Magic in one’s madness

on the abandonment of interpretation

I didn’t realise I was crying. But I knew that the painting had taken me away, to a place that was different to all the places that I had known and that I knew. A distant dimension where I was alone—safe to dream with abandon, without having to explain my dreams to others, not even to myself. Had a stranger not interrupted my impromptu, and largely irrational, display of emotion to ask me if I was okay, it’s probable I would have stayed lost in the same place for the entire afternoon, shamefully oblivious to my own state of overt despair. That was the day that Mark Rothko’s painting No. 3 gave me somewhere safe to cry. But even if I wanted to, I couldn’t tell you how, what it meant, or why.

Had Plato been with me that day at the Met, some kind of pedagogical discussion may have organically ensued from my moment of melancholy. Dressed in a dashing tunic and cloak, the Greek philosopher may have turned to me and said, in a gentle tone of reassurance, that the painting was just an imitation of something that had been created first by God—a fanciful trompe l’oeil not particularly worthy of my tears. He may have even handed me a tissue so that I could dry my eyes, reminding me that the painting could not hurt me, because it was very far removed from what was essentially genuine and what was actually true. A firm believer in the concept of mimesis—translated in Greek as “imitation,” and one of the earliest and most basic theoretical principles in the creation of art—Plato felt that art was nothing more than the imitative re-presentation of nature. All that really exists, according to the philosopher, are ideal things that are created by God. Further to that, the concrete things that we perceive in our person- al existence—tables, chairs, strawberries—are merely shadowy man-made versions of these God-made ideal things. So artists, according to Plato, are basically imitators of pre-existing imitations who make artworks that have been removed from truth not once, but twice.

By inferring that art can only ever be an illusory by-product of a shadowy illusion of truth, the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify its own existence—probing at its surface and violating its core. As a result, our (often conditional) relationship with art in the West has be- come tainted with a sour tumultuousness. Sitting with art has become a rarity, scrutinising it the norm. In the present day, discerning observers of the modern world engage with works of art in what could be described as interpretative dances of death—tearing into artworks in elaborate acts of socially-encouraged intellectual interrogation, before pacing thoughtfully to the next display and leaving the first—metaphorically—for dead.

It’s this lethal level of inquisitiveness that Susan Sontag explores, and quasi-condemns, in her essay ‘Against Interpretation.’ First published in 1966—post-Bauhaus, pre-Banksy—the article examines our pervasive preoccupation with prying the “meaning” out of art. As Sontag states, all Western consciousness of, and reflection upon, art has remained within the confines staked out by this aforementioned theory of mimesis, an ongoing trend that arguably does more to damn art than it does to do it good. For Plato, and many others who subscribed to this line of thought, there was not much point to art, because art could only ever hope to be at best a pretty lie. And so it was that Sontag believed, rightly so, that through the theory of mimesis, art becomes somewhat problematic, and in need of defence.

‘Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reaction- ary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”’

In raising the issue of the hypertrophication of the intellect, Sontag reviles the extent to which we examine art to such excruciating lengths. Indeed, in most modern instances, she writes, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.

‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.’

But our tendency to tame does not stop with the work of art itself. It is true that art can, and often does, evoke feelings of unexplainable nervousness, and sometimes even fear. A stapler is relatively self-explanatory; it is purchased for the purpose of putting staples into separate pieces of paper, so as to hold those pieces of paper together. To encounter a stapler is not (usually) a stressful thing. But to experience a work of art, whether in a book, or while sitting on a bench in a gallery space, is a far more ambiguous encounter. No one has told you what is supposed to happen next, or how you’re supposed to feel. Often, there is a small placard positioned nearby the work with a title, name, medium, and date, but there aren’t usually instructions.

The artwork, unlike the stapler, has not been made for the practical purpose of holding things together. Sometimes it does just the opposite; it pulls everything apart. Thus, art can be, to those uncomfortable with unknowing, a rather frightening thing. But nothing unsettles the average (rational) ob- server of art quite as fast as madness—not necessarily the kind found within the work itself, but within its maker.

