Of Arts and the Animal part 5:

A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

" No, That's not art its, that's just telly, made with telly values"

Measuring by the criterion of self-communication we may distinguish between a ‘genuine art form’, and that which merely resembles the arts but is, in fact, simple craftsmanship or some kind of entertainment or source of information in which the maker gives nothing of himself or herself and only some trivial aspect of the subject is depicted. We may judge the intention to communicate as to its depth and breadth, and may affirm the validity of considering art forms superior or inferior in quality by reference to the scope they afford for self-communication. When we do judge in this way we find a new basis for saying that the traditional scale of values in such matters holds good, albeit with certain nuances favourable to the use of modern forms and techniques in the established arts. The distinction between art and art-like activity is understood instinctively both by artist and audience. Grayson Perry says “No, that’s not art, that’s just telly, made with telly values” with respect to his own television series, and we know what he means, as we know the difference between an artist’s work and an artisan’s.  – Mr. Perry does not say of his programmes ‘this is the best of me’, but ‘this might be of interest’. The act or work of the artist is endowed with a meaning from the depths of the soul which appeals to the audience at the same level; we know by instinct that “when Art is too precise in every part”, when it is entirely the product of the conscious mind, is over-deliberate or didactic in its intentions, is a confection of superficialities, witticisms and wordplay, it is an inferior work. We know too what ‘cheap music’ is, it is that which a composer purchases at less than the cost of his or her entire being; its potency lies in that, at its best, while its breadth is limited to a single definite subject or theme, its depth need not be less than that of serious music, and the lack of context or consequence inherent in the form might even sharpen its effect, as with the exquisite misery of Ma Rainey or the unbridled joy of Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke. At its worst, however, cheap popular music bears no relation to any artistic concept on the part of its writers, they merely ‘sup the beer of them that throw the darts’, describing parasitically the experience of others. St. John Paul II reminds us that every artistic work or act is a failure in so far as that it is impossible for any human artist to realise his or her artistic concept: “All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment”.  We may, however, judge the extent to which the artistic act or work succeeds or fails in its realisation of the concept in any particular case. It is here that technical expertise or the lack of it, enters the frame. Although the authentic artistic concept is generated at the subconscious level, its formulation and realisation are intellectual activities requiring the greatest deliberation and application. We may judge whether the skill and effort applied to the task have proven sufficient.

Now that's art! - made with Grayson Perry values

There is an apparent tension between the first criterion and the second, namely that the work or act may be judged in terms of a communication concerning a certain subject. We may understand Walter Pater’s dictum that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” to mean that music’s ability to communicate without use of the intellectual faculties mediated by language render it supreme amongst the arts, although we should bear in mind the advances in non-figurative and semi-figurative work in the visual arts since he wrote in the 1870s.  This reinforces the appearance of a tension, seeming to privilege the self-communication of the artist over any relationship between him or her and any subject beyond the artist’s own interior landscape as the lack of visual depiction may be mistaken for a lack of representation. In fact, however, because the artist deals with the ‘inmost reality’ of the subject, which is to say the truth concerning it, precisely as it is reflected within the deepest reaches of his or her own soul, there is no tension at all between either self-communication and communication upon some other subject, or else between representation in an explicit and in a non-figurative manner. It is not only the poet, like St. Caedmon of Whitby, who ‘sings creation’; from the caves of Lascaux to the works of Damien Hirst the visual arts have presented the audience with creatures not in themselves as they live in the wild – that is the business of the zoologist – nor as the intellect fancies they might be, but as they truly are at the essential level, not precisely as God sees them, but as the divine idea from which they are formed is reflected in the divine image in which the artist is made; at this level it is an irrelevance whether the subject is presented pictorially, verbally, musically or by some other form of art. A good deal of work that gives the appearance of being non-figurative in fact abstracts from natural forms; the transition to the abstract is, perhaps, best illustrated by futurist works such as Balla’s series of swallow paintings in which geometric forms grow from the birds’ flight. Robert Motherwell’s comments are apposite: “Abstract art is stripped bare of other things in order to intensify it, its rhythm, spatial intervals and colour structure. Abstraction is a process of emphasis, and emphasis vivifies life”. What matters is the extent to which the work succeeds in the act of communication; we may judge whether we know more of the subject for having encountered the work, not just in itself but in its relations – physical, psychological, spiritual and cultural – with others, with the artist, and with God – have we grown in our understanding of and love for the subject? When the subject is an artefact it is these relations that are the truth we seek to understand, them and the substances from which they were fashioned as it is in the material of the artefact that the work of humanity meets the work of God. An artefact has what might be called human relations and also socio-economic relations, and its meaning for the artist and society is derived from those relations such that we cannot know, say, a chair without understanding them. The item was made by an amateur, an artist or a factory; it was bought, given, found, inherited or stolen; and it plays a particular role in the life of the household. The task of the artist in addressing such a subject, indeed to address any subject at all, is to make manifest that which is not readily apparent about it, or which its mundanity causes us to overlook. We may judge whether the technique employed assists in that process. The simple act of presenting a subject in a place of artistic encounter may be sufficient to manifest aspects of the inner reality that generally go unremarked; but the absence of consent to, or expectation of, an encounter will ordinarily negate the artistic intention of such a presentation. The use of media and techniques limiting themselves largely to the surface appearances of subjects is seldom effective in conveying very much truth, except in cases where, whatever the ostensible subject, the work is actually addressed to the subject of superficiality itself – a central concern of pop art. I have said very little about television, and do not intend to say very much more, but I would question the ability of a medium apparently addicted to a realism that is unreal, and a naturalism owing little to nature, to move far beyond the surface appearance of things because, whilst only some works are abstract in form, all successful art abstracts essential truth from visible or sensible phenomena, and the medium seems to allow little scope for such an abstraction.

