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| Study of Eyes, Sarah Myers |
Why Art?
If you ask, “Why
create Art?” you will receive many different, and strange – and
wrong – answers. You will hear that Art is a hobby, something you
throw your time away on in retirement or between jobs. You will hear
that Art is therapy, something people do to salvage their minds in
times of stress or illness. You will hear that Art is a vehicle for
protest, to correct social ills. You will hear Art is a personal
indulgence. Or a mild form of insanity. Or a way to stave off
boredom. And all of these answers are wrong. But you will not hear
anyone give a correct answer, because, in cultures where Art is a
necessity, the question is not asked to begin with. It's like asking
why there are chefs to design food – why there are designers to
create clothes – why there are inventors or innovators of any kind.
It is not in one sense “necessary” to have good cuisine; or
fashion; or even advanced medicine. Many lives have lived without
these good things, and many lives have gone without the refreshment
of man-made images, beautiful or impressive or enlightening. In
fact, though rare, there are whole cultures that have not possessed
any comprehensive artistic expression - there were prehistoric
tribes which for hundreds of years produced little known imagery
except spirals. Well-drawn spirals, admittedly, engraved with skill,
and obviously regarded as significant - but spirals and related abstract lines alone. These
people began to create stylized beast and human forms only after
contact with the civilized Romans.
Art is
necessary for mankind's intellect (rather than his body) and it is
necessary for civilization. And being an Artist is a very simple,
very earnest, very tasking thing – it is being a Designer of
Images. All of us are artists with our eyes – each mind sees the
wonderful, the unusual, the familiar, the desirable, and puts it back
for reference in the memory. But memory often cannot reproduce the
completeness, the sharpness, the reality, that the original impact
had for us – cannot reproduce it even for ourselves, and without
concrete expression, can certainly not convey it to other minds and
souls. Art is a record. It is the visual record that the intellect,
unable to depend on personal experience, demands to claim or to
reclaim a reality.
Art is a record
of sight and thought. It captures the thought or the glimpse and
puts it into a form capable of being viewed by others, of being
revisited by the artist themselves. It is like writing; once the
thought is captured in a word or an image, it remains as a real
presence.
You must ask
carefully what you want to give this immortality to. It is not
enough to be able to draw (or carve, or paint, or photograph)
something – anything - anymore than it is enough to be able to
speak words. You do not go about speaking words, any words, simply
to show that you have the capacity to talk. We put much more
literary value on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar than on a volume
of financial regulations, even if there are more words in the latter.
Though there can be some serendipity in art, and some acceptance of
unexpected experimental results, the artist should have control and
authority over his creation. He is forming it for its permanent
function.
All things
start with a vision; a city where there is only a plain, a voyage on
an empty sea, freedom and warfare and healing, crop-fields and
monuments and roads, the good and bad of men's lives alike.
The Artist is
the maker of visions.
You are making
your own future when you create art. You are forming others' future.
In fact, you are forming mine; and that is what prompted me to write
this article.
It occurred to
me, after some time of observation, that artists just now –
especially young artists – do not realize what their occupation is;
this huge vocation as an image-designer, or vision-maker, or
future-creator. They do not know they themselves will soon determine
what fills, not only their minds, but the minds of others. And not
only the minds, but the experiences. They are repeating what they
passively absorb or reacting to what they passively absorb – the
world is currently full of naive plagiarism. If the content being
thus mindlessly spread was, in its original form, uplifting or
enlightening, the results of unquestioning repetition would merely be
innocuous at best, vacuous at worst. But at the moment, it is an
assemblage of very low-quality, morbid and often sordid material;
usually depressing or demoralizing in its final effect.
I am not for a
moment going to suggest that we should equally mindlessly respond
like those who obeyed the dictatorial cultures of the last century,
in the Soviet Union and Germany: the demand that all art shall be –
perforce - figurative, hearty, “wholesome”, supportive of a
regime. If our souls are like those of the German Expressionists,
crying out in agony at the culture surrounding us, we need to take
this into serious account. Or if we have found a new way of seeing
the splendour or vitality of life, but a way which is not immediately
understood through means of the old conventions (and therefore not
thought “accurate” or “beautiful” by those who are only
acceptant of older styles) this too needs concentration and
nourishment. But that is just the point; we need to consider what we
are doing, what we are perpetuating, and why.
Because when you
draw, or paint, sculpt or photograph something, you are not merely
telling us about it. You are creating a new vision of it. You are
almost creating the thing over again, making it new, in your own mind
and in the minds of others. If you draw a cow, and I see and
internalize your image of a cow, the next time I actually see a real
cow I will not just be seeing the cow, or my image of the cow alone,
I will be seeing your cow also. In the realm of art, you are
inventing a cow, or woman, or a tree, or a sky, a shape, a hue, that
has not been there before. You are recording a thought or an
object's existence. Once I have seen it, it will be present for me -
by itself, and also in those things I see later which remind me of
it. Art is a record – once the expression is there, you and I can
revisit it, revisit the thought or the moment that otherwise is lost,
without language, without substance, in the abyss of time and
forgetfulness.
And it is on
these stones of imagery, visual language, memory, delineation, that
higher cultures are built. It is the basis for their understanding
of what their peoples see and experience day by day. The European
Medieval peasant sees the sculpture of a peasant plowing on the
facade of his cathedral, and he interprets his own activity and his
own identity by the image. A modern man views Picasso's “Guernica”
and it shapes his attitude toward the injustice of war. A citizen of
ancient Athens sees Wisdom as a thing both beautiful and formidable,
a woman with a spear and the death-gaze of the Medusa on her shield.
