An Untenable Position

In the discussion we had at the beginning of class in which we talked about Bataille and the fundamental contradiction between the science we take to be fact and the fact that this science emphasizes our futility to our ultimate demise, I was struck by the untenable position these two contradictory notions put us in.  Last semester, in my Art Criticisms and Methodology course, I wrote a paper about the early 20^th century German painter Emil Nolde whom, I argued, was also put in an untenable position.

            Nolde was a German Expressionist painter whose pieces, like his 1910 Dance Around the Golden Calf, feature thickly painted canvases with large, visible brushstrokes in vibrant colors and display figures in various stages of abstraction.  For years, he was heralded as a great German painter, if not the great German painter of his time.  Nolde was also a member of the Nazi party from the early 1920s.   Many Nazi officials including Joseph Goebbels purchased his works for their private collections.   Nolde attempted to convey his German heritage in his pieces by depicting German landscapes with a spirituality inspired by the Northern Romantic tradition of painting.

In 1935, Hitler gave a speech at the Nuremburg Party congress in which, he derided certain modernist artists as being anti-Nazi.  Following the speech, Goebbels led a witch-hunt that targeted all modern artists in any level of abstraction.  It had been decreed that abstract, or simply expressionist, modern art was clearly unacceptable and would be treated as the degenerate product of sick minds.  Neo-Classical art, which, in painting, relied on the smoothing of brushstrokes, eliminating both the hand and any emotional discharge of the artist, and, in sculpture, drew its inspiration from Greco-Roman figurative sculpture, became the preferred mode of art in Nazi-era Germany. In 1937, Entartete Kunst, an art show organized by the Nazi party in order to display works that had been deemed degenerate, opened in Munich.  The show featured 730 confiscated works by 112 artists.  33 oil paintings and 5 works on paper by Nolde were included in the show.  In 1941, Nolde received a Malberbot which forbade him from painting, exhibiting, or selling his works. 

Nolde was interpellated by the Nazi party through his inclusion in this show and was thus put in an untenable position.  On the one hand, he was an unwavering supporter of the Nazi cause and believed in the Nazi propaganda.  And yet, that propaganda he whole-heartedly believed in claimed that he himself was degenerate.  Nolde agreed that the other works in Entartete Kunst were degenerate; he despised Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, and even other Expressionist pieces.  And yet, his own works were hung beside them proclaiming his lack of German-ness, his impurity and degeneracy.

As I was writing this paper, I tried to imagine the internal conflict Nolde must have experienced in this uncomfortable and mind-boggling position.  I kept thinking about how torn Nolde must have felt between his belief in his own works and his belief in the Nazi party and its cause.  But after reading Bataille and Teilhard, this position seems to be much more familiar.

The disjunction in an absolute conviction in materialism in which we become aware that we are living in a fundamental illusion seems to put Bataille, and us through reading his work, in a similarly untenable position.  I immediately started to consider whether this contradiction made Nolde’s position any less uncomfortable, or whether the position we as humans are in, torn between a faith in ourselves and this drive towards attaining knowledge and self-awareness and understanding whilst keeping in mind our ultimate death, is not as unfathomable and discouraging as it seems to be.