Art Does Not Ask For Proof

We live in a world of evidence. Our cities’ infrastructures and our environmental planning, our school curricula and our economic predictions, are all filtered through the funnel of data that compiles mechanisms of ‘science.’ Fair enough. We need to know what the new bridge will cost, or how many chemo treatments the patient can withstand; we need to calculate and measure the success of our work. But it is clear that we have made some serious miscalculations in the last 100 years. All the proof in the world has not provided the information that we need to see the complexity of the world we live in. We do not understand it. We make decisions that unfold into wild and unforeseen consequences. The proof was not enough. We needed the pattern.

Art does not ask for proof; it directs us to look for pattern.

Strung between the chords of a flamenco song is the empathy of a thousand years of love and pain. In the gestures of a contemporary dancer we can remember all that we have never imagined, and follow the form of the body into an unknown dictionary of emotions. In the strokes of color on a London wall, we find the humor and irony of our own mistakes. On a canvas, in a photo, on the screen, we see ourselves seeing the world. We see it, we see us, we take in the cock-eyed framing that tilts our heads and rests our status quo on its ear. The poetry is there, un-killable. Each of us is an artist, dabbing rhythms, colors, metaphors, and harmonies into our moments.

While abstract concepts may rollercoaster through us in art we don’t understand, the metaphors still enter us, and one day, maybe years ahead, they will speak to us. In the gruesomeness of art we find we are vulnerable and that we bleed. I have a small poster of Picasso’s ‘Woman Weeping’ on my dresser to remind me that to be a student of life is to be willing to be shattered. The darkness in art gives us a visceral experience of being dug up, emptied of the seeds of trust, and carved into the anger or jealousy that has overtaken us. There are things to be angry about in life, and art lets us explore the community of that experience. Through the breaking, tingling, crackling, smoothing, and opening, we are in art, with unnamed resonances coursing through us. We are pulled from our illusion that we can watch life from our safe place at the window. We are participants in the process.

In all forms, art can offer an experience of integration that calls upon our cultural language of symbols, our imagination, our history, our intellect, and our emotions. While we often stress the importance of ‘creative expression,’ it is perhaps more vital at this moment in our history to explore what art has to say about the possibility that our perception itself can be brought into larger circuits of cognition through metaphor. Appreciation of a piece of art can be seen as recognition of the pattern that connects. As I see it, art allows us to perceive from multiple perspectives simultaneously. In order for science to really work with complexity, we need art to help give scientists a more developed capacity to perceive context, one that includes all the disciplines, emotions, cultural symbols, and personal memories. As Blake said in ‘The Grey Monk’: “A tear is an intellectual thing.”