Last nite I had the pleasure of watching 'Synecdoche, New York' at the Univeristy of York's World Cinema Society. While I can appreciate it won't be everyone's cup of tea, it did get me reflecting on some fairly big questions about the function of abstract or surreal art.
I would stick my neck on the line and say this is primarily a self-referential flick in the sense that it takes for its subject matter the making of a piece of theatre. As such it enters into the deeper questions of the status and function of the dramatic mode.
Watching this film feels like you are swimming in a dream. Why the surrealism?
There is a qualitative difference between the randomness say of the numbers which follow the decimal point in the mathematical constant 'pi' and the theatre of the surreal. That difference is the presence of intention, a fundamentally human category. There is a pure green painting in Leeds Art Gallery that you cannot stop looking at, precisely because it has not been made by painters and decorators but by an artist of sufficient worth that their work is hung in a public space. In this way, all art is framed in that we come to it with certain fundamental assumptions, chief among which are its origin in complex human intentions and its wider social and economic value. Standing in front of the Victorian moonscapes of that same gallery, these categories are effaced in the illusion of reality. Which explains both the origin and the function of abstract or surreal art: it arises from the need to bring to the fore these assumptions and encourage that mood of contemplation necessary to explore them.
Why the theme of doubleness?
All representational art seeks to perform the mimetic function, and in this sense is grounded in observation of the world. However, it is difficult truly to "see" when you have looked at the same thing day in day out for 37 years. As creatures of habit, our neurological hardware is so set up that the processing of repetitive and familiar stimuli migrates from the neo- to the sub-cortex, disappearing from the radar of consciousness. While this might make us very efficient machines, capable of multi-tasking without distraction, we lose a great deal in terms of the sensation of a life lived. As William Blake reminds us, we humans are perhaps at our happiest when we pause long enough to re-kindle that quality of fascination that characterised our first encounters with the world:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
(William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence", c. 1803)
There is then the very real danger that art will fail to move us. Indeed, what is a cliche but a story told once to often?
How to regain this sensation of a life lived? Well, in his essay 'Art as Technique' (1925), Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called this dulling of the senses 'habitualisation' and describes it as if it were a ravenous monster "devouring work, clothes, furniture, one's wife" and even "the fear of war". For Shklovsky, the redeeming power of art was that it allowed one to "recover the sensation of life" by imparting "the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known". "Art exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony".
Shklovsky's great theoretical contribution to art criticism was the concept of "defamiliarisation", or the representation of a slightly warped reality for the purpose of effecting us with that sensation of fascination and curiosity for a life lived. Whether the post-impressionistic brush strokes of van Gogh, Stravinsky's dissonant textures of sound, or a movie representing reality at one step removed: all these forms of art exist to deliver us from the virulent, pathogenicity of cliche and into the arms of an intimate, authentic and reactive proximity to the world.
I would stick my neck on the line and say this is primarily a self-referential flick in the sense that it takes for its subject matter the making of a piece of theatre. As such it enters into the deeper questions of the status and function of the dramatic mode.
Watching this film feels like you are swimming in a dream. Why the surrealism?
There is a qualitative difference between the randomness say of the numbers which follow the decimal point in the mathematical constant 'pi' and the theatre of the surreal. That difference is the presence of intention, a fundamentally human category. There is a pure green painting in Leeds Art Gallery that you cannot stop looking at, precisely because it has not been made by painters and decorators but by an artist of sufficient worth that their work is hung in a public space. In this way, all art is framed in that we come to it with certain fundamental assumptions, chief among which are its origin in complex human intentions and its wider social and economic value. Standing in front of the Victorian moonscapes of that same gallery, these categories are effaced in the illusion of reality. Which explains both the origin and the function of abstract or surreal art: it arises from the need to bring to the fore these assumptions and encourage that mood of contemplation necessary to explore them.
Why the theme of doubleness?
All representational art seeks to perform the mimetic function, and in this sense is grounded in observation of the world. However, it is difficult truly to "see" when you have looked at the same thing day in day out for 37 years. As creatures of habit, our neurological hardware is so set up that the processing of repetitive and familiar stimuli migrates from the neo- to the sub-cortex, disappearing from the radar of consciousness. While this might make us very efficient machines, capable of multi-tasking without distraction, we lose a great deal in terms of the sensation of a life lived. As William Blake reminds us, we humans are perhaps at our happiest when we pause long enough to re-kindle that quality of fascination that characterised our first encounters with the world:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
(William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence", c. 1803)
There is then the very real danger that art will fail to move us. Indeed, what is a cliche but a story told once to often?
How to regain this sensation of a life lived? Well, in his essay 'Art as Technique' (1925), Soviet literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called this dulling of the senses 'habitualisation' and describes it as if it were a ravenous monster "devouring work, clothes, furniture, one's wife" and even "the fear of war". For Shklovsky, the redeeming power of art was that it allowed one to "recover the sensation of life" by imparting "the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known". "Art exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony".
Shklovsky's great theoretical contribution to art criticism was the concept of "defamiliarisation", or the representation of a slightly warped reality for the purpose of effecting us with that sensation of fascination and curiosity for a life lived. Whether the post-impressionistic brush strokes of van Gogh, Stravinsky's dissonant textures of sound, or a movie representing reality at one step removed: all these forms of art exist to deliver us from the virulent, pathogenicity of cliche and into the arms of an intimate, authentic and reactive proximity to the world.
