If someone asked you to spend an hour staring at a particular photograph, a painting or a sculpture, and then report back what you saw, how well would you be able to describe it to them? Some people would refuse, giving excuses to the effect of "I'm not really an art person." The fact is, there is no such thing as an art person, because we are all 'art people.' Whether or not we have had much exposure to the visual arts, there are certain images that resonate deeply with us. Unfortunately, in this day and age there is so much media available to us that we often narrow our focus to a select few genres that we are comfortable with, and only rarely stray outside of our marked territory. If we were to approach art with a truly open mind, not only would we be able to appreciate what we saw, but we would also come to better understand our own emotions and communicate more effectively with the people in our lives.
Any work of art is an act of communication, and the task of the observer is to decipher the artist's message. Mark Doty, writing in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, contemplates what the intended messages within still life paintings could be. Acknowledging that these paintings contain neither drama nor subjects that convey meaning, Doty still finds meaning within them, for he believes that they (in general) portray a particular vision.
First, a principle of attention, simply that. A faith that if we look and look we will be
surprised and we will be rewarded.
Then, a faith in the capacity of the object to carry meaning, to serve as a vessel. For
what? Ourselves, of course. I mean that the objects depicted are, ultimately, soulful, are
anything but lifeless. Of course they have lost their particular contexts, all the stuff of narrative, the attached human stories that would have placed them in some specific relation to a life, but they are nonetheless full of that life, suffused with intimacy (48).
Still lives are a way in which one may project his or her thoughts and emotions onto the painting, without being interrupted by a story or a subject of the painter's choosing. Because there is no context or narrative, they reflect only the consciousness of the viewer by using mundane objects as a focal point for meditation. If one can meditate using still life, why can't the same be said for other paintings? They, too, were painted out of a belief that they could carry meaning, and operate on a 'principle of attention.' Artists are separated from their viewers by factors of time, space and cultural differences, but their creations are built to withstand these factors. If viewers can decipher the message, then a link between them and the artist will be established, fostering better communication in the future. Every time one looks intently at a painting, they are strengthening their ability to perceive the world around them.If staring at paintings is so good for the mind, why don’t more people do it? Perhaps they feel that they do not know enough about the medium, and at the risk of not understanding a work, of not 'getting' it, they prefer to stick to the films and photos they are familiar/comfortable with. Jeannette Winterson, a journalist and science fiction writer, was an example of someone with this mindset; she had little interest in the visual arts because of her background in literature. This changed when she stumbled across an oil painting in Amsterdam that so moved her that she fled to a nearby bookshop, sat down, and wept. When she realized that her distress was due to ignorance, Winterson resolved to educate herself, reading every art critic from John Ruskin to Michael Levey, and focusing her visual education on modern painters. Although this did not turn her into an art expert, she succeeded in her goal to change her emotional connection to art.
I still know far far less about pictures than I do about books and this will not
change. What has changed is my way of seeing I am learning how to look at
pictures. What has changed is my capacity of feeling. Art opens the heart.
Art is one of many avenues by which one may feel and understanding the emotions of others; a way of channeling empathy. Like many people, Winterson had primarily knew about feelings through books and through face-to-face contact with people. When she opened her mind to the visual arts, she found that art was another avenue of understanding people, and learned that art criticism was another method by which she could express herself. The same can be said of anyone who explores art in any medium. Whether one is a collector, a critic, or themselves an artist, art opens the heart. The trouble is, it is still difficult to get people into art if they’ve had little to no prior exposure, and Winterson’s case is the exception rather than the rule. Because of this; how might we lure the layman into art galleries and museums?
Perhaps the key to popularizing art lays in convincing people that appreciating art doesn’t take as much effort as they might think. The commonality between Winterson (pre- 'awakening') and others who are apprehensive about art is the knowledge that, like any form of love, falling in love with art takes time. This is why people will often say they 'have no time for art'; the time commitment prevents novices from fully appreciating a Titian, a Rembrandt, or a Van Gogh. Even those who take the time to visit an art gallery or a museum feel that they don't spend enough time to justify the excursion. As Winterson explains, it is not entirely their fault.
Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. There are the paintings, the marvellous speaking works, definite, independent, each with a Self it would be impossible to ignore, if... if... it were possible to see it. I do not only mean the crowds and guards and the low lights and the ropes, which make me think of freak shows, I mean the thick curtain of irrelevancies that screens the painting from the viewer... Is the painting authority? Does the guide-book tell us that it is part of The Canon? If Yes, then half of the viewers will admire it on principle, while the other half will dismiss it on principle (47)."
It is an endless barrage of distractions, says Winterson, that keeps us from truly seeing a painting, from knowledge of its purchase price to whether or not it is part of The Canon. If we are going to spend any time at all looking at paintings, we had better be prepared to focus on the images that catch our eye. All of the background noise, the curators, the other viewers, and the guide books, must be tuned out so that our paintings may be the sole recipient of our attention. To spend time with an artwork does not imply that you have to pursue a Ph.D in studio art or art criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it means that to approach art, as a novice, requires a self-education outside of any classroom. Looking at different paintings, and attempting to suss out what they mean, is a good place to start. Reading about different art movements and the artists that contributed to them is another. The extent to which one will pursue this education is up to the individual; the only prerequisite to learning is approaching the material with an open mind.
