Please Note: This posting provides all of my students
in all of my classes with an example of the format I prefer when they
post to their individual blog sites. This example is to assist them in
fulfilling the requirements of their Topic Essay Question assignments.
FORMATTING NOTE: Please use the essay number and title for your posting headline - for example: Essay 17b - Artist - Religion - Art
Essay 17b
Artist - Religion - Art
THE QUESTION: If
Art and Religion can be considered inextricably linked, then what do
you believe the relationship or connections between the Artist, Religion
and Art itself is all about and, why could this alliance possibly be
responsible for influencing humanity the most?
PART ONE
SUMMARY:
What I experienced in my attempt to answer this Topic Question was a
greater clarification of the relationship or connections between the
Artist, Religion and Art itself. It gave me the opportunity to focus my
research and discover more than I had anticipated.
REASON:
The reason this question was asked was to explore the place of the
Artist, Religion and Art in the greater scope of human history and to
further determine if they were interdependent.
PURPOSE: As
for the purpose of selecting and answering this question among the
others we had to chose from, I believe that by better understanding
whether or not concrete relationships or connections between the Artist,
Religion and Art exist and to what extent, I will be better able to
understand art itself and, religion as well. But perhaps more
importantly, the evolving role of the artist in society.
DIRECTION:
Doing the research for this Topic Question and answering it as honestly
as I can may or will set me towards asking similar questions that I
will set out to answer if for the only reason of deepening my knowledge
and understanding of the subject.
IMPRESSIONS:
What perhaps impressed me the most was was how artists have evolved
through the millennia and how the connection between the Artist,
Religion and Art lasted in various forms. Sadly, both religion, most
notably Catholicism, and art have been on the decline for well over a
century. As a result of the research however, I truly believe that when
both, or either, Art or Religion become more pertinent to the average
person, then, and only then, will they enjoy the popularity they
experienced at their peak in the Italian Renaissance.
PART TWO
ANSWER:
Artist, Religion and Art are connected and interrelated because they
provide answers to questions that have vexed us since the beginning of
time. Who am I? Why am I here? Am I alone? The answers to these
questions have been provided by the Artist, the organized belief of the
commune (Religion) and the work they have produced or directed both
solely and collaboratively.
Ambrose Bierce the author of The Devil's Dictionary, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil%27s_Dictionary) was a columnist in the San Francisco-based News Letter,
a small weekly financial magazine. He wrote in 1911 that religion was,
"A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the
Unknowable." (http://quote.robertgenn.com/getquotes.php?catid=258) The
explanation required visual support since, a picture is worth a
thousand words.
Arthur Schopenhauer the 19th century German philosopher (1788 - 1860) said, "Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first."
(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/author/a/arthur_schopenhauer_5.html) He was
one among the first of many 19th century philosophers the to contend that at its core, the universe is not a
rational place. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer)
Is
then religion a rational function? Before I answer that, I must go
back in time to find the origins of Religion. And, with that said, its
collaboration with Art. However, without the Artist, there is no Art.
Following that train of thought: without Art, there may have been no
Religion. According to Trevor Pateman, "It is an arguable claim that
all serious art is in some sense an attempt
to articulate something ineffable, something which transcends everyday
reality, and that it is consequently religious art, whatever the
conscious beliefs of the artist or the audience. On this basis one may
think that artistic creation is (in some sense) a religious act." Or, as the Twentieth Century artist once said, "To
reproduce is human, to create is divine." (http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/religionandartrevised.html)
Max Sterner,(1806–56) the author of The Ego and Its Own (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner) writes, "Art is the beginning, the Alpha of religion, but it is also its
end, its Omega. Even more - it is its companion. Without art and the
idealistically creative artist, religion would not exist, but when the artist
takes back his art unto himself, so religion vanishes. However, in this return
it is also preserved, for it is regenerated." (http://i-studies.com/library/articles/art_religion.shtml)
As
for the role of the Artist in all this, Aristotle said, "The aim of art
is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward
significance." (http://quote.robertgenn.com/getquotes.php?catid=249) How
then could it not be so without the artist? My favorite art historian
Ernst Gombrich who wrote in my favorite art history book - the Story of
Art, said that art was, "...a special faculty of the human mind to be
classified with religion and science."
He also
said that, "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only
artists." He also said, "What an artist worries about when he plans his
pictures, is something... difficult to put into words. Perhaps he would
say he worries about whether he has got it 'right.' Now it is only when
we understand what he means by this modest little word 'right' that we
begin to understand what artists are really after."
In
his book, Art and Illusion (1960) , Gombrich wrote that, "Indeed, the
true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to
create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great
master the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible
world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible
realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use
our eyes."
The Pioneer spacecraft was launched in 1972
with a a pair of plaques with a pictograph depicting, among other
symbols, the nude figures of a human male and female to provide
information, in the event they are intercepted or found by
extraterrestrial beings, about the
origin of the spacecraft and the planet it was launched from. Gombrich,
in true style, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "...what
could a directional line mean to creatures who hadn't invented bows and
arrows? And if, somehow, they were to grasp that the drawings depicted
humans, without a knowledge of foreshortening how could they know that
the woman's body was slightly turned, partly obscuring a hand? They
would assume that Earth women had a claw."
 |
| FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer_plaque.svg |
In short, he
answered this question as he continued to ponder on the "art" spacecraft
was carrying when he said, "The pictograph illustrated that illusion in
art derives from a system of conventions evolved over centuries of
trial and error, a process of "making and matching" whereby our reaction
to an image corresponds to the reality of what it represents.
Therefore,
Art and Religion is inextricably
linked through what Gombrich so aptly describes as the Artist's attempt at making and matching and our reaction to the image and how it corresponds to our reality of what it represents. This reality he believed is
"what happens when somebody sits down and tries to paint what is in
front of him."
(
http://www.4shared.com/document/GGLvh3kR/Gombrich_-_ART_AND_ILLUSION.htm)
