THE NECESSITY OF ART

What is essential

Recently, there have been a spate of articles on how to pack a “go” bag in the event of a natural disaster or calamity that requires leaving in a hurry with only what is necessary.  Of course food, water, medicine, and documents are the type of essentials recommended by the Red Cross, those items that give us physical sustenance and a public identity.  However, what most people say they wish they brought are family memorabilia, journals and photos, things that reveal a personal identity and a nourishment for the soul.

Art serves the same purpose

Music, painting, and literature endure when systems fail, and help us endure the aftermath by evoking our better selves.  A society that values the arts values the whole human being.  For example, I am “fed” at my sons’ high school concerts in a way I never will be at a restaurant.  “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” Antoine de St. Exupery tells us.  That means responding with the interior: the mind, the heart, the soul and sometimes the gut.

What remains

The short story “The Portable Phonograph” by Walter van Tilburg Clark was written in 1950, long before the current popularity of post-apocalyptic literature, but in the aftermath of WWII, a real reckoning for modern world order.  In this chilling tale, a small group of survivors of an anonymous war’s devastation meet to listen to books and music.  What this means for them and how it challenges the dynamic of survival raises questions for all of us:  What would we save?  Would we be willing to share?  How is community redeemed or threatened by art?  This story begs us to look outward at the value of art, but inside at our own response to it.

Similarly, Jeannette Winterson, an award-winning contemporary British writer examines the value system art encompasses in her essay “The Secret Life of Us.”  Unsurprisingly, it does not play by the same rules as our economic or political systems, but Winterson argues, serves an equally important purpose.  “Art is potent, confrontational, difficult.  It challenges what we are…..”  Discussing these concepts will help us determine if we are up for the challenge.

 

Download The Necessity of Art as an e-book

 

THE PORTABLE PHONOGRAPH

by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

The red sunset, with narrow, black cloud strips like threats across it, lay on the curved horizon of the prairie. The air was still and cold, and in it settled the mute darkness and greater cold of night. High in the air there was wind, for through the veil of the dusk the clouds could be seen gliding rapidly south and changing shapes. A sensation of torment, of two-sided, unpredictable nature, arose from the stillness of the earth air beneath the violence of the upper air. Out of the sunset, through the dead, matted grass and isolated weed stalks of the prairie, crept the narrow deeply rutted remains of a road.

In the road, in places, there were crusts of shallow brittle ice. There were little islands of an old oiled pavement in the road too, but most of it was mud, now frozen rigid. The frozen mud still bore the toothed impress of great tanks, and a wanderer on the neighboring undulations might have stumbled, in this light, into large, partially filled-in and weed-grown cavities, their banks channeled and beginning to spread into badlands. These pits were such as might have been made by falling meteors, but they were not. They were the scars of gigantic bombs, their rawness already made a little natural by rain, seed and time. Along the road there were rakish remnants of fence. There was also, just visible, one portion of tangled and multiple barbed wire still erect, behind which was a shelving ditch with small caves, now very quiet and empty, at intervals in its back wall. Otherwise there was no structure or remnant of a structure visible over the dome of the darkling earth, but only, in sheltered hollows, the darker shadows of young trees trying again.

Under the wuthering arch of the high wind a V of wild geese fled south. The rush of their pinions sounded briefly, and the faint, plaintive notes of their expeditionary talk. Then they left a still greater vacancy. There was the smell and expectation of snow, as there is likely to be when the wild geese fly south. From the remote distance, toward the red sky, came faintly the protracted howl and quick yap-yap of prairie wolf.

North of the road, perhaps a hundred yards, lay the parallel and deeply intrenched course of a small creek, lined with leafless alders and willows. The creek was already silent under ice. Into the bank above it was dug a sort of cell, with a single opening, like the mouth of a mine tunnel. Within the cell there was a little red of fire, which showed dully through the opening, like a reflection or a deception of the imagination. The light came from the chary burning of four blocks of poorly aged peat, which gave off a petty warmth and much acrid smoke. But the precious remnants of wood, old fence posts and timbers from the longdeserted dugouts, had to be saved for the real cold, for the time when a man’s breath blew white, the moisture in his nostrils stiffened at once when he stepped out, and the expensive blizzards paraded for days over the vast open, swirling and settling and thickening, till the dawn of the cleared day when the sky was a thin blue-green and the terrible cold, in which a man could not live for three hours unwarmed, lay over the uniformly drifted swell of the plain.

