What is Art? Baxter: The Human Being is Object and Subject

A certain North American tribe was approached by the representatives of the Government. Young men were needed to work as labourers building roads; and the Government hoped that the men of this tribe would fill the gap. But the tribal representatives replied – ‘No; if our young men work on the roads they will be unable to dream. If they cease to dream the tribe will die. And the earth is our mother. If we help to build roads we will be wounding her flesh.’

We can see how irritating this subjective view might be to a man whose mind was rather objective. The point I wish to make [here], is that the two protagonists expressed equally valuable but separate segments of [truth].

We are probably in our own culture most [familiar] with the first segment. We are aware from our first consciousness that roads are [required], that roads need to be built; that men make a livelihood by building roads.

We are less familiar with the second segment. In this particular tribe, dreaming was an integral part of the communal ritual. By dreaming, and the recounting of dreams, they were joined to their ancestors and to one another. Literally, if dreaming ceased the tribe would fall apart.

[In] the second part of the subjective view, the horror of the tribesmen at the fact of wounding the earth, is particularly [ ? ] for New Zealanders. When I saw lately how one of the cones of Saddle Hill, the maternal landmark which stands between the Taieri plain and the township where I grew up, was being chiselled away (to get gravel to pave roads and aerodromes) I suffered an interior wound that still remains with me. The earth mother was having one of her breasts cut off so that we might have roads.

The fact that modern man (so objective in orientation) does not recognise that such [a feat?] is an injury to himself and his [attitude] to the living world does not in fact make it less so. We carry the wildernesses that it made deep inside us.

This preamble may indicate that when I say that art is subjective I do not mean that it is unreal. Confronted with the aboriginal view of existence, man has a choice of two [methods] by which he can give it meaning and [ ? ] either by the objective disciplines of [ ? ] and morality, or by the subjective [ ? ] of art and contemplation.

The two types of discipline, though separate, are in themselves radically page 405 opposed. It is [necessary] to make them so, by insisting on one [basic] discipline to the all but total exclusion of the other. I am not prepared to give an [ ? ] value to the objective disciplines; for on their own, I think, they give a very misleading, arid and two-dimensional view of reality.

The objective response to reality is predominantly societal and impersonal; the subjective response predominantly communal and mythical. To make works of art one has to be ready to set aside the objective lens and [ ? ] the unrectored chaos of life until such time as it takes a mythical shape. This is the meaning of the discipline of art; and it involves the acceptance of emotional uncertainty and privation.

Thus I define an artist as a person who makes it his business to follow the subjective road, not as a specifically religious contemplative, but as a natural contemplative – one who dreams, imagines, cogitates, in the hope of creating a visual or auditory form that symbolises some part of the reality from which it is abstracted. This is an artist per se, a sign of contradiction in the world of objective disciplines; whether or not he is successful is of course another matter.

I have stressed the subjective origin of art. Yet, to have the fullest possible reality, a poem – the form with which I am most familiar – has to combine subjective and objective elements. Thus I recently wrote a poem called ‘Blood Test’; and in this poem the objective structure of reality was represented by the experience of having blood taken from one’s arm by a nurse.

The subjective element was represented both by a myth of ancestry – my ancestors objected to my letting their blood be taken from my body – and by the vampire myth – I say in the poem that the young nurse is happy to be a vampire, and sends me on my way an inch shorter.

The second myth undoubtedly has sexual connotations. The poem is a combination of realist and mythical components, and thus (I think) more fully real as a reflection of the meaning of existence than either a medical report or a dream sequence.

The poem embodied no doubt an element of protest against the clinical view of life, the sense of being treated as a clinical object; and it was very necessary that I should write it, since the making of the poem was a step in the direction of accepting that I am one of the living who is also in process of dying. The poem might be of a similar subjective use to others.

As I grow older, I become less and less certain of the rules of verse-making. Perhaps the analogy of a chicken-coop may be helpful. One man may make a chicken-coop as if he were making a jewel-box – every hinge is carefully screwed on; every joint is mortised; and the whole is painted with a glossy grey paint. However, from the point of view of the chickens, the main thing is that their coop should be roomy, dry, warm and habitable, with a bit of straw scattered round for good measure.

In verse I am myself more of a chicken-coop-maker than a jewel-box- page 406 maker. Thus my view of technique is that I wish to reduce its demands to a minimum. I want to let the meaning, the influx of reality, dominate the poem. The necessary minimum of technique is that which will give form to an experience: less than the minimum leads to formlessness. But a fuss and flourish of technique is generally a sign that the artist is not sure of the value of his material.

A lot of paint may cover worm-eaten boards. If a chicken, or the ghost of a chicken, can be heard clucking in the coop I have made, then (and only then) am I satisfied. Do I build imaginary coops for real chickens; or real coops for imaginary chickens? I must leave the solution to the Zen masters. Their answer might be – ‘Quatz!’ said in a voice so loud that it all but shatters the disciple’s eardrums.

I believe that reality is indecipherable by logical and geometric method. One has to grow eyes in one’s rectum to understand the world. I am still growing mine. If there are phonies around, they are either those unfortunates who write endlessly with no technique whatever, or those who believe that technique will provide them with a true theme. May God give them brains and the gift of silence.

One desires one’s poems or plays to be reflections of a human reality. If I were an angel I might be in love with the beauty of quartz crystals; but, since I am a man, quartz crystals bore me after a few minutes – and this includes the granular and crystalline facts of politics, economics, abstract theology, aesthetics, and all other innocent and angelic disciplines – but I am hopelessly attached to that sad human monster and his woman, moving out of the holy garden into the unholy desert where his God waits for him in the shape of a dying brother – because he is myself no doubt, but also because he is other people.

His delusions (that he is wise; that he is loving; that he is master of the universe) fascinate me more than the most lucid truths ever proposed by an electronic computer. He is Job. He is Oedipus. He is a murderous and injured Christ. His heart is composed in equal parts of flesh and of stone. He is a void capable of both agony and joy.

All my mirrors are made for his benefit. May they console him a little with the knowledge that his illusory virtue is more real than his undoubted crimes. He is the subject and object of art.

1967 (461)