8 - Staging modernist abstraction: Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

Summary

What do you see?

John Logan, Red (2009: 9, 66)

Do not let us deceive ourselves, the common man, such as we produce in our civilization, is aesthetically a dead man.

Herbert Read, ‘The Fate of Modern Painting’ (1952: 63)

Basically, we liked everything.

Lee Hall, The Pitmen Painters (2008: 70)

It represents a man who moves across a space and disappears.

Yasmina Reza, ‘Art’ (1996: 63)

‘What do you see?’ (R 9, 66). A recurrent scenario in modernist discourses on visual art is the attempt to imagine what might be happening when the ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’ citizen gazes at a work of art. The scenario may be designed to raise broad questions about aesthetic education, and the nature of the artwork itself may be non-specific. But in the tendency for abstract art to be implied, we see how abstraction functions as a limit-case for questions of art's intelligibility or unintelligibility. In this chapter I examine three plays that actually stage this scenario, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, as part of their exploration of the legacy of visual abstraction in modernism.

First, let us look at how modernist art criticism prepares the ground. In the essay ‘Art and Life’ (1917), summarising the aesthetic revolution since Cézanne as ‘the re-establishment of purely aesthetic criteria in place of the criterion of conformity to appearance’, Roger Fry insisted that any such artist was inevitably ‘moving into a sphere more and more remote from that of the ordinary man’ (Fry 1981: 8). ‘In proportion as art becomes purer’, Fry argued, ‘the number of people to whom it appeals gets less’ (10). In ‘Art and Socialism’ (1912), Fry had anticipated the ‘violence’ of the misunderstanding between the true artistic community and the public, when the ‘average man’ becomes ‘extremely irritated by the sight of works which appear to him completely unintelligible’, not to mention ‘noxious and inassimilable’, to the extent that such art must undergo a process of ‘disinfection’ (49). Since the Victorian era the prevailing plutocracy had, he laments, produced a populace ‘whose emotional life has been drugged by the sugared poison of pseudo-art’ of the Victorian era, a condition of ‘corruption of taste’ and ‘emotional insincerity of the mass of the people’ such that, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw from a 1908 speech in Liverpool, ‘any picture that pleased more than ten per cent of the population should be immediately burned’ (44).