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Sustained and Redemptive Winds:
Art in a Time of Adversity
by
John Wood
There are a few works of art in this exhibition one might call
beautiful, but there are certainly not many. This
fact may disappoint some viewers, especially those who are troubled by
harsh encounters with art, by art that seems deliberately rough-edged,
hard, unbeautiful, or often even ugly. Because much of the
world’s art—from Paleolithic cave paintings to the work of today’s
Visionary Realists—is beautiful, some viewers have come to assume that
art’s sole function is to bring beauty into the world. When art
sets out to be joyous and celebratory, that is usually what
happens. Consider the Belvedere Apollo, van der Goes’s Adoration
of the Shepherds, Botticelli’s Primavera, Sōtasu’s Pines
of Matsushima, Kōrin’s Irises, the majority of
Impressionist paintings, Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House, Beethoven’s 9th
Symphony, Whitman’s Song of Myself, and on and on, joy
after joy. The joy we see and hear in such works as these is
probably the sacred spring from which most of the world’s art
flows. But it is not great art’s only source.
What, one might ask, then is the source, the explanation of
the despair, the hopelessness and horror of van der Weyden’s Descent
from the Cross, the right panel of Bosch’s Garden of Delights,
Mantegna’s St. Sebastian, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas,
Friedrich’s The Polar Sea, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa
and his moving portraits of the insane, most of Ensor and Munch and the
German Expressionists, Picasso’s Guernica, and on and on
again, but this time horror after horror, pain after pain? The
answer is that art is born as easily of outrage, anger, and pain as it
is of joy. All human emotions are potential sources for art, and
the explanation for those frightening works of art and despairing
artists I mentioned lies in the word I used to describe Gericault’s
portraits of the mad—moving. No artist is required to
work beautifully, only to touch us, to affect us, to move us.
We as a species are driven to share with others our emotions,
both the joyous and the painful. Hardly a day passes in our lives
in which someone does not want to tell us of her delight in something
or his disappointment in something else. Apart from sex, this is
the most fundamental kind of human conversation. Art is a similar
way of sharing, reaching out to, and conversing with others. It
is a conversation about the deepest of our emotions. Occasionally
through the revelation of our pain comes comfort, but more often than
not comes consolation and redemption. And in art that consolation
can also transfer to the viewer. The sadness or despair that is
depicted has the power to liberate the viewer as well, to rescue and
deliver him from it by forcing him to confront another human being’s
experience of emotions all humanity has in common. Is something
like this not the point of almost every novel by Dostoyevsky—redemption
through suffering? Here is the sacred ground religion and art
share. And what of those other bleakest of modern novels:
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Céline’s Journey to
the End of Night, West’s Miss Lonelyhearts? The
beauty of such works, apart from matters of craft, lies not in
traditional notions of the beautiful but solely in how we are
touched, how we are moved and affected, how those authors give us more
life in order to help us deal with our lives.
The way in which the Sustained Winds artists touch
us is not always in a traditional novelistic or narrative manner.
The invention of photography had a profound impact on all the visual
arts because its camera-eye exactitude freed artists from the tyranny
of reality. In doing so it left them free to pursue impressions,
symbols, cubes, abstractions, and even the combining and mixing of
media. But more fundamental than freeing painting from realism,
photography freed “meaning” from the social and historical collection
of narrative references it had so long been bound to—primarily those of
Classicism, Christianity, and Romanticism. Consider Mondrian’s
work, for example. His geometric abstractions do possess meaning,
but meaning having nothing to do with gods, archetypes, the
brotherhood of man, or the spirituality of Nature, yet having much to
do with juxtaposition and what juxtaposition can suggest.
Artists in distancing themselves from the old fashioned,
weighty “meanings” of the past invented new visual grammars. We
easily understand the traditional grammar of a painting of Ulysses
strapped to the mast and lured by the overpoweringly seductive song of
the Sirens. Apart from the formal statements it might make, it
makes two factual statements: This is Ulysses, the mythic
hero, and You, too, can be overpowered by sexual Sirens if
you are not careful. Mondrian’s grammar, however, is
different; it is invitational. It coaxes us, Look at the
juxtaposition of these shapes and it asks us, Do these
juxtapositions suggest anything to you? Mondrian’s grammar
had far less to do with telling than with showing
and suggesting, and so the question of meaning shifted from
“What does it mean?” to “How does it mean?” Because traditional
meaning is so embedded in our thinking, we sometimes think that it is
the only kind of meaning, and so when confronted with strikingly
original work such as those in this exhibition, viewers are sometimes
left feeling baffled, left wondering, “But what does that have to do
with the hurricanes?” Many of these artists in their showing
and their suggesting leave that up to us because they are not
trying to narrate a story; they are trying to put certain things
together in ways that reverberate so deeply with their loss, pain,
anger, and other emotions that those emotional reverberations speak to
us in fresh and unique ways—in healing and even beautiful
ways.
As I said earlier, the beauty here lies in how we are touched,
how we are moved. No one can stand before the outrage, the fear,
the fury, and the desolation of so many of the works of art in Sustained
Winds and not be affected. In looking at this exhibition of
the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on some of the finest
artists of South Louisiana, one will see that the sustained winds of
those terrible storms resulted in something redemptive. In these
artists’ depictions of the chaos, displacement, destruction, suffering,
and loss those winds brought, there also is the liberating spirit of
endurance and deliverance.
Author’s Note
John Wood is a poet and photographic/art critic whose
books in both fields have won national awards, including the New York
Times Book Review’s Best Books of 1995 and the American Library
Association's “Outstanding Academic Books of the Year” for 1992.
He is as the principal Editor of the publishing house 21st Fine Arts
Books and is also a professor of English literature, Director of the
Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, and a professor of
photographic history at McNeese State University in Lake Charles.
He co-curated the landmark 1995 Smithsonian Institution / National
Museum of American Art exhibition Secrets of the Dark Chamber,and hehas
published over twenty books. His exhibition catalogue essays on a
variety of painters and photographers have been published in Italy,
Germany, Greece, Mexico, and the United States. The Los Angeles
Times said of Wood’s work that he “draws boldly original revisionist
conclusions and systematically dismantles many myths.”
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