If I see the blue of a Matisse sky, or the blue of a sky by Francois
Boucher, or the blue of the sky painted on the ceiling of an Egyptian
tomb, will I not see the blue of my own sky through those thousand
blues that I have assimilated through the experience of other eyes,
who knew how to record the tint or the thought of their skies? And
if you paint me a green sky, I may soon understand one of many things
– I will understand that the sky, under certain circumstances of
weather and environment, is indeed more green than blue – or I will
understand the effect it would have on our emotions if, in a suddenly
altered world, all sunlight were green – the quiet grace of the
colour, as the overarching heaven – the fearful ghastliness of the
colour, as an all-surrounding cloud – what you thought, when you
made a green sky as a building block in the world of the mind.
With your art
you are not only defining a thought, you are creating a thought, and
not only creating a thought but – insofar as your work is unique
and superior – a way of thinking. If what you produce is solid
enough, useful enough, and circulates to any extent, it will be
utilized as building material in your culture. Imagery is one of the
chief building materials of any progressive civilization, at any
time, in any place. And especially in our era, the cataract of
pictures, symbols and images - pouring into the collectively
insatiable minds and eyes of our populaces - is there for a reason.
There is an ancient Hebrew proverb, attributed to Solomon the Great -
“the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing”.
The more mankind sees and hears, the more he wishes to see and hear.
What he takes in, culturally, will be either valuable or worthless –
enlightening or vitiating. It is our labour, as artists, to ensure
the quality of what goes in. For mankind will keep watching and
listening. He cannot stop, any more than he can stop eating or stop
breathing.
If an artist
finds themselves disturbed by the idea of their own work going
directly into their culture as one of these building blocks, they
must pause and think. Indeed, it is necessary for us all to pause
and ask, at the first sign of uneasiness, “Why am I uncomfortable
with my work forming a part of the context around me, with my art
being used as part of the material constructing this culture?” It
is a more important subject than it may seem to the individual
artist, struggling merely to create good work. And one of the
reasons for its importance is this: great art always outlasts
politics; it even outlasts societies, civilizations and religious
forms. How many of you know the face of the Mona Lisa, the name of
Leonardo Da Vinci? But how many of you know the names of the Sforzas
and or the members of the Florentine Signoria for whom the artist
worked? How many of us have seen the crumbled but perfect forms of
the Grecian gods, and understood something of beauty and glory that
we did not know before? But how many of us worship Poseidon or
Aphrodite, or would know the correct offering or rites to approach
them religiously? We walk over the ruins of dead civilizations,
combing the dust for artifacts, and lift from their long sleep the
small stone images, the small gold jewels. We do not own the
suzerainty of their kings or nobles – authority long perished –
we do not descend from their peoples – lost in the wanderings of a
thousand tribes – we may not even be able to decipher their
languages. But we treasure their art, we look and we stretch back
over the millennia to revisit the thought of one artist, his one
reflection or one transient moment of his life that was caught in a
solid form.
So the artist
understands, more clearly than others, perhaps, that neither he nor
his work exists in only one context. His thought and his art travel
from era to era – even from culture to culture. If this is bound
to happen inevitably, after he and his contemporary culture vanish
from the earth, it is as well to view it as a possible source of
freedom while he is still alive and has creations and inventions yet
to produce. It is essential to look outside one's time and place –
to know what is mere cultural imposition or assumption, what is only
the trend of a generation (perhaps only of a decade!), and what is a
lasting desire or reality – what is an eternal question, and what
merely a conundrum of some over-sophisticated social structure, or a
hardship of an immature system unexpectedly lacking some human
necessity. And when there is a lack, aesthetically, personally,
societally, the artist asks, Can he supply it from some other time,
some other place? If there is insurmountable antipathy between his
art and his surrounding culture, should he, at any time, wholly
switch cultures? How much of culture can he create himself? How
much with the help of others?
As disorienting
as these considerations may seem, the artist is almost always asking
them on a small scale. He borrows across ages and across
geographical divides, practically without thought, to mend some
compositional defect in a painting, or to provide some colour or
sensitivity to a form. The Renaissance artist brings back the fluid
bodies of the ancient Greeks; the twentieth-century painter sources
his strong shapes from the art of Pacific Islanders; there is a
medley and chaos of influences in every piece of fine art that has
ever been produced.
Someone
ignorant of history laughs at the ideals and achievements of past
cultures, not knowing that the rules of his own culture, by which he
judges, are just as trite, and his civilization just as transient.
The artist knows more; and though he does not need to strive, in some
cold and abstract way, for “timelessness”, he must still be aware
of his own works' possible position in the destiny of humankind.
Will his efforts help the intellect of men now – help them to be
greater, and wiser, more merciful and more just? Give them visions
of the things they cannot yet dream, but need to be able to dream and
to fulfill? Will his efforts still be of use in a decade more?
Fifty years? A century? If his artwork is dug up from the wreck of
the civilization which claimed him as its own, long after all memory
of its politics and fashions and commerce is gone, will his record of
one moment or one thought still provide food to the human mind, a
vision for a new time that even he could not foresee?
