Art, Truth and Time E-Book

Anselma Scollard

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 134

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Art, Truth and Time is a book which endeavours to show that artistic creation depends as much upon the body, as it does the soul, and the soul's intelligent use of the body's way of understanding. When there occurs a complete disjunction between the two, as occurs in much of contemporary art, art is stripped of its inherent beauty, its wholeness. In this book the author considers the nature of art from its earliest manifestations to the present day, endeavouring to show that its truth transcends time and place through the unity of soul and body and man's awareness of this unity, not a barren unity, but a unity which is profoundly creative.

Leseprobe

SISTER ANSELMA SCOLLARD OSB is a Benedictine contemplative nun of St Cecilia’s Abbey, Ryde, Isle of Wight. She has a double degree in philosophy and sculpture from the University of California. She also has an ma in philosophy from the University of Warwick, with a special interest in aesthetics. Before entering St Cecilia’s, she held a senior lectureship in sculpture, during which time she travelled extensively in Italy studying the history of the art of the Quattrocentro and Renaissance periods, and in France, where her particular interest was in the sculpture and bas reliefs of early medieval cathedrals and churches; during this period, she took a Certificat d’études françaises. At St Cecilia’s, her practical work in sculpture has evolved into an interest in architectural landscape, the making and designing of furniture and various garden structures, and to ornamental trees and their situation in a monastic setting. She continues to write on aesthetic matters and the connection between art and religion.

‘Presenting death in its finality’ (p.67). Lamentation of Christ (Il Cristo Morto), Andrea Mantegna. Image credit: Wikicommons

First Published 2019

ISBN: 978-1-912387-55-7

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emission manner from renewable forests.

Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by Lapiz

Text and images (unless otherwise indicated) © Sister Anselma Scollard 2019

Ninianae Abbatissae

Matri Amantissimae

‘The last work of an extraordinarily prolific career, it is Michelangelo’s final statement’ (p.71). The Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo. Image credit: Wikicommons

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

PART ONE – Art and Truth

The Experience of Truth

Art, Truth and Time

PART TWO – Art and Humankind

Body and Soul: Some Reflections on Art and Religion

The Sense of Touch Versus Conceptual Art

Why Artists Need Hands and the Process of Individuation

PART THREE – Criticism

Spontaneity and Objectivity

Relativism: Art Without Object

Boredom and ‘The Art of Change’

Technology and Technique Versus Art

The Importance of the Subjective: the True Meaning of Originality

PART FOUR – Art and Death

Two Contrasting Images of Death: or Horizontal and Vertical Images of Death

Art and Death: the Endless Search, the Enduring Present

PART FIVE – Architecture

To Innovate with Tradition: the Aesthetic Spirituality of Dom Paul Bellot, Architect and Monk

Visual Silence in Monastic Architecture: Cistercian Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries

APPENDIX

‘Beauty is founded on the perfection of a thing, where measure and order are of the first importance’ Dom Paul Bellot (p.88). Dom Bellot window, Quarr Abbey

Acknowledgements

MY PARENTS, Rosalind Thomas, Albert Hofstadter, Ettore and Marisa Pattofatto, Roy Oxlade and Rose Wylie, Luigi Canale, the Abbess and Community of St Cecilia’s Abbey, Richard Demarco, who has always given me his support, Gavin MacDougall, who has kindly agreed to publish this book, and Alice Latchford, who has been so helpful in the editing of the book.

Foreword

SISTER ANSELMA SCOLLARD’S book of essays, with its thought-provoking title Art, Truth & Time, should help act as an antidote to the problems now besetting the world of the arts, just as the arts are thus considered a healing balm to suffering humanity. The arts in general are subject to the malformation of truth in our distinctly materialistic society. Sr Anselma Scollard is well aware of this fast-developing problem. Ever since I first read her essays, I knew that I could rely on her profound understanding of the nature and purpose of art from her daily experience of her life as a member of an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns as well as someone educated as an artist. She is commitmented to a life of prayer in the Benedictine Abbey of St Cecilia on the Isle of Wight, one of the places of religious pilgrimage in Europe where the sound of prayer can still be heard. I associate every Benedictine abbey with the beauty of its location in harmony with nature.

