Category: Art

Art as yet unknown

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Honoré de Balzac wrote Le Chef d’Oeuvre Inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) in 1831. In it an artist spends ten years creating what he thinks is his masterpiece. When he finally shows it to two young artists they stare at it, uncomprehending.
“Can you see anything?”
“No, can you?” “Nothing”. “All I can see are blocks of different colour in a confused mass bound by a multitude of weird lines which form a wall of paint”. The artist is horrified “Nothing! Nothing to show for ten years of work!”
In his book Balzac aims to show the futility of aiming for perfection but, 50 years before Post-Impressionism and nearly 100 years before abstract art, he unwittingly anticipates the bemused reaction to the work of artists such as Cézanne and, later, Mondrian, as shown in the photos above.
In the 1880s Cézanne made around 100 paintings of one mountain, le Mont Victoire in Provence. The subject matter was a pretext. He was trying to show the problem of painting a 3D subject on a 2D canvas, using “blocks of colour” and “mulitudes of lines”. Most viewers saw confusion and weirdness. In the 20th century, artists such as Mondrian were inspired by Cézanne to limit their works to the formal elements of line, colour and “walls of paint”. Balzac is usually categorised as a Realist, a mere recorder of everyday life. The trouble with categories is they are limiting and therefore often wrong. Balzac was also a visionary.

The Drill Bit Castle

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I live in a South Northumberland mining town that once had at least four pits. My flat is part of what was originally a Mechanics Institute, a cultural haven for miners. For many years I worked in the town’s High School, which was built on land reclaimed from one of the local pits. The school faced a park formed round a landscaped pit heap. Opposite my flat is a cemetery containing the grave of two miners who, along with 202 others, died in the New Hartley Pit Disaster, 160 years ago, three miles from here.
This week I walked around a nearby nature reserve created on the site of Weetslade colliery. The park has a monument to the mining community, an art installation caled “The Drill Bits”. It reminded me of the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, 30 miles up the coast, which I visited a few days ago. I saw them from a distance, both perched on a hill. The teeth of the drills look like the crenellations of a fort, and the drill bits stand like the turrets of a ruined castle.
Normally, when you think of historic Northumberland, you call to mind its many splendid castles. Weetslade, however, reminds you of another important heritage, a working class one, a heritage happily still being honoured and preserved.

What do we do now?

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There was always a moment in Spike Milligan’s long-running TV comedy series Q when he liked to break the fourth wall. To end a sketch he would face the camera and declare he had run out of lines and didn’t know how to get off stage. His arms would slump by his side as if his puppet strings had been cut and, incapable of action without his script, he would forlornly declare “What do we do now?”.

Jean-Antoine Watteau created his enigmatic painting Pierrot in 1718/19, just three years after the death of the greatest puppet-master of them all, the Sun King, Louis the 14th. For more than 70 years Louis had been the sole arbiter of life in France. France was his stage; he wrote the script and directed his people. He built the finest stage set ever seen, the Palace of Versailles. Now he was no more. Pierrot stands, like Spike, with his puppet strings cut, waiting for direction. He speaks for France “What do we do now?”

Why Mr Jones does not know what is happening

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You walk into the room, with your pencil in your hand,

You see somebody naked and you say “Who is that man?”

You try so hard but you don’t understand

Just what you will say when you get home

Because something is happening but you don’t know what it is,

Do you, Mr Jones?

( Ballad of a Thin Man Bob Dylan )

In philosophy there is a method of thinking with the daunting name of phenomenology. It is a method based on the belief that the best way to approach thinking about something is at first to simply describe it accurately without reference to extraneous matters such as received ideas and beliefs. These matters are called the “epoché”, the irrelevant concerns that should be set aside while you focus on the object at hand.

Importantly, this affects how you should view, think about – and talk about – art. Looking at, and talking about, a work of art in the light of your knowledge of art history, for example, leads you to think in terms of categories and to make false assertions about artists’ intentions. Good teachers, when asking students to write about works of art, remind them constantly to go back to the work itself, to describe what they see rather than make judgements from what they know about the artist.

Even more importantly, artists themselves think phenomenologically. The art critic Ernst Gombrich states that art creation is a balance between knowledge of previous ways of depicting reality and the wish to create new ones which are a better match with the way they see nature. So a good artist is a phenomenologist in two ways – he focusses precisely on what he can see and tries to avoid relying on “schemata”, received ideas of how to represent this. This is why Constable said that when he painted he tried to forget he had ever seen a picture. It is what Monet was getting at when he stated that he wished he had been born blind. In phenomenological terms great artists refuse to attend to the “epoché”; they put aside those things outside the object being observed – formulae, received ideas, schemata.

