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Design Review: Volume 3, Number 5 (March-April 1951)

The Need for Criticism

page 123

The Need for Criticism

The enthusiastic people who have for five years supported the Arts Year Book will be glad it has achieved substantial recognition as a national institution which is likely to remain with us. It will be clear, as it proceeds, that this review is quite narrowly concerned with a deficiency in this year's volume which should not be perpetuated.

It is a thick book. The title lettering on the cover is thick, the type lies thick on the glossy paper, the ‘exhibits’ are thickly crammed between its solid covers, and the written comment and criticism are, with two exceptions, pretty thick too. It has no edge.

What purpose engendered it? and who is it for? The book itself is evidence of some deliberation. In the preface ‘they’ (unspecified) write that ‘… a periodic stocktaking of a country's assets in the various fields of the arts is a desirable thing…. With the all-over view supplied by an annual survey of developments in all branches of the arts the individual worker has a clearer picture of where he stands. The artist individually and collectively, is assisted to plot his course with intelligence, and so everyone is able to proceed with increased confidence. Co-ordination in the progress of all the arts is encouraged. Form and direction are given to widely differing yet essentially related creative activity, making for a higher degree of aesthetic order.’ That is what the editors set out to do. It is clear that they are to do it for the benefit of practising artists. The actual problem of editing, they say, may be comparatively simple.

And what happens? A sample will show: beneath this crudely optimistic preface is jammed as a tailpiece Mr Russell's sensitive picture, Melancholie. The essential disrespect which this incongruity suggests, arising from a desire to show regard for the painting and to use it for the advantage of the book, sounds the confusion of purpose which weakens the book in almost every part. It has its expressed object of being an ‘all-embracing’ review for the benefit of working artists and at the same time it is acutely concerned with itself as an Arts Year Book —‘A-Y-B’. It is muzzy with self-consciousness. Look at the self-advertising title on the dust-jacket, at the inside flap, where are offered the Arts in a self-conscious convulsion (mystery, suspense, thrills galore). Read the preface and the comments introducing the pictorial art and poetry sections, sodden with self-justification.

Asking myself if I make too much of these weaknesses — not allowing for New Zealand conditions, giving credit for the effort made, and so on — I am reminded of the need, mentioned more than once in the book, for adhering to single standards of judgement. Then little about the book seems really satisfactory. Like a woman seeking assurance in a mirror — without either simplicity or profound self-knowledge — it mars its virtues.

Inhibiting self-consciousness is a chronic New Zealand complaint, and in the arts we are constantly getting in the way of our work. When I have seen the splendid complete absorption of human energy and skill in a task, it was generally sheep-shearing or car-doctoring, building a henhouse or preparing a meal. And it was a delight to watch the union of the doer with the object. We are at home in these activities and feel reasonably sure about them, a shorn sheep is something on which we are able to pass a confident judgement. But our artists look abroad. They page 124 feel their isolation, the lack of a local tradition, and of a disciplinary, informed, critical opinion. Because they are unsure, their concern with themselves as artists obtrudes in their work. We see the picture and the painter being a painter, the poem and the poet being a painter, the individual quality of the object, which is for the artist's special sensibility to perceive, which he must lose himself in representing, which gives to a work of art its own fire of life, its reason for being — is lost.

This may be amply illustrated from the work shown in the Year Book. (My remarks about the work of individuals are intended to criticise it only in so far as it is related to my contention here, and because it seems to illustrate characteristics significantly common in the sections where it appears.) An artist who does not heed Matthew Arnold's advice to ‘keep his eye on the object’ will hardly avoid the cliche. It may be a community cliche, or one which he creates for himself. Not being freshly united with each new object he can but repeat a worn generalization. In J. Edward Murphy's drawings the uninteresting repitition of what was not, I think, in any case a very original conception is an example of how this may occur in an effort to escape the ‘conventional’; conversely, T. A. McCormack's Still Life shows how absorption in the object produces a completely individual result, which also tells something about the quality of flowers generally — and tells it in paint. This picture with Bessie Christie's Tobacco Queue, M. T. Wollaston's Landscape, and a few others, is an exception to what seems to me a stiff literalness in the pictorial section — for example, the Parents, by Gordon McAusland, appears to be the laborious translation of a verbal idea into pigment. Contrast this with New Year's Day, by Evelyn Page, a picture which directly apprehends its object.

