We spent this week looking at some looking at some excerpts from Daniel Siedell’s Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? that we looked at before our July break, but from another viewpoint.
Share your own thoughts with us.
Quotes:
“The result of this self-discovery in the studio is pain – the pain of separation, alienation, loneliness, and death. Edvard Munch…once said ‘Art emerges from joy and pain,’ and then he added, ‘Mostly from pain.’ …it reminds us of something we want to forget – our suffering, our vulnerability, and our weaknesses. At the deepest levels, it is the emaciated figures of Munch rather than the heroism of Michelangelo’s titans or the beauty of Raphael’s angels that connects with us…Munch’s wound connects with our wound. We must…be led by God into the hell of self-knowledge and out again. We need to be killed and then raised from the dead…Modern art puts us back in touch with our pain and suffering, which is where art meets us, where God meets us, for we are like Melville’s Ahab: ‘gnawed within and scorched without.’
Modern art contradicts our desire to cover up this wound. It reminds us who we are in part by reminding us that there is a lot more at stake in art than representing classical stories and biblical narratives, in shaping virtue and teaching morality through images. It wrestles with our tendency to make our beliefs about ourselves and our world the center of the cosmos, to make ourselves the subjects of our existential sentences, to be, as David Foster Wallace said, ‘lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms.'” (page 9)
“The tradition of modern art, beginning with Gustave Courbet in the nineteenth century and extending into the present, establishes the artist’s studio as a legitimate place for a human being to paint their way into their identity – through faith, disbelief, hopes, and fears. In the studio they stand before themselves, the world, and God. Unhinged from the necessity of understanding their work as the fulfillment of commissions, they were free (or, as Sartre observes, condemned) to define the trajectory of their own work, through their own felt experience – to create their own significance, to invent their own roles as artists and the function of their artifacts as a means to give meaning to their lives. Free to do anything in the artist’s studio, the modern artist has a responsibility to do something. The modern tradition in art is thus the accumulation of these remarkable somethings, disclosing the human condition in particularly powerful and distinctive ways, as art becomes a means of self-discovery.” (page 8)
Questions:
From what does Siedell say artists were “unhinged” from? Is this true? Is art large enough to do what Siedell says it was meant to do in the modern era?
What about the “doing anything?” Is that realistic or possible? When reduced to “doing something” does that not bind an artists and take away the “anything?”
Quote:
“Modern art puts us back into touch with our pain and suffering …And, east of Eden, it is only through this suffering and fear that we can experience beauty, goodness and truth.” (page 9)
Question:
Is this true? Is it impossible to see truth, goodness and beauty from any other place or condition?
