ART

by Hugh M. Lewis

Sublime beauty can be found in the commonest of things and in the plainest of faces. To discover aesthetic feeling and character even in human ugliness and natural decay is an art in itself. From such a superlative standpoint, the cosmetic, the refined and sophisticated, the conventional and the ‘beautiful’ frequently appear contrived, superficial, meretricious, and even grotesque and perverse in their artificial exaggeration of the natural forms, lines, textures and colors of the world.

I have long striven to bring my art into everything I have done—in my painting, my poetry, my other writing, in my anthropological research and understanding, in my teaching, in my wood working, in my social relationships and even in my worldly adventures. Things are hardly worth doing if not done well with an eye to balance and form and with the extra care and attention to minor details. It is a paradox that some of my most rewarding aesthetic experiences have been in figuring out special ways to help or to make others happy in the world. In whatever I choose to do, the challenge to produce something interesting, and perhaps even profound, is always an intrinsic part of the problem.

It is a grand paradox that will not allow itself to die to consider that Vincent van Gogh was perhaps the poorest, most persecuted, and yet most productive of artists to have ever lived. Now, barely one hundred years since his tragic suicide at thirty seven years of age, one of his lesser paintings will see at an auction for millions of dollars, and a whole multi million dollar industry has grown up around his family name. And yet while he lived and worked, the world denied to him even the most basic support. Van Gogh gave so much to a greedy and ungrateful world, and now even many of his biographers and fifth generation analysts would deny him even the most basic sanities and human sensibilities and sensitivities which made him such an uncommon artist. He was not so much anti social as he was alienated by a world which denied him a life while capitalizing upon his art. The lesson taught by Van Gogh’s tragic life is that we must honor the living as much as the dead.

A genuine artist transforms everything and anything she/he touches. A great name can even turn the crudest of crap into gold while an unknown name can quickly render the finest and most expensive of materials into worthless waste. But neither fame nor fortune can guarantee an object of art against the acid test of time. Reputations wax and wane with the changing tides of fashion and currents of culture, but among some of the greatest pieces of art of humankind are many made by anonymous hands. The highest reward of great art is always in its making.

The relationship between money and art has always been something akin to prostitution. Propaganda is the inevitable product of such artistic prostitution. All art produced for such a purpose may be masterpieces of the art of propaganda, but are rarely much more than minor and mediocre works of art. Such art capitalizes upon the brevity of the critical Moment, and pays the price by its ephemeral transience in the world.

While all artists need money by which to work and live, genuine art is never produced primarily for the purpose of making money. It is a happy balance any artist can strike between a means of making a living and an end for which to live.

Even artists must struggle and juggle the contradictions of the world.

I was once told by an authority that art was a difficult row to hoe in the world. For a few, it is the only row to hoe.

To ask an artist to live without art is like asking anyone else to live without air to breathe. Art is the food of the soul, and the human soul is the center of the artist’s being. Happiness is the heart of the possessor.

People who claim that the artist is essentially useless in the world unless famous or fortunate fail to appreciate the vital role that art plays in the world and the crucial connection that has always existed between art, culture and human awareness and adaptability in the world. Art may often be trivial and superficial, and artists banal and crude, but art and artists are never useless in the human world.

Though humankind can learn to survive in the world without art, and even learn to be happy in spite of art, it is bound never to live well in such a world without art.

Humankind evolved to be artistic—creativity is the touchstone of human nature. Art is what separates humankind from the other animals in the world. It is not surprising to see that art had an important survival function in both the human and natural worlds.

One of the greatest tragedies of the human world is that, in spite of so much civilization, more people do not learn to become artists in their lives.

It is a capacity most humans share, and yet which seldom becomes cultivated to its fullest potential. Many social constraints frequently work to frustrate and interfere with this fundamental human capacity, in order to channel its basic energies and abilities into more controlled areas of activity and to induce greater conformity to social norms of belief and behavior. There is always an aspect of unpredictability and danger associated with artistic creativity which is often considered threatening to the status quo of social order—particularly if such an order is especially conservative and resistant or reactionary to change. This aspect of the association of art to liberal change, unpredictability and innovation tends to cast the artist in an ambivalent and somewhat liminal position in the normal social order. This has not always been the case—artists have been frequently aligned with and supported by, and therefore co-opted by, the most conservative and dominant interests of society. Great art has often been the dependent stepchild of a proud and ruthless despot, but the basic function of art to anticipate and make aware change in the world has never been altered or co-opted by any political interest except as propaganda.

