Kandinsky / Attenborough

Ergo

Slipping and climbing at the same time is no miracle.

Like diving to the summit of Mont Blanc.

Little dashes (thus: -----------) are a miracle, because some time they stop.

When?
If all the bread-crumbs, all the pharaohs, all the gnats, all the malignant gaps, the torn into scraps, together with all the wars, and aeons, and skiers (not forgetting the boxers!), all the painters whoever painted, the horse trams, which have turned into flying machines, the stockings, the ichthyosaurs, the Milky Way, all the drops of milk from the cows, whales, goats, seals lionesses of the entire prehistoric and simply historic periods, which were sometimes black, sometimes red, and sometimes white – from time immemorial until today, until the second that has just elapsed, were black red and white and … are

HAVE

Determined

Attained

Their end.

Rather not.

Paris, May 1937

(Published in Transition, 1938; Lindsay and Vergo, p.810)

Yesterday, I watched on TV an episode of David Attenborough’s The Perfect Planet. I now find myself thinking of Kandinsky’s quest to call attention to the interconnectedness of all things and his revulsion at what he called the ‘disease of separation’ that blighted not just the art world but the world in general. From the microscopic to the astronomic, he sought continuities. 

It’s the lack of recognition of the interconnected, holistic nature of things that has allowed humanity to bring our planet and its inhabitants to the poor state of health that Attenborough describes. Pillaging the earth for what we can use and abuse, burn and sell, without regard for the impact it has elsewhere in the system. 

Bread crumbs and pharaohs, wars and skiers and the Milky Way. I came looking for Ergo this morning, because I remembered its listings of diverse phenomena and its suggestions of hidden continuities, the same quest that we see in Kandinsky’s paintings and in his theory. 

I remember in the 1990s, a colleague writing to the OU to ask why it was focusing so much on French art of the 20^th century, to the detriment of German art. We guessed the reason was some French art, particularly Surrealism in certain of its dissident forms, seemed to lay the ground for postmodernism in the arts. The importance of postmodernism hasn’t passed and, for sure, that particular thread of art history is interesting.

But, I’d contend, while that historical trend may speak lots of culture in a late capitalist economy, it offers little in terms of how to conceive and overcome the more fundamental crises of our age at the start of the third decade of the 21^st century. Certain moments of Modernism were thrown under the bus, carelessly identified as perpetuating modernist tropes and therefore seen as no longer relevant. 

Contrary to what lazy-minded summaries might lead you to think, the holistic, synthetic world-view that Kandinsky developed – particularly after about 1918 - was grounded in a quest rather than a simple system of belief. He explored ‘the spirit’ in his early work, but he also went on to explore and increasingly use the methods of scientific enquiry. He doesn’t pretend to have the answers: like the shaping of the potentially endless list in Ergo, his work is an on-going enquiry into the nature of connections, a quest to find what holds things together.

In his terms, a quest to replace 

‘either – or’ with ‘AND’.

A better model for us as we head toward the depths of the 21^st century and all that it threatens.