The Enigmatic Artist
Once we shift to process over product, and self-realization over the surface concerns of creativity, you enter the realm of the enigmatic artist. The real point of art shifts from the medium-as-messenger to the message itself, and what matters is the profundity of the message.
If we cling to the pre-modern Western idea that ‘art’ rests in its surface-level concerns of decoration, social-grease, investment, or propaganda to confirm immediate ideas, then we are simply splashing about up to our ankles in the shallows of creativity, unaware of the potential in its depths. The truth is that creativity is our only path to evolving consciousness. In the domain we call ‘the arts’, there is the potential for paradigm-shifting, transformational re-alignment of our fleeting experience as human beings, with all its accompanying questions, pangs, doubts and desires.
If I sound evangelical, the crucial difference is that my angels have no wings. My theory of art’s essential role in evolving consciousness can be approached rationally. It does not require unequivocal faith in unseen forces, and, though creativity bridges the everyday with a realm that transcends intellectual rationality, my theory doesn’t reject rationality. It is not tyrannical and makes no demands, it only raises possibilities to be explored – creatively. It is benign and utterly democratic, open to all and doesn’t suffer from the inherent shortcomings of its political equivalent. It is also directly accessible now, to you and me.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that ‘the medium is the message’ suggests that the medium, the messenger in effect, determines how that message will be perceived. Up to a point it is true, the messenger can affect how the message is interpreted, but it can’t change its goal. And I believe that the goal of all our creative endeavors is to fulfill consciousness, for us to benefit from its full bandwidth. For me, a full bandwidth of consciousness is when we integrate our two ways of knowing - the intellect and the Absolute; or that which can be explained and that which can’t. Without this integration, we deal with existence armed only with the intellect, which is inherently limited. That is why creativity is so important, so vital to self-consciousness, so integral a part of life, because it offers a bridge between the two.
If we accept creativity as a meta-language for evolving consciousness, we grant it full efficiency as a means of self-realization that can lift us ‘up where we belong” (I will assume this cool hook from songwriter Will Jennings is a metaphor for Enlightenment, summing up the perennial aspiration of self-consciousness).
Then, the enigmatic is a prerequisite for progress in climbing the ladder of meaning. A curious mind leads to enigma; enigma leads to paradox, and paradox is a sure signpost to the Gates of Wonder through which Enlightenment awaits.
If the artist is merely saying ‘I believe in…’ fill in the blank for religious, humanitarian, philosophical, environmental, or other propagandized concern, it may be viable, it may provide a path to a more all-encompassing understanding of creativity, but it remains more of a question than an answer to the underlying aim of evolving consciousness.
On the other hand, if we approach creativity as our most important and powerful meta-language to fulfil consciousness, beyond reason and, therefore beyond the gods of religion and the ideas of philosophy; beyond the rationality of the scientific exploration of the fragments of aspiration, then we should embrace the enigmatic.
Allowing that enigma is an efficient compass to help us fulfill our perennial aspiration, what, exactly, is it?
Well, if we could define it other than in generalities, it wouldn’t be enigmatic. The point of enigma is to hint at meaning that is beyond the definitions of our intellectually couched languages, and all our languages are intellectually couched or we couldn’t either use or evolve them. Enigma acts as poetry does, it uses verbal language to allow us to read between the lines to what cannot be explained as powerfully if defined. That sums up the nature of creativity in the arts once we step out of the shallows.
In process-based aesthetics that is equally true for artists and audience alike since the distinction between the two is merely a lower-level expression of a governing process. The art object may conveniently separate them but, in a fully mature aesthetic culture, it no longer governs. The two are joined in creativity, and enigmatic creativity is more powerful than its explicit counterpart.
The whole of Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 18, which begins with “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…”, could be reduced to a simple statement: ‘You are seriously adorable.’
But it would have had an audience of one, assuming dear old Bill wasn’t a serial philanderer. Whereas the sonnet has had an audience of an untold and ever-increasing number. That is the difference between the readily explicable and the enigmatic.
Watch “Through the Gates of Wonder - The Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat”, directed by Mark French