Of Arts and the Animal part 4

A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

From the nature and purpose of the arts we may discern three criteria whereby the artistic act or work may be judged: firstly, it is a self-communication of the artist; secondly, it is a communication concerning a subject as it presents itself to the artist; and thirdly, because it is a communication of and about creatures, it is a communication of the Creator mediated by the artist. I shall make a few observations on each of these points in turn.

The prerequisite for a successful act of communication is, of course, that artist and audience should form a connection, a personal relationship mediated by the artistic act or work; “personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever”. When, therefore, the medium impedes or prevents a connection it fails in its artistic purpose, thwarting the desire to communicate, whatever its form or content might happen to be. In the first instance it is absolutely necessary that the work be recognised as an artistic act or work if artist and audience are to connect through it, just as the works of God must be seen as such if we are to relate to Him through them; this requires a place of encounter, an intellectual, and ideally also a physical, space where the audience may recognise the artwork and consciously attempt to assimilate it, receiving the intended communication.  While the artistic encounter may take place unexpectedly, as when one turns a corner and is struck by the magnificence of the architecture, it is best achieved when the audience chooses to attend the place of encounter with the specific intention of engaging with the artwork, of reading the book, watching the play or listening to the concert. On the other hand, it is difficult to the point of near impossibility for an artwork to be seen as such in contexts in which art is expected not to be found; the decorative arts have long suffered from this disability, but today it is works for the broadcast media that are doomed to failure as television, the internet and radio are generally regarded as being merely parts of our domestic environment, much like the carpets and furniture – ignored equally whether made by dedicated artisans or machine-made and mass-produced, although trade associations and those responsible for paying the bills will shout about it loudly if the former is the case. Consequently, artists working in these forms seek ever more extreme expressions in their attempt to connect with their intended audience, thereby forming a culture in which artists working in less prosaic media feel a corresponding obligation to express themselves in ways that conform to and respond to, or react against, what becomes a cultural norm. Lady Gaga comments thus: “The internet has become a veil over music and the artist. I want to push through the boundaries of that and break through the wall with my monster paws and fists!”

As an act of self-communication the artistic act is an expression of love, “le don de soi-même”, an act of self-realisation through self-sharing in which the artist reaches out to embrace the audience and to hold them in the arms of his or her self-expression. In the practice of the arts we come to know the image of God within ourselves by the imitation of the divine action. The artist begins work by self-reflection, plumbing the depths of his or her own being, reaching into the semiotic unconscious of sensuality, rhythm and archetype where the foundations of the fabric of our being lie hidden, and finding there the reflection of all the words contained in the Word, the primary goodness which begets goodness, giving rise to the effusion of love that seeks to communicate in a union bound together in the contemplation of that goodness. The painter, the sculptor, the writer, the composer, the actor, the musician, “they’re really saying ‘I love you’.”

Ted Hughes (image Wikipedia)

