Art--Creating Worlds Beyond Sight

I substitute taught in a high school art room yesterday. I like artists. I’m not one—but I’ve worked with artists, writers and photographers for much of my life. They seem to like and work well with me. I once had the pleasure of reading a letter a top flight commercial artist had written about working with me—he was positively glowing in his comments.
So artists and I feel like a natural fit. My wife is an artist and, whatever disputes we have are rarely if ever over matters artistic. I enjoyed a whole day among budding artists, many of whom at sixteen or seventeen are already quite serious about it.
I’ve also been called a “philistine”—most notably one time when I argued that Aristotle would have been a footnote in history were it not for his physically active and bellicose student, Alexander The Great—who spread Aristotle’s teachings over the known world.
But that’s another issue. (I prefer Daumier’s drawings to Matisse; Kandinsky leaves me ice cold while I thoroughly enjoy Picasso and Modigliani. I quite willingly accept being faulted for lacking an appreciation for ALL art. )
Sitting at the teacher’s desk, I spotted a quote she had posted. It went something like, “Nature has made her world, art must create its own.” I sat and thought about it for awhile. The quote was attributed to Sir Thomas Browne. (I assume the Browne in question was the Seventeenth Century English writer.)
I don’t know if that was terribly true before the Nineteenth Century—when many artists were hired to or seemed essentially interested in DEPICTING nature—but it certainly became true once the camera was invented.
Painters who had made their living painting portraits and displaying landscapes were suddenly out of a job. In the hands of a truly skilled photographer, the camera essentially does both things better. It takes a bit of snobbery to insist on a painted portrait today.
Artists began to try to paint what lies behind the realistic depiction of a person, a river or a meadow. I don’t know if they were actually creating a world so much as trying to explain it, to make you see a reality invisible to human sight or even the conscious mind.
I love cubism, for example. It often shows me what I was sensing, what I was glimpsing in the periphery of my field of vision. That is probably validly called a creation of the artist’s own world. I might never have seen what I only glimpsed had an artist not showed it to me. No camera could do that.
But creating one’s own world can be a licentious, dangerous or even silly thing. It can be a form of narcissistic self-absorption which manufactures a world that is all too close to what many ancient Greeks called our world—the defecation of the gods.
I saw a bit of that today. Perhaps all young artists go through such a stage. I’ve seen much more of it in student art shows at art institutes here and in bigger cities. I’ve seen a bit too much of it in museum staged shows of established artists.
Create your own world—be sure that it relates even to philistine viewers like myself (as Modigliani, Picasso, and Gauguin did). Startle, amuse or bemuse me as Dali did. But don’t set a broken chair in a corner, cover it with dirty clothes and sneakers and call it a world of art created by an artist.
That cannot be what Browne meant. It cannot be what the camera has driven art to. A colorful splotch on a canvas can, sometimes, be merely a colorful splotch on a canvas. There may be no insight, no true creativity, no newly fashioned world. Just meaningless self-indulgence.
Art must indeed create its own world. I would ask of some artists (and students), Be careful that this is what you are actually doing.