I’m a very ‘umble person
A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’.
Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s)
Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl Marx’ statement that, while Christianity preached ‘submissiveness and humbleness’, the proletariat needs ‘its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.’ Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, the scheming antagonist of David Copperfield (1850), incessantly saying he was a ‘very ‘umble person’, is the epitome of false modesty.
In Modernism, heroic tabula rasa attitudes allowed for anything but attitudes of humility. There are a few exceptions, like T.S. Eliot’s famous line that ‘humility is endless’, which acknowledges that the idea that age brings wisdom is deceptive (i.e. the humility is vis-à-vis the shock of realizing that knowledge can become worthless). Or in fact, as Jennifer Kabat points out in her piece about the influence of Depression-era posters on current advertising campaigns, the exception of artists, employed by the state, seeing themselves in the service of the common cause. But I guess as a movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some – not all! – parts of minimalist, proto-conceptual, post-beat, collectivist-hippie attitudes brought in the idea that the artist’s work can be a humble reflection of the everyday, from Yvonne Rainer’s integration of simple gestures into dance moves to Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro, who in 1967 covered a piece of floor he cleaned with a square of newspaper pieces, in reference to simple housekeeping habits from his village (_Pavimento (tautologia)_, Floor, tautology). The idea was, simply, that it was about the work, not the artist; as Nietzsche (of all thinkers) put it: ‘There is true modesty (that is the knowledge that we are not the works we create).’
Which brings me back to Obama’s ‘humble’ vs. Bush’s ‘humble’: Obama’s sentence acknowledges that it’s not about him, but about the task, and everyone; whereas Bush, much in line with Uriah Heep, made a statement about himself…
A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’.
Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s)
Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl Marx’ statement that, while Christianity preached ‘submissiveness and humbleness’, the proletariat needs ‘its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.’ Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, the scheming antagonist of David Copperfield (1850), incessantly saying he was a ‘very ‘umble person’, is the epitome of false modesty.
In Modernism, heroic tabula rasa attitudes allowed for anything but attitudes of humility. There are a few exceptions, like T.S. Eliot’s famous line that ‘humility is endless’, which acknowledges that the idea that age brings wisdom is deceptive (i.e. the humility is vis-à-vis the shock of realizing that knowledge can become worthless). Or in fact, as Jennifer Kabat points out in her piece about the influence of Depression-era posters on current advertising campaigns, the exception of artists, employed by the state, seeing themselves in the service of the common cause. But I guess as a movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some – not all! – parts of minimalist, proto-conceptual, post-beat, collectivist-hippie attitudes brought in the idea that the artist’s work can be a humble reflection of the everyday, from Yvonne Rainer’s integration of simple gestures into dance moves to Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro, who in 1967 covered a piece of floor he cleaned with a square of newspaper pieces, in reference to simple housekeeping habits from his village (_Pavimento (tautologia)_, Floor, tautology). The idea was, simply, that it was about the work, not the artist; as Nietzsche (of all thinkers) put it: ‘There is true modesty (that is the knowledge that we are not the works we create).’
Which brings me back to Obama’s ‘humble’ vs. Bush’s ‘humble’: Obama’s sentence acknowledges that it’s not about him, but about the task, and everyone; whereas Bush, much in line with Uriah Heep, made a statement about himself…
