MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.
Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time!
Roger Scruton was one of Peter’s most engaging allies and oponants. They saw eye to eye on many things regarding art and not much else. He was a regular contributor to the early days of Moder Painters and after Peter passed he was a trustee of the Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation until it closed a few years ago.
Roger Scruton passed away earlier this year, January 12th 2020.
Roger Scruton and Right Thinking
by Peter Fuller
Roger Scruton is best known as a prolific polemicist of the British ‘New Right’. In the first issue of The Salisbury Review, a journal of ‘Higher Conservative’ thinking which he edits, Scruton wrote about ‘the importance of regaining the commanding heights of the moral and intellectual economy’ for conservatism.
Roger Scruton by Greg Funnell
It is hard to believe, however, that even he thinks that is what he is doing through, say, his occasional column in The Times. Apparently he intended no irony when, in the wake of the Falklands fiasco, he expressed the view that dying for one’s country was ‘the most vivid human example of the sacred, of the temporal order overcome by a transcendent meaning’. Could this metaphysical transfiguration of futile deaths amongst tundra and penguin shit have inspired Scruton’s condemnation (without ever having seen it) of The Day After - an American TV film on the effects of nuclear war — as ‘pornography’ ? Perhaps he felt that such a film should depict the blinding light of millions of transcendent meanings, rather than a vision of fire storms, radiation sickness, cinders and General Anaesthesia.
But those who know Scruton only through his hasty and intemperate journalism, in which he seems to be engaged in some personal stampede to speak the unspeakable, should not be put off from his books, which are different in both tone and content. Some of them show a searching after the truth, a distaste for conventional cant and a vigorous critical independence of mind which should commend them even to those who, like myself, are of very different political persuasions.
Over the last ten years, Scruton has published a number of works on aesthetics, including Art and Imagination and the exemplary The Aesthetics of Architecture of 1979. There can be little doubt that these explorations are among the most rewarding of their kind to have appeared in English in recent years. This new volume, The Aesthetic Understanding (Carcanet, 1983), is a collection of substantial and considered essays which provide an excellent introduction to the depth and breadth of his aesthetic concerns.
For Scruton, the primary question is not ‘What is Art?’ but ‘What is aesthetic experience, and what is its importance for human conduct?’ He is unaffected by any of the fashionable tendencies to deny, dissolve or reduce aesthetic experience; the tools he uses for his investigation are those of analytical philosophy, and the conclusions he arrives at are notable for their emphasis upon imagination.
‘In the light of a theory of imagination’, Scruton writes, ‘we can explain why aesthetic judgment aims at objectivity, why it is connected to the sensuous experience of its object, and why it is an inescapable feature of moral life.’ For him, aesthetic experience also has practical value: it represents the world as informed by the values of the observer. But his position is not one of unalloyed subjectivism: he insists, and rightly so, upon the dependence of aesthetic and moral life on the existence of a ‘common culture’, a system of shared beliefs and practices that tell a man how to see the situation that besets him.
I am with him here; but such emphases seem rare elsewhere in contemporary critical writing. Scruton understandably argues that Marxist, sociological, structuralist and semiotic schools of thought have contributed little or nothing to the answers to the questions that concern him. Such practitioners miss the point that there is a relative autonomy to aesthetic experience, that it can genuinely be distinguished from, say, scientific, moral or political understanding. Nonetheless he shows an exemplary concern for, and knowledge of, the material bases of each of the several arts and pursuits he discusses.
There is, for example, something refreshing, in the light of recent controversies, about his defence of the literary critic as a reader with taste, judgment and ‘a certain kind of responsiveness to literature’ who addresses his remarks to readers of literature who are not also professionals. (Nonetheless, the least convincing text in this volume for me was Scruton’s own excursion as a literary critic. His study of Beckett labours the none-too-original point that he was a ‘post-Romantic’ writer of genius whose vision was entirely integrated into his style.)
More original and intriguing is a selection of his texts on music, dealing, with illuminating clarity, with themes like representation in music, musical motion, and especially musical understanding. Scruton makes the point that anyone who is ingenious enough can interpret music as a language, code, or system of signs. But perhaps the relation between such semantic analyses and musical understanding itself ‘is no closer than the relation between the ability to ride a horse, and the semantic interpretation of piebald markings’. Scruton convincingly describes musical understanding as ‘a complex system of metaphor which is the true description of no material fact’. Characteristically, he stresses the imaginative activity involved in the hearing of music, through which sound is transfigured into figurative space.
