Another in the interesting series which brought forth so many variations on this controversial
artist.
TO HELL WITH PICASSO – OR, THINKING ABOUT THINKING
One has to be awfully careful about saying “to hell with Picasso” - I mean, one must really
think about that.
First of all, there’s the problem of who is Picasso. OK – he’s a very famous artist, and one of
the reasons he’s famous is because he painted some extremely weird and bizarre paintings,
about which a great many official as well as unofficial art critics have expended reams of
paper and oceans of ink – or the computer equivalent thereof.
Long ago I was in Paris and I went to the Picasso Museum or whatever it was called, and I
was very much the dutiful tourist in those days. So I schlepped around from painting to
painting, and from room to room, and I studied all the notes attached to the walls and in the
brochure in my hand, and a whole lot of facts about various periods and styles and themes
and techniques that this man had gone through arrived in my mind where they have
continued to stew for years in a state of maldigestion. What I actually experienced for real
was that Picasso was a damn good painter in the conservative, conventional old style when
he chose to do that, but that he mostly didn’t choose to do that, but went off instead into all
sorts of what seemed to me to be crazy, ugly, distortions and perversions. These pictures
gave me no pleasure at all, but – as I said – I was a very dutiful and obedient tourist, and so I
did the plod and I came out being able to say “I’ve been to the Picasso Museum” and having
picked up enough of the accompanying jargon there to feel thoroughly uneasy and
uncomfortable whenever his name came up. In later years, of course, I came to realize how
very conservative and conventional my upbringing had been, and that I was in fact very
narrow-minded!
Because I have received a great deal of education in various fields I have learned that it really
isn’t safe to go round saying “to hell with Picasso!” One reason for this is that we live in an
age of experts. No matter what field is at issue, there are experts who know a frightening
amount about it, and if you make a strong statement of approval or disapproval based purely
on your gut reaction to the thing in question, chances are you are one of those fabled fools
who rush in where angels fear to tread. You will be made to look and/or feel extremely foolish,
because, dear heart, you really know nothing about art/Picasso/ aesthetics/ cubism –
whatever…
And I have to nod my head knowingly and say, yes, I know this sort of thing from the music
field. Once upon a time I could be in the same room with a live or recorded performance of a
Bach keyboard fugue on the piano or pipe organ, and I would simply hear a blur of busy
sounds that went up or down or all over the show and I almost instantly switched off and went
into a trance thinking about everything in my life except the music that was flowing through
me.
And if you had asked me how I liked the fugue, I would have said something like: “It doesn’t
speak to me”.
But years later, when I had to study fugue-writing as part of my advanced music studies, I
very quickly changed my tune, as you might say: I then discovered what fugues were about, I
acquired an overwhelming respect and admiration for Johan Sebastian Bach, and I really
listened when I was privileged to be in the presence of his music, following the
announcements of subject and countersubject, and all the cunning inter-twinings of the
various delicate parts that wove together to create the magnificent whole.
So I have to presume that Picasso experts would regard my gut reactions to Picasso’s work
as infantile and irrelevant. My eyes and my mind simply have not been trained to see what is
there, and to understand what it all means.
Like a cage of monkeys in the zoo… what does Joe Bloggs see there? A jostling crowd of big
and small monkeys jumping around that cage – perhaps two are eating bananas. But Dr.
Hans Engelbrecht, the curator of the zoo, who is a world authority on monkeys and is just
completing a major new book on the social behaviour of this particular breed of monkeys –
well, what he sees when he looks at that cage would occupy a great many pages in the new
book.
So, one thinks twice before saying “to hell with Picasso.” But wait a moment – there’s another
problem that complicates the issue. And that’s that hoary old Emperor’s New Clothes story.
It’s all about peer pressures, and wanting to look good and knowledgeable to our fellows, and
not wanting to be shown up as ignorant or not “with it”. And the story tells us clearly that the
Emperor was in fact naked, but the courtiers and onlookers thought there must be something
wrong with them if they simply said what they saw. So everyone except the little boy spoke
admiringly of the Emperor’s magnificent new clothes. So one can’t be sure that any particular
thing might not be a case of a naked Emperor!! No matter how “expert” the expert, he or she
may be promoting something that is not intrinsically valuable – in terms of perhaps aesthetics,
or whatever the value system may be that is at issue. The expert may not be doing this in a
consciously fraudulent way – it may be at a far more subtle level.
