Unfortunately I got a shitty grade (7/10) because this is more of a synthesis article than an illustrative essay. So I've decided to publish the original unedited draft form of this essay, on how not to write an illustrative article LOL.
Why is art important
Art is an echo of its creator, it creates a window of opportunity for us to empathically connect with it's originator. Like a video recorder that plays back, art gives us the opportunity to understand the context in which it was created. And if we can understand and relate to it, we can build on that substance. When we relate though similarities in our culture, we reach therapeutic realization when we identify with the situation that the art presents. Art creates a level of transparency that murmurs through the dimensions we are normally thought to be bound. Without art, we are missing an exercise of thought that challenges and develops our understanding of limits in many dimensions.
In the feature film based on a true story titled "Monuments Men" I learned that in the midst of war, people risked their lives to protect and save objects of art. The lieutenant describes to his unlikely band of men in the drought of any likely success, the importance of their mission to save art. "You can wipe out a generation of people, you can burn down their homes and somehow they'll still come back. But you take away their achievements, and their history, and art, then it's like they never existed." What I believe this contemporary film is reminding our current generation, is that without art we take a substantial loss of our society's collective understanding.
In Jeanette Winterson's "Art Objects" I found her statement "a society in denial will not find much use for [art]" profound. It struck me that those whom cannot understand the language of art when looking into the mirror will not see the truth. If we don't exercise active submission, which is my interpretation of her saying "Letting art is the paradox of active surrender" (Winterson 6), we lose the ability to see further than what we are accustomed to accept. We will stay ignorant and in denial that there is more to the world, myopically seeing only what we want, propagandizing and twisting truths out of context. For if you cannot empathize you will not transcend yourself. You can educate yourself, but you cannot become cleverer; Yet learning to understand art divines for something similar, if there is such a thing as becoming cleverer. Absorbing art exercises your ability to connect, identify, relate, and normalize your perspective with the world around you, and [question] how you, yourself fits into that.
In "Decreation" by Anne Carson, I am introduced to more than shades of gray in between black and white. Rather, that depending which perspective you take, you will see things differently. By taking her prose "If conditionals are two kinds now it is night and all cats are black" (Carson 100) I strike a chord and resonate that a white cat in the blackness of night must surely go invisible as there is no contrast. And therefore what Carson says becomes a true argument, based on seeing things differently. I know math is important because it has structure on which to logicize rules to extrapolate predictions. Math is an accepted form science. But there is also the art of science, the art of letting us question those rules. We accept questioning as it allows us to strive for new ways of fulfilling, just as Winterson said implied. I tried to find patterns in Carson's prose to figure it out, this is my usual way of thinking, but what I found was a puzzle. I struggled to solve her prose by looking for a pattern, and even applying logic: if this, then this; when this, else this; if conditionals apply then statement equals true. I had yet to "let" Carson's work wash over me. Perhaps by studying Math I become more logical; Science I become more searching; Studying Art, I break down the boundaries and preconceptions I am conditioned with, culturally, or by pedagogy. Carson's poetry forced me to struggle and question my boundaries of thinking. It exercised my mind by creating a turmoil of questions and chaos before I could distill some truth, I had to break down my preconceptions and understand that argument, was built on perspective. Art, then to me is another vehicle for relaying perspective.
In Helene Cisoux's "Without End", I struggled and struggled to relate to what she was talking about. But after actively surrendering as lessons learned by Winterson, I did get it. She wants the scruffy notes before the essay, unedited, uncensored and full of emotion. The marginals, rather, the gut reactions I punctuate these essays with while I angrily try to absorb what I am looking at. And so, while she is describing what she sees in art, she writes in this poetic form that at first I found profoundly irritating to understand. I graffitied her essay with my notes of frustration and questions. It was only when I read back over the battle in my marginal notes that I realized, triumphantly how right she was. Through drawing, she sees a battle from the landing of the quill to capture an exchange between the artist's living subjects. What emanates from the artist's line cannot be a freeze frame, but the struggle to connect the emotion, the exchanges that are happening before him, from the beginning of the scene to the finality of the scene, in one line. A painting cannot exhibit that kind of struggle. A painting is the edited form of the drawing, as her essay is the edited form of her messy notes. She admits she did not want to censor herself, she wanted us to listen as she rattled off. And in dealing with the battle of her writing, I "got" terrible truths of the scenes she saw in those drawings. The subject people were real, their exchanges and defiance were real, and whose side was the artist taking? And the executioner proudly wins and glorifies a bloody act without repentance. It makes me fearful of the way people lived back then, fearful of the way society was to drive on such a freakish act. I saw what she found horrifying, and felt it. Art exercises our ability to empathize, which I believe combined with our other skills accumulates to a greater intelligence than the sum of each skill on its own, and therefore is a valuable ingredient to complete our wholeness.
The ability to empathize transcends our humanity. It transcends the boundaries of race, culture, language, history, age and prejudices and unites us. And those side by side, also viewing, and the traces of echoes from the past are symptoms of error and fear or rapture we can learn from. I saw a Facebook picture of a scene with a painting hanging on the wall of a museum, depicting a dancer in the midst of prose. Infront the painting a girl no more than three or four years old was so taken with the fantasy, she mimicked and danced in front of the painting. Her joy was so overwhelming to others seeing the scene that they stole snapshots of the girl fixated before the painting using their phones, to remind themselves how a three year old became a vessel for the art. This is the picture I saw, of a girl so young before she can articulate evoked and mirroring the painting, and like a channel she provoked the same awe in others, and like a ripple even onto myself just seeing a memento of that scene. I am moved by the value of art that language and words alone are inefficient to explain, and yet even a three-year-old can.
