Life and Life-Energy
Roy Lisker
Chapter 5
Aesthetic Experience
When a work of art succeeds in its purpose, its message has been conveyed, via one or several sensory domains, through the skillful manipulation of psychological states of anticipation, anxiety, hope and fear. The resulting sense of fulfillment is akin to the experience of giving birth. Experiences which liberate our life-energies from the bound self invest the objects associated to them with the living qualities they have evoked.
Every artistic medium has developed a basic technical vocabulary for analyzing this dynamic. This makes it possible to establish an objective connection between our emotional responses and the devices employed by competent artists to arouse them. That this relationship of craft to affect be achieved generally presumes some basic level of artistic education in the audience, what is called 'cultivation'. The ways in which the sound of a 'concert A' will alter its function, hue and meaning throughout the unfolding of a song or symphony may not be appreciated or understood by someone with little background in music. It is in music that this correlation of craft with affect is most notable. The devices of are even given names like "anticipation", "suspension", "partial cadence", "deceptive cadence", "full cadence", "dissonance", "resolution", "modulation" and so on.
Thereby a true voyage of exploration, a true adventure of mind and spirit, is initiated. Operating at a deep, pre-conscious level, works of art have the power to elevate our psyches to the highest mental states.
It is only natural that the keen delight associated with such states will be projected onto the things that produce them. The nobility which they evoke in us will then be attributed to the artistic vessel. The work itself , neither alive nor conscious, can neither have nor lack nobility. Yet in our imagination we believe it to be so. Thus, in reading a novel or watching a play we become morally indignant, amused or compassionate in turn, forgetting that the words are only on the page, or are merely being spoken by actors simulating the persons evoked, but in no sense identical to them.
Gifted artists excel in the ability to weave these textures of illusion from the most commonplace objects, phenomena or events, investing them with subtlety, sensitivity and living emotion. Through craft in the skillful arrangement effects, the subtle mechanisms of psychological adjustment are directed along pre-ordained paths, giving us the confidence to do the work on ourselves that will lead to insight and understanding.
The following analysis of Albrecht Dürer's masterpiece, "Melencolia " will attempt to highlight the ways in which psychological phenomena are deliberately manipulated by the artist in the service of a high artistic purpose.
Dürer: Melencolia
The cluttered visual field provokes an immediate and strong response . All of the objects depicted make some allegorical reference to astrology, to medicine based on the 4 humors ( of which melancholy is one ), and to the doctrine of correspondences of Italian humanist neo-Platonism of the 15th century.
Yet despite this communality of origins, these objects appear starkly alien in their relationship to one another. Many of them are broken, unfinished, neglected. The great stone dodecahedron, its large prominent face obstructing the view of the central figure, suggests a sculpture, conceived and partly attempted before being abandoned: out of reach on the unfinished pedestal the artist's hammer lies idle.
Other tools surround the melancholic figure - fallen angel, Minerva, broken-winged Icarus? : a plane, nails, a saw, an auger . The naked block depresses by its sheer weight, an overly ambitious, work too grandiose for realization. Yet its very presence in the line of sight of its creator, is a source of continual agitation through the contemplation of its aborted possibilities.
The central figure absent-mindedly holds the stylus leg of a geographer's compass in her right hand. It remains motionless, in suspended animation. Has she wearied so quickly in tracing the disc of the bleak, storm-strewn sun, towards which the compass arm and her own hard, squinting eyes inexorably converge?
The crowded room is filled with artifacts of every description. Strange then, is it not, that one sees not a trace of food anywhere? Starvation has reduced the dog curled up beside the polyhedral block and the broken-stringed lute (neo-Platonic symbol of heart-break) to a pitiful state. Could this be because the angel is too distracted to remember that a pet needs proper nourishment and attention?
Although the field of the engraving "Melencolia" draws our attention in many directions, its primary focus is the mind of the oppressed figure. All of its lines converge powerfully to her face, eyes and brain. Curled into a ball and pressed tightly against her temple, her left hand relieves an omnipresent headache. Every object in the field of the picture competes for her attention, which has been thoroughly fragmented. Each object suggests a thought; the catalogue of objects inventories her reflections. Through Dürer's skillful rendering we share in all of her scattered meditations: the bleak sun, pale as the vision of a failing eye; the marble ball; the huge polyhedral block; the lute; the various tools; the cherub (kindred spirit or idle figment of imagination? ) ; the clanging bell overhead; the 4x4 magic square beneath it .
Both the presence of the ladder in the center of the field, and the manner in which it is drawn, are exceedingly strange. No master artist would have portrayed an object (had it not been his deliberate intention to do so) so fundamental to the structure of this engraving, in such blatantly false perspective. The jangling dissonance of this misbegotten ladder sends powerful ripples of unease, distress, anguish, even suffering, throughout the entire composition. It literally "throws everything off" .
This cannot be an accident, not in an engraving which is universally appraised as Dürer's masterwork. One understands it purpose through examination of the line of intense concentration, virtually at right angles to the ladder, connecting the upper left hand corner to the wan sun, to the surreal ladder, to the crown of the cherub's head, to the dark eyes of the fallen angel, to the closed fist of the left hand relieving the turmoil of an aching brain.
In what can only be considered an supreme understatement, the art historian Heinrich Wöfflin states ( The Art of Albrecht Dürer; Heinrich Wölfflin; Phaidon Press, 1971 ) that when one imagines the ladder being removed from the engraving the prevailing mood calms down. Deliberately incorrect perspective produces an Escher-like effect, a sleight of hand to intensify the aura of mental anguish dominating the panoply of images of melancholy.