Derek Webster & Mr. Imagination

Photograph by Soichi Sunami A Recognizable Image Each of rhe many articles in this collection documents, in one way or another, the nature and importance of Williams's fascina¬ tion with all things visual. But the role of the images created by art, and their function in providing what might be called the furniture of his imagination, is perhaps best indicated in his delightful narrative "Effie Deans." There he remarks: "1 love pictures. Nine times out of ten when 1 go into a house and have to wait a moment or two for whoever it is to appear, I find interesting ones to look at, in the plainest households sometimes." Watercolors, still lifes, old chromolithographs, paintings, calendar pictures, all had rhe power to fascinate him and frequently found their way into his poems. As he points out in "Effie Deans," his being a physician gave him many special opportunities to feed his fancy, for "a physician often comes upon delightful objets d'art inauspiciously lighting the days and years of some obscure household in almost any suburban town." Proceeding to construct his own musee imaginaire out of the various objects and pictures he had encountered on his rounds, he offers us, in fact, a brisk and yet detailed insight into rhe visual sources of many of his poems. For these visible remains of human creativity, we realize, form part of an archive of images stored away in his mind for possible future use in his own creative work. After all, since Williams believed that in matters of technique, of design, and emotional intention, the artistic goals of painters and poets were the same, there was nothing to hold him back from trying to do in words what the painters were doing on canvas, or, for that matter, from trying to turn a striking picture into a poem. Of course it should be remembered in this context that when Williams constructed a poem from an image he had taken from painting or photography, or when he described a painting in one of his articles, he often did so from memory. Fascinated as he was with rhe visual nature of things, the innumberable pictures "fastened" by others which he had stored in his memory, would often spontaneously materialize as part of a poem or prose piece he was writing. But during that process of storage, these images, over the years, rarely remained unaltered. His active imagination would most often take hold of the image which had originally caught his attention, and remold it by adding or subtracting details. Thus, as the world of art. For, Williams argued in his "Vortex," it was in the structural organization of objects, and in the poet's perception of their visual presence, of their existence as "an arrangement of appearances, of planes," that their significance as universal representants of certain supra-individual human emotional states was revealed. Much later, in discussing the paintings of Marsden Hartley, he would assert the same principle more pointedly: "Unless you paint pure nothing, you paint a place-and in that place you will reveal all places in the world." 8 A Recognizable Image that place for 1 deny that I am dependent on any place." As becomes clear from Williams's comments on the goals of his magazine Contact, he saw one's immediate environment, one's "locality," as the only source of that universal experience which, he thought, "great" art expresses. Such universal experience was communicable only on the basis of an authentic perception of the objects of the material world, which, he reasoned, could only stem from an accurate representation of the things we know, the things with which we are intimately familiar: the "sensual accidents" bred out of "the local conditions which confront us." This was what established "the essential contact between words and the locality that breeds them." I lowever, while the materials which were to make up authentic expression could be found in one's immediate environment, nothing held back the artist in his search for methods to come to an authentic expression of his locality, from utilizing such progressive means of expression as might have been developed by artists in other environments. At the same time he must recognize that even these means of expression were at least partially responsive only to the conditions prevalent in the locality in which they were first developed. 1 fence, Williams argued, the American artist could profit from, for example, "this French Orchid," Dadaism, in constructing his own means of expression, hut only as long as he realized that "the American contour is not particularly dadaesque" and that the Dada method, or any other, would have to be uuxhfied substantially to fit into the American context. In an unpublished notation he once remarked: "Picasso will not leave Paris because he has the brains to know that if he came to America he would have to be affected by it and paint that way-and he doesn't wish to at his age."12 To fail to enter into such a process of modification, to merely copy the styles developed in Paris without adapting them to the particular requirements of the artist's immedi¬ ate environment, to try to paint Parisian pictures in New York was, Williams asserted, the unenlightened response of truly provincial minds. The styles of painting generally grouped under the heading "Regionalism," too, were in his eyes the products of artists who were imitators, copiers, artists who simply used mechanically learned methods to express the surface eccentricities of a particular great names of Western European art: Rembrandt, Pd Greco, Michelangelo, Brueghel, Bosch. That Williams was in no way favorably disposed toward a policy of special pleading on behalf of the inherent virtues of American artists can be seen from his scathing denunciation, in "The Neglected Artist," of the spiritual No wonder, then, that to attack art came, in Williams's eyes to be to attack the meaning of life itself. Thus when, in 1920, in The Freeman, Harold Stearns derided what he considered to be the various naivetes of the sophisticates, and included in his list of their foibles "an exaggerated emphasis on the importance of art," Williams clearly felt personally attacked. Stearns remarked that political cause only if it could encompass that cause without compromising the artist's "sight," his integrity of vision. It should never allow itself to be encompassed by such a cause, for then it would inevitably end up being dragged down to lower standards. Art should be, Williams indicated in "The Neglected Artist," an "asylum," a "haven," a separate world of more perfect structures sham, it does little to clear up the often frantic support given by these very artists, "great" and not so great alike, to some of the most destructive political movements imaginable. Thus when Pound went on the radio in support of the Fascists, and Williams felt called upon, at about the same time that he wrote "The Poet in Time of Confusion," to attack Pound for this political stance, he did so primarily in terms of Pound's ability as a poet, as a "see-er," concerning the objective truth of sight to escape from political responsibility. In the end, therefore, no matter how loudly he might proclaim that Symbolism was dead,'" there really was very little which separated lus "sight is truth" theory from the "art for art's sake" position of the Symbolists. familiar Williams was with Douglas's ideas. Reed Whitremore suggests that Williams may only have read a short outline of the Social Credit ideas written by Pound for The New English Weekly. Mike Weaver, on the other hand, documents a considerable involvement on the poet's part in actions inspired by the move¬ ment.21 In any case, there is little evidence in Williams's talk of any thoroughgoing familiarity with the details of Douglas's concepts, but the poet could certainly sympathize with the major's attempts to rescue individualism and the structures of capitalist economic practice from the speculative excesses of the times, and back to the primrose path of a massive productive capacity. Already in 1924, in Rome, Williams had expressed his enthusiasm for the basic prem¬ ises of American commerce: in his article on Sheeler, that the world of the artist is "the world in which men meet and work with pick and shovel, talk and write long winded books. It is the same world we go to war in," he in actuality never chose to confront that world in other than its visual textures, in its surface modulations. How an artist could express that world 'discover' the elements with which the Zeitgeist had confronted his world," and that his insight was limited to a synthesis of fragments of understanding "which he shared in common with all others," he clearly indicated that he understood that the person is dependent on what might be called "social knowledge" to express his "indi¬ viduality." But when, at the same time, he insisted "that it is only the individual who can advance 'beyond his day,' formulate the thoughts about him, remake the world," he still refused to recog¬ nize that such "individual" advances, given his remarks about the barbarians nevertheless, mistakenly, use war primarily as a tool to obstruct the progress of the arts. All wars, he seemed to argue, are wars against art, a notion which itself is the expression of an incredible hubris concerning the actual function of art in society, representative of his fundamental unwillingness to recognize the unromanticized, bleak exploitation of actually having to be a part of that world in which people "work with pick and shovel," and become cannon fodder for reasons quite other than the advance¬ ment or obstruction of the arts. When, m " I he Poet in l ime of ('onfusion," Williams listed as a question the artist like the economist-must answer: "are women in public life the source of degeneration and homosexuality the source of genius?" he was formulating a question which preoccupied Wciningcr, and which the latter in fact answered affirmatively just so...

