Practical Epiphanies (or: Art Education)

Emily Dickinson once wrote that she knew a poem when she read it because it made her feel like the top of her head had come off. That is, I think, as good a definition of Art of any genre (painting, writing, dance, music) as any other. But why should anyone want that? Doesn't it sound kind of painful? Like decapitation? Do I want the top of my head to come off? Let's say I don't. What have I lost?

When the top of your head comes off, just for a second, the universe floods in; and just for that second, something made sense and was seen clearly that is normally just a tangled knot of wet string. Just for a second. It's a flash and then it's gone, but there's nothing on earth except art that can do this thing. And to me, if you've never known it, that's sad. That's a tragedy, like never falling in love. Someone who has never fallen in love of course has not lost anything, because they never had it to begin with; and if you've never had the top of your head pop off then I suppose you haven't lost anything either, technically. But there's a hole in your life that you can't even see because you don't know that it's supposed to be filled.

It makes us more human, I think. Like falling in love. Or like that moment on a midwinter's day when you step outside, and the sun is shining, but cold and pale, more like the memory of the sun than the sun itself; and just for that moment, your memory of a bright June sun and its palpable heat on your face and your arms is so vivid that it feels more real than the actual sun, shining. It doubles us and splits us and then knits us back together again.

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. ~James Russell Lowell

Exactly.

I'm not saying that anything that isn't art that is no good. A novel can be an excellent novel without being art; a painting can be a beautiful painting without being art--because art goes beyond the technical mastery of a skill into the realm of intentions and a desire to say something in particular. There are many good television shows and plenty of good music that are designed to be disposable; and what of it? who cares? It's not a bad thing that capital-a Art is outnumbered a hundred to one by competent (and not so competent) entertainments. Any more than it's a bad thing that, for every one of us, the people we fall in love with are rare while friendships are comparatively plentiful. Just because friendships aren't falling-in-love doesn't mean we should denigrate friendships; nor does it mean that, because love affairs are a kind of madness that strike like lightning once or maybe twice and turn your life upside down, one should abolish love.

The more serious problem of talking about art is that we all know what it feels like but no one knows how else to define it, because that thing that pops the top of my head off might not work for you. At the top of this post is a painting by Emily Carr, one of my favourite visual artists. I love her work. Georgia O'Keefe never did much for me, though I can appreciate the technical mastery and symbolism of her work. The impressionists made paintings that are very pretty but which don't speak to me. But anything by Van Gogh makes me very happy. The paintings I love have a lot in common: colours stronger than those found in nature, thick paint and visible brush strokes, a slight sense of surrealism--things represented as they are instead of how they look. Of course this does not mean that the impressionists produced something that is not art--only that I am not in their audience. Art, despite its appearance, is a community project: it is not enough for the artist in their garret to produce something beautiful and amazing in solitude; it must be seen to be completed. It must produce that thing we call the artistic experience in an audience to be a work of art. Without an audience, there is no art. (This is why I find it so distressing when a blogger comes down hard on themselves for wanting an audience for their writing. What else should you be writing for? Do you realize that every writer who ever said that a writer should write for the love of writing itself has, in fact, published?)*

To put it another way: if the artist is a mother and the work of art is her baby, then the audience is the midwife, who births it. Without an audience the work of art is never born, it doesn't live.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner

Even experts and critics can't tell you what art is, only what produces that experience for them--though if you were as widely and deeply educated in their subject matter as they are, your opinions would probably be closer to theirs than they are today. The charge of elitism in the arts confounds me. What could be more democratic? You get to decide what art is for you. You get to decide which artistic community is your home. Art is that thing that hooks into you and pulls you open to pour itself inside you. No one else gets to tell you what that is.

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Which might make one ask why the hell anyone needs arts education, then, since it's a universal human experience that cannot be defined by anyone else. No one needs to take a class on how to fall in love, do they?

