“The pearl”, announced Fellini, “is the oyster’s autobiography.” By this he meant that the production of art was an act of self-expression, the self being an amalgamation of one’s experiences and feelings. For Camus, a more sombre character perhaps, art was an act of confession. Either way, we can construct arguments about art being about communication in every instance, and much that is to be communicated is to do with the individual’s response – whether conscious or unconscious – to the universe. The further question is, is this enough?
Alain de Botton, entrepreneur and philosopher, has deduced that “art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion”. His column in the Guardian (Should art really be for its own sake alone? Friday 20th January 2012) begins, like much thoughtful conjecture, with what we might describe as a man clambering onto a box to reach a faulty light bulb, sure that with a few deft touches he can fix the problem and illumine the dull interior of the room: one must hope that the box bears the weight.
As is my wont, I am troubled not by de Botton’s conclusion that art could, and perhaps should, serve a grand narrative, a mainstream and overarching socio-political agenda – his touchstone is religion, and the art produced by religion, which serves to keep us on someone else’s arbitrary concept of the ‘straight and narrow’ – but by his opening gambit that “art has replaced religion”. It is, admittedly, cheap to nitpick, but where is the fun in accepting that art is a system in the way that religion is a system, or that art has an inbuilt ideology in the way that religion must, and does? If pushed I would assert that art is the self expression permitted by the system (permitted meaning recognised, valued, marketed) whereas religion is the attempt to build a system to supersede the existing system in which individuals subsist. I’ll unpack this.
Art is painting, poetry, film, sculpture – any craft that might be said to produce objects (and we can include Mozart’s Monda alla Turca as an object as well as a Hemingway short story) to primarily serve the needs of the creator purely by existing or having existed rather than for practical purposes is a work of art. Art is not designed to meet the needs of consumers. The picture of a Paris cafe you buy from the high street store, on a fake canvas, is not a work of art, though it might have been inspired by one. The chair in your living room is not a work of art, as it was created to fulfil a practical need, the needs of faceless millions, rather than to assuage some selfish desire of the creator. It is not a system. We can say that art subsists within a system that enables its production and encourages veneration, either through reflection (critics, reproduction for private ownership of facsimile) or amplification (‘popular’ culture) but it cannot, logically, be a system.
Religion, on the other hand, can be defined perfectly as a system; let’s remember that objects and individuals subsist within a system, so objects and individuals cannot be systems. The definition of a system is a collection of objects and individuals, things that have nothing in common other than that they share the same territory. Britain is a system; poverty is a system; democracy is a system; BBC1 is a system; the Milky Way is a system; the White Album is a system*. I do not yet believe in temporal systems, as time is not implemented, constructed out of lesser parts or managed by the elders or the lords of the hierarchy, so no, your life is not a system. But we’re getting somewhere.
Because it seeks to enshroud within clear boundaries, to be itself a territory within which all things move, every religion is a system. Each seeks to close the clasp, to trap and catalogue. But this is not to criticise religion, merely to say that it is like any other system. It has its adherents and advocates, and it has its share of objects. Anyone who has visited those tiresome and deadening rooms in the Louvre in which the walls are crammed with identical images of vacant-eyed creatures crowned with halos, three fingers held up in occult sigil to a god who prefers to be inferred rather than painted, will understand immediately that art finds itself within a system, and can never replace that system.
That little gripe aside, and it is of course a highly personalised and unfair gripe, de Botton’s piece is well worth reading if only to contest it (and what better compliment can one give to a philosopher than, in good humour, to tangle oneself in his arguments?).
