Art for Arts Sake?

I recently read an article by the founder of The School of Life, Allain de Bottom, who broaches the question “Should Art Really Be For its Own Sake Alone?”  I would highly recommend this brief article to anyone at all interested in the intersection of Theology, the Church and the Arts.  The article reminds me of much of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s critique of the arts in his book Art in Action which I would also recommend.  de Bottom argues that an artist’s reason for creating doesn’t necessarily undermine the value of that which is created.  This of course butts heads so to speak with much of the modernist “art for arts sake” aesthetic, which he suggests loathes any whisper of aesthetic utility.  From this relatively rigid perspective, art must be encountered and experienced only as art, nothing more, and nothing less.  At any rate I wanted to take a few moments and play his assertion, which I generally agree with against another assertion I tend to agree with, Jacques Maritain’s assertion that the artist should create first and foremost for the good of that which is made, and see which one might come out on top. 

I appreciate de Bottom’s concern with artistic content.  Most artists through history don’t share the 21^st century art world’s aesthetic.  Most through the 18^th century at least connected art with some other purpose. Their art wasn’t created solely for its own sake.  Even modern artists respected in the art world have done the same.  de Bottom sites one of my favorite artists Mark Rothko as an example.  He suggests that Rothko himself hoped his work would accomplish something: “allowing the viewer a moment of communion around an echo of the suffering of our species.”  I would suggest many who have seen his work, particularly the layered black canvases he painted for his work for the Rothko Chapel, can attest that he accomplishes this, and perhaps more.  From the opposite direction I was struck on a trip to the National Gallery of Art in DC last year (after reading Art in Action) at the manner in which art work intended for devotional use, for example altar pieces which at one point were installed in churches, were displayed outside of their intended context, with no meaningful nod to their liturgical past.  This removal of an art work from a utilitarian context in order to serve in a purely aesthetic one seems peculiar at best to me.  So I resonate with the assertion that the artist inserts some content into what they create, even if that content is the assertion that what they create carries no content.

On the other side I resonate with the notion of art’s inherent value regardless of its content.  For that I go to Roman Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, who I must confess I read largely through Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of him which she shares in her book on writing Mystery and Manners.  I’ve since read Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, but for some reason I still tend to prefer O’Connor’s Maritain over Maritain himself.  At any rate, I tend to agree with O’Connor that the artist, particularly the Christian artist, should not create as a means to simply promulgate some message.  She would suggest that message lives inside the artist and will reveal itself through the work.  In order for it to be truly heard it must be deeply incarnated into the work, in a manner similar to the way in which the Being and truth of God were incarnated into Jesus, partially to give that truth a greater resonance with those with whom the Divine intended to communicate.  So in short, the purpose the artist hopes to accomplish must be deeply packed into their work.  It must come second to the value of the work itself.  The viewer, hearer, reader of the work’s encounter with the artist’s purpose must be earned through the hard work of the artist to incarnate this purpose into their work. 

So which side wins?  Well, you may have figured out by now if you’ve read any of my blogs that I tend to be a both/and type of person.  I believe both the aesthetic and utilitarian, for the lack of a better word, have to live together for art to function in a manner in which I would tend to recognize as art.  Now I understand the subjectivity of that statement.  And I understand the cans of worms opened by that conclusion, but that’s what the comment section and future blogs are for, isn’t it?

Comfortably Numb: A Restless Prayer

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
And I have become comfortably numb

-Roger Waters

I’m not too manly to admit it.  I cannot listen to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb without tears coming to my eyes.  There’s something about David Gilmour’s 4 minute guitar solo at the end of the song that does it to me every time, which of course is no good when you’re stuck in traffic and trying to choke back tears so the guy in the Beamer next to you doesn’t catch sight of you weeping like a baby in your car.  On a side note, this is why I try not to judge the folks who dance and make hand gestures to the music in their cars to harshly… there are times when I’m one of them. 

At any rate, I would venture to say that the song stirs in me something akin to my experience in worship.  Of course what is stirred isn’t a worship of the song, or of Gilmour or Floyd, but of the God who gave Gilmour his hands and feel on the guitar, and gave Roger Waters his creativity with words, concepts and composition.  It’s the same experience of Divine encounter I often feel when playing drums as I individually, and as a member of the faith community, employ music to worship in a church setting.  I know that will sound odd to many ears, and I don’t fully understand why or how that happens, but I’ve been thinking about it, and would like to explore that “why” and “how” a little here.  This may be irrelevant to most folks, particularly if you don’t experience this song in the way that I do, but I’m pretty sure we all have some song, or movie, or television show that regularly, if only fleetingly, pulls back the veil that separates seen reality from the reality not typically available to our senses.  So perhaps this might be helpful to someone other than me.

