The Importance of Rounton

by Miles Richmond

The Third Millennium has dawned with an unprecedented Global Crisis. Our Human future has never looked less assured. Predicting a fourth millennium is as hazardous and uncertain as a future for Longbridge.

 Religion, Philosophy, Science and Art have up till now provided guidelines by which we might know ourselves, our world and our place in it. Today we are falling apart. We are coming apart at the seams so rapidly that it may soon be impossible to repair the rent. 

Under the accelerating pressure of global capita1ism we are all driven like 'Ghosts from an Enchanter Fleeing'. If we cannot escape this enchanter we become inevitably consumers with ever more rapid and conspicuous consumption or the deprived with ever more rapid and conspicuous deprivation. Evidence of the break- up of our world is there for everyone to see.

Rounton in the Third Millennium has a difficult assignment. In the 19th and 20th centuries Rounton was nourished by and contributed to the Humanist tradition which has been an essential part of our life since the middle ages. This tradition, splendidly embodied in the work of Philip Webb, maintained the transcendence of the work of human hands for human needs over the demands for profit and an expanding market. The choice is stark: We respect the world or we exploit it.

Philip Webb chose to respect it and all his work expresses that respect and it is impossible in the face of his work not to recognise what a difficult assignment Rounton has. Rounton is historically identified with Webb (he built most of its houses). But where are his values today?

In the arts they have been effectively consigned to the dustbin. Artists, in large numbers, throw in the towel with a flourish, and flaunt their nakedness in the arms of fashion and advertising. Big business is delighted, and pays them for surrendering a citadel from which exposure and criticism of exploitation has traditionally been mounted. To develop an integrity of vision which can make effective comment or criticism demands some detachment for which a price must be paid.

Webb, Blake, Bomberg, all were prepared to pay this price. They have all been associated in some way with what Rounton has represented. But who in a new millennium is prepared, even sees the need, for this detachment? Our schools rather encourage students to make a commodity for the art market and promote it with all the techniques of advertising and fashion. And who can help going with the flow when market forces, in various ways, ensure that the price of detachment is almost beyond our means?

But not quite: and there will always be some who refuse to go with the flow, and to them I would say that I think Rounton may be a good place to nurse the delicate buds that may be appearing in spite of the threatening dawn of a new age. But if Rounton is a nursery, it is an Alice in Wonderland kind of nursery, where you have to be gardeners tending the buds on your own trees! Some confusion is inevitable and some basic principles may be useful.

The first, most important, and never to be forgotten is that we live in the world much as a child lives in the womb: our outer senses conform to and confirm our sensory faculties. Our well-being depends on waking up to this fact. This has been taught from Christ to Marx through the last two millennia. If it is still often forgotten, it should be kept in mind here. Since the world is singular, mankind is singular, and our concern here is to nurse the tender shoots within and without through the final storms of a long bleak winter in which world and mankind have been exploited by a power in ourselves which has resented, or refused to wake up to our real position in the scheme of things.

We take our stand here, as free agents, free artists together admitting our responsibility to one another and the world. The world is as it is, but art can change it.

It can change it: as language, it communicates senses we share and, through our delight in these senses, perhaps arouse them in others to appreciate the world they are in. Art changes by replacing the torpor and ennui of tired sense with the fresh and vital sense the artist is trained to apprehend. Vital sense replaces tired ideas. The mind has an incurable tendency to drag the senses into ideas and ideas into things. This is the slippery slope where the world and my fellows become an idea, a thing, a commodity to exploit, puts us back in the jungle of haves and have nots.

The artists defends their freedom from this exploitation and in doing so defends the freedom of us all. It is a freedom from things. As Macuse says: "The truth of art lies in this: that the world really is as it appears in the work of art."

 The artist is concerned with appearances. What appears may be a mystery but it is certainly not a thing. If Rounton is a THING with a past, it has no future.

 As far as it appears today, it may be a mystery about to unfold.

Miles Richmond, Rounton, 2000