PAGEANTRY: AN INDISPENSABLE MODERN ART
Collier, John
Pageantry: An Indispensable Modern Art By JOHN COLLIER Secretary of the People's Institute, New York City MOST art, since art began, has looked backward. It has sought a revival of lapsed...
...For good or ill we have and hold collectively...
...We were always social beings and dwellers within institutions, but we are now bound together by mightier forces, which span continents and oceans and enwrap the whole world...
...Now pageantry is collective art...
...This is no conservative cry, but rather a call for creators and for the creation of new social institutions, which will absorb the values of those that belong to an earlier age and can never revive...
...Viewed intimately we see that machinery wholly disregards the family...
...Machinery specializes labor and takes the vital expressiveness out of it...
...These new migrations are a movement of individuals, responding to an immediate economic pull, rather than the movements of colonial peoples or of tribes or nations carrying their institutions with them...
...It is time to send out a call for the salvage of institutions...
...But our world is brooding and experimenting to read the future through art...
...Collier is an admirable statement of the place of pageantry in modern art.—EDITOR'S NOTE...
...It has sought a revival of lapsed interests, lost loves, forgotten hopes and glories of old years...
...More and more the people of city and of country are turning to the pageant for an outlet to community self expression and for the preservation of healthy tradition...
...It is collective action under the sway of joy...
...Migrations on a scale never known before and in a way never known before are changing the face of the world...
...It is the most synthetic art, being drama, music, decoration and dance in one, and it is the most co-operative art, for multitudes of average people can render themselves creatively into and through the pageant form...
...The pageant builder stands, with reference to the age just dawning, in a position at least as central, creative and potential as the drama builder or architect of the dawn of Athens...
...Experimental science and political democracy are doing the same work...
...We stand, in fact, at the edge of a chasm, into which it would be easy to plunge the greater part of the human heritage of beauty, loyalty and civilization, and we face, just over the chasm, a promised land and sky-towering mountains and a starry sky...
...The family, the neighborhood, the guild, the church, the nation—all these collective units, in which life has gathered up its beauty and hope, are shredded to nothing by machinery...
...Other reasons make pageantry a peculiarly modern art...
...the pigmy is mightier than the giant of our grandfathers' days...
...The harnessing of machinery to social ends and the creation of new positive social institutions—these and none others are our means...
...Production and distribution are the determining influences in building up our great commercial cities, and we do not yet plan our cities or our civic institutions with a view to human or social conservation, but only to economic effectiveness...
...There is a third reason why pageantry is an indispensable modern art...
...A3 Wordsworth is related to the renaissance of wonder and to the coming of spiritual romanticism in the nineteenth century, so the pageant builder is, or can be, related to the dawn of social emotion and the spirituality which the twentieth century may achieve...
...The pageant is a synthesis of art, better adapted to bring out in the average man a more burning and positive vision of collective life, of its best dramatic possibilities and splendors than any other art or any other devices we have yet arrived at...
...Machinery has reduced mankind to a level...
...Of course machinery is only one of the influences which are producing collective thought...
...Humanity is ready for new institutions, and these institutions can become, for the first time in history, not institutions of conservative restraint and negation but institutions of liberation, joy and group achievement...
...Leisure, on which a heavier burden has been thrown than ever before, is given to commerce to exploit, and to exploit largely, through power machinery or labor-saving devices of one kind or another...
...Is it not indeed a new world...
...How can we bridge the chasm...
...the many must strive together if they will control the ravages of that new giant, the labor-saving machine...
...It is collective action in line with an emotional aesthetic, ideal purpose...
...The far has become the near in our day...
...In the following taken from an article recently written for the New York "Press" by Mr...
...This is one of the reasons for the development of pageantry...
...But machinery is the transcending influence which makes for collectivism...
...See America First As against Przemysl and Irkutsk and Crwgzvdt, we have Cutty hunk, Manayunk, Kokomo, Schenectady, and, not to forget, Skaneateles, Canaja-horie, Waxahachie, Kankakee, and Ishpeming.—Philadelphia Ledger...
...We want art to make us conscious of our own age —of the forward-looking movements and the seed within the shell...
...New class alignments on a vast and fiercely economic scale arc resulting from machinery...
...Now pageantry answers our call...
...Machinery, which has made us collective beings in an economic way, has played havoc with social institutions...
...And it is a world of tremendous possibility, but never have the social, the human and the ideal within us been beset and menaced with actual destruction as they are now...
Vol. 6 • November 1914 • No. 45
