“Flaunting The Spirit Of Support For the Arts”

by James R. Oestreich
 
[The following article was published in “The Arts” section of the New York Times on 15 April 2013.  I’m rerunning it on ROT because it’s such a wonderful report on what public support of the arts can do for a community, especially when the community itself embraces it wholeheartedly.  I can only wish that we in the United States could see this value and benefit, though I know that a project like the Linzer Musiktheater am Volksgarten will never happen here in my lifetime.  (The very fact that “People’s Garden” is part of the theater’s name would be anathema to some elements of our society.)  Readers of ROT will know that support for the arts is a special interest of mine and I have published articles in defense of that cause on several occasions in the past (“Degrading the Arts,” 13 August 2009; “The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010; "The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)" by Paul Molloy (from Allegro), 22 May 2011, “Are the Arts a Luxury?” by K. C. Boyle (Allegro again), 29 January 2012).  I post this article as a sort of sad dream.  ~Rick]

LINZ, Austria — This industrial city of almost 200,000 midway between Vienna and Salzburg, and the capital of the state of Upper Austria, has long had a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to culture. So it seemed, at least, in a series of slightly defensive speeches by government and arts figures on Thursday evening at the opening of the new Linz Opera House, formally known as the Musiktheater am Volksgarten, referring to the public park it adjoins.

True, Linz can claim the composer Anton Bruckner, who was born in nearby Ansfelden and spent more than half his life in the region. But Salzburg can, and loudly does, claim Mozart, who was born there and stayed for more than two-thirds of his 35 years, however unhappily toward the end. And whom can’t Vienna claim? Myriad composers great and small ended up there, ultimately including Mozart and Bruckner.

Linz took a step forward in 2009, when it was named a European Capital of Culture. And now it is making a stronger bid to put itself on the international cultural map with its handsome new house, some 30 years in the planning and 4 in the building, at a cost of $236 million. Its centerpiece is a 1,000-seat jewel box of a theater for opera, orchestra, musicals and ballet, lavishly equipped with the latest technology and featuring, by early indications, excellent acoustics. It also contains a black-box theater, a rehearsal hall that can double for chamber concerts, a top-flight restaurant and grand, welcoming public spaces.

Public being the operative word. Amazing for Americans to hear, the financing was 95 percent public, with 20 percent coming from the Republic of Austria, 50 percent from the state of Upper Austria and 25 percent from the city of Linz. That left a mere 5 percent to be raised from private corporations and individuals.

And public spirit carries into the design. The site chosen (after a first location was explored and rejected) was an isolated plot in a down-at-heel part of town. But the design competition was won by the London firm of the architect Terry Pawson with a plan founded on the quixotic notion of displacing part of a major thoroughfare to allow the main entrance to open onto the park and draw the citizenry into those public spaces, providing what Mr. Pawson has called “a new, common living-room for the whole city.”

The complex poses a counterbalance to the old city and the Brucknerhaus, the former home of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, on the Danube River at the other end of the Landstrasse, the main street. It has already stirred development in the neighborhood and, by all accounts, has begun to change the nature of the city itself.

So there was reason to celebrate on Thursday. In addition to speeches by the project’s prime movers—notably Josef Pühringer, the governor of Upper Austria; Thomas Königstorfer, the executive director of the Landestheater Linz, the agglomeration of musical, theater and dance companies that runs the Musiktheater; Rainer Mennicken, the intendant, or artistic and administrative director, of the Landestheater; and Dennis Russell Davies, its American chief conductor—the program offered performances calculated to show off the Musiktheater’s versatility and the Landestheater’s constituent elements.

The speeches were music to American ears (if not always fully understood) and seemingly justified in their self-congratulation. In addition to the one-time building costs, public financing covers 85 percent of the Landestheater’s $52 million annual budget.

“Culture costs,” said Maria Fekter, the Austrian minister of finance, “but a lack of culture”—Un-Kultur—“costs much, much more.”

Between speeches, with the Bruckner Orchestra in the pit, Mr. Davies conducted excerpts from Philip Glass’s 1992 opera, “The Voyage”; from operas by Mozart, Rossini and Strauss, and an operetta by Lehar; and from Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” The program also included a moving dedication of the house by the the Austrian writer Thomas Arzt, in a choral recitation by the actors of the Landestheater, and ended with a rousing version of “The Rhythm of Life” from Cy Coleman’s musical “Sweet Charity,” with, eventually, the entire company on stage.

But it was the next two productions—“Ein Parzifal,” by the experimental Spanish company La Fura Dels Baus, late Thursday night, and Mr. Glass’s opera “Spuren der Verirrten” (“Footprints of the Lost,” or, as it was referred to here in English, simply “The Lost”), in its premiere on Friday, each a spectacle in its way—that really put a stamp on the weekend and spoke to an adventurous artistic vision at the Landestheater. (What the choice of “Die Hexen von Eastwick”—the John Dempsey-Dana P. Rowe musical “The Witches of Eastwick,” in its Austrian premiere—spoke to, I hesitate to speculate.)

“Ein Parzifal,” presented in front of the Musiktheater for an audience of 12,000 in the park, by police estimates, is indeed “A Parsifal,” certainly not the “Parsifal.” To recorded excerpts from Wagner’s “Parsifal” (and, for some reason, “Walküre”), booming through the neighborhood, acrobats dangled from huge cranes or perched atop the building, acting out themes and gestures from the opera, which the uninitiated could only have found mystifying.

But it did not lack for entertainment and even edification. The group patterns were often beautiful and captivating, and some of the effects were breathtaking.

The depiction of Parsifal himself was less successful, seen through the eyes of a New Yorker. A huge puppet lifted by a crane and manipulated by handlers on the ground, he resembled nothing so much as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And that was before he started turning colors.

