Ten things about Art
FIRST
ten pictures of stuff that is art, or inspires art, or might as well be called art because it takes you towards the boundaries of thought and logic and human possibility ... number one might as well be bubbles !
because ...
matter, from what we know, likes to aggregate in patterns, some more spectacular than others, some astonishingly ordered such as DNA, some halfway between randomness and logic ...
SECOND
UNCERTAINTY. Doubts and uncertainty beget stress, which we all know is injurious to health. Years ago, I thought that certainty and agreement could be within the grasp of every rational mind. Hah ! If I’ve ever learned anything, then I’ve always been the last to know … even though Bertrand Russell had spelled it out in one curt sentence … “Be certain of nothing, for nothing is certain.” …
Everything we know is only what we like to think we know, everything we see is only the mind’s best guess as we wade through oceans of sensory chaos. Looking at art teaches you something about uncertainty, if only by default. Artists get away with approximations that would annoy the hell out of engineers. Very often, an artist has to leave stuff incomplete.
I’ve often sat in front of this drawing and searched it for content.
You can guess what the women and their babies might be saying but you can’t know, or else Leonardo would have had to invent the speech-bubble.
Two thoughts only dawned on me very slowly, years after I’d first looked at the picture.
I’d been looking at the faces and hands too much, but what are they sitting on ? I wonder, but don’t know if they are sitting on a rock, for Leonardo’s church supposed itself a rock ?
And it took me ages to realize he’d never got to grips with the technicality of placing their bare feet in a living stream. Leonardo kept this unfinished work with him.
Is it the stream of time ? I don’t know, and that really doesn’t matter now.
THIRD
Physical grace. Occasionally the World Stands Still. For me, when someone is entering the scene who is perfectly poised, agile and purposeful in their movements, and whose every movement seem to flow.
Once, in a shabby club in Bristol, a big girl in an ugly sweater walked to the centre of the floor and spun a triple pirouette, and then walked off again.
On Brighton beach, I saw a tiny sinewy man stand on his hands and “walk” on them down the steep shingle into the sea.
A new drinking partner in a beer garden, when light-heartedly challenged by me, turned six or seven cartwheels until she came to a halt standing in a bed of roses.
Sometimes such moments coincide with the camera shutter … I think, for instance, this picture by Thollier might be one …
FOURTH
Memory of place … Canaletto, the stonemason’s yard, painted late 1720s
it can be assumed that the human mind is as great as the universe … if only because its boundaries are undefined
can I make another assumption ... that everyone I know has their own private memory bank of places and spaces ?
and then add that I think there might be another memory bank we keep which holds on to fleeting impressions of atmosphere and space and light ?
maybe it isn’t a bank, more of a cloud, or perhaps a labyrinth without walls ?
anyway, whenever I visit this painting, I can hear and feel the empty undefined sunlit spaces of childhood, a time before the fabric of memory was woven, dyed, stained, embroidered, frayed at the edges …
FIFTH
GUILT ... I journeyed to a hospice where a dearly loved one was fading away. We talked about the general topic of guilt, honour, shame, etc, and I confessed that, when depression clouded my days, then I would sometimes become so burdened with shame at all the daft and dishonest and selfish things I’d said and done ( or left undone ) that I would mutter, “I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself …”
She, with a chesty laugh through her tracheotomy plug, recognized that condition and said it had afflicted her often … And of course, guilt is a very common affliction which no one likes to talk about, and rightly …
In Brighton, I had a great job delivering rental cars with a bunch of youngsters thirty years younger than myself and we also had a brief discussion of guilt which led me to state that I thought I might easily fill a thick book, maybe even a couple of volumes, if I started to write down all the horrid things I was ashamed of. A girl in the back seat said, “I wouldn’t go there, Tris … that way lies madness”
Sometimes when I’m looking at Rubens’z fabulous frivverless fripperies in the National Gallery, the gleaming frames remind me that “Guilt is a luxury you can’t afford”.
