In parallel to this, ‘anartism’ has become a sort of substitute for faith. The artist is now clad in philosophical clothing. The language of morality (or perhaps mysticism) has superseded that of aesthetics. One no longer comments on the beauty of artistic works, but on what interesting state of mind they reflect.
Mr Michel Ragon, the fifty-three-year-old president of the International Association of Art Critics, makes the following remark: ‘From John Cage729 and Julian Beck730 to the hippies, a spiritualistic tide has slowly been spreading across the globe, one that is more oecumenical that any council has ever been and makes no distinction between Zeus and Buddha, picking up Krishna and Zen along the way and ultimately readopting the universalistic social mindset that characterised pre-Marxist socialists. Jesus is thus no longer the son of God, but brother to both Gandhi and Martin Luther King’ (in L’art: pour quoi faire?,731 Casterman, 1971).
People now visit exhibitions ‘as they once visited Lourdes’. ‘Once inside the painters’ church, they make the sign of the cross and believe that it all actually happened’.
Supported by snobbism and various subsidies, ‘art enjoys all possible rights but is robbed of all possible means’. And yet, the avant-garde somehow manages to take pleasure in denouncing the ‘corrupting power of money’: it is the peak of intellectual chic for all those creative individuals whose works are currently trendy and is, therefore, well-paid. Are today’s painters inconsolably grief-stricken due to no longer being ‘cursed’? ‘Just imagine a happy and fortunate chick, a frolicking Ingres, an elated Delacroix, an appreciated Cézanne, a power-wielding Van Gogh and uncontested Picasso!’
One speaks of ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ art. Despite making no attempt whatsoever to conceal her sympathies for the extreme Left,732 the author still manages to write: ‘It is as absurd for an artist to avail himself of Marx, Lenin or Che Guevara as it is for him to capitalise on Stalin or Mao’. Incidentally, she adds, it is ‘bourgeois art’ that the ‘proletarians’ favour, especially when it takes on a Sulpician or chromo sort of shape (see also the ‘Stalinian icons in Déroulède’s style’ mentioned by Malraux733 in the afterword of his Conquerors).
Some fifteen to twenty years ago, non-art rushed into the gap that had been opened by the great trend of informal art. In this abstract form, Mrs Parmelin sees a mere ‘academism of modern art’; a fake type of avant-garde that takes us back to the ancient history of the Near-East: ‘Beware lest you corrupt yourselves, and make yourselves a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth’ (Deuteronomy 4:16–18).
From a more general perspective, one cannot help noticing that informal does not relate to anything specific: no familiar landscape, and no particular type of man, people or era. It is therefore no coincidence that it has become fashionable at a time when cultural diversity finds itself under threat. Being of universalistic essence, it is the sole kind of art unable to arouse a bad conscience within a ‘unified’ humanity.
The Zhdanovism of the French Communist Party
It would be a genuinely vain endeavour for one to seek out a single abstract canvas in the great museums of Leipzig and Dresden, in East Germany. In the USSR, the advertising of ‘socialist realism’ is an inherent part of the struggle against cosmopolitanism. Zhdanov, Stalin’s secular arm in the cultural domain, was this doctrine’s very first theoretician and the master-purifier of the Academy of Arts.
In its 1967 edition, the Dictionary of Soviet Philosophy defined socialist realism in the following manner: ‘Its essence resides in its faithfulness to life and the truthfulness of the latter’s depiction, no matter how difficult it may be, expressed entirely in artistic images envisioned from a communist perspective. Its fundamental ideological and aesthetical principles are as follows: devotion to the communist ideology; conducting one’s activity in the service of the people and the party’s own spirit; maintaining the closest possible ties to the struggle of working classes; socialist humanism and internationalism; historical optimism; and the rejection of formalism, subjectivism, and naturalistic primitivism’.
