druk w: w: Sol invictus. Malarstwo a
chrześcijaństwo, red. Stanisław J. Ruksza,
IX Biennale sztuki, Wobec Wartości, Muzeum Archidiecezjalne w Katowicach,
BWA, Katowice 2003.
janusz krupiński
The Ideal of Creative Grace: Religiosity
Religiosity is an internal attitude or a particular way of treating or
feeling things, people, and the world...
Religiosity understood in this way – that is as a feeling – is far from
denying the possibility of creation.
The essence of creativity is connected just with feeling, and not with
activity/making or dealing. And a
feeling is creative when it is pervaded by religiosity.
If only creation is a movement towards what’s higher and other, that is
the movement in which man can exceed himself.
Before I develop this thought, I’d like to present a differentiation of
two opposing images of creative process and creation.
I call them, however not arbitrarily, the ideal of creative grace and the
ideal of creative power.
[1]
These investigations over the ideal of creative grace have led me to the notion
of religiosity.
1. Power and grace
The ideal of creative power has dominated the mentality of the last
century. The artistic and political avant-garde movements and, first of all, the
very idea of avant-garde have been its products.
[2]
This ideal determines the desire of predictability... of life and the world; the
aspiration after domination, control and power, the primacy of
self-consciousness. A man who
captured (!) this ideal, wants to be the source of everything, and to
subordinate everything to him. He
understands creation as a movement from his inside to the outside, for example
in the shape of expression that articulates his ego or the self-realisation.
He wants to see the start, the point of departure only in himself.
He wants to be the first mover, and the first cause and reason of
everything, owing nothing to anybody, and depending on nothing. Ex nihilo.[3]
However, according to the ideal of grace, the proper creative movement
goes from the outside to the inside. Just like inspiration (or inhalation, the
breath in). A work happens as if a
miracle, that is there are no regulations, rules, notions or methods that could
lead to it or that could take it in and exhaust.
The one who experiences it, doesn’t say I, for example “I have drawn”.
He says only: something is drawn “in me”, something is seen “in me”.
Something happened “to me”.
And he even does not call it his own work, like Ernst, who has rejected
the thought about the “creative power of the artist”.
2. Feeling
Casus: art. The creative act
of the artist, contrary to the present common knowledge, is realised in
communion with something or someone; it consists in the way of treating, taking,
experiencing, and referring to...
Therefore it’s feeling, not making something.
Usually we associate feeling with the viewer or the listener.
Erroneously thinking about the audience or about the recipient.
The first viewer of each work of art is its very author.
For it’s in his view (always, and in the case of the viewer is the same)
in correspondence to the assumed/got way of seeing, that a form appears.
To paint is, for example, to look, with your eye and hand.
Since it’s also the hand that can feel (not speaking about the palm!).
And the eye can form, and the hand can see.
What hand makes, what goes out from under it, that is a work, has the
right to be only with respect to the feeling it awakes, even though only in the
hand – in comply with the way of communion and treatment, the creator brought
himself to do.
Whatever makes the chisel or the brush, it is born in feeling and lasts
only until the feeling won’t reject it.
Therefore we can say that conducting follows the will of feeling.
Speaking about feeling, I don’t mean experiences, affects, excitements or
impressions. The one who thinks
highly of experience or impression is, in fact, closing him at the external
reality, and takes delight in his internal states.
He values things, at least the works of art, as much as they give him
experiences. If by feelings we were
to understand experiences or impressions, our feelings would have not been
important, “my” feelings or what I feel towards something or at that something
would not be at stake. In feeling
just that meeting with what’s felt is at stake.
Not impressions, but sensibility is at stake in feeling.
It consists in sensibility.
For it is the manner in which a man meets his opposite half way.
Feeling is the denial of the cutting off, the separation from the
reality. It’s a movement, where the
man opens outwards.
Performing is or the self-realisation of “I”, the reflection, the copy of
ego (his projects, plans, expectations and desires) in non-ego, or that
impersonal, “objective”, and methodical procedure.
What is to be done, is previously known to the performer.
Feeling is a feedback movement, where activity includes receiving and
reacting to it. There is also
attention, waiting and patience in it.
