Earlier this year, the TLS published my review of two books by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In the recently translated first volume of Also a History of Philosophy (2023), Habermas discusses a paradox in the genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking, that is, contemporary philosophical thought that is concerned with the character of our knowledge of the world, but which has abandoned any ambition to imagine, describe, or know anything beyond our world. The paradox is this: despite the secular character of modern Western thought, its origins can be traced back to early Jewish theology and ancient Greek metaphysics. In this respect, modern Western thought shares features common to other major intellectual traditions which also draw upon ancient religious texts, notably, Buddhism and the Vedic teachings of ancient India, and Taoism and the Confucian teachings of ancient China. These traditions all experienced a gradual but decisive revolution in character during in the period known as the Axial Age (roughly, the eighth to the third centuries, BCE).
Habermas’s argument is that during the Axial Age, previously well-established forms of reasoning ceased to provide convincing explanations for what was observed in the natural world, and that core religious beliefs and ritual behaviours ceased to provide effective forms of communal integration in the shared social world. These failures, or blockages, provoked the intellectual revolutions associated with the teachings of Buddha, Moses, Laozi, and Plato. The collective learning processes that overcame these blockages – which took different forms in each context – provide the template for Habermas’s theory of philosophical and social progress. As a species, he argues, we are able to learn, to solve problems, to improve our knowledge of the world around us and the arrangements by which we organise our society. While progress has taken different forms in the East and the West, there is an underlying continuity of shared learning and its application across the whole range of human thought.
It is an appealing theory, developed at length in this and the subsequent volumes (yet to be translated), but, as one might expect from a history of philosophy, Habermas pitches his argument at a high level of abstraction. His ideas have been on my mind recently, as I have reflected on my visits to two interesting art exhibitions, where formal problems in modernist painting have been addressed by artists whose life experiences draw on diverse cultural inheritances. Just as there are more roads to contemporary post-metaphysical thought than the particular road taken by Western rationalism, so there are more roads to contemporary abstract painting that the road taken by twentieth century American and European artists. This in turn implies two further thoughts: first, that there is more than one road forward, to new forms of painting; and second, that there is no one end point to which these roads might lead. Instead, there are, in the words of Catherine Li, unlimited endings.
Anwar Jalal Shemza was born in northern India, but in his early twenties he lived in newly independent Pakistan, where he published modernist novels and poetry in Urdu. He moved to England in his late twenties and studied fine art at the Slade School. Provoked by the failure of British artists and critics to understand the rich history of Islamic art, over the next thirty years he produced a body of work that combined elements of both European and Islamic traditions, transformed into a rich modernist aesthetic that celebrated the interplay of colour, geometric forms, and the drawn line. His work is characterised by repeating patterns: of circles and squares, of architectural motifs, of Arabic calligraphy, and abstract patterns drawn from traditional south-Asian textiles. The influence of Paul Klee, whose work Shemza greatly admired, is clear, but by his use of Islamic shapes and symbols, he created a distinctively heterogenous form of modernist art.
Heads, an exhibition of Shemza’s early work, mostly dating from 1956-57, when he first arrived in England, is currently on show at Hales Gallery, in Shoreditch. I had never seen these paintings before, although I know Shemza’s work quite well, and they surprised me. They appear as early experiments in fusion: of modernist European portraiture – Picasso, for sure, but also Modigliani – with bright, earth-colours formed into geometric patterns, drawn from Indian artwork traditions. These paintings look unlike anything else being made in Europe at that time, and yet they also appear familiar and accessible: the distortion and jumbling of the elements of the face, familiar from cubist work; the chequerboard squares beloved by Klee but presented in colours drawn from Mughal textiles; and the repetitive wall-paper patterns found both in the work of Matisse and traditional Indian block-printing. These artworks infuse modernist European forms with elements drawn from Shemza’s Indian heritage, creating vibrant images that connect traditional portraiture to geometric abstraction. Just as Pakistan was a new political entity, an innovative attempt to overcome the blockage caused by colonialism, so Shemza’s work appears as a new solution to formal problems in modern painting, the use of colour patterns to suggest emotion, which is no longer immediately visible in the deconstructed cubist portrait.