Around the smoldering peat four men were seated cross-legged. Behind them, traversed by their shadows, was the earth bench, with two old and dirty army blankets, where the owner of the cell slept. In a niche in the opposite wall were a few tin utensils which caught the glint of the coals. The host was rewrapping in a piece of daubed burlap, four fine, leather-bound books. He worked slowly and very carefully, and at last tied the bundle securely with a piece of grass-woven cord. The other three looked intently upon the process, as if a great significance lay in it. As the host tied the cord, he spoke. He was an old man, his long, matted beard and hair gray to nearly white. The shadows made his brows and cheekbones appear gnarled, his eyes and cheeks deeply sunken. His big hands, rough with frost and swollen by rheumatism, were awkward but gentle at their task. He was like a prehistoric priest performing a fateful ceremonial rite. Also his voice had in it a suitable quality of deep, reverent despair, yet perhaps, at the moment, a sharpness of selfish satisfaction.

“When I perceived what was happening,” he said, “I told myself,” “It is the end. I cannot take much; I will take this.”

“Perhaps I was impractical,” he continued. “But for myself, I do not regret, and what do we know of those who will come after us? We are the doddering remnant of a race of mechanical fools. I have saved what I love; the soul of what was good in us here; perhaps the new ones will make a strong enough beginning not to fall behind when they become clever.”

He rose with slow pain and placed the wrapped volumes in the niche with his utensils. The others watched him with the same ritualistic gaze.

“Shakespeare, the Bible, Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy, “one of them said softly.  ”You might have done worse.”

“You will have a little soul left until you die,” said another harshly. “That is more than is true of us. My brain becomes thick, like my hands.” He held the big, battered hands, with their black nails, in the glow to be seen.

“I want paper to write on,” he said. “And there is none.”

The fourth man said nothing. He sat in the shadow farthest from the fire, and sometimes his body jerked in its rags from the cold. Although he was still young, he was sick, and coughed often. Writing implied a greater future than he now felt able to consider.

The old man seated himself laboriously, and reached out, groaning at the movement, to put another block of peat on the fire. With bowed heads and averted eyes, his three guests acknowledged hid magnanimity.

“We thank you, Dr. Jenkins, for the reading,” said the man who had named the books.

They seemed then to be waiting for something. Dr. Jenkins understood, but was loath to comply. In an ordinary moment he would have said nothing. But the words of The Tempest, which he had been reading, and the religious attention of the three, made this an unusual occasion.

“You wish to hear the phonograph,” he said grudgingly.

The two middle-aged men stared into the fire, unable to formulate and expose the enormity of their desire.

The young man, however, said anxiously, between suppressed coughs, “Oh, please,” like an excited child.

The old man rose again in his difficult way, and went to the back of the cell. He returned and placed tenderly upon the packed floor, where the firelight might fall upon it, an old, portable, phonograph in a black case. He smoothed the top with his hand, and then opened it. The lovely green-felt-covered disk became visible.

“I have been using thorns as needles,” he said. “But tonight, because we have a musician among us” – he bent his head to the young man, almost invisible in the shadow – “I will use a steel needle. There are only three left.”

The two middle-aged men stared at him in speechless adoration. The one with the big hands, who wanted to write, moved his lips, but the whisper was not audible.

“Oh, don’t,” cried the young man, as if he were hurt. “The thorns will do beautifully.”

“No,” the old man said. “I have become accustomed to the thorns, but they are not really good. For you, my young friend, we will have good music tonight.”

“After all,” he added generously, and beginning to wind the phonograph, which creaked, “they can’t last forever.”

“No, nor we,” the man who needed to write said harshly. “The needle, by all means.” “Oh, thanks,” said the young man. “Thanks,” he said again, in a low, excited voice, and then stifled his coughing with a bowed head.