And there is the imagination which does not vanish in fantasy, where
everything could be completely different.
Feeling is an outward movement of my ego towards the Other, to meet Him
half way. When, however, there is a
hope of participation in the existence of the Other, I would speak about
religiosity yet.
[4]
3. Religiosity
Religiosity is something more primitive than all religions.
The term of “religious” has not to mean something “connected with certain
religion”, and particularly with religion in the sense of institution (“the
Church”) or confession (the system of beliefs, and dogmas).
This is an authentic religion – exactly like the acceptance of (the
truth) that reveals – is possible thanks to religiosity.
Therefore I understand religiosity as certain state of soul or spirit, a
kind of mood, and an internal attitude consisting in… In what?
For a long time the sources of religio and religiosus are
seen in the words of religere and relegere, that is in “careful
heed”, “deep consideration”, “conscientious attention”, “devotion to justice”,
or in the word of religare, that is in “renewed union”[5].
These attempts to grasp the sources of the word/notion of “religio”
(irrespective from their etymological-genealogical significance) tell us that
the essence of religiosity is the movement of exceeding ourselves to meet the
Other half way. It is the openness
of man onto the reality of the Other, with which he can be unified.
Therefore living with unreality is alien to religiosity.
In the openness are concealed, demanded by it: conscientious attention,
caring consideration, reliable realisation, listening and asking favour, and
ardent concentration…
Feeling that attempts to accept the movement from the outside – to meet
it half way. It is realised when it
meets a revealing approach, finding a fruitful, liberating way of treating what
it meets. All the time hesitant, for it
knows that whatever it knows, it is dependent on the Other.
A hunch of something other as someone Other is connected with humility
which is specific for religiosity.
With the assumption/hope/consideration that there is something higher than my
ego.
Something higher... What?
This question denies humility. It
articulates the will of grasping the Other.
It thinks that the Other can be grasped, caught, kept.
Seized with the power of mind, with the power of thought, and subjected
to the rule and control. (In the
word “to grasp”, like in German word of “Begriff” we hear grasping, seizure,
capture, taking possession, hence the meaning of the notion of grasping.
Where’s the will to grasp, there’s exclusion of the Mystery and the
sacred, hence desacralisation)
This is why we aren’t looking for the Other; this is the Other that turns
up (Picasso, Tarkowski, Buber, Weil, and St. Paul...).
And we? We don’t remember
about ourselves. (Even though we
find ourselves simultaneously in the Other, anew? the new?)
Ego that would count on the Other, that it would rise thanks to Him
(magic), only wants to heighten. It
is interested, incapable to self-sacrifice, to self-abandon.
But how can man reach the Other without all this?
Complete disinterestedness means suspension of ego.
The stripped inside of man is the empty, free space left for the coming
of the Other. Then it can become
His shrine.
The attitude of religiosity requires giving something from the self.
And even sacrificing of self, of everything, which the ego is consisted
of, of the own tastes, preferences, plans, projects, purposes and intentions...
The one who needs, desires, or wants something, has in the field of
attention only things that can be favourable or unfavourable to his needs,
desires and wants. He takes them
into account and treats them adequately to this.
Nothing exists for him except things that can be correlated with his
interests. The fate – like
everything he has not already dominated – is his enemy.
Therefore it is completely alien for him the experience of the gift that
is brought by the fate...
Projects, intentions... What do they mean when the Other appears?
And when they mean anything, then the Other does not appear.
They erect before Him a wall of mirror (Empedocles).
To be open at what’s other borders with the impossible.
Since long time it was stressed, after Empedocles, that it is unlikely to
approach to what’s unlike us, wasn’t it?
Even though we are unconscious of it every day, objects, the world, and
the people we meet are such as our experiences, images and expectations have
made them. The figures that
appear correspond to forms, in which we see and think.
According to the measure of ego.
Even the face of beloved person that appears is rather an echo, or an
after-sight of our own desires.
We meet rather them, that is our own reflection, don’t we?
In this way others become only a basis, the screen for our projections.
From the Other we are separated by the precipice, we are incessantly
erecting the wall of images… and illusions.
Therefore…
Meeting the Other is the gift of grace.
