Art, or From the Imagined Imaginary
to the Materialised Imaginary
Before broaching the problems of the place and role of the imagination in artistic creation, it is crucial to define what we will call here artistic practices and to show their extent and universality. By artistic practice, I mean everything people have invented to ‘enhance’ themselves, to care for their appearance and to introduce ‘beauty’ into the relations they have produced, not only between themselves and nature, but with the invisible entities whose existence and actions seemed to them to influence their fate: namely, the gods, spirits and the ancestors. This can be found in every era and in all societies, however each may define what it means ‘to be beautiful’ or ‘to make something beautiful’.
It is also essential to see that the domain of the beautiful exceeds in several ways the domain of the arts. When a man from the Baruya tribe in New Guinea picks a flower as he walks through the forest and sticks it in his hair, his gesture is neither a matter of art nor one of ritual. Unlike young children, who do not do it spontaneously, he is enhancing his looks by adding this flower which, furthermore, is not just any flower, since it is yellow, like sunlight, and the sun was the divinity worshipped by the Baruya before their conversion to Christianity. In our own society, think of women who put on makeup before going out and are attentive to what they are going to wear that day. Behind these everyday gestures loom the huge industries of fashion, ready to wear, and the advertising deployed so that this fashion will prevail and therefore sell. Another example, much less noticed, less visible and referring to a reality now nearly vanished, are the city allotments which until recently lined the outskirts of numerous towns and cities. ‘Handsome’ gardens were those with straight paths, vegetable plots containing a succession of cabbages, carrots, lettuces, et cetera., all growing in straight rows without a weed to be seen. By giving this handsome appearance to his garden, the gardener had put both his garden and himself on display. The pat he would give himself on the back when someone declared that he had a ‘fine’ garden was not only due to his technical skills or to his knowledge of the plants he grew and their needs in terms of water or fertilizer, but to something else, something more; it was to the care he had taken in organising the space and the plants he cultivated. The peoples of Melanesia, steeped in knowledge of the plants they grow, take care to ensure that their gardens are handsome, and even that they smell good, because beauty and agreeable odours please their ancestors and draw their favour. Beauty and fertility go hand in hand.
Whether it is exercised in a modest form, like choosing a tie to match one’s shirt, or in the highly complex technical and ritual forms involved in making a mask in which a spirit will dwell for a time, the aesthetic function is never wholly autonomous. It is always embedded in social relations that recruit it for their own purposes and will therefore invest it with their own meaning. It is present, albeit in very different degrees, in all human beings. For it is not just any African who is capable of taking a piece of wood and carving the statue of a Dogon ancestor, the aspect and dimensions of which are preordained and must be respected. There are, indeed, African and Melanesian artists, even though only a short time ago, many anthropologists and art critics denied their existence because they did not find in the African woodcarver or blacksmith the image of the twentieth-century Western artist, who was released from any allegiance to the representations artists shared with the public, whereas in previous centuries they had depicted the life of Jesus or the Annunciation. For these critics, the African artist was primarily performing a ritual, and he was the anonymous author of his works. Yet the names of African artists and that of their village were known far beyond the borders of their tribe; they were anonymous only because their name was not mentioned, or did not interest the European who bought their work, or, as Michel Leiris confesses to having done, because the latter stole it.1
But exercise of the aesthetic function overspills the art sphere in yet another way, for since the earliest times, the appreciation of beauty has played a role in human relations with the natural environment. Nature has always presented our senses with its brightly coloured and sweet-smelling flowers, its soft sands, its majestic mountains, with glittering waves rolling and crashing onto a shore, its birdsong and so on.2 The appreciation of beauty is born of the sensations and emotions aroused by the perception of relations and the order obtaining between forms, between colours, odours, movements, and so forth; and nature presents all that without owing its existence to humans. Artists are not the only ones to feel or seek ‘aesthetic’ emotions, but they carry this quest the furthest, using their minds and their hands to produce the works that distinguish one society and culture from another and set their mark on the periods of our history. We are going to examine their arts, once again attempting to detect what they have in common, the constants, in spite of their differences.
