Artists, Save Yourselves!

“At this moment in time, does my art matter? Does yours?”

by

Recent world events have left us — me, anyway — reeling, angry, confused. Though there is a glut of self-helpy, life-coachy accounts for artists, and though I read daily affirmations like “every creative act is one of resistance/rebellion/revolution” or “artists are the conscience of society,” I find myself battling cynicism. Insta-activism, and especially Insta-artivism, can be so facile. 

I could liken myself to the “diffuse public” that critic Ben Davis described in a recent article, a public that “squints at the wall label, and wonders, “Wait… how is this inscrutable object supposed to bring about the revolution, again?” But the better me, the one that finds cynicism too easy, wants to have an answer to that question. 

At this moment in time, does my art matter? Does yours? Can it do anything to lift this psychic toll? Can it, in fact, be revolutionary? 

I’ve come to believe that it can’t. 

But maybe that’s because somewhere along the way I inherited a definition of art that wasn’t big or deep enough. Maybe I need to renovate my thinking.

Last summer, my daughters and I drove from our home in the Northwest Territories to southern Alberta. We stayed in roadside hotels along the way, the kind that smell like stale cigarette smoke and carpet deodorizer. But after a long day’s drive, it felt great to flip on the TV and watch the Calgary Stampede. 

One evening, my gaze wandered from the rollicking rodeo action to the window. By comparison, the heavy curtains seemed so still. They weren’t closed all the way, and a vertical bar of evening sunlight shone through the center. A jolt of recognition moved through me. It was a blazing portal, a narrow doorway, a way out of here! It was a Barnett Newman, no doubt about it. Or at least it embodied the spirit of a Newman. 

In the 1960s, the New York School painter was known for his massive, minimal canvases, and for what he called “zips” — brightly painted verticals that were meant to provide glimpses into truer cosmic realities. 

Newman didn’t view his paintings as mere metaphors. Zips were not like portals. They were portals. He didn’t expect viewers to physically step through them, but to do so in their minds.

When I first learned about Newman, I thought he was full of religious hokum. But I was just a kid, really, 20 years old or so. I didn’t have the spiritual hunger or the depth of malaise I do now.  

What I now find compelling about Newman was his belief that art must have an intensity that matches the intensity of the human condition itself, and his insistence that to survive the horrors of the world (in his day, the Second World War and the A-bomb), we must look up and out, away from the self. We need an experience of enormity, he said, “which might lift modern humanity out of its torpor.” 

On that Alberta road trip, I didn’t need a portal or a lift. I’m most at home on the highway and quite content in budget hotels. 

But in later weeks, I really did. When I brought to mind that Newmanesque window of the Super 8 hotel in High Level, Alberta, it worked. I stepped into that bar of light and felt immediate reprieve. The experience made me want to lean into Newman’s hokum. It reminded me of all the quasi-spiritual experiences I’ve ever had with art, and how they often led me to scratch my head. Whatever was going on in those pieces of art, and in that Super 8 Newman, I needed more of it. 

We are four months into a second Trump administration, and 20 months into the war in Gaza. It has been 18 years since smart phones began fusing to our fingertips, and 20 years since social media began cleaving us from the natural world and from the innocence of our own unnoticed, unbranded and unperformed lives. 

But in renovating my thinking, I’ve learned that we’re also part of a much older story, one that has left us ill-prepared to deal with all this dizzying nowness, and one that has made it hard for head-scratchers like me to lean into spiritualities, even arty ones — Newman’s hokum, Wassily Kandinsky’s theosophy, Hilma af Klint’s visions, Agnes Martin’s “secret religion,” and so on. I believe, but I don’t believe.

In a nutshell, that much older story is this: Once upon a time, animals talked. Trees did, too. Love potions, curses, magic spells, spirits in the water, spirits in the rocks, God, gods, devils, angels — these were as real to the medieval mind as gravity itself. 

But then René Descartes came along, who believed that physical matter did not possess a spirit or a soul in the way that humans do. His Cartesian dualism was foundational to modern philosophy. As Charles Taylor describes it, after Descartes, “the whole fabric of the material world was seen as inert, not expressive of anything, nor the site of human meanings of any kind … The world is no longer the site of spiritual and magic forces but comes to be understood in terms of laws defined purely by efficient causation.” 