Heavy with pyrotechnics, the production ended, as it almost had to, with fireworks. Given their proximity to the building, they may have struck fear in the hearts of those financiers. But for anyone who could stand a little humor in this most humorless of operas, La Fura’s fanciful take was welcome and occasionally revealing.

Mr. Glass’s new opera, based on a play by the Austrian writer Peter Handke, was scarcely less outlandish in its elaboration of an elliptical text. The libretto, by Mr. Mennicken, the intendant, carries an epigraph from Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” And the work circles back—in both its imaginative beauty and in its utter incomprehensibility at times—to Mr. Glass’s early collaboration with Robert Wilson, “Einstein on the Beach,” of 1976.

But more on that another day.

[When I lived in Koblenz, a small city in central Germany with no great claim to cultural prominence—well, Beethoven’s mother was born in a suburb across the river—I was mightily impressed with the Stadttheater, the city theater company, and even the small Stadtoper, though I’m not an opera fan.  (I’ve written before on ROT about my years in Germany, most recently in “An American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March.)  Nearly every German town has at least an orchestra or an opera troupe, and larger towns, like Koblenz, had both, plus a ballet company and a municipal theater.  American artists come to these small companies to work when their careers are just beginning because the U.S. doesn’t have this cultural commitment so it’s not easy to find places to get started in those professions here.  It’s shameful to me that we can’t nurture our home-grown performing artists—and even welcome foreign artists to our own shores the way ours have to go abroad to hone their skills.]

“Don't Sit Back – Push Back”

By Paul Molloy

[The article below appeared in Allegro, the publication of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in April 2011. As readers of ROT will know, I have a long-standing and fierce interest in the support of the arts in U.S. society, both governmental and private. No great society has existed without giving tangible support to its artists and the art they create. It doesn’t have to be money, of course, but that is ultimately the measure by which we gauge the status of any community endeavor. It’s also the necessary foundation of almost any other kind of public support, including art in education (teachers and equipment cost money), accessible venues (even park land requires funds to keep up and maintain), or publicity (newspaper ads and TV commercials, along with posters and mailings to keep audiences informed, have a financial cost as well). When a government, whether local, state, or federal, takes stands in opposition to art, artists, or any component in the complex network in which art functions, the repercussions eventually reach the spectator-consumer—you and me. The results of that opposition, even just neglect, can take years and even decades to reverse. When that happens, we as a society, a culture, suffer and generations can be deprived of the important consequences of accessible art, art education, and the free expression of ideas. Paul Molloy, Political Director of Local 802, speaking for the musicians union, makes important points in “Don’t Sit Back”; I urge you all to give it serious thought. ~Rick]

'Disaster capitalism' and its impact on arts and education

The union busting in Wisconsin brought out thousands of protestors. Many are waking up to how bad things have gotten.

How did we get to a place where vilifying teachers, the arts and working families has become an accepted economic strategy to "restore our country’s financial health"?

It didn’t happen overnight. The attacks on organized labor, the arts and teachers are part of a scheme that’s been decades in the making – a political strategy that sees the government as a facilitator for corporate profit above all else.

It goes like this:

• Manufacture a financial crisis by taking the common wealth (your tax dollars) and redistributing it upward in the form of tax cuts for the very wealthy.
• Then, revenue that ordinarily pays for things like public education, first responders, social safety nets and food, water, air and other environmental protections is now in the bank accounts of people and entities with no incentive to invest in new businesses or jobs. (Why? Because the government is handing them wealth for free.)

In fact, over the past three decades, these policies created a society where the 400 wealthiest people in the country control more capital than the other 150 million-plus U.S. citizens combined.

The road from there to here

How was this possible? After three decades of sheer repetition in the media, the general public bought into the idea that if you give large tax cuts to the wealthy, they will use them to create jobs, prosperity and a healthy economy for all. There’s just one problem: it’s not true.

• Big tax cuts passed in 1921 and 1925 didn’t help the economy. In fact, wages stagnated, and in 1929 the stock market crashed and gave us the Great Depression.
• After the 1981 tax cut was passed, the U.S. experienced a recession that lasted nearly two years.
• Three years after the big tax cuts of 1987, growth slumped, giving us the recession in 1991.
• The years from 2001 and 2008 saw some of the slowest economic growth in decades.
• Despite tax cuts in 2001, 2003 and a tax rebate in 2008, the U.S. economy lost 4.5 million jobs between 2007 and January 2009.

In 2008, the economy sank into the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, 25 percent of all American children lived in poverty, official rates of unemployment hovered around 10 percent, but were more like 25 percent for young people and over 30 percent in some minority communities.

When the country is in financial dire straits, it creates opportunities for ideological politicians to use the crisis to go after organizations and segments of the workforce with which they disagree politically in the name of budget balancing.

The attack on public sector unions in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan is one such example. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, only in office since January 2011, declared a $177 million shortfall in the state budget and that painful cuts were necessary.

When public sector unions willingly stepped up to the plate to do their part, Governor Walker insisted they give up some of their collective bargaining rights.

What the governor did not disclose is that when in office just under two weeks, he and his allies in the legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks to corporations. Neither the collective bargaining rights Walker sought to eliminate nor the public unions had anything to do with Wisconsin’s budget gap.

What’s lost on ideologues like Governor Walker is that economists will tell you that a good way to get out of debt is to increase jobs and GDP.

This too seems lost on the leadership in the House of Representatives. Promises of job-creating legislation during the 2010 election cycle have been shelved in favor of more ideological initiatives.

Three months into the 112th Congress, they have created zero jobs.

(By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the 111th Congress, two months in, created or saved 3.3 million jobs).