Which brings me to Bob Dylan. When have you ever seen a conversation between a journalist or critic and an artist where the artist does not appear uncomfortable and on the defensive? The reason is that in such interviews there is a phenomenological divide between the questioner and the artist. The journalist/critic is often asking questions about the very things the artist has tried to reject when making his/her art. The questions are referring to the epoché and not the art itself.

When in this situation, rather than be discomforted Dylan chose to give journalists a hard time. Most journalists he faced were of an older generation out of touch with contemporary popular music. They could hardly attend to the phenomenology of a music they had never listened to. So they fell back on the received ideas they had gathered about Dylan”s music – its place in the “protest movement”, its influence on young people, Dylan”s supposed role as leader of the younger generation. We can see examples of the kind of questions he was asked in Martin Scorsese”s film No Direction Home. “How do you label yourself?” “What’s your role?” “Do your songs have a subtle message?” “Do you consider yourself the ultimate beatnik?” “What message were you trying to impart by wearing a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited?” It is not just the fact that these questions are obviously plain stupid. They represent the wider problem of how non-artists approach artists. Even serious Fine Art critics often miss the phenomenological point. How often do we hear “What are you trying to say?” “What does this mean/symbolise?” “What point are you making?” “Would you call yourself a (apply label here)?”

Famously, Dylan wrote a song about what I call the phenomenological divide; about the journalist who puts his eyes in his pocket, the journalist who only knows of the epoché. In “The Ballad of a Thin Man” Dylan tells the journalist “You don’t know what is happening here, do you Mr Jones?” It has long been known that the song is about journalists and their stupid questions. Phenomenology explains why their questions are stupid.

Why looking is like tasting

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When I’m asked why I like an abstract painting I usually reply that I like the look of it. This is often not accepted as an answer, particularly if the questioner is not a fan of abstract art. I am usually then asked why I like the look of it. This does not happen when the conversation is about food. If I say I like cheese no-one ever asks me why. If they did I would simply say I like the taste of it. No-one would challenge that answer.
In other words, enjoying looking at something is not seen as believable, even though for me neither the enjoyment of looking at art nor the enjoyment of eating require explanation. Unless I come up with a verbal explanation of why I like looking at something I am seen as a fraud and abstract art as a hoax.

The truth is that explanations of why you like the look of something are like explanations of why you like the taste of something. They are false rationalisations. You may say that the colours are harmonious, the composition is balanced, this cheese has a nice texture,  but these are just describable attributes which we work out after the initial attraction. This initial attraction cannot be verbalised. Please stop asking me why I like the look of something.
It is not by accident that the word taste applies to art as well as food.

Be careful what you wish for

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In the growing climate of anti-royalist feeling in pre-revolutionary France there was a cult of admiration for republican Rome. Jacques-Louis David, who had a track record of jumping on promising bandwagons, produced these two paintings at that time as a salute to the popular Roman values of heroic, male stoicism.

From their schooldays the French audience would know the stories the paintings referred to. The first, titled “The Lictors bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons”, tells of Brutus who led the Roman revolt that expelled the King and brought about the first republic. As consul, one of his first tasks was to pass judgment on conspirators who tried to bring back the king. Among the conspirators were two of his sons. The verdict was death. He did not spare his sons. With the others, they were flogged and beheaded. The painting shows the moment the dead sons are returned to an admirably impassive, stoic Brutus. We are meant to contrast this male strength with the weakness shown by the despairing mother and sisters on the right of the painting. The French public is being given a lesson on the qualities needed to conduct a revolution.

The second more famous painting, titled “The Oath of the Horatii”, instructs us with the same contrast. Strong males and weak females. Rome is at war and this war will be settled by three champions selected by both sides. The three sons of the Roman Horatius will fight for Rome. We see them proudly receiving their weapons from their father while mother and sisters again despair. An 18th century audience might also be aware of the events following the oath. Rome wins but only one son returns. All the enemy’s champions have been killed, including one who happened to be engaged to one of the Roman sisters. When her surviving brother returns, she weeps for her fiancė. For this crime against Roman stoicism, the brother kills her. His sister.