In sum, the story of disenchantment. 

The above quote is from Taylor’s latest book. Entitled Cosmic Connections, it explores Romantic poetry. Taylor’s thesis is that we —today — can learn something from how that era’s poets positioned themselves against the violence, technological advancements, and widespread disillusionment of their age. They did so by rejecting the sharp separation of spirit and matter, by returning to irrational, whole-fabric beauty. 

If we can manage to even partially heal our own Cartesian rift, or to make that separating line a little fuzzy, we might again experience the world as an enchanted place. 

My additional thought is that we might even begin to understand that the best and most compelling art is indeed so moving and compelling because it is imbued with something beyond its material properties. Taylor often quotes Novalis, who wrote “humans, animals, plants, stones and stars, flames, tones, colours…act and speak as one species.”

If you are like me, you find this idea of spiritually imbued matter to be a bit of a stretch, but also strangely affirming of suspicions you’ve already harboured. Hasn’t the creative process always been described in spiritual ways? Why would the product of such a process be dead or inert? 

Stephen King said, “All the arts depend on telepathy to some degree.” He wasn’t being glib. 

Philip Guston said that when he was painting, “forms and spaces move towards their destined positions.” He also said, “I never feel myself to be more than a trusting accomplice.” 

I have stood in front of many artworks, unable to make sense of what I was experiencing. Some kind of revelation occurs. I don’t always have the words for what is revealed, but it’s like finding a piece to a 100,000-piece puzzle I’m blindly, intuitively, fitting together, one that doesn’t have the picture on the box. Some fragment of a mysterious whole gets pressed into place. It’s an experience that makes me want to — again — lean out of my intellectual conservatism and into my wilder, freer side. 

I was at the Art Gallery of Ontario recently, where they have a few Gustons. Romantic poets developed their own distinct images and signs for the spiritual, the invisible. So did Guston. He had pink. He had rust. He had blood red. He had eyeballs, lightbulbs, old shoes, bent nails, bricks, stitches, patches, and of course — cigarettes. The metaphysical planes of his paintings are so thickly congealed that everything, all his colours and objects, feel so positively wedged inside them. What Guston reveals: We are suspended in Divine jelly.

The other month, when scrolling on Instagram, I stopped on an image of a flaming snowball. Made of carved wood (maple) and acrylic paint, Brent Owens' sculpture is so gloriously rustic, so hot and cold. In the piece, ice and fire are one roughly hewn surface. What Owens reveals: Two modes of being can be paradoxically fused. The impossible is possible! We must believe in astonishing things! The piece did not feel like a non-living object. It felt like a living symbol. 

Here’s Annie Dillard: “Symbols and art objects do not stand for things; they manifest them, in their fullness. You begin by using symbols, and end by contemplating them.”

I realize I sound like a Catholic now, which is pretty strange for someone who is Protestant. But even as a kid, I remember being jealous of what Catholics believed. Transubstantiation is their belief that in The Eucharist, the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ. If I could believe that, in a literal living symbol, instead of believing the elements to be merely representative, the Eucharist would feel much more potent. If I could believe that art objects are imbued with spirit, like they believe painted icons to be, I’d approach them differently, too. 

For some Catholics, the world was never fully disenchanted. Despite Descartes, the Enlightenment, and the Reformation, many still believe in the sacred waters of holy wells, in the healing powers of relics, statues, and in the teeth, bones, clothing and hair of centuries-dead apostles. 

In an essay on the Catholic thought that informs the work of artist Kiki Smith, Marina Warner quotes her as saying “Catholicism is always involved in physical manifestations of spiritual conditions… In that way it is compatible with art.” 

So, then, are many non-Western spiritualities. 

Like any good thought-renovator, I always look for pushback. In the book The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm argues that a widespread loss of belief in spirit and magic has actually not occurred in the Western world. Some form of belief in the supernatural, he says, survives across religious, educational, and age demographics. Rather, he suggests, the story of disenchantment could be better understood as “magic's sequesterization, rationalization, and professionalization, not its disappearance.” 

