ART: OR THE TEACHING OF
RESISTANCE
Copy of a Commencement
Address
Given by Frederick J.
Kiesler
The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
June 12, 1959
This is your hour and day of liberation from the
boundaries of school. Your diploma is your ‘declaration of independence’.
But independence places the greatest of
responsibility on your young shoulders towards yourself and towards society.
From now on you are free, on your own in the wide world of art. You will wander
with star-dust in your hair, but again and again soot will fling itself into
your eyes, blind your vision, and the sweet fruit of art will only too often
leave a bitter taste in our mouth. That can’t be helped. You’ll have to learn
to take it and you’ll have to learn to take it with good grace or with
rebellion, but never with conformity. That indeed is your greatest problem: how
to avoid conformity, to know; when and when not to compromise. That is the
question.
It is of course impossible to dictate to the world
your ideas except when the idea itself is creative enough and grows incessantly
and becomes a giant tree which bears fruit for everyone to delect himself; but
that might take five, ten or fifty years, but don’t worry about it, the true
artist does not know time – the question is, when will time know him? There is
no competition in are. Art is or it is not. Art cannot be made. It has to grow.
Of course these are old facts, this is old hat; but
the amazing thing about art is, that it’s truth have never changed. That old
hat wears well and the more patina it has the better it looks – and if you
throw it away because it has become shopworn and unfashionable, then you have
become a commercial artist.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you will
first make money as a commercial artist for ten or twenty years and then with
saved gold as security devoted to rest of your life to pure art. Let me tell
you once for all: that does not work. You either love or you prostitute. You
cannot fool art – therefore you have to make up your mind very soon. That does
not mean that circumstance might not force you, as it has often me too, to earn
a living with other means than the one you love the best; but in that decision,
what to choose and what not – when to accept and when to quit, lies your
maturity, your honesty and your true talent. You must never fail to see
yourself everyday in the perspective of time; yet your greatest power as an
artist will lie in your strength for undivided spontaneity.
Gold is not the security for the artist. The
security for the artist lies in himself; not in his brain, not in his social
connections, not in galleries and museums but right down in his heart.
It is the heart that will give you the strength to
resist foolish temptations if you treat it well - if you learn to listen to
it’s beat. The restless pounding of the big and small world in action will mix
with your heart-beat and will try to drown out it’s peaceful pace, but you tune
in stubbornly the wave length of your hear, and the amazing miracle happens
that your creative experience at this moment evokes the same wave length in an
audience far away from you or near personally unknown to you. It hits
unfailingly the target. This transmission of the creative impulse is the magic
spark of art; it is that spark at which we all aim and so few achieve.
Let me tell you one of several experiences of my
early life in the theater. Perhaps that will make this point clearer:
I was a very young man in Vienna. There was an old
actor, 82 years. And there was the Imperial State Theater, a classic repertory
theatre of the Emperor. The name of the actor was Alexander Girardi. He was a
comedian. All his life he had played and sung in vaudeville. One year before
his death he was invited by the Emperor to join the rostrum of the States
Theater, an honor never extended to a vaudeville actor before. There was good
reason for it – he had that divine spark.
I was sitting in the balcony on the opening night
of his first appearance. The Burg Theater is enormous, larger than the opera,
five golden horse-shoes, two balconies and a stage as big as a city plaza. He
walked on surrounded by no setting, on an empty stage brilliantly lit, all
alone. In his right hand he held a plane, he represented a carpenter. He sung a
folk-song called: “Das Hobellied” – just three short verses. He had hardly any
voice left –- you could not call it singing – you hardly heard his words. He
made no gestures with his hands. His face wore a crown of white bushy hair. He
sang the song without orchestra in the pit, looking straight into the eyes of
three thousand people. It was a simple song. It said that all people quarrel.
Everyone thinks himself better than the other, but
fate and death plane them off to equal size. And when death tapped him on the
shoulder to come along, he tried to fool death by making believe he did not
hear, but death whispered into his ear: it is time, don’t fool, come and say
goodbye to the world. And so he did and parted from his beloved plane.
Now let me sing one or two verses. Forgive me if I
do it in German. I am sure it has never been translated.
“Da streiten sich die Leut’ herum…
“Da ist der aermste MAN DEM ANDERN VIEL ZU
REICH
“Doch KOMMT der tod einst mit Verlab….”
You
see it is an extremely simple song. Only three short verses.
That
event took place 45 years ago. I can still see and hear him today as then. How
is such an impact possible? I think I know now. It is that experience that I
want to convey to you. Because it holds true in all the arts, not only in
acting.
You
see, the truth of his personality and the true meaning of the song coincided
completely. The two truths were insolubly bound together by a masterly
technique. None overlapped the other: neither his personality, nor the subject
matter, nor the fabulous technique. The impact of such honest creativity is
irresistible, unforgettable, and lasts as long as you live.
True
– to lose or not to lose one’s creative impulse of one’s adolescent days is
the question. To preserve one’s dream world, one’s own dream world is
the Alpha and Omega of our creative power.
How to become aware of it?
How to make it grow?
These
are the crucial questions of education in creativity.