These differences are easily explained. The arts speak to us through our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and so on; and they thereby differ in the material component each has selected to act on our senses. These components can be rocks, woods, metals, different colours of clay, plants flexible enough to be braided, or others that produce odours or oils, and even the wind; or again, colours, effects of light, rhythms. All can be used to signify, including the human body itself, which is the supreme support. Thanks to our bodies, we can sing, dance, paint, sculpt, play an instrument, and so forth. And the combination of the senses and the material supports enlisted to signify gives rise to the various arts: music, song, dance, painting, sculpture, the novel, poetry, theatre, ceramics, basketry, weaving, flower arranging, architecture, but also body painting, and more.
A few examples will illustrate the type of ‘reality’ an artist creates and the effect his or her creations can have on those who view, listen to, touch or read them. My first choice is the novel. A novel is the story imagined by an author of a series of events experienced by imaginary characters in a fictional world; it ends in the resolution of something that was at stake between the characters in the story. A novel is made of words and sentences printed on a paper support in the form of a book; reading it is an act that mobilises inner speech in the reader when he silently speaks to himself the words he reads.
The events and the world described in the story thus exist in the beginning only for the author who has imagined it, and then afterwards for each person who reads it. Once the book has been read, the events and the world described no longer exist; but they do not return to nothingness. They continue to have a virtual existence, and they come to life again with each new reader. But each time they come back to life, they are still what they are: ‘unreal’ social and cultural realities. What does ‘unreal’ mean? It means that, aside from arousing readers’ attention, interest and emotions, the events and characters described in the novel do not turn into flesh-and-blood characters living and acting in the same world in which the reader lives when not reading the novel. It is this difference that makes the reality of the events and characters present in the novel unreal. This by no means implies that this reality devoid of depth, this unreality, cannot profoundly affect readers, shock them, upset them, or introduce them to other ways of seeing, thinking and even acting.
Everything found in a novel is thus both imagined and imaginary, but the nature and the weight of its imaginary content are not the same in love novels (The Princess of Cleves), a historical novel (War and Peace), a mystery by Michael Connelly (The Black Box) or, finally, a science fiction novel by Asimov. Asimov transports us to a galaxy that does not exist, in spaceships that have yet to be invented, and where humans battle creatures that have nothing human about them but belong to a much more ‘advanced’ civilisation than our own. From a novel whose author depicts passions between a man and a woman, which are known to exist, to a novel in which the author brings to life creatures without human form living on unknown planets, the work of the imagination required to produced imaginary material is taken further and further. Each time, the nature of the imagined imaginary has a different content and meaning.
But whatever the nature of the novel (even a serial) and however artful the author, everything described – events, characters, outcome – merely attributes feelings, acts, and tragic or happy relations to characters that are the symbols that bear them.3 Furthermore, all this is expressed and communicated by words, sentences, a style, images, a film, which themselves are symbols. So we see that a novel combines, in its own way, several components: an imagined world that is more or less imaginary while remaining unreal, characters and events charged with symbolic dimensions, all of which is expressed and printed on a material support comprised of the sheets of paper that make up the book.4 The imagined, the symbolic and the material are the three elements we find, in various forms and proportions, in all art works.
Let us now turn to the example of theatre and the actor playing Hamlet. Sartre writes quite properly: ‘The actor who plays Hamlet makes himself, his whole body, serve as an analogon for that imaginary person … He uses all his feelings, all his strength, all his gestures as analogons of the feelings and conduct of Hamlet. But by this very fact he irrealizes them. He lives entirely in an irreal world. And it matters little that he really cries in playing the role’ (original emphasis).5
To de-realise oneself is to ‘act as if’ by taking the identification with another much further than does the child who is and is not the teddy bear he plays with and to which he ascribes life. In his Hamlet, Shakespeare has combined the three components of the imaginary, the symbolic and elements taken from real life: an unfaithful mother and an accomplice of her lover, who has killed both the man who is her husband and his own brother; a few historical allusions to the Kingdom of Denmark placed in a fictional setting, and a bloc of pure imaginary: the statue of the Commander, which triggers Hamlet’s famous dialogue with himself: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’6