With hindsight, knowing what we know about the subsequent course of the French Revolution, it is a shame the French are unable to ask Jacques-Louis David a question. What were you promoting with these paintings? Simply the strength of character to pursue the cause? Dutiful, patriotic determination? Surely you didn’t mean we needed to kill our sons, daughters and sisters In the name of Roman virtue? Or did you? Because that’s what happened next.

After the fall of the Bastille, at first aristocrats, royalists and moderates, as long as they swore allegiance to the republic, lived safely. What David and other armchair revolutionaries could not have foreseen, however, were the events of 1793 and 1794. The Terror.

The Terror, that time of fanatical infighting and bloodletting, was the time when David’s ideal of Roman stoicism was pushed to it’s appalling limits. Factions competed with each other to be the ultimate Brutus in the way that they dealt with royalist conspirators. Thousands of so-called conspirators were imprisoned simply for their unacceptable beliefs. In September 1792 around half of them were massacred by the Paris mob. Women were not spared. Prisons which had been reserved for women suffered the same fate. The Princesse de Lamballe, a companion to Marie Antoinette, was, like many others, brought to an impromptu tribunal in prison. When asked to swear an oath of hatred for the king, she refused. At which point a door opened and she saw the fate awaiting her; men with axes and knives. She was led out and butchered.

At the height of the terror whole families were guillotined simply for being aristocratic. Like Brutus and Horatius before them, Jacobin leaders purified those families that did not live up to the Roman/revolutionary ideal by slaughtering sons and daughters. Chrétien de Malesherbes had committed a double crime. He was aristocratic and, as a lawyer, had conducted the defence at the king’s trial. On the day he was executed he was made to wait and watch while his daughter and a granddaughter were guillotined before him. Soon after, his 76 year-old sister followed him to the scaffold.

Be careful what you wish for. In promoting Roman stoic virtues perhaps Jacques-Louis David and other pre-revolution idealists did not foresee events such as these. But that suggests they did not fully appreciate the messages within the paintings. It’s not even as if these messages were coded. They were hiding in plain sight. When the mob rose, the writing had been on the wall for some time. And so had the paintings.

The power of art

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There was a time when a painting could make or break a government. It could serve as propaganda for a political movement. In 1830 Liberty leading the people by Eugène Delacroix promoted the republican cause:-

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Or it could express defiance in the face of an unwanted establishment. I know of no more shocking anti-war statement than Goya’s Disasters of War, which shows the barbarity of the conflict during the Spanish uprising against the French at the beginning of the 19th century:-

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But those days are gone, aren’t they? Painting no longer has this power.

Or does it?

In February 2003 an American delegation to the United Nations was making its case for armed intervention in Iraq. The press conference following Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council was about to take place live on TV. Then someone noticed that on the wall, in full view of the cameras, was a large reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, his powerful protest against the 1937 German/Italian bombing of a defenceless Basque town. Screaming women, dead babies, burning houses, suffering animals. So they covered it up. Who’d have thought it? The most powerful government in the world threatened by a painting. In the 21st century. Maybe those days are not gone after all.

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The colour of vowels

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” A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue – vowels / One day I will recount your latent births.” VOYELLES Arthur Rimbaud

 

 

 

When I think of the days of the week, in my mind’s eye I see some of them as shapes and colours. Saturday is a red upright rectangle, Sunday a white oval. Wednesday is also an oval, but yellow, whereas Monday is orange but shapeless. The other days of the week have neither shape nor colour. The proper name for this crossing-over of the senses is, of course, synaesthesia. Mine is limited to just four of the days of the week, but in certain people it can be much more pronounced. Not much to shout about, perhaps, but at one time, in the world of the arts, it was a hot topic.

Rimbaud wrote a poem about it – “Voyelles” – in which letters themselves – the 5 vowels – summon up colours and sounds. He was sharing in a popular belief. Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances” had earlier talked of “perfumes as cool to the touch as children’s flesh”. Rimbaud had a friend, Ernest Cabaner, who taught the piano by sticking pieces of coloured paper on the piano keys, because he believed each note of the octave corresponded to a particular vowel and colour. Rimbaud himself wrote that he imagined a future “universal language” that could be understood by all the senses at once.