A few weeks earlier, I visited an exhibition of work by two London-based artists, held at Lot Projects in Broadway Market, organised by Catherine Li, an innovative young Chinese curator who lives and works in London. This show contrasted the figurative work of James Lang, which draws on medieval motifs and symbols, with the abstract work of Dien Berziga, that plays with modernist appropriations of traditional craft skills. I had admired one of Berziga’s paintings, which I saw at another exhibition, last year, so I was eager to view more of his work. (Full disclosure: I admired it sufficiently greatly to purchase it, and it now hangs on one of the walls of my home).
Berziga is of mixed Italian and Chinese heritage, and his work draws on his experience of visiting the beautiful, ancient architectural monuments preserved in Rome, as well as the brash modernity of contemporary Chinese urban environments, where everything that is old has been destroyed to make way for the new. His work hints at aged materials, for example in the shapes and construction of his frames, but in reality, he makes extensive use of contemporary technology to achieve the desired effects. Likewise, his palette draws on a traditional range of dark, earth-like tones, familiar from European landscape painting from previous centuries, yet the mark-making and gestures are informed by the work of contemporary abstract painters. From this blend of old and new, East and West, Berziga creates hybrid forms which draw attention to their diverse historical and cultural sources. Their modernity, one might say, is partly achieved through the self-conscious way in which they acknowledge the traditions from which they have emerged, even as they celebrate their distance from these same traditions.
That the mixed heritage of an artist’s life experience can lead to the mixing of meanings in the artist’s work, is a theme drawn out by Catherine Li in the texts she produced to accompany the exhibition, which she entitled A Sack of Dirt. She plays with the idea that “sack” can mean an object that we use to hold or store valuable items (in French, a handbag is un sac à main), but the word “dirt” has mostly negative connotations, as something that is unsanitary, unclean, not to be mixed with the sacred and the precious. Yes, dirt is also sometimes a synonym for dust, or particles of soil, the part of the earth’s crust which supplies fertility and food to sustain organic life. A sack of dirt might be something worthless, something to be avoided or thrown away; but equally it might be a precious source of growth, a source of sustenance, and of new life. As Li says: I use sack to describe the truth that painting always has a limitation – it is always a limited container, materially. I mean, paintings have limited beginnings but unlimited endings.
The twentieth century Spanish critic Eugenio d’Ors once wrote: outside tradition there is no place for true originality, everything that is not tradition is plagiarism. Although the original text is in Catalan, the saying is now displayed in Spanish, on the façade of a former Habsburg palace that is part of the Prado museum in Madrid. It is a modernist thought engraved onto traditional architecture. It is a paradoxical thought, but it draws our attention back to Habermas’s argument that traditional worldviews – ancient religious and philosophical belief systems – contain within themselves the materials out of which contemporary answers can be constructed, to resolve problems that our ancestors were unable to overcome. Modernity is characteristically self-aware of its novelty: but it arises from within the traditions of the past, drawing on them as it defines itself against them.
There is a reason why reading Homer still makes sense, why reading Confucius and the Vedic texts remains valuable: these foundational documents of global culture were important, for many centuries, as enablers of social and political stability and progress. The answers they suggest to the dilemmas they present no longer satisfy us today, but they provide resources from which we might construct new and better solutions. It is also why older art, whether from the classical period, or more recent centuries, retains its value and interest; not because it is somehow better than contemporary artworks, but because it is necessarily the starting point for anything better that might come later.
Contemporary culture – whether we consider philosophy, painting, or criticism – inevitably starts from a limited set of resources, from the dirt in the sack, that Li describes. Nonetheless, it can take us in an unlimited number of new directions, some of which might prove to be dead ends, but others might be progressive. This is the context in which I enjoyed viewing the work of Shemza and Berziga, two artists who, in different times and in different ways, have combined elements from two very different painting traditions, to make new work that speaks to our post-metaphysical world, whether we experience it today in Asia or in Europe.