Emerson Sayde Kirks / 5.17.24 / "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
-Robert Frost
Art is created for the purpose of seeing yourself in things that are not you. Maybe, even, these things become you, if the art penetrates deep enough to rearrange the fabric of your conscience.
Nothing makes a room emptier than being touched by something and simultaneously being unable to grapple with that sentiment. The first incident of this, you’ll love the piece like you loved betrayal, when you were too naive to know what to do with it. It doesn't matter if you outgrow this piece; it is the one which you learn from. This piece will teach you how to suffer. For me, this first virtuosity was The Two Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin:
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
And how do you wrestle with that for the first time? I burdened myself with the moth-eaten question: what do you do when something of a tragic beauty wants you, wants you all the way down to the marrow? How do you hack with being eaten alive?
The institution of art as an outlet to publicly evince despair, grief, and loneliness is a fossil of late Romantic craft. From Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare to Picasso’s Blue Period to depictions of Hamlet’s Ophelia, the acceptance of harrowing artwork bloomed through the Romantic and Renaissance periods. First, people came to terms with countenance of the calamitous on a historical basis via art, then artists like Käthe Kollwitz familiarized people with the unexplained desolate.
It is no question that we call these pieces beautiful for all it encapsulates, beautiful as in venerably ugly. Is there something to be done with them along with commemorating the wallowing of mankind?
To me, heartsick art wasn’t as freeing as many people believe it was intended to be; yes, it is representative, but further than that, we have no ability to recollect what these artists intended, if anything at all. Pensive depictions of anything with direct ascription to a familiar pain, instead, locked me in a cell and buried deep the key.
An often underindulgent stance taken to dig this key up is to explain the art in a detached way; this does nothing but reduce the art. Art, as unfortunate as it may be, cannot only exist as what we as individuals understand it to be, and yet it exists differently to all.
There is a romanticism of tragedy that has taken heed in the past couple hundred years. There is a new idea of “beneficial breakage” that can give meaning to obsolete curses in the interest of self expression. That leaves mischanced artwork to leave one of two impressions on a viewer: comfort or repulsion.
And there is a need to be sad again, to burrow yourself in that which you know of old. Sad art rekindles that feeling over, and over, and over. Survivors of trauma make disaster their God and look for clinical satisfaction in just how bad they can feel. This is the comfort of the grotesque: art severs familiar feeling wounds you had long forgotten of.
I cannot speak on repulsion, but I know that we are afraid of what is unfamiliar to us. I feel a lump in my throat whenever I look at Salvador Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans. It is gross because it is unrelatable - yet one of my favorite pieces.
And when I look too closely at this piece, when I see Freud in the lower left, I am reminded that, no, I did not experience the putrefaction and death that accompanied the Spanish conflict, nor am I even familiar with it.
But that is the beauty of designation; before I even knew this piece was about the devastating Spanish civil war, it screamed self-sabotage to me. I thought that it was about neglecting your responsibilities for the hell of feeling solicitude, tearing yourself from your closest relationships, ruining your life just because you could. And even once I found that that wasn’t the artist’s original, intended sorrow, my interpretation exists in good will with Dali’s.
So it seems that our end is always self-made. Find yourself face to face with an artwork of heartache, relate it to yourself. Then, forgive the both of you. For your fevers, poetry, gloom, and all. Let bygones be bygones; you cannot dig up the key.
Comentários