The psychology and sociology of art, artists, and the creative process.
This letter constitutes a permission to reprint or mirror any and all of the materials mentioned or linked to herein subject to appropriate credit and linkback.
Every article published MUST include the author bio, including the link to the author's Web site.
AUTHOR BIO:
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Bellaonline, and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
The Sample Articles (please scroll down to review them):
I. The Basic Dilemma of the Artist
II. Form and Malignant Form
The Basic Dilemma of the Artist
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
The psychophysical problem is long standing and, probably, intractable.
We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.
A compromise was proposed long ago : the soul is nothing but our self awareness or the way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that pain that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.
A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find the exact part of the brain which is responsible for the specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself.
Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the effect, as is well known. Similarly, the contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of the same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS the pain itself.
A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain.
The gap is even bigger when we try to apply natural languages to the description of emotions and sensations. This seems close to impossible. How can one even half accurately communicate one's anguish, love, fear, or desire ? We are prisoners in the universe of our emotions, never to emerge and the weapons of language are useless. Each one of us develops his or her own, idiosyncratic, unique emotional language. It is not a jargon, or a dialect because it cannot be translated or communicated. No dictionary can ever be constructed to bridge this lingual gap. In principle, experience is incommunicable. People - in the very far future - may be able to harbour the same emotions, chemically or otherwise induced in them. One brain could directly take over another and make it feel the same. Yet, even then these experiences will not be communicable and we will have no way available to us to compare and decide whether there was an identity of sensations or of emotions.
Still, when we say "sadness", we all seem to understand what we are talking about. In the remotest and furthest reaches of the earth people share this feeling of being sad. The feeling might be evoked by disparate circumstances - yet, we all seem to share some basic element of "being sad". So, what is this element?
We have already said that we are confined to using idiosyncratic emotional languages and that no dictionary is possible between them.
Now we will postulate the existence of a meta language. This is a language common to all humans, indeed, it seems to be the language of being human. Emotions are but phrases in this language. This language must exist - otherwise all communication between humans would have ceased to exist. It would appear that the relationship between this universal language and the idiosyncratic, individualistic languages is a relation of correlation. Pain is correlated to brain activity, on the one hand - and to this universal language, on the other. We would, therefore, tend to parsimoniously assume that the two correlates are but one and the same. In other words, it may well be that the brain activity which "goes together" is but the physical manifestation of the meta-lingual element "PAIN". We feel pain and this is our experience, unique, incommunicable, expressed solely in our idiosyncratic language.
We know that we are feeling pain and we communicate it to others. As we do so, we use the meta, universal language. The very use (or even the thought of using) this language provokes the brain activity which is so closely correlated with pain.
It is important to clarify that the universal language could well be a physical one. Possibly, even genetic. Nature might have endowed us with this universal language to improve our chances to survive. The communication of emotions is of an unparalleled evolutionary importance and a species devoid of the ability to communicate the existence of pain - would perish. Pain is our guardian against the perils of our surroundings.
To summarize : we manage our inter-human emotional communication using a universal language which is either physical or, at least, has strong physical correlates.
The function of bridging the gap between an idiosyncratic language (his or her own) and a more universal one was relegated to a group of special individuals called artists. Theirs is the job to experience (mostly emotions), to mould it into a the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of a universal language in order to communicate the echo of their idiosyncratic language. They are forever mediating between us and their experience. Rightly so, the quality of an artist is measured by his ability to loyally represent his unique language to us. The smaller the distance between the original experience (the emotion of the artist) and its external representation - the more prominent the artist.
We declare artistic success when the universally communicable representation succeeds at recreating the original emotion (felt by the artist) with us. It is very much like those science fiction contraptions which allow for the decomposition of the astronaut's body in one spot - and its recreation, atom for atom in another (teleportation).
Even if the artist fails to do so but succeeds in calling forth any kind of emotional response in his viewers/readers/listeners, he is deemed successful.