Not so long ago, there was a spate of books about “Busking” – fraudulently conveying the
impression that one is knowledgeable in various fields such as politics, philosophy, film – or
whatever. “Busk your way through Philosphy” – you mug up a few key phrases, acquire a
smattering of the appropriate jargon – and you can get away with murder (an art that many
politicians have long practiced!).
Then there’s all the more recent literary theories about Reader Response and that sort of
area, which claim that the author’s intention is quite irrelevant – even assuming we know or
are able to discover what that intention may be. All the emphasis is on the reader, or the
recipient of the art-work. But even here, there are huge problems! When we say “beauty is in
the eye of the beholder”, what exactly do we mean? The ignorant, spontaneous, untutored
eye of the total layman? Or the eye of the insider – the person who brings tremendous
baggage TO the art-work? We see schoolchildren on museum and art-gallery tours. They are
being programmed young into the accepted cultural responses – injected with the baggage,
so to speak.
We haven’t even gone into the vexed topics of intrinsic value – does such a thing exist? If it
does, how do we access it? – and fashions in art, music, literature, etc.
Human creativity is so complex, and human reactions to it are even more complex!
And so one may be doomed to wander forever in a limbo of indecision between one’s
instinctive gut reaction, one’s educated response, the advice of so-called experts, and the
dictates of current fashion!
I’ve written: “one’s instinctive gut reaction” – but do we honestly end up with any such faculty
after we’ve been through the educational mill?
It’s all a big game, isn’t it? Culture and our responses to it is like playing a complicated game.
We have this concept called “understanding” – education is about this “understanding”. What
“under stands” or “stands under” this artwork? And then there’s the generally accepted
corollary to this: to understand is to forgive! No matter how shocked or outraged one may feel
when confronted with a certain work or school of art, one submits to the process of seriously
studying the then prevailing conventions, the artist’s purpose – expressed or deduced by the
“experts”, - all the influences that played upon his work, so that one is simply not allowed to
say: “to Hell with Picasso” without qualification.
I once went to a psychologist who based his practice on the belief that, if you have been hit by
a bus, you can spend forever examining retrospectively all the minutiae that concern the bus
and the accident itself, OR you can put all that behind you and focus on who you are now,
having been hit by the bus. Exposing oneself to any form of art is like being hit by that bus –
but of course, although some artworks actually seem to traumatize us, mostly the coming-
together is neutral or pleasant. And so the multitude of approaches to the human
confrontation with creative artworks swings from focusing on the artist to concentrating on the
receiver/spectator/listener.
Perhaps we could also bring in the colour-blindness analogy here. Young children learn to
see and to speak about what they see. Colour is one of the first concepts they are taught. But
in cases of colour-blindness the child does not see what most other people see. Presumably
there is a kind of “colour-blindness” in the aesthetic field too, so that there may be who knows
how many people who cannot – because of something in their inborn nature – see what most
other people see or hear or understand in an artwork.
So, we are trapped in a maze, or a spider’s web, or a quagmire: it is decidedly risky to say “To
Hell with Picasso!”
In philosophy, we studied cynicism, and we came to see that the ultimate limit of this stance is
speechlessness or paralysis, because if one is a total cynic, one has, in logic, to be cynical
about cynicism itself.
At the opposite extreme, we have seen that total blind faith in the so-called experts may often
be misplaced, and that, in any case, the experts themselves undergo fashion shifts.
Few of us would be content to adopt the paralysis of total cynicism, and many of us reserve a
very healthy opposition to being devoted slaves of the “experts”; so it seems that our only
realistic path forward is to attempt an ongoing “educated” discernment, while being only too
aware that what has been done to us in the name of “education” is itself not at all a solid and
reliable foundation for life and for the ever-new confrontation of the individual with the artwork.
Our conclusion can only be: “it’s damned risky to say ‘To Hell with Picasso!’ ”.