"Art and the Religious Sense: The Human Longing for Beauty--a Yearning for the Absolute."
Monday, March 8, 2010 -- Speech at the American Bible Society, New York, NY
Fr. Thierry de Roucy
"Good evening dear friends. It is a pleasure to be with you tonight and to speak about the humanization of the culture. We are all aware that, at least in its traditional features, the religious phenomenon has known a dramatic decrease in the past decades. New generations seem very little interested in what they perceive as mere institutions, incapable of meeting their most pressing existential needs. On the contrary, it is striking that art attracts and fascinates more and more. Museums have never before recorded such a large audience. Art sales keep beating their own sky-high records. And young generations show massive interest for art studies in its different forms. Such enthusiasm is all the more surprising because art, like religiosity, by the way, is at odds with our society's most accepted criterion. We value what is efficient and productive, whereas art is gratuitous. We value immediacy and automatism, whereas art takes a lot of patience and personal engagement. We value easiness and comfort, whereas the artist's life is unsecured and difficult. This leads us to a simple question: Why? Why does our society hold on with such passion to art? We proclaimed the death of God and the 'age of maturity' of humanity….Why do we keep so profoundly attached to such useless and somehow enigmatic tradition?
Maybe the first hint of an answer to that question is: because art meets a desire. The Estonian composer Arvo Pårt is regarded by many--including young musicians-as one of the most lively and creative protagonists of contemporary music. How does his music, besides being deeply religious and rooted in tradition, fascinate such a large audience? In an interview, answering to that question, Arvo Pårt said: "Both of us have an overwhelming desire. The artist who creates his work and the observer or the listener who comes to see or to listen to it. We come together with open hearts. Once we are there, perhaps we will find ourselves." True art meets a desire. Art is an encounter that is made possible by a common language, a common desire. This is so true that someone who lacks nothing, wants nothing, desires nothing, would show no existential interest in art. One has to be poor in some way to penetrate into a museum or a concert hall.
Once someone asked Alberto Giacometti how he knew a work was finished. He answered: "I don't finish, I just give up." Few artists in history were such restless seekers as Giacometti. Every morning he would destroy what he had made the day before and start it anew, unsatisfied. What was he looking for? The British art critic John Berger writes: "The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality--and he was concerned with nothing else but the contemplation of reality--could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed, but the incomplete history of his staring at it. The act of looking was like a form of prayer to him--it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute." The work of art is not the end, it is not the goal. It is a sign. It is a hint towards the absolute. A milestone on our way to absolute beauty.
A true work of wart helps us 'find ourselves', as Arvo Pårt says, precisely because it expresses, awakens, and ignites our desire for absolute beauty. This desire is 'overwhelming' because it is so deeply rooted in our humanity that, no matter how much we try to discard it, it surfaces again and again. By 'beauty' we certainly do not mean something that can be traced back to a rule, a style or a recipe. It has to do with experience. Anyone who ever visited the Sagrada Familia and contemplated Antonio Gaudi's work and its continuation through Etsuro Sotoo, knows that beauty is like a church and a family: it is somewhere we belong. The experience of beauty has to do with the feeling of being 'at home'. Or at least with the nostalgia of a place called home. A home for our hearts…
For the same reason, it makes so much sense that Makoto's experience of exile and quest of beauty would lead him to the foundation of the International Art's Movement, that is, of a place to belong, to experience the beauty of communion.
Art expresses the ideal. Sometimes giving us a foretaste of it. Sometimes just carrying the memory of it. Sometimes re-opening the wound of its absence. Reading Rostropovitsch's memoirs, we learn that communists were great promoters of art, apparently. In reality, each composition was submitted to approval by the regime. And there is one thing that would definitely have a work of art banned from concert halls: the expression of sadness, and particularly the use of dissonance. It was banned because it opposed and resisted the power's claim to have achieved the ideal society. Art brings us back to the humility of our condition. Maybe it is specially true for contemporary art. It is inhabited by a profound feeling of the limitedness of our condition. Whoever wandered about amidst the art galleries in Chelsea or the corridors of the MoMA knows how much contemporary art is pregnant with a sense of drama, if not of tragedy. Rothko spent his life looking for beauty. Yet the sense of tragedy never quits his canvases, even the brightest ones. It is always there, in the edges, "blurred with sadness and mystery." He used to define his paintings as a "space" or a "stage". He too was striving towards a home in which to belong. Yet he could not prevent the progressive dying away of his own light, overwhelmed by the sense of tragedy.
Now let's make a step further, looking at another great artist, Andrei Tarkovsky. A Russian filmmaker, he worked under the communist regime. For the reason already mentioned, he had a very hard time with the censors and could only make seven movies in his lifetime. All along the way he suffered from criticism and calumny. He was exiled away from his beloved country which he would never see again. He died of cancer little after completing what would be his last work: "The Sacrifice". In his lifelong reflection on art and cinema, Sculpting in Time, he wrote: "An artist cannot express the moral ideal of his time if he does not touch its deepest wounds, if he does not live and suffer these wounds in his own flesh." This means that, at the very core of the work of the artists, there is a compassion. A passion with and for his people. Same desire, same passion. If we sometimes experience art as balm, it is because the work of art mediates the compassion of its maker. Tarkovsky also states that the artist is "the conscience of society, its most sensitive organ." Nowhere is the wound so open and profound. Nowhere is the yearning for the ideal so conscious and pressing. The heart of the artist, and therefore his work, is a crucible where the sense of tragedy meets the ideal, and becomes a cry, and a prayer.
