Art and Artist (v) + Bodies and Artifacts (v)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[11] Primitive religion, as a belief in souls (as we know it), is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form. But from a study of these abstract preliminary stages of religion, which are a matter of spirits and demons, we see also that the urge for abstaction in primitives is rooted in the soul-belief that, in the intellectualized form of the East, culminates in the absolute abstract of the soul. Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most
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definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature.

Good point, re: relative qualities. Naturalist artists are trapped in abstraction much as Satanists are trapped in Christianity.

But the origins-of-religion stuff is hard to follow. If the gods have already assumed concrete form in higher religions , did the "lower" religions not project the god-force onto very concrete beings and objects? The omniscient Christian god seems ultimately abstract compared to myriad snake-gods whose abstract being may at least inhabit real snakes periodically.

[12] The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a belief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, created also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul. Everything produced objectively in any period by the contemporary ideas of the soul was beautiful, and the aesthetic history of the idea of the beautiful is probably no more than a reflection of changes in the idea of the soul under the influence of increasing knowledge.

The most illuminating demonstration that the source of the beauty-ideal lies in the contemporary ideal of the soul is found in the religious art of all times and peoples, but most conspicuously in the higher cultures, where the already unified idea of the soul was ideally embodied in the forms of their gods. ... The concept of the beautiful, which inspires the works of art of a period, is derived, not from the abstract sig-
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nificance of the soul-concept (in the way in which, for instance, the Romantics spoke of the "beautiful soul"), but from its concretization . That is, the religious art portrayed the idea of the soul in concrete form for the men of the time, in the shape of gods, and so, psychologically speaking, proved their existence . It is precisely the concreteness of art as compared with the idea of the soul that makes it convincing; for it creates something visible and permanent in contrast to something which was merely thought or felt ,...

This close association, in fact fundamental identity, of art and religion , each of which strives in its own way to make the absolute eternal and the eternal absolute, can be already seen at the most primitive stages of religious development, where there are as yet neither representations of gods nor copies of nature. Almost all students of the art of primitive peoples get the unanimous impression that..."the intention of primitive art was far less towards the imitation of nature than towards the representation of particular ideas ." [Franz Kugler, 1842] More than fifty years later...Leo Frobenius says the same of African art: "We cannot say that there was any direct extrovert effort at the attainment of some perfection of form . All the objects of art come only out of the need to give plastic expression to ideas ." ... Here... the redeeming power of art, that which entitles it to be regarded aesthetically as beautiful, resides in the way in which it lends concrete existence to abstract ideas of the soul. Art, then—at least in its beginning—was not the
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satisfaction of the desire of the individual artist to attain immortality for himself in his work, but the confirmation of the collective immortality-idea ... Thus primitive art must be, like the primitive idea of the soul, collective in order to achieve its aim, the continuation of the individual existence in the species . And it follows, too, that primitive art must be abstract in order to reproduce this abstract idea of the soul as faithfully as may be. Worringer was certainly right in denying that art began with the imitation of nature, or even had this object; but it was imitation all the same , though in a wider sense. The most definite representation possible of an idea is imitation, in the ideoplastic sense; and we might explain this very character of abstraction of primitive art by the fact that it faithfully represents an idea which is itself abstract . ...the further the divinizing of the soul in different personifications proceeded, the more concrete , or, as we should say, naturalistic , art became. If in this wise the obstinately defended theory of imitation (though not strictly in the sense of imitation of nature) is found to have a deeper significance in the soul, we may use the second disputed principle of the old aesthetic also to support our new structure. The accusation of aimlessness made against an art which exists only for beauty's sake cannot be sustained , either in respect of primitive art or in respect of the individual creative dynamism of the modern artist. Art unquestionably has an end , probably even a variety of ends—but the ends are not concrete and practical , they are abstract and spiritual .

...

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There is no doubt that even in the historical times of art religion used it as a means to represent, in objective and concrete form, the contemporary idea of the soul; but not, so to say, "illustratively," as if mankind were too immature to form abstract ideas of the soul. It had to be made concrete, pictorial, and real, so as to prove its existence, and had to be presented in matter to demonstrate its indestructibility. Not only, therefore, have we in the art-form (style) the expression of a will that varies from time to time under the influence of changes in the soul-idea, but the same principle holds even of the content of art—so far as it is religious—and, indeed, it is religious from the start, if we may give this name to the supersensible, even where it has not condensed into the idea of a god. It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives the concretization of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity.

