I wanted to post this because the historical context struck me. The author is Franz Marc, writing a proposed preface to a second edition to the expressionist text Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which chronicled the art of the Der Blaue Reiter group from 1912-14. This preface was written at the very beginning of World War One, a conflict in which Marc himself was killed, in 1916.
This is quoted in its entirety – emphasis mine to highlight key sections.
‘Foreword’ to the planned second volume of Der Blaue Reiter, trans. K. Lankheit, reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 158-159
“Once more and many times more we are trying to divert the attention of ardent men from the nice and pretty illusion inherited from the olden days toward existence, horrible and resounding.
Whenever the leaders of the crowds turn right, we turn left; when they point to a goal, we turn our backs; whenever they warn us against we hurry toward.
The world is crammed to suffocation. On every stone man has put the brand of his cleverness. Every word is leased or invested. When can man do for salvation buy give up everything and flee? What but draw a line between yesterday and today?
This is the great task of our time – the only one worth living and dying for. Not the slightest contempt for the great past is involved in this. We want something else. We do not want to live as carefree heirs or to live on the past. Even if we wanted to live like that, we could not. The inheritance is used up, and substitutes are making the world base.
Therefore we venture forth into new fields, and we are shocked to find that everything is still untrodden, unspoken, uncultivated, unexplored. The world lies virginal before us; our steps are shaky. If we dare to walk, we must cut the umbilical cord that ties us to our maternal past.
The world is giving birth to a new time; there is only one question: has the time now come to separate ourselves from the old world? Are we ready for the vita nuova? This is the terrifying question of our age. It is the question that will dominate this book. Everything in this volume is related to this question, and to nothing else. By it alone should we measure its form and its value.”
This is clearly the work of a man deeply troubled by the ways of the world. There’s a kind of millenarian desperation to it – the need to upset everything before it all collapses into a great, devastating war.
He evaluates the usefulness of art (though the word ‘art’ is never mentioned’) through the lens of how to disrupt the impending catastrophe. It should strive fervently for new ways of expression, explicitly countermanding the demands placed upon it by formal political power.
Simultaneously, there’s a response to the urbanizing/technologizing moment of his time, and its relationship to the “maternal” past. The crush of humanity and its seeming domination of the natural world (“On every stone man has put the brand of his cleverness”) triggers a visceral reaction to past ideologies, and puts the artist on the path towards creating for a new world.
So, it shows the need for the creation of the new in times of technological and political catastrophes, and the need to recognize when we reach the tipping points of out economic, political and technological reality.