Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 1, April 2001
_______________________________________________________________
Art
in Today’s World
By
“I keep in my deeper self all the dreams of the world”,
wrote F. Pesoa. This is what we are like at the moment of our birth, then life
channels our story according to the place, the time and the society where we
live. This story takes place in the more general history of man where the place
of art has evolved considerably.
At first man thought he held his powers from gods and
art was sacred, then little by little man acquired more and more power over
nature. Later, thanks to printing he was able to spread his knowledge almost
everywhere and man became the centre of the universe. At the same time he became
art’s main subject. Then came a period when many people thought science could
explain everything, so religions and religious arts were no longer of much use.
Instead, we saw great ideologies appear, each of them with a ravenous appetite
for power. That led to two world wars, massive destruction and the whole planet
was damaged.
Artists, like the planet, felt lost and hopeless!
But
while war brings destruction and death, it also brings new technologies that can
prove to be very useful and make man’s life better. Actually, nobody can stay
indifferent, neither can artists.
Today,
two important developments can be registered in a modified communication
context:
-
the move of artists towards science and new technologies,
-
the move of scientists towards art and spirituality.
Thanks
to ease of communication, art can be, and in fact is diffused and exchanged
everywhere in the world. The best example of it is music. It is the same with
science, yet its position today is not very easy, relativity and quantum
theories have shown that truth once reached can be proved untrue in a different
context. Secondly, everything is connected and thus we cannot separate the
observed object from the observer, neither can we separate the different
elements of nature and man is one of those. Imagination, which has always been
considered as the key of creativity by artists can also open large avenues to
new scientific research. To reach the source of this imagination we have to turn
inside in order to discover what we keep in our deeper self that we have
ignored.
Nevertheless
we must not forget possible dangers that could arise from all the communication
facilities: the unlimited nature of information, in content and quantity might
create a new Tower of Babel; moreover, couldn’t this apparent complete liberty
be more or less manipulated by an anonymous trade system which excludes an
important part of the population? Favouring virtual communication rather than
actual one can lead people to lose entirely the sense of reality and ignore or
despise all those living around them.
The
communication era has started; will we be able to survive such a difficult
period?
Artists
are lighthouses in the middle of the rough sea. Their beams should be observed
with the greatest care and echoes can be felt in the depth of our hearts. Like
that, they might show us the way towards a more harmonious and more peaceful
area.
What
is art today? Is it important? Is it mostly reserved to rich people? Can we live
without art? What is the modern trend? I do not think anyone will be able to
give very accurate answers to these questions since it has always been difficult
to give precise definitions concerning art and today it is even more difficult.
What we can say is that if art does not play such an important part as it used
to do formerly, the reason is probably that we have become very materialist
people and we consider that science and new technologies are serious matters
whereas art is more like an entertainment.
Most
people think that scientists are people worthy of respect, their discoveries
rapidly lead to new technologies which are applied in many different fields, so
they allow people to become more efficient every day. Since time is money,
scientists are very important people. For many, artists are special. As long as
they do not disturb the good society order too much, one can bear them.
Nevertheless they admit that a few among them can become very famous, earn a
tremendous amount of money, and then are worth being considered.
From
this starting point, many questions arise:
Have
things always been like that? If not, why have they changed? It is usually said
that those who study science only use logic and their brains, whereas those who
practise art, are just dreamers who express their inner drive, their feelings
and emotions. We may wonder whether things are as simple as that?
Now,
with the new computer age, while all the data are changing, what will be the
consequences for the generations to come, in matters of art, science and more
generally speaking in matters of life?
In the general history of man, we may say that for many, many centuries,
art and science were not separated; together they used to express man’s
veneration and fear in face of the splendour and the dreadful powers of Nature.
Unable to understand most of the phenomena, man attributed those tremendous
powers to gods and used his science to please those gods through beautiful works
of art. So, art was a sacred science.
But
it is in man’s temperament to try to understand and master everything that he
has to deal with, and little by little, man acquired more and more power over
nature. He discovered the roundness of the earth, was able to cross oceans, and
thanks to printing, could spread out his new theories and discoveries; then, art
started to represent scenes of ordinary life with no links whatsoever with gods
or religion.