“The records, though,” said the old man when he had finished winding,“ are a different matter. Already they are very worn. I do not play them more than once a week. One, once a week, that is what I allow myself.”

“More than a week I cannot stand it; not to hear them,” he apologized.

“No, how could you?” cried the young man. “And with them here like this.”

“A man can stand anything,” said the man who wanted to write, in his harsh, antagonistic voice.

“Please, the music,” said the young man.

“Only the one,” said the old man. “In the long run we will remember more that way.”

He had a dozen records with luxuriant gold and red seals. Even in that light the others could see that the threads of the records were becoming worn. Slowly he read out the titles, and the tremendous, dead names of the composers and the artists and the orchestras.

The three worked upon the names in their minds, carefully. It was difficult to select from such a wealth what they would at once most like to remember. Finally the man who wanted to write named Gershwin’s “New York”.

“Oh, no,” cried the sick young man, and then could say nothing more because he had to cough. The others understood him, and the harsh man withdrew his selection and waited for the musicians to choose.

The musician begged Doctor Jenkins to read the titles again, very slowly, so that he could remember the sounds. While they were read, he lay back against the wall, his eyes closed, his thin, horny hand pulling at his light beard, and listened to the voices and the orchestras and the single instruments in his mind.

When the reading was done he spoke despairingly. “I have forgotten,” he complained. “I cannot hear them clearly.”

“There are other things missing”, he explained.

“I know,” said Doctor Jenkins. “I thought that I knew all of Shelley by heart. I should have brought Shelley.”

“That’s more soul than we can use”, said the harsh man. “Moby Dick is better.”

“By God, we can understand that,” he emphasized.

The doctor nodded.

“Still,” said the man who had admired the books, “we need the absolute if we are to keep a grasp on anything.”

“Anything but these sticks and peat clods and rabbit snares,” he said bitterly.

“Shelley desired an ultimate absolute,” said the harsh man. “It’s too much,” he said. “It’s no good; no earthly good.”

The musician selected a Debussy nocturne. The others considered and approved.

They rose to their knees to watch the doctor prepare for the playing, so that they appeared to be actually in an attitude of worship. The peat glow showed the thinness of their bearded faces, and the deep lines in them, and revealed the conditions of their garments. The other two continued to kneel as the old man carefully lowered the needle onto the spinning disk, but the musician suddenly drew back against the wall again, with his knees up, and buried his face in his hands.

At the first note of the piano the listeners were startled. They stared at each other.

Even the musician lifted his head in amazement, but then quickly bowed it again strainingly, as if he were suffering from a pain he might not be able to endure. They were all listening deeply, without movement. The wet, blue-green notes tinkled forth from the old machine, and were individual, delectable presences in the cell. The individual, delectable presences swept into a sudden tide of unbearably beautiful dissonance, and then continued fully the swelling and ebbing of that tide, the dissonant inpourings, and the resolutions, and the diminishments, and the little, quiet wavelets of interlude lapping between. Every sound was piercing and singularly sweet. In all the men except the musician, there occurred rapid sequences of tragically heightened recollections. He heard nothing but what was there. At the final, whispering disappearance, but moving quietly, so that the others would not hear him and look at him, he let his head fall back in agony, as if it were drawn there by the hair, and clenched the fingers of one hand over his teeth. He sat that way while the others were silent, and until they began to breathe again normally. His drawn-up legs were trembling violently.

Quickly Doctor Jenkins lifted the needle off, to save it, and not to spoil the recollection with scraping. When he had stopped the whirling of the sacred disk, he courteously left the phonograph open and by the fire, in sight.

The others, however, understood. The musician rose last, but then abruptly, and went quickly out at the door without saying anything. The others stopped at the door and gave their thanks in low voices. The doctor nodded magnificently.

“Come again,” he invited “in a week. We will have the “New York”.