Every artist has a reference group, his audience. They could be alive or dead (for instance, he could measure himself against past artists). They could be few or many, but they must exist for art, in its fullest sense, to exist. Modern theories of art speak about the audience as an integral and defining part of the artistic creation and even of the artefact itself.
But this, precisely, is the source of the dilemma of the artist:
Who is to determine who is a good, qualitative artist and who is not?
Put differently, who is to measure the distance between the original experience and its representation?
After all, if the original experience is an element of an idiosyncratic, non-communicable, language - we have no access to any information regarding it and, therefore, we are in no position to judge it. Only the artist has access to it and only he can decide how far is his representation from his original experience. Art criticism is impossible.
Granted, his reference group (his audience, however limited, whether among the living, or among the dead) has access to that meta language, that universal dictionary available to all humans. But this is already a long way towards the representation (the work of art). No one in the audience has access to the original experience and their capacity to pass judgement is, therefore, in great doubt.
On the other hand, only the reference group, only the audience can aptly judge the representation for what it is. The artist is too emotionally involved. True, the cold, objective facts concerning the work of art are available to both artist and reference group - but the audience is in a privileged status, its bias is less pronounced.
Normally, the reference group will use the meta language embedded in us as humans, some empathy, some vague comparisons of emotions to try and grasp the emotional foundation laid by the artist. But this is very much like substituting verbal intercourse for the real thing. Talking about emotions - let alone making assumptions about what the artist may have felt that we also, maybe, share - is a far cry from what really transpired in the artist's mind.
We are faced with a dichotomy :
The epistemological elements in the artistic process belong exclusively and incommunicably to the artist
The ontological aspects of the artistic process belong largely to the group of reference but they have no access to the epistemological domain
And the work of art can be judged only by comparing the epistemological to the ontological.
Nor the artist, neither his group of reference can do it. This mission is nigh impossible.
Thus, an artist must make a decision early on in his career:
Should he remain loyal and close to his emotional experiences and studies and forgo the warmth and comfort of being reassured and directed from the outside, through the reactions of the reference group, or should he consider the views, criticism and advice of the reference group in his artistic creation - and, most probably, have to compromise the quality and the intensity of his original emotion in order to be more communicative.
I wish to thank my brother, Sharon Vaknin, a gifted painter and illustrator, for raising these issues.
Form and Malignant Form The Metaphorically Correct Artist and other Romanticist Mutations
By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Every type of human activity has a malignant equivalent.
The pursuit of happiness, the accumulation of wealth, the exercise of power, the love of one's self are all tools in the struggle to survive and, as such, are commendable. They do, however, have malignant counterparts: pursuing pleasures (hedonism), greed and avarice as manifested in criminal activities, murderous authoritarian regimes and narcissism.
What separates the malignant versions from the benign ones?
Phenomenologically, they are difficult to tell apart. In which way is a criminal distinct from a business tycoon? Many will say that there is no distinction. Still, society treats the two differently and has set up separate social institutions to accommodate these two human types and their activities.
Is it merely a matter of ethical or philosophical judgement? I think not.
The difference seems to lie in the context. Granted, the criminal and the businessman both have the same motivation (at times, obsession): to make money. Sometimes they both employ the same techniques and adopt the same venues of action. But in which social, moral, philosophical, ethical, historical and biographical contexts do they operate?
A closer examination of their exploits exposes the unbridgeable gap between them. The criminal acts only in the pursuit of money. He has no other considerations, thoughts, motives and emotions, no temporal horizon, no ulterior or external aims, no incorporation of other humans or social institutions in his deliberations. The reverse is true for the businessman. The latter is aware of the fact that he is part of a larger fabric, that he has to obey the law, that some things are not permissible, that sometimes he has to lose sight of moneymaking for the sake of higher values, institutions, or the future. In short: the criminal is a solipsist - the businessman, a socially integrated integrated. The criminal is one track minded - the businessman is aware of the existence of others and of their needs and demands. The criminal has no context - the businessman does ("political animal").
