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As a kid raised on the bayous of south Louisiana, I wasn't necessarily destined for much beyond this sleepy town; such would be against the natural order of things and certainly outside the realm of the expected, given the family and class into which I was born. But accidents happen, and one's life may well be changed by the amalgam of something as simple as a handful of brush strokes.
Cold and wet outside, this morning reminds me of that morning some 35 years ago when I wandered my way through a museum filled with works well beyond my comprehension, searching for beauty and finding instead the burden of a lifetime. If art can help us understand the soul, as I believe it can, then my small epiphany came when I happened upon "The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch Preparing to March Out" by Rembrandt van Rijn. As unprepared, uneducated, and uncultured as I was then, the painting stopped me short; it took each conceited concept I had of myself and held it out for examination and ridicule.
The painting hangs in the Rijksmuseum and it is massive, almost 12 by 14 feet. I was, in a word, overwhelmed by the beautifully rendered central figures (Cocq and Ruytenburch), the arquebusiers held at the ready, the particular mastery of chiaroscuro, expressions caught in time, materials you could almost feel: all this splayed out on a single canvas and overwhelmed my sense of equilibrium. But as varied and full as this piece is, it was the chicken feet that captivated me and forced that sudden realization that what I was, who I was, would never be as deeply understood as the ordinary claws of a chicken that (were it even painted from a model) had perished over 300 years before I was even born.
I have come to believe that art is the measure of one's soul; it is a counterbalance to the burden of reflected light.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-W.H. Auden
Both Plato and Aristotle held the fundamental view that
art was imitation, yet while Plato found that imitation removed art one step further from reality (and we were already once removed), Aristotle held that the removal offered us perspective. Through imitation, we can gain access to moral insights—think
mimesis,
hamartia, and
catharsis—learn to empathize, and perhaps be enlightened.
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche posits that art, created out of the tension of order and chaos, is the method we use to order the world: “If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.” Yet Saul Bellow tells us that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
Pick up any book on aesthetics and you will discover that art is commonly, if simplistically, defined as a creation that contains representational, expressive, or formal properties. And believe me, the theories get even more obtuse from there. A course I took in aesthetics had a text that was over a thousand pages long, almost two inches thick, and didn't contain a single clue as to what arrested my progress through the Rijksmuseum.
Lately, having recently reread the philosophical autopsies of art performed by the likes of Kristeller, Tilghman, Rey, and Adajian (hell, I even suffered through the theories of Eagleton who proposes that art is the unknowing and confused expression of harmful ideology), I can't say I am any closer to understanding art than I was that chilly morning so many years ago. While I have found some small understanding in Wittgenstein's approach to the subject of art though his study of games, it isn't much to hold onto. That old master essentially concedes that any attempt at a single understanding or definition of art—because of its diverse nature—would necessarily stifle artistic creativity.
At this point in my life, I am willing to admit that I am no closer to understanding art than I was those many years ago, stunned and captivated by those exquisite feet, so infused with meaning, so peripheral to the larger—more important—picture.
Grab your coffee and pull up a chair. What is art anyway?