When you are interested in the art of painting and like to visit museums, you may become aware that also in the arts there is a search for meaning for that which lies beyond the visible world. The impressionists wanted to leave the naturalists behind and express the feelings which the outer world evoked in them. Then appeared the expressionists. They wanted to go much further and make the soul and spirit visible. A good example of this vehement search for meaning behind the visible world, a search for the spirit of the colors was Alexej Jewlensky. His search for transformation evoked in him in 1921 an endless series of pictures which all had just one subject: the face of man. Again and again he painted human faces until the pictures transformed into the face of Jesus and ended in colors on golden ground with titles like “meditation” …These pictures made a strong impression on me…I wondered if Alexej Jewlensky had by deep meditation come to see the face of God behind the human face?!
I remembered once having heard that the word for God derived from a Sanskrit word which was really the word for “man”. The word God was the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not understand. The LOST WORD. The ancients had praised God as a symbol of our limitless human potential. But that ancient symbol had been lost over time. The lost word, lost symbol, is enshrined in the word hu-man (God-Man)
Remember the inscription at the entrance to the apollo temple in Delphi: It said: ” Know thy Self! This inscription is well known. Not well known is the latter part of the inscription at the other end of the temple. It said: “And you will know God and the Universe!”
Earlier I mentioned the thoughts that kept coming and questioning me after I had seen the exhibition of Jewlensky’s series of paintings named “Faces” and “Meditation”. It appeared to me that Jewlensky’s concentration on the human face tried to give a voice to the intimation of our own worth. As the philosopher Kant had expressed it, the human being as a creature conscious of the vastness of nature and also able to affirm himself against it. In the very awe that we experience before the power of the natural world, we sense our own ability as free beings to measure up to it, and to reaffirm our obedience to the moral law, which no natural force could ever vanquish or set aside.
The truth of the human condition. What does it mean to be human – what lies behind the human face?
Immanuel Kant had these lines engraved on his gravestone: “Two things fill my mind with ever new and growing admiration and awe, the longer and more frequent I reflect on them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law inside me”
It seems as if the human search for meaning is proximate to the religious frame of mind, arising from a humble sense of living with imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest unity with the transcendental.
Now what is happening today in art? What are the important characteristics of the postmodern art?
I see addiction to effects. What does that mean? The psychologist would say, it is a function of easy rewards. The addict is someone who presses again and again on the pleasure switch, whose pleasures by-pass thought and judgement to settle in the realm of need. Art is at war with effect addiction, in which the need for stimulation and routinized excitement has blocked the path to that which longs in the human soul for beauty, for meaning, for values and happiness.
And art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental.
In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of man.
Richard Wagner expressed it with the following words: “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.”
Even for the unbeliever, therefore the presence of the sacred is one of the highest gifts of art.
Conversely the degradation of art has never been more apparent. And the most widespread form of degradation – more widespread even than the deliberate desecration of humanity through pornography and violence – is kitsch, that peculiar disease which we can easily recognize but never precisely define, and whose German name links it to the mass movements and crowd sentiments of the 20th century. Meanwhile there has been a steady advance of kitsch. Far more important, given its influence on the popular human psyche, has been the “kitschification” of religion.
Kitsch is a mould that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in. It is not only Christian civilization that has undergone “kitschification” in recent times.
Equally evident has been the “kitschification” in Hinduism, Buddhismus etc. Mass produced Ghaneshas, Buddhas and other religious idols have knocked the subtle temple sculptures from its aesthetic pedestal.
Kitsch is not, in the first instance an artistic phenomenon, but a disease of faith.
The “Disneyfication” of art is one aspect of the “Disneyfication” of faith – and both involve a profanation of our highest values. The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes.
The touchstone of true art is: Does what is named “art” appeal to our higher nature or not?
For us who live in the aftermath of the kitsch epidemic and desecration of all spiritual ideals art has acquired a new importance.
Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration. A world where the human dignity is no longer clearly perceived.
Therefore art matters in all its forms.
It is a paradox, however that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to nihilism. I repeat: the characteristic of true art is beauty. Its principal sign is its appeal to our higher nature.
I spoke of kitsch and desecration as a deprivation of feeling. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by that what they both deny, which is sacrifice.
All the beauties of operas till example arise from the constant presentation of this proof. Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of art.
The connection between sacrifice and love is also presented in myths, rituals and religions and – it is also the recurring theme of art,
Beauty, love and virtue is vanishing from our world because we live as though nothing matters. And we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it. The false art of our time, mired in kitsch and desecration is one sign of it.
The symbol of the Christian cross symbolizes the way to a higher state of consciousness, also named Christ Consciousness. It is through sacrifice, transmutation of the earth-bound EGO into the higher SELF, which means new spiritual Life in the pure Light, understanding, of true unconditional Love.
When we hear the word “sacrifice” we think of giving up something in the sense of losing something. We should think of sacrifice as a transmutation of physical and psychic matter into something more refined and spiritualized. The latin word means “sacer facere”, to make holy, to make sacred (sacrifice).
When you live in a true state of self-forgetfulness, you are filled with an overflow of an energy; it is also the source of all artistic creativity and geniality. The moment of magic. When it seems as if art – music, poetry – is happening to the artist or being “received” as Mozart has described his geniality.
But to return to our theme which is a reflection on art or artistic expression of what we name “beautiful” in an universal sense.
I would summarize my reflection that it is not in the “things depicted” when we determine art as “beautiful”. It is the experience of art and about the pursuit of meaning that arises in us from that experience. It doesn’t mean, however that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and there is no objective property we could recognize and about whose nature and value we could agree.
The experience of beauty is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in the object, to make critical comparisons and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives.
But it would be wrong to see beauty as a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, this would misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives.
The pleasure we experience in the recognition of art as meaningful and beautiful is the fact that the artist was able, to give form or articulate our deepest feelings, values and high ideals.
Today aesthetic judgement seems to be experienced as an affliction, an intolerable burden, a world of high aspiration and ideals that is in sharp conflict with the tawdriness of our daily lives. The desire to desecrate is a desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself so that it no longer seem like a judgment of us. You see this happening in all our western civilization today. The delight in bad language, words, violence in motion pictures, sexuality, seems to serve as a refuge from the burden of culture which represents an investment over many generations, and imposes enormous and by no means clearly articulated obligations – in particular, the obligation to be over and better than we are, in all the ways ours might appreciate. Manners, morals, religious precepts and ordinary decencies train us in this, and they form the central core of any culture.
The search for the “face of God” is man`s search for his own meaning and what it means to be “hu-man”.
In the “Vedas” there is a saying: “Harken men, my brother. Man is the truth above all truths, there is nothing above that. There is not a power in the world greater than a fulfilled noble human being”.