Whenever a human activity, a human institution, or a human thought is refined, purified, reduced to its bare minimum - malignancy ensues. Leukaemia is characterized by the exclusive production of one category of blood cells (the white ones) by the bone marrow - while abandoning the production of others. Malignancy is reductionist: do one thing, do it best, do it more and most, compulsively pursue one course of action, one idea, never mind the costs. Actually, no costs are admitted - because the very existence of a context is denied, or ignored. Costs are brought on by conflict and conflict entails the existence of at least two parties. The criminal does not include in his weltbild the Other. The dictator doesn't suffer because suffering is brought on by recognizing the other (empathy). The malignant forms are sui generis, they are dang am sich, they are categorical, they do not depend on the outside for their existence.
Put differently: the malignant forms are functional but meaningless.
Let us use an illustration to understand this dichotomy:
In France there is a man who made it his life's mission to spit the furthest a human has ever spat. This way he made it into the Guinness Book of Records (GBR). After decades of training, he succeeded to spit to the longest distance a man has ever spat and was included in the GBR under miscellany.
The following can be said about this man with a high degree of certainty:
- The Frenchman had a purposeful life in the sense that his life had a well-delineated, narrowly focused, and achievable target, which permeated his entire life and defined them.
- He was a successful man in that he fulfilled his main ambition in life to the fullest. We can rephrase this sentence by saying that he functioned well.
- He probably was a happy, content, and satisfied man as far as his main theme in life is concerned.
- He achieved significant outside recognition and affirmation of his achievements.
- This recognition and affirmation is not limited in time and place.
In other words, he became "part of history".
But how many of us would say that he led a meaningful life? How many would be willing to attribute meaning to his spitting efforts? Not many. His life would look to most of us ridiculous and bereft of meaning.
This judgement is facilitated by comparing his actual history with his potential or possible history. In other words, we derive the sense of meaninglessness partly from comparing his spitting career with what he could have done and achieved had he invested the same time and efforts differently.
He could have raised children, for instance. This is widely considered a more meaningful activity. But why? What makes child rearing more meaningful than distance spitting?
Nothing does but common agreement. No philosopher, scientist, or publicist can rigorously defend an argument in defence of a hierarchy of meaningfulness of human actions.
There are two reasons for this inability:
- There is no connection between function (functioning, functionality) and meaning (meaninglessness, meaningfulness).
- There are different interpretations of the word "Meaning" and, yet, people use them interchangeably, obscuring the dialogue.
People often confuse Meaning and Function. When asked what is the meaning of their life they respond by using function-laden phrases. They say: "This activity lends taste (=one interpretation of meaning) to my life", or: "My role in this world is this and, once finished, I will be able to rest in pace, to die". They attach different magnitudes of meaningfulness to various human activities.
Two things are evident:
- That people use the word "Meaning" not in its philosophically rigorous form. What they mean is really the satisfaction, even the happiness that comes with successful functioning. They want to continue to live when they are flooded by these emotions. They confuse this motivation to live on with the meaning of life. Put differently, they confuse the "why" with the "what for". The philosophical assumption that life has a meaning is a teleological one. Life - regarded linearly as a "progress bar" - proceeds towards something, a final horizon, an aim. But people relate only to what "makes them tick", the pleasure that they derive from being more or less successful in what they set out to do.
- Either the philosophers are wrong in that they do not distinguish between human activities (from the point of view of their meaningfulness) or people are wrong in that they do. This apparent conflict can be resolved by observing that people and philosophers use different interpretations of the word "Meaning".
To reconcile these antithetical interpretations, it is best to consider three examples:
Assuming there were a religious man who established a new church of which only he was a member.
Would we have said that his life and actions are meaningful?
Probably not.
This seems to imply that quantity somehow bestows meaning. In other words, that meaning is an emergent phenomenon (epiphenomenon). Another right conclusion would be that meaning depends on the context. In the absence of worshippers, even the best run, well-organized, and worthy church might look meaningless. The worshippers - who are part of the church - also provide the context. This is unfamiliar territory. We are used to associate context with externality. We do not think that our organs provide us with context, for instance (unless we are afflicted by certain mental disturbances). The apparent contradiction is easily resolved: to provide context, the provider of the context provider must be either external - or with the inherent, independent capacity to be so.
