The Artist as Demiurge: Seligmann on Space

This essay introduces the Seligmann Center’s publication of the fourth of Kurt Seligmann’s New School lectures. They are available from the Center or through me for $15 apiece. Each includes a reproduction of Seligmann’s typescript together with scholarly and artistic responses.

Unattributed quotations are from Seligmnn's lecture.



     Kurt Seligmann’s lecture “The Quest of Space” opens by noting the distinction between the physical space of the two dimensional canvas and the imaginative space created by the artist. He then proceeds to discuss the relations between these and the space of lived experience. Though Seligmann considers historical techniques for achieving the illusion of three dimensions, his essential interest is not in photorealistic verisimilitude but rather the potential for art to create an autonomous zone, no longer dependent on observed reality but subject only to the creator’s vision.
     Having posed in this way the fundamental challenge of visual invention, he conducts a painter’s tour through art history making cogent comments on cave paintings, Italian Renaissance, and modern works. Many of his observations are suggestive, even impressionistic, inviting further speculation rather than making dogmatic statements. His account contrasts the unframed floating images of palaeolithic art with the ancient Near Eastern works with which the artist “overcomes his awe of the boundless by magico-plastic means.” These poles, which might be termed the realistic and the magical, define the issue for Seligmann. Pragmatic rather than dogmatic in his general assumptions, he allows for the claims of expressive theories such as those promoted by the Romantics and functional theories in which the most important element is an effect on the consumer such as didactic art and pure entertainment, yet his own orientation is closer to formalist theories that focus on qualities in the work itself such as those of aestheticists and New Critics.
     He discusses a succession of artistic practices, medieval, Renaissance, academic, impressionist, and Surrealist, providing flashes of fresh understanding more often than not, but always pursuing his grander theme. Though the question seems at times in his exposition a technical matter, for Seligmann artistic creation of space reenacts the creation of the universe described in the opening line of Genesis. Using concepts derived more from philosophic and Hermetic sources than Hebrew ones, he seeks to establish the artist as an independent quasi-divine demiurge whose creations are self-justifying. Spurning the concept of artistic creation as imitation of reality and also the Surrealist faith in the integrity of the unconscious and of chance, he asserts the autonomy of the imagination.
     In this emphasis he distances himself from many earlier writers. The most widespread view, dominant from Plato until recent times, regards art as mimesis of the perceived world, but Seligmann specifically opposes the sufficiency of imitation. For him realism misses the point; its pursuit abdicates the potential of art and, in the crushing phrase he used in “Artist, Canvas, Reality,” realism is “the lowest of tastes.” When he lectured on “Space” he maintained that art is always artificial, “a world in itself . . . alluding to reality, a symbol of reality, a mirage of the thought rather of the real, than of the reality itself.” The greatest medieval paintings are “artifices in the image of creation which was the work of the greatest of all artificers, God.”
     In realistic cave paintings, on the other hand, as there are “no limiting edges,” there can therefore be no distinction between the world and the objet d’art, and this requisite artificiality remains still out of grasp. By attempting to mirror what we see, the realistic artist forecloses the possibility of a more profound truth. For Seligmann the move from applying images to available rock surfaces without any “frame” to “the invention of the four edges of a painting” is “most important.” Within a defined space the artist may create a work which “stands for the universe,” in effect, a new cosmos.
     He contrasts the random “realism” of cave paintings that reflects the mundane vision available to all eyes with ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art works which, he argues, create a “safety zone” in which people are protected from chaos. We moderns, having emerged from the long era of faith stretching from archaic times until the nineteenth century, may yet take refuge in the similarly “foolhardy optimism” of magic which, like religion, promises an intelligible, orderly, and significant cosmos. An accurate vision of the whole would indicate the interrelationships of all parts as a sort of unity in variety akin to that of a multi-faceted diamond. To explore these linkages between micro- and macrocosm is the artist’s task.
     Seligmann dissented not only from the traditional theories of art as imitation, but also from Surrealist doctrine and practice which valued chance and the unconscious. He is surely challenging Breton when he condemns “haphazardness,” declaring “conception cannot reconcile itself with chance.” Further, “Artist Canvas Reality” made clear his reliance on conscious “Mind” in conceiving new art. Reluctant to identify with any other theoretical formulation, he considers Space itself to be in exile in 1953 (just as he and many of his friends had been), yet he predicts a rebirth of this “artistic space” in spite of the fact that “the plastic means used by the surrealists seem to be hostile to any deep and clear space construction.”
     The upshot of his rejection at once of the traditional and academic view and of his generation’s leading avant-garde formation is his judgement that “the boldest works of our time are . . . eclectic” and among these he must surely include his own. In “Artist Canvas Reality” Seligmann had described art as a “mysterious transubstantiation” using the language of Roman Catholic ritual to imply the quasi-divine status of the artist. He notes that the artist can create “a well understood world order to which everything the big and the small, the distant and the close submits.” “The work of art,” he goes on, seeks thus to render visible the “intercourse between the limited and the limitless.” In this way “boundless time and the time of human history reflect one another.” The system works, as he notes in his lecture on “Magic” because art, like mysticism or magic (including the kabbalah), reveals that “all is contained in all,” the universal in every the particular.
     Seligmann’s idea of art is closely allied with his interest in magic and the occult. The written tradition originates with certain passages in Plato (who elsewhere endorsed the imitation theory) and continues through Longinus, spreading with Neoplatonism, and becoming dominant with the Romantics. In the Ion and elsewhere Plato speaks of the artist as god-like, divinely inspired. The idea of the creator as demiurge rooted in passages of Plato is later critical to mystical texts which in turn underlay occult thought including that of the Hermetic Corpus which Seligmann found so significant. Plato’s Timaeus argues that the universe is so orderly and beautiful that is must surely be the product of a demiurge, that is to say, a craftsman or artist whose work is purposive, rational, and benevolent, the intentional product of mind (nous), a term Seligmann employs similarly. According to Seligmann the Persian deity Mazda “carved out” a portion of space-time “in which one can live.” Through imitation of this supreme intellect people may fulfil their highest destiny.
     Neoplatonism sustained these ideas. According to Plotinus "every particular thing is the image within matter of the Intellectual Principle which itself images the Divine Being." Such theories reentered European culture with vigor during the Renaissance through the publication of the Corpus Hermeticum and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. From this theory arise the complex multiple meanings of such paintings as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. What Ficino called “natural magic” to distinguish it from black magic relies on the mystic connections between natural phenomena, their mental representation, and the design of the cosmos.
     In specific terms, for Seligmann this means that “the small expresses the large,” a principle echoing the Hermetic microcosm/macrocosm relationship. The Smaragdine Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and passed down by Arabic authors, asserts “that which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below.” For Seligmann this identity is “the fundamental justification for magic.” Such interconnectedness also underlies symbolic and metaphorical associations of the sort critically important for seventeenth century iconography such as one sees in baroque title pages and emblem books and in the imagery of Metaphysical poetry.
     The conception of the artist as demiurge underlies Seligmann’s fascination with magic, hardly the magic of parlor tricks or Satanism, but rather the linking of above and below, inside and outside, the painting in a frame and the world outside. It is not through the realism of superficial resemblance but rather through a symbolic system of correspondences that the artist mounts to the sublime. For Seligmann the Egyptian deity Thoth, a figure closely identified with Hermes Trismegistus, is an important prototype of the artist. In “Space” he refers to Thoth’s act of creation through laughter. Perhaps ripples of that cosmic laughter may be seen in the carnivalesque costumes and ribands so frequent in Seligmann’s oeuvre.