Here we come to the interesting question... whether the transition from animism to religion...was only possible through art, because in art lay the only mode of exhibiting the soul in objective form and giving personality to God. It seems certain that art was at one time more abstract, since its purpose was to give existence to the non-existent by the truest possible copying. In the course
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of development it merely became more concrete , a destiny which it shares with all other ideologies , as I have shown elsewhere, and with the development of human institutions out of these ideologies. Its culmination came in the individual art-creation of the Classical style as we have it in Greek work. There man himself—in his full naturalness, yet in idealized beauty too—had become the vehicle of an immortal soul and was not, like the Oriental gods, a mere representative of the belief in the soul. In this sense not only did the development of the soul begin with art, but the process of humanization of the soul completed itself in art and not in religion. It was art, by its embodiment of man in lasting material, that finally gave him the courage to reassume the soul which, because of the transitoriness of its bodily form, he had abstracted into an absolute idea of the soul.

From a point of view such as this, art, though born from the same spirit as religion , appears not only as outlasting it , but actually as fulfilling it . If religion, as is hardly disputable, could only develop beyond soul-belief by the help of art, and if, moreover, as I would believe, the humanization of the soul, which implies the completion of religion, is accomplished by art, religion would almost sink to a transition stage of art. This is, of course, a matter of attitude—but it does seem certain that the development of art has always striven beyond religion, and that its highest individual achievements lie outside purely religious art, until in modern times it completely emancipates itself from that influence and even takes its place. But this tendency towards independence corresponds to an irreligiosity (or even an anti-religiosity) which is inherent and essential in all artistic creation, and which we must admit, in spite of its logically contradicting our own discussion, unless we are to sacrifice a decisive, and perhaps the most important, side of the creative impulse to a one-sided theory. Personal creativity is anti-religious in the sense that it is always subservient to the individual desire for immortality in the creative personality and not to the collective glorification of the creator
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of the world. The individual artist of course uses collective forms, among which the religious, in the widest sense, take first place, so as to overcome his personal dualism by a social compensation. But at the same time he tries to save his individuality from the collective mass by giving his work the stamp of his own personality.

Briefly as can be:

Much of the difficulty in following all of this (rest assued I have been trying for years, not days) arises from the cosmic scale-and-scope of the subject matter. This discussion is cosmic, literally and otherwise.

i.e. The trick (one of them, at least) is to hold off imagining preachers and pulpits wherever the word religion or its derivatives appear; similarly, abstraction here has nothing at all to do with Pollack or Rothko, who enter the fray much further down the line.

I am just beginning to reckon with Marxism and with Hegelianism, but dare I say that Rank here, coming at things from an entirely different angle, nonetheless does identify a dialectical process, or perhaps an array of them: to make good on the primal religious impulse, something must be concretized; subsequently, this process of concretization runs amok, thus ending up in well-and-truly irreligious behavior. There is much more to this, though, than simple "idolatry." Idolatry per se is a one-sided, "mechanistic" concept. Somebody first had to create the "idols," and this somebody thereby changes themselves (or evinces some prior "change") at least as much as the resulting concrete objects change their eventual idolators (or simply are the evinced change, in holding anyone's attention so raptly upon a mere chunk of rock).

I'm completely buying this part of Rank's theory. Me, the self-conscious individualist, the apologist for high modernism, and the vaguely Puritanical observer of 2020s cultural excess. I'm buying it. I think he's right.

Here's who I think is wrong, wrong, wrong: almost every other theorist of "collective" and "individualistic" art-behavior that I've ever read.

These days, because there is very little true collectivity remaining in the world, it is easy enough for people to assume that an artist who puts forth some throbbing squeakfart commotion or a mangled pile of art-debris must be cosmically irreligious in Rank's sense; whereas to those of us on the inside, whatever we are working on at the moment, it is obvious just how wrong this parsing can be, even if it is right about half of the time. The "religiosity," in Rank's cosmic sense, of an artwork (perhaps by extension of its maker) is most or all of what people, nowadays, are trying to parse when they are confronted with something unfamiliar (or all-too-familiar). But this is just the "mechanistic" life, lived entirely on the visible side of the dialectic. This is precisely what cannot be parsed from the surface of an artwork in absence of an ultimately circumscribed "collective" culture. In absence of such a culture, there is only experience, presentism, "an erotics of art" without any hope of returning (and why tf would anyone want to?) to some hastily triangulated "hermeneutics." (Sontag, "Against Interpretation.")