When the two had gone together, out toward the rimed road, he stood in the entrance, peering and listening. At first there was only the resonant boom of the wind overhead, and then, far over the dome of the dead, dark plain, the wolf cry lamenting. In the rifts of clouds the doctor saw four stars flying. It impressed the doctor that one of them had just been obscured by the beginning of a flying cloud at the very moment he heard what he had been listening for, a sound of suppressed coughing. It was not near by, however.

He believed that down against the pale alders he could see the moving shadow.

With nervous hands he lowered the piece of canvas which served as his door, and pegged it at the bottom. Then quickly and quietly, looking at the piece of canvas frequently, he slipped the records into the case, snapped the lid shut, and carried the phonograph to his couch. There, pausing often to stare at the canvas and listen, he dug earth from the wall and disclosed a piece of board. Behind this there was a deep hole in the wall, into which he put the phonograph. After a moment’s consideration, he went over and reached down his bundle of books and inserted it also. Then, guardedly, he once more sealed up the hole with the board and the earth. He also changed his blankets, and the grass-stuffed sack which served as a pillow, so that he could lie facing the entrance. After carefully placing two more blocks of peat on the fire, he stood for a long time watching the stretched canvas, but it seemed to billow naturally with the first gusts of a lowering wind. At last he prayed, and got in under his blankets, and closed his smoke-smarting eyes. On the inside of the bed, next the wall, he could feel with his hand, the comfortable piece of lead pipe.

 

THE SECRET LIFE OF US

Jeanette Winterson

 We censor it, sentimentalise it, treat it as a commodity. But we can’t reduce its power.

Jeanette Winterson on why art now matters more than ever

An American lady travelling to Paris in 1913 – the kind of American lady who will still be travelling to Paris in 2013 – asked Ezra Pound what he thought art was for. Pound replied: “Ask me what a rose bush is for.”

Europe was on the edge of war. Do rose bushes matter in a war? What can art do for us now, in the likelihood of another war?

I know there is a sneaking feeling, even among art lovers, that art is a luxury. While pictures, books, music and theatre are not quite handmade luggage or perfume, most people would not admit that art is essential. The endless rows over funding centre on an insecurity about the role of art in society. Nobody doubts that hospitals and schools must be paid for by all of us. Mention art, and the answer seems to be that it should rely on the marketplace; let those who want it pay for it.  Art is specialised, particular, elitist and probably bogus. In Britain, a few old masters, Shakespeare and Dickens, Mozart and Puccini, are enough to feed the general interest in the arts.

Modern art has become a media circus; a money-driven, prize-hungry extravaganza, dependent on marketing and spin, which may leave the public with a few extra names it recognises, but that makes everyone cynical about the product.

The word gives it away: product. Art is being treated as a commodity. We doubt that it is special. Dead artists belong to the heritage industry. Live artists belong to the PR industry.

It may be that capitalism will be as successful with art as it has been with religion, absorbing it to the point of neutrality. Capitalism, for all its emphasis on the free market, hates competition – that is, any challenge to its system. Anybody with a smattering of English history knows about the great conflicts between church and state. We know that traditionally there have been been two powers: the material world and the invisible world. God and Mammon.

Well, Mammon won the big battle, and there is no effective force in the west to challenge the dogma of capitalism. The church at least paid lip service to a different value system to the one Margaret Thatcher hailed as “no alternative”.

Art is a different value system. Like God, it fails us continually. Like God, we have legitimate doubts about its existence but, like God, art leaves us with footprints of beauty. We sense there is more to life than the material world can provide, and art is a clue, an intimation, at its best, a transformation. We don’t need to believe in it, but we can experience it. The experience suggests that the monolith of corporate culture is only a partial reality. This is important information, and art provides it.

When you take time to read a book or listen to music or look at a picture, the first thing you are doing is turning your attention inwards. The outside world, with all of its demands, has to wait. As you withdraw your energy from the world, the artwork begins to reach you with energies of its own. The creativity and concentration put into the making of the artwork begin to cross-current into you. This is not simply about being recharged, as in a good night’s sleep or a holiday, it is about being charged at a completely different voltage.

