JM Larkin
“Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know what it is.’”
–Matthew Arnold, “Last Words on Translating Homer,” 1873
The Grand Style, used to describe the elevated poetic rhetoric of Shakespeare and Milton through T.S. Elliot and Wallace Stevens(1), is far from absent in the discussion of visual art(2), despite the visual often being pivoted as the underdog against the persuasive dominance of the written word(3). It is within the many paradoxes of ‘Modernism’ (“All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.” Wallace Stevens(4)), that art conveying meaning without relying on incompatible historical and social realities flourished. Poetry by its nature is forced to justify its blatant lack of utility and adapted quite easily to the absence of general context that plagued the ever expanding world, relying on ingrained lyricism to provide, as it always has, a remedy for rumination. While never at great risk of becoming too self-helpy on its own, the tendency for grand poetry to demand relevancy through eloquence has led to unusual applications of verse visually; fragmented and altered cursive Walt Whitman attributions adorn the walls of middle-class suburban dining rooms and Orientalist translations of Rumi are printed on coffee cups in yoga-themed cafes (both are available on Etsy). The persuasive potential of the visual finds obvious application in advertising(5), with words and images in multimodal cahoots for the benign and noble purpose of selling a product. This has resulted in some of the noblest compositions of the 20th century, like The Marlboro Man or Charlie the Tuna, who both masterfully adagize the emphatic distinction between taste and flavour. While poetry needed to reassert its absence of utility, creating works whose meanings evade even its author (“There seems to be a feeling in the academic world that there’s something interesting about my poetry, though little agreement as to its ultimate worth and considerable confusion about what, if anything, it means…On occasions when I have tried to discuss the meanings of my poems, I have found that I was inventing plausible-sounding ones which I knew to be untrue.” John Ashbery(6)), the use of persuasion in peddling the visually superfluous never really caught on. One could argue that the canonization of mid-century expressive painting demonstrates an acceptance of the grandness of the indeterminate in the visual, but such grandness then by admission can be attributed only to the natural state of the artifact after it has been produced, not to the rhetorical skill of its maker. And the pervasive and unfortunate association of visual art with high finance has made it quite difficult to justify work as nothing more than an advertisement for itself, relying heavily on the precedence of the written word in the form of, frequently misapplied, philosophy and social criticism. What is absent in visual art is the continuity of rhetoric that has elevated the written word beyond simply a means to convey the obvious and to sell itself. Consideration of the following principles may help the working artist overcome this:
Material Awareness
Of principal importance, primarily because of the ubiquity of its absence, is an understanding of what materials the artist is actually working with. It is of no real fault of the current artist that they do not possess the intimacy of materials of their predecessors as most all of them arrive at their “chosen medium” through pursuing what is commercially marketed and available to them, resulting in the artist’s earliest hurdle to extend their own art beyond the end product of a commercially ubiquitous form completely detached from the invention of the “artist”. In order to achieve The Grand Style, an artist must know that their gesso is not actually gesso, or that their canvas is not really canvas. It is essential to understand and demonstrate basic principles such as fat over lean. The ceramicist must know at the least where their clay comes from(not which art store), just as one who pours resin should be able to describe, at a minimum, the difference between organic and synthetic resins. A disconnect with the past is acceptable, but ignorance is unforgivable. Masters of this application of The Grand Style are Helen Frankenthaler, Constantin Brancusi, and Medardo Roso, whose engagement with their work is always intimately tied to the realities of the material they use. Material awareness, while imperative, is also the most easily achieved of the many available visual rhetorical devices.
Rhythm and Meter
The proper application of these principles relies heavily on the intuitive command of spatial distance. Color is quantitative and subject to Euclidean methods of analysis, but the artist need not be concerned with this in the same manner as the commercial color matcher, whose job concerns overcoming the challenges of metamerism. It is in fact the elusive nature of rhythm and meter in visual composition that make it one of the most potent devices when properly used. Commonly described devices of verbal rhetoric (such as repetition, omission, or solecism) are easily applied to any visual composition, while literal attempts to direct the eye by use of line and tonal emphasis should be avoided as pedantic. Meditations on time create a deep sense of spatial punctuation and can be achieved through blatant references to the past either stylistically or didactically. Emphasis on material atrophy is extremely powerful, requiring a thorough mastery of the aforementioned principle of material awareness. Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer come to mind when considering particularly masterful applications of the principles of rhythm and meter in contemporary visual artifacts.