If propaganda has been the corruption and pollution of great art, critics have been its parasites. While the usefulness of art in the world can never be doubted, the necessity of the function of artistic criticism can always be questioned. History has remembered many great works of art and many great artists, but no critics or works of criticism. If propagandized and politically co-opted artists have become professional prostitutes, then the critics have been their whore-mongers and pimps. It is a paradox that the artist is always her/his own worst critic, and that all-authentic art is also implicit criticism.

Perfectionism is the poison of authentic art. It is a paradox that while all authentic art attempts to improve itself, it never answers the claim to perfection. Irremediable perfectionism leads to frustration and stagnation of artistic growth. It is a symptom of artistic immaturity and regression.

The artist is like a fruit tree, not to be judged by the merits of any particular fruit, but by the entire compendium of the artist’s life work—by the number and size of the seasonal harvests. Each individual work, like any particular fruit, must be judged against the overall size, variety and yield of the artist’s entire production. The artist must learn to cull the lesser fruit and to concentrate upon the better fruit, and it is the most any artist can hope for to have a long life with many full and productive seasons.

A single masterpiece never an artist makes, but an artist must make many masterpieces.

Few firm lines can be drawn different forms and kinds of artistic activity and between art and many aspects of life. A creative artist is by definition a syncretistic synthesizer of many diverse elements of experience and life. Artist excellence in one area or domain tends to generalize itself to the artist’s entire life and to lend aesthetic awareness to many other areas of activity. Similarly, an artistic society will tend to demonstrate talent and genius in a relatively wide arc of cultural activity. Restriction and boundedness is antithetical to an artistic way of life. This tendency must inevitably sometimes comes to odds with the professional need to focus and concentrate one’s expertise upon a relatively narrow and well defined domain in order to achieve the standards of excellence characteristic of great art. The mark of a true artistic genius is her/his basic versatility—to work with excellence in a variety of different media, through professionally restricted to just a few.

An artist is rarely just as asshole.

The amount, variety, and relative quality of art can be taken as a useful and valid measure of relative health and adaptive achievements of any human culture and all human civilization. The progress of human civilization can be indexed by number and productivity of its artistic genius. No society too preoccupied with the basic human biological survival can find the spare time and energy to produce great art. The great cave paintings of Lascaux can be taken as the first evidence of human civilization in the prehistoric world. We recognize the European Renaissance for what it was, as a great dawning of human civilization at the end of a long dark night of the middle ages,, by its blossoming and flourishing of great art. The huge stone megaliths of Easter Island are a strange archaeological testimony to the power and vitality of artistic production in determining the course of survival of its Polynesian people. It an be taken as an important symptom of our modern malaise if fewer and fewer people can either find the time, means or energy available to pursue art even as just a part time avocation.

A world in which success is built upon the strict separation of work and play,, the dichotomization between professional and personal, the alienation of human labor from the products of that labor, the cooption of human time, energy and freedom, intellect and the values for the purpose of exploitation, and the repression of the subjectiveness and will of the individual for the objectivity and sake of the ‘System,’ the artist who manages to make work play and play work, who fails to separate personal interests and tastes from professional prerogatives, who is supposed to do what she/he likes and like what she/he does, who is intimately attached via her/his labor to the objects of art which they produce, who resists, and must resist the monetary cooption of their time, energy , liberty, ideas and values in order to avoid the exploitation of their labor, and who revel in their own and in human subjectiveness and in their individual willfulness, can only be regarded with deep suspicion and, at best, great ambivalence by other, more ‘normal’ members of society. At worst the drive of such normative constraints may lead to the recrimination of the artist and the repression of all art which is not mandated by service to the System and thus propagandized. It is not unusual if artists are made to suffer severely for their lot in life, and that they should be more sensitive to this suffering and in tune with its social causes and consequences more than the normal run of the mill. Unmitigated and chronic feelings of guilt, shame, persecution, and of anxiety and hysteria have their source in the ambivalent status role of the artist in human society. T seems that little can really be done to alleviate such symptoms and suffering short of the basic reorientation of our modern System away from mass production and toward the kind of handicraft production from which all art comes.