The importance of the idea of synaesthesia in the late 19th century was bound up with a general belief in the interconnectivity of all the arts. The art form many avant-guard artists aspired to was music, seen as the purest, most abstract of all the arts, since there was no requirement for it to represent the real world. Language, colours and sound were seen to be coming together. Critics appreciated the musical qualities of poetry, not just its meaning. The formal elements of visual art began to be described as a language. Where poetry had led, painting followed. In the 1880s and 90s, post-impressionist painters began to use colour expressively, rather than as a way of representing objective reality.If Matisse or Gauguin wanted a face to be green, then green it became. If Rimbaud wanted a boat to be drunk, then drunk it was.

In effect poets and artists were liberating the formal elements of their medium – words and colours – from the requirement to correspond with the outside world. And so language and form begin to take on a life of their own. Rimbaud’s word-pictures are powerful and interesting in their own right without needing to be explained in relation to the real world. This is the same move towards abstraction that Matisse made in his paintings. Colour for him was synaesthetic – it had emotional power and could hold the painting together without the need to be realistic. This was the first necessary step on the road to abstract art. These days line, shape, texture and colour are sufficient to carry a whole painting.

Abstract art is an acquired taste. Not everyone likes it. I do. But then I would, wouldn’t I? I see Saturday as a red rectangle.

George Shaw – “The Sly and Unseen Day”

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I went to see the George Shaw exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead three times in 2011 and then attended a talk he gave at the same venue. His paintings are interesting on many different levels. They deal with universal concerns – memory, time passing – and yet are rooted in a very specific, everyday subject matter. He paints from photographs he has taken of the estate where he grew up – Tile Hill – on the outskirts of Coventry.Tile Hill is one of the many modern estates built in the 1960s to replace the kind of terraced streets I was born in. They were conceived after the Second World War in the spirit of Modernist town planning as an optimistic commitment to a better future. Having left home for higher education, Shaw eventually returned to photograph and paint the streets and woodland paths of his youth. The effect is strangely moving. What you see is a place which is growing old, being reclaimed by the natural world it was placed in. There is an air of death and decay. In a way you feel sorry for the place as you would for an ageing relative. In fact what you are feeling sorry for is yourself, your lost youth, the passing of time, the approach of death. The title of the exhibition supports this feeling. “The sly and unseen day” is a quote from Hardy and refers to the day of your death. The estate is a poignant metaphor for a person’s life. Like us, these estates were conceived in a spirit of hope and started life fresh, bright-eyed, looking to the future, but in old age we might ask what did we achieve, did we really fulfill those dreams? Places have a shelf-life just like us. The streets of my youth are no longer there.The history of Utopian planning schemes goes back a long way. Near where I lived in the centre of Leeds was Quarry Hill a large block of flats built in the 1930’s to great acclaim as self-contained urban environment. That too was demolished many years ago.
Shaw’s work also relates to themes found in the wider artistic world of literature. When talking about his paintings Shaw refers to Elliott, Larkin, Hardy etc. The titles of his works have a literary air about them. So I don’t think it is too far-fetched to see links in his work with writers’ themes – even if they were not specifically intended. A comparison with Proust for example seems apt. It isn’t just because Proust’s subject matter was the process of remembering the past. There is a more specific link than that. Proust saw his chilhood in terms of the paths around his childhood home. In fact he names each of his novels after one of these pathways – Swann’s Way, Guermantes Way etc – each of them leading to a different part of his memory. Shaw’s paintings show many routes round his home – steps. underpasses, gaps through hedges, actual paths through woodland. He uses them the same way Proust did – remembering those paths brings the past to life.
Finally the images themselves are striking, beautiful even. Unusually they are painted using enamel paint as bought in a hardware shop. They are at times almost photo-realist but have a an ethereal quality about them. The paint has a solidity and a sheen which seems both real and suggestive. The literary connection which comes to my mind is again French. Baudelaire was one of the first artists to describe the urban world , giving it the same respect as the natural one. He saw meaning and beauty in the everday. He called his works ” Les fleurs du mal” and any one since who sees truth and beauty in concrete,iron and tarmac owes a debt to the poet who believed that what most people reject as ugly can produce “flowers”.
The post-show talk with Shaw was not long enough. In fact only three questions were taken from the audience. This was a shame. The reason why Shaw’s exhibition has impressed me so much is that it opens up so many thoughts and questions which I can relate to. It came just at the the time when I was looking back at the Leeds I barely knew as a child and at an age when you can’t fail to think at times of “The sly and unseen day”.

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