A Strange Love

 
"There is a lot, in my view, of useless discussion about the relationship between the biological functioning of the brain and a whole spate of nebulous issues such as morality, love, beauty, ugliness, creativity, etc. It must be mostly conjecture given that scientific observation allows us to see only so much.

Wherever wisdoms are being proffered, people on the proscenium and also in the platea are well dressed and full of pride. The air is insidiously perfumed with selected brands of eau de toilette. In contemporary life opinions go hand in hand with image, a particularly clean cut one, defining the egos and the modern ethos with dress and manners - like people always have.

In such a scenario, much is mooted in the fashion of 'academic rigour'. People everywhere, to obtain doctorates, produce collections of long paragraphs with even longer footnotes. It's an oppressive cultural climate. If there is a lot of intellectual rigour, I'm not sure how much practical rigour is out there. There is a lot of provocation around but where effort is really required is in producing a heightened artistic ambience, not for an élite nor the 'informed', but for the general public; works that are simple in their metaphysics and yet challenging in their execution.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declassified the importance of philosophy below that of language by pointing out that philosophical confusions are merely confusions in the use of language. What has afflicted the modern artist is more elementary. He suffers an incomprehension about art itself and so by extension about his role. For example; what could be meant by such terms as 'creative freedom' and 'freedom to create'? The vagueness about his own esteem finds its worst expression in certain attempts that fall under the definition, "conceptual".

Yet, there is the issue of 'freedom to love', in the sense that one gives of oneself to something beloved, voluntarily, free of coercion. Making art, one thinks, could be the thing most similar to this kind of loving. Doing it for itself rather than trying to impress. How much of the modern works is produced in this spirit is the moot point. Modern works seem encumbered with the weight of Nietzschean philosophies and strange political ambitions to overcome the very frailties, which are, traditionally, the actual materials of artistic inspiration.

If there is a parallel with linguistics in seeing, then in the very least, the vocabulary (as words are for thoughts) must be made up of real things, the objects of everyday life, both natural and man made. Beyond the words for these objects, each thing is also a symbol, both for itself and whatever other qualities it may represent. A lion is a symbol of courage, not just because that is the convention but because that is what the character of the animal seems to be. A work of art that contains the image of the lion is not just an illustration of the thing itself but also by its reproduction, a form of visual communication. All visual art is therefore allegorical at some level.

The problem of modernism is not so much that a poet like ee cummings would forego capital letters and punctuation marks but the loss of joy in the unending hunger for novelty. The contemporary zeitgeist displays a strange love for harshness; bare surfaces that juxtapose against naked angles that avow no strutural subleties nor common sense, no lintels for dust, garlands for flowers nor mouldings made for the eggs and darts.

"I can't imagine my own view of the world without 'The Great Gatsby'." - Clive James

 
ROMA, 23 6 2011