The churchgoers do constitute the church - but they are not defined by it, they are external to it and they are not dependent on it. This externality - whether as a trait of the providers of context, or as a feature of an emergent phenomenon - is all-important. The very meaning of the system is its derivative.
A few more examples to support this approach:
Imagine a national hero without a nation, an actor without an audience, and an author without (present or future) readers. Does their work have any meaning? Not really. The external perspective again proves all-important.
There is an added caveat, an added dimension here: time. To deny a work of art any meaning, we must know with total assurance that it will never be seen by anyone. Since this is an impossibility (unless it is to be destroyed) - a work of art has undeniable, intrinsic meaning, a result of the mere potential to be seen by someone, sometime, somewhere. This potential of a " single gaze" is sufficient to endow the work of art with meaning.
To a large extent, the heroes of history, its main characters, are actors with a stage and audience larger than usual. The only difference might be that future audiences often alter the magnitude of their "art": it is either diminished or magnified in the eyes of history.
The third example - originally brought up by Douglas Hofstadter in his magnificent opus "Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" - is genetic material (DNA). Without the right "context" (amino acids) - it has no "meaning" (it does not lead to the production of proteins, the building blocks of the organism encoded in the DNA). To illustrate his point, the author sends DNA on a trip to outer space, where aliens would find it impossible to decipher it (=to understand its meaning).
By now it would seem clear that for a human activity, institution or idea to be meaningful, a context is needed. Whether we can say the same about things natural remains to be seen. Being humans, we tend to assume a privileged status. As in certain metaphysical interpretations of classical quantum mechanics, the observer actively participates in the determination of the world. There would be no meaning if there were no intelligent observers - even if the requirement of context was satisfied (part of the "anthropic principle").
In other words, not all contexts were created equal. A human observer is needed to determine the meaning, this is an unavoidable constraint. Meaning is the label we give to the interaction between an entity (material or spiritual) and its context (material or spiritual). So, the human observer is forced to evaluate this interaction in order to extract the meaning. But humans are not identical copies, or clones. They are liable to judge the same phenomena differently, dependent upon their vantage point. They are the product of their nature and nurture, the highly specific circumstances of their lives and their idiosyncrasies.
In an age of moral and ethical relativism, a universal hierarchy of contexts is not likely to go down well with the gurus of philosophy. But we are talking about the existence of hierarchies as numerous as the number of observers. This is a notion so intuitive, so embedded in human thinking and behaviour that to ignore it would amount to ignoring reality. People (=observers) have privileged systems of attribution of meaning. They constantly and consistently prefer certain contexts to others in the detection of meaning and the set of its possible interpretations. This set would have been infinite were it not for these preferences. The context preferred, arbitrarily excludes and disallows certain interpretations (and, therefore, certain meanings).
The benign form is, therefore, the acceptance of a plurality of contexts and of the resulting meanings.
The malignant form is to adopt (and, then, impose) a universal hierarchy of contexts with a Master Context which bestows meaning upon everything. Such malignant systems of thought are easily recognizable because they claim to be comprehensive, invariant and universal. In plain language, these thought systems pretend to explain everything, everywhere and in a way not dependent on specific circumstances. Religion is like that and so are most modern ideologies. Science tries to be different and sometimes succeeds. But humans are frail and frightened and they much prefer malignant systems of thinking because they give them the illusion of gaining absolute power through absolute, immutable knowledge.
Two contexts seem to compete for the title of Master Context in human history, the contexts which endow all meanings, permeate all aspects of reality, are universal, invariant, define truth values and solve all moral dilemmas: the Rational and the Affective (emotions).
We live in an age that despite its self-perception as rational is defined and influenced by the emotional Master Context.
