MG writes:
Hope you like the revamped design!
Pictorial or plastic 'art', whether representational or symbolic, has permeated cultures around the globe for at least 40,000 years. What prompted early humans to seek to make sense of their environment, or to reflect it, by daubing pictures or by making three dimensional carvings of those things which they saw around them? We can surely never know. At root, it may be merely that those few with the skill, as today, chose to make their mark not with stories, musical or otherwise, but with more tangible representations; ones less prone to the vagaries of language and its ability to accurately delimit and describe the world in which we live..
Until the dawn of the 'artist' during the renaissance and the autobiographical or biographical descriptions of their work, and the motivations for that work, we wander through a fog of interpretation in both assessing and analysing the 'art' of earlier times. What motivated the cave paintings of Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal man at Cantabria or Ardèche? Did they serve a religious purpose, animal worship; were they a means of communicating, or educating, what exactly was to be hunted; did the representation of a successful hunt lead to a belief of success in the minds of early man; were they meant to placate a divine 'God', or gods, with images of man's success and thus ensure that God, or the gods, would favour such an outcome; were they merely an early manifestation of "l'art pour l'art" (art for art's sake), 'I do this simply because I am able'?
What of the totemic representations of the North Americans, the Polynesians, the Meso-Americans and other so-called, 'primitive' culture around the globe; why did their representations follow highly stylised archetypes? Why did the Muslims, denied the opportunity by the Qu'ran of faithfully representing the world around them, turn to the magnificent geometry of the designs on the walls of the Alhambra and the 'Dome of the Rock'. Does the architecture of the early Egyptians, the Mayans, the builders of Anghar Wat merely represent another manifestation of the desire to represent a vision of the world but in monumental form? Denied their state of mind, their beliefs, their social community or adequate written records, we gaze through the same vague clouds of interpretation which obscure the designs of our earliest 'cultured' ancestors.
As a mediocre painter and 'drorer' of birds, and the occasional, Chris Foss-inspired spaceship, myself ('pac-a-mac Will', curse of the sand dunes*), I believe that I know now why I paint and, more importantly, wish to paint; self esteem, the knowledge that I can do something which is so often denied to others; the approval of others, that others may wish to expend the fruits of THEIR labour (money) on something that I have done; the visceral joy to be derived from simple praise, irrespective of who gives it; the enormous personal satisfaction which is derived from starting out with a 'blank canvas' and seeing it slowly metamorphose into something somehow beautiful, however banal or mediocre it might be.
However, such explanations do not truly explain my motivations; for how to explain why I took up the practise in the first place? What led me to want to represent my world, or at least a very small part of it, in pictorial form? What prompted me to spend hours, days, weeks, years in honing, and enhancing, whatever skill I might possess into a semblance of achievement? Where did the notion come from that I might have any skill worth the honing? Answers to these, more fundamental, questions are as shrouded in mystery as my 'primitive' ancestors.
Steeped in the traditions of a 'classical', 'grammar school' education, I have been exposed to the 'art' of countless generations of 'artists': the classical beauty of Phidias and Praxiteles (Roman 'imitators' are, to all and intents and purposes, unknown); the sublime icons of Andrei Rublev; the 'devotional' works of Bellini or Giotto and the high-Renaissance of Michelangelo and Raphael; the nature-inspired works of Constable and Turner, Corot and Courbet; the birth of "l'art pour art", Monet, Manet, Pissaro, Sisely and Duchamp's 'Objets trouvés' performing duty as midwives; the dreamscapes of Dali, De Chirico, Magritte; the abstractions of Rothko, Marc and de Kooning.
Whatever the musings of the artists themselves and the (often) pseudo-intellectual proclamations of the critics and art historians, I have always had a deep distrust of the reasons given for any one artist's, or group of artists', motivations for their work. In my experience, 'art' which has a 'purpose', communist or Nazi inspired art of the twentieth century spring readily to mind, is not art, merely painting or sculpture or architecture. This may, of course, stem ultimately from the Renaissance concept, most succinctly put by Albrecht Dürer, 'the artist is chosen by God to fulfil his commands', that the artist is privileged in a way denied to other mortals, 'truly chosen', and has a knowledge and a skill which is denied to others but substitute 'instinct' or 'unknowable reason' for 'God' and you perhaps come up with the real reason why human beings paint or sculpt or build; or compose music or write.
It is strange sometimes, the things that prompt you to think, be creative, to write or to paint. This little piece ultimately stems from a news report of a statue of the 'young Hitler praying', sculpted about ten years ago, which is currently displayed in what was the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland; that scene of so much hunger, deprivation, inhumanity and pointless loss of life which led inextricably to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.. The statue, first seen only from the rear down a long 'passageway', as in all of its previous installations, only has its significance, if any, revealed as you are finally able to see exactly what the statue is depicted as doing and the identity of the 'child'; needless to say, its position in the former Warsaw Ghetto has generated some controversy.
A statement about how evil can come from the most benign of sources; a memorial to the Jewish dead; a cheap exploitative trick and attempt to shock? I doubt that the artist, or the 'committee' that decided to place it there, can truly fathom why it is there and not in some other place at this time.
* 'Pac-a-mac-Will'** was an epithet given to the late, great, British cartoonist, Bill Tidy, by Mike Harding, whose book of 'poetry', 'Napoleon's retreat from Wigan'***, Tidy illustrated.
** 'Pac-a-mac', a brand of plastic raincoat, common in the nineteen-sixties, which could be folded down to a size convenient for your trouser pocket and which always had, to my nose at least, the scent of a baby's regurgitated milk. I have, since the book was published, a notion of Tidy as a rather 'down-on-his-luck' flasher!
***The opening stanzas of which were:
It was on the plains of Irlam, the year was 1815
Napoleon were sat in his long-johns, supping brasso**** with Josephine.
He'd chewed his nails to the very quick, so he chewed them down t' slow
He were chewin' very hard, when up the back yard, came a corporal, his nose all aglow.
"Eh been mon capitaine," he cried. "Sakrit Bloo, murd alors parlez voox."
And Boney spat out a big lump of nail and said: "Bugger me, what's to do?"
**** 'Brasso' is a brand of liquid metal polish.
Throughout the poem, Harding postulates inveterate nail biting, and Napoleon's embarrassment about the practise, for the common portrayal of Napoleon with his hand tucked inside his waistcoat
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