SIXTH
The Derveni Krater … The People of The Past were smarter than you can possibly imagine … well, some of them …
At a glance, you might take this for a bit of late eighteenth century neo-classicism … and you’d be wrong by two thousand years, and some more … this is Greek bronze from 330BC, maybe a bit earlier … a cunning assembly of wrought and beaten and cast metal, in which the figures are modelled with a grace and subtlety rarely seen in any great art …
The narrative complexity of the party-scene has taken up a few chapters of scholarly dispute … and we have few clues as to who made it … this was a party piece for posh drinkers, but it really is a kind of party in itself …
One photo cannot do it justice, so clicketty-click on the links, the youtube video shows it to better advantage than any of the best books …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LYNl3JezPA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derveni_Krater
SEVENTH
The Sky … is a painting with the clearest palette … is an open book without a discouraging cover … is a poem without a beginning or an end … light and life come through the sky … when our world ends, everything that we once were will radiate away from or through the sky and will dissolve back into the eternal cycle of order and chaos …
EIGHTH
DREAMS … I was talking to one of the modern world’s many professional counsellors who are sometimes called psycho-therapists. She said she won’t discuss people’s dreams during their paid sessions because they divert her clients’ focus from the urgent central issue of their personal weaknesses and their failures of understanding.
Well, yes, I can see her point … but only up to a point.
Dreams are still part of the lived experience of many people, and for some of those people they offer a key to what might be the only securely locked room in their personal and ricketty palace of inverted priorities and unresolved issues, wherein may lay hidden all of those cobwebbed and dusty questions that are too hard to ask, let alone answer.
In Art, however, and particularly in painting, dreams seem to take on another significance … the artist might offer us a view into a world that has little rhyme or reason, but it still acts a kind of yardstick by which we measure our own understandings, and our uncertainties.
I think that looking at other people’s imagined worlds can be a kind of prism for thought, where many of the tangled knots of existence can be teased out and split off into nearly recognizable smudges and blotches of shades and colours, even if their shapes and functions remain vague.
Time spent contemplating other worlds, whether real ones or improbable fictions, time spent trying to accommodate one’s own narrow thinking to another’s equally limited point of view, will often lead us towards fresh intuitions about our own situations, tastes, beliefs, anxieties, confusions.
That said, most paintings can’t and won’t offer copious rewards ... but look twice anyway, just in case.
NINTH
LAUGHTER … I haven’t got a “proper” sense of humour … you’d be lucky to hear me tell a joke because I can only remember one joke, maybe two, after all these years of laughing at other people’s … yet I’m addicted to laughter, and I’m addicted to the company of those who live to laugh lightly … am I like a crack-head without a lab ? …
it doesn’t matter … and I can’t figure out a point of view about Art and Humour … in Umberto Eco’s splendid detective novel, The Name Of The Rose, ( much better than the fillum ), the fulcrum of the plot turns out to be the Church’s suppression of Aristotle’s Treatise On Humour, ( which never existed outside the novel ) and the novelist implies that tyrants hate humour because they fear ridicule … laughter bonds people as powerfully as love
visual art can be “good-humoured”, especially in books designed for children, or in those lovely old compendium’s of Giles cartoons … yet I can’t think of any gallery or museum I’ve been where people might have lingered to laugh … maybe the nearest I get to laughter in the arts is when Steve Bell draws a cartoon and borrows from a famous composition of some great painter … this mischievous travesty of Grant Wood's American Gothic is already old but still seems topical …
TENTH
LOVE … the comforts and the excitements and discoveries of shared affection are something we all crave … although artists tend to be more interested in the erotic possibilities of true intimacy than in the mundanities of domestic contentment … but either way the viewer wins … the best art comes from the souls of those who have loved and from those who have endured all the illusions and delusions that come with the full package … no point in making a list of them for we’d have to write an encyclopaedia … the best are all sweetness and light, the things we need most … and we need them to be unencumbered by futile notions of obligation and ownership because only unconditional love can endure