The
answer becomes more difficult if we are honest, and know by our experience that
creativeness cannot be taught directly . . . . only indirectly. Like the
seed of a plant, developing in silent darkness by its own instinct, so we too
must always return to that dark seclusion to become again and again aware of
our own creative instinct. Without that return, there can be no advance. Once
we have trained ourselves to sink back to our origins as humans, adding our
growing experiences to the fertile mud at the bottom of our life-well, we are
all right. If we, however, remain suspended in mid-air on our way back and
forth, we are in trouble. We do not replenish our creative strength – we rather
loose it as time goes on, simply because we are not nourishing creativeness
from the roots of life, but exploiting our old storage to its daily limit of
exhaustion.
To
learn to forget oneself is not easy. First of all, I think it is important to
know that man, particularly creative man, is born unequal, like apples, eggs,
even valleys and mountains. While we, here in the United States understand that
here is equality of every man, woman and child of every creed and race before
the law, we do not want to understand that there is not and cannot
be equality or democracy in Art.
Faith
in political democracy does not provide one automatically with equality of
talent for art. No matter how many courses you take in any grade or school –
equality cannot be obtained. Imitate to perfection the imagery of a Picasso,
Matisse, Miro or the techniques of Jackson Pollack or Kline – you will remain
what you are, and Picasso remains Picasso. No, - success by clever imitation
won’t last; success by tricky mixtures of different styles won’t last and
perfect counterfeits of fashionable artists won’t fool forever. Every creativeness
in every human being has its own mixture. No two are alike. None can be
exchanged for the other. Eventually they can only imitate each other like
monkeys – if they want to appear like equals. The question is therefore not:
how can one be equal but how can one remain unequal, truly one’s
self: unique.
Culture
as a commodity cannot be bought, no matter how many reproductions of Master,
old or new, are in front of you. No formula is good enough for Art - the
raw, direct experience with life is the thing. Life is the real educator in
art.
A
photograph of the Parthenon has real value only if you have actually seen the
Parthenon before, right there on the Acropolis in its full stature, natural
light and surroundings. Only then has any photograph of the Parthenon value,
because the photograph awakes your original experience! There is no short cut
to Art. Vita brevis, ars longa. “Life is short, Art ling-lived.” The
experienced Latins knew it. The way of Art is long-lived too. We have to learn
to know that. And none of us can change it.
Artists
are born unequal. I am little, 5 feet 1 inch, and many of you our there are 6
feet 1, and no technique can stretch me to 6 feet 1 and no technique can
squeeze you into 5 feet 1 inch. A rock cannot become a mountain, and a frog, no
matter how much air he inhales, cannot blow himself up and become a swan. Are
we not educating people with false ambitions in life and Art? And planting in
them the seeds of unbearable frustration? May everybody to his dying day learn
how to enjoy Art, but for heaven’s sake, lets stop manufacturing artists!
Education
is trying now to apply modern psychology in methods of teaching art, science,
literature and music, splitting the personality of a human being in order to
put under the microscope the parts of his psyche, but we will never be able to
put them back in a new type of coordination to soothe the false desire to be
another personality than the one he was born to be. More than in any other
realm of human life, the so-called artist must learn only one thing in
order to be creative, not to resist himself, but to resist, without
exception every human, social, economical factor that prevents him from being
himself. In that respect any artist in any field is unique because he is
given the inherent right of resistance to falsehood, presumptuousness to
mediocrity to fashions, in short to: conformity. The real artist will never
shirk this responsibility and the devastating consequences that might follow
his being himself. The artist is never of his time. He is always against his
time. If he was only of his time, he would already be dead. Time is the
instant, and every moment lived is already past, and the instant is eternity.
The artist’s work represents eternal truth. What his contacts are with the eternal
truth: the sub-conscious, the super-conscious, the mastery of techniques – he
doesn’t know. Nobody can teach it – because nobody knows. It is the direct
contact with the unknown that creates the reality in Art: the known does not.
Take
the mandate to independence in Art, which nature gave you with blind
enthusiasm. Rely on yourself – and in the long run, you must win.
To make people believe the idea of everyone is born equal, and achievements are made through hard work and good virtues is constructing a hierarchy within the society. A linear way of growing, learning, and seeing the world is the side effect of such belief. What if we think backwards and the only equality we have is death. The length and quality of life varies but the existence of an ending is definite. The “ending” is the starting point. By this, I do not mean we hold absolute truth and complete personality when we are born, I imagine it’s non linear process derivative from one equal starting point. As a result, the moment we came to earth may be nothing special compare to any other moment in life. What if we are perfectly equal and have no intelligence at the point of death and life is about losing self or the decadence of uniqueness. The institutional teaching of the same knowledge, the broadcasting of the same material, the same books we read, the same radios we listened, the same artists we admired, and the same houses we lived, all contribute to this process. In this perspective, resistance became the only meaningful aspect that education should have. To resist conformity, resist the decadence of self is what we need to learn and art is the way to realize the resistance. Apply back to what Kiesler said, the question is “how can one remain unequal, truly one’s self: unique.”
