What is art?

 

It is here that we reach the pivotal point of our discussion when the central issues become clearer. The word 'art' has never been satisfactorily defined, and therefore the fatuity of the common question 'But is it Art?' is exposed as a means of acquiring any useful answers. We have proposed that apart from the virtually universal instinct of language, there are those for whom the making of music and of pictures are also instinctive. The very finest of artists, of whatever sort, need not be taught; perhaps only exposed, to music and pictures, and learn instinctively as they develop, as all of us do with language. Certainly there are gifted musicians for whom language is very minimal., but execution is all. Also, John Carey in his book What good are the arts? proposes that those who acquire the greatest benefit from any artistic activity are probably those who actually do it. The rest of us receive our artistic pleasures second-hand. It is obviously possible to enjoy art without having instruction, although our pleasure may well  be greatly enhanced by it.

 

We can learn and anticipate pleasure over and over again from a familiar picture or piece of music, and it seems plausible that possession of language does contribute largely to that experience. This is an interesting point in slight conflict with some further views below. But some 'professional' art critics and commentators must take the blame for much obfuscation, confusing it with profundity, as any gallery brochure will quickly show. They use language, as we have discussed earlier, as a vehicle for extreme metaphor, piling one verbal image on another, supporting a panoply of values, which although truly arbitrary, are endowed with eternal and absolute authority - true 'art-speak'.

 

We all have the same sensory equipment and receive data from the outside world, but it is the interpretation of this which is the real source of what we call art. We talk as if objects themselves are endowed with some quality such as 'beauty' but in fact it is generated within ourselves, whatever it is, and is not 'out there'.

 

Art and reality

 

 Ernst Gombrich has offered the opinion that there is no such thing as art, only artists. John Carey in addressing this question answers it by saying that anything can be a work of art, and the property does not reside in the object itself but in the fact that somebody just considers it as a work of art. Kant interestingly expressed the view:

 

The world as we know it is our interpretation of the observable facts in the light of theories that we ourselves invent

 

Literature has been viewed as an essential factor in understanding our culture, and in fact became an 'activity' in its own right, as we described earlier. Artists themselves can be famously inarticulate in discussing their own work. Francis Bacon once said  'It is pointless to talk about art, one only talks around it' . But at the other end of the scale have been those artists who can become completely enmeshed in their own verbosity but saying little. And between are those who seem to have voiced very relevant comments about the 'nature' of what they do.

 

Francis Bacon wrote about painting as 'taking reality by surprise', and there is absolutely no doubt that much modern art does just that by declaring the considered intention of presenting such a completely novel situation that can often border on the infringement of normally accepted bounds of obscenity or taste. This is not a veiled justification for censorship, in any way. On the other hand we have all experienced the thrill of seeing or hearing something, usually undefinable, in a work of art for the first time.

 

Most popular culture found in films and TV has an explicit quality, leaving nothing to the imagination, that  it  is completely counter to the 'indistinctness' that Carey suggested was the essence of all good art. J.M.W. Turner about 200 years earlier, when criticised for painting indistinct pictures, replied ' Sir, indistinctness is my forte'.

 

Unlike music, there appears to be a need for most of us to seek some degree of 'reality' in paintings, and in visual images in general; to find a context, to put a label on it, to recognize it. No one asks 'What is that a piece of music of?'  However, what we take as being 'real' is often very far from it. Letting go of the need to 'make it real', or to 'recognize the subject' is one of the most difficult things to achieve successfully in painting.

 

 Our minds need to understand, to make sense of, what we have seen.  There may be no such thing as 'reality', which could be a very unnerving conclusion. Patrick Heron, despite the fact that he was, at a very early age, an extremely competent painter in the traditional figurative sense, then went on to devote the rest of his long life to exploring pure colour and form by removing all reference to recognizable objects, by painting pictures of a loosely geometric nature and colour combinations, as also did Mondrian more formally.

 

 Art and emotion

 

The art has always come before the theory, but we all know that there is somewhere a positive link between forms of art and emotion. It is well known, for example, that the use of a specific musical key can induce a certain mood, not entirely subjective. The whole tone scale, used frequently by Chopin and Debussy is generally agreed to invoke a rather wandering, misty, quality which has served well in the musical vocabulary of the Impressionists. One of the early Ionian scales was for long prohibited in the church music, being condemned by Rome as 'Modus Lascivus' (Wanton Mode!). A well known example of its use is the song 'Summer is icumin in'. 

