Pure Work: Mallarmé, Mondrian and Adamson (part 2)

Tombs for Mondrian and Brennan

Moving between the cover and the subtexts so far set out, one is confronted upon opening Waving to Hart Crane by two concrete poems that replicate the plastic image of Mondrian’s ‘Victory Boogie-Woogie’ from the cover. ‘Lozenge for Brennan’ and ‘Lozenge for Mondrian’ bring into close interplay the various concerns of the writers already mentioned. It is through the apposition of these figures that Adamson’s response to the Mallarméan poetic takes shape. While the lozenges draw to mind Mondrian’s own work of the same plane and form, they also visually mime Mallarmé’s dice from Un coup de dès. Reproduced en face, the lozenge/dice appear to verge upon rolling into the gutter of the pages.

That the poems are defined as lozenges places them under the sign of Neo-Plasticism, and will lead us to examine Mondrian’s rigorously conceived theories, the work’s relation to symbolism and experience. At the outset, however, that the poems are marked as Lozenges similarly brings to the fore that they appear in relation to death. The word lozenge connotes tomb or more exactly tomb-stone, from the Latin via Old French (lapis-lapidem-lauza-losenge). Adamson is once again writing in the elegiac tradition of the ‘tombeau.’ Reading them in the perspective of the Mallarméan poetic and the poems’ relation to the néant, these two poems represent homage and tomb to both Brennan and Mondrian. Adamson echoes Mallarmé’s acts of homage (see ‘Hommages et tombeaux’1) in which Mallarmé determined his own poetic lineage if not succession to Poe and Baudelaire. The tomb offers homage while the homage erects a tomb in which the predecessor is laid to rest. That Mallarmé is himself invoked no less than six times in the two poems suggests something not only of the French poet’s prevalence but also, perhaps, his irreducibility in Adamson’s work. While Adamson in effect lays Brennan and Mondrian to rest, Mallarmé becomes a spectre, a trope of negativity, that continues to function in the lozenges as a kinetic force, disinterred and disruptive to language. Mallarmé becomes a sign in the lozenges of the inability of the work to reduce itself to being.

Dualism: Mondrian towards the limit

Mondrian’s conception of art resonates strongly with Mallarméan poetics, yet the ontology that he develops differs radically. Whereas the practices in Mondrian’s and Mallarmé’s aesthetics are largely concordant, the results are dissimilar. A key difference between Mallarmé and Mondrian, one that is central to Adamson’s lozenges, is that where Mallarmé is obsessed with death, Mondrian, throughout his extensive theorising of the relation of art and life, barely affords death a glance. While both discuss abnegation and spirit, Mallarmé and Mondrian appear to move towards different ends. To look back upon Adamson’s construction of Crane’s bridge, it is as though each began their journey across the bridge from the centre, moving in opposite directions with the possibility that at the completion of their work they would arrive once more at the centre of the bridge; where they stood turned away, they would then stand face to face. This is perhaps the effect Adamson achieves through ‘Lozenge for Mondrian’as it traces the limen between a Mallarméan art concerned with mourning and silence, and the art of Mondrian where ‘MONDRIAN SEEKS HIS LIFE/ NOTHING TO DO WITH GRIEF TIME DEATH.’2

Mondrian’s conception of life has nothing to do with grief or death but, contrary to Adamson’s statement, everything to do with time. Similarly, Mondrian does not at any point gesture towards absence, towards an elsewhere where negativity determines a limit to being. Mondrian is concerned with the evolution of the universal, the spiritual in Hegelian terms, but rests it solely and without recourse in the perceptive experience of form and motility, believing it possible to bring it, Life, into full presence through Plastic Art. Mondrian’s work is remarkable precisely for this lacunae, that he forms a conception of art grounded in the absence of the subjective and the self-conscious abstraction of natural appearances, yet does not essentialise that absence as Mallarmé does. This draws Mondrian closer in some respects to Rilke’s stance, at least as far as both embrace a conception of art premised on the maintenance of dualist tensions and the artist’s, or more thoroughly the art work’s, ability to endure the tension therein.

Mondrian places his conception of art in terms of the evolution of modernity, conceiving of an art that extends the spirit beyond and within the individual, away from the natural, a move Mondrian notes as in accord with the technological progress of the early twentieth century:

The life of modern cultured man is gradually turning away from the natural: life is becoming more and more abstract.

As the natural (external) becomes more and more ‘automatic,’ we see life’s interest fixed more and more on the inward. The life of truly modern man is directed neither toward the material for its own sake nor toward the predominately emotional: rather, it takes the form of the autonomous life of the human spirit becoming conscious.

Modern man —although a unity of body, soul, and mind —manifests a changed consciousness: all expressions of life assume a different appearance, a more determinate abstract appearance.3

Here is a transformation of consciousness akin to Rilke’s, yet opposing the abstract and rarefied to the consciousness that Rilke named ‘supernumerous existence’ at the end of the Ninth Duino Elegy. In his first essaying of the New Plastic, Mondrian claims that art is ‘the product of a new duality in man’ which is itself ‘the product of a cultivated outwardness and of a deeper, more conscious inwardness.’4 The lozenges represent Adamson’s perhaps most apparent example of Mondrian’s ‘cultivated outwardness.’

