Views of Art: Influences
I started to write a post called “What Are Artists For?”. I devised a working definition of art, based on my own time thinking about the matter, and was going to write my operative definitions of true art, a true artist, and criteria for separating good from bad art. But it all started to smell a bit self-important. It reeked too much of my own opinions masquerading as authority.
So I retitled the post to “The Kind of Art That I Like,” and started writing a more honest post, which owned up to just being about my own tastes and preferences.
But finally I realized that I should start by just talking about the thinkers & theorists who influenced my view of art as a starting point. So now this post is called “Influences.” Maybe I’ll get to my own definitions and tastes later.
Cheerfulness & Acceptance: DAVID LYNCH, HESSE and THE ROMANTICS
Good art has a power to take the world—which, after all, is full of death, heartbreak, violence, strife, futility—and raise its ugliness up to a point of beauty. I’m reminded of an interview I can no longer find where David Lynch once said that his putting the most hideous of his imaginings on-screen was a sort of spiritual work in defeating those imaginings “because it shows that at least we can wrap our minds around those things” (probably not an exact quote). By all accounts David Lynch is a sweet and cheerful guy in person.
In The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse’s protagonist Joseph Knecht writes about the serene joy which descended on the elderly Glass Bead Game master as he neared his death:
This man possessed the virtue of serenity to such a degree that it radiated from him like the light from a star; so much that it was transmitted to all in the form of benevolence, enjoyment of life, good humor, trust and confidence. It continued to radiate outward from all who received it, all who had absorbed its brightness.
This stoic cheerfulness is a high goal for each living person, and also the distillate of all art (even that which seems to deal with distressing subjects):
To achieve this cheerful serenity is to me, and to many others, the finest and highest of goals. [...] Such cheerfulness is neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality, alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is a virtue of saints and of knights; it is indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death. It is the secret of beauty and the real substance of all art. The poet who praises the splendors and terrors of life in the dance-measures of his verse, the musician who sounds them in a pure, eternal present--these are the bringers of light, increasers of joy and brightness on earth, even if they lead us first through tears and stress. Perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a melancholic dreamer; but even so their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and the stars. What they give us is no longer their darkness, their suffering or fears, but a drop of pure light, eternal cheerfulness.
In her study of the Early German Romantics in Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics, Julia Perrey defines Romanticism as that impulse which “concerns itself with raising all parts of life, especially its contradictions, onto the ‘higher aesthetic plane’,” and I suppose that whether Romantic or otherwise, art that faces & reconciles life’s contradictions, and seeks to find beauty in the suffering, is art that I like.
For an example of dark subjects digested & sublimated to a higher plane, listen to the otherworldly beauty of this movement from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a work whose subject matter is literally the end of the world, and which was composed while Messiaen was in a WWII P.O.W. camp in Germany.
Vision: KANDINSKY on the Spiritual in Art
In the absolutely splendid blog Brain Pickings, Maria Popova, who is just the sort of Omnivore of the Humanities that I adore, writes an excellent précis of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I can hardly address it any better than Popova already has, so I urge you to read her superb treatment here.
In brief, Kandinsky asserts that, by faithfully manifesting their own inner vision, artists (often unrecognized in their own day) help to slowly & steadily raise the spiritual state of all of humankind. Regardless what one might think of a concept like “the spiritual state of all humankind,” what resonates with me is Kandinsky’s commitment to the artist’s individual vision.
The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being.
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The artist is not only justified in using, but it is his duty to use only those forms which fulfill his own need… Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.
I love artworks which feel like they were born out of the strength of an artist’s vision. I despise artworks which feel like they were constructed by committee or by focus group.
Aesthetic Arrest: AQUINAS to JOYCE to CAMPBELL
Proper art is static and improper art is kinetic.
-Joseph Campbell paraphrasing James Joyce, from Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce
I LOVE Joseph Campbell. I just love him.
(Disclaimer: his work is full of flaws and he espouses many views we’d now rightly recognize as misogyny, ethnic essentialism, cultural chauvinism, and just plain bad scholarship. BUT, despite adopting some of the narrow view of his time, he possessed a sincere love for humanity—imperfectly manifested—and a mind capable of drawing wonderful connections and parallels across a vast number of disciplines. He is my model for the Omnivore of the Humanities, a cross-disciplinary scholar who did trade some academic depth for some breadth of insight. OK enough said about that [maybe more on his good & bad qualities in a later post].)
Campbell introduced me to the aesthetic theories of James Joyce. When I first listened to Campbell lecture about Joyce’s theories, I’ll admit, I didn’t really grasp what he meant. Take the quote above. Is Campbell saying that only painting, sculpture, and literature (“static”) are proper art and that the performing arts (“kinetic”) are improper? No.
“Static” and “kinetic” aren’t referring to the qualities of the artworks themselves, rather to their intended effect on the audience. Campbell quotes Joyce:
“Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us.”
Art which causes us to desire something may be called pornography—not just the sort of pornography which usually goes by that name (i.e. prurient sexual content), but also all advertising, and indeed a lot of commercial art in general, is pornography in this sense.