Similarly, his essay on photography provides far and away the most authoritative exposition of the profound differences between photography and painting of which I know. Scruton argues that ‘representation’ is a complex pattern of intentional activity, the object of highly specialized responses. Photography, when it is true to itself, necessarily eliminates such intentional activity; the photograph is, as it were, too closely wedded to the appearances of given reality, especially in terms of its details, to represent anything at all.
Of course, he acknowledges that representations can be photographed; for example, when a photographer takes a picture of a woman posing as Venus. But a photograph of a representation is no more a representation than a picture of a man is a man. Scruton argues that painting is essentially a representational art - though he undoubtedly underestimates the decorative contribution to this art form - whereas photography is not. Insofar as there is representation in film, as opposed to photography, its origin is not photographic but theatrical. Scruton then successfully deploys the distinction between ‘fantasy’ and true imagination to argue that, to its detriment, the cinema has been indissolubly wedded to the former - and that this has something to do with the nature of the medium itself.
Scruton’s views on architecture will already be known to readers of his earlier books: he conclusively demonstrates the vacuity of the modernist ‘functionalist’ theory and practice, and revives the idea of the history of architecture as ‘the history not of engineering but of stones, in their expressive aspect’. There is no necessary, causal link between proposed functions and ultimate forms which can be extrapolated without considering the linking term of style. In any event, the functions of good buildings often change through historical use. Churches become museums; railway stations, as at the Angel, Islington, in London, shopping arcades. Scruton maintains that it is through aesthetic understanding that the eye is trained and that the architect is thereby able to envisage the effect of his building. Without this process of education, there is no way an architect can seriously know what he is doing when he begins to build.
This leads Scruton to a defence of the present possibilities for the classical tradition in architecture, whereas it has led me (for very similar reasons) to a belief in the enduring potentialities of a neo-Gothic style. Perhaps it is Scruton’s tendency to slide from belief in authority towards rigid authoritarianism which causes him to prefer the former to the latter: in any event, he not only ignores the achievements of, say, nineteenth-century Gothic, but seems unaware of the strong continuities between Classicism and the modernism he abhors.
This is admittedly a difference of taste; it is none the less important for that. But the real question, for me, is whether Scruton’s aesthetic position necessitates, or even implies, adherence to his political ideas. Scruton’s own view, at least at times, is that it does. Thus, in a private communication, he has welcomed the positions I have taken on aesthetics, but regretted that I have refused to adopt the politics which, for him, seem to stem from them.
But his own position involves him in a profound contradiction of which he seems blissfully unaware. For example, he is frequently at pains to dissociate himself from any espousal of the ideology of the ‘Free Market’ economy, which he perceives as a product of nineteenth-century Liberalism. This is understandable because competitive market capitalism has indeed shown itself to be singularly incompatible with those aesthetic and ethical values rooted in a conception of a common human nature, and a common culture, which he and I both seek to uphold. Nonetheless, his practical politics are invariably those of vigorous support for the most archaic revivalists of a nineteenth-century, free- market economy. Thus Scruton’s article about the Royal Academy Summer Show, published in The Times last June, was headed, improbably, ‘A Victory for Art at the Polls’.
Scruton should take a more careful look at the architecture of Peterhouse, which formed us both. He accuses Sir Leslie Martin, head of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form in Cambridge, and architect of the hideous ‘functionalist’ William Stone building in the grounds of the College, of what he calls ‘the Architecture of Leninism’. He fails to point out, however, that the Great Hall of Peterhouse is embellished by William Morris’s superb decorative restoration, affirming the values of tradition and aesthetic experience. Sir Leslie is a member of the British cultural establishment; William Morris was a revolutionary socialist.
I do not, for one moment, wish to imply that the left has provided a true haven for the ethical and aesthetic values eroded by the right. That would be palpably absurd. My point is rather that if Sir Leslie can epitomise ‘the Architecture of Leninism’, and Morris can affirm true aesthetic values and experience, then there is no necessary connection between Scruton’s sound aesthetic insights, and so-called ‘conservative’ political ideas.
Nonetheless E. P. Thompson pointed out that the true vandals of British laws, customs, and liberties in the 1970s were ‘not the raging revolutionaries of the extreme Left’, but the Tory establishment itself. It may well be that there is no hope for the maintenance of conditions favourable to those authentic and ethical experiences, rooted in a common culture, in which Scruton and I both believe. But if there is, I believe it will be found in a revised socialism rather than in the ravagings of a ‘Free Market’ capitalist economy. I cannot see the June 1983 elections as a ‘Victory for Art at the Polls’ and I do not think Roger Scruton could either, if he was as honest and critical in his politics as he is in his aesthetics.
1983