At
the end of the 19th century, people thought science would be able to explain
everything, so they did not need religions to help them understand the world,
they created instead new ideologies, called: socialism, communism, liberalism...
each one of course being superior to the other. This led to a disastrous
competition that exploded into something unknown up to that time: two world wars
and the possibility of destroying the planet with nuclear weapons.
Art,
the abandoned brother, felt lost; without any landmark, creed or value, it
started experimenting everything and experiencing the deepest despair.
Among
the painters, I am going to quote PICASSO. In 1937, after the complete
destruction by the Nazis of a small village in the north of Spain, he painted “Guernica”.
Guernica became the symbol of man’s barbarity. If, as in the corrida,
we find in it three main actors, that is to say: the
bull, the horse and the man, what makes the corrida an exciting,
beautiful coloured show does not exist here.
On
the contrary, in this painting, there are no colours, everything is black and
white, in the middle we can see an eye- like electrical lamp which is supposed
to be the sun, the man, who is a soldier, is killed, trampled down by the horse,
the horse is dying, so are the women and children, the bull looks infinitely
sad, everybody is a victim... Under the sun lamp, there is a flame held by a
running man, showing the consequences of hatred. The whole world has become a
lethal corrida, the whole world has become mad...
At
that time, most of the artists partake Picasso’s vision; in literature, many
plays reveal the absurdity of life, as with Samuel BECKETT, Harold PINTER and
many others...
Years
later, Bernard BUFFET still paints landscapes looking like prisons, where trees
are stiff and leafless, where electric posts look like miradors and roads are
leading to nowhere. Artists do not meditate about death as they used to do, for
example, observing a skull on a table, they become death itself. This is quite
obvious if you look at Picasso’s last self-portrait.
But,
do not think that we have reached the pitch of horror; we shall get it with
Francis BACON, the painter. Bacon’s main subject is man, but what man
experiences is not only intellectual suffering, his whole body, like a naked
new-born animal, becomes the prey of a non-defined cold green world. Each of his
paintings is more horrible than the next. For Bacon all this was “exhilarating
despair”. Did he have real fun while painting? I do not know. Little by little
he drank himself to death and died in 1992. For me, these paintings are so ugly
that I can hardly look at them, but some people buy them although they are
extremely expensive (they are even more expensive than Picasso’s). Fortunately,
all the painters are not like Bacon. If the 20th century brought wars, distress
and despair, it also brought a new approach to science and opened the way to
incredible technological possibilities.
Some
artists have taken great interest in science. Salvador DALI for example, was
deeply interested in physics and optics; he was fascinated by time and its
relativity, that is why we find so many soft watches in his paintings. But the
painter whose art cannot be separated from scientific research is VASARELY. He
used to say that in the past, the artist created from what he knew of Nature
through his senses, but now that science has revealed to us the infinite of
Nature, we are no longer static observers but dynamic participants. Vasarely
marvelled at the possibilities opened by physics in which one could consider
matter and energy as a distortion of space. For him, philosophy, mathematics,
poetry, music and plastic arts will explore this huge field that has now been
opened. He invented a plastic art
combination by using algorithms. First he created “black-white binaries”
with asymmetries, the same work could become two, one positive, one negative.
Then he introduced colours, and by changing the presentation, he could obtain 16
– 32 – 64 solutions from one creation. Moreover, the same picture could
appear to the observer once like a hollow surface and then like a convex one.
Besides, in his paintings there is a perpetual inhaling and exhaling breathing
movement between the observer and the observed object. By constantly working on
this abstract game of possibilities where intuition could be called the leader
of the game, he achieved real, beautiful works. Some
of them look very much like Tibetan Mandalas. Composition and colours are quite
similar. Vasarely, like the composer of the Mandala starts from vacuity, but
while the first one gives abstract shapes to his drawing, the lama imagines
deities who live in the background of his consciousness. It all works as if
behind the apparent reality, there were another reality that can suddenly appear
out of meditation; that reality emerges from vibrations which can be felt by
every human being, no matter whether he is a scientist, an artist or a spiritual
man. As I said before, intuition is the leader of the game, but afterwards
everything needs to be organized and then comes reason. Concerning science, an
Indian philosopher, Inayat Khan wrote: “Science is born of the seed of
intuition, conceived in reason”.
