AN ENDURING LOVE
WHAT IS ART?
A NOTE
I decided to not offer the last promised part of the essays I have thus far published as it is too heavily political and away from the point of the discussion about the arts, beauty, creativity and culture. This essay below is one of many others I have written over the last few years, as I attempt to bring my thoughts together about these things. This then is the first of a number of essays which approach particular ideas in more detail. I hope you enjoy them, and please do ask questions or make comments…Robert Golden
It is not only a loved one with whom we share our love and humanity.
Everything we think and make is an expression of culture. The most significant part of culture in regard to the human heart, is the arts. They provide a process and pleasure, education, the development of deep sensitivity towards others and the cultivation of knowledge and wisdom. This is a cultivation of our humanity. The arts differ from craft’s concern of making functional objects (a chair, a shirt, a pot). The arts differ from decoration and entertainment’s concerns with prettiness and distractions. And the arts differ from propaganda’s preoccupations with ignoring complexity, stifling dialogue and supressing opposition.
What then constitutes art today? Styles within that stream are dominated by self-absorption, de-construction and conceptual abstraction.
When I look at or read any art form, I ask myself, has my imagination or heart been touched? Has it informed my humanity? Has it increased my understanding of what it is to be a decent human being, to be able to understand the rigors of social and personal life, to find empathy for the condition of others? Has it somehow been able to rationalise my understanding of Albert Camus’ assertion that the central tragedy of existence is that as your soul wishes to survive, the body wishes to rest and to die.
Has the pursuit of the artist, no matter the style, the subject matter or the theme, revealed truths relevant to our shared time? Can I sense relevance between the artist’s personal concerns for form and narrative with the tragic social needs of our period?
QUESTIONS
I believe these needs are: our understanding the reality of power and wealth, and of ideology and cultural assumptions which shape our consciousness; our need to understand day-by-day reality; and our need for hope.
I believe we also need their wisdom in our thinking about, if not answering the common questions: what, if anything, is the meaning of our existence; how do we fit within the meaning we construct; and what is particularly human about love, knowledge and beauty?
Whilst artist’s personal developmental preoccupations with form, technique and inquiries into meaning may be of professional interests, works manifesting process and artisanal inquiry are simply that, and of less interest than their works as masters of form and ideas.
RELEVANCE
My primary concern with any art work is to ask: is it relevant to the human condition; is it helpful for grasping the well-being of our shared lives; and does it illuminate the darkness of my nights?
Even when I say to myself that the work is clever or entertaining, I separate that from whether it has touched my heart, whether it has allowed me to see greater depths or wider horizons, and especially whether it has helped me to engage my own humanity.
In the simplest terms – has it served me to become wiser, kinder, and more motivated to struggle for change?
This is not a simpleminded one-dimensional response, demanding that art conforms to a specific social-political idea, that it ‘serves the revolution’ or even that it explains the current period. That would be to demand art should be informational or propaganda.
Art is subtle, poetic, generous, multi-layered, nuanced, often indirect, and it is a dialogue, asking questions of the reader or viewer. Propaganda is strict, demanding subservience, insisting on a singular truth and clearly not a discussion but a proclamation posing unquestionable beliefs.
SUBJECTIVITY and TRUTH
As a photographer I document the world not as it is, but as I understand it to be.
My hope is that my subjective vision somehow aligns with what it really is, that it aligns with measurable social or personal truths. Art works on more profound layers of our consciousness. That which touches us most deeply we harbour for the rest of our lives.
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and yes, many photographers including Paul Strand, W. Eugene Smith and Edward Weston are a part of me, as are Beethoven, Aaron Schoenberg, Garcia Lorca, Nazim Hikmet Albert Camus and John Berger.
They are irresistible. With them having become a part of who I am, how can I accept the superficiality and self-possessed objects of Post-Modern Brit Art? The value of art is not only in a particular work but also in the way the audience perceive the artist’s way of looking at our troubled world. If I do not sense dignity or wisdom, if I do not sense an intellectual and creative nobility, if I do not see a caring for the condition of others, if they do not encourage me to embrace love, liberation, freedom and knowledge, I ask ‘who are these people calling themselves artists’?
Two men arguing and another walks by, distressed, exhausted, with his shoulders slumped and his toes crossed, I felt empathy for the distemper of the two men on the left and the defeat of the walking man. Does it show and does it matter?
ME OR WE
If I smell an artist’s self-indulgence – that western middle-class preoccupation with their every sneeze and every passing emotion, or as is usual, their preoccupation with their ‘Me’ over our collective ‘We’, their individualism run amuck leaves me emptied, sullied by their ego-centrism and my wasted time. This ‘Me’ centred preoccupation is a lazy capitulation to the cultural conformity of our time. It is their embrace of the status quo and in the case of most of this stuff, questionably called ‘art’ rather than entertainment or decoration, it is a diversion, often a celebration of the monetary value of an unmade bed or a diamond covered skull, rather than a generous and beautiful embrace of the struggling human spirit.
In starker terms those decorators accept it is okay to produce their work based on a financial foundation created by exploitation, starvation, impoverishment, torture and war. In that, they are servants of the rich and their critics, their media managers and gallery owners.
Why 500 years after Leonardo, 100 years after Schoenberg, 50 years after Albert Camus, 30 years after W Eugene Smith or presently with John Berger does their work still carry meaning for me? It is because inherent to their work is not only formal beauty but an embrace of our shared humanity which desires a better and changed world, and for that and therefore them I have an enduring love.
Above all, artists must not have imposed upon them the needs of governments, political parties or ideologies, and the ‘truths’ these sponsors claim as their own.
Of course, it is vital that artist’ share an awareness of oppression and a desire to address it in some way. The aesthetic dimension must incorporate social reality into their work, as if food absorbed into a body, naturally, organically to inform the breath of the work.
the central tragedy of existence is that as your soul wishes to survive the body wishes to rest and to die. At 80 Camu resonated