Good News 5 – Mystery
Our imagination thrives on mystery. We hunger for the opportunity to make a discovery, always hoping to find out more about what is going on, wanting to solve puzzles and constantly seeking to understand more about the world around us. Imagination is what makes us human. Books offer one way to feed our imaginations, inveigling our attention though novel settings, people and events which call out to us and draw us in, asking us to explore ‘what’s happening?’ Some challenge us by presenting scientific, historical and analytical information, new perspectives on what we thought was familiar. I could read all and every day, working my way through a library. Books of every kind keep me alive, but I’ve written before on the current and compelling allure I find in detective novels which give me the opportunity to solve a mystery – who did what – or at least attempt to do so!
Our engagement with the visual arts is different. Unlike time with books, our engagement is often ephemeral. We seldom set aside the time to explore why a particular work of art seems to speak to us: we just ‘like it’, enjoy looking at it, but the pressure of events in our current very busy world soon shifts our attention. Unlike when we visit to a gallery, the paintings, photographs or objects in our home offer a different opportunity. They are always there to re-catch our attention, but even they can slip into the unconsidered background. However, when we allow it to happen the process of really looking can be immensely rewarding, especially if we give space for the artwork to flow in various directions, some directly related to what we see, but mostly through the other images, associations and ideas that emerge.
On the wall in my bedroom there is a painting by Linda Kent, oil on canvas, 35×44 centimetres. If it were a photograph, you would say it was a composition comprising a letter resting on a piece of wood. It is unnamed, but let’s provisionally call it ‘Mystery’.
The first question we are prone to ask of a picture is ‘what does it represent?’ There is a long tradition of representation in art, a tradition we can trace back to the cave paintings in Lascaux, and before. We don’t know what the artists in Montignac were seeking to achieve through their wall paintings. Testing suggests they appear to have been added over several generations some 17,000 years ago. They include some very detailed and accurate images of the fauna from that time, mainly horses, cattle, stags and bison, surrounded by stick-like people. We can see these paintings are far from mere representation, but we don’t know what ends they served. They may have been painted for enjoyment, for instruction in hunting techniques, or they may have had some ceremonial or religious significance. Looking at the paintings of the stags and bison, the fidelity is incredible, capturing both form and movement.
Is Hidden also a demonstration of fidelity to what can be seen? Or is it like a carefully executed Thomas Gainsborough canvas? Think of one of his portraits, a landowner with his estate behind him, and his other chattels nearby (usually a wife and a dog, and maybe a child as well). In contrast to the vibrancy of those Lascaux paintings, the deliberate accuracy of Gainsborough’s work is very static: as we look, we are witnessing a pose, a demonstration of prestige and wealth, the elements of the painting subordinate to the male at the centre. The painting is a recording, and a viewer would be expected to understand this is a person of importance, of power. This moment was deliberately frozen so it would continue to impress us long after the event. Perhaps Hidden is also intended to convey a message?
Is it like a Thomas Cole painting from the 19th Century, an accurate depiction of unspoilt scenes in New Hampshire, an almost photographic record of mountains and rivers, natural beauty? No, his work is much more than that: we know Cole removed objects he didn’t want in his paintings. Log cabins, farmed areas and clearings would be erased. Cole was asking us to see what the world had been like. Unspoilt, this is ‘nature’. Is this a painting in a series, like Monet’s series of twenty-five paintings of ‘Haystacks’, his revealing examination of the impact of light and weather on the humble haystack? If there ever was art that was solely representational, photography killed it. How interesting that some artists today use a photo-realist approach, also capturing a specific moment, a particular perspective, encouraging us to look again at what we thought was familiar: the fact we are looking at a painting shifts our examination of an image in a way that may not happen with a photograph. If many artists eschew the representational in their work, others create images of what has never been, sometimes close to reality, and sometimes abstract, fantastic, abstruse or unreal.
Time to get back to Hidden. What are we looking at? Across the base there is a horizontal piece of wood, a noggin, that appears to be part of wall before the plasterboard has been put in place. There’s a vertical stud, and another noggin, or wooden cross brace, further up. The envelope resting on the lower noggin is facing away from us, apparently sealed. We don’t know if there is any information on the front, a recipient’s name and address? But this isn’t a photograph. As far as the observer is concerned, this image only exists as a painting, not a representation of a real wall. Slightly mysterious, we seem to be observing the inside of an unfinished wall and an inaccessible letter. The painting is far from photographic, with a rough surface of thick paint, clearly an oil painting. Naming it ‘Hidden’ was deliberate.
I could ask the artist, what is this about?’ There is a vast industry concerned with ‘explaining’ art. Historians show us how imagery became more faithful to what was being seen, through the increasing understanding of perspective, sight lines, reference points and so much more. Others explain what the artist was trying to achieve, how the work related to a commission, a place where it was to be displayed, how it was informed by beliefs, values and hopes. I can still recall my giddy excitement as I read an analysis of The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein the Younger, in John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture. He used the painting to explore what he argued we have lost through the gradual erosion of the spiritual by the scientific. John Carroll might have been a little didactic (actually, quite a lot), but he did make me think. I had the same experience reading Michel Foucault’s exploration of Velázquez’ Las Meninas in his book The Order of Things. Intellectually fascinating.
I still enjoy reading commentaries like those. However, they are almost independent of the experience of the artwork itself. The alternative is to see what a painting offers when observations aren’t mediated by experts or commentators. The artist knows each work escapes their control, but I suspect they may wonder how each viewer reads their work, anticipating each will do so in their own, particular and sometimes idiosyncratic way. I like to look at Hidden and I don’t feel the need to have it explained. The more I have looked at it, I have found that in several different ways it encourages me to think about ‘mystery’.