This is called Romanticism - the malignant form of "being tuned" to one's emotions. It is a reaction to the "cult of idea" which characterized the Enlightenment (Belting, 1998).
Romanticism is the assertion that all human activities are founded on and directed by the individual and his emotions, experience, and mode of expression. As Belting (1998) notes, this gave rise to the concept of the "masterpiece" - an absolute, perfect, unique (idiosyncratic) work by an immediately recognizable and idealized artist.
This relatively novel approach (in historical terms) has permeated human activities as diverse as politics, the formation of families, and art.
Families were once constructed on purely totalitarian bases. Family formation was a transaction, really, involving considerations both financial and genetic. This was substituted (during the 18th century) by love as the main motivation and foundation. Inevitably, this led to the disintegration and to the metamorphosis of the family. To establish a sturdy social institution on such a fickle basis was an experiment doomed to failure.
Romanticism infiltrated the body politic as well. All major political ideologies and movements of the 20th century had romanticist roots, Nazism more than most. Communism touted the ideals of equality and justice - while Nazism was a quasi-mythological interpretation of history. Still, both were highly romantic movements. Politicians were - and to a lesser degree today (see the case of Prince Diana), are - expected to be extraordinary in their personal lives or in their personality traits. Biographies are recast by image and public relations experts ("spin doctors") to fit this mould. Hitler was, arguably, the most romantic of all world leaders, closely followed by other dictators and authoritarian figures. It is a cliché to say that, through politicians, we re-enact our relationships with our parents. Politicians are often perceived to be father figures. But Romanticism infantilized this transference. In politicians we want to see not the wise, level headed, ideal father - but our actual parents: capriciously unpredictable, overwhelming, powerful, unjust, protecting, and awe-inspiring. This is the romanticist view of leadership: anti-Webberian, anti bureaucratic, chaotic. And this set of predilections, later transformed to social dictates, had a profound effect on the history of the 20th century.
Romanticism manifested in art through the concept of Inspiration. An artist had to have it in order to create. This led to a conceptual divorce between art and artisanship. As late as the 18th century, there was no difference between these two classes of creative people, the artists and the artisans. Artists accepted commercial orders which included thematic instructions (the subject, choice of symbols, etc.), delivery dates, prices, etc. Art was a product, almost a commodity, and was treated as such by others (examples: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Goya, Rembrandt and thousands of artists of similar or lesser stature). The attitude was completely businesslike, creativity was mobilized in the service of the marketplace. Moreover, artists used conventions - more or less rigid, depending on the period - to express emotions. They traded emotional expressions where others traded in spices, or engineering skills. But they were all traders and were proud of their artisanship. Their personal lives were subject to gossip, condemnation or admiration but were not considered to be a precondition, an absolutely essential backdrop, to their art.
The romanticist view of the artist painted him into a corner. His life and art became inextricable. Artists were expected to transmute and transubstantiate their lives as well as the physical materials that they dealt with. Living (the kind of life, which is the subject of legends or fables) became an art form, at times predominantly so. It is interesting to note the prevalence of romanticist ideas in this context: weltschmerz, passion, self destruction were considered fit for the artist. A "boring" artist would never sell as much as a "romantically-correct" one. Van Gogh, Kafka and James Dean epitomize this trend: they all died young, lived in misery, suffered self-inflicted pains, and ultimate destruction or annihilation. To paraphrase Sontag, their lives became metaphors and they all suffered from the metaphorically correct physical and mental illnesses. Kafka developed tuberculosis (his punishment as part of his on going trial), Van Gogh was mentally sick, James Dean died appropriately in an accident. In an age of social anomies, we tend to appreciate and rate highly the anomalous. Munch and Nietzsche will always be preferable to more ordinary (but perhaps equally as creative) people.
Today there is an anti-romantic backlash (divorce, the disintegration of the romantic nation-state, the death of ideologies, the commercialization and popularization of art). But this counter-revolution tackles the external, less substantial facets of Romanticism. Romanticism continues to thrive in the flourishing of mysticism, of ethnic lore, and of celebrity worship. It seems that Romanticism has changed vessels but not its cargo.
