The Malta Independent 12 November 2024, Tuesday
View E-Paper

Josef Kalleya, Ezra Pound and Victor Pasmore…and again: the Left

Wednesday, 17 June 2015, 12:32 Last update: about 10 years ago

Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci

 

These are three personalities who have nothing - or very little - to do with one another, yet the three are geniuses of great talent. They refused to conform to the system in which they were born, and also offered dangerous, radical and revolutionary alternatives against such systems.

The first of these is Josef Kalleya, whose Christian faith was so profound that it edged on the absurd. It put him in a dangerous position, so much so that even the Church itself, as a universal authority, attempted with all its might to marginalize this unique Maltese artist as well as his enigmatic and powerful works.

The fight of the Church authorities, sometimes subtle and other times expressed violently, against his unknown masterpieces was confronted by the artist with further works of profound thought, with a meditative silence and with an internal artistic revolution.

Josef Kalleya's situation reminds me very much of that faced by the great Russian author Leo Tolstoy with the Russian Orthodox Church, from which he was excommunicated. However, where the Russian writer established, without the expressed desire to do so, a radical movement based on the politics of non-violence (which directly influenced the young Gandhi), the Maltese sculptor decided to confront the ecclesiastical power with great religious submission, with unmatched obedience, total and almost infantile obedience with 'dogmatic' and perfect agreement with the Christian faith as it is taught in Biblical writings. Like Tolstoy, Kalleya believed that there was nothing clearer or easier to understand than the writings of the New Testament. The difficulty was not in the word but in action.

Even Victor Pasmore, who knew Kalleya well (as I wrote in a previous article) used to believe in the non-violent struggle against the dominant system and passed through interesting times also. He participated in actions against the values and politics of the capitalist system. This was made clear with his arrest when he refused to enter into military service which served the interests of the global economic powers who were fighting for the division of worldly treasures between themselves.

This division gave birth to the atrocious wars which plagued the 20th and also the 21st century. After his revolutionary activity, Pasmore decided that the best way in which to confront this cruel system was with brush and canvas.

Based on leftist anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist premises, Ezra Pound came to the paradoxically opposite conclusion to that of Pasmore and Kalleya. His beliefs and his analysis which were rather grotesquely Marxist and leftist were confusedly intermingled with his psychological elements, which led him to perceive Mussolini as the saviour against the capitalist system. Due to his mistake of equating capitalism with the Jewish people, his anti-Semitic philosophy was violently expressed.

Pound believed that during the process and the tragic evolution of Italian fascism and German Nazism, the savior against hegemony, against rampant capitalist imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century was in fact Mussolini. Others were also of the same opinion, such as Stravinsky and the British Vorticists. Pound was fervently in favour of fascist totalitarian politics and also, unfortunately, in favour of Hitler's atrocious politics.

A paradox. A paradox which I attempted to address during my last exhibition at the old University campus in Valletta.

Kalleya, Pasmore and Pound. All contemporaries. One was a fervent Catholic, co-founder of the M.U.S.E.U.M, who based his Christian beliefs on some of the greatest anti-Catholic dogmas as are the existence of hell, limbo, purgatory, and on the absolutism in the misericordia of God as the Father, which would even lead to the salvation of Lucifer.

Kalleya understood the Church not as a global organization and power, but as Ecclesia, meaning a community of peoples all united through diverse forms of the same faith. His proposal for City Gate, Valletta was out of this world. He wanted to transform Valletta into the womb of the Madonna and the entrance was to be the spiritual entrance into the world of the Mother of God.

Pasmore, who was a pacifist activist but a leftist activist, after his death had to experience the Catholic blessing of his works during the opening of the Pasmore Gallery at the Central Bank. He had chosen our islands as his second home and here we have the fortune of seeing how he managed to express his radical pacifism through forms which were inspired from forms found around Malta. We should be proud that Pasmore presence was and is here amongst us.

For Pound, the evil and bestiality of dominant society provoked him to respond with the same evil and bestiality in his works, through his character and even in the ugly and beautiful paradoxes in his life.

Three giants who in their own way fought against the same system within which we are living today.

Within the context of all this, I was glad to hear Prof. Dominic Fenech talk during the opening of the Classical Studies conference (University of Malta, Valletta Campus). He enunciated an important and intriguing point: he quoted from a book written by Anthony Burgess (another radical author who also has a direct connection to Malta) wherein the study of Classics in this novel became subversive to the present system. In fact, as I have asserted in other articles, the study of Beauty - and even the study of the classics in the contemporary scene - has become a radical, revolutionary and leftist action.

Society has cast aside and thrown out all elements of Beauty, of Thought, so much so that this has now become dangerous. Today, the search for Beauty, for Truth (whatever this may be) and for values of the Antique World, and the path towards the Classical past are no longer stagnant, antiquated, useless or archaic endeavours. They have become and are becoming dangerous counteractions to the society of hamburgers which is offering only rubbish and nonsensical values. The mistake of the Left is that it is failing to notice that the fight against poverty and for equality, towards the equal distribution of wealth, towards a stable politics of justice for all, is not a uniquely economic fight for everyone to own a fridge, a television and have free healthcare.

It is a greatly difficult struggle to not allow neoliberal society, which offers us fridges, televisions and free healthcare, to undermine all our basic values, drain our minds to take back those fridges, televisions and health services for free itself. The nation remains empty headed, and also without fridges.

To fight against poverty by offering hamburgers to the poor is the trap with which capitalist society succeeded in fooling the Left. To offer healing to the poor in this manner is the language of the Right.

The Left is that which offers whole alternatives, holistic and fundamental, not only from the economic angle but, moreover, from the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and artistic side. Alternatives cannot only be alternatives to the burger, but must be alternatives of thought and action.

Thus, it is extremely important that the Left revises its approach towards art, towards history and to the Classic.

If it fails in doing so, it itself will become the voice of the Right and of the dominant class; the class against which the Left believes it is fighting. 

 

Josef Kalleya's works will be discussed within an international context, together with the work of other Maltese and foreign sculptors, during a conference being organized by the History of Art Department, University of Malta. Further information may be found on https://www.um.edu.mt/events/parmes2015

 

Article edited and translated by Nikki Petroni

Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci is the artistic director of the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale which will be held between 13 November 2015 and 7 January 2016. APS is the main partner of the Mdina Biennale


  • don't miss