Look; ‘Art’ Stands for Meaning
By Marjorie Augenbraum
Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs
The oldest objects that the Western world calls “art” were made approximately 30,000 years ago. One is a carving in the shape of a man with the head of a lion. Another is an array of drawings of animals on the walls of a cave. What is most fascinating is that they were made at all.
In our day and age many consider art an “extra,” something we visit in a museum. When the priorities of life are considered, art often does not make the list. But is that right?
In many early cultures, there was no word for “art.” Objects had a purpose. Even later, art stood for meaning. Recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art there was an exhibition of Renaissance-era portraits. They weren’t created to be decoration. They documented the lives of real people. Portraits are visual mementos, a kind of summary of a life. If we look, each portrait will tell us a lot.
Last year the Peabody-Essex Museum exhibited 19th century American landscape paintings from the New York Historical Society. Although they display a lot of precision, these paintings were not made as leaf-by-leaf exact reproductions of particular locations. They are representations of real sites, enhanced by not a little artistic license, but why the explosion of landscape paintings at that particular time? They resulted in part from a search for the answer to the question, “What is American?” Throughout the 19th century this question arose in many areas of American culture. The painters of the Hudson River School put their stake in the ground. Many of these landscape paintings are meant to reveal the country’s potential, but also by extension the potential of its people. Just look at the vastness and the variety the artists show us.
Of course, it is unfair and untrue to classify all art as “functional” or containing a message. One of the most intriguing American artists, James McNeill Whistler, stood at the exact opposite pole. The meaning in Whistler’s work is in the very fact of its lack of message. Whistler immerses us in mood and sensation. The aesthetics are the “meaning.” Later, in the paintings of Mark Rothko there are no recognizable objects. The painting itself, as a whole, is the object and is offered to us by the artist for reflection and contemplation.
So, back to the lion-headed human and cave paintings. They must have emerged from some need or compulsion. After all, the people who made them were living a harsh Ice Age existence. It’s difficult to believe they had inclinations toward “extras” or luxuries. They had to carry their belongings around, so the objects must have had importance. And people returned to the same caves over centuries, adding new drawings and paintings to the existing work. Whatever those objects and paintings meant, they were carefully made and highly regarded. Art was not extra. It never has been. We just need to look.
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As featured in the Beverly Citizen
www.montserrat.edu