Although it runs counter to our usual intuitions, thanks to Campbell, I’ve begun to recognize a lot of artistic products as pornography in this sense: kitschy photographs, paintings, and home decor whose main object is to be cutesie, inspire nostalgia, elicit an “aww,”—they really all represent pornography in the sense that they are causing us to desire to possess the thing depicted or the feeling elicited. Likewise a lot of TV and movies that really just cater to our desire to (1) look at hot people doing stuff and (2) play-act fantasy lives where we ourselves are sexy, rich, or adventurous. These are all improper art because the main relationship of the viewer to the piece is a relationship of wanting-to-have. It goes without saying that I’m not calling these things equivalent to actual porn; I’m using “pornography” here in a specialized technical sense in the context of these aesthetic theories.
What about the second part, “loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something”?
On the other pole from “pornography” is what Campbell calls “didactics”: art which urges us to loath something, flee from something, or change something. In this category goes most political and social art, whose function is to arouse moral outrage and cause a change in behavior. This subcategory of didactic art may also be called propagandistic art. Despite having a higher moral function than pornography, it is still “improper art” in that it is kinetic: it makes the viewer want to do something. (I know, I know, you’re asking: if desirable pretty things and moral social things are both improper, what is left? We’ll get to that in a minute).
I have a harder time rejecting social and political art, and I don’t reject it entirely. It may be necessary to pose a separate dichotomy from Joyce’s proper/improper polarity: a valid/invalid polarity. Perhaps some art is “improper” in the Joyceian sense but is still valid. After all, social change is certainly a necessity at this point in history, and artists do have a role to play in social transformation. I remember reading in The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work a transcript of a round-table discussion in which an artist, while thanking Campbell for introducing him to the distinction between proper and improper art, acknowledged (and now I’m paraphrasing because I don’t have the exact quote handy) “But during the Vietnam War I certainly created some ‘improper’ art, and at that time it was right to do so.”
SO THEN, what is “proper art”?
Proper art, according to Campbell, induces the static experience of “aesthetic arrest.” Aesthetic arrest is the experience of being held by an artwork, entranced by its novelty, its meaning, its beauty, without either wanting to possess the thing depicted or flee from it.
Proper art achieves aesthetic arrest by possessing three qualities, which Joyce has borrowed from the writing of Thomas Aquinas:
[Aquinas] defines the key aspects of the esthetic experience in terms of three Latin words: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Stephen [Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] translates them as “wholeness,” “harmony,” and “radiance.”
Wholeness: The thing rendered is to be seen as one object set off from everything else in the world…We are to concentrate only on what is within that frame. It is to be seen as one object.
Harmony: When you have seen whatever is within the frame as one object, what matters is the relationship of forms in relationship to each other: part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts: That rhythmical organization, what Joyce calls “the rhythm of beauty,” is the magical thing. These parts include colors, relationship of colors, forms, intensities of light [for visual arts; for music the parts include harmonies, timbres, rhythmic ideas, formal components; and so on for other arts].
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Radiance: When the artwork is well achieved, when the object is fortunately rendered, it fascinates. It is satisfactory, adequate in itself. That is the radiance. If it’s a radiance that doesn’t overwhelm you, we call it beauty. But if the radiance so diminishes your ego that you are in an almost transcendent rapture, this is the sublime.
The resulting experience of aesthetic arrest is a momentary transcendence which is the ultimate goal and highest actualization of proper art:
Then you see it is that thing which it is and no other thing. You are not moved with desire or with fear or with loathing. You are simply held in esthetic arrest by the beautiful accord, Joyce’s “rhythm of beauty,” the “enchantment of the heart.” This is a breakthrough. You have gone through the object and felt the transcendence that manifests through it, the transcendence of which you yourself are a manifestation. Pure object turns you into pure subject. You are simply the eye, the world eye, regarding beyond desire and loathing, just as God beholds the world on the seventh day. Nothing to do. This is it.
To me the artwork which epitomizes aesthetic arrest is Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. Here there is no meaning, per se, no narrative, certainly no social moral. But integritas, consonantia, and claritas are here in abundance. The piece is so unified in its aesthetic, in the internal relationship of all its parts, in the rhythm & construction of its form, and so shines with a seeming meaning beyond the literal/verbal. Take a peek and see if you agree:
So There You Have It.
A thinking person might see how these three strands complement each other and go together. The greatest of the 19th-century Romantics and David Lynch would certainly stand as artists who match my (and Kandinsky’s) idea of strong artistic vision. The nonjudgmental equanimity written about by Hesse is related to Joyce’s proper art, which doesn’t seek to change the world or reform the viewer.
In short, you can see that what I am interested in is artistic integrity, vision, aesthetic interestingness, cerebrality, abstraction, and a nonjudgmental stance on the part of the artist… much moreso than prettiness, enjoyability, entertainment, social relevance or even, necessarily, comprehensibility! Marketability or popularity is my least favorite measure for the worth of art.
It’s likely that these themes will continue to crop up in future posts. Stay tuned! Thanks for reading.