Going about anything with an open mind is easier said than done. Art can often appear to require an expert's knowledge to understand, and although asking an expert about an artist or an art movement may yield the desired information, it does little to further one’s understanding of the big picture. The dilemma shared by consumers, tourists, and sightseers is that they all use - are exposed to things - without understanding them. Walker Percy explores this theme in his essay The Loss of the Creature, arguing that there are two broadly-defined types of people; experts, who reign sovereign over a particular realm of knowledge, and consumers, who have no access to that knowledge other than through use, and the use of a thing does not equal ownership. Experts can be scientists, literary or art critics, engineers or businessmen; they all enjoy exclusivity by merit of the specialization of their trade. According to Percy, the result of this specialization is the total, voluntary, surrender of sovereignty over everything but one’s own domain of knowledge.
"This loss of sovereignty is not a marginal process, as might appear from my example of estranged sightseers. It is a generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of the horizon is thought to lie (cite)”
According to Percy, specialization causes people to have the incorrect mindset that they should, or perhaps even must, surrender their sovereignty over parts of their lives. This means that, for many people, the effort of exposing oneself to art and trying to appreciate it is futile; they believe that the major ‘questions’ posed by art have already been answered, and that the unresolved questions are the sole responsibility of people within the ‘art world.’ Again, we come back to this notion that there is such a thing as an ‘art world’, or a ‘science world’, or a ‘literature world.’ Specialization is important, yes, and it is often necessary to advance further discoveries in fields, such as biology and chemistry, that have reached maturation. However, the fact that experts exist does not exclude the layman from participating; if anything, the layman who delves into an unfamiliar topic may gain a new perspective on what he already knows. Like Jeannette Winterson, the layman who does this will then be able to create something entirely new.
Walker Percy offers a solution to the issue of people surrendering their sovereignty, as a way of enabling them to regain control of their lives. He calls the solution ‘recovery’, and it applies whenever someone is forced to approach something completely unfamiliar to them. This can happen either by accident or design, but in schools, recovery may be implemented as part of the curriculum.
But since neither of these methods of recovering the dogfish is pedagogically feasible-perhaps the great man even less so than the Bomb-I wish to propose the following educational technique which should prove equally effective for Harvard and Shreveport High School. I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards (cite).
The great man is an expert within his field, so willing and able to teach others that whomever he shares his knowledge with, he also imparts his passion for the subject to them. As such, it is a form of ‘planned’ recovery. The Bomb is an accidental recovery; when a bomb goes off in the biology laboratory, then the student may see the dogfish in its entirety for the first time. The dogfish is no longer a specimen, but an individual being, belonging in its own unique habitat rather than on the dissecting tray in a lab. Because the bomb and the great man are both (usually) impractical, the alternative is a different type of ‘shock’; having students walk into their classes expecting one thing, and experiencing another.
This may be feasible in the context of art education. Rather than being placed in its usual ‘packaging’ (to use a term of Percy’s) of an art history classroom, a museum or a gallery, a painting may be displayed in a mathematics class as a study in geometry, or perhaps fractals or integration. It may also be displayed in a history class, as an illustration of the zeitgeist of the era being taught, or even in a chemistry class - with the focus of the lesson being on the chemical composition of the various paints and varnishes used. Presenting a painting out of context is perhaps the best way to show an otherwise uninterested student - or layman - how to fall in love with it. If the layman experiences the painting in a language he understands, he will be encouraged to investigate it further.
This proposal, to encourage an intellectual awakening in the masses, would be a massive project indeed. However, the project is necessary; many of us, due to the consumer culture we live in, have been lead to believe that satisfaction comes from what we consume. These people can be controlled by their spending habits, from what they eat to what they wear, and even to whom they vote for. This is the warning given by Walker Percy in the last paragraphs of The Loss of the Creature; that refusing to educate oneself leads to mental enslavement. The layman will be seduced as long as he regards beings as consumer items to be experienced rather than prizes to be won, and as long as he waives his sovereign rights as a person and accepts his role of consumer as the highest estate to which the layman can aspire
… the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners think he is (cite).
One’s humanity comes from his mastery, his sovereignty, over his domain. Therefore, anything that removes his sovereignty also removes his humanity. This is why consumerism is so dangerous; it takes away the personhood, the uniqueness, inherent in all people, and homogenizes them. Intellectualism, over multiple disciplines, is the only way to combat this force. If this is the case, how can one turn the layman into an intellectual? One approach is through art; art is accessible to anyone and everyone, regardless of culture, religion, ethnicity or personal history. The desire to create and experience art is a drive that exists in all humans, and by encouraging it, one may help others to recover their individuality. Their individuality is expressed not only in how they approach art (from the perspectives of sculpture, painting, literature or music, to name a few), but also in what their approach entails. There is a niche for everyone within the domain of art, and it begs to be filled.
Works Cited:
Doty, Mark. Still life with oysters and lemon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Print.
Percy, Walker. "The Loss of the Creature." www.udel.edu. University of Delaware , n.d. Web. 5 Mar. 2013. <www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/loss_creature.pdf>.
Winterson, Jeanette. Art objects: essays on ecstasy and effrontery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf :, 1996. Print.
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