Finn Bille
My older brother, Per Henrik Bille, is by all conventional standards an artist. He was educated at the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and he is a life-long active painting artist. When I asked him for a statement on the nature of art, he wrote, “I have given up writing about art because I think it is impossible and useless.”
But the philosopher-artist could not resist trying anyway. This is what he wrote:
“. . .we wonder about wondering about the riddle of where we come from as if there is a parallel universe to which we have no access except by wonder. In this process art is constantly produced, a confirmation of our otherness deeply rooted in reality: The reality of reality experiencing experience. Art deals with reality but never in terms of answers, only, always posing new questions. The answers lie in the questions.”
Right!
Let’s try bringing the question of art down to earth.
How do we use the words “art” and “artist”? What do we intend when we use them? I hear musicians referred to as “artists.” We have an organization in Chattanooga that purports to build “art”—ArtsBuild. We have had a program that brought “artists” to live and produce “art” in Chattanooga—ArtsMove.
If we sidestep the fundamental definition of ”art” and instead explore how we use the term, by that definition, the following function or activities are art: Sculpting, painting, weaving, writing poetry or fiction, storytelling, etc.
But wait. Does sculpting mean any shaping of any material in three dimensions? Does painting mean any application of paint on any surface intended for display? And is any work done on a loom art? Are poems and short stories always art? Can you write a poem or a piece of fiction, or tell a story and not commit art?
To answer these questions, or find what “answers lie in the questions,” we could go back to exploratory-philosophical statements like my brother’s. He seems to imply that some kind of deep wonder, and some kind of secondary or compound perception—that is, experience of experience —defines the mental state that produces art, and even that it necessarily and always produces art. This idea is hard to get a handle on, but I suspect that artists intuitively agree, or that those who work with this mindset are, indeed, artists.
Meanwhile let’s simply accept that what is called art could indeed be art, and then check to see if it engages us with wonder and a deepened experience of life. Maybe it is art.
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Finn Bille is a poet and storyteller. His CD with Rick Davis on the hammered dulcimer, Marzipan: Stories with Music, and his book, Fire Poems, are available at WinderBinder bookstore on Frazier Avenue.