The Work of Art

NAMING beauty

In all the cities of the world, it is the same, the universal and the modern man is the man in a rush, a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness, nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.

– Eugene Ionesco, Notes et Contre Notes,
quoted by Thomas Merton in Raids on the Unspeakable

In order to teach people to work with life instead of against it, I try to find ways to help them see, understand, and name how life functions in nature, art, craft, and design.[1]  I’m usually teaching where people already live and work; where life has already defined paths and destinations: where walls, windows, doors already define design and structure. I have to figure out how to talk to people about what’s already there before we can discuss doing anything new. So I try to get people to stop, look, and see. The trick is to shift perspective, to be able to identify the parts, the whole, and how they do (or don’t) relate to each other – and to us.

I start by asking folks to mix up some materials so we can do something together, and so they can focus closely on something simple, without the distractions of what they think they already know about our shared context. We gather tools and materials and set to work. Making mud is a great way to warm up any group. Everyone works together to help mix big batches of dirt, sand, water that we stomp around in, barefoot. People get comfortable (after all, you only take off your shoes when you’re at home or on vacation, right?). We talk. As the material comes together, so does the group. Then everyone gets a bucket of mud and a board, and I invite them to schmear the mud on the board and play around with line, texture, shape, and anything else that might come to hand. I might suggest an assignment to get things moving, but he point is not the assignment, but simply to see how minds and hands work together. After a half hour or so, most people have gotten to a stopping point, so we arrange our work so all can see, and talk. There are likes and dislikes, varieties of analysis and criticism, expressions of regard for those who have definite talents, and then humility – often surprise – at unexpected beauty that “just happens.”

After a couple of hours, we’ve sidestepped awkward introductions, learned some names, shared an experience, gotten dirty, laughed, loosened up, and learned concrete lessons about our materials and each other. We not only have material to work with, we also have a sense of ourselves as individual members of a unique group, we’ve laid a foundation for a common language. Then I try to talk my way through the process that we’ve all just completed, using the same materials and the same square board, but now trying to name some of what happens when you make a mark on a blank surface.

Naming helps us grasp what we know – as when you buy a new car, you take possession of the name as well as the object; your awareness shifts, and suddenly you see the same make and model on every street. Before the apple, Adam and Eve had no name by which to separate themselves from their bodies and from the rest of creation. Whether we lament their loss of innocence or celebrate their acquisition of power, naming their nakedness was as important to Adam and Eve as naming the animals.[2] Naming the elements of design is equally important. It begins with a simple combination of looking and doing.

For example, if I make a dot on my board, like this:

…

we see how a simple point changes everything. What was blank nothingness takes on order and structure. The point locates forces of relationship.

Mathematicians define a point as the intersection of two lines, like this:

The lines of the “X” indicate the relations your eye recognizes when you think “center” in relation to “square.” Two forces intersect, and germinate a new, third force.

By naming that intersection center, we recognize the relations that establish, strengthen, and confirm wholeness. Once we’ve named and seen it, we relax; we feel that “it’s all right” – in other words, that relations between the parts are as they should be – integrated – again, it fits together.[3] We say “it’s good.” “Good,” in Latin, is “bonum,” and the root of our word “beauty.”

[1] Modern art theory divides manual “craft” from conceptual “art.” But craft without art is merely technology — tools for production and profit. Art without craft is “design” – a drawing of something that someone else can make – without thinking – by machine. “Manufacturing” requires no manual skill. We call “design” modern simply because we can produce it in facile, monotonous, and seemingly endless quantities. Reduced to machinery, neither art nor craft produce anything more than pleasure we can sell, bodies we can buy, and cheap purposes paid out in dollars – slavery legalized, because the slaves get a share in the profits. Ananda Coomaraswamy says that “industry without art is brutality.” True art and craft flourish only in freedom, in a practical but non-economic union that combines beauty and purpose, necessity and survival, knowledge and understanding, experience and wisdom. It requires real work, done by hand, heart, and mind.

[2] When we read that God gave Adam and Eve dominion over creation, it’s interesting to note that the language had less to do with the power of master and slave than it had to do with the mundane cooperation between inhabitants of one house (from Latin, domus). We build and occupy houses to serve the needs of all the inhabitants, so dominion can imply service, the rule of relatedness rather than the practice of power. We measure service not by rightness or wrongness, but by how things fit – or not. When they fit, we get life. Whether we do it for theology or science, the ultimate purpose of naming the parts has little effect on our ability to control life but immense impact on our ability to participate in it.

[3] The quality of wholeness is also essential to health and holiness – words that share a common linguistic root, because they share a common basis in human experience. Holiness suggests union with the universe. Health suggests union with nature. Breaking either bond destroys wholeness and invites disease.