Sr Anselma’s work elucidates my personal commitment to helping artists make proper use of art language which, according to Joseph Beuys, is our birthright in support of his firm belief that ‘everyone is an artist’. By that, he insisted that everyone is born to be creative. He personified the true spirit of post-war contemporary art and he was therefore fully aware of the Celtic dimension in the process of the Christianisation of Europe emanating from the Hebridean sacred island of Iona, defining the monastic world of St Columba and his fellow missionaries. I would ask anyone reading these essays to relate them to The Demarco Archive (www.demarco-archive.ac.uk) as a large-scale collaborative work of art, as a veritable ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, which came into being in the post-Second World War years, interlocked with the history of the Edinburgh Festival. These essays are essential reading for me in the immediate development of the Archive as a work of art and will surely help clarify the nature and purpose it as an academic resource; a resource inspired by our European cultural heritage in the second decade of the Third Millennium, expressing the passing of time within the Christian Era upon this planet which is defined poetically by Hugh MacDiarmid as a ‘Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ or a ‘beautiful, neglected urchin’.

These essays defend the nature of art in its most exalted form, so that art is seen clearly ascending to the condition of prayer, enabling us to express our gratitude for the gift of life. It is a multi-faceted expression of our human capacity to love. It helps us heal the self-inflicted pain and sorrow resulting from human conflict. In a future continuing to be dominated by the uncontrollable growth of commercialised culture, mass media, the banking system (which continues to make the rich richer and the poor poorer) and the manufacturing of weapons of war, the very title of Sr Anselma’s collection of essays instils in me a sense of hope in a world which can believe in the poetic words of John Keats – that ‘Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth’.

Her preface to her essays is best defined in her own words. In these few words, she makes it clear that her essays are simply ‘what art is about and how it expresses truth’. In short, studying Sister Anselma’s essays has provided me with hope for the future of an art world much in need of her understanding of art language.

Richard Demarco

Kingston University Emeritus Professor of European Cultural Studies

Preface

THE ESSAYS CONTAINED in this book were written over a fairly long period of time and served different purposes. Many were written as a philosophical or aesthetic critique of a then contemporary artist or exhibition. Others were written in a monastic context and for a monastic readership, others treat of contemporary, still endemic, attitudes about the nature of truth, its relation to religious belief and its effect on artistic creation. In these various contexts the views which I express form a gradual development in belief concerning what art is about and how it expresses truth. The ‘problems’ concerning present day art are based on a world view (specifically Western) which denies the significance of the cooperation between body and soul. In contemporary thought what was once the soul, has become mind or intellect – a conceptual process – which is considered as something separate and superior to the body; while the body is but a series of needs and functions which must be fulfilled. In this sense the body is inferior to the soul, and it (the body) has become the servant of the soul, rather than its helpmate. Artistic creation depends as much upon body as soul and the soul’s intelligent use of the body’s own way of understanding.

When there is a complete disjunction between body and soul, certain ideas come into being which recognise only one or the other of these two ‘presences’ and so emphasise one whilst excluding the other. Conceptual Art is such a phenomenon, where matter is no longer involved and there need be no material manifestation in the artistic ‘object’. In a sense, there is no object, just a subject. Another example of the separation of body and soul is the absolute glorification of body, its desires and appetites to the complete disregard of the spirit. Jackson Pollock’s ‘Action Painting’ might be an example of this. When there is this unnatural separation of body and soul, which comes as a result of the disregard of the intrinsic unity between the two the result is a world view which denies the existence of a Creator who has (with love) established an order in the universe whose highest manifestation is that of man, made of body and soul. Man has been entrusted with the guarding and protecting of this natural order through a respect for the gifts of imagination and understanding as much as a respect for the human intellect and its capacities.

Finally, there is the religious context within which these essays were written, giving them, I hope a particular clarity. All the essays were written since I entered the monastery, and each was preceded by prayer.

PART ONE

Art and Truth

The Experience of Truth

THE NOTION OF TRUTH, a belief that something exists, is real and can be found or at least experienced, has a comforting quality about it, a stability which underlies what we think and what we do. Even if we deny the existence of truth or think we have no access to it, everything we do and say as rational creatures refers to it even if only implicitly. It is symptomatic of our age that either it is said we cannot know it or, if it can be known, it must be limited to a scientific expression, that the only truth we can be sure about is revealed by the scientific method; it is analytic and deductive; any statements about reality which go beyond scientific principles are uncertain.

