MODERN ART

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 35, 4 May 1927, Page 6

MODERN ART

BEETHOVEN OR JAZZ MAGIC NOT LOGIC From time to time a great outcry arises from the people—a complaint that modernist art is mad—in other words is irrational. I can only hone that the people are right. All great art contains an element of the irrational. One might almost say that art is the irrational, contained in a structure of the purest and most logical shape. Without that logical shape or architecture the irrational does, of course, become lunacy. But within that shape the greatest art is contained. The irrational in logical shape produces such creators as Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven. Art is magic, n,ot logic. This craze for the logical spirit ; n irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity, in an age where women try to ab >lish the difference between their aspect and aims and those of men; where, as >a.rt of this ridiculous and unpleasant attempt they adopt a uniform dress. In this age, too, the edict has gone forth for the abolition of personality for the abolition of faces (which aie practically extinct). If you ask what songs the Sirens sing in these days, we may well rep.y that the wireless and the jazz .»and have taken the place of the Sirens, who have lost their old allure Or perhaps they have retired from the unequal contest, finding their singing is too unremuneratlve, and we may see them, slightly raddled and very noisy, dancing at a night club. Tli is state of things is mirrored within modern syncopated dance music, which removes music from the world of inspiration, where form evolves itself organically and from the inner need of the artist, and brings it into the world of machinery where form is super-imposed as a logical idea.

There is no time or space for dreams. —EDITH STILLWELL