{"id":8694,"date":"2020-06-08T13:01:20","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T12:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=8694"},"modified":"2020-06-08T13:01:20","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T12:01:20","slug":"andrew-hamilton-joy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2020\/06\/08\/andrew-hamilton-joy\/","title":{"rendered":"Joy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2018Art is only a \u2018substitute\u2019 as long as the beauty of life is deficient\u2019 (Piet Mondrian, \u2018Pure Art and Pure Plastic Art\u2019 (1937)).[i]<\/span> <\/span>My work notebooks are full of quotes I have written out similar to this. Looking through the notebooks I have made over the past twelve years I find I am drawn repeatedly to artists who tend to be on the austere side. And I go beyond even these artistic \u201csaints\u201d and scribble down quotes from actual<\/em> saints, monks and nuns. It was while reading Paul Schrader\u2019s book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer<\/em> that I came upon the only recorded statement from Fra Angelico: \u2018art requires much calm and to paint the things of Christ one must live with Christ\u2019.[ii]<\/p>\n

I jotted that down in February 2017 \u2013 I must have already achieved my New Year\u2019s resolutions by then and thought I could set the bar a bit higher. The second track on the album Joy<\/em>, \u2018a\u2019 once had a subtitle which I had heard the Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho recite at the beginning of a talk he gave: \u2018brothers and sisters in suffering, old age, sickness and death\u2019.[iii] I eventually hid this subtitle as I was worried it might scare people away \u2013 I had even forgotten until this week that I had this text in my mind when I wrote the piece. I had spent the last few months wondering to myself what on earth this piece might be about and now I know!<\/p>\n

Probably the most austere of all is one of my longtime heroes: the painter Agnes Martin. As if to chastise myself for the way I have spent my life I wrote this into my notebook: \u2018art work… is not beneficial, nothing is gained from it, and it does not tell the truth. It is enjoyed or not according to the condition of the observer. A very small gesture of exultation\u2019 (Agnes Martin from \u2018The Untroubled Mind\u2019).[iv]<\/p>\n

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Notes and sketch from the composer\u2019s notebook<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You may ask why on earth do you find these quotes useful? I fully own up to having a tendency towards the austere myself: over the past five years I have gone at least twice a year on silent retreats in a Buddhist monastery and my biggest disappointment during this lockdown has been missing out on a cancelled ten-day silent meditation retreat at the monastery led by an amazing nun. But also reflecting on it for this article I suddenly realised that I probably need a corrective or balance to clich\u00e9d notions of what the arts exist for and the gush spewed out from the art and music worlds to continue making anything. Maybe I am very contrary (okay, I am) but when I read blanket statements about how art needs to reflect life (whatever that means and what if mine is really boring and mundane?!) I think of Martin at her fiercest: \u2018art work\u2026does not represent life because life is infinite, dimensionless. It is consciousness of itself. And that cannot be represented\u2019 (Agnes Martin from \u2018What We Do Not See If We Do Not See?’).[v]<\/p>\n