Let us now turn to instrumental music, for instance, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Here there are no words, as in a novel, nor actors on a stage, as in the theatre or the cinema, to communicate the meaning; there are sounds and rhythms produced by the different groups of instruments and musicians that interpret the piece under the direction of a conductor, who imposes his style of execution. Without words, the sounds, timbres and rhythms of the music alone symbolise and communicate to the listener the way Vivaldi experienced and imagined the changing seasons in the surrounding Lombardy countryside when he composed this work, sometime around 1718. In the absence of words, the music will signify something different for each listener, and the signification each gives it is not imposed. The listener draws meaning from the sensations and emotions the music arouses in him or her and which ‘evoke’ things felt and imagined in the course of his own life. As Lévi-Strauss commented, ‘Music has its being in me, and I listen to myself through it.’7
In a concert hall, those listening to the music often close their eyes or stare blankly at the musicians and the conductor. We do not listen to a piece of music one note at a time. We listen to it as the synthesis of a whole. And while we are listening, time is as though suspended, or at least is completely one with the living presence of the music as it unfolds. The music is both a real and unreal presence, since once the piece is over the music exists only in the memory and somewhere within the listeners and the musicians. We find in music the same characteristics as in games: creation of a space-time that eclipses the space-time of ‘everyday’ life, which reasserts itself when the music falls silent, when the concert is over. It is, as Sartre says, like coming out of a dream, leaving an imaginary world that embodied an aesthetic pleasure.8
My last example will bring us back to the image, with Leonardo da Vinci’s mysterious portrait of the Mona Lisa, painted in Florence between 1503 and 1505. The fact that we still do not know the true identity of this woman is of no importance; whoever she was, it is the smile of the woman who is there, looking back at us, that fascinates the millions of visitors to the Louvre. Seen at close range, the painting is nothing but an accumulation of brush strokes that have deposited on the canvas layer upon layer of pigments and oils, which, through the interplay of colours and lines of the body, have created the woman’s face and her smile. As with the notes of a musical score, it is not the brushstrokes that the visitor sees from a distance. It is a beautiful, smiling woman who is there, and yet who does not really exist. She is present but in an unreal fashion, present while absent. And yet, this unreal being ‘captures’ our gaze and ‘bewitches’ us.
Alfred Gell speaks of alchemy, and even transubstantiation, in the case of the transformation of the oils and pigments that become the Mona Lisa.9 For him, art is a technology of enchantment, and the artist is a sort of magician, like Leonardo da Vinci, who, using the same materials as any other painter of his time, painted a masterpiece that no one else could have produced. For Gell, then, in the first place, it is not a message that an artist wants to transmit; it is this enchantment, this impact on our senses and our emotions, which both captivate and transform us. Detached from its creator, the work becomes a social actor.10 And it is this same capacity to act on us and to cause us to act that explains the power and effects of sacred objects. We will return to these when we analyse the imaginary of religions. Before that, however, I will attempt to identify what all forms of art seem to me to have in common, their invariants, as it were.
• Any work of art initially springs from the mind and the sensibility of an individual and thus possesses a mental [idéel] and virtual existence that this individual will then transcribe and transform – through a succession of technical and cognitive (and even magical) acts that he has mastered – into a symbolic and material reality that means something for him and has the potential to arouse in those perceiving it an inextricable mixture of sensations, emotions and representations.
• Because the emotions and meanings with which the artist has imbued his work have been inscribed in it using physical materials that symbolise and communicate these, the meaning the author has given his work can never be completely transparent. Owing to the materiality of its symbolic signifiers, the work both evokes and conceals the meaning it bears, rather than revealing it explicitly. The viewer, the listener or someone who touches it is thereby invited or forced to give it a meaning.
• Because in order to signify and to act, all forms of art make use of physical symbolic materials – chosen by the artist but which differ for each form – the meaning of a work of art for the perceiver must indissolubly go through the senses and the body as well as through the mind.
• Lastly, a work of art, whether secular or sacred, creates a space and a time distinct from those of everyday life. The latter is suspended and eclipsed, as it were, to make way for a time and a space created and occupied by the presence of the work of art and its effect on those who view, listen to or handle it. The presence of the work of art momentarily de-realises the world preceding its perception and that which will follow it, and offers in its place, but only for a short time, a virtual world that is and can only be something unreal. Its unreality can be measured and avowed very simply. The Mona Lisa will never step down from her frame to become a flesh-and-blood woman. The equestrian statue of Louis XIV at Versailles will never break into a gallop. The degree of reality of the unreal makes this impossible. Alternatively, the unreality of sacred objects, whether they are works of art or simply tree stumps or rocks, in no way prevents them from enabling the impossible to become possible. Quite the contrary. It is because these objects were made or chosen to host a spirit or a god and have become indispensable to the performance of rituals that they attest to the real existence of a world, this time surreal, that in turn invests them with its presence and power.