Art and Reality
Conversations with my father.
by Héctor Sabelli

In art, no matter how unreal it seems, always one finds reality, in the same manner as psychological investigations finds in the most fantastic dream, and in the most pathological delirium, a threat that allows us to know the real life causes that have originated such fantasies, even when this cause is hidden behind the most extravagant symbols. Ancient Greek art often reflects the brutal form of living of the monarchs of the time and their family (Oedipus, Electra, Agamemnon, Antigone). Everything is full of crime, usurpation, violent and scrupulous ambitions. In the same manner, modern art is often full of terror, murder, war, because modern life is full of crime and conflict, bloodier and less humane than those portrayed in art.

Some contemporary critics have pointed out that art reflects reality better when there is no divorce between life as it presents ourselves in front of our eyes, and the life the artist believes ought to be lived. It also best reflects reality when, in describing one that he considers detestable, he does it to call and enlist forces that can change it. Instead, those who have no interest in changing the present, or those who do not believe that change is, or will ever be, possible, prefer art as escape. Artistic escape deals with subjects that shun all the present problems and make itself busy with trivialities. Such a focus, however, in fact reveals that there is a reality that one wants to forget or hide. If one paints misery, even objectively, one paints against it, perhaps unwillingly.

In classical theatre, we often see conflicts between kings and noblemen, the struggle of limitless ambitions that utilize crime as a tool without much hesitation. Wasn't this, in fact, a real aspect of that society? Contemporary subjects are often dreadful because sometimes life in our times is dreadful. Even when he does not realize, the spectator is consoled seeing that what happened to him also happened to the protagonist. The crimes of the stage, are the potential crimes that people perform in their imagination, moved by hate.

Contemporary art devotes itself only too often to horror, crime, alienated protagonists, particularly in novels and films. It seems to say that this is natural, this is life. Yes, that is life, but only some forms of life, and these forms are only possible within a particular social system. The artistic distortions express in many twentieth century schools have a clear meaning once we think how such distortions are similar to the traits of contemporary society. In fact, these painting, sculptures, or poems cannot be understood through sane reason. In the same manner, our capitalist society cannot be understood using sane reason: luxury next to misery, unemployment next to unused goods, leisure next to painful work. With irrational art, the artists say that nothing can be understood, just as nothing can be understood in the world. Hence, nothing can be done, by reason, to change the way of living from the present one. This is the essence of conservative thinking. Those groups in power want to conserve things as they are because they believe--erroneously, we shall attempt to demonstrate later on--that this is what suits them best. When they are sure of your power, they produce frivolous art, like a musical. When they think that they will be dislodged from power, they enter into pessimism and the absurd.

In contrast, a progressive art can demonstrate that life can indeed be understood, and that social organization can indeed be changed. This is the socialist art, where there is no antagonism between the better development of the individual, and the harmony of collective life.

Up to now I agree with the ideas of Antonio Sabelli, an Argentine physician and largely unpublished philosopher, my father. Up to now I had agreed with him. But, a son of a different generation, I have witnessed developments that make me discard his faith on socialism in art or life. Life proved indeed more absurd than we had imagined. Socialist realism, instead of painting life and growth, became propaganda or a sterile traditionalism. Such artistic deviation reflected a distortion of the society that gave it origin. Socialism as a reality was a tragic joke that hope played on science and science played on hope. The lies and the shame of socialism became already evident when the French and the German socialist parties called the workers to kill each other in that infamous first World War. It showed its despicable face when the French socialist government closed the frontier to the Spanish Republic, when French socialists--and communists--supported the torture and the repression of the Algerian patriots fighting for independence, when a French socialist president sent his terrorist team to sink the environmentalist ship Greenpeace. The name of socialism became bloodied in communist Russia and communist China, in the invasions of Hungary and of Czechoslovakia, in the sad dictatorships of Eastern Europe.

Certainly, the Russian revolution created a few years of artistic Renaissance. The innovators were the painters and sculptors and poets of a thousand schools that you father understood as "bourgeois". Irrational art, the art of the absurd, like the unreal perspectives of Escher, make us see reality better. Irrationality is not only a escape from reality: it is a portrait of reality. You were convinced that socialist art was the forge in which to create the new socialist man. There was nobility and reason in the idea of art that would be at the same time realistic and romantic, a picture of what it is and a creation of what it could be, "romantic realism" as the Russian artists called it, "socialist realism" as it later came to be known. Putting it in the hands of administrators and policemen, such an artistic project became rigid law and censorship that strangled art, and at times the artist. No, the Russian soul did not die, nor did the dreams of socialism for many. After their heroic resistance against Nazism, communists presented an attractive face, and this is when you wrote about socialist art. I live an older time, a generation who has seen the face behind the mask. As I look at his portrait in my desk, I realize that my father is younger than me, I wrote many years ago. Many years ago.

Art concentrates and clarifies life. In the work of art, literature, theatre, film, persons and scenes are seeing "from inside". The author shows the inner process of the protagonist, and the spectator enjoys to see all with clarity. A character monologues in this stage; this is one more help that the writer offers to his audience. No protagonist knows so much about the other as this spectator, who sees all and to whom everything is explained. Instead, in real life, we can know clearly only a few persons, and only few persons have the ability to see clearly.

For this reason, the persons who surrounds us, and who we do not understand, can irritate us more than the characters in a work of art, about whom we could give our opinions with sufficient reason. From one viewpoint, art is a simplification and schematization of life. "Art is the elimination of the superfluous", said Michelangelo.

A writer could continue, without erring too much, the beginnings of the work of another writer, adequately imagining the new actions of the protagonist who he knows so well. Instead, he could never be so sure about the behavior of the most intimate other in a given circumstance.

Bergson had expressed the opposite idea, namely that intuition may allow us to know another person like we know the character of a story. Am I continuing Antonio's ideas as he would have develop them if he would have lived a few more decades? In another story, Pierre Ménard attempts to reconstruct Don Quixote [Borges]. Is it possible for one artist to continue and complete the work of another? In the Renaissance, disciples continue or collaborated in the work of their masters, did they express the same intuitions?

Perhaps, it is for this reason that art gives us a special sensation of rest, of relief from the complications of life. Other times, art fabricates for us an interest that we cannot discover in daily life because of our insufficient capacity to understand what is presented to our eyes. Art can also inject us with the enthusiasm and the optimism that we need not to cow and frighten when facing the difficulties of reality.

And it does so in the following manner: the artist has our same ideas and purposes, but he is more decided, more capable, stronger than us in facing obstacles. Then, he makes us despise and lay aside these obstacles, he gives us a message that charges us, as with enthusiasm. Other times, he helps us to justify to ourselves our own conduct, because he has acted in the same fashion and knows how to express the good reasons that proclaim natural and legitimate that choice of action. The protagonist becomes for us a tailor-made companion, without fault, blemish, or flaw.

Here we have an opposition to Aristotle's concept of tragedy as a portray of the hero's tragic flaw. Tragedy is the fact that the hero's virtue also is his fatal law.

Painting makes us see nature better. To see a real fruit on top of a table appears to be banal and trite. Our attention is not aroused by its position of equilibrium on the surface of the table, by the manner in which the light shows us ("draws" we say) the contour of the fruit, its lighted surfaces and its shadows. Because it is a fact of daily observation, all of that seems to us something without importance; it is not worth it to stop and reflect. Instead, if we see in the canvas a good picture of the same fruit, we think: this is not a fruit, it does not have the substance of a fruit, its relief or smell, and yet it gives us a complete idea of the fruit, even if it is just enough to touch the canvas to set us right. But it does give us a surprising impression of the thing; we have the impression of its relief, we wish to touch it, to be sure that it in fact comes out from the plane of the painting, we almost seem to perceive its aroma. Likewise, of a well-made portrait, we say, "it seems that he will move and speak to us" . The only strange feature we notice is that the attitude of the man in the canvas does not change; yet, we are not sure that he does not move, we have to look at him continuously for awhile to ascertain that he is different from the real men, and he does not move, and he does not speak. 

In the portrait of the fruit, and in the portrait of the man, the same strange process occurs, a first impression that what we see in nature and what we see in the canvas are so similar that we almost confuse them. They seem equals, and it even appears that in the canvas the play of light, shadows, and colors becomes more visible, as if they raised toward us in the canvas more than in reality. What can we learn from this comparison? That the light and shadows that surround (or form, in other cases) the contours and the surface of bodies, that colors are sufficient to give us the same impression, whether in reality or in art.

We thus see in reality that what we believe banal, trite, ordinary, vulgar, without importance, prosaic, dull, tedious, comes to us as an image by a marvelous combination of lights and shadows. We learn to know nature, to be impressed by her marvel. Art is a guide and a discoverer that introduces us to reality. Art comes out from reality to return to it in a short time, contemplating it better. And this cycle renews itself constantly, in an eternal journey of learning.

I still find most still-life banal, trite, ordinary, vulgar, without importance, prosaic, dull, tedious, a mere show of skill, earlier on a celebration of newly acquired wealth which may have moved the Dutch merchants but leaves me unmoved. And then come Hector Giuffre's paintings, where the ordinary reveals the extraordinary.

Many of the universal themes of art reflect the long-standing conflict between poetry, beauty, illusion and romance with a coarse and anti-poetic reality. To end this conflict between art and realty it is necessary to make reality poetic. Reality cannot be artistic without the most ample freedom within which a person can devote himself to creating work, rather than to routine, and can assert himself in harmony, rather than submit it to, the will of others. Without economic independence of all and each one, there cannot be freedom in any sphere. For these reasons, a society is characterized by economic equality or failure cannot create an artistic reality; under such circumstance, art and reality grow in contrast to each other. The characters of the more common forms of entertainment often reflect what good or dull people do to get out of poverty. Other times, they describe unleashed ambitions of men or of organizations, or the struggle against the discriminations created by race, social status, or wealth.

Reality was not artistic for painters and writers at a time in which the artists' success depended upon finding a more or less capricious sponsor. It is not necessary that reality be coarse for art and poetry to emerge as the reaction of a strong spirit against such reality, as proof that one does not submit to it and can overcome it through the creation of an exquisite flower of a spiritual manifestation. No, art is generated in spite of such a reality, and, as a consequence of such a reality, the theme and the development of art becomes bitter or grotesque. So is Don Quixote, bitter and grotesque, as two simultaneous manifestations in one character. Thus art always carries within itself a part of reality, evident or hidden.

It does not contradict the above to add that in the same undesirable social organizations, even those persons who enjoy a good social status cannot produce works of art without colliding with an anti-poetic reality. Reality will not become poetic for them simply because they enjoy a more pleasant life. Their own reality becomes anti-poetic by the spectacle of the daily life of others who live immersed in conflict. Hence their works of art also become bitter, or may express a selfish unconcern, which is another way to be bitter. Because if they will not be sensible, they could not produce art.

Art thus is a tension between two complementary opposites: painting reality as it is, and elevating reality toward an ideal. One could use the term idealization to describe this process, focusing on the positive meaning of the term; but idealization has taken a negative connotation in psychiatry, namely the self-deceiving perception of others as perfect or ideal, a process characteristic of immature and/or pathological personalities, and often followed by de-idealization. These processes of idealization and de-idealization are commonly observed regarding popular appeal in art as well as in other fields. Freud used the term sublimation to describe the evolution of complex ideas and feelings from simpler ones; for instance art was seen, crudely, as the sublimation of the child's play with feces.

Those who have witnessed the manner in which chimpanzees paint with their own feces will respect this apparently weird Freudian insight. But still it seems difficult to view our spiritual creations as a sort of reverse perversion, the result of the blockage of our simple biological instincts that, in their diversion from the original target, now create a more sublime reality. One could describe this tension through the idea of romantic realism, but this is the name for a school, and one that degenerated into propaganda to boot, whereas we are looking for a term to describe a process that is universal to all art. We think that a good choice may be elevation; beautification and spiritualization would be two prototypic examples of elevation. Antonio conceived art as an action upon and as a construction of reality. Art is education --Goya's The Horror of War teaches human politics. Art creates and communicates a vision --Goya's paintings imply the alternative vision of a peaceful life. Art is a collective form of psychotherapy --in painting war in its reality, Goya gives psychological insight into the pathology of the beliefs and feelings that make people participate in war. In the same manner, erotic paintings communicate a psychotherapeutic vision of beauty, love and excitement. And paintings of nature or of abstract forms teach us to see beauty, and to seek it. What differentiates this committed art --humanly-committed art-- from the use of art as propaganda, is exactly this process of elevation.

Art is a schematic simplification of reality. "Music" said Ludwig Feuerbach, "is a monologue of feeling". Art compensates us of our insufficient vision of real life, the product of our inadequate ability to understand. Art is an artificial simplification of nature and human nature, so we can understand them more readily -- or at least believe that we do. But art deceives us if we do not constantly remember that it can only give us the profile of real life, and never its complexity.

The painter, the poet, the composer separates colors, words, sounds from the complex manner in which they present themselves in nature, and thread them in a relatively simple combination at the level of our human comprehension. The artists are thus in an imminent condition of understanding the language of nature, even if not all of them, understanding well.  

Pleasant music, that is to say, what is for us music, is a combination of sounds which requires as its first condition that the simple should not become plain and artless. But it also requires that its complexity allow us to follow the thread of sounds, and that, even if we cannot predict this sequence in its entirety, the future sounds will appear as an unexpected surprise which requires excessive auditory and mental adaptation. The imagination must be able to make a partial prognosis of the sound, that is to say, to predict to some extent the order and quality of the sounds which one will expect to see emerge according to the musical theme. This may explain the pleasure that we experience in repetition in music and in poetry. With repetition, the succession of sounds that at the start surprised us as strange now becomes natural. To predict something is restful, although to predict all is not. In the same manner, we could attempt to explain the reason for the symmetry in all human-made products: it is sufficient to see a fragment, a profile, of a symmetric object -- furniture, tools, jewels, and other devices of daily use-- to know all its other sides. We think that we give to an object an artistic form when we make it symmetric.

The symmetry of human constructions serves as a comfort for those who are fatigued by the irregularities and asymmetries of nature--most minerals are asymmetric and irregular; symmetric crystals are rare. Living organisms appear for the most part symmetric to the external observer.

Perfect symmetry, however, is boring. Visual creations are characteristically asymmetric. The Egyptian sculptures balanced their rigid posture with the asymmetry of one leg forward. Likewise the Greeks made their creations asymmetric. Persons prefer the symmetric proportions of the square and the asymmetric proportions of the golden rectangle as the most pleasant ones.

In poetry, rhyme, as well as rhythm, also reflect a tendency toward the simplification of sounds. Such simplifications result from the repetition or similarity of sound.

In contrast, in nature, seeing one fragment or profile does not allow us to know the totality. We do not know as much about a mountain which we see from one side as we know about a face which we see from its profile. Life presents an enormous amount of irregularities or randomness, as we call the facts which we are no condition to predict. Symmetry makes us from irregularity that is often so tiring. Perhaps, this tendency to order, to symmetry in all that we wish derives from the request of our mind for something not tiresome.

* * * *

Our ear can perceive sounds that range from a minimum of 16 vibrations per second up to a maximum of 50,000. But in music, that is to say in what we find pleasant in sound, the range is reduced to 40 and 5000 vibrations per second. Pure sounds are pleasant to the ear. Almost all musical instruments emit simple sounds. If one perceives two simple sounds at the same time, the sensation is pleasant if the relation between their frequencies is simple. Likewise the relation between one and another sound in a rhythm is simple.

We are bewildered, amazed, and rattled by the loud sound of nature in all her complexity, that we only perceive as confusion. There is a relative limitation in what harmonies we perceive and accept as such.
Our brain auditory centers are only capable of perceiving adequately some determined rhythms, not too complex, although this capacity is progressively enlarged with education. Through history, we observe the passage from simple and monochord musical productions to later and more complex music branded as noise by petrified traditionalists.

The interval between two notes is most pleasant to the ear when the frequency of vibration of the three notes is 4, 5 and 6. In the same manner, the harmonics that accompany the main sound have frequencies of vibration that are a multiple (that is to say, a simple relation) of the frequency of the main sound.

One may summarize by saying that the selection of sounds which are pleasant, that is to say that art that makes music, lead to a simple relation among elementary numbers. Instead, when the sounds are not harmonic between them, their frequencies have no simple relations. The fact that in antiquity persons found unpleasant any type of harmony, indicates that we have learned to understand more and more complex forms of relations. Classic music that we find today simple to accept, included dissonance for the audiences of their time. To say that reeducation of our ear, we find pleasant evermore complex relations, implies that art captures evermore complex realities. And to capture, in last instance, to simplify, because one relates what was up to now unknown with what was already known, revealing their similarities. Once more, in art we feel thereby rested because it presents to us a reality molded to human measure without too much effort on our part.

In summary, the artist sketches reality to produce his work, and this sketch, made by him, cannot but represent his way of seeing the world, or his desire for the world to be in accord with his wishes. Both vision and desire emerge from his own individual life, from the place that the artist occupies in society, from his way of thinking. A painter or a writer will not paint the world write in the same manner if he finds it pleasant or painful as it is. He will not write in the same manner if he hates the hopeless world, or if, on the contrary, he has optimism and faith on a brighter future. The mode of being, and the concrete life of the artist develops her or his artistic scheme. In turn, the artist's success depends on whether or not a large number of persons in the social milieu share his view of the world.

* * * *

Art is, hence, a creation based on materials extracted from nature (even when an artist may think that it is pure creation) a creation influenced by the manner of living and the ideas of the artist, by his emotions and by the interest of the class to whom he belongs and/or with whom he feels solidarity.

In almost identical fashion, the Italian thinker Umberto Eco describes contemporary culture as taking consciousness of the rights of matter in order to understand that there are no cultural values that do not proceed from some historical and early event, that there is no spirituality other than that manifested through concrete material situations. "We do not think in spite of our body, but with our body." From Michelangelo's famous poem to the present, artists have often realized that their material represents both creative avenues and limitations. The eye of a person with sensitivity can discover the beauty of art in nature as well as in the yards of factories, among their products and their waste. Artistic photography reveal artistic forms where the naked eye does not, in the detail of a screw, the form of a can. Matter appears thus stronger than art, more animated, more inventive and richer in possibilities. [Umberto Eco, La definición del arte, U. Murcia, Milano, 1968]. Such picture of matter reproduces the concept of the early Greek physiologists who viewed all matter as living, in contrast to the mechanists that saw matter as inert, under the influence of physics.

Contemporary art seems particularly sensitive to the value and fertility of matter. In fact, abstract art tends to pay more attention to the material than figurative art, in which the artist's idea may appear to construct his work regardless of the matter used [See Luigi Pareyson. Estetica Teoria della formatività, Marzorati, Milano, 1961].

In Antonio's conception there are flagrant omissions -- sex and ethnicity or nationality -- characteristic of liberal ideas of the first half of the century. On the other hand, current ideologies often blur issues of class. Is it by chance that the entertainment industry owned by the wealthy focuses on the life of the wealthy, while seldom portraying workers and farmers? Is it by chance that such class bias arises in the only country among industrialized nations that does not keep health statistics according to social class?

Given similar technical talent, the greatest artist is that who feels solidarious with those who struggle to create a better social organization. Either clearly or tacitly, consciously or not, such ideas permeate a work of art in the subject chosen and in the form and style in which it is developed

Art complements our incomplete perception of reality. Why is it more interesting to read a historical novel than a straight-forward biography? No matter how deeply the historian investigates the intimate processes that explain the life of a person, their essence always escapes him, even if he counts with the help of confessions and memories. Besides the greater or lesser sincerity, the protagonist himself ignores the enormous and complex unconscious processes that lead his actions in a given direction. Imagine now the other, a novel written by someone who is not only intelligent and well-documented, but also reach in sensitivity and imagination: All the voids are now filled; we see the protagonist in his entirety.
Translation and comments to be continued

"Art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a finish" (Aristotle, Physics II. 8: 99 a.)