"I don't get it....."

"Everything you can imagine is real." - Pablo Picasso

I studied a brief history of art in my Film Appreciation course at FTII two years ago. The first picture was a cave painting. As soon as man could find something to scribble with, he did it on the walls of the caves. He drew animals, human figures and pictorial stories of everyday life. As early in time as cavemen, we have wanted to talk about our situation in this puzzle that is life...to understand our surroundings, it's mysteries and our feelings. Art is but an expression of ourselves. As time has moved, mediums have changed....to photographs or the moving image. 

Art movements moved beyond replicating or recreating life around us, to other levels. Levels of impressionism, expressionism, surrealism and abstraction. According to Picasso, "All children are born artists. The problem is how to remain an artist after one grows up." When we were children, we saw the world through innocence, drawing the sun, moon, mountains and stars as we "thought" them. I still find children's doodles so much more artistic than a perfectly drawn and painted picture of still-life fruits. I enjoyed art class thoroughly in school. Colors, brushes, palletes, dirty cloth, mess.....I loved it and still do. But my art teacher was an inattentive ass. He never gave me high marks and I would just scrape through. In my kindergarten, I still remember how much I was scolded for coloring outside the line of a circle. Why is our education system so immune to children's needs of not just learning but exploring and enjoying art?

This brings me to the point of abstraction. When young, the system wants you to ape and think in line. Once you are out of school and college, and working, the system wants you to "think out of the box" or "laterally" to increase profits for the company. This is where abstraction comes in. To go beyond and think of life in terms of dreams and heightened imagination. "Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."--Picasso again..... 

Why does everything have to make sense immediately? Take poetry. Not all poetry can be "understood" at one go. You can learn it's meaning, but understanding can happen anytime. I'll give you an example of myself. When I was studying literature in my graduation...I studied, P B Shelley's Ode to a Skylark. I loved the poem...it just spoke to me...and my Bengali Prof was very dreamy. I learned what it meant and gave my exams. But I understood it only some years ago. It's opening verse is, "Hail to thee Blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert....that from Heaven or near it, Pourest thy heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art." I haven't appreciated unpremeditated art until recently. Films/books/music...which flow effortlessly. A quote from the film The History Boys goes, "You don't always understand poetry? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it... whenever."

I look at all abstraction with the same thought. It may not appeal, may not make sense for now....but if it has entered my subconcious at some level, there will come a time when I will gloat in it. I think of it from the creators view. His/her imagination made him/her to create what I am looking at now. They wanted to say something in a way they wanted to....they created it for themselves......for all great art is made for oneself because it's one's own expression. 

David Lynch's Eraserhead and Dali-Bunuel's Andulasian Dog have to be the most abstract and warped films I have ever seen. I do not claim to understand them completely or "get" them. They are a piece of art for me.....to make my own meanings out of it. An artist always has an idea behind his art, but when it's thrown to the public, he opens it to interpretation. No doubt I'd enjoy knowing what was his idea behind it too. While watching Eraserhead, I was holding my head in my hands, and wondering what I was going through. But it left me thrilled! Exalted! I still think of those images and enter an alternate world. That for me, is the escape through art that I love.  

I think abstraction is a challenge. To take the image, the words, the music and store it in your head. It is someone's imagination.... and it might just make sense someday!

"I don't think about art when I'm painting. I try to think about life." - Jean-Michel Basquiat