We are afraid to face the fact that life is meaningless unless WE observe it, unless WE put it in context, unless WE interpret it. We feel burdened by this realization, terrified of making the wrong moves, of using the wrong contexts, of making the wrong interpretations. We understand that there is no constant, unchanged, everlasting meaning to life, and that it all really depends on us. We denigrate this kind of meaning. A meaning that is derived by humans from human contexts and experiences is bound to be a very poor approximation to the TRUE meaning. It is bound to be asymptotic to the Grand Design. It might well be - but this is all we have got and without it our lives will indeed prove meaningless.
Dreams of Reality - The View, and the Point of View
A Dialogue about Art - Excerpts
Between: Roberto Calvo Macias and Dr. Sam Vaknin
Roberto:
What's the meaning of it? Its sense? Why did that Altamira Cave man paint those animals, Why? For magical purposes? as a religious act? What was his proposition? To communicate his personal views? Was he mad, as Vincent, did he see something different, that others didn't? Did he see animals in the abstract? was he the first person to think in the abstract, was he the first man? Was it a kind of pastime, a diversion, a game? Moreover, can we measure it? are there good and bad artists? What defines a great work of art? The recognition of the public? In which way, its quantity or its quality?
I have always been a bit of a dreamer, with a facility to imagine in the abstract, but years ago, when I began to read some poets, and other writers like Borges, Jünger, Neil Gaiman, something strange changed my view. What happened to my eyes? Why did my sight get so clear? Was it something mystical, the beginning of madness? What is the dividing line?
I don’t know if it is schizophrenia, god’s gift or some other matter. Probably I am mad, but what does it matter with ART? Where is the relationship between order, hard work, etc. and the Quality of ART? Was Vincent a calvinist man?
Sam: Absolutely. Read his letters to Theo. Also study the last two years – especially the last two months of his life. The “madder” he got – the more diligent, industrious, hard working and disciplined he became.
Roberto: Which ones of this list, all of them manifestly anarchs, unstable and inconsistent, do you consider not to be great artists?
Thomas de Quincey, Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, Byron, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Mozart, Isaac Albeniz, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, John Lenon, Camarin, Michaelangelo, Rimbaud, Gaudi, Dali, Jimi Hendrix, Federico Garcia Lorca, Holderlin, Woody Allen.
Sam: This is quite a list. Still I think that it misses the point. Art, by definition, is the surrender of the anarchical spirit to the dictatorship of the format. A painter is limited to his rectangular piece of cloth or cardboard, to his paints, to the maxims of his language, however private. Art is the sad documentation of the capitulation of form to matter, of the subordination of the ethereal to the material. It is a white flag in the ever raging war between the eye of the spirit and the eye of the flesh. Even the most prodigious and insane of writers must sit down, face the sharply limited piece of paper, write in reasonably straight lines and succumb to the most basic rules of grammar, of syntax, of meaning, of alliterative or other resonance. Even the most deranged and non-calvinistic composer can use, as a maximum, the dodecaphonic scale. This is what I meant by order and discipline. They are imposed, inherently, in the very choice to engage in a work of art. Working habits are a natural extension of these spatial and temporal constraints.
Roberto: What about the work of art? for example, what about Dr. Jekill and Mrs. Hide? Is it a masterpiece, though it was written in just one weekend under the influence of great amounts of cocaine? Are the images of E. A. Poe, mercurial, abysmal, mathematical as they are, unfit to describe the century? Doesn't his Maelström mean anything to you, apart from a horrific picture?
Is it that my satanic images are just that? Were Michelangelo’s later sculptures worse than his first ones, unfinished as they are? Mention to me, if you please, great works of art from the Calvinistic land: Le Confederation Helvetique. I love this country, my aunt is Swiss, but what great art works have come from Switzerland?