However, the current House majority did vote to eliminate funding for National Public Radio (and with it, critical infrastructure for disseminating AMBER Alerts, which have successfully recovered 532 abducted children).

Cutting through to the marrow

Maintaining this state of emergency mentality allows ideological politicians to insist on deep cuts in taxpayer- funded programs unrelated to the court system, the banking system, defense or commerce.

What does this mean for public schools?

• The phony arguments for improving public education that gave birth to the "teach to the test" model will only intensify and worsen.
• When funds are cut from education budgets, existing problems are compounded.
• Meal programs for the disadvantaged are cut, classroom sizes increase while the number of qualified teachers needed to address the needs of all students decreases.

To add insult to injury, teachers – particularly the most experienced and longest serving among us – will continue to be blamed by many politicians and talking heads in the media for the effects that poverty, hunger, abuse and lopsided distribution of resources have on student performance.

These attacks are currently being used to strip teacher seniority rights, divert public money to charter schools that foster a two-tiered, second-class citizenship system for special needs and second language children and to undercut living wages for teachers.

In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg wants to transfer $139 million in public funds to charter schools next year and cut $207 million from public schools.

As I said in last month’s Allegro, one might be inclined to think that the emergent model of education in the U.S. is to provide just enough training to supply employers (that benefit exponentially from these tax cuts) with a continuous source of cheap, unskilled and low-skilled labor.

Attacking the arts

The offensive against the arts occurs on multiple fronts. During the culture wars of the 1980’s, certain religious groups and their political allies in congress assailed certain federally funded works of art as indecent, blasphemous or subversive.

Calls for "decency" and "moral values" – litmus tests for works of art that received public funding – buzzed throughout Capitol Hill.

When the NEA came up for a five-year budget review in 1989, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced an appropriation bill to ban the funding of what he considered "obscene" art.

His bill failed, but the compromise has had a chilling effect on federal funding of free speech and artistic expression ever since.

It required the NEA to adopt obscenity guidelines established in 1973 by the Supreme Court.

While Congress couldn’t directly deny grants to artists whose work it considered obscene, the NEA had to from that point forward.

However, Congress does have the authority to defund the NEA, and depending on which party controls both chambers, threatens to do so in the name of decency, family values and fiscal prudency.

As part of the temporary budget bill passed the first week of March, the House of Representatives voted to cut $43 million in funding for the NEA and kill the Arts in Education programs at the U.S. Department of Education.

(Incidentally, the greatest beneficiaries of this program are New York State schoolchildren.)

In addition, the House also voted to cut significant funding for the National Writing Project ($25.6 million), Reading is Fundamental ($24.8 million), Teach for America ($18 million), National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10.7 million), New Leaders for New Schools ($5 million) and many other important arts education programs.

In addition to attacking arts and arts funding from a cultural point of view, anti-intellectualism, a centuries old, divisive propaganda tool which shuns individual expression and independent thought, is deployed to generate hostility and mistrust toward artists and teachers for political gain.

The argument goes like this. Education and expertise are regarded as the arrogant and snobbish products of an elite and privileged upbringing and are therefore out of sync with mainstream American values and the "just folks, wanna-have-a-beer-with" personas we seek to hold office and make major decisions.

As a result, those with backgrounds in the arts, sciences, philosophy or literature are to be regarded with suspicion and contempt (as are their supporters in office and other places of influence).

By delegitimizing these fields, their respective workforces and the skills necessary to work in them, it becomes "acceptable" to cut funding for higher education, despite what people like our president and governor say about helping our kids become more competitive in the workplace through a leaner, more efficient education system.

Since 2008, 43 states have enacted drastic cuts in higher education, making it more difficult for kids from poor and middle class families to get the quality education they need to succeed in life.

In New York, Gov. Cuomo wants to cut aid to State colleges by 10 percent. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett wants to cut funding for state colleges and universities by nearly 50 percent.

Don't sit back: push back

Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein coined the phrase "disaster capitalism" to describe "this phenomenon of seizing disasters to push through this radical brand of capitalism . . ." She maintains that such public policies "only work if we don’t know about them."

The general public is slowly beginning to wake up to the extreme ideological overreach witnessed in recent weeks.

Protesters took to the state capitals in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan to protest their respective governors’ threats to public sector unions and working families.

Demonstrations continue nationwide in favor of collective bargaining rights and balanced tax policies that benefit all Americans, not just 400 of them.

In a show of solidarity, Local 802 members took to the streets and joined with other unions in demonstrations at New York City Hall and the Statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey.

As for our industry, I’ve said it again and again. Unless we are willing to settle for a dystopian society devoid of curiosity beyond which mall has better curly fries, we cannot sit idly by and allow these deep, harmful cuts in arts and education.

As long we ignore cynical, reverse-Robin Hood public policies that steal from the poor to give to the rich, we can expect more cuts in arts and education spending, more attacks on organized labor and even larger transfers of wealth from the vast majority of the public to a select and powerful few.

If you’re ready to fight, we need you. Please contact my office at Pmolloy@Local802afm.org or (212) 245-4802, ext. 176.

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 2

[Here’s Part 2 of my short discussion of some of the theories of Susanne Langer. Occasional readers of ROT will find the first part, which covers art in general, posted on 30 December 2009. I make no apologies for the superficiality of this review, but I do recommend that frustrated readers turn to Langer’s own books to flesh out this introduction, especially Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form.]

If, as Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions, where, then, does beauty enter the equation? Well, in a way, it doesn’t. It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art. “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.” ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criteria Langer applies to art when she considers beauty. It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant. In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so. Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . . Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them. The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition. In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty. (I quoted Langer--and some others as well--in a brief consideration of this topic in “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 4,” ROT, 14 November.)

