Subject: Dissertation on Art and Life
Cutrufelli@aol.com
Date: Fri Jan 21 2000 - 04:47:17 CST
The Thesis That is Art
Refining expectations
What expectations lie within our asking "What is art?" It often seems we are
looking for a theory explaining a phenomenon which cannot be bent to
theoretical shape. But the many attempts to answer this question have
brought forth countless theses, a great and continuous narrative on art.
Similarly, we seldom cease in our inquiries about the make-up of reality, we
persist in asking "What is life," despite all the theories so far. In art we
deal with both, inextricably, each and every time a work is produced, the
artist during the process, the viewer and critic thereafter. Not that the
beholder has a much easier time of it, for as the poet Paul Celan tells us
"Reality is not simply there, it must be sought for and won." And each time
anew.
We come up, yet again, empty-handed when trying to get a hold of a definitive
answer. But we can and do see the sense in working with rough drafts and
refining, refiguring them.
Distinct figures
The figure in literature - in theatre and even the performing arts, - tone
and rhythm of music, the image, the object in the visual and plastic arts:
these are constructs, fictions, artificial phenomena which speak to us of the
real. Paraphrasing not only Nietzsche and Picasso, Oscar Wilde and Poe: 'Art
is a lie which tells the truth.' None of this is new, we have all traced
these steps on the way to learning how to see, recognize, define, but we
always seem to get lost on the way. Time after time I'm back where I
started, returned to the thought that art and life, no matter how
effortlessly - or violently - they are meshed, how indistinguishable they
seem to have become, are, and will remain, distinct.
Nor can I really make a thesis of this conviction. But I do wonder whether
the kinship tells us something else. The only way I know to find out about it
is to go to the works of art themselves.
Dissolution of art and reality
The new media makes a point of telling us they have brought art and reality
together, often claiming synthesis. But it seems to me that more of a
dissolution occurs. If we look at literary figures, at images in art, we can
discern subtle, yet hopefully salient differences, not in the 'what,' but in
the 'how,' in the qualities beheld.
Guessing art from life
The image in art - even a Bukowski character, is almost always hermetic,
enigmatic, something to which we must discover a path, find access to,
whereas a house, a rose, snow, a television becomes - if we are lucky - more
unfathomable the longer we think about it although we assumed we knew all
there was to know. And this is again, assuming we think about it. This is
not to say Mozart's Requium, Basho's haiku will become transparent to us in
time. We'll never be able to take Emily Dickinson's "nobody, too" for
granted, the way we do, say, a motorboat. But in the hands of an artist, the
motorboat, whatever form it takes on, will keep us guessing - like Nathalie's
video or Emily's masks - we'll keep asking how, why, what is the motivation;
or: what crashed-out shipbuilder made that thing?, reminding us of
Greenaway's encounter with a viewer who chided: "What must your mother think
of you?"
True, we may ask how in the world can that woman get up in front of a TV talk
show audience and discuss the excruciatingly intimate details of her painful
relationship to her father. But it is more a rhetorical question. We don't
really need to know, she's left nothing to anyone's imagination. Sylvia
Plath's lyrical voice on the same subject, however, will long haunt us after
we thought we had exhausted understanding.
Dilemma of origin
So what I keep wondering is, art and life may not ever be the same, but don't
they exist at one and the same time in the same realm, and are they of the
same origin? But what might this origin be? Fascinating as they may be in
their Möbius strip-like character, the traditional stances pointing one way
within the dilemma in the claim "life imitates art" or "art imitates life"
simply do not reach far enough. And so the dilemma persists.
Artness of the world
And it has led to our penchant for descriptions which let us know of our
insufficiency. We have called art incommensurable, transcendent,
transgression, numinous; we say the sublime is at work, a third element (as
Patricia mentioned) allows us to perceive the artness of a work, without
which we would have a cracked lens on one side and a sunset to forget. We use
metaphors of: excess, flash, glimpse, rupture/rapture, ephemeral, truth,
trauma, beauty, even Transformation of the Commonplace (Kenner). We sense
there is always something beyond - beyond words, beyond form, beyond emotion,
beyond our ken. Such an inviolable veil for such an indeterminable phenomenon.
Divining
It is not only art which works its seduction on us, we too must use guile,
deception, indirect speech in trying to reach art. Both travel as digression.
Then there is the image of the divining rod with all its metaphorical power
of seeking, blessed gift, the divine. Art as "divining the world".
Dare to fail
We often fail. But the obsession with failure is the provenance of beholder
and artist alike, as Samuel Beckett knew: "To be an artist is to fail, as no
other dare to fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it
desertion".
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