 

Artists' words 

 

Some artists , such as Constable for example, were under no illusion about the nature of their work and wrote:

 

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. Why then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments

 

 By 'natural philosophy' here he meant what today we would call 'physics. This seems a remarkably astringent statement about the nature of painting as he, a professional, saw it; the more so considering it was written early in the 19th century. Gombrich, on quoting this passage in his Art & Illusion, further comments that

 

Constable's statement should not be confused with those wild utterances with which artists sometimes like to startle and shake their contemporaries. He knew what he was talking about. In the Western tradition, painting has indeed been pursued as science, and is the result of ceaseless experimentation.

 

 The Chapman Brothers short-listed for the Turner Prize 2004 who have recently made three-dimensional representations of Goya's dramatic pictures in which captured soldiers are executed and mutilated (part of their Turner Prize submission) are reported as offering the following rather confused opinions:

 

These new sculptures will have some people foaming at the mouth. People don't respond to art in a very honest and truthful way. They tend to do what they are instructed to do by whoever they get their opinions from. Art is probably the last place that anyone is going to have an honest reaction. I think 'shock' is not a very good word to describe art. They are inanimate objects placed in a sterile environment for the entertainment and education of the masses. I've been living with them for six months so if they were shocking on the first day they are not anymore. We think they are entertaining, thoughtful, beautiful, classical. Expect to see what you expect to see.

 

Here again we see the assumed superiority of artists being proposed ('education of the masses').  Can such elitist views last?

Cezanne is usually given the credit for being the father of modern painting, and his letters show how he laboured for years to extract what he wanted from a subject, such as Mont St. Victoire (that he painted so many times). He wrote painfully, and modestly, about his efforts and what he felt about his relationship to nature. He had less facility with words than with paint. He wrote to Emile Bernard in 1904 :

 

Nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant. One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way, and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.Taste is the best judge. It is rare. Art only addresses itself to an excessively small number of individuals.The artist must scorn all judgement that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes painting to deviate from its true path - the concrete study of nature - to lose itself too long in intangible speculations.

 

. Shortly before he had written another letter to Bernard;

 

 Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that God spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air . I must tell you that I had another look at the study you made. You have the understanding of what should be done and you will soon turn your backs on the Gauguins and the Van Goghs!

 

Here, as he attempts to describe what drove him, and in mechanical terms, one gets the impression that he was a craftsman struggling to master his craft and medium in the best way he could see. It is straightforward, honest, if not always crystal clear.

 

Despite Cezanne's casual dismissal of van Gogh, the same sort of impression, of an honest intellectual struggle, comes across from the letters of van Gogh himself. One gets the feeling from Gauguin, on the other hand, that he was quite a showman, well able to paint attractive pictures, but only to justify them in rather blustery phraseology.  Rothko is an example of a painter who for many people is extremely obscure, but perhaps he had conversed internally with himself for so long, and so intensely, that he lost the ability to communicate with others easily. He was certainly reluctant to write about his work. Some art appears to be explicit in a dramatic way, but probably owes more to the fact that it is presenting an 'obvious' event in a highly original way or setting, such as Munch's 'Scream'.

 

Patrick Heron was a fine artist, and also writer on the art of painting. He wrote in 1963 : 

 

 Painting still has a continent left to explore, in the direction of colour (and in  other directions). Painting, like science, cannot discover the same things twice over; it is therefore compelled in those directions which the still undiscovered and unexplored dictate. It seems obvious to me that we are still at only the beginning of our discovery and enjoyment of the superbly exciting facts of the world of colour. One reels at the possibilities now; the varied and contrasting intensities, opacities transparencies, the seeming density and weight, warmth, coolness, vibrancy or the superbly inert 'dull' colours. Certainly I can get a tremendous thrill from suddenly seeing two colours juxtaposed.

 

 Finally, Francis Bacon again,  speaking of painting once said that

 

You are always an artisan. Once you become what is called an artist, there is nothing more awful, like those awful people who produce those awful images, and you know more or less what they are going to be like.

 

 

 

 © Frank Evans 2009