The biblical notion of truth, both in the Semitic and Greek sense, indicates something far richer and more comprehensive than the parameters set up by scientific method. Truth in the Old Testament is seen as a virtue. It implies value and is often coupled with the virtue of mercy ‘hesed’, a characteristic of the heart. Truth in this setting is usually translated as fidelity – a willed stability, duration, solidity of purpose, an enduring reality. None of these latter characteristics could be said to define contemporary society. It is not strange then that truth itself should be given such a limited definition, since those characteristics which have defined it in the past are found in little favour today. The Greek word for truth – ‘aletheia’ – suggests something without veil: something literally unconcealed, something which is revealed. The clarity implied in this term, as with the Old Testament word ‘emeth’, can have a moral overtone. It can signify sincerity and uprightness, also completeness, totality, perfection – fullness. Thus, the two biblical expressions of truth, Semitic and Greek, could be said to converge: truth is something which endures and is singular. It is pure in so far as it is not ambiguous or confused.

But truth is not just a reality which exists outside of us, which is what its scientific expression would have us believe. It, or the understanding of it, implies an attitude; it implies a belief – a certainty, not a restrictive certainty, which is dictated from without by a system, but an inner certainty. Truth and our attitude towards it, may be conscious or unconscious, but either way it grants assurance and confidence. In this sense truth approaches the traditional definition of faith – ‘cum assensione cogitare’, to think with assent. The awareness of truth cannot be had by applying a method, as if it were the result of the application of some scientific equation. It exists whether we allude to it or not. For even if we apply a method to find out whether something is true, there must always be an underpinning of confidence. Our very ability to apply a method implies a true state of affairs, or a constancy which indicates that using this method will render a true answer. Truth necessarily manifests itself in specific instances, but the rules for its application must lie beyond the individual instances. To limit truth to the scientifically verifiable is to betray its ontological character – it is to betray reality. To say truth has an ontological character is substantial, that a statement can be found worthy of verification, either that it is verifiable by reference to some real object or state of affairs. To say that we experience a truth is to know something with certitude, even if this certitude does not render itself capable of a complete explanation. Here truth approaches faith, not necessarily by having as its object something with religious content, but by being accepted. This sense of truth will not exclude doubt, but by an assurance which is more than feeling and as something which is a lived attitude pervading one’s actions and decisions, it will develop, in time, a stability which eschews the vagaries and uncertainties of relativism establishing a hope which does not deceive.

Art, Truth and Time

THE FOLLOWING IS MEANT to give some idea of how truth is reflected in an object of art and how this truth functions in relation to time: whether time determines the meaning of an artistic statement of truth, or whether that statement describes a reality which, although located in time, has horizons which extend beyond the immediate.

In what sense can art be about the truth, when truth is usually conceived of as the product of the discursive intellect, a description of a verifiable reality using concepts with fixed and specific meanings? In order to understand how truth can pertain to art, it is first necessary to see that truth is not limited to the intellect. Truth exists beyond and before the conceptual giving of meaning. An inability to map out by analytical reasoning the logic of certain meanings does not render them less significant and true. In a work of art meaning operates, is conveyed, differently. Reality can be described variously and is not for that less true. As Ernst Cassirer noted, the nature of reality is far richer than that which can be described by scientific concepts and formulae. To think that the truth of reality can be explained by discursive reasoning alone is an illusion. The work of art manifestly tells us this: ‘For the aspects of things are innumerable, and they vary from moment to moment.’1

The truth spoken of in an object of art is contained within a framework – an artistically meaningful statement made up of related terms. These terms are not conceptual but intuitively perceived. They are variously: colour, surface, line, mass etc contained in and making up a whole. The logical confines of the artistic object are determined by the object and contained within it. The truth sustained within the object is the sum result of the fitness and necessity of its elements. This framework is established by the artist – be it a canvas edge or, for example, Brancusi’s Table of Silence. The framework is one with the elements it contains. The meaning is to be found here within this space, and not explained by something outside it. It is understood as it presents itself.

Essentially what marks out the art object in its traditional sense (a tradition which has infinite horizons) from many objects, collections of objects, or phenomena on the artistic contemporary scene, is this sense of ‘internal relatedness’ which does not require something extraneous to it in order to be appreciated and understood. It needs no further verbal interpretation. It is basically self-sufficient.2 This ‘internal relatedness’ which has been the sine qua non