The Act of Creation (51 page)

Where the Tragic and Trivial Planes meet, the Absolute becomes humanized,
drawn into the orbit of man, while the banal objects of daily experience
are transfigured, surrounded by a halo as it were. The meeting may have
the majesty of an incarnation where the logos becomes flesh; or the
charm of Krishna's descent to dally with the shepherdesses. On a less
awe-impiring scale, the tragic and the trivial may meet in golden lads
and chimney-sweeps; in the petrified boot which the Pompeian boot-mender
holds in his petrified hand; in the slice of pig's kidney which Bloom
fingers in his pocket during the funeral service. Laplace regarded it
as the ultimate aim of science to demonstrate from a single grain of
sand the 'mechanics of the whole universe'.
The
locus in quo
of human creativity is always on the line of
intersection between two planes; and in the highest forms of creativity
between the Tragic or Absolute, and the Trivial Plane. The scientist
discovers the working of eternal laws in the ephemeral grain of sand, or
in the contractions of a dead frog's leg hanging on a washing-line. The
artist carves out the image of the god which he saw hidden in a piece of
wood. The comedian discovers that he has known the god from a plum-tree.
This interlacing of the two planes is found in all great works of art,
and at the origin of all great discoveries of science. The artist and
scientist are condemned -- or privileged -- to walk on the line of
intersection as on a tightrope. At his best moments, man is 'that great
and true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other
creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds'.
C. VISUAL GREATION
XXI
MOTIF AND MEDIUM
Looking at Nature
Kepler, contemplating a snow-crystal melting on his always sweaty palm,
saw in it the harmony of the spheres reflected miniature. Let a less
romantically disposed person look for the first time at a snowflake
under a microscope: he will catch his breath and wax equally lyrical:
'How strange -- how beautiful -- how clever is nature', et cetera. Yet
the symmetrical pattern of hexagons thus marvellously revealed, loses
all its magic when drawn on a drawing-board. It becomes aesthetically
neutral for lack of a second context -- the familiar sight of the
feathery snowflake. It is the superimposition of the two matrices -- the
trivial object revealing the mathematical regularity of its micro-cosmic
architecture -- which creates the impact, and gives rise to the aesthetic
experience.
Whether Odysseus saw in the sky at dawn 'rosy-fingered Athene lift her
golden ray', or whether you share the sorrow of the weeping willow,
there is inevitably a second frame of reference superimposed on the
picture. Man always looks at nature through coloured glasses -- through
mythological, anthropomorphic, or conceptual matrices -- even when he
is not conscious of it and believes that he is engaged in 'pure vision',
unsullied by any meaning. The 'innocent eye' is a fiction, based on the
absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be isolated in the
mind from the influence of past experience. There is no perception of
'pure form' but meaning seeps in, and settles on the image (though the
meaning need not be expressed in verbal language, about which more later).
The idea that looking at nature is self-rewarding, and that landscapes
devoid of action can give rise to aesthetic experiences, is of relatively
recent origin; so is landscape painting.* Dr. Johnson regarded mountains
as 'rather uncouth objects'; in the literature of the eighteenth century
precipices were branded as 'frowning' and 'horrid'. [1] The further
we go back in time the less appreciation we find of the purely visual
aspects of form and colour in inanimate nature:
Considering the bulk and value of Greek literature, and the artistic
brilliance of Athens, the feeling for nature . . . was but poorly
developed among a people whose achievement in the dramatic and sculptural
arts has been unsurpassed; it is seriously lacking in Homer, even when
he refers to the sea or to the famous garden of Alcinous, and it can
hardly be said to enter Greek drama save in the
Oedipus at Colonnus
and in some of the lyrical choruses of Euripides. Indeed, the continent
of nature had to wait for a thorough and minute exploration until the
romantic movement of the nineteenth century: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth,
Goethe, first brought the ocean, the rivers, and the mountain ranges into
their own. . . . For primitive man earth and sea are simply the perennial
source of those material goods on which life depends, and mountain peaks
are uninteresting and unattractive because they are barren and bleak
(Listowel). [2]
The same could be said about the underprivileged classes and nations in
our own time. The peasants in the alpine village where I live in summer
never cease to marvel at the silliness of tourists who talk about the
'beauty' of the mountains -- which to them means so much timber, pasture,
and hay. Travelling in India one is amazed by the indifference, even among
the educated classes, towards landscape and scenery, birds and plants.
