"Coquette et Froide" poem by Julia Ward Howe; // "That'll Be Our Song" (2023), book by Snehil Niharika; // "She Was A Phantom of Delight", poem by William Wordsworth; // @true-love-is-everything // "To Athena, who may Command him Anything", poem by Robert Herrick; // Rush (2013), from the trilogy Breathless, by Maya Banks
‘All art is quite useless’, Oscar Wilde famously proclaimed in the Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde believed that the task of art is neither to instruct nor influence action in any particular way. On the contrary, the aim of art is to create a mood that reveals art and conceals the artist. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, he argued. ‘The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.’
This is a complex claim which undoubtedly raises a number of questions that need to be thought through in greater depth. What is implied by ‘the perfect use of an imperfect medium’? And how might the morality of art be linked to the paradoxical process of revealing and concealing?
Think of one of the great novels or poems that you have read, a theatre performance you have seen, a photograph, or a piece music that you love, and remember the moment when all of a sudden, somehow, everything seemed to make perfect sense. But remember too, just as the feeling appeared to reach its height, it slipped away, leaving behind only the trace of an incomplete and impossible truth. Regardless of how hard we try, this curious occurrence never quite translates into words. In the space of art, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, the solidity of things crumbles and we are dispossessed of our powers to know and master the world in thought.
A poem about a flower in bloom is never an absolute representation of the flower. It cannot provide exact information about the physical properties of the petals, nor can the poet, in the manner of the scientist, succeed in producing concrete objects of rational knowledge that can be used for other purposes. On the contrary, in the poem, language turns into ambiguity and the artwork brings about an experience which cannot be synthesised or subsumed under a clear concept. To quote Blanchot, ‘Art brings duplicity with it’, which is why, for Plato, all the arts were viewed with suspicion. Operating by images, not ideas, Plato believed that artistic practices stir up our emotions, leading us further away from truth and toward illusion. As a result, art was deemed to be a dangerous source of corruption, the presence of which must be controlled, if not entirely banned, from the citizens of his ideal republic.
Let us assume for a moment that we agree with this traditional Western attitude, that language is (and more importantly, ought to be) an empowering tool for rational understanding and certitude. We soon discover that the mystery of artistic language cannot be anything but a flaw. Objects and events that stimulate rather than limit equivocation, unsettle our notion of truth and challenge the very principles upon which our social, economic and political order is founded. For example, since the idea of peace has long been equated with harmony and knowledge, the existence of ambiguity inevitably poses a threat to the welfare of any given society. Thus, the more accurate and informative we are in our modes of expression, the greater the possibility of eliminating the unstable void between self and other, word and object, in our attempt to make sense of the world as a whole through language.
Blanchot was passionately devoted to the exploration of language. Paying heed to the enigmatic nature of language, he describes words as reassuring and disquieting monsters with two faces. In one of his essays, ‘Literature and The Original Experience’, Blanchot makes an interesting distinction between the work of art and the usual object. He observes that matter itself is of no particular interest in the usual object. An ordinary object refers neither to the person who produced it nor does it refer to itself, rather it disappears altogether into its uses. To exemplify, let’s take the fork. The very event of its being created vanishes in its functionality. However, in the work of art, something else emerges together with the thing that is made. Faced with the artwork, we’re touched by an eerie ‘other’, something secret, which seems to defy the laws of cognition. While the usual object announces only how it serves, the artwork announces that it is. What distinguishes the artwork from the usual object appears to be the way in which it relates to the paradoxical play of being.
Now let’s return to the imaginary space of Oscar Wilde’s statement, ‘the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.’. Arguably it is the indeterminacy of artistic creation that renders it ‘imperfect’ and yet at the same time is the source of its openness. The artist is doomed to failure (as Samuel Beckett once observed), but not to domination, in so far as the artist allows the ambiguity of meaning to flourish. Perhaps this can also help us understand Wilde’s first assertion that the aim of art is to reveal art and conceal the artist. Once the artist claims to be telling the truth, realising an action or idea through his work, the work of art loses its purposelessness and instead becomes a means of communication; a way of imposing personal views onto others. Surely this is the life and language of political activism, not art. The more light we shed on a certain object or experience, the more we reduce it and violently suppress its attending otherness.
Perhaps what Wilde is hinting at here, is that art should make what disappears in the useful object, reappear in the work of art. In other words, for it to be called a veritable artwork, the work itself must reveal the obscurity of being and maintain the question of art as a question. Whereas the utilitarian logic of our everyday communication seeks primarily to rid words and objects of their indefinite character, art puts infinity back into language where impossibility and incomprehension are no longer deprivation, but affirmation. As T.S. Eliot writes, ‘genuine poetry can communicate without being understood’. In the experience of the work of art, the essential mystery of being remains mysterious and the artist allows the duplicity of meaning at the heart of language to erupt.
The will to know is without doubt an essential driving force of humanity, but what happens if the ideals of revelation, as total understanding, become the leading goal in society? Within the space of the work of art, distance is kept and things are hidden from view. In the artwork, a person or object whose infinite being we can never fully know, is unveiled precisely by not being entirely exposed. By virtue that it lacks a single, unified truth, the work lets the object and viewer roam freely in the endless realm of the imagination, liberated from the clutches of comprehension. Here, it seems, lies the morality of art.
The word ‘secret’ in English stems from the Latin sēcrētum, which means separated, set apart, withdrawn from view. The secret of secrecy, says the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, ‘does not consist in hiding ‘something’, in not revealing the truth, but in respecting the absolute singularity, the infinite separation of what binds me or exposes me to the unique, to one as to the other.’
Respecting the other person means to keep a secret, which is to suffer the possibility of failure; to live with uncertainty and separation, as well as to tolerate this difference by taking it to heart. In other words, in order to respect another human being I must sacrifice to a certain extent my burning Orphic desire to see the world in its nakedness and to know the other beyond the veil of mystery. In the work of art, truth withdraws and the artist fails, but in the midst of this space of secrecy, the other gently reaches me in her invisible intimacy.
This essay was commissioned by Dan Curtis and Jason Kerley as part of the artists’ publication for the collaborative exhibition ‘On Watching’ at Bermondsey Project Space 2, 2013.