In this event man exceeds the “principle of Protagoras” (he opens up at
the reality of other dimension than he himself), he ceases to listen to only his
own thoughts, at least he is not keen on his own existence, on him, or on his
own ego.
Therefore liberation?
Love?
4. The Source
This what makes that love is creative is just religiosity.
For we know that the one who thinks only about the value of the other,
doesn’t love it, truly. But the
one, who opens his eyes at the Other, loves Him.
As early as before any worth of Him will appear, and before it will be
given to him. He believes in the
Other. The happy love for the Other
can show in him an even not expected higher value, “as if it would spout from
the loved by itself...”[6].
“Spout”! “By itself”!
The Other appears to be the source of the creative process.
The work is made by itself.
It flows from the Other. This is
from where the creator or the artist can draw.
He accepts the movement that comes from the other side.
The artist gives himself to what he is given.
He lives, he is in Him. This
is the event in which the external reality fills his inside (with its light?).
And since then he takes part in its existence.
This is the real sense of the originality of a work of art.
“Original” means source or coming form the source, in the initial
(“original”) meaning of the word.
[7]
Having such consciousness, Norwid wrote, “Originality is
conscientiousness in the face of the sources”[8].
We should not prove in particular that today in the common opinion an
authentic artist is the very source of his works.
The artist is treated as non-original when his works are not the
expression of his ego, and if he doesn’t derive them from himself, that is when
he owes anything to something else and depends on anything.
Behind this image there is the absurd of Ouoroborus (the snake which
flows from his own jaws, simultaneously eating himself).
We have also that of Münchhausen (who draws himself from the bog by his
own hair), Supersalomon (who can pour from the empty) and the Avant-garde (that
starts everything from the zero point, after bursting out all contents, after
losing memory). The will of power
pushes into absurd, not recognising the character of its utopia.
It dreams about the self-creation of man, on Man as the First Cause and
the Beginning.
Meanwhile, does this what the artist can find in himself come from him
and belong to him?
For Rilke the German word of “schöpfen” could mean simultaneously “to
create” and “to draw” from somewhere (see his Handinneres and Auguste
Rodin). For his translators,
however, these are only two different meanings of the same word, and have
nothing in common. And joining
them in mind to say that to create means to draw is passing as just
preposterous.
Yes, we are speaking about the essence of art all the time.
Beauty is the glare of the opening of the Other and at the Other.
Hence we have the link of love and beauty.[9]
It is a grace. It is not anything
that can be intended, seek or make.
No list of conditions, deeds and merits can provide its presence.
Like in the case of (moral) good, the one who aims at beauty goes away
from it.
Is beauty a value? Or is it
an aura of appearance of some values?
Finally, it is rather the light of existence, that is the real existence.
As far as beauty is concerned, the answer is yes, voiced in the face of
Existence.
5. Voices of artists
Now I give voice to artists themselves, hoping that they will give
credence to the aforementioned abstract considerations.
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Van Gogh: “Sometimes I have a terribLe clarity of view.
Since th% nature is so beautiful, I don’t feel myself, and pictures are
coming to me as if in a dream”
[11].
Mozart: “I’m not here.
Everything, even the invention and performance comes in me as in a beautiful and
very clear dream”.
Shchedrin: “I’ve got an impression that my music is told me by someone from
above. I remember when Dmytri
Shostakovitch said, «I still don’t understand how I wrote the Andante from my
Eighth Symphony»”[12].
Matisse: “An artist is not free to do whatever he likes… We are not the
lords of our work (production), it is imposed on us”[13]<-a>.4/o:p>
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Redon: “Everything in ar4 happens through gentle submission to the coming
of unconscious”.
Picasso: “You start to paint a picture.
What works out is completely different.
Truly, it’s amazing how little important is, in fact, the will of the
artist…”[14].
Picasso: “A picture is not anything thought in advance, and when you are
creating it, you only follow the movement of thought”
[15].
Picasso: “When you start to paint, you don’t know what the result will
be. When you finish it, you don’t
know it, either”
[16].
Klee: “A work of art spreads in space and time like the crown of a tree…
Like in the case of the tree, the role of an artist is nothing more than to
accept and direct further that depth that came to him.
Neither to serve, nor to be master, only to mediate.
