More importantly, Serra's work presents sorrow in a dignified way. It does not go into details; it does not analyse any particular cause of suffering. Instead, it presents sadness as a grand and ubiquitous emotion. In effect, it says, 'When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore or throw away your grief.'
We can see a great deal of artistic achievement as 'sublimated' sorrow on the part of the artist, and in turn, in its reception, on the part of the audience. The term sublimation derives from chemistry. It names the process by which a solid substance is directly transformed into a gas, without first becoming liquid. In art, sublimation refers to the psychological processes of transformation, in which base and unimpressive experiences are converted into something noble and fine - exactly what may happen when sorrow meets art.
Many sad things become worse because we feel we are alone in suffering them. We experience our trouble as a curse, or as revealing our wicked, depraved character. So our suffering has no dignity; it seems due only to our freakish nature. We need help in finding honour in some of our worst experiences, and art is there to lend them a social expression.
Sublimation: the transformation of suffering into beauty.
15. Nan Goldin. Siobban in My Mirwr. Berlin, 1992
Until far too recently, homosexuality lay largely outside the province of art. In Nan Goldin's work, it is, redemptively, one of its central themes (15). Goldin's art is filled with a generous attentiveness towards the lives of its subjects. Although we might not be conscious of it at first, her photograph of a young and, as we discern, lesbian woman examining herself in the mirror is composed with utmost care. The device of reflection is key. In the room itself, the woman is out of focus; we don't see her directly, just the side of her face and the blur of a hand. The accent is on the make-up she has just been using. It is in the mirror that we see her as she wants to be seen: striking and stylish, her hand suave and eloquent. The work of art functions like a kindly voice that says, 4 see you as you hope to be seen, I see you as worthy of love.' The photograph understands the longing to become a more polished and elegant version of oneself. It sounds, of course, an entirely obvious wish; but for centuries, partly because there were no Goldins, it was anything but.
Art can offer a grand and serious vantage point from which to survey the travails of our condition. This is particularly true of artworks that are sublime in the Romantic sense, which depict the stars or the oceans, the great mountain chains or continental rifts. These works make us aware of our insignificance, exciting a pleasing terror and a sense of how petty man's disasters are in comparison with the ways of eternity, leaving us a little readier to bow to the incomprehensible tragedies that every life entails. From here, ordinary irritations and worries are neutralized. Rather than try to redress our humiliations by insisting on our slighted importance, we can, through the help of an artwork, endeavour to apprehend, and come to appreciate, our essential nothingness.
A sense of the sublime in our ordinary lives is usually a fleeting state, one that occurs more or less at random. On the motorway we catch sight of the sunlight breaking through rain clouds over a distant hill; on a plane we glance away from the in-flight entertainment and notice the Bernese Alps or the lights of oil tankers across the Singapore Strait. Art can mitigate randomness and chance, though, for it provides tools for generating helpful experiences on a reliable basis, so that we can have continuous access to them whenever we arc able to look up from our sadness.
Caspar David Friedrich uses a striking, jagged rock formation, a spare stretch of coast, the bright horizon, far-away clouds and a pale sky to induce us into a particular mood (16). We might imagine walking in the pre-dawn, after a sleepless night, on the bleak headland, away from
human company, alone with the basic forces of nature. The smaller islands of rock, each swept endlessly by the grey sea, were once as dramatic and thrusting as the major formation just beyond them. The long, slow passage of time will, one day, wear it down as well. The first portion of the sky is formless and empty, a pure, silvery nothingness, but above are clouds that catch the light on their undersides and pass on in their random, transient way, indifferent to all our concerns.
The tensions in my marriage and the frustrations of my work are not my problem alone, they are part of the structure of the
16. Caspar David Fritdrich, Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore, r.1825
The picture does not refer directly to our relationships, or to the stresses and tribulations of our everyday lives. Its function is to give us access to a state of mind in which we are acutely conscious of the largeness of time and space. The work is sombre rather than sad, calm but not despairing. In that condition of mind - that state of soul, to put it more romantically - we are left, as so often with works of art, better equipped to deal with the intense, intractable and particular griefs that lie before us.
Rebalancing
Few of us are entirely well balanced. Our psychological histories, relationships and working routines mean that our emotions can incline grievously in one direction or another. We may, for example, have a tendency to be too complacent, or too insecure; too trusting, or too suspicious; too serious, or too light-hearted. Art can put us in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves.
Imagine that we have fallen into a way of life that suffers from too much intensity, stimulation and distraction. Work is frantic across three continents. The inbox is clogged with 200 messages every hour. There is hardly time to reflect on anything once the weekday starts. However, in the evening we are occasionally able to return to a perfectly symmetrical and ordered one-bedroomed house in the suburbs of Chicago (17). Looking out of the vast windows at an oak tree and the gathering darkness, we have a chance to resume contact with a more solitary, thoughtful self that had otherwise eluded us. Our submerged peaceful sides are given encouragement by the regular rhythms of the steel l-bcams. The value of gentleness is confirmed by the delicate folds of a gigantic curtain that wraps around the elegant living space. Our interest in a modest, tenderhearted kind of happiness is fostered by the unpretentious simplicity of a terrace inlaid with limestone tiles. A work of art helps return to us the missing portions of our characters.
Since we are not all missing the same things, the art that has a capacity to rebalance us, and therefore arouse our enthusiasm, will differ markedly. Imagine we happen to be a bureaucrat in one of the sleepier branches of the Norwegian civil service, based in the idyllic though rather quiet town of Trondheim near the Arctic circle. We last experienced an intense emotion many years ago, perhaps at university. Our days run like clockwork. We are always home by 5.15 p.m. and do the crossword before bed. The last thing we would need in such circumstances is to live in a pristinely ordered home by Mies van der Rohe. We might be advised instead to engage with Flamenco music, the paintings of Frida Kahlo and the architecture of Mexico's Catedral de Santa Prisca (18) - varieties of art that might help restore life to our slumbering souls.