The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work. I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.” I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings 50 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive. When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it. Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism. We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in. Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging. She didn’t provide us with a definition of what qualifies--primarily because there aren’t any . . . and there don’t need to be. We’re all equipped to discern effective art. “The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer. This ability to appreciate art is natural, she said, though it can be enhanced or inhibited by various influences, including experience and upbringing. “Since it is intuitive,” Langer explained, “it cannot be taught; but the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.” I take this to mean that Langer thought we have to be open-minded to experience art in all its varieties. (That obviously doesn’t mean we have to like it all, but we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss any of it before we’ve contemplated it without preconceptions.)

We may not be able to teach artistic understanding, which Langer said is like creativity--though she stressed they are not the same thing--but we can direct or misdirect the ability to appreciate art by schooling--or the lack of it. If all we’ve learned about painting, for example, are the schools, genres, and styles of academic taxonomy, “we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.” As we’ve already seen, Langer felt that our scientifically-oriented society has led us away from appreciating the creative aspect of human endeavor:

Our scientific convention of abstracting mathematical forms, which do not involve quality, and fitting them to experience, always makes qualitative factors ‘content’; and as scientific conventions rule our academic thinking, it has usually been taken for granted that in understanding art, too, one should think of form as opposed to qualitative ‘content.’

This carries over into our education as well:

People who are so concerned for their children’s scientific enlightenment that they keep Grimm out of the library and Santa Claus out of the chimney, allow the cheapest art, the worst of bad singing, the most revolting sentimental fiction to impinge on the children’s minds all day and every day, from infancy. If the rank and file of youth grows up in emotional cowardice and confusion, sociologists look to economic conditions or family relations for the cause of this deplorable ‘human weakness,’ but not to the ubiquitous influence of corrupt art, which steeps the average mind in a shallow sentimentalism that ruins what germs of true feeling might have developed in it. Only an occasional devotee of the arts sees the havoc . . . .

Art education, as I’ve argued myself (see “Missoula Children’s Theatre,” ROT, 25 August, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children's Theater in America,” 25 November), is “the education of feeling,” Langer declared, “as our usual schooling in factual subjects, and logical skills such as mathematical ‘figuring’ or simple argumentation . . . is the education of thought.” She was adamant about the importance of this training and observed that the only way to get it is to be exposed to creativity and experience it in our lives. So kids' theater, and art museums, and concerts, and so on are necessary--and basically all that is necessary--for teaching people to enjoy and appreciate cultural and artistic endeavors:

Few people realize that the real education of emotion is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling. Art education, therefore, is neglected, left to chance, or regarded as a cultural veneer.

Up to now, I’ve been concentrating on Langer’s discussions of art and beauty in a general sense. Her theories, however, did separate the arts and she wrote about the characteristics of each genre. Each art form generates a “virtual” sphere of its own. The visual arts, for example, create “virtual space”; music, “virtual time”; and literature and drama (by which Langer meant the written texts, not the performing art), “virtual history.” (Langer devoted three chapters to drama in Feeling and Form.) Each art’s symbolic vocabulary is used by the artists to express their impressions of life and the world; it is the task of the perceivers to interpret these same symbols in order to absorb those impressions in their own ways.

(Langer, who wrote before computers became common and therefore before the term ‘virtual reality’ took on the meaning with which we’re familiar today, used the non-tech sense of these phrases: “Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.” Having recently posted on “Theater and Computers” [ROT, 5 December], I don’t want to commit an unintentional act of equivocation here. In Langer’s own use, a virtual phenomenon is a “semblance,” which she equates with the Aristotelian “imitation.” So, a theatrical act “imitates” a real act, or “resembles” one.)

Literature, Langer asserted, “projects . . . virtual memory,” a vision of life “completed, lived. . . events that compose a Past.” Drama, by contrast,

presents the poetic illusion in a different light: not finished realities, or ‘events,’ but immediate, visible responses of human beings, make its semblance of life. Its basic abstraction is the act, which springs from the past, but is directed toward the future, and is always great with things to come.

While literature “moves toward the present,” drama moves “toward something beyond; it deals essentially with commitments and consequences.” Drama, “though it implies past actions,” Langer indicated, is “directed toward the future”:

This future, which is made before our eyes, gives importance to the very beginnings of dramatic acts, i.e. to the motives from which the acts arise, and the situations in which they develop; the making of it is the principle that unifies and organizes the continuum of stage action. It has been said repeatedly that the theater creates a perpetual present moment; but it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic. A sheer immediacy, an imperishable direct experience without the ominous forward movement of consequential action, would not be so. As literature creates a virtual past, drama creates a virtual future. The literary mode is the mode of Memory; the dramatic is the mode of Destiny.

“In the theater,” Langer believed, “most people--and especially the most competent spectators--feel that the vision of destiny is the essence of the work, the thing that unfolds before their eyes.” After all, a fundamental element of theater is action, which Langer saw as “oriented toward the future.” As she explained this:

In actual life the impending future is very vaguely felt. Each separate act is forward-looking--we put on a kettle expecting it to boil, hand someone a bill and expect to be given change, board a bus with casual confidence that we shall leave it again at an intended point, or board an airplane with somewhat more conscious interest in our prospective exit from its inside. But we do not usually have any idea of the future as a total experience which is coming because of our past and present acts; such a sense of destiny arises only in unusual moments under peculiar emotional stress.

In drama, however, this sense of destiny is paramount. It is what makes the present action seem like an integral part of the future, howbeit that future has not unfolded yet. The reason is that on the stage, every thought expressed in conversation, every feeling betrayed by voice or look, is determined by the total action of which it is a part--perhaps an embryonic part, the first hint of the motive that will soon gather force. Even before one has any idea of what the conflict is to be (i.e. before the ‘exposition’ has been given), one feels the tension developing. This tension between past and future, the theatrical ‘present moment,’ is what gives to acts, situations, and even such constituent elements as gestures and attitudes and tones, the peculiar intensity known as ‘dramatic quality.’

