Where Phantoms Reign: Myth & Nature in Modern Art
by Martin Weyers
published on August 18, 2008
1. The Raft of the Medusa
There are few occasions for an artist to pick up a historical event and turn it, by means of the arts, into a symbol that can stand for a whole decade, a century, or even a period that is as long lasting and diffuse as the one we refer to as modernity. The young French painter Théodore Géricault had the good luck to select a subject not only able to cause a stir in the Paris Salon of 1819, but, what is more, to become a symbol for a new era of Western culture. His huge painting, The Raft of the Medusa (193.3 × 282.3 in), which shows a group of castaways on a self-built raft, has since then impressed generations of art lovers as one of the milestones of French painting hanging in the Louvre.
The Méduse was flagship of a convoy of four frigates that set sail in 1816 for the French colony in Senegal. The boat shipwrecked near the coast of Mauritania. There was not enough space on the six rescue boats to carry the whole crew, so they built a raft for the lower ranks, to be towed by the rescue boats. Eventually the crew of the rescue boats lost patience and cut the towline, abandoning two hundred fifty people to their fate. Géricault’s painting portrays the exact moment when, after 13 days adrift, a ship is sighted on the horizon that would save the few survivors.
The painting triggered a political scandal; the ruthless higher rank passengers on the Méduse along with the captain – a political minion without significant nautical experience – soon became a symbol for the corrupt and selfish French government.
However, what makes The Raft of the Medusa a great piece of art, rather than merely an example of didactic “social realism”, is (next, of course, to its formal qualities) the ambiguity of the subject. The painting can, of course, be taken as a political statement; at the same time it is much more.
The Raft of the Medusa can be regarded as a metaphor for the situation of modern man. Gérciault forsook the traditional religious and mythical subjects in favour of an incident drawn from the newspapers of the day. And yet he succeeded in creating a symbolic representation for a new era of political, moral and metaphysical disorientation.
The way the tragic event is depicted is everything else but realistic. The effect of the brawny nude bodies of the shipwrecked, in combination with pathetic gestures, insipid lighting, and a pyramidal formal arrangement, is more an artificial staging than what we would expect from a newspaper illustration. The nude men could have escaped from Rubens’ Hell Fall of the Damned, only to find themselves in the hell of nature – no god, no angel, no nymph to save them; no devil necessary to afflict them.
In Romanticism, nautical allusions serve as one of the major metaphors for the life journey. Other than in the sea pieces of Géricault’s contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, nature in The Raft of the Medusa is depicted as a violent and callous element, similar to the way modern scientists like Jacques Monod or Richard Dawkins describe the cosmos as the product of a blind unconscious process, without any meaning or spiritual dimension.
The only mythic reference in Géricault’s painting is the name of the shipwrecked frigate – Méduse. Almost one hundred years later, a ship named after the Titans would become a metaphor for the technical hubris of modern man; in contrast, the fate of the Medusa seems almost predestined, given the odd choice of name for a frigate.
We may have chosen to be modern, by putting into force the technical gods as represented in the Titanic, but if we are without a myth, it's not because we have chosen to be myth-less. The salvation of the shipwrecked lays in civilization, embodied in the ship at the horizon – a god of technology - rather than in a metaphysical prospect.
Here, for the first time in art history, a contemporary event from the newspapers replaces the traditional religious, mythological and historical topics. And it becomes a symbol for a new age, the age of disorientation. Modernity, on one hand accompanied by an atmosphere of departure, is, on the other hand, characterized by a feeling of loss – the loss of a mythic worldview that used to harmonize man, nature, life, death, heaven, earth and stars.
If we accept the idea that The Raft of the Medusa depicts the situation of modern man and society in a myth-less world, as well as the search for something new, against the background of nature experienced as a hostile environment – where on the raft would we locate the artist? Is he the man on the lookout on the right, atop the pyramid, looking forward to new horizons, waving a piece of cloth to attract the attention of their saviours? Or is he the old man on the left, shown in the traditional pose of melancholy, looking back to a more pleasant past, one now gone forever?
Amazingly, the figure of the old man on the left, in the habitus of an ancient Greek philosopher, calls to mind Rodin’s Thinker (also known as The Poet), on top of his monumental work The Gates of Hell (originally meant as a depiction of Dante, and later changed to a more general image of the poet or philosopher, perhaps the artist’s alter ego). While Rodin’s Thinker is looking down on the fall of the damned (and hence may stand for artists, like Géricault, who focus on the drama of modern man), the old man on Géricault’s raft is looking back into a past that has already dissolved.
