Terry Teachout, the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, wrote a fascinating article that was buried in the weekend edition of the June 26th newspaper, “Too Complicated for Words: Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?” Here is a condensed version:
The novels of [James] Joyce and Gertrude Stein, the poetry of Ezra Pound and John Ashbery, the music of Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter, the paintings of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock: All have at one time or another been dismissed as complicated to the point of unintelligibility.
Modern art comes in many varieties, and countless works once thought to be unintelligible now strike most of us as clear. But I have yet to notice a collective change of heart when it comes to such exercises in hermetic modernism as Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” which contains thousands of sentences like this: “It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?”
Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? Fred Lerdahl thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned. In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays “a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result.” He distinguishes between pieces of modern music that are “complex” but intelligible and others that are excessively “complicated”—containing too many “non-redundant events per unit [of] time” for the brain to process. “Much contemporary music,” he says, “pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity.”
. . . . The word “time” is central to Mr. Lerdahl’s argument, for it explains why an equally complicated painting like Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm” appeals to viewers who find the music of Mr. Boulez or the prose of Joyce hopelessly offputting. Unlike “Finnegans Wake,” which consists of 628 closely packed pages that take weeks to read, the splattery tangles and swirls of “Autumn Rhythm” (which hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) can be experienced in a single glance. Is that enough time to see everything Pollock put into “Autumn Rhythm”? No, but it’s long enough for the painting to make a strong and meaningful impression on the viewer.
That is why hypercomplex modern visual art is accessible in a way that hypercomplex literature and music are not. You can’t get through a complicated novel faster by turning the pages more quickly. Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way. I suppose I could get to the bottom of “Finnegans Wake” if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble? Or would I be better served by spending the same amount of time rereading the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” a modern masterpiece that is not gratuitiously complicated but rewardingly complex.
“You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence,” H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading “Finnegans Wake.” That didn’t faze him. “The demand that I make of my reader,” Joyce said, “is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” To which the obvious retort is: Life’s too short.
My big take-away from this article is the useful distinction between complex art and complicated art; the former is gratifying, albeit challenging, while the latter is gratuitous and grating.
The question for us to explore is this: Why does the modern artist pursue “complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity”? Following H. G. Wells’ complaint to James Joyce, it would seem that complicatedness happens when the modern artist – shirking his status as a co-creator – refuses creaturely things, such as “elementary needs” and “restricted time and intelligence.” He aspires to be the Creator – not to be like the Creator. He tricks himself into timelessness and omniscience, creating art that demands to be worshiped (“he should devote his whole life to reading my works”). The result of this trickery is complicatedness, which beguiles the reader, listener or viewer into thinking that the art is deep when it might be shallow, wise when it might be foolish, and beautiful when it might be ugly.
Complexity, I submit, is the signature of the Creator; all derivative creators can only aspire to forge this signature. Delusion––another name for complicatedness––occurs when the cocksure scribe confuses himself for the Author, signing off on art that is a poor copy of the original.
Cross posted on Mere Orthodoxy
June 28th, 2010 | 1:07 pm | #1
After learning about how Pollock produced his artwork–dripping paint onto canvases with sticks, stones, brushes, etc.–it’s hard to see it as in any way complicated. Beautiful? Yes. Complex and intricate in its design? Sure. Great modern art? Yeah. But intellectually deep and complicated? No. Not for me, at least. Still, I do appreciate looking at it.
As for Joyce, I always thought that part of his complexity–especially in Finnegan’s Wake–had to do with his attempted destruction of the novel, even of language itself. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I always saw that work as attempting to do to the written story what the Dadaists attempted to do to art: destroy it.
And as for the modern music I hear at the philharmonic…much of it just sounds like a bunch of noise, as if someone decided to throw the instruments down the stairs, and then play the noise back to the audience.
June 28th, 2010 | 3:03 pm | #2
STEVE: Thanks for offering a comment which reinforces Terry Teachout’s point: “hypercomplex modern visual art is accessible in a way that hypercomplex literature and music are not.” Notice, you appreciated Pollock’s paintings after learning more about his techniques and conceptions. Should art require an education for appreciation? Or does the best kind of art stand on its own?
June 28th, 2010 | 6:35 pm | #3
Christopher: “Should art require an education for appreciation? Or does the best kind of art stand on its own?”
It’s an interesting question. The more I’ve learned about Abstract Expressionism, or Impressionism, etc., the more–in general, that is–I’ve appreciated it. But it’s limited. As I learned about Dadaism, or Futurism, I could appreciate their place in art history, but I found much–no, most–of the artwork ridiculous. Duchamp’s “Fountain”? Arp’s paper pieces randomly dropped onto another paper? They’re a complete joke.
So yes, I’d say that in most cases, the best kind of art can stand on its own, accessible to the connoisseur and the regular Joe. There is a surface appeal, but one can find depth–real, legitimate depth–if one looks for it. One can look at a piece of art, but perhaps, one can see into it as well (if that makes any sense).
June 29th, 2010 | 9:17 am | #4
“Should art require an education for appreciation? Or does the best kind of art stand on its own?”
At least some of what I regard as the best kind of art does require education. Offhand I’ll offer The Arnolfini Wedding and the Annunciation, both by Jan van Eyck, as examples.
July 1st, 2010 | 8:03 am | #5
This reminds me not only of modern literature, but also much modern literary theory. Perhaps this explains some of Derrida’s appeal – beguiling the reader into thinking his work is insightful when it is really rambling, penetrating when it is really obfuscating, and wise when it is really foolish.
July 2nd, 2010 | 2:27 pm | #6
I cannot agree that Joyce, unlike other modernists/postmodernists perhaps, had the “destruction of the novel” as his aim. The complexity of the language in “Finnegans Wake” arises, I believe, from the desire to write a story including, well, everything (“Here Comes Everybody”). It would certainly be much easier to read if Joyce, a resident of such polyglot locales as Trieste, Paris, and Zurich, had confined his punning to English.
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