In a paper entitled ‘Creativity and Madness Revisited from Current Psychological Perspectives,’ clinical psychologist Dr Neus Barrantes-Vidal, an assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, states that many old folklore beliefs have maintained for centuries that there is a hint of genius in the madman and, conversely, that creativity itself demands some degree of lunacy. These longstanding legends may explain our curiosity towards the complex characters of artists themselves, but they do not justify the borderline obsession with knowing the method behind their questionable madness, or rather, the madness behind their method. Even so, perhaps due to the rise in the prestige of psychoanalysis in the mid- 20th century, or as a result of the deterioration of privacy since the digital revolution, we’ve never been more fascinated not only with what an art- work means, but also with what an artist may or may not have meant. And, furthermore, with what psychological predisposition may have led to the artwork being what it is, and what potential complex may have stopped it from becoming something else.

Just as modern interpretation often leads to the cross-examination of an artwork’s content, the incessant intrigue with the creator’s psyche often calls into question the intent of the artist’s soul. It seems it’s not enough to hypothesise what the apple in the painting may or may not represent; we also want to know when the painter first tasted apples as a child and whether the experience was positive, or if the taste caused a trauma that simmered in the subconscious until the eventual diagnosis of a supposed and/or rumoured psychological disorder. History has led us to believe that the details of the artist’s relationship with apples are important and relevant specifics worthy of investigation, because we should know where the artist was coming from, and we should know what they were thinking, because that might reveal what the artwork really means. The truth is, the apple has nothing to do with anything at all.

‘No great imaginative power without a dash of madness,’ Roman philosopher Seneca once said. William Shakespeare, too, had a thing or two to say on the matter of art and madness. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he writes: ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.’ In other words, there are common characteristics that are shared between all three: an unyielding faith in their own fantasy, and the ability to give shape to wild dreams. Liberated by their own inner irrationality—some- thing that is sometimes deemed to be socially improper—many lovers and artists alike appear to exist in a state of consciousness that is free from what Sontag referred to as the effusions of interpretation, intangible toxins that seep into the skin before penetrating the soul, slowly poisoning our sensibilities. The more we focus on the apple, the more we starve ourselves of the only thing that is sincere; the thing that lunatics, lovers, and poets seem better equipped to sense—what we feel.

We may desire to know an artist’s darkest secrets, or the reasons why the painting made us cry, but the deeper we search for meaning, the more en- trenched we become in well-constructed lies—dishonesties that smother the discernment required to sit with art, and feel. In truth, the apple doesn’t mean anything to the artist unless we, the methodical meaning-makers, de- cide that it must. And maybe we only want it to mean something so that we feel less afraid. Less fearful of a fierce creative force that we haven’t had the chance to predetermine, program, or personalise. Because art is just something that is. As psychoanalyst Carl Jung reminds us, ‘Personal causes have as much or as little to do with a work of art as the soil with the plant that springs from it.’ To try to interpret how the work of art reflects the artist’s state of mind, whether it be their rumoured depression or supposed psychosis, in a vain attempt to find some sense of its meaning, is comparable to kneeling to examine the dirt beneath a beautiful bed of roses. You can if you feel called to, but you may be grazed by thorns, in futile pursuit of understanding something that need only be admired in its most unadulterated form.

Sometimes I still think about that day with Rothko at the Met. About my journey to a distant dimension that a painting had to help me find. I remember that it was quiet, and that, although my body was near others, I felt all alone. To this day I still can’t tell you why I cried, because I don’t want to ruin the memory with faux details of what it might have meant. ‘You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me,’ Mark Rothko once wrote, ‘and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.’ Art is a force to be romanced with, not something to be figured out. Don’t be the person who forgets to feel. Be the lover who’s not afraid to cry.