Like others of those memorable works of art which expose the trembling anatomy of the human consciousness under certain conditions of social suffocation, Boris Lurie's "Dance Hall Series," are works of esthetic surgery.
The times are suitable for this kind of examination. It is at once a deeply exacerbating expression of personal involvement for the artist and, because he is a true artist, therefore for all of us. Lurie condemns. He is also condemned. He is under sentence of having been born in the epidemic age which besieges morality and of having a certain inescapable comprehension of it. It is a situation out of which a valid art of awful and penetrating commentativeness can grow. But make no mistake: Lurie is more than an onlooker. So too are we if these papers are truly experienced.
These observations which are also, I supposed it must be said, canonical works of art as pure aesthetically as they are exegetically, are not to be mistaken as expressions of sexuality. They are rather, expressions of alienation and of the desperate, agonized and inchoate struggle to merge into something which is, for an impossible moment, anesthetic. They are, of course, doomed struggles too. There is no meeting ground for these “partners.”
There is no terror here for the sake of terror. There is none of this variety of stylish theatricality. Terror is present but it is not a sickly device. It is quite real and there is a lamentation for it too as there is for the ugliness and brutality which are also part of the dance.
These predacious gropings of lost and irretrievable souls contain a validity and a pointedness which invest them with an enduring value, They are swift, quick, direct and their effect is both massive and penetrating. They possess an audacious presence.
In the midst of a society of whining protesters and their dull homogenized, flatulent exaltations of the beatnik variety Lurie’s statement becomes refreshingly meaningful.
These works are in their unique way, exaltations of certain essences of the human condition which are base and ignoble. This is something which only art can do for a cathartic purpose. The Divine Comedy, after all, is not complete without its Purgatory.
Bennett Schiff
New York City
August 1961