Archive for January 2011

Since I was a child I’ve been fond of Jesus’ parable of feeding the spirit: that man cannot live by bread alone, but also requires the word of God. I think the reasons I’ve always appreciated this were because it was well explained to me by a teacher who had formerly been a priest, and it made sense to me in a manner that has remained true to my life as I’ve lived subsequently. That the spirit, or mind requires feeding seems self-evident.

This idea has been relevant to my interest in the arts, and I’ve also noticed over the years a personal preference for food metaphors. Food, after all, is a substance we ingest, we bring into ourselves, where it is transformed into something disgusting that comes out the other end of our bodies. This transformation is called digestion, and we understand through this process we remain alive through the derivation of nutrients, in effect becoming “what we eat”.

This physical digestion can mirror of that of the mind – we continually ingest, take into ourselves, ideas that enter our mind through conversation, reading, and general interaction. Our minds continually process the languages of our environment, be they symbolic, gestural, or spoken, and ‘digest’ them into some part of our worldview and subsequently some part of our sense of self.

Almost everyone alive is capable of feeding themselves in some way, even if they are not actually able to cook a meal. In that sense, we are all literate to the symbology of the gastronomic spectrum, all the way from food freshly killed in a hunt to the four-course meal of a fine restaurant. Along the spectrum are canned food we merely reheat, sandwiches, and fast food burgers. So-called special occasions require meals at the higher end of the spectrum, whereas quotidian meals after a long day can occur on the lower end.

Carr: Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that is absurdly overrated by everyone else.
Tzara: Because man cannot live by bread alone.
Carr: Yes, he can. It’s art he can’t live on.
-Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)

If the spectrum of food goes from the self-acquired meal to restaurants, on what spectrum does art lie? Why in effect, is my question being asked? Because Art is a strange and forever undefinable thing, precisely because it is a food of the mind, an intangible and a philosophically confused concept. As Wittgenstein sought to make clear a hundred years ago, some philosophical problems are merely problems of semantics, entanglements of concepts without a clear language. Art is such a thing: forever subject to pithy definitions which merely become mottoes for one of its clique camps. For the conceptualists art is something different than for the painters, and thus like God it is subject to much under its name, in a variety of churches under many flags.

Why is it we consider it normal for children to draw? And why do we find it usual that adults mostly do not draw? For that matter, why do we find it normal for children to play, and find it usual that most adults do not play, but those who do are honoured as actors? In keeping with my food theme, children do not eventually grow out of making food for themselves. Sure, there are people who ‘can’t cook’ but presumably this means they are reliant on heating up frozen dinners. Food making remains a part of our lives throughout, while art making is allowed to disappear.

But does it? If you can’t cook, that can be done for you – simply go to a restaurant or a soup kitchen. But art? One goes to a gallery, and hence a gallery is analogous to a restaurant. Or, like the ever-present unquestioned nature of food culture, we could say the dominance of created visual products we call tv shows and/or movies (even video games) are somehow reflective for our appetite for imagined products.

Galleries do not seem to think of themselves as restaurants for the spirit, offering menus of imagined products. However, if pressed, I think they would see the similarity between the haute cuisine chef and the international exhibiting artist.

Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.

None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.” – Greta Christina, Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies| (My source)

Creating anything is a human thing to do: we take basic foods and we make meals, and we take sticks and make symbols. Everyday we manipulate a set number of symbols in composing text messages and emails, and to do so is to be part of our human community. A teenager unable to text (i.e. write) in today’s world would be one who is cut off from their community, and thus damaged. Being human is to be both a meal maker and an art maker, but importantly, I am using the word “art” in a generic creative sense of the word to encompass everything learned and extensive of the imagination, such as writing quotidian messages, or the dominating created world of pop culture.

Along the food-spectrum analogy, most everyone is capable of making a sandwich. Culturally, the creativity of everyday is not very advanced. Once we get beyond sandwich making, the understanding of these cultural worlds diverges: the fine restaurant has a place in our lives that a fine gallery doesn’t.

“Food” as a word is easily understood as something encompassing a long spectrum of things that are ultimately put in the mouth. But Art, through its semantic confusion, is not easily reduced as something “put somewhere”. It does not have an obvious end point, but is to be described as “experienced” or “felt” or “seen”.

What interests me is why the analogy of restaurants so easily breaks down, and why Art remains perceived as something privileged and removed, whereas restaurants and food culture are so thoroughly embedded. Why do galleries exist dependent on grants, whereas the idea of supporting a restaurant by grants is absurd? The easy answer is the physical need for food makes food culture obvious, but we do not speak of art as psychological need which would make its cultural contribution obvious as well. Also, the another obvious answer is that pop culture provides the feeding of the psychological/imaginative appetite so thoroughly that only those with “finer palates” seek out the higher forms in prestigious galleries. This is analogous to the “culture war” within Food: buying organic and local vs. fast & processed.

In the Art culture, we have fast and highly processed food as well. And just as a diet consisting entirely of highly processed food is extremely unhealthy, it is probably equally mentally unhealthy to be a digester of corporatized pop culture exclusively. Unfortunately, like a Big Mac filming a Whopper, reality television has begun to exploit the end products of generations of television: these terrible, stupid people who are not (in the old sense of the term) “cultured” precisely because they are instead “pop cultured” and thus comfortable with confessing to video diaries and being idiots on camera.

“I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. – David Brooks, Social Animal

To be alive is to participate in a food stream, and to be human is to participate in a knowledge stream. A human beings, we participate in a collectively created culture which subdivides into subcultures, two of which are food-related and art-related. Food culture is so healthy in its level of participation that people need to be careful around it, lest they become obese, while art culture is a muddied, confused and sclerotic thing, always being defended and dependent on social largess.

Clearly, the place of Art in our lives requires a rehabilitation—one which recognizes its place in a healthy and full life. Just as a diet consisting entirely of fast food is dangerous, so too is a mental life informed solely by corporatized products. However, this is not to be read as a defence of government grants, but simply to remind you that restaurants do not require support. If we include film, we may already have a healthy art-culture. If we consider art to be something solely related to galleries, we may ask why haute cuisine is not dependent on grants, or why the art experience away from commercialization insists on being free, when it is free food that one really requires.