When I read Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes, I’m not just reading a poet’s take on the world, I am entering into a different world – a world built from the beginning on other principles. William Carlos Williams said: “It’s hard to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Art’s counterculture, however diverse, holds in plain sight what the material world denies – love and imagination. Art is made out of both: a passionate, reckless love of the work in its own right, as though nothing else exists, and an imaginative force that creates something new out of disparate material. Art’s experiments are not funded by huge state programmes, venture capital, or junk bonds; they are done when someone picks up a pen or a brush, or sits down at the piano, or takes a piece of clay and changes it forever. A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.

Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no shortcuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. Only the experience. Art can’t change your life; it is not a diet programme or the latest guru – it offers no quick fixes. What art can do is prompt in us authentic desire. By that I mean it can waken us to truths about ourselves and our lives; truths that normally lie suffocated under the pressure of the 24-hour emergency zone called real life. Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find is ours.

I know of a man, a Quaker, who volunteered as an ambulance driver in the second world war. While other men had pictures of their sweethearts in their breast pockets, he carried a photo of a Queen Anne chair. In his despair at where human folly had brought him and millions of others, he needed to remember the glory of the human spirit, as well as its loss. Like Barbara Hepworth, he believed that art affirms and sustains life at its highest level. He became an antique dealer because he wanted to be surrounded by what the Jews call “real presences”. A real presence is one where spirit and body, or spirit and object, have never been separated. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking a chair, a picture, a book or a human being; what makes us feel alive is the living quality lodged there.

This quality is abundant in art. It is the reason why art is timeless. It is the reason why art does not date. We don’t go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. Go and visit Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North and you will meet the same imaginative hugeness as in Chartres or Westminster Abbey. The scale is different, the sensibility has changed, but the spirit is the same.

Mass production is about cloned objects. Art is about individual vision. Individuals can work together, as they must in theatre or opera, or where assistants work under a master, or they can work alone. However it happens, art is never a factory or a production line. Even Duchamp’s Readymades were a way of forcing us to concentrate on the thing in itself as it really is.

Capitalism doesn’t want you to concentrate – you might notice that much is amiss. A blurred, out-of-focus consuming is what suits the marketplace best. Somebody has to buy all that overproduction of useless dead objects. In contrast, all art is live theatre. The dialogue continues between object, maker, owner, viewer, listener, reader. Roger Warner is 89 and he still talks to his furniture. His daughter Deborah Warner makes the stage talk to us.

Art is a continuum, passed down from hand to hand, lost, rediscovered, found in objects as proof of a living spirit that defies the orthodoxy of materialism. Yes, art becomes a collector’s item, or a rich man’s trophy. Yes, art is traded for large sums of money, but this is not art’s purpose, nor its nature. If money ceased to exist, art would continue. If war flattened London tomorrow, someone would start to make an installation out of the rubble.

Why did the Taliban bullet down the Buddhas? Why did Hitler burn books? Why was Ulysses banned? Why did Franco refuse to show Guernica? Art is potent, confrontational, difficult. It challenges what we are, and that is equally true of a Queen Anne chair, the Mona Lisa or Rachel Whiteread’s House. We can muzzle the power of art in all sorts of ways – destroying or banning it is too obvious. A favourite gag is to familiarise it so that we no longer see it (Constable), or to sentimentalise it, so that we read it but do not allow it to read us (Dickens). Even better if we can just watch an adaptation on TV. The Queen Anne chair may seem unthreatening compared with Rachel Whiteread, but before we console ourselves with its antiqueness (ie expensive, dead), let’s take it into Ikea and watch some MDF look pale.

Don’t be fooled by the way capitalism co-opts art. It pretends to do it for money, but underneath money is terror. Terror that there might be a different way to live. There is a different way, and it’s not a William Morris utopia, or an Omega workshop niche; it’s a celebration of the human spirit. Art reminds us of all the possibilities we are persuaded to forget. Peace or war, we need those alternatives.

Jeanette Winterson gives the Orange Word lecture, What Is Art For?, at the Apollo Theatre, London W1, on Wednesday. Details: 0870 890 1101, or www.orangeword.co.uk. The Guardian is the media partner for Orange Word.