WRITING
WHY ART?
Paul Klee in his pedagogic writings speaks of chaos as ‘. . . an unordered state of things, a confusion. “Cosmogenetically” speaking, it is a mythical primordial state of the world, from which the ordered cosmos develops, step by step or suddenly, on its own or at the hand of a creator.’
Klee, as a teacher, is analytical, considered and apparently entirely unspontaneous. Reading his words today I find them excessively introspective and it is tempting, after reading any of his theses, to respond with ‘Get a life, Mr. Klee’. That said, however, his writings should be required reading today in art schools (or universities as they are now, quite wrongly, known). For even after three quarters of a century they remain landmarks in the theory of form production and are, from an art-historical perspective, as pertinent as Reynolds’ Discourses on Art from about 130 years earlier. They should be read today if only so that their pronouncements can be challenged. One of Klee’s premises (and he is by no means alone in this) is that one of the functions of art is to create order out of chaos. Nature, the universe, is in chaos, he says, and always has been. This, though is no longer thought necessarily to be the case. Current theories would suggest that nature is a well-ordered structure of dependencies, inter-dependencies, symbioses, saprophytic and parasitic tendencies and so on, and that even the chaos thrown into these structures by the dominant species can itself be argued as a sort of order.
So what is the artist to do about all this? Well, not to go along Mr. Klee’s path for a start. On one level, a level with persuasive favourable arguments, it is his role to comment upon and to reflect politically, environmentally, socially, on the state of the world in which he lives. On another level he has a responsibility to provide a sort of intellectual escape route from all this. However, for myself, I am not sure I am particularly concerned with either of these paths. What I find more seductive is the idea of creating chaos out of order – in other words to work in a direction exactly opposed to that of Paul Klee. But I would modify his terms: not chaos but uncertainty, not order but knowledge. I am led towards this path because I can’t help thinking that today we know too much. I am interested in mystery and there is not enough of that. It is a function of mine, I think, to create mystery, not to be a dealer in facts, but to ask questions and give no answers. We need mystery and ideas, not facts and knowledge. All this is a reaction, I suppose, to our cleverness. We have become a supremely clever species but as our cleverness has increased so has our stupidity, while wisdom and intuition, both of which are more precious, have declined tragically. One of the results of this increased cleverness and reduced wisdom is our unwillingness (inability even) to reason, and think properly and creatively for ourselves. The television advertisement tells us that some stuff in a bottle kills 99.9 per cent of household bacteria. Scientific tests (clever) have proved it. But hang on a bit. Don’t we need the presence of those bacteria to maintain our immune systems (wisdom) and to keep us healthy? Our lives have become, without most of us realising it, the gullible victims of scientific studies, surveys and sham pronouncements which all sound clever and are conveniently lost among the genuinely clever and, admittedly, useful developments.
All this has, surprisingly perhaps, quite a lot to with art. At least these are the sorts of ideas I tend to think about when I am in the studio. It is because we are surrounded by facts and knowledge and clever things that it falls to art, in my view, to talk of ideas about mystery and uncertainty and to try to awaken people to the possibility that the unknown is much more rewarding, seductive and tantalising than the known fact. The unknown can take you on an endless journey. The fact is the set of buffers at the end of the railway line.
People often tell me, when talking of technique and about the way I draw, that I am so clever. I cannot take this as the compliment that it is meant to be – I don’t want to be seen as clever and, as like or not I’ll reply with something along the lines of ‘Perhaps, but being a fine calligrapher does not make you into a poet.’ I prefer to be asked questions like ‘Why is that square red?’ or ‘What is that set of lines for?’ Such questions begin to make me feel that I may have succeeded and I will invariably answer ‘You tell me’. I am not trying to be obtuse or difficult – it is the responsibility of the viewers to construct their own personal responses to the questions, to the mysteries I have submitted.
Through my art I try (and Paul Klee would disagree with this) to take the known and re-describe it as the unknown, to take knowledge and re-describe it as uncertainty. If I cannot do this, and it is by no means easy, I can usually, at least, take the known and try to re-define it.
