humble and not smug may emulate the tumble bug end of quote

a moth told archy once quotation marks it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while quotation marks

or as archy himself put it another time quote if i had my life to live over again i would give dignity the regal razz and hire myself out to work in a brewery quote

archy was quite a guy and i haven t read a better critic recently but maybe id better sign off with his own words which are yours for another renaissance of the arts every spring and every autumn quotation marks which takes a mehitabel for doing quote some day my guts will be fiddle strings but my ghost will dance while they play for they can t take the pep from the old girls soul and i am toujours gai unquote

an archy descendant

all quotations are from the lives and times of archy and mehitabel by don marquis published in 1950 by doubleday and company inc garden city new york and with the publishers permission

Murray Turnbull is Professor of Art, U"iversity of Hawaii at Ma"oa.

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