If we engage in this play of locating the artist in a group of castaways that, in a way, represents society, the old man looking back is probably the most unpromising choice: the son he holds with his left arm is already dead. The artist unable to stop gazing at the dramatic events of time, without letting the human condition shine through, is not much more than a newspaper illustrator. The artist who turns his back on contemporary life is himself only a shadow of the past: his creations are dead right from the beginning.
2. A New Mythology?
Some while before the Romantic Movement arrived in Paris (where the foundations of modern painting were laid), the philosophers and poets of German Romanticism had already built a tradition of discussing the decrease of Christian religion and the possibilities of a “new mythology”.
Art historian Robert Rosenblum, in his book Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975), suggests an alternative view on the evolution of modern art with Germany, rather than Paris, as its center. Rosenblum’s romantic perspective on modern art history is revealing, though there can be no doubt that the new formal achievements in general came from Paris, and later were adapted – and sometimes enhanced – in Germany by painters such as Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Max Ernst or Max Beckmann. What makes many of the German paintings of the early twentieth century so amazing is the mythic, rather than decorative, spirit that gives such depth to some of these artists’ works.
“Where there are no gods, phantoms reign.” – The German Romantic poet Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg) recognized as early as 1799, in his paper Christendom or Europe, that the disappearance of the gods results in a ghastly, rather than enlightened, new world. For Novalis though, the fall happened not with the decline of Christianity, but with its emergence: “The period of the genesis of European phantoms, which also rather completely explains their form, is the period of transition from Greek mythology to Christianity.”
Today we are used to other phantoms - the phantoms of materialism, neo-Darwinism, and the ubiquitous TV. Money as god, genes as gods, or Hollywood actors as gods – we live in a world of phantoms to such a degree that were he alive today, Novalis might even prefer to wish back the Christian spirit.
Being modern means being myth-less; being myth-less means being rootless.
How can we take new roots after the symbolic landscape of the cosmos has been turned into a wasteland, nature into a recreation area, and earth into a resource?
Man has not consciously chosen to be myth-less; it has happened to us. As a consequence, man has turned the whole outer world into something that must be of practical, economical, political, social or sanitary use, while the arts have been degraded to intellectual entertainment - merely a means to distract our troubled minds from the real world.
How to deal with this in the arts, if the old symbols are dead?
Few people who are interested in mythology are aware of the problems of contemporary mythic art. And yet, some of the major researchers have recognized the situation very clearly. Carl Jung for example, in a paper from 1934, About the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, muses that it may be much better to commit ourselves to the indigence of being without symbols rather than wearing costumes we do not own. And Joseph Campbell, in The Hero’s Journey, criticizes the artist who wants to “copy” archetypes:
Quote:
“I remember back in the 1940s and 1950s how there were a couple of very important artists who were just doing clichés. This whole thing of the archetypes came up and they were copying archetypes. That’s not what it’s all about; it’s to see and experience the archetypology of a living moment. What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.” [1]
While Wendy Doniger, who occupies the Mircea Eliade Chair at the University of Chicago, recognizes the insufficient ways myth is presented in popular culture:
Quote:
“On the one hand, it is true that mythological art survives [in, sic!] pretty dreadful and inept representations. That is to say, you can re-tell the passion narrative or the story of Adam and Eve in fairly unartistic ways and still have people moved by it, because the story itself survives. And that's not true of another kind of story. If you tell a love story very badly, and the characters aren't realistic or you don't care about them, people don't like it any more, and they say that it isn't any good.
“So you can get away with a lot of kitsch in mythology, but I think that something is lost in a really kitsch representation, and that if you have a really beautiful representation of a myth, it does ultimately survive better, and carry forward more of the original meanings of the myth than a kitsch representation. They both work but, ultimately, kitsch is not as effective as really honest heartfelt mythology.” [2]
The problem of the artist of today, who tries to achieve something deeper and more meaningful, is that he either has to work with personal symbolic images that are not shared by others, or he works with symbols of the past that have lost much of their credibility and mythic power. In the first case, the artist is not understood at all; in the latter case he is understood all too well. In between these options is found art that is made for decorative purposes, for pure entertainment, for the art market, or for the art critics. The mythic artist who tries to reach a larger audience is forced to use stereotypes – a situation that seems to be as hopeless as that of the men on the Raft of the Medusa.
Is there rescue in sight?
In The Way of Art, Campbell suggests that you don’t have to paint gods: you can experience aesthetic arrest in painted apples (if they are painted as well as Cezanne’s apples).
However, aesthetic arrest is only one of several major functions of the arts. Art is a way of perception. More than a century after Cezanne’s apples and Manet’s asparagus (all Zen qualities of painted vegetables aside!), in the long run some may feel dissatisfied by the lack of visionary qualities that comes through in recreating the outer world with paint and canvas.
Is there a way of accessing the mythic powers through inner experience? Campbell somewhere suggests each find a single fragment from the pile of shards left in the ruins of the mythic world, a fragment that speaks to you, and then play and work with it. (Maybe this is an approach that should be taught in art schools!) Anyway, it is but a fragment, rather than a seemingly intact arrangement. There is a Buddhist saying: “Kill the Buddha when you meet him on the street.” For today’s artists, this should be turned into “Kill the Buddhas on your canvas, burn the saints in your writings, crucify Jesus in your art studio!”
However, neither adapting fragments nor smashing myths will lead to any significant new art form. The fragment that speaks to you has to speak (as Campbell points out in the quotation above) through a living moment or an inward experience; otherwise, the artist who tries to evoke archetypal energies gets stuck in clichés and stereotypes.
Picasso, in his choice of topics (figures -whether dressed or nude -still lifes, landscapes, genre painting, etc.) not very different from his academic contemporaries, was one of the first to create new content not by depicting form, but by smashing the form and re-arranging the fragments according to the feeling of a living moment. That was the necessary next step, once artists had successfully rid their work of the religious and mythological connotations of the past and started focusing more and more on the visible world. The tradition of religious and historical painting had to be cut off, but also the new tradition of naturalist and impressionist painting that had begun worshipping the superficial world of external phenomena.
However, while Picasso is the painter of the living moment par excellence, he never managed to create visionary art out of an inner experience. This different way of creating more or less abstract forms on the canvas with subtle connotations to the outer world, arising out of a contemplative state of mind rather than analytic consciousness, was developed by artists like Wassilij Kandinsky, the great theorist of this movement, and Paul Klee, one of its greatest painters.
Drawing for Klee was a contemplative act. He creates rather than depicts nature. His way of drawing is more than an art style; it is an almost universal way of creating out of the deeper spheres of our consciousness, without losing touch with the sensual world. Klee's visions are right on the edge between inner and outer world. According to Kandinsky’s conviction, the powers operating in the artist are the same powers that have created the stars, the galaxies – the whole universe. Klee, the magician among the painters of the beginning twentieth century, was successful in re-harmonizing these two dimensions of the cosmos. The world, at least in the arts, is in balance again, and we recognize that "the two kingdoms are one" [3].
3. The Re-creation of Nature – A Journey to the Edge of the Pencil[4]
According to Campbell, we can no more predict tomorrow’s myth than any more than one can predict tonight’s dream. No one can predict tomorrow’s art either (assuming we’re talking about more than just fashions). The consciousness that will bring forth new and significant mythic art forms will, though, have to comply with some spiritual insights. In a way, it must reconcile man and nature, the conscious and the material world, the archetypal and phenomenal worlds.
There is another famous saying by Novalis: “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet” [5]. Campbell, in The Hero’s Journey interprets the outer world as the world of tradition - that which can be taught – and the inner world as your response to it – an interesting view of the poet’s insight into the relation of subject and object.
However, there’s an even deeper meaning.
The soul is the realm of reconciliation of those two parts of the world – inner and outer – that belong together, but have been falling apart. Novalis continues: “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.” The psyche is a place of potential growth, and the more the inner psychic and the outer cosmic world overlap, the more we gain ground both in the physical and psychic dimension - and the more we are in balance.
The inner and outer worlds are identical anyway; we’re just experiencing the one world in two dimensions. The mystical way of experiencing dissolves the categories of inner and outer. There is only one cosmos, one “undifferentiated consciousness” (Campbell), but it is explored in different ways, by looking inside, or looking outside. An artist has to explore both, because, as Max Beckmann puts it, the purpose of the arts is to make visible the invisible, through reality as the actual mystery of existence. Now that we have been hypnotized by the phenomenal world for so very long, it’s time though to explore the cosmos within, as Novalis did:
Quote:
“More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts -- needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul -- that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable.” [6]
To explore the inner cosmos and to recreate the nature within, not much equipment is needed. No teacher, no master, no drugs, no starship, no mythology. All you need is a piece of paper and a pencil.
[1] Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey. Novato, California, 2003, p. 190
[2] Ray Grasse: “Myth in the Modern World. An Interview with Wendy Doniger”, originally published in: The Quest Magazine, Winter 1990. Quoted from http://www.raygrasse.com/pages/myth.html
[3] "The two kingdoms are one": according to The Hero with a Thousand Faces the central realization at the final stage of the hero's journey
[4] Journey to the edge of the Pencil is the title of a series of drawings by Alexander Johannes Kraut
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