What is so hopeless here? Things could be alright this way! This is merely the latent art-ideology of postmodernism which is close-at-hand but seldom realized, the flipside of the postmodern dialectic, the Puritan return to "religiosity" without starving or killing anyone, and the synthesis-transcendence of postmodern decadence into the proper amount of desublimation (i.e. just barely enough). This is l'art pour l'art. People really don't like that idea, though. L'art pour l'art seems to many people to be the ultimately "decadent," perverse idea to come out of the transition from the proto-modern to the late(r) modern. But by the time one has traveled with Rank and Becker from the beginnings of recorded history all the way through the modern period, one realizes the full import of "cultural relativity" vis-a-vis the purported "decadence" of the third millenium. The audience quite literally has no illusions about what they are presented with. That is freedom! It is freedom for audience and artists too, unless of course the one is hellbent on controlling the other, in whatever way. That need for control-of-the-other is precisely what people feel, deeply, when their collectivity has been pulled out from underneath their feet; and so we remain unfree, as always before, starving in the midst of plenty, and so on.

And . . . "collectivity" is not coming back, right?

The accusation of aimlessness
made against an art
which exists only for beauty's sake
cannot be sustained, either
in respect of primitive art
or
in respect of the individual creative dynamism of the modern artist.
Art unquestionably has an end,
probably even a variety of ends—
but the ends are not concrete and practical,
they are abstract and spiritual.

[28] Certain modern art-historians assume that the origin of primitive art is to be found neither in the imitation of nature nor in the impulse to abstraction, but in bodily ornament. ...the (to the best of my belief) latest author who cham-
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pions this view; according to which we should be justified in saying that the tendency toward self-creation which is brought to light in modern artist-psychology is one of the essential components of artistic creation even in primitive times . E von Sydow...accepts the view that "the beginning of art lay in its application to the body." He does not, however, mention his precessors, so that it is apparently psycho-analysis which led him to this idea. Yet, if this were so, the psycho-analysts interested in the problem of art would not have needed to wait for Sydow in order to introduce this principle of explanation into the history of art, and anyhow it would be a confirmation on their part of a view which is alien to them. For this view of art presupposes a voluntaristic psychology, which in my own case I was only able to reach after passing beyond the libido theory of Freud, and which takes Sydow also far beyond his sexualization of the artistic impulse.

So, "hands off yourself" just won't work if we want to have any art at all.

Here also is a major clue to how Rank claims to know what he knows. It is, admittedly, not a particularly strong case and in any event not subject to much development or accumulation of evidence short of a time machine.

Sydow, it is true, appeals to the deliberate interference with the natural form of the body in primitive tribes, which in some cases, although not always, is sexual in character; for instance, the deformation of the skull, the piercing of the ears, lips, nose, etc. But even in the artificial painting of the body and the tatooing which is to be found all over the world, the sexual explanation fails completely; and so Sydow's generalization looks more like an instance of our self-conscious impulse to creation than a proof that art in particular has a sexual origin. "Art rose, not in any isolated and self-contained work, but by the moulding of the human body, to a formative plasticity, urged thereto by an idealized instinct of will to style. It is true, indeed, that even at this stage the art-form, as it is found in nature, but impresses and enforces a dominant form on the natural material of bone, flesh, and blood, as an assertion of its own independence; so that art in this application of it to man himself achieves or seeks to achieve a truly new creation. It is only when the art of the body has been perfected that is separates
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itself from the body and becomes self-dependent in a permanent work"... Yet again, to make this view sound, we must give a plausible explanation of why body-art passed over to ornament proper, a problem of which there have been some preliminary explanations, but which, if we assume the priority of "body-art," more than ever demands a clear psychological understanding of the development of personality—to which accordingly we must now pass.

