Richard Gilman
ART AND HISTORY
Among other uses every art appears to lend itself to History
by possessing a history of its own. How much more does Art, the
totality of aesthetic works as well as the abstraction by which we hold,
in consciousness the faculty that produces them, seem to possess the
historical as one of its attributes and identifications? We speak of
the "development" of the novel, the "course" of music, the "fate" of
poetry.
We talk about movements, revolutions and returns (neo-this
and neo-that), about avant-gardes (spearheads, colonizers of the
future) and academicisms (wrongheaded repetitions performed in
despite of time and change). One of our thoroughly contemporary
notions about art is that of "crisis," which means that we have come
to see it as periodically trapped between a closed-off past and a not–
yet-open future, which however must sooner or later come to open,
as all future does.
All this habit of mind - art seen as history, as chronological
extension and time filling up with truth or beauty - is on the analogy
of general human history, which, dominating the way we see time,
dominates whatever is produced within its walls. And in the same
way that thinking of life as history is, beneath its purely technical
useS, in the interest of reassurance, so thinking of art as history serves as
reaSs~rance
too. For whatever the local, provisional quality of events
and . enterprises, however painful, worn, inadequate or perverse exis–
tence may seem at any time, the fact that it is going to go on - that
there
will
always be more of this self-secreting substance, the historical
- means that there are going to
be
new chances, possibilities, acces–
sions and revivals,.for
art
as well as life. Every .n.ew. generation makes
this more or less explicit, ours more than most; we are always in the
~ay
of having everything made good.
