Lasting Longings for Harmony

 

It’s quite a paradox, especially for ponderous art lovers: in existential stress situations one apparently does not turn to those art works with the heaviest philosophical credentials or the highest emotional pitch.  One rather seeks refuge in pure aesthetic attention:  following a beautiful bold brush stroke (1) ,  listening intently to a subtly modulating melody (2), savouring the changing luminosities of the sky.

So, for instance, on that early morning end of January, after a sleepless night worrying about the diagnosis I’d just received (3), I could not eat, I could not read, nor could I find solace in Bellini’s heart-felt Gethsemane or in any other pathos-filled paintings.  But leafing distractedly through my art books,  my trembling finally did recede,  my anxiety did get quelled by the soothing sight of an elegant annunciation angel (4).

One can observe the same phenomenon, when, with age, a certain tiredness (5)  and the inescapable experience of the frailty of life (6)  seem to engender an increasing need for sheer beauty & harmony. A craving for disinterested aesthetics as a source of relief from the perils of the world, from one’s own anxieties (7), offering moments of reprieve from chaos and discord (8).

In previous eras, a sense for metaphysics and a belief in transcendence would have given legitimation to this longing for aesthetic bliss – it would have been seen as serious proof of the immanent congruence between cosmic harmony and the human soul (9).

By contrast, in our (post) modern times aesthetics and harmony have often been discredited as being amoral, apolitical. And since the romantic era, pure absolute musical harmonies have become suspect for their alleged lack of individual emotional expressiveness.  In our age, we rather prone political action and technological solutions to put things right, we rather recommend the sharing and expressing of raw emotions without overly formal complexities.

But ah, it is something (10)  to be able to focus only on perceiving, on making sense, on discerning harmonies and significations (11).  And it is something  to believe that this intense aesthetic attention can bring us closer to timeless sublime principles of beauty and signification, surpassing our own frail petty lives, adumbrating a possible human dignity shared across the ages.

 

 

Douze Petites Notes … (12)

(1)   Eg Tiepolo rather than Rembrandt,

(2)   Eg Mozart rather than Beethoven

(3)   A scary medical diagnosis, with uncertain outcome at the time. But effectively treated now, so I can look back with relief to the whole episode (and blog-readers need not to worry)

(4)   Giovanni Bellini,  St Vincent Ferrer Polyptych  - Detail of an annunciation angel

(5)   a growing realisation of how the world is, how life is – and our (or at least, my) utter inadequacy & powerlessness

(6)   as most of us must experience one day: the death of a parent, and prior to that - so shocking, so painful - their decay. 

(7)   A Nietzsche-quote, stumbled upon in an old notebook of mine, well worth to be reproduced again here digitally: « Ma mélancolie peut se reposer dans les cachettes et dans les abîmes de la perfection, c’est pour cela que j’ai besoin de musique »

(8)   This flight into the safe Haven of Harmony, goes back a long way:  “The Pythagoreans […]  cleansed their minds of the noises and perturbations to which they had been exposed during the day by certain odes and hymns, which produced tranquil sleep and few, but good dreams.” (p32 Jamie James: “The Music of the Spheres” see below)

(9)   As elaborated in this wonderful book by Jamie James: “The Music of the Spheres – Music, Science and the natural Order of the Universe” .

(10) “something”? something fervently to look forward to, each and every day: dwelling in beauty in the early still hours of the day, coming home to music after all the sound & fury of a worldly day

(11) Some key elements in the exercise of our aesthetic-cognitive faculties; as noted by Alpers & Baxandall in their study on Tiepolo (“Tiepolo et l’intelligence picturale”) : «  […] Produire du sens, […] Chercher de la lumière […] Le travail de déchiffrement présente un pur plaisir »

(12) Also the  title of the first section of Andre Manoukian’s effortlessly swinging & learned book on music (“Sur les routes de la musique”).  And so we make it to twelve silent notes – hurled  into the world wide web, perhaps to be read only by some voraciously learning chatbot.

an affinity with fragments

The Lili Dujourie exhibit was aptly called  "folds in time" : 

Because of the folds, obviously. Elegant draperies folding majestically, reminding one of the very venerable folds of art history.  (And there’s ironic playfulness, of course, in these contemporary folds,  but also genuinely solemn elegance.) 

Because of the evocation of time:  time – not entirely lost, but slowly unfolding in a sonnet, while a woman smokes in front of a window,  while smoke curls, while light changes ever so slowly in a dusty room. Or lazy summer time, when  the slow  summer light in an apartment at the seaside might recall winter. 

              

 (but then,  ah the poignancy of contemporary art – so ephemeral its contemporary means, so transient the modernity of its medium : a dated Kodak slide projector, trembling black & white videos from the 70s, collages of yellowing brittle paper scraps, and then that dusty fraying velvet – no match for those 15^th century panels where the deep glow of oil paint still rivets the eye)   

“an elegant celebration of the fragment”,  read another exhibit-comment, a phrase which promptly dazzled me.

Fragments! 

