Nicholas Higgins 12/06/2020

Modern Art and Man’s Search for Meaning

‘Through art we can know another’s meaning of the universe’, Marcel Proust, Maxims

Modern art is uncompromisingly divisive. For some, it is the pinnacle of a progressive, 21st century society. Modern artworks do what all good art should do, they subvert conventional wisdom and challenge accepted norms. Thus, they are enshrined with a religious fervour in the world’s top museums, and sell for fiendishly expensive sums on the international art market. 

Others are left bewildered, even enraged; is this art, art, what does it mean, why do they do it this way? Are artists just pulling the wool over our eyes and having a laugh at our own expense. They’re indignant that ‘something a toddler could paint’, commands so much attention and monetary value. Contemporary art is also abhorrent; Marcel Walldorf’s ‘Petra’ showed a silicon and metal sculpture of a German police woman squatting and urinating a synthetic puddle onto the museum floor. Andres Serrano placed a plastic crucifix into a glass tank filled with his own urine. For those who find this ugly and disgusting, they’re patronised by the privileged insiders, ‘you just don’t understand art’. The humble layman is left feeling like a stupid, unintinated philistine. 

I happen to agree with these protests. Criticising modern art as a freak show, however, does not get to the heart of the matter. Simply bypassing it, or getting angry with it, fails to see that it is one of the keys to an understanding of our times. Art will always conjure the ‘spirit of the age’ (the zeitgeist); whether that art is Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque or Impressionist, all reflect and express a particular view on life and a society’s deep ultimate values. Herein lay modern art’s value. It is the mirror to a crisis in our culture.

Take, for example, Jackson Pollock’s much lauded ‘drippings’. In what was termed ‘action painting’, he randomly tossed paint onto large canvases on the ground. Pollock brought to full circle the work of his avant-garde predecessors, Cezzane, Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky and many others. All sought to release art from a slavish copying of reality and develop a ‘new expression’. Only then could the artist shed light on the ‘universal’; the truth of things behind their appearance, the deeper structure and laws of reality. Cezanne tried with post-impressionism, Picasso with Cubism, Mondrian and Kandinsky with the abstract. Pollock brought all these methods to a fever pitch with ‘abstract-expressionism’. This was a new method of depicting reality, a new from of speech, a new sound.

Pollocks drippings represent modernity’s unique understanding of ‘the universal’. In his explosive, random streaks of paint he flung the door open to chaos. As one critic put it, ‘those violent forces - the whirls, the plunges, the thrusts - began to float in an equilibrium of chaos against chaos’. His random tossing of the paint was the metaphorical liberation from all concrete value - political, aesthetic or moral. 

For in this nihilistic world view there can be no absolutes, no true values (so why not put a crucifix in some piss?). The secular thinkers of the last century (Heidegger/Satre/Camus) proclaimed the universe to be utterly aimless, meaningless, irrational and absurd. The only discernible realities are fear, agony, despair, and the absurdity of life. This is a reality without God, without any sort of God at all. The divine, the spiritual and transcendent had died two centuries earlier with the dawning of the Enlightenment and ‘Age of Reason’.

Pollock made visual this new worldview. He painted Nietzsche’s declaration, ‘God is dead and man has killed him’. Contemporary artists have followed in this tradition. As the high prophets of humanist humanity, their task is to expose this world in all its rotten glory. To reveal it as putrid, empty and senseless, as deeply inappropriate, as a strange prison where we do not belong. To visually echo the teacher in Ecclesiastes, ‘Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless’.

Damien Hirst’s ‘A Thousand Years’ was made from a decomposing cow's head, maggots and flies, while Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ consisted of her own unmade bed with sweat-stained sheets and underwear. This art is ugly, because life is ugly, and the highest duty of art is to be honest about who we are rather than deluding us with comfortable fables. It’s the genius of these artists that they can portray such a dismal view of reality quite so well.

Francis Bacon’s, Head VI, is an even more forceful description of how the 20th (and 21st) century man looks at and understands himself. Here he reinterpreted a very much human, ‘normal’, portrait of a pope, into a nightmarish, neurotic, schitzoidal picture of modern man. The pope’s head is torn into the abyss as he screams in agony. In his search for his true self, his humanity, Bacon only sees a cry of despair. As he put it himself, ‘man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason’.

These artists are crying out to understand humanity, to find the ‘man-ness’ in man. For truth more than the brain can encompass and the eye see. For a world beyond the material, behind the appearances. Indeed, for a reality which lies in the depths, behind, beyond this world. Was this not the avowed aim of the modern artist we mentioned earlier, to express the ‘universal’?

But how is this possible when they subscribe to a worldview that denies the immaterial’s possibility? It is a contradiction in terms. The secular artist’s quest for the universal is doomed from the start. It is but a groping in the dark for the things it can never truly grasp.  

The more these artists try to evade the logic of this position, the more they’re driven to an art that can only find alienation, dehumanisation and frustration in humanity. Anguish and guilt, isolation and emptiness, doubt and damnation. Bacon’s portrait is the true visual portrayal of this modern condition. It is the howling for lost values and greatness, for a humanity deprived of its freedom, love and rationality. Walk around a modern art gallery today and listen to the music of our times - and hear, see, open your eyes to the cries of despair, the cursing, the collapsing of this world.

What however of the Christian, indeed most religious people, who think this is not the way of things. Indeed, what if I don’t think the world is irrevocably rotten? What if I think love, beauty and good still exist? What if I do think there are certain universal moral laws? That I am not a collection of copulating atoms or a ‘naked ape’, but a thinking, searching human being? The modern artist, and indeed the modern world, do not account for this kind of beholder. 

Most faiths agree with the modernist creed that the earth is a fallen place; ‘the world languishes and withers. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants’, so lamented Isaiah (Isaiah 24). But compared to modernity’s unflinching pessimism, Christianity at least, offers hope, a way out of this despair. The world does not have to be this way. Our art does not have to look like this. It can be uplifting and deepening as it had been for centuries. The atheist will retort that religion is just another idea of our own, something to give us the tranquillising thoughts that we are more than highly complex bundles of atoms evolved in a long history.

I suppose this is a matter of faith as it is art. But regardless of belief, is there not a place for art that finds the best in humanity? These artworks are like a beacon of light amidst this vast darkness. I think it’s telling that whenever Picasso painted the woman he loved, he did not paint her in an absurd or gross way, he painted her in a normal, flattering way. How revealing that even here love breaks through barriers of absurdity and lostness.

Modern art is the ultimate mirror of our times, and it is here we really see what is happening to man and society. Modern art, with the loss of God, is the drama of our age. Pollock, Bacon, Hirst and Emin have done what all good artists do, they’ve incited a reaction. Their artworks confront our preconceptions. They make us stop, pause and question whether we really subscribe to this view of the world.