`Every person is a special kind of artist'

STRATFORD CALDECOTT celebrates a movement of artists and thinkers who work in harmony with the rhythms of nature
Art: For Whom and for What? by Brian Keeble, Golgonooza, 1998, Ipswich, £14.95
BRIAN KEEBLE is a publisher as well as a writer. He is closely associated with the poet Kathleen Raine and helps to edit the journal of her London-based Temenos Academy, which is frequented and supported by Prince Charles. This group of thinkers, artists and architects draw their inspiration from what they call the philosophic perennis: not restricting this to Thomism (though the philosophy of St Thomas is one of its primary expressions in the West) but applying it to the workings of spiritual intuition in every religion. Islamic thinkers and Orientalists are particularly prominent among the influences on the Academy. (Knowing this makes it easier to understand some of the Prince's activities in recent years, including his public statements on architecture, and on the importance of good relations with Islam.)
Those associated with Temenos believe that through the correct use of the imagination (understood as a faculty of perception not of mere fantasy), human culture comes to embody divine wisdom. In a healthy, "traditional" society there is no human activity work, play, song, sex or death that is not in one way or another integrated with that wisdom. Human life should be lived, according to this primordial ideal, in harmony with the design of God in nature, using a productive method "in keeping with the rhythms and substance of nature".
These thinkers were ecologically-minded long before it became fashionable to be so. As for art, they see this as an aspect of the universal human vocation. An artist is not a special kind of person: rather, every person is a special kind of artist.In modern times such ideals have largely been abandoned. Brian Keeble is therefore no friend of modernity. But he does not confine his critique to the arts. Large-scale industrial production is bound up with the divorce of art from science, minds from matter and humanity from nature. "The juggernaut of modern industrial enterprise is based upon the moral neutrality of capitalist investment which exploits the nature of usury to exert unrelenting pressure towards a purely quantitative, economic expansion... We are embroiled in a pattern of life that is hardly able to distinguish between what is a real need and what is an artificially stimulated appetite and so cannot distinguish satisfaction from superfluity".
Keeble turns to several artists who represent tradition in the modern word' Samuel Palmer, Eric Gill, David Jones and Michael Cardew interspersing these chapters with more general reflections and commentary. The piece on Palmer contains excellent reproductions of works by the artist that positively shine with a light from beyond the world. A far cry from impressionism, they
succeed in capturing the "selfilluminating interiority of things, the sacredness of their being". This is a sacramental rather than a dualistic Platonism, distinguishing the world of Forms from the world of material appearances only to unite them in a new synthesis.
AmCHAPTER on Gill is followed by one on his disciple, the uch more difficult (less dogmatic, more tentative) writer and artist David Jones. For Jones, too, every human being is an artist, a "sacrament-maker". The central motif of his work is the relation between Art and Eucharist this supreme sacrament being the "paradigmatic performance of all acts of making". "The incarnate Logos, present in and uniting all things, is the decisive sanction for the artist's task." When this vision of man as homo faber breaks down in the modern world, we are looking at the death of humanity. As Jones writes: "What shall it profit a
community of men if it gains the whole world of political and economic and social rights and equalities and loses the 'habit of art'?"
The final artist to be considered is the English potter Michael Cardew. Cardew emphasises the artist as "Primordial Maker", and the influence of both Eastern and Western religious traditions is apparent in his understanding of art: that true art is not something different from craft, that its aim is to achieve a synthesis of use and beauty, and that the personality of the artist can only be realised through self-forgetfulness. "When concentrating on the form of something, you are unaware of being yourself, yet you are nourishing yourself, and the form that you do produce is yourself." Cardew brings us back once again to the wisdom of which this book is a fittingly beautiful treasury, and demonstrates that, far from being anachronistic, such wisdom is as important today as at all other times and places.