The French Communist Party, which has since been mixing wine with water, was not to be outdone during the 1950s. It walked its own path of ideological-artistic Zhdanovism. In 1953, French author Aragon, who had had the audacity to publish a Picasso-made portrait of Stalin in his Lettres françaises,734 became the focus of a most callous disavowal: ‘The secretariat of the French Communist Party strongly disapproves of the publication of Picasso’s portrayal of the great Stalin in Les Lettres françaises on the 12th of March. Without casting any doubt upon the genuine sentiments of the great artist Picasso, whose attachment to the cause of the working class is known to all, our party’s secretariat must express its regret at that fact that comrade Aragon, who has otherwise been involved in a courageous struggle for the development of realistic art, has allowed the said publication’ (17th March, 1973).
Shortly afterwards, ‘indignant’ letters began pouring into the headquarters of the Central Committee, each striving to outdo all others in denouncing the ‘doodle’ most acrimoniously. One of the readers of L’Humanité hurled the following words at Picasso: ‘Do not be pretentious! Your talent is not worthy of Stalin’.
On the 9th of April, Aragon proceeded to explain himself: ‘I chose to publish the portrait because I saw nothing wrong with it, nothing that could pain others or contradict the deep sadness felt by Picasso, myself and the grief-stricken readers at the time, a profound sadness that the news of Stalin’s death had aroused in us all’.
The art of abstract Soviet painting, currently headed by Oscar Rabin, is henceforth tolerated, as confirmed by an exhibition launched in Moscow on 29th February, 1976 and comprising seventy paintings. Its representatives are, however, excluded from any and all membership in the Syndicate of Artists.
On the 20th of October, The Pravda remarked: ‘The purpose of modernism is to falsify the reality of the external world using every available means. […] A young and strong organism is in no need of drugs and our young socialist society categorically rejects the ensorcellment of modernism’.
Various experiments conducted over the past years, particularly in England by professor Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape, Grasset, 1968), have shown that chimpanzees are able to create quite appropriate non-figurative paintings. They can even produce a large number provided that they are supplied with adequate materials. They do, furthermore, have the advantage of being modest.
As for Hélène Parmelin, she points out that she has no intention whatsoever to become the defender of ‘pompous’ painters. Instead, she struggles most vigorously for the genuine ones, whether good or bad; for all those for whom a ‘trace of man’ can indeed subsist in art. And she defines this art as follows: ‘It is, in a way, the only means bestowed upon man to familiarise himself with the world using other means than research and the accumulation of scientific knowledge; for painting does not sublimate the world: it extends it. It neither copies it nor imitates it, but actually echoes it. It thus requires “infinite maturation”’.
The book opens with the author quoting Baudelaire’s735 exquisite statement: ‘Nothing is as tiring as having to explain what everyone ought to know’.
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L’art et la rose,736 an essay by Hélène Parmelin. UGE/10–18, 183 pages.
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Half a century ago, in a series of powerful works, Camille Mauclair737 had already targeted ‘counter-academism’ and the ‘internationality of ugliness’ (See La folie picturale,738 Watelet, 1928). Denouncing a painting art that strived ‘to impose a kind of deformation, as well as an international ugliness that abolishes ethnic characteristics and aspirations, excludes nature for the benefit of a type of geometric hallucination and produces identical paintings in Rio,
Warsaw or Paris’, the author affirmed: ‘Our painting abilities have been disrupted; so be it. The real danger, however, lies in the conception which seeks to impose the tyranny of interchangeable formulae where our taste, sensibility and territory no longer matter, while simultaneously separating art from nature and the artist from his own kind and severing their roots’.
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A Parallel History
The high priests of the Incas actually went to the moon, and extra-terrestrial beings used the alignments of Carnac739 so as to land in Baalbek740 or Tiahuanaco.741 More recently, they caused the sun to go bonkers in the vicinity of Fatima.742
Our entire history is to be rewritten; in their official declarations, scientists conceal the truth from us all. It is the great initiates that possess ‘true’ knowledge, but they hide in remote areas or lost continents. As a result, truth can only reach us in filtered form, one drop at a time.
And yet, one can still catch sight of it through certain editors, particularly in the collection entitled Les énigmes de l’univers,743 headed by Mr Francis Mazière (Fantastique île de Pâques744 ) and published by Laffont editions. There are also further ones, including Présence du futur745 (Denoël), Les Chemins de l’impossible746 (Albin Michel), Guides noirs747 (Tchou), Réalisme fantastique748 (Copernic), Aventures mystérieuses749 (J’ai lu), and many others.
