A work of art is a perfect vehicle
for demonstrating the issues involved in the ideas I have been developing about
the human living environment. For
centuries, a painting was a vehicle in the West for creating a fixed eternal
image, a realistic subject, a totally defined discrete figure or series of
discrete figures, with firmly depicted boundaries and features that separated
the figure or figures from the ground surroundings. In truth, the background could be as fully
defined as the subject. This, of course,
is different from the way humans naturally view things, in which focusing on
the subject leads to a blurring of the background.
The effect of creating such a
hyperfigurized painting was to create a defined transcendent entity that truly
stood apart from and rose above the organic perishability in the traditional
living environments of the time. In
these living environments, it was a constant struggle for a person, as the
figure subject of his own life painting, to stand apart from all the ground
elements. The threat of
undifferentiation, of being swallowed up by the ground through natural
calamity, accident or disease, or psychologically, through degenerating into a
more primitive mammal, was constantly present.
A highly figurized painting was a situation that one could enter through
his imagination and live within it as a reality that seemed eternal. Such a painting was a psychological defense
against undifferentiation. It is no
accident that so many of the scenes depicted in these Realist paintings were
related to the transcendent reality involved in religious and mythological
scenes, scenes involving an eternal non-material world. Many of the images were portraits that could
give the subjects a sense of surrogate immortality in the imprints that their
images left on canvas. The subjects were
usually wealthy and powerful people who were very conscious of trying to deal
with their vulnerabilities as mortal humans through a surrogate immortality of
a portrait. Another subject of these
realistic paintings was historical events that people wanted to memorialize
such as battles. Still lifes were a
perfect way of shrinking the perishable world down into a subject matter that
could be captured and immortalized. And
landscapes were a vehicle for trying to capture the transitory ephemeral images
of natural scenery and making them permanent on canvas.
These highly figurized realistic
images were the basic stuff of painting for hundreds of years in Western
art. That is, until the Impressionists
came along. The Impressionists created
what appeared to be a purposeful sensory distortion of their images, such that
figures blended into their ground and into each other. One justification for this was that with the
play of light and shadow in the natural living environments, this perception of
reality was actually how it was. Figures
actually never stood out from their surroundings the way Realist painters would
have had us believe. But Impressionism
was new and was initially soundly rejected by the established interests in
French art circles. Time, however was on
the side of the Impressionists. As well
as the Neo-impressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists, the Abstract Expressionists,
the Magic Realists and all the other different movements of art that broke with
realism. These movements captured the
imagination of collectors and museums.
An important question to consider is
why did the Impressionists come along when they did? As well as all the other diverse groups that
followed them? Why did they appear at
the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth? Perhaps it was that people needed paintings
for different purposes than they did during the time of the Realists. The Realists needed their paintings as
vehicles for fixed real images, transcendent figures that rose above the
organic perishability of the traditional living environments in which they
lived. Aesthetic anchors to which they
could cling in an environment of organic impermanence.
Then technological development came
along in the West and started to thoroughly transform living environments. With machines and machine-made environments,
people created living environments of understimulation and overstimulation,
vacuum and tension-pocket environments where people could no longer feel
totally comfortable with their mammalian human natures.
In the new environment that began to
evolve, the kind of indeterminate stimuli that came from traditional more natural
environments and that blended and merged with other stimuli, gradually started
to disappear and what remained were the determinate defined discrete stimuli of
machines and technological products, stimuli that stood apart unto themselves. It was the indeterminate organic blendable
continual stimuli from grounding that people needed to feel fully alive and to have
the means to make the imprints that not only led to rich vibrant experiences
but also to preparing for death. These
indeterminate organic blendable continual stimuli with blurry boundaries are
not measurable by math or science, but they are what our minds experience. We do not experience the world as pinpoints
of visual stimuli, but rather as a seamless free-flowing panorama. When science turns the whole world into
pinpoints of data, it is distorting, it is affecting the flow of
experience. There are phenomena and
stimuli that have only blurry boundaries, and they do not easily lend
themselves to measurement or manipulation by science.
It is these phenomena and stimuli
that the French Impressionists unconsciously wanted to salvage from the
onslaught of technological change in Europe.
They did not need transcendent figures to cling to in order to protect
themselves from organic perishability.
They needed to recapture grounding and organic blendable continual
stimuli in order to feel alive as humans again.
And they did this by creating paintings of only partially differentiated
figures still somewhat embedded in the grounding that surrounded them and still
somewhat infused with the organic blendable continual stimuli of light and
shadow that allowed them to bond well with other people and with the places
where they lived. In general, these
paintings mirrored for the Impressionists the more organic mammalian human side
of themselves. The painters painted more
organic images which, in turn, stimulated them to be more human in a mammalian
sense.
What is it that these different
modern art movements had in common? They
all broke or blurred experiential boundaries, thus opening the opportunity for
more organic blendable continual stimuli in the encounter between the artist
and the viewer, on the one hand, and the painting on the other. Cubism broke the boundaries that existed
between different perspectives of a given subject. This highlighted the way people actually view
subjects over time. Surrealism blurred
the boundaries between the world of dreams and the world of reality. Abstract Expressionism blurred the boundaries
between shapes with symbolic meaning and shapes that had no meaning. Magic Realism blurred the boundaries between
magic and mythology, on the one hand, and reality on the other. By blurring boundaries between phenomena,
painters created the spaces for blendable continual stimuli that allowed them,
the painters, to feel more organically alive. In today’s world, a painting does not serve
the purpose of creating transcendent figures that rise above the organic
perishability in the world. If anything,
many of the modern art movements after the Impressionists have primarily served
to find a way to restore the organic grounding that was seen as potentially so
treacherous, at least on one level, by the old European salon artists. We don’t need art to preserve imprints
anymore; we have science and technology to perform that task.
But as science and technology move
into more and more areas of life, there are fewer and fewer places in the field
of human experience where painting, and the arts in general, can find
vulnerable spaces that are available for blurring new boundaries. Science and technology are creating a tight
seamless whole structure of knowledge, architecture and artifact. There is less and less left to play with experientially. To pull people out of the rigidity of this
structure, some of the extremely contemporary Western art is now created for
shock value. Give a person a shock of
overstimulation through abrasive images or abrasive designs to pull him out of
his growing numbness and robotization.
Put in the context of the desperate purpose of this contemporary art,
the Impressionists can be seen, in their attempt to capture the immediacy of
primary experience in nature and in ordinary everyday life to have fought a
laudable but difficult battle. If only
we could recapture some of the immediacy captured in their paintings and
reimplant it in our own increasingly isolated robotic lives.
(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow
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