Embellishment
To make the unnecessary necessary is at the heart of The Grand Style. Thoughts and ideas emerged from contextual nebula should be emphasized when applied visually, whereas there is decent argument for its disadvantage in the written word (“A disadvantage of the rhetorical style appears to be that a dislocation takes place, through the hypertrophy of the auditory imagination at the expense of the visual and tactile, so that the inner meaning is separated from the surface, and tends to become something occult, or at least without effect upon the reader until fully understood.” T.S. Eliot(7)). This level of ambiguity should be considered an asset to the visual artist whose artifacts sort of stick around more than a poem, in that they like take up permanent and real space. It should be noted that any level of embellishment, even in the most minimalist fashion, should be considered for its stylistic merit in a visual format. Thusly, the blue of Yves Klein should be seen as an embellishment in the most profound sense.
Multimodality
A painting should never be seen as just a painting, or a sculpture never just a sculpture. The artist wishing to achieve The Grand Style should always consider the totality of their work in relation to everything else around it. The plinth, the stretcher frame, or the tack that pins the paper to the wall should all be considered integral parts of the whole work. There should be no distinction between the vitrine and the object it contains. Recognition of the dynamic interaction between common objects enables the artist to avoid hierarchical pitfalls and emphasizes the unique role of the artist in aestheticizing the banal. Marcel Duchamp is the most obvious example, but a replacement of “multimedia” with “multimodal” may reveal how important this device is to current artists, though many fail to initiate the full potential of its application (again likely due to a lack of material awareness).
Allusions to History
It remains relevant that of all genres of painting, ‘history painting’ was considered to be the highest in its ability to achieve The Grand Style (“In conformity to custom, I call this part of the art ‘history painting’; it ought to be called ‘poetical’, as in reality it is.” –Sir Joshua Reynolds(1)). That “history is in the eye of the beholder” means it’s a near inexhaustible source of creative inspiration for the artist, and as there seems to be nothing left to say about history that hasn’t already been said, its mere mention elevates the work beyond the narrow confines of its own context. Cy Twombly was undoubtedly a master of this.
Incongruent Didacticism
The artist is frequently wrong and should be minimally concerned with the consequences of their misunderstandings. What permits the brazen use of persuasive devices by the artist is the lack of any general argument. Plainly, if the artist is not trying to convince of anything, any efforts to persuade exist only by the merit of their presentation, not the congruency of their assertion. A skillful combination of capriccio and adagia suits this purpose. It is at great peril that the artist wishing to produce work of a didactic nature make the substance of their amble personal in nature, lest they rely heavily on humor, as is the case with Philip Guston. Still, in most every case it is better to remain gnomic and optimistic, for nobody really needs to be taught bitterness.
Conclusion
It can be said that reliance on written word of the most prosaic nature has damaged the ability for visual art to express its fullest rhetorical potential, but this is not to say that critical or academic examinations of work are somehow wrong or any less important, the same way that not all art at all times should aspire towards greatness (“…it is more important, in some vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet…” T.S. Eliot(7)).
Notes:
- Burton, Gideon O. “Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric.” https://rhetoric.byu.edu/
- Reynolds, Joshua. “Seven Discourses on Art.” www.gutenberg.org/files/2176/2176-h/2176-h.htm.
- Foss, Sonja. “Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory.” https://people.uncw.edu/atkinsa/496/Framing%20the%20Study%20of%20Visual%20Rhetoric.pdf
- Burke, Ted. “Some Notes on Wallace Stevens.” www.thevariablefoot.com/2020/08/some-notes-on-wallace-stevens.html
- Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Barthes-Rhetoric-of-the-image-ex.pdf
- Goldman, Nathan. “The Pleasures of John Ashbery’s ‘Difficult’ Poetry.” https://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-john-ashberys-difficult-poetry/
- Eliot, T.S. “A note on the verse of Milton.” https://pages.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/eliot.htm
The Jazz Robot Studios 