Christianity has been a notable practitioner of the moral aspects of art. Fra Angelico worked in a society that took it for granted that people needed to be kept on track by ghoulish aesthetic evocations of hell (23). The artist hence strived to make his images of hell as haunting as possible; one was supposed to have nightmares inhabited by the flesh- eating demons one had seen on the wall, and to be horrified by the prospect of being boiled alive. The ideal response, from the artists point of view, would be the anguished complaint, '1 simply can't get that image out of my head.'
We can think of secular, modern versions of hell that are far less theatrical and perhaps far more effective for us now. For the non- believing person, hell is just the abandonment of the path to the better self. Eve Arnold's photographs of divorcing Russian couples are hell in an everyday, godless form, and all the more convincing for picking up on the casual ubiquity of suffering (24). The real difficulty with presenting moral ideas in art ('be kind and compassionate', 'do not blame others for everything', and so on) is not that they seem surprising or peculiar, but rather that they appear obvious. Their very reasonableness strips them of their power to change our behaviour. We hear a thousand times that we should love our neighbour and strive to be good spouses, but these prescriptions lose any of their meaning when they are repeated by rote. The task for artists, therefore, is to find new ways of prizing open our eyes to tiresomely familiar, but critically important, ideas about how to lead a balanced and good life. It is no easy task to keep making what is hellish vivid: the attempt can easily yield just formulaic horror, which
A reason to say sorry.
24. F.vc Arnold. Divorce in Moscow. 1966
ends up touching no one, until a skilful artist like Arnold stops us in our tracks with an image that brings home what is truly at stake when we let ourselves and others down. We might long to hang her work in the bedroom or the kitchen, in just the right place so that it can be seen when one is tempted to say in anger, 'Well, that suits me fine, let's just fucking get divorced. See you in court.'
Moral messages - messages that encourage our better selves - can be found in works of art that seem, initially, to have little interest in 'saying' anything to us. Take a Korean moon jar (25). Aside from being a useful receptacle, it is also a superlative homage to the virtue of modesty. It stresses this quality by allowing minor blemishes to remain on its surface, by being full of variations of colour and having an imperfect glaze and an outline that does not follow an ideal oval trajectory. Impurities have found their way into the kiln, resulting in a random array of black dots all over its surface. The jar is modest because it seems not to mind about any of this. Its flaws merely concede its disinterest in the race for status. It has the wisdom not to ask to be thought too special. It is not humble, just content with what it is. For a person who is given to arrogance or anxiety about worldly status, and who frets about being recognized at social gatherings, the sight of such a jar may be intensely moving as well as encouraging. Seeing the ideal of modesty so clearly may make it obvious that one is in exile from it. All the same, here it is, waiting for us in the jar. It would be understandable if a person who was at heart sincere and good, whose arrogance was only a habit built up to protect a vulnerable part of themselves, should, as they contemplated the moon jar, find themselves yearning to make a change in their lives under the aegis of the values encoded in a piece of ceramic.
Art can save us time - and save our lives - through opportune and visceral reminders of balance and goodness that we should never presume we know enough about already.
A reminder of an attitude we might take to a social gathering.
25. Choson dynasiy. Korean Moon Jar 17th 18th century
Self-Understanding
We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don't really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience as half-formed and giving them clear expression: what 'was often thought, but ne'er so well expressed'. In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.
Imagine you're drawn by the sight of a box, Untitled (Medici Princess), by Joseph Cornell (26). Why the strange feeling of recognition? What part of oneself is like this box? Despite the overt visual reference to Bia, the daughter of the Duke of Florence, Cosimo 1 de'Medici, who died when she was only six, one is not being invited by Cornell to discover an inner princess. Rather, his box presents us with a model of how one might coordinate the diverse elements of a single identity. The box says, 4 am made of a web of relationships.' The iconic birds, ladder, flowers, sundial, maps and fox are emblems with special references to Bia's experience or personality. We can't tell what they are, but we respond to the idea of a complex set of symbols that make up a diagram of a life. The box contains a concentrated archive of the self. Here, something as fluid and indistinct as personal identity can be presented in a manageable and usable way. It's not so much that one identifies with everything in this particular box as with the nature of the underlying project. Ideally, there would be an artist like Cornell (who died in 1972) who could make a box for each of us, so that we might come to know ourselves better, and have a tool with which to make ourselves better known to others.
Contemplating Cy Twombly's dark, scratchy, suggestive surface is rather like looking in a mirror in which you notice an aspect of your appearance you had not paid much attention to before, except that what's at stake here is not a row of molars, but your inner experience (27). There are moods or states of the mind (or soul) that are perplexingly elusive. One has them often, but can't isolate or examine them. Twombly's work is like a specially designed mirror of a part of our inner lives, deliberately constructed to draw attention to it and to make it clearer
It is hard to say what this 'means': it seems, at first, to have an eloquence beyond words.
26. Joseph Cornell, Untitled Medici Princess;. 1948
This is what one of our inner moods might look like.
27. Cy Twombly, Panorama, 1957
and easier to identify. It homes in on what it's like when you almost know what you think about something, but not quite. It pictorializes a moment in reflexive life suggestive of ambition and confusion; the thin, light marks on the surface might be rubbed-out words chalked on a blackboard; the smudges might be clouds through which we glimpse distant stars. Whatever they arc, what matters is that we don't get to see them precisely, so we are held in the moment of being on the cusp of something. We are about to understand, but have not yet understood. This moment is important because it generally does not live up to its promise. We abandon the process of reflection. Not much of a decision about the personal meaning of love, justice or success is achieved, and we move on to something else. Looking at Twombly's painting assists us in a crucial thought: The part of me that wonders about important questions and then gets confused has not had enough recognition. 1 have not taken proper care of it. But now I see this part of myself reflected in the mirror of art; now I can make more of it.'