Ours is a modern society, which does not value too highly the kinds of interests and involvements which fosters the cultivation of art. Instead our society places a premium upon socio economic achievement and status which translates into ones occupational position and sociability within the System. For any authentic artist, where one stands within the world hierarchy of widget or wug production and consumption is at best secondary to the existential and historical problematics of creativity and culture.

The eye of the artist is to see in each and every image of the world its own momentary and its revealed potential for eternity captured in the subtle and sublime interplay of light and shadow, in the tonalities and values of local colors contrasts, and atmospheric effects, in the synaesthetic effects of surface textures, intersecting lines, curving depths, and sharply cut corners, in directional movements and flows of design patterning. The hand of the artist transforms everything it touches into something vibrant with life animating, vitalizing, transmitting, moving the inert. Art expresses motion in stillness, sound in silence, light in darkness and life in the inanimate and lifeless. For the authentic artist every moment, every scene, every sound, every act, every word, is pregnant with the vitality of life, and the whole world presents as endless array of possibilities waiting to be born. In this sense, we may speak legitimately of the inherent awe and wonder if art in the world.

In all art, simplicity is the quintessential of virtuosity and the only permissible style of conveying the sublime, the subtle and the profound. Even sophistry and unnecessary complexity weaken the form, take away from its strength, and render its feeling and movement superfluous. It follows that simplicity can be the source of grand sophistication and sublime complexity, while the sophistication and complexity of design and execution can sometimes reveal great simplicity.

In great art, the medium is always metalogical with its message, form follows function and function fits the form, design determines the execution and the execution determines the design, and the unique composition of its elements always and only points indirectly to their ultimate significance and purpose. The profundity of great art is its embodiment and expression of grand paradox—its depths are reflected in the shallowness of its surface spaces.

All authentic art is in some strange, unfathomable measure, and in some secret, mysterious way, prescient of the near future at the moment of its origination. We welcome new art when we open our doors to the changes that the future has brought, and new art becomes acceptable only after past tastes have been replaced by future appetites. In this way, art has always had a wonderful affinity with the mystical and the prophetic, and artists share similar attitudes, orientations, life styles and world views as visionaries, seers, fortune tellers and shamans. The authentic artist has sharpened awareness and an attunement to the environmental and with the larger world that is lacking in the less sensitive, the more mundane and convention bound. It is the very sharpness of the artists sensibilities and keenness of this kind of awareness which drives the artist to create new forms which are more consonant and harmonious with the changing world as they experience it. It is through such creation of new and novel forms that the new ways of seeing, feeling, sensing and acting in the world is made available to the less acutely aware and those of duller sensitivities.

The function of art is to mediate change in the world by incorporating it into more conventionally and culturally acceptable forms. It follows that indirectly the function of art is to preserve past forms in viable new shapes.

All art works within some convention, tradition, or cultural constraint—even if only in reaction, rebellion or in destructive denial of such constraint. Without attachment to any constraint, art is impossible, and what would pass for art is only counterfeit and trivial. The creation of new forms of art lead inevitably to the establishment of new conventions, the founding of new traditions and the inauguration of new cultural constraints. What is born in freedom and in the breaking with constraint, leads to the restriction of freedom and the broadening of constraint. The dialectic between art and the society, in which it is situated and supported, is the dialectic between the liberal and the conservative, the marginal and the conventional, the peripheral and the central. What begins in art ends in cultural constraint. The revolutionary and new of one age is the conventional and old of the next.

No portrait is painted that does not present the disguised face of the artist. Every painting, no matter what the subject, contains the imprint of the artist’s unique individuality and the impression of her/his personality. In however subtle a manner, lifeless symbols and emblems are anthropomorphized with human traits and characteristics, and everywhere the painter cannot but help leave her/his signature in paint.

Without art by which to frame our experience, the human being is little better than an animal or a machine in the world. More than anything else, besides perhaps Religion, it is art which humanizes the world and which makes the human being worldlier.

Great Art, like great Religion, springs from the spirit of humanity and has its common source in the soul of the individual human being. Art and Religion are the best expressions of humanity and human identity in the world.

