So. . . if art is the aim of this website, then who is an “artist”, and what is “art”?
I am sure there are many views on this subject, but, in case of interest, I will share a few thoughts here of my own, because I often think about this question! Along the way, I will give some examples to relish.
I do not see the role of the artist as being, for instance, to capture something “pretty” with the aim of making you coo at it and say “isn’t that cute?” or “isn’t that gorgeous?” Call that anything you like, but not art!
I also don’t see art as being the mindless rehashing of the flow of conditioning that we have received our whole lives, via words, sounds, images and so on. That is simply babbling like a brook, which receives water from one side and then senselessly spits it out the other side!
How can we de-babble ourselves and our civilization?
The task of the artist is surely to witness that flow of water in some way, before spitting it out again – so that the water takes on a flavour of the artist’s perspective and experience in that moment of witnessing.
Yet how much of what passes for “art” and “music” is, in fact, no more than babbling?
How many times have we heard “poetic” lyrics that deliver concatenations of tepid phrases such as “I look for my lost love in the stars above”, or “Oh brother take my hand and I’ll lead you through the land” (yawn) or perhaps just “The sky was blue then some clouds drifted by”?
Of course, when people hear the word “sky” they often think of the word “blue”, and when people hear the word “clouds” the first verb they might think of in relation to them is “drift by”. . . and so if their lips try to form phrases without the full conscious attention of the poet’s artistic mind, this is the kind of drivel that is likely to slip out, ad nauseum!
The way I see it, the solution – either for the would-be artist, or for anyone who wants to enjoy and appreciate art – is the ancient practice, made famous in Buddhism, of watching your own mind!
In this way, perhaps the task of art is a particular subset of the task of meditation!
It is only by developing certain forms of consciousness – of our thoughts, feelings, experiences and perspectives – that we are capable of taking all the incoming impressions and transforming them into art, rather than just the babbling brook that may be misnamed “art” by those who don’t see the difference.
Following the above examples, and to demonstrate what I mean, let’s take a master poet – Shelley – and see how he described such things in one of his poems, “The Cloud” –
For a blue sky, Shelley wrote:
And the winds and the sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air.
What can I say – it’s just pure poetic brilliance!
And as for clouds, he described one like this:
I am the daughter of Earth and Water
And the nursling of the sky.
Not only does it sound good and contain evocative symbolism, but, first and foremost, it casts a fresh perspective on something familiar to all of us – a vision of a cloud that you have probably never had. . . and one with emotional resonance that stokes your imagination.
Or, let us take another master poet – Thomas Hardy – who is in my view the greatest poet, or ultimate “bard”, as he was a master not only of literature, language, storytelling, scenes, lives, passions and meanings, but also, at the same time, of ingenious musicality through the ways he assembled his words. Let us see how he managed to express things, and whether it could be called “babbling”! Here is an example:
I have watched her walking, riding,
Shade-flecked by a leafy tree,
Or in fixed thought abiding
By the foam-fingered sea.
Here we see his typical balancing act between, on the one hand, phrases of simple direct everyday meaning – with nothing complicated about them – such as “watched her walking” and “leafy tree”, and, on the other, phrases of ingenuity and originality of language and meaning, such as “shade-flecked” and “foam-fingered sea”. As he often does, he has created two new words, here, that didn’t exist before! And he does it without you hardly even noticing. There is a sense of action to them, too, which makes it seem like the tree and the foam are alive: we can imagine the shade of the tree “flecking” her face, and the foam “fingering” the sea. As with Shelley, the imagination is stoked!
What’s more, practically every verse of Hardy’s – this one included – forms part of a narrative from someone’s life, bringing that additional context of emotional resonance to the words. In this case, this is not a random woman that he is describing, but an old love who used to wear a “gown of fading fashion” but has since transformed herself into a snooty “court-clad” lady who swings by in a chariot.
Also you can hear in this verse his typical musical cadence of syntax, where he writes “Or in fixed thought abiding”. Ah, I love that phrase!
How much more of a babble, rather than art, this verse might have been, if he had instead written:
I have watched her walking, riding,
Under the shade of a leafy tree,
Or sitting in deep thought
By the turbulent sea.
Of course, ten thousand people or more have described the sea as “turbulent” before, but how often has it been described as “foam-fingered”?
Of course, you don’t want every turn of phrase to be something unusual or weird – and the best artists know how to mix it all up, with a flow of “ordinariness” to carry it along. . . but the problem is that if you have a three-course meal which consists of rice cakes followed by a bowl of plain rice followed by rice pudding, then we’re just taking the piss. I’m not saying that rice doesn’t have a fine and honoured place on the menu, but if used in this way then the chef may need to hide himself or slip out the backdoor.