The characters in drama are also “makers of the future”:

We know . . . so little about the personalities before us at the opening of a play that their every move and word, even their dress and walk, are distinct items for our perception. Because we are not involved with them as with real people, we can view each smallest act in its context, as a symptom of character and condition. We do not have to find what is significant; the selection has been made--whatever is there is significant, and it is not too much to be surveyed in toto. A character stands before us as a coherent whole. It is with characters as with their situations: both become visible on the stage, transparent and complete, as their analogues in the world are not.

The notion of destiny and “futurality” (my word, not Langer’s) in theater was only a small portion of Langer’s discussion of drama as a form of art. (She also entered the debate about whether drama even is an art. She affirmed that it is.) Nonetheless, I’m focusing on that segment of Langer’s theories (and encourage curious readers to go back to her original books to learn more) because it’s one of the more uncommon aspects of her perspective on drama and theater. As she explained the concept, in contrast to reality:

In actual life we usually recognize a distinct situation only when it has reached, or nearly reached, a crisis; but in the theater we see the whole setup of human relationships and conflicting interests long before any abnormal event has occurred that would, in actual life, have brought it into focus. Where in the real world we would witness some extraordinary act and gradually understand the circumstances that lie behind it, in the theater we perceive an ominous situation and see that some far-reaching action must grow out of it. This creates the peculiar tension between the given present and its yet unrealized consequent, “form in suspense,” the essential dramatic illusion. . . . The future appears as already an entity, embryonic in the present. That is Destiny.

In reference to the Aristotelian dichotomy I mentioned earlier, Langer specified, “Destiny is, of course, always a virtual phenomenon--there is no such thing in cold fact.” But, she concluded, it is still “an aspect of real experience” and part of what separates humans from other animals because it enables us to sense “past and future as parts of one continuum, and therefore of life as a single reality.” Drama, therefore (if I may extrapolate a little), is a fundamental aspect of human intellectuality because it facilitates one of the basic distinctions of human existence. I think the evidence of this axiom can seen in plays like Eimuntas Nekrosius’s The Square, a Lithuanian play from around 1991 that depicts the difficulties of learning how to live in a free society after years of Soviet repression. Even more recently, the Iraqi National Theater is planning to reopen (after an abortive attempt a year ago) as if the drive to perform were too strong for Baghdadis to suppress for too long. In words that are the prosaic echo of Susanne Langer’s philosophical analysis, one actress said: “It’s as if the spectators want to send a message . . . they are not afraid, and life goes on.” Destiny, indeed.

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 1

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was an art philosopher whose best known books are Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and Form (1953), the latter of which I want to discuss a little with respect to art, beauty, and theater. Her magnum opus, ranging across many academic disciplines, is Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, a massive study of the human mind that attempted to incorporate feeling into a grand scheme of human thought, published in three volumes in 1967, 1973, and 1982. A trained musician, Langer played the piano and the cello and music was an enduring pleasure of her life. She was a poet in her early life, composing poems before she knew how to write them down and her first published book was The Cruise of the Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales (1923), a collection of children’s stories. She even wrote a play called Walpurgisnacht, performed by family members in a grove of woods near Lake George, New York, where her family vacationed. (Langer and her cousins also presented a Hamlet whose text they rewrote themselves.)

To summarize the work of any philosopher is to court distortion and oversimplification. Langer’s subject was vast and her ideas were complex and difficult to unpack, though her writing was straightforward and, given the complexity of her ideas, clear. But I’m pulling her words on one or two particular topics out of the entirety of her generally unified theories, which runs the further risk of misrepresentation. Nevertheless, I expect I’ll be quoting her directly a lot here because not only do I feel Langer’s own words are the focus, but I couldn’t articulate her thoughts better than she herself did. Furthermore, I guess that because privately I find enlightening what Susanne Langer has to say about art--she makes about the best intellectual argument for the significance of art in society, in human existence, that I’ve ever encountered‑‑I also think it’s something everyone should find worth contemplating, so I’m promoting her writing, not my own. (There’s no book-length biography of Langer--a subject I’d imagine would be interesting to research--so the best published source of details about her life is a lengthy interview article written when Langer was at the height of her career: Winthrop Sargeant, “Profiles: Philosopher in a New Key,” New Yorker 3 Dec. 1960: 67-100. Another, shorter article of note is James Lord, “A Lady Seeking Answers,” New York Times Book Review 26 May 1968: 4-5; 34.)

Langer, one of the most-read philosophers of the 20th century, was among the first to work in the field of aesthetics and write about how we perceive beauty and art. Until she began to write about aesthetics, it was all but ignored by philosophers. Langer, however, saw art as a fundamental human activity, equal in significance to the acquisition and use of language. In Philosophy in a New Key, she wrote:

I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other than discursive language.

Of course, she’s talking about art, which she defines in Feeling and Form as “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” Art, Langer felt, is what humans use to express things they feet that resist reduction to ordinary “discursive” language--everyday speech and writing. We need art, in other words, as much as we need language because without it, we can’t express much of what we sense, perceive, or feel. Indeed, for Langer, the drive to find meaning through symbols and art is a coequal endeavor for humans with the scientific impulse to find facts, both being at the apex of human intellectual refinement. She viewed art, among other disciplines, as a form of language:

[T]he term ‘language’ encompasses not only the written and spoken forms that most people use in everyday life, but also the less common symbolic forms of the mathematician, the physical scientist and others. These forms have been developed just because of the limitations of ‘ordinary’ language and permit their users far greater precision in expressing thoughts.