All this does not mean that earlier civilizations derived no emotional
experiences from nature. But they were derived from different sources:
the supernatural powers and magic forces which animated the visible
world. The Babylonians populated the starry heavens with lions,
virgins, and scorpions. The Sicilian straits were to the Greeks not
a landscape but the seats of Scylla and Charybdis. To Homer, a storm
at sea signified the anger of Poseidon; to Mr. Babitt it signifies
the majesty of nature, a vaguely personalized Power manifested in the
spectacle before his eyes.
There is always a second matrix active
behind, or superimposed upon, the visual appearance.
The beholder
may be convinced that he is simply perceiving images on his retina, but
he is in fact perceiving with the whole of his brain; and what he sees
is modified by the perceptual codes which operate in it, resonances of
his racial and personal past, floating images of touch and smell, even
kinesthetic sensations or incipient muscular stresses. When an appearance
gives rise to an aesthetic experience, it always represents or symbolizes
or expresses something behind and beyond its retinal image -- exactly
as the pigment on a canvas always refers to something beyond its frame.
A human face is also an object of nature, a landscape of live tissue. To
evoke aesthetic feeling, it must point at something beyond itself in the
beholder's mind. The analogue of the snow-crystal is here that scaffolding
of perfect symmetry and proportions, whose geometrical laws the painters
of Greece and the Renaissance tirelessly pursued. The golden section and
other basic proportions were thought to be the ultimate constituents of
organic form -- as the Pythagorean scale of music was thought to regulate
the heavenly motions, and as simple geometrical units, the architect's
elementary 'modules', combined to make Gothic cathedrals. The philosophers
of classicism, from Pliny to Leonardo and Dürer, saw beauty wherever
mortal flesh testified to the immortal axioms of Euclidean geometry.
However, the ideal to which the bloated Venus of Willendoff testities with
her pendulous breasts and enormous hips, is not Euclid, but the goddess
of Fertility. Our whole manner of perceiving the human frame depends on
our ideas about its purpose or function -- on the selective code which
determines our criteria of significance and patterns our vision. I am
using here the word 'function' in the dictionary sense, as referring to a
'mode of action by which [a thing] fulfils its purpose'. The definition,
of course, takes it for granted that we know what the purpose of the
thing in question is. Now if the thing is a railway engine, the answer
is clear; but the purpose of the thing called a human body is open to
various interpretations. And according to the interpretation of human
purpose which we accept, our ideas will change, and our manner of seeing
the human body in its functional aspect will change accordingly. In the
drawings of some lunatics, adolescents, lavatory artists, and tribesmen,
the dominant functional aspect is shown by a huge genital part, while the
remainder of the body is only indicated by a sketchy outline. On Egyptian
wall-paintings and reliefs, conventionalized and schematized figures are
shown functioning as fishermen, hunters, builders, servants, or parts of
a state procession. The size of the figures is usually proportionate to
their rank -- not to bodily but to social stature; male skin is painted
dark brown, female skin pale yellow; the code which provides the criteria
of relevance is not visual but conceptual. For three thousand years the
sculptors and painters of Egypt produced no original discoveries in the
technique of visual representation. They had no visual curiosity. In its
indifference to colour, movement, human anatomy, Egyptian painting was
more single-mindedly functional than any before or after; but 'function'
was defined as social function, a person's rank and occupation in the
social hierarchy. Apart from that, individuals are interchangeable,
without personal identity, and their appearance devoid of interest.