Yes, the melancholy remembrance embodied within fragments, such as paper scraps, ragged pictures:  like this picture of a luminous corner of a room, with a window suggestive of a sunny world outside (it could have been the window in the Arnolfini's room , but it isn’t) – or the  picture of a terrace with a balustrade, looking out over a sea (it could have been a Corot in Italy , or else a dusky Lorrain – but it isn’t)

 

Fragments, reflected in a broken mirror, or deceivingly sturdy like those elegant colourful fragments made of papier-mâché. 

Or frozen fragments of time, such as a book lying on a window sill, with a timeless seaview outside.  

But over to another fragment, in another museum – the eye, enchanted by intense red, zooms in on the folds of a man’s sleeve.  The eye is seduced too by the gilded clasp and by the illuminations of a book of prayers.  But it remains insolently indifferent to the face of this owner of sleeve and prayer book.  A wealthy donor, devoutly praying, buying salvation and posthumous 21^st Century admiration (albeit it here only for his sleeve and his book). 

The Summer Pursuit of Happiness

Nothing like a sunny Summer Saturday in Belgium to watch humankind’s stubborn pursuit of happiness (1) in action.  It had been raining for days with temperatures nearing winter levels, but now, 25 degrees were imminent.  So overnight the inundated staying-at-homers had switched from coats & pullovers to sprightly summer attire, and found themselves optimistically thronging the train platforms to board a train for a suitable summer day trip.(2)

Luckily, from my commuter days a long time ago, I still knew how to manoeuvre to get a seat in a chock-full train.  The elderly couple opposite me looked equally content to be seated – he was spelling out the sports-pages, regularly sharing comments with his wife who made approving noises without for a moment letting her intent gaze stray from the pictures in the Ikea-catalogue.

Jealously, I tried to emulate this woman's unperturbed concentration amidst the clamour of elated people on a summer train.  In order to contribute to the happiness of this summer day, I carried with me a small booklet:  “The Beautiful”  “Het Schone” - a stately Dutch translation of an un-apologetically convoluted analytical German  philosophical text (3) .   

Mustering all my (rather fading) powers of concentration, here's what I read about the work of art:

 “Wat betekent het dat hier niet iets werkelijks wordt vervaardigd, maar iets waarvan het ‘gebruik’ geen werkelijk gebruiken is, maar wat zich karakteristiek verwezenlijkt in het beschouwend verwijlen bij de schijn? “ (4)

“Het beschouwend verwijlen bij de schijn”!


"The Contemplative Dwelling on a Mere Image"!

What a lovely phrase to dwell on indeed. And the perfect permit for my contemplated day of happiness! 

While everybody was storming beaches, forests, amusement parks and zoological gardens, I was going to stroll through the deserted summer streets of Antwerp; I was going to do dwell in (for sure) deserted art galleries; losing myself and finding the world in images. (5)

And indeed it was happiness: to walk aimlessly through a city that had slowed down, with people lazing about on terraces, sharing an illusion of carelessness - with summer stillness reigning outside the shopping streets and with the elation of hearing cyclists whizzing by rather than cars roaring by.

 And happiness it was indeed : to wander about the rooms of a small but carefully arranged exhibition with few acclaimed masterpieces, but with many more petits maîtres to discover or to meet again (6). Ah, so that is how Fantin-Latour (with his so very still paintings - often depicting women painting or reading) looks like: an intense yet introverted presence.
Happiness it was, to look at the photos in the exhibition (7) which boldly claims to want to instil in its visitors the same disinterested elation as  experienced by a walker “bevrijd van de druk van werk, zorg en haast”. (8)    

And then, of course, this being Antwerp – there is always the river.  The grand river Scheldt – bringing the ways and the smells of the great outdoors.  A huge Russian ship lay moored to the quay, a  container boat chugged along, a speedboat speeded up. There was  the sun, the water, the wind – fragments of music drifting from the other side of the river (ah the wistfulness of Arab music), mingling with the screeches of seagulls, with the deep bass of a ship’s horn, and, faintly, coming from the city, the sound of a church’s carillon joining in.

Happy Notes

1.   Happiness depends on shutting off empathy, I recently read. Or just shutting off global newsfeeds.
2. It would be really bad taste to compare the storming of trains by frenzied day-trippers to the storming of the Calais channel tunnel by frantic migrants. 
3.  “Het Schone” –  Hans-Georg Gadamer
4.  "What does it mean that not something real is manufactured here , but something of which the “use” is not an actual use, but the contemplative dwelling on a mere appearance/image” [translation suggestions are very welcome] 
5.  " Dankzij het schone lukt het op den duur zich de ware wereld opnieuw te herinneren. Dat is de weg van de filosofie."  “Thanks to the Beautiful, one can in due course again remember the real world. That is the way of philosophy” 
6. Exhibition TourDeFrance    (Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts Extra Muros)
7.    Fotomuseum Antwerpen  Exhibition Fotomuseum Anwerpen ;  
8.  "freed from the pressure of work, care and haste”