All these collections saw the light of day following the release of Matin des magiciens,750 published by Gallimard in 1960. Louis Pauwels, a former teacher, writer, journalist and metaphysical poet from the Dutch part of Belgium, wrote it in collaboration with Odessa-born Jacques Bergier, a sixty-four-year-old mixture of professor Cosine751 and professor Calculus.752 It was a triumph. The book’s success enabled the rehabilitation of alternative literature and allowed a certain ‘sect’ to come out of its catacombs, a sect whose cult had, thus far, only been celebrated in bookshops such as ‘L’Atome’, ‘Le Palimugre’, ‘La Mandragore’ or ‘Le Terrain vague’.
Nowadays, Pauwels and Bergier would love to be able to acknowledge their legitimate children and none other. It is too late for that, however. It is a fact that they both deplore, for the creator has become the victim of his own creation. Such is the revenge of the Golem.
The trend of a ‘parallel history’ can be accounted for through two sentiments that are currently resurfacing: a nostalgia for a ‘mythical’ past and a hunger for the fantastic. The more space society dedicates to scientific certitudes, the more people ‘reassure’ themselves through the imaginary. The fantastic has been fashionable for about a decade and a half now: this marks the return of the new gods. As for science-fiction, it projects into the ‘hyper-future’ a variety of scenarios that speak to us in the present tense.
Even history itself cannot find any shelter in this regard. There is no longer such a thing as a history ‘of divine right’. There are, instead, several pasts to ‘choose’ from and be reconstructed, since each one leaves a different mark on our present. Modern historiography has broken with the illusion of a ‘unidimensional’ or purely event-based history. It revises the past from a structural angle and the perspective of mentalities.
The authors of the Mysteries of the Universe collection (the most representative publication of its kind) venture even further, of course. They have set their minds on rethinking our whole history, denouncing all ‘conformist’ scientists and ‘falsifiers’ by means of an inexhaustible topic: Tradition.
The Secrets of the ‘Great Initiates’
This is what Mr Jean-Michel Angebert writes in Le livre de la Tradition:753 ‘The Tradition expressed in the great legends, mythologies and sacred texts of our various religions is the sole guiding thread with the ability to lead us through history’s symbolic and initiatory labyrinth’.
He adds: ‘The primordial scripture whose elements are scattered across all languages did not aim to preserve the material traces of human thoughts, but to act as testimony of a non-human message that has come to us from the stars around. This initial living scripture made use of engraved symbols corresponding to sounds whose very number and vibrations triggered a prodigious activation of man’s entire mental faculties. As a result of a catastrophe whose cause remains unknown, mankind lost its clairvoyant ability, an ability that has henceforth been restricted to a small number of initiates’.
These initiates include Rama, Orpheus, Hermes, Jesus and Plato, in addition to alchemists, astrologists, the constructors of cathedrals, the druids, the Cathars, the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar and, more generally, all those that can be the focus of any claims whatsoever simply because we scarcely know anything about them.
This sets the pace of a collection in which one encounters both the worst and the best, with the most interesting content represented by the essays of Jean-Gaston Bardet (Le trésor secret d’Ishrael),754 Millar Burrows (The Dead Sea Scrolls), Jean-Paul Clébert (Provence antique),755 Jacques Huynen (L’énigme des vierges noires),756 Helmut Berndt (Die Nibelungen),757 Gilbert Pillot (Le code secret de l’Odyssée),758 Jean-Louis Bernard (Aux origines de l’Egypte),759 Fernand Niel (Connaissance des megaliths),760 Gérard de Sède (Le mystère gothique),761 and others.