The symbolic language of art, however, “has no vocabulary, no dictionary definitions,” Langer explained. It is . . . an expression of non-discursive thought.” Discursive language--that is, the language of discourse--comprises only one portion of human expression, covering a limited aspect of human experience. Humans are symbol-makers--dreams and myth, Langer demonstrated, are other forms of non-discursive, symbolic expression; we perceive the world around us in symbols of all kinds and even think in symbols. “Freud . . . observed that in dreams speech has the same function as visual image,” Langer noted, for instance. Discursive language, she found, is inapt for communicating many of the activities of the human mind, aesthetic experience among them. “The making of this expressive form,” proclaimed Langer, “is the creative process that enlists a man’s utmost technical skill in the service of his utmost conceptual power, imagination.”

Ordinary discursive language also has an inadequacy in that is it linear. When we view a painting, a movie scene, a live performance, or even a landscape, we experience many things at once; the images hit us simultaneously. But try to describe that painting in words, either orally or in writing, and we are reduced to explaining the images serially--first the size and dimensions, then the colors and textures, the figures and shapes (or some version of that scheme). The same is true of performance description (which I’ve made something of a practice so I can attest to this predicament). Only the non-discursive, symbolic language of art can accomplish this simultaneity. Without it, we can’t communicate with one another a significant aspect of our lives.

While many philosophers before Langer began her writing saw art as mystical and non-rational, beyond coherent thought in the mysterious realm of emotion and intuition, Langer saw art as another form of human rationality, the form that deals with ideas that can only be expressed in symbols. Langer placed considerable value in art which has been informed by human thought. After all, she proclaimed, “‘feeling’”--the basis of art--“is not something opposed to reason.”

The foundation of Langer’s philosophy was the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a German-Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in the U.S. in 1941. (Langer’s own family left Germany in the mid-19th century during another round of revolutions and violence in Europe. She grew up speaking only German in her home--her mother never learned to speak English--and, though born in New York City, always spoke with a pronounced German accent.) Cassirer understood that disciplines which seemed to be in conflict with one another like art, religion, and science were really different forms of symbolic thought. By isolating artistic expression as some unknowable construct, Langer’s predecessors couldn’t contemplate the whole of human intellectual activity, as she saw it. And by accepting this dichotomy, relegating the arts to a lesser plane of human endeavor and stressing a world of science and logic only, we have developed a society devoid of symbolic expression, a poorer place for all of us to live in. “A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage . . . . Technical progress is putting man’s freedom of mind in jeopardy,” said Langer. “Indifference to art,” she declared, “is the most serious sign of decay in any institution.”

“[T]he function of art,” Langer wrote, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.” Langer observed that

there are two opposite perspectives from which any work of art may be viewed: that of its author and that of its spectators (or hearers, or readers, as the case may be). One perspective presents it as an expression, the other as an impression. From the former standpoint one naturally asks: ‘What moves an artist to compose his work, what goes into it, what (if anything) does he mean by it?’ From the latter, on the other hand, the immediate question is: ‘What do works of art do, or mean, to us?’ This question is the more usual, even in serious theoretical thought, because more people are beholders of art than makers of it, and this counts for philosophers as well as for any unselected public.

If, I think Langer believed, the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then omitting the part of life expressed by art--not just by those who make it but by the rest of us who perceive it--leaves a huge portion of our lives unexamined. “[I]t is the whole life of feeling--call it ‘felt life,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘direct experience,’ or what you will--which finds its articulate expression in art,” she insisted, “and . . . only in art.” As a crucial aspect of human existence, “art penetrates into personal life because in giving form to the world, it articulates human nature: sensibility, energy, passion, and mortality. More than anything else in experience, the arts mold our actual life of feeling.”

On the significance of artistic expression, Langer specified that “it clarifies and organizes intuition itself” by “formulat[ing] our conceptions of feeling and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together.” It puts everything together, she posited, and functions as an important societal asset “because the formulation of ‘felt life’ is the heart of any culture, and molds the objective world for the people. It is their school of feeling, and their defense against outer and inner chaos.” Langer concluded:

Art does not affect the vitality of life so much as its quality; that, however, it affects profoundly. In this way it is akin to religion, which also, at least in its pristine, vigorous, spontaneous phase, defines and develops human feelings.

But in Langer’s epistemology, “human feelings” isn’t a restrictive phrase. To be clear on this point, she specified that “by ‘feeling’ I mean everything that can be felt. This includes all mental acts and perceptions.”

Art, in Langer’s conception, “is envisagement of feeling, which involves its formulation and expression in . . . a symbol . . . .” But not all symbolic creations are equal. The “envisagement” can be distorted by interfering experiences which the artist hasn’t sorted out. “Candor is the standard,” wrote Langer. The feelings art “envisages” must be honest feeling: bad art is corrupted by false emotions.

In contrast, however, art which is merely imperfectly crafted by an insufficiently masterful creator is “poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition.” The product is “sincere enough,” said Langer, “but confused and frustrated” by “recalcitrant” media and lack of technical skill in the artist. While truly bad art must be “repudiated and destroyed,” insisted Langer, “as a lie may be exposed and retracted,” poor art is simply dismissed. (Langer also discusses non-art or false art, a creation which doesn’t fail to express an emotion because there’s no attempt to express anything. We’ve all encountered this: tourist art, airport art, junk art, artistic pabulum. It takes the form of an artistic object but not the content. Whether this is the creation of a charlatan or just an untalented producer is irrelevant from the perspective of aesthetics.)

I spoke just now of form versus content, which is misleading. In Langer’s artistic epistemology, while art may appear to be “formed content,” in actuality, the form and content are inseparable. She explained that

a work of art is a structure whose interrelated elements are often qualities, or properties of qualities such as their degrees of intensity; that qualities enter into the form and in this way are as much one with it as the relations which they, and they only, have; and that to speak of them as ‘content,’ from which the form could be abstracted logically, is nonsense. The form is built up out of relations peculiar to them; they are formal elements in the structure, not contents.

