Public and Private Art

© Silke Hesse, 2013

About Public Art and Private Art

Silke Hesse

There is public art, a great deal of it, but there is also private art; and there is public art that can be read as private art, and private art that is displayed as public art.

I have just been reading my colleague David Roberts’ book on The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. I have no contribution to make to his argument but he mentions, in passing, the total work of art of medieval times: the cathedral, in which architecture and stained glass and stone sculpture and wood carving (the intricate choir stalls come to mind) and the gold and silver work of the chalices and reliquaries, and the paintings, and the organs and their music, and the singing and chanting, and the embroidered vestments and banners, and the mosaic floors, and the fresh flower arrangements, and the dance-like rituals, and a great many other works of beauty all add up to unite artists and artisans in a common endeavor centered on their faith. And their contributions to the common project unite the populace paying homage to their common beliefs. In modern times the common religion, which no longer exists in that form, has at times been replaced by ideological politics: Hitler and Lenin and the North Korean Kims have, so to speak, designed versions of the total work of art or Gesamtkunstwerk. This is a term first introduced by Wagner for the half-religious, half-nationalistic quasi-operatic performances he staged in his Festspielhaus, partly with the intention of truly uniting a newly united Germany that no longer had a uniting religion. One could perhaps say that Wagner is half-way between the cathedral and ideological art. Medieval Gothic art differs from ideological art as we know it, in that in the latter the balance between common or prescribed purpose and individual contribution tends to be so lopsided in favor of prescribed public purpose that the dynamic and productive ambiguities of art can not come about. 

Today the styles or movements or schools of art, to which individual works make their unique contributions, are perhaps the equivalent of the cohesive focus that religion once was in the Gothic cathedral, style being the often difficult to define philosophy or sense of being or purpose of a period. Of course the common purpose is far less specifically embodied in mere styles and sometimes indiscernible to the untrained viewer, to whom many modern works of art can seem quite meaningless. On a lower level, fashion that displays common style in unique manifestations can perhaps also be a version of the total work of art. In summary, the public aspect of the work of art falls flat without the originality of the individual artist’s contribution, which was always discernible in the great Gothic cathedrals. And I would say that today’s individual artist’s contribution also falls flat if its social and stylistic context is missing or unrecognized.

In the Gothic cathedral, every artisan and craftsman had a role to play, from the great masters down. In our days, art has become much more elitist. As is the case with sport, art too is now practiced by only a tiny minority whereas the general public, once they have graduated from school where activeness and creativity are still encouraged, are factored in as viewers or spectators. There are, of course, always classes on offer in places like Neighborhood Houses that teach you painting or pottery or cross-stitch or quilting or wood-work or flower arrangement or the decorative icing of cakes or carpentry or photography or a dozen other crafts. They encourage you to adorn your daily life in popular and widely practiced forms or to mimic great art that has ceased to be confronting. Few people who go to such classes and acquire such skills then seem to be able to use them to express their own vision.

It can, among other things, take extraordinary skill to be competent in a craft. Almost everyone is now a photographer. But it is difficult to make the camera see things your way, for our own eyes are very selective. They will see contours that the camera misses, exaggerate colors or pick out striking combinations, and focus on areas of intricate detail that eventually hardly feature in the snapshot. More often than not, the camera ends up just teaching its users to see in its indiscriminate manner and not the other way round. Even bright clear photographs can be very disappointing. And cameras have spoilt us; we’ve forgotten how to sketch or even notice things in the simplified and characteristic ways we perceive them as they catch our attention. That is, of course, the only way we are likely to remember them as significant.

But does the context for the amateur artist always have to be public fashion or current style? Can there be such a thing as private art where the dynamic is between much smaller groups of people and the means of expression are simpler and more everyday?

My eldest daughter has made herself a dress. It is of dark blue felt, the simplest and slimmest bell shape on her slim figure, but the upper part of the bodice is made of a deep purple material with little eccentric leaf-green shapes that could have been conceived by Arp floating across it in all directions. This elegant, womanly dress has the simple shape of a child’s drawing, and the Arp-shapes too, though they take us back to the sophistication of early modernist abstraction, seem inspired by a child’s view of life. The little scrap of material she used was what was left over from a playsuit I sewed for her from a sales remnant when she was hardly a year old. There are photos of her wearing the suit, but her memory goes back a long way and she can still feel how she loved it. The dress seamlessly blends the child with the woman, what I once made for her with what she has become and made of herself and for herself. She wore it on Sunday when she came with me to visit a very old friend who had first met her almost fifty years ago when she was three; at that time she had probably just outgrown the play-suit and reluctantly passed it down to her younger sister. My daughter chose the dress for this visit, one she knew I might not find easy, in solidarity with me. Your daughter looks just like you, the friend said with surprise, though this is actually hardly the case. In the end our visit had both the calm serenity and the liveliness we had hoped to bring to it. This dress is what I would call private art: original, dynamic in its tension of then and now, of a simple classical beauty but also meaningful in all its aspects, and always capable of coming alive in new and unexpected ways. Seen on the street it is just a nice dress. Put in a gallery, people would shake their heads at the presumption: there this dress would be like a butterfly on a pin, dead and lusterless.

