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In his classic work, What is Art? the
Russian writer Leo Tolstoy argues that the point of art is not the
product, but the process. The process of art, he wrote, is part of
the basic human need to communicate in an alternative language—which
distinguishes it from the written word. Through the word, people convey
their thoughts to each other. Through art, however, they convey their
feelings.
Over the last few years, I have been walking in the borderlands of art,
exploring the mysterious regions where the language of images, words, and
music meet and speak to each other. I have been trying to shape a visual
language that can function poetically. Like the structures in my prints,
I have been reaching across ambiguities towards more illuminating questions.
Exploring the emotive sides of human experience through the medium of visual
poetry is an ambiguous exercise. But it is a necessary and intentional ambiguity.
The significant questions in my research hang on the nature of poetic language.
What is it? What is it for?
The language of poetry and art is the only way to express certain aspects
of experience. How do you even describe a simple activity like going for
a walk? Perceptions, consciousness, emotions, memories, and cultural influences
continuously interact in our experience of reality in subtle and complex
ways. Poetry can help us make sense of this complexity, clarifying our relationship
to each other and to the world.
The starting point of my visual poetry is in the contemplation of experience.
This eventually leads to questions that affect every aspect of society—cultural,
ethical, and political. And because reality itself is multi-layered, I have
layered my work with many different visual vocabularies.
The path to creativity
To illustrate what I mean, let us walk through the printmaking process—or
at least, through the process that has become both a working method and
a creative journey for me.
Over the last six years, I have been involved in an intense period of studio
research, first at Northern Illinois University, then at Illinois State
University, and now at the University of Alberta. My studio work over those
years was broken into several suites of prints exploring related themes.
I started each suite with an intentionally simple everyday activity. Every
day for two months, I set out on a planned route around the outskirts of
Bloomington in central Illinois, a borderland where the rural environment
meets the urban. The walks fostered a meditative state in which I was open
to whatever images I might encounter. This was my “walking research.”
Returning to my studio, I made drawings from memory of visual events that
had struck me during the walk.
After a while, I began to see recurring visual motifs in my drawings. Most
of them focused on industrial objects, sirens, water towers, generators,
and fragments of garbage that stood out—threatening and foreboding—on
the prairie landscape. I liked these objects on a visual level because they
were in such harsh contrast to their rural surroundings and because of their
suggestive qualities. They allowed me to reference figurative forms without
literally drawing the figure. I hoped this ambiguity would allow viewers
to react to the forms in more open ways, and to bring their own experience
to the image. Through the drawings, I was also able to investigate visual
motifs and the formal possibilities of space, composition, and colour.
As I worked on these drawings, I simultaneously researched other artistic
sources, primarily Béla Bartók’s opera Duke
Bluebeard’s Castle, Arnold Schoenberg’s stage work
Erwartung, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Initially, I turned to Paradise
Lost for subject matter—simply as a powerful and evocative
source of visual inspiration. I allowed the rich language to colour
the mood and atmosphere of my drawings.
Very quickly, the religious content of the work by these masters began to
influence my attitude in the studio. This attitude shift is best illustrated
by Ingmar Bergman’s words in relation to his film The Seventh Seal.
“Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant
in this connection,” he wrote, “it is my opinion that art lost
its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship…”
In considering these series of prints, I wanted to build upon the contradiction
that, regardless of my own belief and doubts, I have an interest in religious
images and ideas.
Once these ideas began to emerge, I felt ready to bring my walking research
and my literary research together. It was not my intention to illustrate
The Metamorphoses or Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, but
rather to use them as creative spurs. They became, in a sense, the stage
on which the forms drawn from my walks appeared as characters. The dialogue
between image and text or music stimulated me to manipulate and change the
emotive and physical state of the images.
In Paradise Lost, for example, I focused on the famous passage
that describes Sin, Death, and Satan facing one another at the gates
of Hell—the passage so beautifully illustrated by William Blake.
I started by drawing from the poem in abstract language using line
etching, aquatint, and mezzotint. As the characters, I used the forms
that I had discovered on my walks. For example, the print entitled
“Double
Formed Object” emerged from the passage in which Satan asks
Sin, “What art thou, thus double-formed?” For this work,
I placed two siren shapes, one on top of the other in a serpent-like
arrangement. To me, the passage is a clear expression of the western
idea of a divided human nature—part spiritual, part material.
Another series of images emerged from a similar working method, this
time with Ovid’s Metamorphoses as literary inspiration.
