The Artist as Critic of Society

Eighteenth-century English artist and poet William Blake, and contemporary artists American poet Allen Ginsberg and New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, were all critics of their times.

Blake’s prophetic books can be read in part as commentaries on the three revolutions (American, French and Industrial) that shaped his life. J. Bronowski, in his book William Blake and the Age of Revolution (New York, Harper and Row, 1969) questions why the prophetic books are difficult, with “smoky and violent” imagery, whereas Blake’s poems can be read simply. He argues that the prophetic books were rhetoric, and that Blake needed to conceal his message for fear of the authorities.

There was one exception. The French Revolution, “written plainly and with open sympathy”, was set but never printed. According to Bronowski, the more repressive political environment in England and the deteriorating situation in France, as the Revolution gave way to Napoleon, added up to “an unhappy turning point in Blake’s writing.” His rhetorical writing in later years would never again be so clear.

Blake was, in fact, tried for sedition in 1804, and although the charges were dismissed, grew disillusioned with politics and turned his social conscience to the evils of the industrial revolution. The later prophetic books Milton and Jerusalem overflow with Satanic wheels and Satanic mills, as in the poet’s view “all the Arts of Life [had] chang’d into the Arts of Death”.

While Blake was obliged to live in fear, Ginsberg had the opportunity in mid-20th century America to be more forthwright with his social commentary. According to Václav Havel, writer and dramatist and first president of the Czech Republic, “the literary works of the Beat authors were understood not only as a denouncement of the social establishment…as a protest against the superficiality of our civilization…. but also as a potential instrument for resistance to the totalitarian system that had been imposed on our existence”.. When Ginsberg returned to New York from Paris in 1958, into a storm of controversy over his book Howl, he was asked by Marc D. Schleifer why he had returned. “To save America,” he answered. “I don’t know what from.” (Both quotes from Allen Ginsberg: Spontaneous Mind, edited by David Carter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

Ginsberg was also an environmentalist. In an interview with Simon Albury in 1986 (in Carter, 2001), he counted as one of the changes that had lasted from the nineteen-sixties “a permanent change in civilised consciousness so that it includes the notion of one world, fresh planet, the awareness of the fragility of the planet as an ecological unity…”

McCahon, of course, is well-known for his paintings eulogising the New Zealand landscape and incorporating it into scenes and texts taken from the Bible. Quoted in Peter Simpson’s book Colin McCahon: The Titirangi Years (Auckland: Auckland University Press 2007), McCahon writes of Landscape theme and variations (Series A&B), that he “hoped to throw people into an involvement with the raw land”. Returning from a trip to America in 1958, and dismayed by “the despoiled landscape of [the city of] Auckland’ “he fled North in memory and painted the Northland panels”. On one of these panels McCahon describes the rugged region as “a landscape with too few lovers”.

Searching for Answers: Symbolism, Contradictions, the One

How do human beings cope in a society with environmental and social challenges? The symbolism in their work suggests that Blake, Ginsberg and McCahon might have answered the question in similar ways.

Bronowski describes Blake as a mystic. “The mystery is that one and the many are parts, each of the other; that in the beginning is the end, and that the centre meets the circumference.” People must progress not only as social beings but personally, seeking experiences despite the frustration and sorrow they may bring. The idea of contraries was fundamental to Blake’s thought: the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience represented two contrary states of the human soul, which must eventually be reconciled.

Colin McCahon, with his lifelong friend John Caselberg (a poet in the bardic prophetic tradition like Ginsberg and Blake), collaborated in the 1950s on a broadsheet of art and poetry called Issue. (McCahon’s love of poetry and use of text in his work are described in a separate Suite 101 article, The Word and Religious Art.) In the book Answering Hark (Nelson: Craig Potton, 2001), Peter Simpson includes excerpts of a joint manifesto (prepared for the broadsheet but never published), called On the Nature of Art. McCahon’s handwritten manuscript of this essay features drawings that “closely relate to the themes of the manifesto, especially the idea of synthesis out of the dialectical clash of opposites”, which Simpson acknowledges as a “William Blake-like notion”.

The manifesto also makes reference to the unity that is the goal of the mystic: “In art, with death we have life, an end is always a beginning”.

For his part, Ginsberg (in a 1970 interview with the New York Quarterly, included in the Carter book) described his ambition as a writer in almost mystical terms. It was, he said, “to write during a prophetic illuminative seizure…to be in a state of such complete blissful consciousness that any language emanating from that state will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate.”

Although Blake and McCahon would not have used the Buddhist terminology of “blissful consciousness”, Ginsberg’s artistic goal is a sentiment with which they might well have agreed.

A companion article on Suite 101 (Prophetic Art) looks at what appears to have been a similar wellspring of inspiration for these three creative men.

Artist in Society

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