Vienna is the most fantastic city for art. Its many museums, housed in magnificent palaces or outrageous and wonderful modern structures (KunstHaus Wien!) have at every turn the famous, the obscure-but-great, and in the end the just overwhelming. There is the Venus of Willemheim, Portrait of a young girl
by ??, and Schiele’s The Embrace
to pick just three out of so many thousand my head is still spinning.
All of which set me thinking about why people make art. At the heart of it I don’t think there is a reason amenable to words. Creativity is a natural part of being human. It’s our response to “being in the reality of existence” in the same way that a plant’s response to sunlight and water is growth. But the form which that creative urge will take is shaped by particular aspects of the environment and the psyche of each artist. This is obvious in the trivial: bishops, nobles and kings commissioned works designed to connote their piety and power. Portraits were painted for sentimental reasons and to allow distant subjects to recognise their ruler. Paintings of bible stories were for the education of the illiterate.
From here on it’s worth deeper consideration. Both artist and patron use visual means to explore topics of personal interest. Naturally pornography is common throughout history, sometimes cloaked in “acceptable” guise. Also common, especially in combination with the first, is philosophical allegory. A way aside from language for the investigation of ideas and meaning. I’m sure there are themes and reasons in pre-modern art which I’ve forgotten or failed to notice, but there’s one which particularly takes my attention – either because it was of special interest at the time or because it is of special interest to me. I suspect both.
This is abandon. By that I mean the sexual or ecstatic or mortal extremis which prompts the subject to relinquish normal constraint and propriety. More: a mutiny by the deckhands and the engine crew which tosses the captain and navigator overboard and leaves the ship stripped of sails and flag running wild with wind and current.
Humans have always had an uneasy relationship with abandon. Shelley’s Anarchie
puts the fear in political terms; the mob risen without rule or curb. The Church takes the subtle approach – celebrating that which it would control. This is no longer an age of saints and miracles, of the passion of the Christ, but of measurement, bureaucracy, and video surveillance.
It’s the antithesis of art.
I read a lovely article in the Boston Globe this morning about the Grand Inquisitor’s questioning of Jesus from the Brothers Karamazov. Wishing to preserve the people’s bodies, and protect their minds from chaos, the Inquisitor would crush the spiritual wellspring of creativity. We fear to but yearn to kill that technocrat within us. To give in to our love and passion. Dostoyevski’s Jesus killed him with a kiss.