On my veranda there is a flotsam mobile my grandchildren made for me under the direction of my teacher-daughter one year when they were on a beach holiday at Sorrento. I was told they each contributed one of the pendants that hang from a driftwood board. That board contains dozens of large borer holes, made perhaps by drilling shells, perhaps by other mysterious creatures. There is always so much you can’t account for when you find things on the beach. One of the children has contributed a kelp holdfast that looks like a volcano with lava-encrusted sides; there’s a lacy and lumpy piece of bleached coral, perhaps from a long way away; surprisingly, the twisted dried stalk one of them found was pliable enough to hold a complicated knot; further down a little banksia cone hangs like a gadgety submarine; one of the children contributed a large, worn abalone shell that, amazingly, still has its mother-of-pearl glow; and at the bottom of the mobile there’s a wind-dried root like a dancing witch with billowing skirts from which an arm and a broom-stick seem to protrude when it twirls around. The children wouldn’t tell me who had found what; it’s for you to work out, they said. I think of them in turn and wonder whether happenstance or predilection led them to choose their finds. What are they all really like and where will their fate take them as they’re worn down and reshaped in the turbulence of life? For me, this is a communal work of art in which five children, who will always be part of one family, my family, present themselves to me through their very different choices, acknowledging the role fate and coincidence will play for them by means of their found objects, committing themselves to interaction and togetherness, and submitting to the winds of life that twirl them around as they try to show me how they see themselves and how they see me. They have given this mobile to me because I am their grandmother; am I, in their eyes, that worm-eaten but interesting, perhaps even beautiful piece of driftwood?   

Some years ago my brother and sister-in-law took me along on one of their outback trips: from Melbourne to the Flinders Ranges and Arkaroola, through Marree, past Lake Eyre to Oodnadatta and Dalhousie Hot Springs, through the Simpson Desert with its towering red dunes, to Birdsville, Coongie Lakes with their water-birds, Cooper Creek, Innaminka, and finally back home via Broken Hill. It was a feast of landscape. But how to remember it all? I eventually decided to knit each of these landscapes into a striped square of colors and textures, one landscape a night while I sat and listened to the news. World events rushed on hectically from day to day but the landscapes remained: red soil, golden grass, blue hills; purple Salvation Jane, red soil; golden beaches, swamps, mud flats and lakes; green grain fields, bright yellow rape fields, blue hills; layered dark red iron-rock cliffs; plowed fields with their rows of young crops; dry sandy-colored soils with sparse grey grass; the ocean with its rows of foaming waves; grey and yellowy layered cliffs; burnt tree trunks against a soft sunset sky; rocks; colored cliffs; bush; the sea at night and in the evening; parched plains; red rocks; patches of bush with flowering wattles; and so it went on. In the end there were seventy squares that could be sewn together to make a blanket. I ringed them with a crocheted strip of dark ocean blue. This rug stood for my country, a warm country, a land of great beauty, beneath which, I found, I could sleep and dream very well. These stripes and textures give me just enough help to recall each place in turn; they keep my memory active without distracting it. For me they are better than photos because they give me just essentials to work with, thereby forcing me to make a creative effort every time I confront them anew. For other people, of course, this is just a patchwork rug made by someone obviously determined to use up every last remnant of wool collected from a large circle of busy knitters. They’d probably concede that it looks quite pleasing in its balance of colors and that it seems right in my bedroom, blending in with other things I have. So is it art? Who is the viewer in this case? My answer would be: “It is me, another me.” There is the crafting me who made this rug, and there is the receptive me who lives with it and we’re two different people. These knitted squares work on more than one plane; they record and reawaken memory but they also transcend it. They are something that can be lived with over a long period of time. Whatever one may call it, art or just craft, my rug is important to me. It is also private and secret: it is my remembered country and it is now always there to return to.

The examples I have given here are rudimentary. But in each case the focus is a carefully, meaningfully and beautifully created object – the dress, the mobile, or the rug – that attracts attention and gives rise to a certain intimacy between the maker and the viewer, an empathy with some kind of sharing or exchange of views and emotions that can lead to new understanding. And it is a relationship that can be ongoing. The “public sphere” in the first two cases is the family. In the third, it is the everyday self versus the creative self. That is, in my experience, more or less what art is and what it does.