Again, in the poetry — Denis Glover shows his ability as a parodist, Basil Dowling is refreshingly content with his modest accomplishment, and there is genuine and sometimes moving particularity in James Baxter's Rocket Show and in Ruth Dallas's poems — but there is not a rhythmically individual and exciting poem in the collection. The piece which leads off portentously — Sonnet For Our Time — shows the characteristic interference of the poet's self-consciousness in the poem he is writing. Why use the sonnet form, which demands progression, when there is so little movement? The simple theme, the clinging in a doomed world to the satisfaction of personal relations, remains undeveloped (scarcely justified, I should say, but the poem may be intended ironically). It is extended into a sonnet through a series of heterogeneous images (tidal wave' which is the ‘shattering curtain of a pantomine’, ‘soggy structure’—pantomime or tidal wave—which ‘reels and sways like a dying dinosaur through worlds’ … etc.), which confuse and hold up the sense. The first line sags with the affected ‘my darling’, where an effective caesura (or a shorter line) is needed. The alliteration is over-worked and enfeebling (‘caught in the pause that presages a bomb’). It appears that the potentialities of an idea have been aborted by poetic exercise.

Now it is true that it must be left to the artist to grapple with his situation, to get and digest his experience as best he can — chiefly, in many cases, to escape the overwhelmingly verbal nature of his education. But he can be helped by criticism which will enable him to find himself, and to forget himself. The Arts Year Book, which sets out with unquestioned sincerity but with confusion of interest to help artists, gives little room to criticism in its ‘all-embracing’ review, and the space that is allowed is generally not well used.

One exception, which should be mentioned first because it is the kind of criticism which ought to inform the whole book, is E. H. McCormick's contribution, in which he traces the pattern of New Zealand's culture over the—last hundred years through an examination of title pages. The writing is closely packed with sense, exact and incisive. Mr. McCormick moves surely through documentation and detailed observation to his general conclusions. Apart from Roger Duff's note on Maori cave drawings and, in part, H. V. Baigent's on the amateur theatre, this article is the only instance where the writer really faces his material squarely and ventures his judgement on particular points.

Patrick Macaskill's article on the year's fiction is comparable in its attempt, but is nullified by loose writing, by its lack of specific reference (‘later, however, the novel seems to lack the central thread or emotional theme necessary to integrate it and indicate some sort of structural plan …’, etc.), and-its liking for vague, superficial generalities (‘the cultural scene’, ‘New Zealand atmosphere’, ‘… particularly Sargenson, whose style and technique are especially suitable.’). The jargon of criticism keeps the reader once removed from the writer's material.

In the section on architecture — but why go wearily on? Generalities, generalities, generalities. Fat ones, thin, ones, fuzzy ones, dizzy ones, grave old plodders and fresh young friskers — who will lead them to the river and drown them all…. Except one. The one which arrives without being asked.

The idea of a periodic review of the country's art is not questioned, and one must acknowledge the energy and concern for art in New Zealand which produced this one. But a review which is not critical misses its opportunity and is likely to make unsure artists more self-conscious than they already are. If the review is for artists it should be workmanlike and particular in its approach to the material it is treating. The lay public will not lose by that either.

The desire to be ‘all-embracing’ is preposterous. Surely it is enough to include as much of significance as can be handled conveniently. Nor does there seem to be any reason why all sections should be included in one volume. Separate publications might lessen problems of editing — it may be seen in this book how unsuitable the type is to the paper and to the double column — and some might be more cheaply produced. Best of all, that insidious spirit, ‘A-Y-B’, might be laid at last.