The meaning of this verse is for all practical purposes THE SAME as the original verse, you might observe! And I would agree. Yet we see how Hardy has transformed what could have been a babble of clichéd phrases going through an unthinking person’s mind, formulated into a quickly forgettable verse like the second one above, to one which I have instead returned to time and time again and enjoyed afresh on each re-reading, because it is a potent play of perspectives!
And that, in short, is what I think of as “art” in the true sense! – A play of perspectives.
But from there, there is so much more that could be said, to tease this out further. . .
. . . and much of it is not only non-analytical, but in fact anti-analytical.
Let’s face it, the analytical mind – which compartmentalizes reality into lines and boxes and does all in its power to banish to the hinterlands what is or could possibly threaten to be inconsistent or unpredictable – narrows down the scope of the artist’s canvas needlessly, and renders his or her works inadequate!
So let us welcome the analytical mind, invite him into our homes, sit him down in a cosy armchair in the corner with a nice cup of tea, so that he is there when we want to talk to him, and then let us leave him there while we go into the next room, passing under the archway that says “ANTI-ANALYSTS, ENTER HERE”.
So, I will start again, pondering the nature of art, but this time I will embrace a spontaneous unedited flow of thought, and see what comes out:
I see the role of the artist as being one of meaningful focus, leading to a panoply of potential manifestations of art: to turn your attention in a particular direction or view – or at the least hint at it; to speak; to show; to tell a story; to reveal something; to express or cathart; to recoil from and not necessarily just recapitulate what others have expressed or catharted; to question what was too soon accepted; to accept what was too long rejected; to reduce things to their essence, or perhaps by turns to flesh out their details in full view; to make connections, and often unexpected ones, between different realms of experience and association; to build a grand vision; to document a different perspective, a fresh angle; in its most basic form to document or expose something about life and the universe and people’s journeys through it; in its most exalted form to capture something essential of our emotional experience and travails, and of our collective and personal origins and destinations; to dive into our passions and feel ourselves throbbing with them – or without them; to reach inward to a place of spiritual clarity, where streams of consciousness and feeling merge as though in a lake at the centre of your being; to enlighten what was in darkness; or perhaps, instead, to endarken what was burnt in the sun so that it can heal; to map our mistakes; to laugh at our limits, our proscriptions, our neuroses; or, perhaps, just to laugh randomly, without any particular cause except that it may be provoked by the artist’s cheeky rearrangement of the world; to imply what cannot be seen directly, or what we are not ready to face; to express a love which has a hundred thousand million causes, each of them helping to illuminate her face like a sun in love’s galaxy; or to express a love which has no cause at all, except for itself, beckoning coyly from out of its own unending mysteriousness; to spotlight love, like a lighthouse to guide sailors on their troublesome voyages, or a lantern held up in a bedroom doorway; or to protect love in a grey haze of enchanting mist, wrapped around its fullness of being, so that it cannot be pinned down and reduced by harsh defining rays of unwelcome light; to prepare a particular landscape, with its elements laid out (even if, in extreme cases, the landscape is for all intents and purposes a non-landscape! – then it is still, paradoxically, a landscape of a non-landscape…); to represent something to you for your perusal – for you to experience – for you to be a new witness of – which the artist wished to linger on.
And that may or may not include something “pretty” – but more importantly includes something which the artist saw meaning in focusing your attention on.
There are a great many “meanings” in life besides just “cute” and “gorgeous” clichéd ones, of course! Some, for example, may be “disgusting”, and yet that may say something more meaningful, in the context!
I am reminded, also, of a comment my late piano teacher, Mr Seymour, once shared with me when I was an adolescent: “Ah, and here we see why Bach is still loved by so many, and held in such esteem, above practically any other composer: see here how your ears expect the next chord to be like THIS. . . but instead he defies your ears and takes you HERE. . . and what a chord it is!”
It’s true: Bach plays with you, as a listener, as though he is weaving a story with many twists and turns, amidst all the repeating themes, and he savours the repetitions just as much as the novelties, and knows how to balance them together, and all the while with great passion sneaking out incorrigibly on all sides.
In my own small way, I will aspire to the same aim, on this website, as I take you on a journey.
It will be a journey of passion; a dance between repetition and novelty.
And then there is one more thing to say, about that which cannot be described, but which cannot go unmentioned either: that penetrating beauty of being, which the artist, if lucky, may encounter on his or her journey – let us say his, for I am thinking now of myself, and the experience of being struck down by such an experience; for I was struck down, worse than any soldier in battle, and only remain able to function by having limped out again, just far enough to string some of these words and projects together: a beauty which, when encountered, permeates each movement, feeling, expression and touch with wonderment, and brings the artist to his knees with tears of joy; a new standard of beauty saturating reality with its inner contours, and filling the darkness with a light imperceptible to the eyes; and, alas, a beauty which lies beyond the scope of the artist entirely, except to taunt and inspire.
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