Ordinarily speaking, all manner of beasts roam unseen through the undergrowth of our minds, prowling amidst wonders and profundities we simply do not know that we know, hidden within what Ted Hughes called “the dark hole of the head”. Over the last hundred years modern psychological theorists, not least Pope Benedict’s atheist guest at the Assissi conference Julia Kristeva, have explored these aspects of human nature in secular terms, beginning with Jung’s study of the archetype as “an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche”. Today the cryptozoologist Merrily Harpur advances a Neoplatonist theory to explain the mysterious creatures, such as the Beast of Bodmin, that people sometimes see, suggesting that they are daimones, intermediate beings, having “a dual – indeed interchangeable – existence both in our imaginations and in the World Imagination – the Anima Mundi”, which raises fascinating questions about the boundaries between the interior reality and external objectivity, and also about the relationship between the unconscious and the divine (which Christianity would generally describe in more transcendent terms than these). Many writers and thinkers have described encounters with and experiences of phenomena that, while seeming substantial, were nevertheless not ‘out there’ but in here, the space between the ears, such as Marie Stopes’ Nemesis Halliday Sutherland, whose travels in Scandinavia were attended by a vision of trolls, or Kathleen Raine whose understanding of the nature of the arts was shaped by her vision of the singing fruits of the tree of knowledge. Whilst the artist fosters a sensitivity to such spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious, he or she cannot rely upon them but actively hunts the thought-fox, drawing what is found at the semiotic, generative level up into the symbolic level where, by words, notes and images, it may be constituted into an artistic concept, distinct from the mind in which it is contained, in a process analogous in some measure to the conception of the Eternal Word in the bosom of the Father. From consideration of the artistic concept the will to action arises as we desire to realise the concept externally; thus, in reflecting and participating in the divine action by the practice of the arts, the image of God in us manifests its Trinitarian character.

To be continued...

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard

Of Arts and the Animal part 3

 

A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

Whilst every creature represents God and communicates aspects of His essential attributes, we are alone in being made “to the image of God” (Genesis I 27, 1^st lesson Holy Saturday). This entirely shapes our relationship with our fellow-creatures as their relationship with God is mediated through humanity, and our relationship with Him is determined by our relations with them. As God addresses us in them, He does not address us, His created audience, in the first instance; rather, He addresses Himself through us – he does not say “I giraffe you” but “I giraffe Myself through giraffing you” as human and giraffe are held in the heart of the Most Blessed Trinity and it goes deeper than that as the image of God in humanity brings the giraffe into the very centre of our being, our human nature. That which is in God is reflected in us, and that includes the idea from which each creature receives its nature, hence Adam knew the beasts and fowls by name as God brought them before him, and God related to them through Adam’s knowledge of them: He “brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name” (Gen. II 19, Septuagesima Tues. Matins 2^nd lesson). St. Robert Southwell writes:

“Man’s mind a mirror is of heavenly sights,

A brief wherein all marvels summèd lie”.

Thus, in the fall of Adam, the entirety of the corporeal creation fell, and all creatures are redeemed in the sacred humanity of Christ save only those rational creatures, people and angels, who wilfully reject redemption. It was, of course, in the fall that our ability to assimilate that which is communicated to us through our fellow-creatures was impaired to the extent that we are able to perceive so little in our ordinary dealings with them.

We are, however, able to relate to them, and through them to God, through our meditation upon them in the light of our ideas, our mental and moral concepts, and the powers of the soul, in which that which is in God, their creator, is reflected in us. In doing so we act in accordance with our primary vocation to participate in and to show forth the divine action, to ‘have dominion’ over other creatures by sharing in the action of the Lord. Thus, when we think about our fellow-creatures, whatever their species or nature, whether human, animal or inanimate, and whether considered in the concrete or the abstract, the particular or the generic, what we think about is our own nature, the nature of things, and the nature of the Creator of all that is. This meditation is conducted in a perfectly natural fashion by all of us as it is of our nature to act thus, even subconsciously, and when we imitate our Creator in this way, we find in ourselves the echo of this action as, in John Crowe Ransom’s words, “out of so simple a thing as respect for the physical earth and its teeming life comes a primary joy, which is an inexhaustible source of arts and religions and philosophies”. As we see that the created order is very good, goodness begets in us the desire to communicate goodness (which is, theologically speaking, a motion of grace, the action of the Holy Ghost), and so the artistic impulse is born; and in the image of the Creator we create, not, as He does, ex nihilo but from His creation and the image of it He created in us. In the practice of the arts we take possession of the world, and we take possession of ourselves, of the image of the divine that constitutes us as human. In his ‘Letter to Artists’ St. John Paul II tells us that “Every genuine art form in its own way is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world. It is, therefore, a wholly valid approach to the realm of faith, which gives human experience its ultimate meaning.”

To understand the arts in this light is to grasp a sense of purpose from which a scale of aesthetic values may be extrapolated; and that enables us to pass an objective judgement, giving a context to the subjective reactions we feel when confronted with the artistic endeavours of others. Art may be good or bad, it may succeed or fail in its own terms, precisely as art. I ought, perhaps, to mention at this point that 2013’s Reith lectures were on the subject of art and were delivered by Grayson Perry, but this essay-article is neither a commentary upon nor a response to his talks, which are worth reading if you did not listen to them. The only comment I will make is that he was dealing with the visual arts whilst I am discussing the arts in general, and that much of what he has to say is really concerned with comparatively superficial questions of public attitudes towards art and artists rather than the philosophical and theological issues under consideration here.

To be continued...

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard