Subject Matter
“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur.
Subject matter isn’t the only component of art, nor is it the most complicated, but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared.
Subject is what the artist presents. It is the end. All other attributes are the means.
In the following sketch, for example, the subject-matter is the human eye:
The paper, the medium, the artist’s style — these are the means by which the artist has presented her subject.
Because the artistic process is a process of choosing from innumerable specifics and because the artist is the one who performs this act of choosing, the artist’s choice of subject matter thus discloses, with mathematical precision, what the artist regards as relevant in human life. This is as true of poets and poetry as it is of musicians and music, painters and painting, sculptors and sculpting, novelists and novel-writing, and all other legitimate forms of artistic expression, as well.
What is the driving force behind it all?
Where does art originate, and what is its ultimate purpose?
“The function of art is to recreate, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvelous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon,” wrote Oscar Wilde, and continued:
“Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful.”
Poems, stories, paintings, plays, sculptures, songs, and all artistic mediums are important because human beings are a conceptual species.
This, among other things, means that humans survive by use of our reasoning brains.
Humans evolved neither the balls of bulls, nor the trunks of elephants, nor the claws of bears, nor the necks of giraffes, nor the wings of eagles, but the brains of Homo sapiens, with a capacity to think.
We think by means of abstractions.
Poems and stories and other legitimate art-forms concretize our abstractions — i.e. our ideas.
Art starts with an abstract idea, such as jealousy, and, in an artistic work like Othello, shows us how in human life jealousy manifests.
Jealousy is the abstraction. How Shakespeare dramatized it in his play is the concrete.
Similes and metaphors are also a form of making the abstract concrete, and this is why they, too, are such an integral part of art.
The degree to which a story or any other artistic creation persuades or seems plausible is the degree to which it is good or bad, successful or unsuccessful.
Painting and drawing perform the same function as Othello, in a purely visual manner.
Sculpture does so by visual-tactile means.
Music — which is unique among the arts — captures emotional abstractions, via sound and rhythm and melody, so that when you hear music, you feel yourself perhaps excited, or melancholic, or thoughtful, or aroused.
To qualify as a legitimate art-form, the medium must have the power to convey ideas (i.e. abstractions) in a perceptual form — which is to say: immediately and concretely by means of one or more of the human senses. That is the defining characteristic of all art.
A person born blind and deaf who’s taught to read and write purely by means of braille is a perfect exemplification of the human mind transforming, exclusively through the sensory apparatus of touch, concrete existence into abstract thought.
All thought is abstract. This is so by definition.
This is also why culinary art is not in the true pure sense an actual art but a skill: the best hollendaise in the world cannot convey even the simplest abstraction, let alone something as complex as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The same is true of bartending, barristaing, tile-setting, gem-cutting, goldsmithing, photography, silversmithing, carpentry, surgery, sharp-shooting, and many, many other difficult skills and trades, as well. They don’t qualify as actual art, valuable, difficult, enviable, and important as they may be, because they don’t have the power to capture or convey a wide range of abstract meaning: They cannot objectify reality through their medium.
That is what art does. It objectifies the human experience and dramatizes it. This is why art is a human necessity.
Art isolates and thus emphasizes a selected subject — something “recreated from the rough material of existence,” as Oscar Wilde put it — and in so recreating, the artist thereby presents to the world something new.
To fully qualify as art, the medium must be able to reproduce some part of nature, through the selective process in which the artist alone engages, and then infuse this selected, reproduced data with conceptual content. The medium must be able to convey abstract meaning — which is to say, a theme.
The word theme comes from the Ancient Greek word théma, which means “thesis or idea or proposition.”
Theme is what the artwork is about. It’s an expression of the artist’s abstract ideas.
Abstractions are thoughts — or, more precisely, abstractions are the human method of grasping reality. We do this by means of thought.
And we think by means of words.
All words are abstractions.
Reasoning is done through language and the grammar of language.
All abstractions operate along a ladder, at the lowest rungs of which are the most elemental abstractions — which is to say, the abstractions we first learn as very young children — the most immediately perceivable: “dad” means this gentle person whose smiling at you while you squeeze his finger, who is also known as your father, and the words “father” and “dad” mean the same thing. “Mother” means this lovely person who’s hugging you now, who is your mom, and the words “mother” and “mom” — like the words “father” and “dad” — also mean the same thing. “Ball” means this soft round object I’m holding before you now and am going to roll across the floor. “Dog” means this sweet sloppy creature named Lizzy who’s licking your hand right now.
The more complicated, higher-level abstractions, which we learn as our grasp of grammar grows and our vocabularies enlarge, are such things as “individuality,” “love,” “freedom,” “justice,” “esteem.” These are more complicated because they’re abstracted from previous abstractions.
To abstract means to isolate and draw from.
The higher the level of abstraction, the more removed it is from the concrete. Yet all abstractions, from the simplest to the most complex, are embodied in words, which are also concepts, which are also known as abstractions. In this context, “words,” “concepts,” and “abstractions” all synonymous.
But no matter how high or low on the ladder of abstractions— whether “mom” or “dad” or “dog” or “ball” or “love” or “esteem” or “affection” anything else — they are as the words we use to denote them abstractions. The thing in reality that the word denotes is not an abstraction. It is the concrete. Holding someone’s hand affectionately is not an abstraction. The word “affectionately” is, and so are the words “holding someone’s hand.”
We apprehend reality — i.e. we think — by means of abstractions, but reality, the concrete, is what we’re apprehending, as it is also what we’re abstracting from. Reality is what we’re apprehending by means of abstractions.
Thus to reason is to think. To reason is to comprehend. It’s to apprehend. It’s to grasp. Those words are also all synonymous.
Art can and often does assist in this, but it’s important to emphasize that this isn’t a primary but a side-effect — a by-product, a consequence. Teaching and learning are not the primary function of art.
Art isn’t primarily didactic.
Teaching and learning belong to the province of pedagogy, textbooks, non-fiction.
The primary purpose of art is found in the act and fact of human contemplation: the contemplation of having lived through an artistic experience.
No matter how brief or long the poem or song, no matter how concise or lengthy the novel or play, no matter how colossal the sculpture or minute the figurine, no matter how palatial the palace or garden scene, no matter how grand the architectural design, no matter how ornate it is or how complicated and refined, whether minimalistic and clean, whether alive and fated or whether dead like Latin and mistranslated, no matter how purely played the note, no matter how difficult the dance or how basic the routine, no matter how delicate the brushstroke and no matter how subtle the pencil line, whether concise or spare, whether broad or fine, whether muscular or lean, no matter how populated the cast or how brief the brilliantly acted scene — the sense and satisfaction of having lived through an experience is the distinguishing thing. It’s the thing that unites all matters aesthetic, all issues artistic, and draws them together like threads through a ring.
This is why, philosophically speaking, aesthetics is properly regarded as a sub-branch of epistemology: the science of thought.
Good stories and good poems recast reality and show us our abstractions made firm, solid, specific, concrete.
Good stories and good poems condense, concentrate, and intensify the human experience.
I reiterate to stress: the satisfaction one feels of having seen through or lived through something that an artist has described or created is the primary purpose of art.
In describing the sea at dusk as “wine-dark water,” Homer gave us, in three careful and carefully placed words, a stupendously evocative depiction of the natural world — a hyper-depiction, as it were. Thus Homer made concrete a facet of reality, and she did so in a way that’s unignorable and unforgettable — and inexpressibly beautiful. One feels almost as though one has been there, seen it, lived through it, and in feeling this — in contemplating it — one feels deep artistic satisfaction.
That is the elemental function of art.
In this way, poems and stories enhance reality — they intensify it — as all excellent art does.
This is why a beautiful melody beautifully played takes you away to a place far removed from the sordid perils of actual existence.
It’s why when you hear songs you love, you whistle or hum or sing along and tap your toe to the songs you love.
It’s why when you see the look of pure focus and intensity on an eighteen-year-old Richard Burton’s face while he scrubs the floor, his first stage role, no spoken lines at all, no voice, but pure expression and concentration, you feel spellbound, uplifted, inspired.
It’s also why you feel an overwhelming urge to know certain literary passages by heart.
It’s why well-painted palm trees often appear more vibrant and alive than actual palm trees. It’s the power of art.
It’s the power of art at work.
It is, paradoxically, the artists and writers and musicians are among the most inarticulate in explaining the nature and function of their art, and I suggest that to get beyond the interminable jargon, so that we may see at last the true nature and substance of art— and, even more specifically, to see what gives rise to art’s nature and substance — we need not bother listening to any of the the writers, artists, musicians, or even the critics. All we need do is observe how the artistic drive develops in children.
Observe the stories that children tell and write.
Observe the poems they put down on paper and then recite.
Observe what the child with her big stick of sidewalk-chalk draws upon the concrete:
A large yellow crescent with blue stars around it.
A white house in a green field.
A blazing sun over black mountains.
Animals.
Stick figures.
War.
Ask yourself: what drives the child to make those drawings? What drives the child to tell those stories? What is that child thinking about that makes her want to set it down in concrete form? What dictates and determines her subject matter? Why did she choose this subject and not that?
What, in short, is the child doing? And what is that process doing for her?
Why did prehistoric humans paint animals and hunting scenes upon cave walls? What drove that urge? Why did they tell stories? Why did they chisel figures from stone and mold figures from clay? Why did these women and men choose the subjects they chose? And what did those stories and paintings and sculptures fulfill within them?
Why have humans always invented stories?
Why have humans always enjoyed listening to those stories, or seeing them played out?
Why the human invention of musical instruments?
Why did David “dance before the Lord with all his might”?
What need is being fulfilled in this?
The answer to all these questions is the same answer:
Each one of those things, through whichever chosen medium, captures the abstract and makes it real and immediate. It makes it concrete.
It recreates, emphasizes, intensifies, and thus celebrates the human experience.
Humans — the rational animal — need this because our rational minds operate in the opposite manner: the rational mind is thoughtful, inductive, long-range. Art brings the entirety of the universe into our immediate perceptual ken. Art provides us with this power.
It is an awesome power.
Art makes the conceptual perceptual.
That is why stories and art are important. That is the profound human need they fulfill.
“There is no mood or passion that art cannot give us. Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike…. It is through art, and only through art, that we can realize our perfection; through art, and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence…. Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.”
— Oscar Wilde.
