It's a strange thought, that personal identity and qualities of mind and character can be discovered not only in people, but also in objects, landscapes, jars or boxes. If this seems a bit odd, it's because we have, by and large, emptied the visual realm of personal character. Yet when we feel a kinship with an object, it is because the values we sense that it carries are clearer in it than they usually are in our minds.
Art builds up self-knowledge, and is an excellent way of communicating the resulting fruit to other people. Getting others to share our experiences is notoriously difficult; words can feel clumsy. Consider trying to describe a walk alongside a lake on a mild afternoon without the aid of an image. Christen Kobke's unassuming depiction of an afternoon in a suburb of Copenhagen latches onto just those aspects of experience that are so hard to verbalize (28). The light in the picture is tremendously meaningful, even though it is difficult to say what this meaning is. One wants to point at the picture and say, 'When the light is like this, I feel like that.' Kobkc has created an image that is in love with nothing happening. The child hangs over the rails, the man in a top hat looks on while his friend makes some adjustment to the bottom of the furled sail. The women say something to one another. Life is going on, but there is no drama, no expectation of an outcome, no sense of getting anywhere. Rather than this being a condition of boredom or frustration, though, it feels exactly right. It is tranquil but not tired. It is immensely peaceful but not inert. In a strange way, the picture is filled with a sense of delight in existence expressed quietly. It is not the light in itself that is so attractive; rather, it is the condition of the soul it evinces. The picture
captures a part of who one is - a part that isn't particularly verbal. You could point to this image and say, That's what I'm like, sometimes; and I wish I were like that more often/ It could be the beginning of an important friendship if somebody else understood this too.
Since art has this ability to help us understand ourselves, and then to communicate who we are to others, we tend to care a lot about which works of art we place around us. Even on limited budgets, we spend a lot of time worrying about interior decoration, about the objects we use to communicate our identities to the world. An unkind way of analysing our concern with how we decorate our homes is that we're simply trying to show oft - in other words, to tell people how impressive and successful we are. But there's generally a far more interesting and human process at work within the art of interior decoration. We want to show something off, but we're not merely boasting. We're trying to let others know about our characters in a way that words might not permit. That's why we might, for example, invest in some crockery by the twentieth-century German architect and designer Richard Riemerschmid (29).
The enthusiasm for Riemerschmid's plates is likely to reveal more than just a desire for our guests to think we have good taste and enough money to do something about it. Behind the liking for the plates we initially felt in the shop lay a recognition: This is the right crockery for me because it is like my deepest self. I can use such a plate to tell people something important about who I am: about what it is like to be me; Such a statement might seem rather exaggerated, but perhaps it is simply unfamiliar; we are unschooled in taking aesthetic things and repositioning them in terms of our psychological lives.
We don't just like art objects. We are also, in the case of certain prized examples, a bit like them. They arc the media through which we come to know ourselves, and let others know more of what we are really about.
I have also known this kind of feeling.
Christen Kobke. View of 0%terbm fwm Dotstringert, 1838
My good self as a plate.
Richard Riemcrschmid, 'Blauc Rispe" Plate. 1903-5
6
Growth
It is one of the secret, unacknowledged features of our relationship with art that many of its most prestigious and lauded examples can leave us feeling a bit scared, or bored, or both. In the privacy of our minds, an uncomfortable proportion of the world's art collections can come across as alien and repulsive.
Imagine someone who felt ill at ease in front of a painting of a Catholic saint in ecstasy, or an African mask used in the initiation ritual of boys in eastern Angola, or a portrait of an aristocratic English Lord posing stiff and proud at the height of the British Empire (30, 31, 32). If one were to ask the viewer what was offputting about these works, they might ascribe the problem not so much to execution as to a set of negative associations (many with decidedly autobiographical origins) pegged to the very genre to which these works belong. For example, gentle enquiry might reveal that Baroque paintings made our viewer think of the apartment of a cloying and depressing elderly Spanish relative, stooped and sad, whom they were made to visit on Sunday as a child; or that people in top hats evoked a red-faced, patronizing and privileged group of history students who had terrorized them at university thirty years ago; or that African masks brought to mind a film they'd once seen about voodoo, as well as a do-gooding acquaintance who liked to pronounce upon the spiritual superiority of Africa.
Hostility to genres of art can grow out of genuinely distressing experiences. The problem with these negative moments, particularly those we have as children, is that they are at risk of tainting a disproportionate and ultimately unfair expanse of life - and they do so because they have a habit of triggering a variety of defensive behaviours in us. We come across this particularly clearly in relation to art, but it is a cognitive Raw that can poison existence more generally. It can be characterized as an inaccurate, overly jumpy warning system that is much too ready to anticipate danger. It generalizes wildly from specific negative events, often early ones, and uses these to come to global aversions, which undermine our ability to think and act effectively and creatively.
A defensive stance makes so many elements feel threatening. Due to an unfortunate situation or encounter, we might - for example, and just to start the list - become unable to have any sympathy or interest
Snobs make me feel sick.
32. John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Lord RibbUsdalc. 1902
in religion, literature, football, Africa, communal showers, the music of ABBA, upmarket clothes shops, a chat at the school gate with a far richer parent. Our brittle defensive structures lead to impoverishment: we can't make progress in our lives if we keep generalizing about issues which are at heart particular in nature. We are debilitated when we are too quick to perceive threats, when the explosive anxieties of the past make us aggressive towards anything that semi-consciously reminds us of them in the present. We employ a powerful, erroneous emotional logic: a particular rich person looked down on me, and it was a wounding experience; therefore rich people in general will look down on me; therefore I loathe them; therefore a painting of a rich person is not for me. Or, the weird girl down the hall said she could see angels, and made me feel very awkward; therefore only weird people are interested in angels; this is a picture of a man looking at an angel, therefore it is a weird painting, which I cannot find interesting.