Prodigal Daughters

OPENING OUR EYES TO TAKE IN THE BIG PICTURE

My intent in this whole work is to dismantle the assumption that the arts are trivial and don’t matter. Other restrictive assumptions relate to misplaced ideas about their purpose. A persistent one is that art should look, or sound, attractive. This misses the point of art, firstly because the world is made up of matter and spirit, so the spiritual can shine through what is disagreeable and ‘ugly’ in the common view.

When I was around fifteen and complaining that I wasn’t pretty enough, an older friend said to me, ‘There’s beauty in ugliness, you know, but never in prettiness.’ It was a while before I understood: prettiness is judged by the values of society; beauty is an inner quality of spirit shining through that can be present irrespective of what’s on the outside. This beauty, captured in artistic form, makes it possible for us to encounter what we would otherwise reject. Such an understanding motivates those artists who dare to show us humans existing in the worst conditions. It prompted American visual artist Mark Rothko to insist that tragic and timeless themes were the only valid subject matter. When he found that the public was accepting his work as no more than decorative, he consciously excluded elements like joyful light and colour.

Secondly, our perception of what appears good and right is as variable as the society and age we live in. Take, for example, two famous goddess images – one a figurine from ancient Minoan Crete, fierce-eyed, bare breasted and clutching two snakes and the other by Renaissance artist Botticelli, a gracefully languid Venus borne across the waves on a seashell (in his painting Birth of Venus), neither of which is a photo-accurate representation. It’s pointless to judge them by the prevailing taste of a society. What is revealed by these works, what radiates towards us from them is where their essence lies. Exploring the arts can be an adventure when there is so much diversity to amaze and delight.

Artworks do have a tendency to cut through even if we have built up barriers. That’s because at times, without our help, they chisel away underneath our preconceptions. Our eyes can be opened by an artistic event that strikes us with great import. But it’s human nature to wish to feel safe and comfortable with the familiar. This is a reason why art also at times arouses hostility.

There’s the nineteenth century Impressionists. Now we exhibit their masterpieces in top museums. They are displayed as prints on motel walls and in thousands of suburban homes. Yet originally they were considered to be the works of artists who betrayed every canon of artistic good taste. They scared people away.

Explorations in music and dance don’t escape condemnation either. In Paris in 1913 the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky created a piece about human sacrifice called The Rite of Spring (at a time when romantic nymphs and fairies were the usual subject). This strange ballet was performed to innovative music specially composed by Igor Stravinsky. The asymmetric shapes and harsh lines of the dancers, the driving syncopated rhythms and violent sound of the orchestra, sent the Parisian audience into a frenzy. Those for and against broke out into umbrella and fist fights which continued long after the curtain had to be brought down prematurely.

Already a year earlier he had shocked his audience into silence with L’Apres-midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun), choreographed to Debussy’s sensually languid music. It suggested flowing shapes. But Nijinsky drew on archaic Greek vase painting – all angular and two-dimensional until the final moments when alone, the faun broke through the flat plane in an overtly erotic duet with an abandoned veil.

Rejection of the new and strange continues. There’s the vitriol against rock and roll when it first appeared (c.1954), and against every new form of pop music since – although in this case the young are open to change (or media influence) while older folk tend to prefer the music they are habituated to. Sometimes disapproval is valid, but not always.

Pina Bausch became famous for her dance works. Yet her choreographic innovations could drive people out of the theatre. After one hour of a minimalist piece I attended, half the audience, expecting to be entertained, had gone home. For the rest, some power worked on us as we gradually entered another, timeless place and a heightened experience of self, within what older cultures knew as the sacred space.

But unaccountably, sometimes even the most unresponsive can be moved. On a cold winter night I went to a late night arthouse showing of a film made in 1946 by auteur Jean Cocteau. He was using experimental techniques to retell the immortal fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. A group of noisy young men came into the comfortable warm theatre and sat near the back. They started scoffing, but were in full abusive flight for five minutes before the magic of cinema took hold. I like to think that the weaving together of story and cinematic art unexpectedly touched them. Right until the final moments they were silent, until recollecting themselves they gave a hoot or two before leaving.

THE WORK BELONGS TO ALL

It’s not hard to experience the effects of the arts when they are all around us. A consciousness of their true value can only make us more receptive. In their communicative nature the arts are the possession of all of us and we all play a part in their functioning. Both artist and audience make up a work of art. Each one of us needs to come to an understanding of its deeper purpose.

Christo’s Running Fence 1976 was an eye-opener covering twenty four miles across northern California, made of nylon, eighteen feet (approximately 5½ metres) high, suspended by steel girders. His fence ran across private farms and crossed counties. Where it reached roads there was a break. It took note of those who opposed it on their land, the different county rules and also the lie of the land – Christo worked consciously with human and non-human nature. The artwork’s purpose was never stated yet comments about his fence are informative. Some people became more aware of their own bodies and their place in relation to such an unusual work. Others turned their focus to the significance of relationships, of differences and the need to communicate and work together.

Something ordinary was made extraordinary by its context and so set people thinking about who they were. In all artworks this can happen. The active participation of the viewer completes the dialogue, completes the work of art.

This means that in the finality the artist who has created the work does not own it. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to the world and it belongs to the universe and the spirit which inspired its making. The artist must let the child go.

Influential expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky published his theories about art in 1912 in the still significant text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In his book he affirms the mysterious nature of artistic creation. He describes how a work of art, once created, acquires its own autonomous life, independent of its creator. And this life is doubly purposeful, in its material aspect and through its power to create a spiritual atmosphere.