I've seen (and will continue to see) so much great art in the exhibitions and museums here, that it's almost overwhelming. In fact, that response led me to think about how artists among us might come to feel ourselves overburdened by all the great art we witness. So much so that, rather than be inspired by all this wonderful art, we might sometimes come to feel diminished in our own capacity and even paralysed from going futher.
Here's my posting (from janetstrayer.blogspot.com) that addresses the question: Why do ordinary people involved in the arts sometimes feel
paralyzed after viewing collections of great art, or witnessing great
performances of music and dance, or reading the works of great writers?
Even such an accomplished artist as Virginia Woolf, for
example, so adored Proust's novels that she felt herself incapable of writing
after reading him. Such profound (and misguided) experience of great art nearly
silenced her unique voice and vision. Woolf wrote in a letter to a friend: "Proust so
titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence.
"Oh, if I could write like that!" I cry. And at the moment such is
the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures-- there's something
sexual in it-- that I feel I can write
like that, and seize my pen, and then I can't
write like that." (p.213).
Many of us may feel something like this. We're smitten by
great art, transported. It's a wonderful experience. But this can also have crushing
consequences. Art is dangerous. For instance, I consider it a great gift to be
able to witness art in many forms, and I spend what time I can doing so.
Perhaps like some of you, I can also feel the burden of all the great art out
there as an impossible expectation, a negative judgment upon my own paintings
in comparison. Paralysis sets in. Nothing I can do is as worthy as what I've
already seen done. Self-defeat.
But why the contest? Some take it so far as to wish to kill art history, falsely
accusing it of stopping us from thinking and seeing for ourselves. Musing about
this, here are my thoughts and those I've gleaned from a fine little book, How Proust Can Change Your Life by
Alain de Botton (present quotes are from pages noted in this book, London: Picador, 1997).
Here in Provence, where I've been living and painting for the past
months, I'm always reminded of Cézanne, whose work I admire. I'm not a
Cézanne or any other artist
I admire. Too bad, perhaps. But Cézanne isn't me, either. And, who knows
what
that particular path holds? My point isn't to inflate oneself,
especially and
surely not at anyone else's expense. But neither is it to deflate
oneself in
comparison to others. It's a bit of a juggling act to hold in
perspective
(rather than in zero-sum judgment) all that is worthy in art and in
oneself.
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| Provençal Suite 1, homage to Cézanne, www.janetstrayer.com |
What Proust called artistic
idolatry is a cause of the burden great art can have upon us. Idolatry is
like a fetish: it suggests a fixation on one aspect (or image) that distracts
us from, or even contravenes, the overall message and spirit.
For those attempting to make art, it can feel impossibly
heavy to have the weight of all the great art already accomplished upon our
shoulders. By comparison, how meager our own efforts, how distant our works are
from the artistic expectations we may have, based upon the products of those we
revere. We are likely either to be silenced, on the one hand, or defensively to
conflate ourselves with those we revere, on the other. In the latter case, we
become inflated with our idols, identifying ourselves with them rather than
learning their lessons on our own, through our own efforts. Probably most of us
suffer the first outcome, though, and are inclined to defeat ourselves.
Turning back to Virginia Woolf, after reading Proust, she
wrote in her 1928 diary, "Take up Proust after dinner and put him down.
This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do.
All seems insipid and worthless." (p.204). Fortunately, she stopped reading
Proust for a time and wrote a few more books of her own. By the time she returned
again to Proust, her diary entries suggest she'd made her peace with him: he
could have his magnificence and she her own scribbles.
We can change the metaphor. Instead of feeling all the truly great
art out there as a burden upon our shoulders, we can climb upon the shoulders of
the artists we admire. Great artists historically did just that, even while
breaking new ground. Significant works of art can help us define and celebrate
our own independence and choices. Appreciating and learning from them, using them
to shape and differentiate our own ways of looking, seeing, listening, hearing,
making, sharing, developing.
When caught in the spin of artistic idolatry, however, it
can distract us from what art has to offer. Idolatry is at work when we value
something because it's signed by a given artist without appreciating the work itself.
This feeds the industry of making golden calves and their replicas. It also helps
fuel our picture-taking mania to make everything in the Louvre ours (click for my post on this topic ).
Idolaters combine a literal reverence for objects in art
with a neglect of their message or spirit. They search for the exact recipe for
Proust's madeleine, without realizing
that a doughnut could serve just as well. After all, Proust's position is that "a
picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it" (p. 206),
but on the way of seeing that it shows to us. Though we're enchanted to visit
the spot on the Seine where Monet painted, this spot is merely a coincidence.
The real gift is how we appreciate the impression afforded Monet, so that
then we may ourselves apply such vision to what Monet never had a chance to
see. A genuine homage to a great artist is "to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his
world through our eyes." (de
Botton, p.214 ).
The important point here is to grasp the general lesson a great work of art provides so that we can apply
it to the particular things we encounter. The privileged status accorded to
places painted or written about may or may not exceed the evidence of other
places we've seen. It may indeed be latent in almost any place or encounter, so
long as we take the effort to consider it as Proust, Monet, or any great artist
might do.
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| Provençal Suite 2, www.janetstrayerart.com |
I welcome and am grateful for the chance to see things through their eyes. I'm grateful for my months of living in Provence
and seeing bits of the world around me as Cézanne might have seen them. When
the paralysis and self-doubt set in, I have to remind myself that I'm the one
doing the looking, listening, and sensing. I'm the one who has the paint in
hand. Maybe I've even learned something from my neighbor, Cézanne, to enhance
my own inclinations and skills. What I'm left with, whether inferior or
superior to anything else, is what I can do. While still alive, I haven't yet
found what the best of that might be.
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| Autumn Earthbound, current painting in Provence, www.janetstrayer.com |
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