Sam: Art is the picture of the spirit shackled, furiously battling, striving to unchain itself, rebelling against the form imposed on it, mutinously attempting to reflect the world – no, to BE the world – with all its chaotic pain, convulsive features, horrific beauty. It is the spirit of God floating above the abyss, an act of creation, as detailed in Genesis. It is precisely this unnerving, unsettling, terrifying, melancholy, raging contrast that a great work of art makes. Order and discipline applied to order and discipline yield government regulations and other gobbledegook. Order and discipline applied to tumult, chaos, havoc, disorder, anarchy, decadence (ultimately to death) – yield art. You must not confuse the method with the content, the reagent with the substrate. For where do we find greater order and discipline than in the martial arts (they earned their title – “arts” – not in vain)? And where do we find more devastation, maelstrom, turbulence and disintegration of form than in war, their subject matter?
Roberto: If Art came from childhood, why must it require order, discipline... Is it not that every child is a little anarchist? Is that not true , that a child is like a terra incognita, plenty of anarchy, great views of the upper lands? Why should wild horses be less beautiful than domestic ones? Are we not talking about Beauty?
Sam: I am evidently less a romantic than you, Roberto, for I see no art in children as I see no art in primitive people (in the psychological sense, not in the historical or anthropological meanings of the word “primitive”). I see none in childhood but fear and anxiety, egotism and the curiosity to serve it, cruelty and malignancy. Indeed, we grow out of it the same as we pull ourselves out of quicksands. Children are incapable of being artists. They are manipulative Narcissists. Forever in the throes of the Big Bang of their personalities, embroiled in searing heat, unable to see a thing for the brightness of their own formation. To be an artist, one needs to die a little, to experience entropy, to be as barren as those rocks of our moon. One needs to combine that primordial fire with the cold formalisms of death. After all, our works of art are dead: letters are dead on dead, acidifying paper, paints decay, cloth frays and the greatest sculptures turn back to stone. The mystical tradition of the Jews (the Cabbala) says that the first, most comprehensive and hitherto best, act of creation involved divine light which was poured into vessels (again, the incoherent into the orderly). These vessels – owing to a cosmic accident – broke.
The light dispersed, attached to the splinters of the shattered vessels. These are our souls: a measure light, a measure the mundane, a piece of broken vessel. No, beauty has nothing to do with it. Anyhow it is in the eye of the beholder, a matter of judgement, of epoch, of cultural context, of tastes, too relative for art. We are not talking about beauty – but about the law. Creation is the law – art one of its manifestations. In its cold indifference lies the beauty that you are seeking. This is the maddening thing, this apathy towards our individual fates, as though we were its slaves, not its creators. This is what makes us children once more, awed by omnipotence and omniscience. This awe lasts until we overcome this sensation, dare to be Gods again and to create, dare to engage in art. Read Kafka, the most sublime and perfect of all writers.
Roberto: Admittedly, if we mix that powerful imagination, anarchy, with a superior order, then we surely will encounter the superior works of art: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Velazquez, Goya, Beethoven, Ernst Junger, Borges, Goethe, Leonardo, Brunelleschi. But it is not a necessary condition.
Art does not depend on anything. It has nothing to do with order or anarchy, with politics, with technical conditions, with perfection... with nothing. None of all this affects Art. It deals with the deepest reality. With the sense that is hidden beyond the Wall of Time. With the secret of human beings, their inextricable condition of being in the middle between matter and energy. That is what touches our heart like a knife when we see a superior work of Art: it’s a promise, a shared secret. It is the View of Something, that artist, going up the Wall of Time , sharing this with us. It doesn't have to do with the "mundane", it’s just its opposite, the other side of the coin. It’s the view which transcends "materia".
You said that feeling is incommunicable, but there is a kind of collective memory- aka Jungian archetypes. This seems quite correct. And, of course, it’s a plastic land, with degrees. But there are leaps - for instance, the genius. There exist some basic points: the mystical, the religious, the feeling of art. This is the reason for all the persecutions: Christians, Albigenese, Eleusians, Jews, Buddhists, Palestinians, Macedonians, etc... Here, sadly, cold alienated facts contravene you. Mystic questions are very near the line that separates human beings and causes massacres.
