Art as Life

This essay was written in 1957.

Art and life are one through composition as individuality. The way we are composed is our individuality; what we feel is an instantaneous relation among everything we have. It is this relation which is life itself. The I is a composition become a point; it is integration felt as an instant and permanently. The I seems one, but we can see there are many things in it. We say: I have memory; I have hope; I have skin; I have relatives, etc. The I goes from point or oneness to manyness. If we went from the relation among things in a painting to the things themselves, we should be doing something like going from I to the things in I.

The self is that which includes everything in it, and is the result of everything in it. It is cause and effect at once. Relation or composition in a painting is cause and effect at once, too.

A general, diffuse, various thing becomes a specific thing as life comes to be. Birth is the comprehensive become specific. Any making of many things one thing is like birth. The organization which is life is more thorough than organization we see usually. The comprehensive become specific is of a richer sort. Life is reality at its most organizing, most aesthetic. It is because we are aesthetic ourselves, that we are disposed to make art. But the ego can go for organization of a worse kind, of what can be called a spurious kind. When the ego is only a container, as a bucket is of stones, organization is going on of an inferior, and, in the largest sense, of a spurious kind. When a relation is seen among the stones other than what the bucket willy-nilly gives them, there can be organization of a good kind. The first kind of organization is akin to inert memory; the second kind to loving imagination.

When man is artist, he, as a living being, honors life truly, shows life at its utmost, by giving life to objects. The principle of form or composition is the principle of life. Ego and death are separation; the whole self and life are togetherness with difference. It is for this reason that art at its best “has life,” and that life at its best “has art.”

Life, as such, is art. Life is the making one of repose and motion; not just motion. Consciousness in life is the repose aspect of life. True individuality is the repose arising from the relation of a self to all it has to do with.  Bad individuality has in it a separation between outward action and a flat repose inwardly.

Our lives are a making one of difference and sameness. Within the I is a tremendous presence of something utterly different, something akin to everything. Art is the embodiment of this difference and sameness in ourselves.

There is the disintegration of ego and there is the disintegration of death. In the disintegration of ego, a oneness of the individual is used against the idea of diversity and otherness; in death, otherness, diversity work against individuality, making for another kind of disintegration. Integration is the utmost oneness through difference, not against difference. What integration is in life, it is in art.

Life results from reality showing itself as art. In keeping with the materialist idea, life is an organization of matter; as is mind. Matter makes mind. So the question is, how does matter make mind? On what terms? The materialists say that matter is capable of indefinite organization, and when organized a certain way it is alive; can have mind. The materialist, therefore, points to the necessity of organization. Organization is composition in action.

The idealist or non-materialist is just as much for organization as the materialist is. The idealist says the organizing principle uses matter to show itself with; the materialist is disposed to say there was no organizing principle to be seen apart from matter. However, whether the organizing principle is in matter, or uses matter, this organizing principle is like art, is art. Whatever made an individual thing aware of itself has in it the artistic process. Artists are, because within reality is art. There is that in reality, too, which can be seen as against art: that is, the separating principle.

In a living being, there is motion resulting from how the living being looks at itself. Life is motion resulting from a thing’s being for this and not for that; it is motion with pleasure or pain as a cause. It is chosen motion, chosen by an individual thing. This motion must go along with what is about the thing and the thing itself; that is, a person walking across a floor in a crowded room, must be right about the floor, the room, and himself. Wherever an action is environmentally right and individually right, we have the beginning of art. For art is the seeing of relation among objects, which, while true to reality, expresses the attitude of an individual thing, a self.

What does an artist do as he looks at objects? He finds a relation among them. This relation brings them to life. The changing of a number of objects into a composition, is the making of them one thing. And the changing of the many or general into one vivid thing, is like birth. Relation in art is the giving life to objects. From this it results that a still life can be more lively than a group of lions and zealous lion tamers. Art shows that the inanimate is alive; and that the living without relation is “dead.”

The fact that art is life, in the deepest sense of the word life, can be apprehended somewhat through statements of critics. I use Thomas Munro’s Great Pictures of Europe.* Mr. Munro, writing of Hokusai’s Rats and Capsicum Pods, says:

By deft gradations in the shade of gray, and by varied outlines—sometimes sharp, sometimes ragged—it achieves a spontaneous, living quality as decoration that is lacking in the Utamaro print.

