takes it to be all too limited in contrast to the world of which he has caught a glimpse that runs deeper, the world he has felt in a more animated way. And is it not true that even when we take the very small step of looking through a microscope we see images right before our eyes that, if we were not in on the game, if we saw them quite by accident somewhere out there, we would all proclaim to be fantastic and extravagant? Meanwhile, Mr. X, coming across such an image in his daily tabloid, would cry, “That’s supposed to be a form of nature? It’s a botched piece of art!” So, then, is the artist to grapple with a microscope? With history? Paleontology? Only by way of comparison, only in the direction of mobility. And not in the direction of fidelity to a nature that is under scientific control! Only in the direction of freedom . . . a freedom that simply demands the right to be as mobile as grand nature itself is mobile. From modeled image to primordial image! Presumptuous fellow, this artist, who doubtless remains in hiding all the while. Yet artists are called upon today to press forward, to achieve some sort of proximity to that secret ground by which the primordial law nourishes every development. There where the central organ of all temporal-spatial animatedness, whether we call it the brain or the heart of Creation, occasions all the functions: Who as an artist would not want to dwell there? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of Creation, which holds the secret key to everything that is? But not everyone should head there! Each person should move
in the domain where the beat of his heart tells him he should move. Thus in their own age, our antipodes of yesteryear, the impressionists, quite rightly dwelled by the tender shoots and the groundcover of everyday appearances. Our own pounding heart drives us downward, down deep to the primal ground. Whatever grows out of this drive, whether it be called, as it well may, dream or idea or fantasy, is for now to be taken quite seriously, at least if it ceaselessly engages itself to configuration by the appropriate pictorial means. For these curiosities will then become realities, realities of art, realities that make of life something more than, on average, it appears to be. Because they do not simply mirror what has been seen, adding a dash more or less of temperament, but rather make visible those things that were seen in secret. Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) delivered the talk “On Modern Art” from which this essay is excerpted on January 26, 1924, at the art association of Jena, in Germany, in connection with a show of his work. Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art commissioned a translation of the lecture for a catalogue accompanying its fall 2012 exhibition Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision—From Nature to Art. The translator is David Farrell Krell, professor emeritus of philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. The lecture was published in its entirety as “Paul Klee, Über die moderne Kunst,” in Paul Klee in Jena 1924. Der Vortrag (Minerva. Jenaer Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte, 10), edited by Thomas Kain, Mona Meister, and Franz-Joachim Verspohl, Jena 1999. Reprinted by permission of the Zentrum Paul Klee. Philosophy professor John Sallis discusses three Klee works in Curator’s Cut, a video available via Full Story at www.bc.edu/bcm.
ode to the Boston ‘R’ By Will Dowd Face we cut from our photo album. Incident we omit from our history books.
and leave it ajar. Our doctors ask us to open up and say car
We are closer to our mothers than we are to our farthers.
No one can remember what R did to become our scarlet letter,
or czar or jaguar. In studies, children deem us the babysitters
No, we have never seen dropped R’s shimmer in the air.
why there is a blue collar blue law against it. But here we are
most likely to litter, burn dinner, leave the door unlatched,
But they have an afterlife of sorts. They gather in the ether.
with our collective speech impediment, our East Coast Cockney.
leave them at the park without a parka after dark.
They come back to us in the drumfire of late summer thunder.
We chew our words with our mouth open. We draw their drawer
But without R we never scar or scare. We never ask for more.
Will Dowd ’06 is a Boston area writer. He earned an MFA from New York University in 2011.
f a l l 2012
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