I cannot opine the proposed and gently mocked “veneration of ambiguity”. I am some sort of utopian who believes that the creaky, dehumanising machines we encounter in laissez-faire capitalist systems can be demolished not by ridding ourselves of systems but by building bigger and better machines, so appreciate the need for consensus, integral to the comitatus of freedom, and what consensus can there be without certainty of values, without a war against ambiguity? Small wonder then that the Soviet system decreed that art, as de Botton says, should aim “to change or help or console” or that the artistic adherents to Christianity deployed art in exactly – exactly – the same way (“Look at that Last Supper to train yourself not to be a coward and a liar”); capitalism also deploys its cultural footsoldiers, hammering the populace with images of luxuries, and images of people who own luxuries – superb, beautiful, joyful people much unlike ourselves, in our grey failure, in our lack of luxury. It is here that we can, as with the ‘religious’ alcoves of the Louvre and the bold and superficial Soviet art of indoctrination and reinforcement of normatives, perceive what systems do to art when they require it to be subsumed, when they demand fealty: the artist ceases to express the self and instead moves towards the practical business of communicating someone else’s values and ideals, rather than their own. They risk becoming not a craftsperson, but a translator, a disseminator. Which, rather circuitously, is why ambiguity is not to be abominated, and didacticism in art is to remain not precisely in contempt, but held in a permanent state of mistrust.
Interestingly, de Botton moves from questioning the veneration of ambiguity to asking “why should confusion be a central aesthetic emotion?” as if confusion is the inevitable result of ambiguity. This reveals as much about him as my issue with this logic does about my own internal processes. Why should the ambiguous produce confusion? Perhaps a mind that has been shaped within an ordered and coordinated realm, a mind that is conditioned to find meaning – Boolean meaning, certainty – in every symbol is bound to recoil in timorous horror from the equivocal. The universe is not binary, although much of human mental work requires either/or duality (as de Saussure says of language, it is all about difference, it is all about what a thing is or is not. How could it be otherwise?).
The ambiguous is essential to civilisation for the same reason that it is a danger to it: ambiguity encourages thought, reflection and personal involvement in the problem. We must decide, when we encounter an ambiguous object, how we feel about it. With much art, we are told what we must feel. We must not laugh at The Last Supper. We must not become tumescent in the Sistene Chapel (due to the proximity of Art). But nobody can tell us how to respond to ambiguous art, which makes it – curiously, and essentially – our own. It belongs to every individual. The Mona Lisa belongs to every viewer because it elicits a unique response that cannot be universalised, cannot be appropriated by a system and imposed upon all present. Ambiguous art proves to us that there is such a thing as the internal territory, and that this is where the real power lies. We recognise, thanks to ambiguous art, that the unambiguous is bogus. The Last Supper does not permit rebellion against the system it served; its light and shade is crafted with care, in the same way that Soviet art was crafted with care. There is none of the id in it, it is all ego. It is all subsumed by the system. Fair enough, it serves a purpose; it tells us to do something, to undergo some process, to appreciate some value or other because, by consensus, these or those values were deemed vital. Ambiguity allows us to decide what values to accept, or even if there are values at all. This is the fulcrum at which civilisation waits, suspended between forces – the truly civilised are free to notice the machinery of their own freedom; by not being told what to do, they are told what to do. This is the delightful germ of liberty, isn’t it?
So when de Bottom argues that museum’s “curators should attempt to put aside their deep-seated fears of instrumentalism and once in a while co-opt works of art to an ambition of helping us get through life” I wonder if he fully appreciates how ambiguity itself gets us through? Each of us is unique, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to humanity’s personal problems. One person’s certainty is another’s tyranny, after all. Look at the destructiveness of the Tea Party’s social certitude, look at white superiority and eugenics. What all tyrannies, what all fascism, what all systems of dehumanisation lack is ambiguity. And the opposite? Look at the thought of ancient Greece, where democracy flourished into a model for progress, and see how its thinkers debated, presented their arguments not as dialogues but as monologues. Ambiguity, the delight in picking apart one’s own theories, in questioning everything and assuming nothing, produced the finest systems humanity has achieved. The architecture of freedom thrives on ambiguity. Let’s recognise this and celebrate what might be called “confusion” but should be called the profound peace of being free from the barrage of someone else’s values. What’s the word for that? Ah, liberty.
* So, then, is a comedy routine a system, and each joke an object? Is each joke a system and each phoneme an object? Well, yes, the universe, systematically, is fractal. For anyone wishing to observe this cosmic phenomenon, the rabbit-hole awaits.
