Voilà en bref notre position d'artistes : nous sommes les derniers représentants de l'artisanat auquel la production marchande a porté un coup fatal. (William Morris, Edimbourg, 1889)Pour William Morris, la distinction entre l'art et l'artisanat, entre la conception et l'exécution, devait être abolie : tout homme, à son échelle, pouvait être producteur de beauté - que ce soit dans la réalisation d'un tableau, d'un vêtement, d'un meuble ; et tout homme également avait le droit, dans sa vie quotidienne, d'être entouré de beaux objets. (Michel Houellebecq, La carte et le territoire)

L'art et l'artisanat

« Puis John Ball reprit la parole, et dit, « En vérité, je suis sûr que vous savez aussi bien que moi ce que nous avons à faire – et en premier lieu, que nous devons agir – car celui qui est solitaire ou prisonnier peut rêver de la compagnie des hommes, mais celui que des compagnons entourent doit agir au lieu de rêver […] ».

Un rêve de John Ball

Art is long and life is short; let us at least do something before we die. We seek perfection, but can find no perfect means to bring it about; let it be enough for us if we can unite with those whose aims are right, and their means honest and feasible. I tell you if we wait for perfection in association in these days of combat we shall die before we can do anything. Help us now, you whom the fortune of your birth has helped to make wise and refined; and as you help us in our work-a-day business toward the success of the cause, instill into us your superior wisdom, your superior refinement, and you in your turn may be helped by the courage and hope of those who are not so completely wise and refined. Remember we have but one weapon against that terrible organization of selfishness which we attack, and that weapon is Union. Yes, and it should be obvious union, which we can be conscious of as we mix with others who are hostile or indifferent to the cause; organized brotherhood is that which must break the spell of anarchical Plutocracy. One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.

Art under Plutocracy - Art and its Producers

L'âge de l'ersatz

The tale tells that in times long past there was a dwelling of men beside a great wood. Before it lay a plain, not very great, but which was, as it were, an isle in the sea of woodland, since even when you stood on the flat ground, you could see trees everywhere in the offing, though as for hills, you could scarce say that there were any; only swellings-up of the earth here and there, like the upheavings of the water that one sees at whiles going on amidst the eddies of a swift but deep stream.

On either side, to right and left the tree-girdle reached out toward the blue distance, thick close and unsundered, save where it and the plain which it begirdled was cleft amidmost by a river about as wide as the Thames at Sheene when the flood-tide is at its highest, but so swift and full of eddies, that it gave token of mountains not so far distant, though they were hidden. On each side moreover of the stream of this river was a wide space of stones, great and little, and in most places above this stony waste were banks of a few feet high, showing where the yearly winter flood was most commonly stayed.

You must know that this great clearing in the woodland was not a matter of haphazard; though the river had driven a road whereby men might fare on each side of its hurrying stream. It was men who had made that Isle in the woodland.

The House of the Wolfings

In dem Roman schläft der Erzähler, William Guest, nach der Rückkehr von einer Sitzung der Sozialistischen Liga ein und erwacht in einer zukünftigen Gesellschaft, die auf Gemeineigentum und demokratischer Kontrolle der Produktionsmittel beruht. In dieser Gesellschaft gibt es kein Privateigentum, keine Großstädte, keine Behörden, kein Geldsystem, keine Heirat oder Scheidung, keine Gerichte, keine Gefängnisse und keine Klassensysteme. Der Roman untersucht während einer utopischen Reise auf der Themse die Aspekte dieser Gesellschaft, einschließlich ihrer Organisation und der Beziehungen, die sie zwischen den Menschen hervorbringt. Es ist sowohl eine Reise durch die von der Revolution veränderte Gesellschaft als auch eine Suche nach dem Glück. Das Ziel der Suche des Protagonisten ist Ellen, das Symbol der wiedergeborenen Zeit, eine im Sozialismus emanzipierte Frau aus der Arbeiterklasse, aber auch ein gütiger Naturgeist und die Seele in Frauengestalt. 

Gibt es überzeugende Antworten auf Einwände gegen den Sozialismus? Gibt es in der utopisch kommunistischen Gesellschaft überhaupt einen Anreiz zur Arbeit? Wird der Protagonist sein persönliches Glück finden?

Nachrichten von Nirgendwo - Eine Epoche der Ruhe und eine utopische Romanze

Of all the stories kept in being by the saga-tellers and left for our delight, there is none that so epitomises human experience; has within the same space so much of nature and of life; so fully the temper and genius of the Northern folk, as that of the Volsungs and Niblungs, which has in varied shapes entered into the literature of many lands. In the beginning there is no doubt that the story belonged to the common ancestral folk of all the Teutonic of Scando-Gothic peoples in the earliest days of their wanderings. Whether they came from the Hindu Kush, or originated in Northern Europe, brought it with them from Asia, or evolved it among the mountains and rivers it has taken for scenery, none know nor can; but each branch of their descendants has it in one form or another, and as the Icelanders were the very crown and flower of the northern folk, so also the story which is the peculiar heritage of that folk received in their hands its highest expression and most noble form.

The Volsungs Saga

It is true that if all were going smoothly with art, or at all events so smoothly that there were but a few malcontents in the world, you might listen with some pleasure, and perhaps advantage, to the talk of an old hand in the craft concerning ways of work, the snares that beset success, and the shortest road to it, to a tale of workshop receipts and the like: that would be a pleasant talk surely between friends and fellow-workmen; but it seems to me as if it were not for us as yet; nay, maybe we may live long and find no time fit for such restful talk as the cheerful histories of the hopes and fears of our workshops: anyhow to-night I cannot do it, but must once again call the faithful of art to a battle wider and more distracting than that kindly struggle with nature, to which all true craftsmen are born; which is both the building-up and the wearing-away of their lives...

That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few people would venture to assert, and yet most civilised people act as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves and those that are to come after them; for that beauty, which is what is meant by ART, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life, if we are to live as nature meant us to; that is, unless we are content to be less than men.

Now I ask you, as I have been asking myself this long while, what proportion of the population in civilised countries has any share at all in that necessity of life?

I say that the answer which must be made to that question justifies my fear that modern civilisation is on the road to trample out all the beauty of life, and to make us less than men.

Now if there should be any here who will say: It was always so; there always was a mass of rough ignorance that knew and cared nothing about art; I answer first, that if that be the case, then it was always wrong, and we, as soon as we have become conscious of that wrong, are bound to set it right if we can...

The Beauty of Life - Making the Best of It

Up at the League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution, finally shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of their views on the future of the fully-developed new society.

Says our friend: Considering the subject, the discussion was good-tempered; for those present being used to public meetings and after-lecture debates, if they did not listen to each others opinions (which could scarcely be expected of them), at all events did not always attempt to speak all together, as is the custom of people in ordinary polite society when conversing on a subject which interests them. For the rest, there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions.

L'art et l'artisanat

Résumé

Plus de livres de William Morris

Critiques

Ce livre n'a pas encore de critiques