In Jésus ou le mortel secret des templiers,762 Mr Robert Ambelain, readopting the views of Daniel Massé, draws a connection between the life of Jesus and the revolt of the zealots. In La vie secrete de Paul,763 he defines Paul (Saul of Tarsus) as a Herodian prince of Idumean origin, the grand-son of Herod the Great from his mother’s side, claiming that he had participated in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero764 before ordering the burning of Rome. He also mentions the (often ferocious) conflicts between Saint Peter and Simon the Magician.765
Mr Louis Charpentier766 has attempted to shed light upon the secret origins of the ‘Game of the Goose’ (Les géants et le mystère des origines).767 He also wonders whether the Cathedral of Chartres is not, through the Knights Templar and the Order of Cîteaux, heir to the pyramids and the Temple of Salomon (Les mystères de la cathédrale de Chartres).768
On their part, ‘saucerists’ have been equally active with Mr Henry Durrant (Le livre noir des soucoupes volantes769 and Les dossiers des OVNI)770 and Frank Edwards (Flying Saucers: Serious Business).
Following in the footsteps of Mr Robert Charroux771 (Histoire inconnue des hommes depuis cent mille ans,772 Le livre du mystérieux Inconnu)773 and convinced that they had succeeded in deciphering the Etruscan or Basque language, locating the Holy Grail, or perfecting infallibles martingales, fifteen authors of more or less great talent have set out to publish their views. Most of them take pride in their lack of ‘university qualifications’, looking down on those who contradict their assertions and cladding themselves in the mystery of ‘initiation’ the moment one proceeds to ask them excessively accurate questions. Some of them have now attained notoriety and have been heading specialised clubs or reports within the sphere of ‘alternative knowledge’ and magic.
All the ‘usual’ subjects have been raised: forgotten worlds, lost continents, the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids (André Pochan’s L’énigme de la grande pyramide),774 the arrival of the extra-terrestrials (Erich von Däniken’s Zurück zu den Sternen),775 the Cathars and the Phoenicians, gods and giants, shooting stars, treasure hunts, the philosopher’s stone, astral secrets, haunted houses, sea serpents and the thousand and one nights.
In Les archives du savoir perdu,776 Mr Guy Tarade777 makes random claims about the fact that the ancestors of the Siberian sorcerers ‘moved about in space just as we do today’, that extra-terrestrials are buried in Mexico, that there is ‘a bizarre analogy between the shape of a human foetus at the end of its first month of development and that of a germinating wheat seed’, that Hitler did not meet his demise in Berlin (‘As everyone knows’), that Cardinal Richelieu was actually a Rosicrucian dignitary, that the pyramids of Egypt served as ‘anti-radiation shelters’ and that certain pharaohs had the ability to duplicate themselves.
Mr Tarade also says that the apparition of Fati
ma corresponds to ‘the queen of the sky mentioned by Jeremiah’. It is, in all likelihood, ‘an extra-terrestrial being that has, for several millennia, been manifesting herself to the men and women of our planet, using means that remain completely unknown to us’.
Not All Amateurs Are Like Schliemann
From ‘unexpected’ affirmations to puerile assertions, one plummets rather quickly into the sphere of hoaxes. ‘Linguistic fiction’ is, in this regard, a fearsome issue. This (abundantly practiced) method consists in creating close connections between completely unrelated words, some of which even belong to different linguistic families, their spoken usage separated by century-long or millennia-long intervals, before using these dubious approximations (which are founded upon vague assonances) to draw the most ‘fascinating’ conclusions. One thus proceeds to haphazardly ‘compare’ Norwegian, Latin, Swahili and Hebrew. Displaying no discernment whatsoever, a certain part of the public, ever ignorant of the laws of linguistics, swallows such claims whole.
Genre ‘specialists’ often mention the example of Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), a German amateur archaeologist and merchant who, in contradiction with the views of contemporary scientists, managed to locate the Mycenaean and Trojan ruins by relying solely on the Homeric texts.
And yet, however amateurish he may have been, Schliemann still held the scientific method in high regard, always conducting his excavations in a most pragmatic fashion; his successful undertakings were therefore immediately acknowledged. It must also be said that even though Schliemann was indeed an amateur, not every amateur is a Schliemann. One could, at this stage, mention thousands of ‘official’ scientists who have succeeded in attaining palpable results, and tens of thousands of amateurs who have failed to accomplish anything and are unlikely to ever stumble upon anything at all.
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