In the golden age of Greek art, the human body was seen in a totally
different aspect, that of its
physical
function: in throwing
a disc, tying a sandal, or simply lifting an arm; vision is attuned
to geometrical proportion, to the play and co-ordination of muscles
and joints; and by the criterion of a perfect physique, with facial
expressions limited to types, the curve of the buttocks becomes as
important and expressive as the curve of the brow. Again, in Byzantine
painting the human body functions as an indifferent, and often awkward,
shell of the spirit; and if the spirit commands the saint to bend his
head back and gaze rapturously into the sky, the artist has no qualms in
breaking his neck and letting the body float upward with all limbs out
of joint. The Renaissance once more gave the body its due; and in the
centuries that followed it became the carrier of an individual head,
and hence of an expression and mood. For the courtiers of Louis XV,
the principal function of human bodies was to play, suitably covered and
uncovered, hide-and-seek between trees and bosquets, and to fall into each
other's arms. For the impressionist painter, the function of the body is
to demonstrate the impermanence of appearances in the luminous blur of
colours; for the cubist, to prove God's preference for cubes; and so on.
Which aspects of reality dominate the visual matrix of a culture or
group depends ultimately on its conception of the purpose and meaning
of existence. Accordingly, its norms of beauty will always reflect the
archetype of some kind of functional perfection: the rigid dignity of
Pharaoh, through whose eyes eternity looks in stony silence at time;
the play of muscles in the Greek adolescent's perfect anatomy; the
spirituality in the transfigured face of the Byzantine madonna; the
harmonious resolution of the body into Euclidean forms, or a patchwork
of coloured blobs. Whichever aspect is dominant, its matrix acts as a
kind of optical polariscope, through which the particular appearance is
seen as a thing of general significance, an embodiment of some universal
law or meaning.
Pigment and Meaning
Abstract painting is a misnomer, a contradiction in terms as 'pictorial
philosophy' would be. The concept of justice is an abstraction. The
concept of a square is an abstraction. A picture of Solomon meting out
justice is concrete. But the picture of a blue square on a yellow ground
is equally concrete.
'Non-representational art' and 'expressionist art' are serviceable
labels for certain styles of painting; but if they are supposed to
describe a philosophy or a programme, they are equally misleading
and can create only confusion. A pattern of pigment on canvas always
means, or expresses, or represents something which is not the canvas
plus pigment. However, it does not represent objects or events, but
the artist's mental experiences or imaginings of the nature, causes,
shape, and colour of objects and events. It does not represent a model,
but the artist's vision of the model; not a young lady called Lisa,
but the way Leonardo saw his Lisa. It invites the spectator to share
an experience which the artist had; it provides him with an illusion --
not the illusion of seeing a thing, but the illusion of seeing through
the artist's eyes. Without that illusion there will be no response,
and the spectator will behold the canvas through the eyes of a dead fish.
Art was always 'expressionist' in the legitimate sense of the word: it
expressed a subjective, biassed vision -- even if the artist deluded
himself into believing that he was 'copying nature'. And pigment on
canvas always 'represents' something outside its frame -- for instance
the impact of a green arrow on the blue square when placed next to it
on the yellow ground. That impact does not take place on the canvas,
but in the artist's mind, and in the beholder's mind. The pigment of the
blue square remained static and unchanged. But in the beholder's eye its
colour, shape, and weight have undergone a dynamic change. To produce
this illusionary change was the artist's intention; it is as if he were
saying: Look what my green arrow can do to my blue square. The canvas
expresses or represents an idea in the artist's head, and if all goes
well it will cause a similar experience to occur in the beholder's head:
he will read something in the picture which strictly speaking is not
there. Apologies for the pedantic demomtration, but one has to revert
to elementary issues to escape the muddle created by the writings of
some expressionists and anti-representationalists.