Therefore his position is truly important.
But the beauty of the crown does not belong to him, it only goes through
him”[17].
Ernst: “…the role of painter is to mark and project what he sees”[18].
Pollock: “...the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come
through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a
mess”[19].
Japanese sentence: “Paint a bamboo tree for ten years, become the bamboo
tree, forget about the bamboo tree and paint”[20].
February 12th, 2003
(pisane w języku ang.)
[1]
I wrote about them (in Polish), among other things, in my essay entitled
Two Ideals of Creative Grace and Power (in: Zeszyty Naukowo
Artystyczne, the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in
Cracow, vol. 2, 1999).
Wider in: Janusz Krupiński, Intention and Interpretation. On
“Genesis” by Andrzej Pawłowski, ASP, Cracow 2001. It’s just from
Pawłowski’s conception of the “naturally shaped form” I come to the
notion of grace. In the
essay Pawłowski’s Soutane (“-grafia” No. 3, 2003) I try in turn
to show the religiosity of the creative attitude of that artist.
The differentiation of these two ideals corresponds to another one, may
be even more essential: the image as a reflection and the image as
making something present (see: Intention and Interpretation, p.
24-27)
[2]
Unfortunately, the answer to the question about the spirit of
avant-garde is too often searched with those who have put themselves at
the front (treating other as a herd of idiots, which should be directed
by them).
[3]
As if God? In reality, only
god of certain image. To
the ideal of creative grace, I think, the teaching of cimcum by
Luria would be closer.
According to her/him the first act of the process of divine creation
would be an inhalation, a breath in, a contraction, a withdrawal,
self-limiting. In order to
leave free place for something else (about cimcum writes Gerhom
Scholem).
[4]
Here I am falling into glorification of feeling, exposing only one kind
of it. And we know that
feeling can have a destructive form (for example when captured by the
spirit of hatred or curse).
Therefore, if art consists in feeling, it should not result that art is
creative ex definitione!
Those who make definitions of art are used to treat this genus
proximum: “the domain of creation” as something obvious.
Art history is apparently free from assessments.
The methodology seems to exclude all evaluations.
Imperceptibly, however, art histories are written as the history
of “the sacred” and “the saints”, where we have plenty of
“masterpieces” and “progress”.
In blindness and false self-consciousness idols are created.
In art history that I know, the question of genial and
charismatic destroyers is absent.
The public prepared by such knowledge reacts, of course, with
incomprehension, when someone wants to call into question for example
certain Marcel Duchamp...
Historical figures are those that exerted a great influence,
aren’t they?
[5]
See C. G. Jung, Psychology of Transfer; C. G. Jung, On the
essence of Psyche. Letters 1906–1961, (the letter of February 12th,
1959). Jung is adding there
another meaning of the word religere: “to «take into
consideration», to «observe» (for example in prayer)”.
Let’s notice that religare is at the source of the English word
of “rely”: 1. To be dependent for support, help, or supply. 2. To
place or have faith or confidence (The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition).
[6]
Max Scheler, The Essence and Form of Sympathy, translated by Adam
Węgrzecki, PWN, Warsaw 1980, p. 244.
I am quoting Scheler only within the limits in which I can repeat
his particular formulations without reservation.
Scheler shows the nonsense of the idea that love is reaction to
the spotted value of its object.
He defines it as the movement directed towards “being a higher
value” (ibidem, p. 246).
“The values that are higher than those already present in love can be,
however, not given yet as the positive qualities”, s. 239.
The same thing relates to a creating person who is not standing in front
of any value or not directed towards the value of anything.
[7]
See Cyprian Kamil Norwid, On Juliusz Słowacki, Lesson III, in:
Selected Writings, vol. IV.
The poet shows at a figure kneeling at a spring (“who drinks from the
spring, has to kneel and bend his head”).
He opposes to it the image of someone who is drinking from a
decanter, with head up. Who
doesn’t “kneel” will have no access to the Other.
In fact, the Other is higher, and kneeling is a symbol of
humility toward It. The
Other or the Beauty does not strike down to knees.
Those who don’t “kneel” won’t meet Him.
[9]
As readers of Norwid can remember, “Beauty is the shape of love” (Promethidion.
