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RICHARD GILMAN
not fully believe that such a thing is possible, which means that we
have lost the sense (never widely or wholeheartedly supported ) of art
as wrestler with history rather than as an aspect of its expression. A
tenacious resistance of academic thinking (historical thinking in its
quintessential form), and of a humanism trying to add to its justifica–
tions, goes on obscuring the truth that physical events, or "real" events,
including the lives of artists, have one history, and aesthetic events,
without following an arbitrary course and without lacking in their own
kind of reality, have another. Thinking of the arts as the embodiment
or reflection, most subtly as the formalization - the "aestheticiza–
(ion" - of social or moral or psychological history continues to
dominate the academic's teaching and most critical practice. Against
how many pieties does
on~ump
if one sets out to demonstrate that
the chief impulse of the truest art has always been to
~erve,
in no
merely figurative sense, as compensations and atonements for such
histories, for History as the annals of our deficiency.
If
it is at all historical
(if
it has a relation, that is to say, to
chronologies outside itself) art is a counter-history; the surprises,
blessings, threats and transformations it offers are distinguished by
the remarkable fact that they might not have been, that they have
made their appearance as the result of a kind of smuggling operation,
that they stand outside history as a species of alternative to it. So
positioned, they are not subject to any law of historical development
(although to a principle of change kept in being by the new shapes
history continually throws up) nor to inevitability of any kind. Only
when, as periodically happens, an art succumbs to human history,
stopping dead in its tracks under the weight of demand that it fulfill
one or another social or moral or psychological function and above
all that it fulfill it as before, the way previous art has been con–
sidered to do, does it surrender its freedom. New artists, new art, then
come forward to reclaim it; although there is nothing inevitable even
about that.
Of all the arts the theater, perennially broken down, forever
lacking fuel, is perhaps the one most given to predicting its own
future, or rather, asserting, with dogged, blind, quasi-mystical assur–
ance, that it is going to have one. The theater has always survived,
so the almost prayerf\ll argument runs, its history being one of
perpetual recovery from dry spells, wrong turnings and persecution.