Now we get into art's utilitarian side, its social project aspect.** Mind: any artist who produces with this project in mind is not making art, but propaganda; still, it's impossible to avoid the knowledge that good art often transforms the society which originated it, that it does have social and political consequences. It doesn't just pop the top of your head off. Sometimes it makes you see the whole world in a slightly different way; and sometimes, this change in vision makes you want to change other things. Yourself, your community, the planet. Why not?

Consider that falling in love with the right person can make your life, and falling in love with the wrong person can ruin it; for a society to fall in love with the wrong art can be disastrous, in its consequences; and for it to fall in love with good art can make it better and stronger. So it's in our interests, I think, to help people separate the two. To see the difference between works of art that are shallow and self-aggrandizing and vain and destructive, and those which make us see that humans are capable of being better than we usually are.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. ~W.H. Auden

We teach kids in school about healthy eating habits because it makes them, and by extension society as a whole, healthier and stronger. They don't all have to like the same food in the end but we try to help them develop tastes that will keep them well. It's the same. Do you see that? Left to their own devices, kids will choose junk food and junk art; they won't even know that there's a difference between Cheez Product and Cheese. But we teach them, or we try to. That Cheez Product is a source of calories but will hurt them if consumed to excess; that cheese is better and it tastes better, too. That once you develop a taste for Cheese you can't eat Cheez Product anymore (at least, not often). And when one child likes havarti and another cheddar and a third parmesan and a fourth gouda and the fifth just can't like cheese but does like eggs, well, good.

It makes me sad that many people might believe that the book on the left is better because it asks nothing of them, makes no demands, can be consumed and forgotten. Even from best-selling authors I've read instructionals to this effect: that the work should be handed to a reader pre-digested, that it should drag the reader along with as many car chases and dangerous liasons and near explosions as necessary, that the mark of a successful literary work is whether or not a reader can put it down. But pre-digested food is a slim-fast shake. Who wants to live on slim-fast shakes?

(This is making me want to go book-shopping. It's also making me hungry. I think I'll go get some havarti, speaking of cheese.)

I want to know that Frances will learn how to tell the difference between Cheez and Cheese. I want her to have experiences in art-making so that she can learn if there is any part of the act of creation that makes the top of her head pop off (which is what writing does for me, even when it's hard); I want her to have enough exposure to all the different kinds and styles of art to learn how to recognize that moment, to determine which kinds of human she wants to learn how to be. I want her to find that hole inside herself and learn its contours so that she knows how to fill it. I want that for all of her classmates and friends, too, because art helps us to see what human potential is.

If I have to do it for her myself, then I will. Frances has a very well stocked arts and crafts supply cabinet. We play with them freeform--all put out and she can do whatever she wants. When she asks for help I try to help her learn how to see better--instead of drawing her a dinosaur, I try to tell her how to see the dinosaur so she can draw it herself, to see the planes and lines and angles and curves and shadings, even though it will be a long time before she can reproduce it herself. I encourage her to sing and she has lots of little musical instruments that she can make a holy racket on. And she does. We listen to lots of different kinds of music, not just kiddie music, and sometimes we dance around to them together. Because music and dancing should not be the exclusive province of experts and professionals. We read through Alice's Adventures in Wonderland recently; she has lots of picture books that we read and talk about the stories and pictures, at least one every day. Two weeks ago when I was futzing around with my own paints, doing nothing spectacular but having a grand time doing it anyway, she asked to get her own paints out and we painted together. Neither will ever be framed in the Louvre but that's ok. I want her to learn from me--and eventually from whatever formal arts education she gets--that art is a human universal and she has as much stake and claim to it as anyone.

So far, so good.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso

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*This leaves the question of what to do with artists who had no audience during their lifetime, like Van Gogh or William Blake; I'm going to say that it doesn't matter if the audience is displaced temporally or geographically from the production of the artwork. As long as there is, at some point, an audience, then it was Art all along. I'll also admit that there are a lot of works out there that would be Art if they ever find their audience; but until they do, they are not yet born.

**If you'd like a thorough dousing in the utilitarian side, try this: American Canvas, a report on the state of the arts in the US.

Posted by Andrea at January 16, 2008 6:34 AM under

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