Bogumił,
v. 115, v. 109).
He wrote also that beauty “is a blush and is as if the colour of good
(The answer to the ninth “Letter from Poznań”, Selected
Writings, vol. IV, p. 180; ibidem: “There is no art of creating art”;
“Beautiful enters without asking” (Promethidion.
Bogumił, v. 236), it is like “a chord filling the air, as the
working thought is complemented with chords which take the creation over
the undertaken plan and without the clear will of the master come into
his work” (Citizen Gustave Courbet, Selected Writings,
vol. IV, p. 335).
[10]
Vincent van Gogh, citation after: André Malraux, Obsidian Head,
translated by Anna Tatarkiewicz, PIW, Warsaw 1978 p. 159).
[11]
Vincent van Gogh, Letters to the Brother, translated by J. Guze
and M. Chełkowski, Warsaw 1984, p. 436.
When Van Gogh writes that “I can not do without something greater
than me, what is my life, and what is the power of creation”, he is
conscious that he owes his creations to that something “greater” than
him. Although he
calls that gift “the power of creation”, we shouldn’t be deluded, for he
was close to the ideal of grace, and not creative power.
I wrote about van Gogh and his attitude towards the expressionist art
theory and the expression of ego in: Intention and Interpretation,
p. 16–17.
[12]
Rodion Shchedrin, “Forum”, December 13th, 1998.
[13]
Henri Matisse, cit. after Józef Czapski, Looking, Znak, Cracow
1983.
[14]
Pablo Picasso, in a talk to Kahnweiler, 1955, citation after: “L’Express”,
February 15th, 1996.
[15]
Pablo Picasso, A Talk with Christian Zervos, 1933, translated by
E. Grabska, in: Artists on Art. From van Gogh to Picasso, ed. E.
Grabska and H. Morawska, PWN, Warsaw 1963, p. 553.
[16]
Pablo Picasso, A Talk with Malraux, cit. after: André Malraux,
Obsidian Head, translated by Anna Tatarkiewicz, PIW, Warsaw 1978, p. 67.
[17]
Paul Klee, Über die moderne Kunst, in: Kunsttheorie im 20.
Jahrhundert, Band I, hrsg. von Charles Harrison und Paul Wood, Verlag
Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit bei Stuttgart, 1998, p. 428–429 (the part of
Klee’s text, the fragment of which is cited here, was omitted in the
aforementioned anthology of Artists on Art).
[18]
Max Ernst, citation after: G. Charbonnier, Le Monologue du peintre,
Paris 1959, p. 34; quoted in: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind.
Essays on Painting,
translated by Stanisław Cichowicz, Terytoria, Gdańsk 1996, p. 29–30).
Merleau-Ponty writes about reversing roles between the viewer and the
viewed. There we can also
read that “...many painters have been talking about things that can look
at them. For example André
Marchand, following Paul Klee: “In the forest I have many times felt
that it’s not me looking at trees.
There were days where I felt that the trees were looking at me...
And I was only listening. I
think that the painter should be pervaded by the world, and not only to
pervade the world by himself...”
[19]
Jackson Pollock, “My Painting”, Possibilities I, Winter 1947–1948,
reprinted in: Jackson Pollock, Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. by
Pepe Kermel, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1999, p. 17–18.
Picasso has also spoken about the “life of its own” of his
paintings.
[20]
Cited according to: Brigitte Kita, Chado. Tea and Zen, translated
by Małgorzata Gawlik, Ravi, Łódź 1995, p. 24 (ibidem instead of
“bamboo tree”: “bamboo...”).
Simone Weil writes in the same way: “Thanks to rapt attention the true
painter becomes what he is looking at”, “in the state of complete
attention, the ‘ego’ disappears”, “absolutely undisturbed attention is a
prayer” (Simone Weil, Thoughts, translated by Aleksandra
Olędzka-Frybesowa, PAX, Warsaw 1985, p. 163, 151, 152).
She knows and teaches us that “creation is the renunciation of
self in the name of love” (Simone Weil, The Madness of Love. The
Pre-Christian Intuitions.
Translated by Maria E. Plecińska, Brama, Poznań, 1993, p. 161).
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