His suggestion reminds me of my art school experience. In the early 2000s, I was taught to look at art via Marxist and feminist lenses. The autobiographical and psychoanalytic approaches to art were considered passé (which strikes me as funny considering today’s obsession with therapy-speak and identity). The most metaphysical or magical we ever got in school was a smattering of clipped spiritual jargon in the units on semiotics and post-structuralism. 

No wonder I was so drawn to art made by outsiders with intensely idiosyncratic visions and epiphanies, and to found-object art — stuff you could drag out of a dumpster that had a weird vitality to it. It let the steam off, academically. 

I still have an affinity for haunted garbage today.

In Yellowknife, where I live, there is a certain fox. He’s small, about half the size he should be, and so gaunt that his ears look giant. His fur is disturbingly wispy. His eyes change colour often, like two mood rings. Locals have dubbed him Anubis, due to his resemblance to the Egyptian god of the dead. Last March, he appeared in my yard. “Hi Anubis,” I said, quietly. 

Then I stepped outside the bounds of metaphor. This fox was not like Anubis. This fox was Anubis. He was protector of graves, dispeller of chaos. He appeared, as legend states, to guide me through the darkness of my own psyche, to ensure I wouldn’t get lost or be without companionship. For the briefest of moments, the sense of his eerie beauty intensified. The snow fell. My brain waves rippled. He smirked, knowingly. And then my rational mind took over. What nonsense, it said. 

For about five seconds though, I did not couch my seeking in irony. For about five seconds, I felt wonder. The world was filled with some kind of omnipotence, with an actual motion and a spirit — as Wordsworth described it — moving through all things. What a huge relief, to feel something outside my own ego and vanity and intellect, something outside all my limits. 

I have felt it before. Once, in a paleolithic cave in Spain. Often, in the wilderness that begins at the end of my street. Now and then, in a church. On rare occasions, in galleries, when standing before a created object that is so spirit-soaked my knees go a little wobbly.

What a Haley Craw painting reveals: It all breathes, it all roars —the green hares, the red cats, the very air they bound through.

What a Sean Jena Taal drawing reveals: In the murkiest murk, in the deepest, darkest recesses of time and mind, a strange light is growing.

I wrote about wonder in my last essay, too. But I don’t think the relief of wonder is possible without first feeling bogged down by the pressures of identity and weight of selfhood. 

In the book Elite Capture, for example, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò showed how identity politics was stolen from its original intentions to became something self-sabotaging (italics mine). We are suffocating too, under the weight of our own self-diagnosed pathologies. 

In her research, Anna Kornbluh found that novels written in English are almost always written in the first person now, a mode of self. It’s a phenomenon she calls “a radical event in the history of literature.” We’ve lost speculative omniscience, she says, we’ve lost the third person, that magical mode. All this to say, maybe being so mired in maladaptive self-focus makes us well poised to look up and out, to be lifted out of torpor. 

Sometimes, as a thought experiment, I attempt to rank the arts, positioning them in terms of their relative impact. Comedy is the highest art. But sometimes I put film first, because film is more or less a pastiche of all the arts. Then I move literature into first place instead, because I suspect we’ve been formed more deeply by novels than by films. Other times I’m convinced music is the clear winner. But the visual arts are never first. Nor is poetry. Despite my ardent love for both, they are positioned near the bottom, with contemporary dance and performance art coming in last. But art and poetry, writes Taylor, as “subtler languages,” should be celebrated all the more for being so. They may be enigmatic or indefinite, weaker than the force of dogma, debate, and argument, but it is precisely this kind of weakness that can lead to the most intimate epiphanies. 

Rather than lamenting the fact that art doesn’t feel strong enough to directly change anything, that it is not, in fact, of much practical use to the public at all, I can celebrate the fact that its relative weakness can, in incremental, gradual, and very personal ways, save me, save you. It can, at least, save the artists. I mean, is there anything better than watching those forms move towards their destined positions? This is success, in life. Not dopamine hits from follows and likes, not grants, not sales, but this very private ecstasy, this communing with the world.

Or, maybe I’m entirely wrong, and the power of visual art is not subtle at all. Maybe I just can’t see it, yet. 

Reflecting on his art before he died, Barnett Newman said, “one of its implications is its assertion of freedom…if [it were read] properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.” 

That is far too bold a claim, I think. Grandiose. Delusional. 

Or is it? ■

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