The music for the song was written by Gilmour who brought it to Waters who then wrote the lyric.  It was included on Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall, and is one of only two songs on the album that don’t fully integrate into the story being told.  The song itself can be viewed in 2 sections.  The verses are written in the key of B minor and, depending on the arrangement, can sound ominous and threatening, which is the way Gilmour preferred it.  Waters didn’t take to that arrangement, and so the recorded version sounds less ominous than Gilmour’s live versions.  At any rate, the verses are sung from the perspective of someone other than the song’s “protagonist”, for the lack of a better word.  It’s someone trying to “help” the singer, perhaps a doctor or counselor.  This helper seems to be someone who does not necessary have the singer’s best interests at heart.  The chord progression, Bm, A, G, Em, Bm, is constantly descending.  In short the verses are a constant and continual “downer”.  I would suggest this plays on our conceptual constructs involving angst and depression. We describe it as “feeling down”, and it’s often described as a feeling of “drowning” emotionally.  The verses seem to embody that feeling of being pulled under, of being out of control, a victim of hopelessness and despair. 

The chorus changes keys to D major and seems to be the protagonist’s inner thoughts.  It’s far brighter than the verse and alternates between A and D and then C and G chords, moving in fifths, which embodies a more familiar and comforting quality than the verse progression.  The singer seems to describe an inability to communicate with those outside of his or her body, and in both chorus’ reaches for and cites childhood memories as a type of comfort.  The singer seems to want to push back at the verses’ narrator’s attempts to anesthetize him or her, but seems unable to, ending each chorus with the admission that “I have become comfortably numb.” 

Additionally, latent in each chorus is a sense of unarticulatable spiritual longing for something only fleetingly experienced as a child.  In the first chorus there is the assertion that “this is not how I am”.  This longing is clearer in the second chorus when he admits that as a child he “caught a fleeting glimpse” of something, but “cannot put my finger on it now”  That fleeting glimpse as a child has been replaced with numb acquiescence as an adult to something seemingly less meaningful than that childhood experience with what I might call mystery.  Then at the end of the second chorus we go back to the “downer” verse progression.  It seems the protagonist is stuck in his or her numbness.  The chords seem to answer this inner struggle with, “this numbness is all there is”… but that’s when Gilmour steps in. 

The rest of the song, which is about 4 minutes, a lifetime in rock music, is dedicated to David Gilmour’s brilliant guitar solo.  It’s at this point the waterworks prepare to flow.  At the start of the solo Gilmour tends to hang around the middle to bottom of the guitar fret board, playing “lower” notes.  He even gets down to playing around the 2^nd and 4^th frets on the A string, inserting an open A few times.  The solo starts in the territory of the verse progression, low.  Over the course of the 4 minute solo Gilmore seems to slowly work up the fret board.  Spending time riffing around the 7^th, 9^th and 10^th frets, then at the 14^th and 16^th frets, until finally in the wailing climax of the solo he’s droning for measure after measure on the 21^st and 22^nd frets on the high e string, which is the part of the solo that most deeply affects me. 

This is by no means a straight line.  There are peaks and valleys.  Sometimes rising, sometimes falling, but always with what I might describe as a transcendent trajectory.  This feels like an attempt to accomplish musically what the verses couldn’t, to climb the fret board, overcome the numbness, and touch that briefly glimpsed mystery.  I can identify with that struggle: which manifests itself in my spiritual life in my pursuit of God.  Not to mix musical metaphors here, but Jon Foreman of Switchfoot articulates this well in their song Restless.  He sings:

Until the sea of glass we meet
At last completed and complete
Where tide and tear and pain subside
And laughter drinks them dry

I'll be waiting
Anticipating
All that I aim for
What I was made for

With every heartbeat
All of my blood bleeds
Running inside me
I'm looking for you

What moves me about the song is that I experience musically what Foreman describes lyrically; that restless search and struggle to find God, which mirror’s Augustine’s ancient assertion that, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  I would suggest this is true even after coming to faith.  Even then we’re restless for a deeper understanding, a greater knowledge, and more complete experience of the Divine.  This is what the song and Gilmour’s solo draws out of me.

The song ends with Gilmour sliding back down the fret board, ending back where he started on the Bm.  Was all of that transcended trajectory for nothing?  Were the verses right?  Is the numbness inescapable? I suppose that depends on how a person hears the song.  I travel up and down the fret board myself.  Sometimes experiencing and reflecting the glimpses of God’s breaking into the world in Jesus, and sometimes acquiescing to the world’s anesthetizing numbness. It’s then, in the pressing numbness, that I find I’m thankful for the restlessness.  There’s a sense in which one can view it as the Spirit’s loving elbow to our ribs, and you can see it in action in the song’s protagonist and his or her longing for the source of that “fleeting glimpse.”  So take heart, even if we find ourselves back where we started, after all of our efforts, we find the Spirit there continuing to draw all of us toward the love of God.  May we have the ears to hear it… in this and other songs.