A local property developer’s provocative marketing campaign questioning the need for art prompted the Vancouver Sun to ask me to write a meaningful reply. This is an excerpt from a longer feature.
In effort to promote its latest slip of property on False Creek, Concord Pacific is asking a provocative question – who needs art? For an art gallery owner, these are fighting words. To be fair, I assume the question is playfully aimed at convincing condo buyers that the view from this vantagepoint will serve as replacement for original artwork. Certainly Concord’s necklace of land along the creek – capped by the sparkle of Science World – deserves attention.
But the question remains – is art akin to a view? And is it similarly constrained by what you can see?
In the E. M. Forster novel “A Room With A View”, the young Lucy Honeychurch, cosseted by Edwardian innocence, arrives in Florence only to be disappointed that her room lacks a view. Her guardian is outraged. Still, it’s not a glimpse of the Arno that will matter in the end. Lucy soon visits the Santa Croce where she comes across the famous frescoes by Giotto, the first Western artist to put personality and not just piety into his paintings. While the characters in these pieces are the usual pre-Renaissance parade of biblical figures, here they begin to emerge for their individuality. No longer just props; now players. With Giotto, the light of modernity begins to flicker. Lucy sees this light and is transformed.
What we see in a painting is not always what is in front of us. That is one of the ways that original art differs from a view. Art relies upon artifice, a leap of faith into an imagined realm. A view is more passively experienced. We take what there is to see and celebrate or complain accordingly. A back alley dumpster is never mistaken for a soaring mountainscape. You see what you see. Art has a more ambitious plan for our perceived world.
As Baudelaire saw it, the whole of the universe is only “a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination assigns a place and a relative value; it is a kind of nourishment that imagination must digest and transform”. The art historian Simon Schama is even bolder, arguing that the power of the greatest art is the power “to shake us into revelation”. It is not only what we see but what we see differently that matters. Art transforms the experience of life by making it more than the sum of its parts.
One of my artists, Veronica Plewman, paints scenes of small bodies of water, whether puddle or lake or river. These scenes are transfigured by the power of her paintbrush. so they seep into our awareness in ways that a loose ribbon of water stepped over never could. Looking at this work, I find myself transfixed by the shifting energy of Plewman’s paintings. Darkly shadowed trees spangle the water’s surface while a tussle of oranges and yellows suggest the slow arc of afternoon sunshine. I feel I know these places yet I don’t.
This is the power of art – transcendence in a tube of paint…