Whatever the meaning of the much-disputed tatooing as the essential expression of body-art may be, it is at least certain that practical objects, such as hardening the skin or the attraction or repulsion of others, do not have a great bearing. The purely sensual interpreation of tatooing...has nowadays given place to the magic interpretation, as emphasized in Jane Harrison's well-known Ancient Art and Ritual and as has been admitted by W.D. Hambly in his most recent discussion of the subject. But there is no sort of consensus of opinion as to the real point of this magical painting of the body. We shall have opportunity later to give our own view; here it is enough to state the general conclusion that an artistic achievement is also part of the business. ... Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe , which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community , and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others. Both would explain why tatooing follows on the puberty ceremonies at which the indi-
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vidual becomes both a personality and a member of a community.

In a properly multicultural society, certainly, and perhaps in any merely ethnically diverse post-industrial society, the tribal marking which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others , this dual (dialectical?) aspect of such marking is greatly intensified, eh?

It is not enough, then, merely to find in this marking off a desperate lunge at carving out an individual profile. It may just as well be, also or instead, a lunge at reclaiming some collective membership.

On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untatooed is to hazard one's future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tatooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society. We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art even at the primary stage of human creative instinct . This discovery loses much of its strangeness and gains considerably in probability when we remember that the same thing is found in the mediaeval guild uniforms, and still exists today in the uniform of various professions, which marks out the individual above his neighbors, but makes him, as beyond himself, a member of a great professional group or class.

...

[52] If the poet values his
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Muse the more highly in proportion as it can be identified with his artistic personality and its ideology, then self-evidently he will find his truest ideal in an even greater degree in his own sex, which is in any case physically and intellectually closer to him.

Greece, in particular, with its high development of purely intellectual ideologies in art and philosophy, was of course the classical country of boy-love; and there is nothing contradictory in this, particularly if we understand the boy-friendship in the Greek spirit. ... The master—whether philosopher or sculptor, or, in other words, artist in living or shaping—was not content to teach his pupil or protégé his doctrines or his knowledge: he had the true artistic impulse to transform him into his own image, to create. ...

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... the state of being a pupil did not mean the mere acquiring of a certain discipline and the mastery of a certain material knowledge, as in the civilization of father-right, but the forming of a personality—which begins by identification with the master and is then "artistically" developed and perfected on the pupil's own lines. In this sense the Greek was creative before he arrived at creating works of art, or, indeed, without ever shaping anything but himself and his pupil. Socrates is the best known of many examples of this.

This educative ideology of the artistic Greek nation...brings up the question: did that Greek art , which may seem to us today the main achievement of the Greek civilization, perhaps represent to the Greek a mere by-product thereof, an auxilliary, in fact, to the education of the men, who as the real vessels of the culture were this enabled inter alia to practise art for its own sake ? This brings us to another question: was not every great art, whether of primitive or cultivated peoples, bound up with some such cultured task , which lies beyond the bounds of æsthetics , but also beyond all individual artist-psychology ? In any case, there are numerous literary proofs of the high degree to which the Greeks were conscious of this national importance of their art. They said that men should learn from works of art and try themselves to become as beautiful and perfect as the statues around them. This gives us an insight into the characteristic way in which the Greeks extended their own creation of individual personalities to include a whole nation, which was not content to produce works of art for their own sake but strove to create an artistic human type who would also be able to produce fine works of art. Seen in this light, boy-love, which, as Plato tells us, aimed perpetually at the improvement and perfection of the beloved youth, appears definitely as the Classical counterpart of the primitive body-art on a spiritualized plane. In the primitive stage it is a matter of physical self-enhancement ; in the civilized stage, a spiritual
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perfecting in the other person, who becomes transferred into the worthy successor of oneself here on earth; and that, not on the basis of the biological procreation of one's body, but in the sense of the spiritual immortality-symbolism in the pupil, the younger.

Christianity took over this ideal of personal character-formation in the symbol of the Exemplar-Master, but, in proportion as it became a world-wide religion of the masses, it was unable to carry it out at the personal level. The collective immortality-dogma, which became symbolized in Christ, relieved the individual of this task of personal self-creation...

Indeed, in certain Christian interpretations this task of personal self-creation is forbidden, not merely elided.

What to make of all that? If we're being reasonably charitable, it's easy enough to imagine that this reaction was hardly unprovoked, just as it hardly appears unprovoked in its contemporary recapitulations.

What tf's your problem, man? I have been "provoked," that's what. Didn't even need to be a Christian either!!