Show me an authentic artist and I will show you a basically, incurably, honest human being. Authentic art always depends upon the virtue of honesty to always see through the veil of illusion to the substance beneath. Art which relies upon the illusion and trickery of deceit is nothing more than mere propaganda. Authentic art always enlightens the human world—to express and experience the world as it really seems to be by dispelling the deceit which keeps human experience shrouded in the shadow of darkness.

There has always been a very close connection between art and religion, and this connection has been foremost symbolic and mythological. Art creates the symbolic forms which religion then infuses with sacred significance and spiritual purpose. Art always borrow from religion those mythological archetypes and elements of sacred significance by which to create its new forms and symbols. It is to be expected that religion frequently tries to appropriate the role and power of art for its own services, and that artists frequently revolt against the symbolic and social dominance of religion in the pursuit of their art.

Truth and Beauty lies closely connected deep within the human consciousness. It is in this connection that we can refer to the basic archetypes of the collective unconscious of humankind. That which is most sublime also seems to be most true, and that which most aesthetically gratifying tends to be ethically the most rewarding. This association between aesthetic sensitivities and moral sensibilities is always close and inseparable in the human world. We tend to regard that which is ugly as bad, and that which is bad to be seen as ugly. Without normative astuteness, there could be no aesthetic appreciation or ethical evaluation.

Learning to sense the basic beauty of the natural world is unavoidably learning to understand the basic goodness of that world.

We live now in a human made world in which these two basic senses have been separated and effectively sundered. This split between the aesthetic and the ethical has been necessary in order for the inference and intermediation of social control and the socialization for conformity in the world. In our world it is no longer given or necessary that the things we do well must also be basically good, and that our goodness must always be done well. Thus we make modern weapons, which are exquisite from the standpoint of pure, aeronautical design, and we construct public housing facilities and slums without the slightest regard to their basic sanities or spiritual attractiveness. Our world has become fundamentally perverse when we can find beauty in things essentially evil and ugliness in things basically good.

The only thing worst than poor art is the intolerance and the discrimination against poor art. The artistically astute will find such art vulgar, irritating and even insulting, but never threatening enough to warrant persecution and destruction. In this regard artistic freedom is absolute, and requires absolute tolerance. The scaring of objects of art is the equivalent of the burning of books and murder of people---it represents the denial and the loss of freedom of expression, and the exercise of this freedom, which art stand for.

The barbarians who toppled the statues of the Roman world were soon to make those same figures their own sacred idols,

There is always something deeply symbolic about the violent misappropriation of art. It is almost as if the beauty of life were trying to be expressed in terms of the ugliness of death, and natural creation was transformed by destructiveness.

The source and energy of art is the same as for human aggression. It is as much emotional as intellectual, as physical in origin and end as mental. Art is fundamental, ineffable expression of the power of human being in the world. Artistic production is a form of empowerment in the world, and artistic representation symbolizes in basic form the importance of such power.

The appreciation of art has its sympathetic appeal in the same source as its production. Art is not merely intellectually interesting, it is intriguing, satisfying, and moving to the person’s entire sense of being. Artistic appreciation shares its source in the same universal sympathies of being which makes humankind unique and different from all other creatures of nature.

It is this mysterious power and these strange sympathies which makes human nature so unfathomable and so paradoxical.

One cannot analyze an object of art into its design elements or its basic materials in order to understand the source of its power over the human imagination. The power of an artwork is always synergistic and must always be grasped from a holistic standpoint. It is the unique combination of diverse elements and the interrelations which they represent in the world, which confers upon a work of art its special character and capacity to be more, and less, than it seems to be.

Similarly, one cannot simply analyze the life of an artist in order to discover how and why the artist works and creates art. Each artist represents a unique pattern of personality traits, talents and idiosyncrasies, which are integrated in sometimes-contradictory fashion into the being of the artist and reflected in the many peculiarities of their unfolding life style. These patternings are virtually unfathomable from any but a holistic and synthesizing point of view.

We can live without poetry in life but we cannot live well without it. The poem frames our world with aesthetic wonder, and fills all the spaces between our words and deeds with a sublime sense of awe.

All symbolisms in art derives ultimately from nature. The basicness and power of the natural symbolic archetypes of human consciousness—the circle, the snake, the bird, the fish, the human figure itself—all have a deep seated hold over our minds and a deeply rooted influence upon our history. They serve in our lives as a constant reminder of our own autochthonous origins from the earth and our common identity with the natural world.