What future for the fine arts?

For most of its history Western civilization has been defined by a single story, the story of the gospel. It is this story that informed us of the secrets of the human heart, that structured history from beginning to end, that informed our morality and our politics. We may argue about how faithful various parts of that civilization has been to this story but overall, Western civilization has its origin in Christianity.

Although our civilization remains largely Christian it is less so as the years progress. We are in danger of losing the story of our origins. While we may bemoan the loss of native culture and point to the despair that that produces among members of those cultures, we do not apply the lesson to ourselves.

The loss of THE story does not mean that our lives are not informed by stories. Novels, plays and films continue to fascinate us and those who boast of ignoring these seem to us naïve, unfurnished, locked into the technical.

Stories are very much alive and well for us.

A brief look at contemporary cinema and writing demonstrates that we are producing works that penetrate to the heart of the human dilemma in a way unprecedented.

But it is no surprise that the best novelists and filmmakers are those who are still, even unconsciously, informed by THE story. I am thinking of John Updike specifically here. For the art of story telling, the art of penetrating to the heart of the human dilemma was first taught to us in Scripture.

Having said all of this there is one aspect of the arts that stands out as having lost narrative altogether, the fine arts of painting and sculpture.

The initial move of the impressionists to allow the paint to be paint, to show the brush strokes, and to abandon the effort for accuracy of representation for that mystical something that makes a painting say more than a photograph was welcome. Painters were set free from the planned and the intentional to respond to the scene in front of them.

The preoccupation with colour and paint led to the abandonment of the object altogether and to just have the paint, or the bronze or the marble to produce pure abstraction. This also produced beautiful works of art.

The problem was that it looked easy but in fact was more difficult than objective painting. It also broadened the idea of what a painting could be until breadth became license and resulted in the frankly silly.

The progression to abstraction could have, should have, been a small expression of the painterly genre. However, artists and arts entrepreneurs became caught up in a neoism that insisted that all new art had to be at the edge of some movement.

We still hear of exhibitions that they will challenge what we think art is. This has become the cliché of the art world. The fact is that they do not challenge us at all, they bore us to the extent that the general pubic has simply lost interest in the fine arts to the extent that we must question taxpayer funding.

The obsession with the new has driven artists to blasphemy and pornography as being the only areas that are still liable to shock and dismay. But alas even these attempts are becoming a bore.

The real destructive power of neoism in the fine arts is that it decrees that we cannot go back, we cannot stand in any tradition even if that is a tradition of composition and drawing and the painterly skills.

Certainly we cannot go back to producing a painting that has a narrative base.

Why can we not produce a Madonna and child, a crucifixion scene, Abraham about to slit Isaac’s throat, the baptism of Jesus or any number of biblical scenes that were the bread and butter of artistic expression for over a thousand years?

Is it the case that it has all been done before and no more needs to be expressed, that previous artists have emptied the genre? This cannot be so. We still persist in painting portraits, probably the oldest genre of them all and find them still very interesting and challenging.

We cannot go back because a decree has been sent out by our artistic masters that there is no way back to past expressions, that it is impossible for a modern artist to attempt such an expression. We must press on towards a new land of new expressions that will bring us new fame and insight. A visit to the Pompidou centre recently convinced me that this is bosh.

The new land of freedom and individual expression ripped from the constraints and traditions of the past is mostly a desert. We have been hoodwinked. One of the reasons that we cannot go back is that artists insist on the genius of their own creative expression and thus decry any influence in their attempt to distinguish themselves.

They lack not only the artistic skills to produce a narrative work but they are ignorant of the narratives themselves and how they may be portrayed in a new way.

There is no necessary reason for the art of the present day to disavow narrative subjects. The abandonment of such subjects came about because of sentimental story pictures of the Victorians and the discovery of the sensuality of paint in its own right by the impressionists. But by throwing out the baby with the bathwater we have consigned the fine arts to be an expression of story-less sensuality, subtle textures and patterns or unexpected contrasts.

Duchamp’s urinal gave the message that anything can be art and thus broadened the category so that it was in fact no category. This statement cut the link between the modern artist and the artistic tradition and we have had nearly a century of artists who refuse to be taught what their predecessors had discovered.

The result has been trivial works that are more the result of fashion than a real expression of the human or of beauty.

It is interesting that there has been a resurgence of photo-realism in painting. It is as if, finding nowhere to go forward there is an attempt to go back to representation. In Western Australia this often take the form of beachscapes or wave breaks that strive to represent a scene as accurately as possible.

This is a kind of fantasy or pornography because it strives to reproduce and thus own something that cannot be owned. These works strive to create a perfect scene but despite the skill in producing the scene the paintings are strangely expressionless.

Roger Scruton tells us that the difference between fantasy and imagination is that the former is a copy of reality but the latter searches for a deeper vision.

Photorealist work is also void of narrative and lacks the expression the great painters of the past brought to their work, that mysterious something of paint and canvas that tells us much more than a photograph possibly could.

A sign of hope is that art criticism is finally seeing that the emperor has no clothes. Christopher Allen who writes for the Weekend Australian is a case in point. He nails the point precisely:

You don’t become an artist by aping a cool style or even by finding your own distinctive look; you grow into being an artist, if at all, by acquiring a deep understanding of the craft you practice, looking at the world around you and eventually finding something that you really need to say and that cannot be said in any other way.

So many young painters look for their own restricted style and then repeat it ad infinitum. The problem is that the style may be distinctive, it may set one apart, but it rarely breaks free from its own strictures to produce something surprisingly good and genuinely new.

Roger Scruton, an Oxford philosopher, has also entered the lists of those who deplore the state of the fine arts in our time:

Originality is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world. The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary, like the late quartets of Haydn, or whispered meditations like the Sonnets of Rilke. They may be all but unnoticeable amid the fanfares of contemporary self advertisement, like the trapped interiors of Vuillard or the tucked-away churches of Borromini. What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable. Tradition and originality are two components of a single process, whereby the individual makes himself known through his membership of the historical group. (Roger Scruton An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture. Duckworth 1998).

The absence of narrative in the fine arts reflects the modern arrival at the notion that we do not have a story apart from the story that we tell ourselves. The fragmentation of our society is produced by this insight; we now have no common story except for the shallow and false story that we are on the road to more and more amenable life styles.

The fact that we in the developed countries already live in surplus, except for the problem of death, seems to have escaped us.

This common story we tell ourselves, which is really an unfounded optimism, has banished the idea of judgment, which has obvious moral, but also aesthetic, repercussions . All artists are thought to be sincere and to sincerely attempt to convey some personal vision. Who are we to judge?

This means that art prizes typically make awards to works that defy understanding or deliver pleasure. A world free of judgment is a world where judgment is suspended and a grand conceit eventuates. No one dares to speak the truth for fear of appearing to be Philistine and to be garnered with all those naysayers in history that held up the progress of true art.

I have written before of the work of my friend Bob Booth and his venture into Christian art, particularly of his triptych of Descent, Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Bob has bucked the trend described above and has now produced a series of works based on biblical narrative. While recognition from public galleries has been predictably wanting, the church is in the process of embracing him.

The triptych will be hung in the refurbished St Mary’s Cathedral in Perth during lent 2011 and Servite College has bought his “I am your neighbour.” Since the Church exists to proclaim the gospel narrative it finds itself in a prime position to lead the way not to a return to an old aesthetic but to a resurgence of religious painting that has learnt from the progress in painting brought about in the last century and a half.

Bob’s religious paintings do not ape past works although they do share subjects. They are rather an application of the insights of impressionism to traditional subjects to bring about a depth of feeling long absent in contemporary art.