At the most prosaic level, there’s the objects I can see, and especially that envelope. It is turned away from the viewer, and we can’t know for whom it was destined. Perhaps no-one. It could be that this was one of those letters you write to get something said, to get it off your chest, but never to be sent. Plasterboard will go up, nailed to the stud, and the letter will remain, entombed, lost to the world. Shouldn’t we want to know what’s inside? It makes me think of Charles Handy’s image of the white stone. In The Hungry Spirit he explains:
“I keep a small white stone on my desk … It refers to a mysterious verse in the Book of Revelations in the Bible, a verse which goes like this: “To the one who prevails, the Spirit says, I will give a white stone…on which is written a name, which shall be known only to the one who receives it.” I am no biblical scholar, but I know what I think it means. It means that if I ‘prevail,’ I will, eventually, find out who I truly ought to be, the other hidden self. Life is a search for the white stone. It will be a different one for each of us. Of course, it depends on what is meant by ‘prevail.’ It means, I suspect, passing life’s little tests, until you are free to be fully yourself, which is when you get your white stone …
If we knew what was on the white stone to start with, what it meant to be fully yourself, it would all be easy. Since we don’t know what it is until we have it, we can only proceed by constant exploration. It is always a long search. Many give up or never start. … This start on the road to the white stone is not, therefore, an invitation to endless navel-gazing, but a warning not to wear clothes that don’t fit you. Stop pretending, in other words, or you waste your life. “Where I am folded in upon myself,” said the poet Rilke, “there am I a lie.” Look outside first, to find yourself, and do not expect to find the full truth until you have exhausted most of the possibilities, until you are near the end. Death is welcomed by many, because it is the end of searching.
The letter in Hidden reminds me of my constant searching, even though I often don’t know what I am searching for or why, looking for something that is just out of reach. If only …
The image of the unfinished room, with the exposed stud and noggins, leads me on to think about the process of leaving, especially leaving things unfinished. This letter might have been for a partner, or a child, but was never sent, possibly never completed. For me, Hidden conveys this overwhelming sense of the mystery surrounding what has been thought but not uttered. What is known but unsaid. Planned but not realised.
It’s that theme in relation to Hidden that leads me on to think about music, and especially songs by Adele. She has released some of the most powerful, evocative and moving songs about breaking up that I know. Looking at the painting, I find myself remembering Rolling in the Deep, with the accompany video of her alone in a crumbling house:
There’s a fire starting in my heart
Reaching a fever pitch and it’s bringing me out the dark
Finally, I can see you crystal clear
Go ahead and sell me out and I’ll lay your ship bare
See how I’ll leave with every piece of you
Don’t underestimate the things that I will do
There’s a fire starting in my heart
Reaching a fever pitch and it’s bring me out the dark
The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling
We could have had it all (You’re gonna wish you never had met me)
Rolling in the deep (Tears are gonna fall, rolling in the deep)
Now I am wondering, is that letter a threat, lurking, waiting to be revealed?
Adele’s singing to someone, but she’s alone. Will that person ever know what she thought, or, as in Hidden, is what she is saying meant to remain personal and private. Adele specialises in complex and sad songs, and in setting them in abandoned homes. Looking at the painting, I think of her again. This time Hidden has conjured up her song Hello, about yearning to make contact, but knowing it is too late:
Hello, it’s me
I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time’s supposed to heal ya
But I ain’t done much healing
Hello, can you hear me?
I’m in California dreaming about who we used to be
When we were younger and free
I’ve forgotten how it felt before the world fell at our feet
There’s such a difference between us
And a million miles
Hello from the other side
Hidden conjures up the feelings of opportunities lost, too late to address them or to change.
Above the unopened letter the stud and noggin make a cross. Like many people, I have a complicated relationship with the church, the Anglican Church in my case. All that stuff about resurrection, a god, angels and so on, all that side of institutional religion I ignore. However, Christian teachings are about the love you should have for others, the ethic of care and consideration, humility and forgiveness: much of that is deep in my being. I suppose that is the inevitable consequence of growing up and attending church when I was school age, even though my parents didn’t encourage me. It’s left its mark.
I associate churches and religious symbolism with peacefulness, with the quiet of the church, with the soothing repetition of familiar prayers and hymns. That said, religion is intimately involved with the idea of mystery, that there are things we cannot know, meaning beyond our comprehension. In the sealed envelope and the cross, I am reminded to acknowledge something I know but can’t explain, to do with the limits of science, rationality, what we can see, as opposed to what we feel and believe. I was brought up in a scientific environment, my father a physicist, and for many years I thought I would end up as a geologist. Science still fascinates me. However, now I am always a little cautious. No, that’s not it. I am unconvinced that computers, artificial intelligence and scientific analysis will ever explain what we are. Humans aren’t squishy machines, and I believe computers will never be conscious. To talk about them thinking is misleading. They will never ‘see’ Hidden.
I could continue. There is much more I see in Hidden. My engagement with the painting is ongoing and always evolving. However, I’ve run out of space. “Well, there it is” as Emperor Joseph II said in Amadeus. Peter Shaffer knew what he was doing in putting those words in Emperor Joseph’s mouth. As the film delicately made clear, Joseph was well aware there was a lot more to be said, but propriety, time, and his own fear of appearing inadequate made him unwilling to explore the mystery in what he heard. Such a self-important boy!
Looking at Hidden evokes a sense of mystery, of what we don’t know and what we can’t know. At a time when we are subjected to never ending explanations of everything, I find it reassuring there is still mystery. Mystery is good news. It keeps us alive, encourages us to wonder, to seek to solve what doesn’t make sense, to create, and to be dissatisfied. It will be really good news if that continues to be the case: without mystery, we are nothing.