Furthermore, creativity doesn’t depend, in Langer’s theory, on either the form or the content being new, original, innovative, or novel. “A Greek vase was almost always a creation,” Langer observed by way of illustration, “although its form was traditional and its decoration deviated but little from that of its numberless forerunners. The creative principle, nonetheless, was probably active in it from the first throw of the clay.” The work need only be “symbolic of feeling,” even if “a thousand people may have used every device and convention of it before.” (Works of art, even great art, have come out of some of the most hide-bound traditional forms: canonical painting, Socialist Realism, Kabuki theater. Junk, in contrast, has come from some of the freest.)

Though art can be assessed as good or bad, however, doesn’t mean works should (or even can) be judged against one another.

Works of art are not usually comparable. Only prize-juries have to evaluate them with reference to some standard, which is inevitably arbitrary and in many cases inapplicable. A competent jury does not even define a standard. If it consists of people who have developed their powers of perception by long conversance with the order of art . . . in which their judgments are to be made, intuition will guide the verdict. There will be disagreements--not because good and bad works cannot be distinguished, but because among successful ones there is no sure principle of selection. Personal or social factors usually tip the balances; “ratings” are trivial.

(I’ve inveighed against turning art into a competition--the Tonys, Oscars, Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Carnegies, Pritzkers, and so on--on several recent occasions. I find it distasteful, but Langer makes an argument that it is also essentially impossible as well as meaningless--and I wholeheartedly agree.)

[This is only the first part of my brief discussion of some of Susanne Langer’s ideas. Please return in a few days for Part 2, which will cover Langer’s conception of beauty and one aspect of her analysis of drama and theater.]

Degrading the Arts

On Friday, 7 August, Rocco Landesman was confirmed as the new chairman of the NEA, following Dana Gioia (2003-09), a poet. Landesman is a successful and experienced Broadway producer and theater owner (he ran Jujamcyn Theaters, the third largest theater landlord in New York, after the Shuberts and the Nederlander Organization); that makes him a practical man of theater and the arts. At the same time, President Barack Obama, who appointed Landesman, has requested an increase in NEA funding and The House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee of the new Congress has approved $170 million, a raise of $15 million over the last NEA budget. On the surface, it looks like the arts have been returned to a place of prominence and respect in our society after years of animosity and disdain under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Some arts professionals feel the corner has been turned: “I hope that time is over, the period when artist have been held as suspicious by the politicians,” says Michael Conforti, the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. But all is not as well as these indicators suggest. First, the Culture Wars perpetrated by the hard right may be in abeyance, but there is still fight in that old dog. Second, the current economic crisis is taking a toll among arts programs and artists, as it is among other parts of our society. Between the two forces, as former NEA chairman Gioia observed, we have “dismantled the arts-education programs that used to be part of every public school.” The delicate balance in which the arts exist in the United States makes them more vulnerable than other aspects of society--unless those of us who care about the arts keep a watchful eye and stand strong.

On 3 and 4 February 1993, the New York Times ran a pair of articles reporting the decline of arts education in American schools. Now 16 years later, we are once again in a similar stage with respect to drama, dance, music, and art in the schools due to the economic downturn that began last year. In “As Schools Trim Budgets, The Arts Lose Their Place” and “Creativity vs. Academic Study: How Should Schools Teach Arts?” Susan Chira described the loss a decade-and-a-half ago and pointed out what some educators feel will be the consequences. Most stressed how the arts help encourage the students’ creativity and imagination and develop their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. And now, in “Arts Programs in Academia Are Forced to Nip Here, Adjust There,” also in the Times (10 August 2009), Patricia Cohen described the straights in which college and university arts programs find themselves, presaging the same consequences for an even wider spectrum of Americans. Students at all academic levels, from elementary to grad schools, will find their programs, teachers, and classes disappearing as budgets shrink and endowments and subsidies dry up. Cohen’s litany of departments and programs in jeopardy is already disheartening, and the process has only just started.

Chairman Landesman sees the arts as an engine for economic recovery and development: “When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town.” He plans to campaign for increased arts funding on that basis. There is, however, another consequence to good arts education that’s hardly mentioned, one that is particularly important to contemplate when the arts are under attack from many quarters in our society. In a 3 February companion article to the two 1993 reports, “Arts Groups Step In to Fill the Gaps,” Glenn Collins pointed out that “early consistent exposure to the arts builds future audiences.” It also builds a citizenry that values our artistic and cultural heritage instead of being hostile to it. A citizen who has taken an art, theater, dance, or music course and who is thereafter encouraged to experience and enjoy this part of life is less likely to enlist in the forces that oppose free artistic expression.

We are fortunate now that the new administration not only isn’t antipathetic to art and culture but genuinely appreciates that part of our society and promotes it by example. When forces antithetical to the very principle on which our culture rests--the freedom to express ourselves openly--mobilize, institutions of learning must take strong, public stands to preserve the support of this vital element in society. There must be a philosophical commitment to spread the knowledge of America’s artistic life to all who call themselves educated; to reinforce the notion that the arts are for everyone, not just a peculiar elite; to assure that the arts are accessible for everyone’s enjoyment and enlightenment; to argue that our culture is as important a part of the democratic way of life as are the press and the law; and, finally, to teach everyone that we must support and encourage artistic diversity as avidly as we do the intellectual and political. The only way to counter those who would homogenize, standardize, and emasculate our country’s arts is to educate every citizen to respect, honor, and cherish this part of our society. We must constantly insist that this role of the artist be recognized for the importance it holds for society at large.

