Before my partner Jill died, we visited the Phoenix Art Museum about every other Tuesday. On a Tuesday in January of 2009, we visited two traveling exhibits. One was plates of the original illustrated edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayam by a man named Elihu Vedders. Whether or not you like the Rubaiyat, it can’t be denied that these illustrations are great examples of late Victoriana, after it had matured a bit over the saccharine tones of Maxfield Parish, but before it had blossomed into true Art Nouveau on its way to the cynicism of Art Deco.
The translation itself is by a Cambridge Don named Edward Fitzgerald.
Seeing this exhibit a few weeks before for the first time, I looked up the Rubaiyat on-line so that I could read its verses at my leisure. There have been many translations, but the best use a clean, unadorned style which I like to think Omar himself would have chosen, had he written in English. Fitzgerald’s translation is quite good, however, and though I’d never read more than a few verses at any time in my life, seeing them with these illustrations makes me feel as if I’m greeting old friends.
The other traveling exhibit was called Odyssey: photographs by Linda Connor, a collection of photographs that Jill dearly loved. Jill would enjoyed viewing the work of virtually any artist, but her favorite subjects were inanimate--nature scenes, buildings, religious idols, landmarks--and possibly because that’s what she shot herself, that’s what she liked to see in other artists. It took me a long time to appreciate it, but Jill often saw these objects as imbued with a life or spirit of their own. There was no need for her to shoot humans, because the oak tree, the fountain, the mountainside, the statue all have their own lives, their own sense of living which Jilly saw and felt inside them--inside herself.
I was especially fond of the Avedon exhibit when it was in Phoenix, because Avedon shot humans almost exclusively, bringing forth the wonder and complicated nature of the most complicated of creations. It’s not that I can’t see the life and the spirit of the universe inside the rocks, trees, and animals that surround us, but none have the complexity of humans--at least to another human. Perhaps to cats, other cats are a fine example of depth and complexity. Possibly a dog sees a human as incredibly simple, but is challenged by the depth of his own kind. Although it seems unlikely, a tree may be aware of another tree and what it means to the two of them to be trees--a rock or mountain may be aware of its own place and the place of others of its kind in the universe. Perhaps most people would agree that it’s unlikely that rocks, mountains, and trees have even the level of consciousness of a dog or a cat, but it’s presumptuous to think that on some level, they are unaware that they do have a vital place in the universe. It’s also presumptuous to conclude that such things do have “entity” status, do have awareness, but in the case that we’re wrong in that presumption, then we’ve done them no harm. In the case that we’re wrong in the presumption of non-awareness, then we have done them an injury and, perhaps without quite realizing it, have done one to ourselves.
So, at the east end of the Phoenix Art Museum was a tribute to inanimism--to the great monuments of now and then--whereas at the west end is a tribute to the follies, concerns, dreams, and wishes of humanity--in a couple of hundred otherwise unrelated quatrains. Both exhibits gave us a chance to understand within ourselves something we didn’t understand before, as does all art.
They defined art, each to each, in more subtle ways, as well. There are so many working definitions of art--and some that don’t work particularly well at all--that it’s just silly to bring them up. On the other hand, to feel what we feel when we look at something created by the hand of the individual is to feel the art of it all, to feel art within us. From a practical viewpoint, when we view art, we help to create it. Take something famous, such as, say Luncheon of the Boating Party, Renoir’s masterpiece, considered one of the greatest paintings of all time. I choose it because many of the characters depicted on the canvas are actual real-life people from late-nineteenth-century France, including the artist himself.
This means that there are many contributors to this painting on the front end. Not that they’re all artists, but lending themselves as models, as objects of art, makes them effectively co-creators along with M Renoir. Okay, so that’s two co-creators so far, if you count the artist as one and the subjects as one other.
But there is, as many artists recognize, more to it than that. There is still the viewer, the one who looks upon the canvas and interprets it in his particular milieu. Art, we are constantly reminded, is not created in a vacuum. Without the viewer, the artist has created for nothing. Indeed, it might be said that the artist has been clapping away with one hand.
There are two characters in every novel: the writer and the reader. But there is an analog for art: There are three artists in every canvas: the subject, the painter, the viewer. Without any one of them, we don’t just have one-third less art, we have no art, for with no subject, the artist cannot paint and with no viewer, the art has not been created. Art does not come to full fruition until it has been viewed.