Mondrian writes of art in terms of ‘the advancing culture of the spirit,’ asserting all the arts become ‘the plastic creation of determinate, equilibrated relationship’ which ‘most purely expresses the universal, the harmony, the unity that are proper to spirit.’5 The Hegelian basis at this stage of Mondrian’s conception of art is readily apparent. Mondrian goes on to qualify the universal in terms of ‘the profound essence of all existence,’6 thereby formulating an ontology of essence in accordance with Hegelian phenomenology. Through the assertion of the universal, Mondrian discounts the individuality of style, defining style as being the compound of ‘a timeless content and a transitory appearance’ and demanding that art be turned from the individual and transitory appearance towards the timeless content of the universal, claiming ‘the style which universal content appears most determinately plastic will be the purest.’7 Mondrian’s insistence upon the plasticity of art, the purity of an expression that discounts the individual for the universal recalls a great deal of Mallarmé’s own conception of the pure poem, and the relation of the poet to the poem. What is problematic about this conception of an art capable of expressing the universal through the erasure of the subject position is the privilege it affords the artist figure him/herself, which Mondrian puts in terms of a general ‘expanded consciousness’ extending from modern life’s ongoing abstraction of the real. Mondrian develops the perceived duality of the production of art in terms of the purification of the inward determination of appearance, by the movement from the natural to the abstract. This purification turns on the abstraction of the visible and nonvisible from the individuated8:

Starting from the visible: space is expressed in the new plastic not by the naturalistic plastic but by the (abstract) plastic of the plane; movement is expressed by movement and counter-movement in one; naturalistic color is expressed by plane, determinate color; and the capriciously curved line by the straight line. Thus the relative finds plastic expression through the determinate (a direct exteriorizing of the absolute). Starting from the nonvisible, from the inward: expansion is expressed by a (new) spatial expression; rest, by equilibrated movement; light, by pure planar colour. Thus in the new plastic, the absolute is manifested through the relative (in the composition and the universal means).9

Mondrian develops the idea of the absolute’s relativity into various meditations upon equilibrium within art and upon the tension, mentioned just now, in a fundamentally dualistic system. In his later essay ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’ (1936), Mondrian affirms this dualism, stating: ‘Art has shown that universal expression can only be created by a real equation of the universal and the individual.’10 As ever, Mondrian perceives the necessity of equivalency and reciprocity between the universal and the individual through the abstract and the particular, and draws out his theory of equilibrium which will offer a key to the tensions between Mondrian’s and Mallarmé’s conceptions of art, tensions in which Adamson himself is engaged. Mondrian writes:

First and foremost there is the fundamental law of dynamic equilibrium which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by the particular form.

The important task of all art, then, is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms of free lines. We must bear in mind, however, a distinction between these two forms of equilibrium in order to avoid confusion; for when we speak of equilibrium pure and simple we may be for, and at the same time against, a balance in the work of art. It is of the greatest importance to note the destructive-constructive quality of dynamic equilibrium.11

This is why time is so important in Mondrian’s conception of art, determining his concern with the absolute in terms of an ontology that returns to sense-certainty in contrast to Mallarmé’s ontology vested in absence. For Mallarmé, time is itself part of the delusory play of the spirit’s evolution within the absence of being. Mondrian is most explicit about the way in which time establishes a dynamic equilibrium:

The great struggle for artists is the annihilation of static equilibrium in their paintings through continuous oppositions (contrasts) among the means of expression. It is always natural for human beings to seek static balance. This balance of course is necessary to existence in time. But vitality in the continual succession of time always destroys this balance. Abstract art is a concrete expression of such a vitality.12

Mondrian hoped to achieve this concrete expression of vitality at the time of his death (he notes in the next breath that this is precisely the aim of ‘Victory Boogie-Woogie’). Through this constructive-destructive conception of the art work, Mondrian maintains the ontological implications of his ‘vision’ in a direct relation to the phenomenal and the particular, marking out a trajectory of determination which traces the evolution of being determined through the particular’s dynamic movement toward abstraction, a shadow of the Hegelian unfolding of Spirit. The ‘Life’ Mondrian seeks affirms a vitality that, if annihilatory, is vital as annihilatory and moves along a trajectory of being through the particular, which may resonate with the motility Kristeva speaks of as she addresses Mallarmé’s work. Mondrian describes this as ‘the destruction of melody,’13 further determining the privileged position of harmony and composition in Neo-Plasticism. In apposition to this it may be enough for the moment to recall Mallarmé’s own conception of the position of particularity in terms of the evolution of spirit, described in a letter of 1867 to Henri Cazalis: ‘I am impersonal now: not the Stéphane you once knew, but one of the ways the Spiritual Universe has found to see Itself, unfold Itself through what used to be me.’14

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