In my images drawn from walks in semi-rural Illinois, however, instead
of focusing closely on objects, I pulled back in space a little and
made the images somewhat more landscape in feeling. “Reservoir”
is an image based on the drainage ditches and water reservoirs used
by the corn farmers of the area. The print “Broken
Tower” resulted from taking images suggested on my walks
and merging them with the story of Daphne and Apollo. These prints
are sensual and vividly coloured, quite different from the darker,
more foreboding mood of the series based on Duke Bluebeard’s
Castle.
Art in turbulent times
What am I attempting to say in this multi-layered visual poetry? The
answer ties into the function of art in society. There is no question
that poetic language has a unique power to sway the course of human
affairs. A look at the historic role of music, art, and literature
in religion, politics, and society confirms it. Humanity has used
art in all its forms during the times of greatest social ferment and
during the darkest times of war. The twentieth century offers countless
examples of this, including the novels of Primo Levi, the etchings
of Otto Dix, and Iri and Toshi Maruki’s Hiroshima paintings.
Even Plato, who condemned the moral ambiguities and tragic ironies of poetry
as dangerous to tender minds, tacitly underscored the importance of poetry
in philosophical debates. More than two millennia later, Bertrand Russell
found that the most compelling rebuttal he could make to Nietzsche’s
Will to Power: “As against any unpleasant but internally self-consistent
ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts but in an appeal to the emotions.”
Poetry is the language in which we make this kind of appeal.
Since Russell wrote those words in 1945, several developments have combined
to complicate our lives still further. Advancing technologies have supplied
us with an endless stream of new ethical questions, from the relationship
between technology and the environment, to the implications of our new ability
to manipulate genetics. At the same time, many of our traditional sources
of authority—the political, social, and religious institutions that
used to guide public opinion—no longer have the standing they once
had. They no longer provide a clear ethical framework for addressing complex
issues.
Meanwhile, our own Canadian culture has continued to emphasize a belief
in the notion of individualism. While I was considering ideas for my planned
series of prints, Bergman’s thoughts on the creative drive and its
link to worship became an interesting point of departure. Written almost
half a century ago, his words resonate with issues that concern us today.
The rise of individualism in western culture has been, Bergman says, “the
highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.” For many,
the freedom associated with modern culture has come at a price: the creation
of a society that seems to slip all too easily into self-centered pursuits.
As a result, it is tempting to view the sacred and eternal values of the
past as a remedy for today’s malaise of disenchantment.
Art’s role in mass media
One aspect of individualism is consumerism. This is where visual language,
in the form of advertising, plays an important role. In the age of mass
media it is often the loudest voice, not the most relevant or insightful,
that makes itself heard. Visual noise penetrates into every corner of our
lives, using increasingly sophisticated methods to manipulate and tantalize.
Although advertising and the emphasis on material consumption have helped
to expand the economy, their success has created a spiritual and ethical
crisis by undermining our ability to make judgments on social or political
issues outside an economic framework.
Artists exploring poetic language, whether visual, literary, or musical,
are in a unique position to take part in contemporary ethical, political,
and social debates. They can do this by appealing to emotive aspects of
human experience. Poetic work can also provide a way for our culture to
maintain a healthier relationship with the forces of consumerism. That is
because poetry demands a greater level of interaction from the viewer, reader,
or listener than mass media usually requires. We discuss the intangible
aspects of existence—the subtler experiences that give rise to the
most difficult questions about the meaning of our lives—in poetic language.
By contrast, mass media strives for a simple message that avoids complexity
and nuance.
Although many artists today create work that is explicitly political, my
studio research is not intended to take part directly in ethical debates.
Instead, by making emotive poetic images, I hope to create an artistic experience
that will compel viewers to consider their own life experiences with greater
insight. The idea is not to direct a viewer to a particular ethical or political
position (although to a certain degree this cannot be avoided), but to create
an experience of contemplation and reflection.
The images in my work are jarring—intentionally so. Looking at them
the viewer feels that something doesn’t quite fit. They may, in fact,
feel disoriented. But once nudged out of the conventional way of seeing
things, the viewer can begin the process of reorientation to the world,
taking the long way home through the mysterious landscape of metaphor and
myth.
Contemporary culture offers many scientific, political, and economic
models for discussing reality. However, as necessary and beneficial
as these models are, I believe they fail to embrace the whole of human
experience. Contemplation and reflection, fostered in poetic language,
are central to the process of dealing with the world in all its complexity.
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