Much of this confusion (as in other impassioned controversies in the
past) is due to the fact that visual experiences cannot be traduced
into verbal statements without suffering major impoverishment and
distortion. All verbal analysis tends to make implicit, part-conscious
experiences explicit and fully conscious -- and to destroy them in
the process. There seems to exist a kind of biological rivalry between
the eye and the vocal cords, epitomized by the painter puffing at his
pipe in contemptuous silence while the garrulous art-critic is holding
forth. We always see a work of nature or art 'in terms of' a selective
matrix governed by this or that criterion of significance; but these
'terms' are not verbal terms, and if we attempt to verbalize them
the result is unavoidably a gross 'clumsification' -- a medley of
clichés and psychological jargon. The matrix may carry emotive
echoes of some archetypal experience, but our vocabulary is extremely poor
where emotions are concerned. If we say that it responds to the sight
of the ocean with associations of 'eternity', 'infinity', and so forth,
this sounds as if we were referring to
verbal
associations. Such
words
may
present themselves to the mind, but words are the least
important part of the experience, and detract from rather than add to
its value. We cannot help using words in referring to processes which
in the listener's mind are not crystallized into words. The alternative
is to say a rose is a rose is a rose, and leave it at that.
Another difficulty is that at moments of intense aesthetic experience we
see not only with our eyes but with the whole body. The eyes scan, the
cortex thinks, there are muscular stresses, innervations of the organs of
touch, sensations of weight and temperature, visceral reactions, feelings
of rhythm and motion -- all sucked into one integrated vortex. A literary
narrative or a piece of music unfolds in stages, but in a still-life time
is fore-shortened as it were, and by taking it in with a single sweep of
the eye (or so it seems) this multitude of experiences blends into one
near-simultaneous process, so that it is extremely difficult to sort
out the various elements which went into its making. The trouble with
explaining visual beauty, and also its fascination, is that so much is
happening at the same time.
The Two Environments
What is happening is, put into our jargon, a series of bisociative
processes involving the participatory emotions.
At the base of the series we again find
illusion
-- the magic
transformation of the carved tree into a god. The painted mask, the
carved idol, are perceived at the same time as what they are and what
they represent. The witch-doctor works his evil spell by sticking a
needle into the rag-doll representing the victim; the cave-artist of
Altamira made sure of a plentiful supply of meat by populating the rock
with painted bison and wild horses.
To those with naïve tastes, illusion in itself is sufficient to
evoke aesthetic experience, and 'life-likeness' is regarded as the supreme
criterion of art. As mentioned before, even Leonardo wrote 'that painting
is most praiseworthy which is most like the thing represented'. However,
the 'most like' has an infinite number of interpretations -- and that
for two solid reasons: the
limitations of the medium
and the
prejudices of vision . The range of luminosity in the painter's
pigment is only a fraction of that of natural colours; the area on
the canvas only a fraction of the visual field; its coarse grain can
accommodate only a fraction of fine detail; it lacks the dimension
of depth in space, and motion in time. (Even a photograph is far from
being a true likeness; apart from its obvious limitations of colour and
light-sensitivity, it increases the ratio of focal to peripheral vision
about a hundredfold -- which may be one of the reasons why nature is so
much prettified on picture postcards.) Hence the painter is forced to
cheat, to invent tricks, to exaggerate, simplify, and distort in order
to correct the distorting effects of the medium. The way he cheats, the
tricks he uses, are partly determined by the requirements of the medium
itself -- he must think 'in terms of' stone, wood, pigment, or gouache --
but mainly by the idiosyncrasies of his vision: the codes which govern the
matrices of his perception. Whether Manet's impression of 'The Races of
Longchamp' looks more 'life-like' than Frith's academically meticulous
'Derby Day' depends entirely on the beholder's spectacles. An artist
can copy in plaster, up to a point, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze
head; he cannot 'copy' on canvas a running horse. He can only create an
appearance which, seen in a certain light, at a certain distance, in a
certain mood, will suddenly acquire a life of its own. It is not a copy,
but a metaphor. The horse was not a