We in arts education must continue to remind ourselves, our colleagues, and our students of the real value of the arts to the vitality and honesty of society. Artists, as Hamlet notes, “hold the mirror up to nature” even when the reflection shows us as King Lear saw us: a “poor, bare forked animal.” Artists are the whistle-blowers of society. There are laws to protect whistle-blowers in industry and government; must we not also protect, indeed, encourage the cultural whistle-blowers?

Arts education reinforces the notion that artists see the future long before any scientist or engineer can invent it. Da Vinci saw flying machines half a millennium before the bothers Wright made history at Kitty Hawk; Cyrano de Bergerac envisioned men on the moon three centuries before any Apollo spacecraft was launched; Jules Verne put Captain Nemo in a submarine decades before a real one was built. For good or ill, as another Shakespearean character, Duke Theseus, noted:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

“Things unknown” are often also “things uncomprehended.” “Things uncomprehended” are often “things unwelcome.” It is the artist who is usually at the forefront of efforts to acquaint us with and explain these “things,” often whether we want to hear about them or not.

In “The Indispensable Opposition,” Walter Lippmann asserts:

It is all very well to say with Voltaire, “I wholly disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it,” but as a matter of fact most men will not defend to the death the rights of other men: if they disapprove sufficiently what other men say, they will somehow suppress those men if they can.

All around us, we see this suppression--these days often called “political correctness”--by both the right and the left. In a recent administration, according to a book by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, John E. Frohnmayer, the first President Bush tried “to cripple the N.E.A.”; later, even President Clinton wanted to reinstitute the decency clause for N.E.A. awardees. Now it is budgetary concerns and the economy that are looming over our cultural diversity, even as the current administration seems to encourage multiple voices and creative impulses. (Elsewhere, forces of repression, usually in the form of religious zealots, suppress or attempt to suppress voices of which they disapprove.) Lippmann makes the point that we need to hear the opposing, unsettling voices on the basis that “because freedom of discussion improves our opinions, the liberties of other men are our own vital necessity.” He likens the situation to a visit to a doctor whom we pay “to ask us the most embarrassing questions and to prescribe the most disagreeable diet.” While we are free to seek additional opinions, we must listen to them all to determine the truth. As Lippmann observes, “any . . . sensible human being . . . learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters.” We arts educators must constantly remind the world that the artist is the loyal opposition, duty-bound to speak for--and to--the people.

The importance of this function is easy to demonstrate. We have only to look at the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe where writers like Vaclav Havel, later president of a free Czech Republic, and Janusz Glowacki of Poland constantly reminded the rest of the world what life was like there and evoked images of what it ought to be. Challengers in the Communist world were not alone, either, as witness Athol Fugard’s and Mbongeni Ngema’s pointed opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Today we hear of outspoken voices among Muslims, Hindus, and other cultural groups which suffer under authoritarianism and suppression in many parts of the world. Apart from the few political dissenters, whose voices were often silenced, only artists kept the world apprised of the conditions.

I was reminded of this all-important service artists provide when I attended a performance of Eimuntas Nekrosius’s The Square by the State Theater of Lithuania, presented in 1991 as part of The New York International Festival of the Arts. Briefly, the play tells of a prisoner for whom “everything is against the rules.” When he is finally released, he has been so conditioned to do only what he is told that he fails to start breathing again after an X-ray because the doctor did not instruct him to. He dies, literally, because he does not know how to be free. Freedom, Nekrosius is saying, cannot merely be legislated or declared, it must also be learned and prepared for; it also has its dangers. The reality of this lesson, dramatically and clearly demonstrated onstage, is becoming evident all over the region, particularly at this moment in the emerging democracy of Russia. Doubtless this is a message many people would rather not hear. Democracy and freedom are supposed to be the answer to all problems: once free, everyone’s life is supposed to be wonderful. It takes an artist, however, to point out the truth, unpalatable though it be, and to do so in an accessible way that may not be possible for the journalist or political essayist.

A society that ignores its people’s voice, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asserted in a 1991 interview with David Frost, cannot “work because it denie[s] the human spirit.” Jack O’Brien, then-artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, in the March 1991 American Theatre, bemoaned the dissolution of “the link between civilization and the arts.” He reported: “With suspicion that the arts are too expensive or esoteric for them to understand or enjoy, many people have removed all consideration of art and culture from the ‘here and now.’“ These folks, O’Brien observed, have abandoned support for the arts to “the decadent rich, the only ones, in their estimation, able to enjoy them anyway.” It is this link we must reforge through arts education. It is a fight we dare not lose.

Unless all Americans are educated to esteem art and artists as indispensable contributors to the future--everyone’s future--campaigns to silence them, censor them, and abandon our support for them will succeed. Unless we all recognize the arts as a necessity, not a luxury, when we are confronted with the choice between more art and more guns, we will always choose the guns. The training camps for this battle are our schools. It is not enough simply to offer arts courses to those of us who have a personal and abiding interest in our cultural heritage and have elected to make our lives in the arts. We must redouble our efforts to include and maintain the arts as a strategic part of the curricula of all liberal-arts and general-education programs, to assure that those who make careers in the sciences, humanities, and business also appreciate the importance, as well as the pleasures, of culture and art.

In the face of academic budget cuts; federal, state, and local arts council drawbacks; and political efforts--from both sides of the spectrum--to suppress dissenting voices, those of us in arts education must fight publicly to maintain and increase programs in elementary and high schools, colleges and universities that introduce all students to our cultural heritage. If we lose this struggle, we shall surely see the prescience of William Blake’s 1808 admonition: “Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade.”

[An earlier version of this essay was published as "Open Forum: Arts Education: 'Without Fear or Favor'" (ATHENews 6.1 [February 1992]: 3).]