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| A question of “!” Pēteris Bankovskis, Art Critic | |
| While reading Thomas Merton’s (1915–1968) diaries, I came across a fragment which I wish to share. At that time, the 24 year old Merton lived in New York, had converted to Catholicism a year earlier and had received a degree from Columbia University, where he now worked as lecturer. The young philologist was aiming to become a writer and in his heart he felt the stirrings of a calling towards the ecclesiastical. The entry quoted below is from 15 October, 1939, after a second visit to the World Expo when the Second World War, this attempt by the totalitarian powers to divide the world, had already broken out in Europe. Yet Merton was not interested in either the elaborate USSR or German pavilions, or nylon, or even colour photography which was being shown to the world for the first time, but in something completely different. “Fra Angelico’s Saint Anthony the Abbott Tempted by a Lump of Gold. A quite perfect composition. The saintly figure a little to the left of the centre, caught in a sort of slow dance-like movement away from a leaf on the dry ground, away from the only item which seems to tempt him. The clothing moving perfectly, a black robe, almost shiny, a painty grey cloak; as to his face: there’s a melancholy peace in it almost like that of an ancient Greek sculpture. In the background, on a small hill there’s a gleaming red church; some towers against a perfectly clear sky; a row of trees with enamel-like, dark crowns. The scene’s angular contours, splendid, fantastic, and painted in clean colours around him. Gazing at this painting is just like praying. There’s no past or future in the activity visible in the painting. It is full of movement and life, and joy, as well as absolute peace and serenity, but it is still. Obviously it has been still for nearly seven centuries.(1) In time we follow movement from beginning to end, from the moment when it impassively arises from some other activity, until the moment when it merges into another activity just as impassively, with a different meaning already. This successive transformation from activity to activity is a way in which time reveals itself to us, due to the movements, which are all more or less incomplete in their meaning and which never end. But in eternity movement is perfect: there’s no transition from one complete meaning to another complete meaning. Movement in this painting is clean and pure, and so close to complete significance, as can possibly be achieved with human artistry, as it still remains at its most complete point. This perfection of movement can also be achieved for a moment in life, but then it immediately disappears, but in the painting it is always present – not recalled from memory or living in hope, but constantly present. Of course, this is only up to a point, as the painting itself has changed and will eventually crumble, as it seems to me that it’s been created in oils on wood, and these tarnish, crack and deteriorate. But the form which it reflects will never die. Things which have been created can disappear, but “forms can’t”, as these are eternal, sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper(2). | |
 Fra Angelico. Saint Anthony the Abbott Tempted by a Lump of Gold. 1436 | |
| The painted saint has been in this peaceful condition in this quiet scene for seven centuries, but his movement is more complete than any dance movement, as his movement is in a condition of peace; therefore more complete than any dance, unless this dance has been stopped in its most perfect “movement”, which, finding itself in this still condition, encompasses within it the entire dance with all of its movements. That’s what it’s like in eternity, where prayers are not expressed in the way that we express them (as words mean time), but perfectly instead. For example, let us imagine that we pronounce an exclamation mark: “!” In heaven, as well as in the short Gloria(3), as well as in the longest psalms everything is expressed in a perfect way like “!”. (This is like an analogy. Obviously, we can’t even imagine “!” beyond time and space.)” Peace which includes within it movement in all of its complexity. The peace which the observer feels on looking at some scene of nature, or, as in this case, a painting. A peace which leads on to contemplation, to the opening of one’s soul to the infinite. These quests for peace occupied Thomas Merton for the rest of his life, which from 1942 right up to his premature tragic death was spent in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the state of Kentucky. But let Merton and the Saint Anthony painted by Brother Angelico remain just a pretext this time. I’d like to discuss “!””. Possibly people nowadays are just the same as they were fifty, one hundred or seven hundred years ago. Passions, hopes and desires, not to mention anatomy and physiology, haven’t really changed much. Yes, the words with which these passions, hopes and desires are expressed, and the thoughts that are thought with these words have changed. The world of created things does ceaselessly change and consequently so does the interplay between the said passions etc. and this world of created things. For example, with that thing we call art. Those of an older age-group will definitely still remember the feeling of festiveness which came over many a person every autumn and spring on their way to the ‘Latvija’ exhibition hall, to the annual major exhibition. The autumn and spring shows were undoubtedly a sort of transference of warmed-up 19th century Parisian and similar salons into a different era and into a different social system, but in themselves they weren’t bad. The number of visitors at these exhibitions was to be measured in their thousands, which, given the rather low population of Latvia, really was quite a lot. What were people looking for there? A great many things. There were some who simply wanted to pass their weekend in a more interesting way. There were others who somehow self-evidently wanted to find out what new things “our artists” had painted or created in printmaking or in sculpture. There were, of course, the artists themselves and art critics, as well as their friends, relatives and acquaintances (membership of the Latvian SSR Artists’ Union exceeded a thousand.) A number of reviews always appeared about these large exhibitions, and, even though the artists more or less justifiably considered that those writing them didn’t understand a thing about their art, when the newspapers came out, however, they pored over the fresh print hungrily, searching for, no, not an analysis of the trends, achievements and criticism, but their own surnames. In other words, the life of the arts was intense and embraced a broad sweep of society. But the question is about whether the characters and images, being so many, were able to find a viewer, who, on encountering them, would lose their sense of space-time. I think that at that time, when there were only about three programmes on television and personal computers and the internet couldn’t even be dreamed about, when the daily dose of visual information for the average person was many times smaller than it is today, for at least some of their viewers exhibitions of art served exactly as this kind of source of visual impressions. At those selfsame Autumn exhibitions one could quite often see members of the public standing as if paralyzed in front of a painting, drilling into the painted square with their eyes and hard at work, thinking. What was that movement that stopped their thoughts, what were these germs of transcendence that the timeless situation promoted? Probably each situation was so different from the other that it would be difficult to place them into one classification table, unless this table were to be a game without any rules. If, in an average landscape, someone suddenly spotted a geographic reminder of the first love of their youth, but someone else, in the yellow smudge portraying a mushroom in a still life, sensed the taste of hospital millet porridge, then there was no way that the unifying element would be located in the viewers’ information sheet, or in the authorship, the compositional structure or colour combination of the painting being viewed. The unifying factor was the unexpected escape from reality, the exclamation mark previously mentioned, the glimpse into the other side which can only be measured in seconds. This unified people, who at various places in the space and various segments of time encountered an “artistic experience”. In the atheistic Soviet reality, an exhibition – this chaotic pile of created artefacts – was able to create situations where a person encountered a visual image in a similar way as a cloistered monk encounters an icon (a sacred picture). At that time many, perhaps with-out formulating it in this way, without even realizing it, lived like the early Christians, seeking refuge from the harassment of “Third Rome” in the catacombs of intelligence, or seeming intelligence. Visual, or, as they called it at that time, fine arts were a part of these catacombs. Times have changed, and it’s no wonder that the signs and symbols which were to be observed on the walls of the catacombs at that time have, to many, become unintelligible, strange and unnecessary. But that question about “!” hasn’t disappeared anywhere. On today’s art landscape it perhaps sounds even more comfortless, because at the instant when that exclamation mark occurs, there’s no past, no future, not now, nor tomorrow as well, and neither perhaps the day after tomorrow. Translator into English: Uldis Brūns (1) The work dates from 1436, and therefore there was no way that, in 1939, there could have been seven centuries. (2) “As it was in the beginning, now and forever” (Latin.). (3) Gloria [in excelsis Deo] – “Glory be to God in the highest” (Latin.). | |
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