When you talk about drugs, you talk from the mundane side of things. You can talk about drug-addicts, their problems, you can talk about the effects of drugs on humans but you should never talk about drugs. The Shu´ar men, commonly known as Jibaros, or the head-shrinkers, experience time completely differently from Western people. It is impossible to explain it in brief, it has to do with a change in the direction of the flow of time, with dreams and future-past. But, one of the consequences is that they don’t know the meaning of luck. And, if we believe anthropologists, it seems to be impossible for them to understand its meaning. Same goes for drugs, or the mystical experience.
Art can make possible this miracle, to search deeper inside us to meet these unknown feelings provoked by the artist. To look below our surface, to take stock of childhood and its innocent anarchy, to access collective memories and dreams, where the material is already indivisible.
This, and no other thing is, if we may say so, what defines Art. The capability of getting trough matter to show us what is behind it. Here, there is no possible agreement. Not to see Art that way is not to see Art, period. It’s like music, if you don’t dig what it is about, that inextricable thing: "the real thing", then, it’s like eating only the skin of a banana, letting go of its flesh. Here lies my fanaticism, inasmuch as we all are fanatics: I do believe in Art.
Sam: This was a long dissertation in favour of the possibility to communicate from the vantage points of private languages. On the one hand, you admit that we are all trapped in our private hells, unable to communicate with each other except through massacres motivated by atavistic collective archetypes. You say that some experiences (drugs, for one) can not be communicated to the uninitiated. Than, in a magnificent reversal, you say that Art is the communicative bridge. It is through it that we, poor, isolated, humans can march to meeting points where a deeper sort of information is provoked by the artist in the art consumer. Moreover, you seem to claim that Art contains both a functional sample of the world and the rules of language (of connecting objects to its idiom). In other words, you seem to be saying that art is monovalent, it will provoke the same emotional reactions in its consumers regardless of their identity. This is to say that Art is a universal language. Wittgenstein said as much about natural languages. He denied the possibility that private languages with privileged access exist. He wrote that even the speaker of a private language will not be able to understand it. Your version is softer: we all do have semi-private languages and a modicum of privileged access. But Art is the great dictionary which contains the vocabulary of the human condition. Trapped as we are between the spirit and the flesh, between energy and matter, angels and demons, heaven and the hell which is our lives – Art comes to our help. It bandages our wounds, it talks to us in the ancient, unintelligible sounds of our
collective archetypes, it soothes us as our mothers did. It then continues to offer to us the possibility to communicate with each other through its objects, really through the person (or shall I say, persona?) of the artist. Art, therefore, to you, is a liberating act. It breaks through the glass containers of our very private existence which otherwise cannot be communicated benignly. I must say that I share your views with one modification, introduced by the “scientist” in me: there is no way of ascertaining that Art works.
That Art provokes emotions is undeniable. That it, therefore, must be connected to our private languages (=largely, our emotions) follows. To interact with our private languages it must gain access to what hitherto has been a shrine accessed by a priesthood order of one, ourselves. Art demolishes the privileged access maxim. Still, can we be sure that it MEANS the same to all its worshippers? Of course not. Rather it would be safer to assume that an object of art would mean different things to different people. Art resonates with our private languages precisely because it is a private language (of the artist). The affinity provokes empathy and the latter is misinterpreted as understanding. Art is as unintelligible as any other private language. Its relationship to the emotions that it evokes in its beholder – is equal to the relationship between a trigger pulled and a wounded, aching soldier. It resounds, it reverberates through us, in the process wounding us because it reminds us how IMPOSSIBLE it is to communicate, how absurd our existence is, how LONELY we are, how privileged our access is to a language which even we do not fully grasp or understand. Yes, we are sealed off from ourselves as well. This is what we discover through Art. The echoes of our very own languages perishing in the caverns of our minds.
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