It is a great mission and a great responsibility to be an artist, especially in these times of great confusion. Yet there are many obstacles to it. There are many ways to withdraw from that responsibility and to give up the quest for truth. There is of course the temptation to secure oneself a more stable position in the market. But we have to admit that, generally speaking, our human nature is more inclined to comfortable and easy solutions than to difficult and lifelong achievements. During the time that is left to me, I would like to emphasize two features to which all artists should hold fast in order to not only remain faithful to their vocation but to allow themselves to grow, to deepen their roots and to bear year after year more beautiful fruits. I want to talk about the relationship with a master, and about friendship.
By master I mean of course more than just someone who is able to teach me the techniques of art. The master is the one I look at to understand what art is about and what humanity is about. It is someone in whose life and work the longing for truth and beauty is clearer and deeper. Yehudi Menuhim describes his own masters with very touching words: " [They were] people who haven't lost the human touch and who are great in their compassion and who have extraordinary command of knowledge. But they're more humble and great at the same time than the knowledge they possess. I know Enesco as great a human mind as ever I encountered -- and Bartok. Two totally different people who were concerned with the youth and the education of the youth. […] They were concerned with the world." To find such a master should be the deepest desire of all artists, and he or she who found a master should hold on to him as to his most precious treasure. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin has a beautiful way to put it, "The master is he who looks with his own eyes to what everybody has seen, and he is able to perceive the beauty of these things that most people hold for common and unappealing." The master, we could comment, is the one who looks differently at the world, because he is not moved by mere curiosity, projects, or selfish interest. He is moved by a deep and heartfelt longing for truth and beauty.
Is the master just someone I admire and imitate for a period of time, but that I have to quit in order to find my own personal way, so that the real journey would be a solitary one? Is that dependance of being a disciple a threat to my originality? The Irish painter Sean Scully is someone who has a very conscious and generous relationship with his influences, past and present. He was once asked to talk about his relationship with--and the words are those of the interviewer--"the fathers that a strong artist has to assassinate for his own work to fully emerge." His answer to that question is worth listening to: "My work is not a rejection of influences, nor an assassination of artistic parents, but rather an incorporation of whatever is of use to me. I have eaten them, and now I am them. This is what I mean by spirituality. It's an absorption and complete identification into another way. I have not advanced merely through a sense of competition." Building on Sean Scully's statement, we can advance that artists are not bound to either be solitary or in competition with the others. Art stems from a relationship where my subjectivity is not at odds. On the contrary, my masters engage and reveal my true subjectivity. THey save it from the subversive dictatorship of trends and the ruling ideologies. They show me the way to my own heart, to that longing deep inside me. Thus they empower my subjectivity to address and embrace the objectivity of the real and the quest for the ideal.
Now there is a second word which I deem essential to art. A word we are not used to connecting with the mission of the artist. This is the word friendship. Instead, another Irish painter, Guggi, states that, "[artists] need friends more than others." Why so? Because it is his friends whom he credits with inspiring him. "I wouldn't be painting at the standard I am now without the friends I had and have. We were all blessed to have the gifts we had and we were blessed to end up on the same street. They made me dig deeper. When I see how deep they dig, I feel there's no way I'm going to let the side down. I might not be big in the sense they are, or a household name all over the world, or anywhere, but I want to be a great painter, which is what I've always wanted to be." Artists need friends, that is, they need to belong to a company of people who have the same passion, the same quest, the same commitment to art. Of course there is a solitude that is intrinsic in art. Solitude because the ideal is personal and therefore the answer can only be personal. No proxy. Yet genuine friendship is the only thing that can support this lifelong effort towards beauty. My friends encourage me. They remind me of the reason why I started the journey. They help me to not lose sight of the goal. They also inspire me, since the beauty of a true, committed and faithful friendship is maybe the most moving incarnation of that ideal we are striving for.
To conclude these very brief, schematic, and incomplete reflections on art and beauty, I would like to say a word about this project that we started upstate New York--The International Center for a Culture of Compassion. The vocation of this place has to do with all we heard and saw tonight. When I started Heart's Home twenty years ago, it was with the intuition that friendship and compassion is what human heart's need the most. Soon we found ourselves sending hundreds of volunteers to the slums of INdia, Brazil, or Haiti. Not to give anything but their time and their friendship. Progressively we came to understand that not only the prisoners and the prostitutes were in dire need of a human and compassionate presence, but that cities like Geneve, Paris, or New York too were dying of loneliness and crying for compassion. And that culture too needed to be raised up and healed. Set in the Catskills, it is our wish that the International Center for a Culture of Compassion may become a home for the artists, among other culture builders. A place of education, through seminar and retreats. But even more, a place where they can experience beauty, the beauty of nature, the beauty of silence and music, and most of all the beauty of friendship. A second house is currently under construction in order to increase our housing capacity, yet all of you are already welcome at any time, especially on the weekends. New York is an amazing city and center of the art world. Yet we all know how hard and dehumanizing this city can sometimes be. It is our hope that this humble endeavor of ours will contribute to a true rehumanization of culture. Thank you again!"
No comments:
Post a Comment