Let
us consider music, where the same sort of phenomenon can be observed. For Edgar
VARESE, music is “organized sound”; that means it is at the same time art
and science. This opinion is shared by many other musicians, such as: SCHONBERG,
STOCKHAUSEN, LIGETI, BOULEZ... Today, there are electro-acoustic composers who
only work with electronic sounds and who say that their music not only can
be, but really is sensitive and
sensual.
So,
wherever we go, whatever art we consider, we can see that thanks to research
systems and cybernetics, new fields of expression are opened and an enlarged
horizon is now offered to mankind. In theory, research is not limited to one or
to a small group of people, and thanks to the World Wide Web, anyone can
immediately be connected with the person he is looking for. This web, working
like a super brain, is much more than the sum of its parts.
In
front of so many possibilities, we may feel a sort of euphoria and believe that
we have made all the possibilities possible.
In fact, what do we notice
We
do have new possibilities, new openings, but let us consider music again. We can
hear electronic music everywhere; unfortunately it is the same sort of music
that we hear in New-York, in London, in Tokyo, or in any town of the world. So,
it appears that there is a very serious danger of uniformisation.
What has happened ?
In
my opinion, there have been two main problems.
-
First, those that we call “ the creators ” are so enthusiastic
with their research and work that they mostly communicate with people having the
same interests as them, and little by little, they get cut off from the majority
of the other people.
-
Second, and more dangerous, many big companies which are already rich and
powerful have understood that with those new possibilities, they can at the same
time get more money and acquire more power. The more money you have, the more
power you get.
That
is how, if we want to listen to music, and if we use the mass media or the web,
most of the time, we will hear the music that has been prepared for us by the
show-biz industry. Instead of having a beautiful new interesting production, our
horizon is simply limited to what is supposed to please everybody.
Therefore, what can be done ?
Once
again, let us follow an artist, and this time it will be Alberto GIACOMETTI. One
of his very beautiful sculptures is “the walking man”, a man ever so tall,
ever so thin. Tahar Ben JELLOUN, a Moroccan writer imagined this man in a
street of Fez medina called: “the street for one only”. That street is so
narrow that only one man at a time can walk along it, but for this walking man
there will be no difficulty; besides, being so tall, his head will be above the
roofs of the houses and his horizon will be much wider than what ordinary people
can see. It is as if he had pierced the outer surface of the web surrounding us
and could see the infinite. Yet, at the same time, this man keeps on walking,
his feet treading the soil of the street. We feel how difficult his walk is, but
we know that he will not fall, that he will keep on going.
Another
artist, a painter this time, makes us a wonderful gift. It is Salvador DALI,
with his painting: “Saint John of the Cross Christ”. Here Christ is not
crucified on top of the Golgotha but soaring over the planet earth and bending
towards all the beings living there. He reminds us of his suffering, of his
compassion; he has taken upon himself all the suffering of the world, and by
doing so, he has redeemed us of all our wrongdoings and freed us from our
feelings of guilt. What is extraordinary in this painting is that Dali does not
show the attributes of crucifixion, but shows the metaphysical beauty of
God-Christ. At the bottom of the painting, a fisherman of Port Ligat standing by
his boat is about to start his crossing, the sea behind him is calm, the sky is
pure, Christ’s compassion has lifted up the veil of sorrow and fear. So can
compassion do likewise with every human being.
Let
me finish with a poem of Chris DRURY :
A
wave has no real existence, it is the motion of the water produced by the wind
The wind has no real existence, it is the motion of the air
The mind has no real existence, it is the motion of thought...
When there is no wind, there are no waves on the lake
Then
the lake becomes a mirror reflecting the earth and the sky
When the thought dies, the mind becomes the mirror of
the
Universe.
Francis
Bacon by Michel Leiris
Victor
Vasarely “Notes brutes”
1946-1976
Tibet
Inheritance by Detlef Ingo Lauf
Alberto
Giacometti and Tahar Ben Jelloun “Musées
secrets”
Salvador
Dali: Retrospectives 1920 – 1980
Centre
Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne
(18 – 12 –1979 / 21 - 04 –
1980)
Silence
- Art - Space -
by Chris Drury