Theory Now, 2019

Distinguishing between the theory and the practice of art may afford artists a conceptual break, a creative opening through which the boldest of them take the risks necessary to find original ways to obtain images yet to be grasped. Throughout art history we can trace the linear narratives of progress as art historians sanction new visual discoveries, very often to support their own perceived “new art” movements. Later still, academics and theorists can focus their attentions on organizing and incorporating these new practices in visual art into palatable theories of art history. Needless to say, not all artists are happy with this arrangement. When Barnett Newman spoke the above words about his art in Emile de Antonio’s documentary film, Painters Painting,(1) he was adamant that aesthetics, and those “aesthetes” he obviously disdained, were of no use to him in his art practice. Referencing their analyses of style or labels as “false issues” the aesthetes pursue as a matter of course, Barney made it clear that the practical creation of art is distinct from any systematic analysis, and then marvelously illustrates his point in a now famous statement conflating aesthetics with ornithology.

Versopolis, 2018

The paper explores the origin of confusion that rules much of the (visual) art world today. How have we arrived at the situation that the same group of contemporary artists are deemed geniuses by one group of critics, curators, theorists and collectors and total hacks by another group of critics, curators, theorists and collectors? While omiting the question of taste as the possible reason for this dispute - the discussion on taste is impossible anyway - the paper looks deeper into how the confusion arose.

INspire!, 2006

2019

This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster.