Art and the Abstract Truth

How to enter a divine mode of existence

Image: The cast of Vanya of 42nd St, slantmagazine.com

Like many bizarre things we do that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing as perfectly normal, participation in the arts is weird. Maybe you’ve noticed this too. Back in ‘94, I went to see Vanya on 42nd St, a film interpretation of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya starring Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore. It was brilliant. What most struck me at the time was that it was staged in the abandoned New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd St. They had no costumes, and there was no set. To make things even more extreme, since rats had chewed through the stage rigging, the actual stage was unusable, so they performed in what had been the orchestra. I was enraptured by it. 

By way of comparison, Marvel Studio’s “The Marvels,” with its CGI-powered eye candy, cost 270 million to make, and I could barely stay awake (my kids made me go), whereas I was transfixed by Vanya's raw emotional torque. When art is truly great, you seem to meld with it. But why? Here I was, sitting in one theatre, watching another, and knowing full well that it was all fake. They weren't even trying to dress it up. Where did I “go” to have this communion, and what, if anything, was real about it?

Harri Mäcklin, a researcher from the University of Helsinki, has written a fascinating essay on this topic entitled When Art Transports Us, Where Do We Actually Go? He explains that:

Sometimes, artworks have such a magnetic pull that we forget the actual world around us and lose our sense of time and place, of other people – and sometimes even of ourselves. The French art critic Denis Diderot (1713-84) called such immersive experiences ‘art at its most magical.’ Once, a painting by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-89) pulled Diderot inside a pastoral river scene so completely and enjoyably that he compared the experience to a divine mode of existence:

Where am I at this moment? What is all this surrounding me? I don’t know, I can’t say. What’s lacking? Nothing. What do I want? Nothing. If there is a God, his being must be like this, taking pleasure in Himself.

Image: Claude-Joseph Vernet, Italianate River Landscape 1753, Pinterest.com

With paintings, theatre, and film, we can at least say that there is (generally) an accurate depiction of human experience to find ourselves in. But what of the utterly abstract experience of listening to music? Have a look at this moving video of people listening to classical music. Why are they crying? In this case, there is nothing that directly correlates with any definitive thing that we know. After all, notes are just disturbances of the air, and despite it sometimes being called “The Universal Language,” music is no language at all. 

How can tones have meaning? Words have meaning because they relate to things; sentences, because they express something about things. Tones do not relate to things, do not express anything about things, represent nothing, betoken nothing, indicate nothing. What is it then that is meaningful in tones that allows us to distinguish sense from nonsense in successions of tones?

—Viktor Zuckerkandl 

Good question, right?

In many forms of spirituality, there is a premise that there is a higher and truer dimension that exists alongside our own. In this regard, our world is only a pale analog to the real thing in the same way that hothouse tomatoes are the forlorn and sickly cousin of the delicious farm-grown variety. There are truths that stand in a platonic-like form in the higher plane. As our world is a derivative of the upper worlds, their residue still pervades our experience, and when we encounter them, though we might not be able to articulate it to ourselves or others, we know. This explains the universal appeal of beauty, love, joy, harmony, unity, and many other core needs that we all have (and that are not locatable in the material world). Again, quoting Macklin:

All this amounts to a peculiar, experiential dislocation, where the usual structures of my place-awareness are destabilized so that it feels like I’m not wholly in the actual world nor in the world of the artwork, neither inside nor outside, but in a liminal space between them. 

An artist is a conduit. He or she enclothes these immaterial truths within a material garment, allowing us temporary access to the transcendent. Our transfixion, our feeling of being pulled out of our own world and conjoined to another, is the delight of the encounter with art, nothing more. Paint, stone, and celluloid cannot accomplish this on their own. They are only the body. It’s the soul that we love.