Here Mr. Munro is saying that something inanimate—”deft gradations in the shade of gray” and “varied outlines—sometimes sharp, sometimes ragged”—make for “a spontaneous, living quality.” This raises the philosophic question: Did life simply show these “gradations” and “varied outlines” or did “gradations” and “varied outlines” precede life? Was there anything so different in the way reality is seen as life from the way a painting is seen as living? In “gradations” and “varied outlines” there are difference and sameness, that is, reality. Is life the difference and sameness of reality, a showing of it? My opinion is that art says this.

Reality is general and is individuals. Reality is the all and the anything. The all become the anything is, biologically, matter become individually life. Allness implies oneness and everythingness. Oneness and everythingness become anything is like what happens in art. There is a oneness and everythingness which, seen together, make for anythingness, or freedom. Birth is an anythingness out of the oneness and everythingness of reality. Every painting is as unique as a birth.

The fact that the word creation is so much used in art, points to the fact that art is seen as life itself. Creation is in life, but it is the life part of life: there is also the dull or dead part of life. Every living thing in a way is as alive as any other living thing, but it is clear that there is, also, more life in some living things than in others; indeed, that there is more life in a living thing at one time than at another. It is this kind of life that art goes after: that which is the affirmation, increase of life. Life goes after its own increase.

Two things are present in life, have to be: organization and intensity. Organization without sufficient intensity is a lessening of life; intensity without organization is also a lessening of life. The utmost organization making for the utmost intensity, the utmost intensity making for the utmost organization are life at its liveliest: which is art.

It follows from what I have said that a portrait of a man may be more lively than the man himself; that the depiction of a landscape may make the landscape livelier; that art may make decorous peaches livelier than lightweight boxers.

The question of whether art is life has much to do with whether what is called idealism is true. Idealism, from the aesthetic point of view, can be described as that philosophy which sees the world as an embodiment of a form, or forms (and the form might, by a religious idealist, be called God). If all we see, touch, smell, hit, throw, meet arises from form, then form, as the instigator of all this material vivacity and power and diversity, is the liveliest thing there is; for the cause of life would be pure, unrestrained, not-in-the-least-sluggish life. If this is the form art is after, wants to get, does get in a way, then art, having some of the very cause of life, some of pure, unpolluted living, is livelier than life as ordinarily we see it. Art would leap over life as somewhat dull agent, or manifestation, to life itself. We do get then to what Shelley calls so poignantly, fervently, Life of Life! in his Prometheus Unbound.

We do know that art brings life to brick and stone and earth and weeds in a back yard. What is this life? Is it only an artistic metaphor, something which people interested in art are permitted to talk about because no obvious harm is done? Or is it something more? If the abstract and the concrete, form and that which we can touch, are both reality, then life in art and life as we have it in ourselves are alike in a way that goes beyond a piquant, permissible comparison.

Life at its beginning is an interaction of tightness and expansion, hardness and softness, situation and change, state and desire, rest and motion. Art shows life as it begins, as it is unblurred by psychological or sociological dulling. It is because art presents life before timid or acquisitive ego can interfere with it, that art, as life, criticizes ordinary life. The criticism of life by life is art.

Thomas Munro, in describing Duccio’s The Three Marys at the Tomb, says:

Further life is added by strong light-and-dark contrasts between the figures, and between various planes of the tomb and mountains.

So how do “strong light-and-dark contrasts” add life? Munro’s words would be only interestingly metaphorical unless the situations in art have something to do with how reality is when it becomes and is life. Reality becomes life when, as art, reality shows itself as life. Sometimes it does this through individuals, through that artistic, creative happening which is birth. Then the living beings representing reality find art elsewhere, find it in many ways. As they find art, they find life. One large implication of art is: A thing’s being related gives it life. A second large implication of art is: A human being is in a position to affirm life by seeing and affirming his relation with things; and when he does, life is made more lively, for the art it began with is welcomed; beautifully declared.