Paul Klee in his pedagogic writings speaks of chaos as ‘. . . an unordered state of things, a confusion. “Cosmogenetically” speaking, it is a mythical primordial state of the world, from which the ordered cosmos develops, step by step or suddenly, on its own or at the hand of a creator.’
Klee, as a teacher, is analytical, considered and apparently entirely unspontaneous. Reading his words today I find them excessively introspective and it is tempting, after reading any of his theses, to respond with ‘Get a life, Mr. Klee’. That said, however, his writings should be required reading today in art schools (or universities as they are now, quite wrongly, known). For even after three quarters of a century they remain landmarks in the theory of form production and are, from an art-historical perspective, as pertinent as Reynolds’ Discourses on Art from about 130 years earlier. They should be read today if only so that their pronouncements can be challenged. One of Klee’s premises (and he is by no means alone in this) is that one of the functions of art is to create order out of chaos. Nature, the universe, is in chaos, he says, and always has been. This, though is no longer thought necessarily to be the case. Current theories would suggest that nature is a well-ordered structure of dependencies, inter-dependencies, symbioses, saprophytic and parasitic tendencies and so on, and that even the chaos thrown into these structures by the dominant species can itself be argued as a sort of order.
So what is the artist to do about all this? Well, not to go along Mr. Klee’s path for a start. On one level, a level with persuasive favourable arguments, it is his role to comment upon and to reflect politically, environmentally, socially, on the state of the world in which he lives. On another level he has a responsibility to provide a sort of intellectual escape route from all this. However, for myself, I am not sure I am particularly concerned with either of these paths. What I find more seductive is the idea of creating chaos out of order – in other words to work in a direction exactly opposed to that of Paul Klee. But I would modify his terms: not chaos but uncertainty, not order but knowledge. I am led towards this path because I can’t help thinking that today we know too much. I am interested in mystery and there is not enough of that. It is a function of mine, I think, to create mystery, not to be a dealer in facts, but to ask questions and give no answers. We need mystery and ideas, not facts and knowledge. All this is a reaction, I suppose, to our cleverness. We have become a supremely clever species but as our cleverness has increased so has our stupidity, while wisdom and intuition, both of which are more precious, have declined tragically. One of the results of this increased cleverness and reduced wisdom is our unwillingness (inability even) to reason, and think properly and creatively for ourselves. The television advertisement tells us that some stuff in a bottle kills 99.9 per cent of household bacteria. Scientific tests (clever) have proved it. But hang on a bit. Don’t we need the presence of those bacteria to maintain our immune systems (wisdom) and to keep us healthy? Our lives have become, without most of us realising it, the gullible victims of scientific studies, surveys and sham pronouncements which all sound clever and are conveniently lost among the genuinely clever and, admittedly, useful developments.
All this has, surprisingly perhaps, quite a lot to with art. At least these are the sorts of ideas I tend to think about when I am in the studio. It is because we are surrounded by facts and knowledge and clever things that it falls to art, in my view, to talk of ideas about mystery and uncertainty and to try to awaken people to the possibility that the unknown is much more rewarding, seductive and tantalising than the known fact. The unknown can take you on an endless journey. The fact is the set of buffers at the end of the railway line.
People often tell me, when talking of technique and about the way I draw, that I am so clever. I cannot take this as the compliment that it is meant to be – I don’t want to be seen as clever and, as like or not I’ll reply with something along the lines of ‘Perhaps, but being a fine calligrapher does not make you into a poet.’ I prefer to be asked questions like ‘Why is that square red?’ or ‘What is that set of lines for?’ Such questions begin to make me feel that I may have succeeded and I will invariably answer ‘You tell me’. I am not trying to be obtuse or difficult – it is the responsibility of the viewers to construct their own personal responses to the questions, to the mysteries I have submitted.
Through my art I try (and Paul Klee would disagree with this) to take the known and re-describe it as the unknown, to take knowledge and re-describe it as uncertainty. If I cannot do this, and it is by no means easy, I can usually, at least, take the known and try to re-define it.
