A Myth that I have to believe in

(If you think this post looks a bit on the long side, you're hallusinating.)

It's that time of year again. Grab a pencil and paper and try to make sense of the syllabi, trying desperately to cram everything into the timetable. Frankly, I'm kind of fed up with it all. It's not that the courses aren't interesting, I've just had it up to here with this student life, going to lectures and everything else just as meaningless. What I really want is a) get a job or b) start my research for real. I can't do all three at the same time. I can be efficient and energetic and hardworking, but only when I'm doing something tangible, like writing.

To make it more annoying, the most interesting courses always overlap. I really wanted to take the art history course on "Love and evil", but at least I can take the one on 19th century Finnish art. There's also going to be a Shakespeare recital by the Arts department, sonnet 116. It's an offspring from a collaboration, "Art and Disease", between the departments of Arts and Medicine, strangely enough.

I ended up reading more about the programme. They have themes like artists and their illnesses, art as therapy, doctors as artists. They mention that Kalle Achté has claimed in the Kanava magazine that depression and hypomania can increase creativity.

It's certainly a cliché that artists are mentally and sometimes also physically tormented, and channel their illbeing into wonderful art. Yet intuitively thinking, there must be at least a grain of truth to it. If you've ever painted or drawn or done anything else creative, you'll know how you need to be completely focused.

The process is immersive, all your thoughts are directed at thinking of what you're going to do and how. There is no outside world during that time, though of course it can remind you of itself in a less than perfect environment. So creating art is naturally very relaxing in the sense that you're forced to forget all your worries. Which can be therapeutic, I guess. What the doctor ordered, not so often.

Personally, I'm not sure if an anguished or depressed state of mind is necessarily useful. Being depressed basically shuts down your brain and you become this zombie that is unable to react to or do anything. If you're angry or angsty, on the other hand, it can spell doom for your brush if you channel that energy into aggressive strokes.

Being excited and happy, however, seems to enable the best results. So hypomania, why not? Just pray you'll have it if you're a professional artist, hmm?

As much as I hate all these romanticized myths about any profession, be it artist, scientist, doctor, I'm slowly beginning to appreciate the conventional, stereotypical views on art and artists. I haven't quite found my golden middle road between dismissing art theory as hopelessly relativistic, self-interested and autoerotic rubbish on the one hand, and devouring and absorbing it completely as something most divine and sublime on the other.

I seem to be treading the muddy soil somewhere along the way across the noman's land, twists and turns aplenty. I make occasional jabs at intertextual, psychological and other kinds of nonsensical interpretations, but always make sure to keep my bearings by glancing back at the beacon of purely visual aesthetical pleasure.

My personality tends towards extremes, but I truly believe in moderation. Yet I wonder if art isn't a playground to allow for excess, to revel in it. By the looks of it, you'd think so today. But was it always like that? Did cave paintings try to create discussion in the society, to break familiar lines of thinking? Or how about still lives, aren't they just about the most controversial thing you've ever seen?

Much of art is still created for the purpose of hanging it up on your living room wall. Few people buy art that is disturbing or unsettling. Artists need to eat too, and since the more conventional art forms and styles sell better, they're here to stay.

I often think back to a visit to Juhani Honkanen's atelier years ago. I didn't care much for his scenery paintings. Your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety landscapes of Finnish woods, thunder clouds on the sky, dark pines and firs towering over the viewer, the random heather bush on the side. To quote the Joker: why so serious? I don't understand why much of the nature scenery has to be so sombre and gloomy, what with all the impending storms on the sky.

I prefer his abstract and surreal paintings, even though I can't usually stand surreal art (which in my opinion is quasi-creative expression at its most contrived, repressed, stifled and boring). He's quite decent at portraits as well, especially the more adventurous ones. But guess what? At the exhibition, he'd only sold many of the sceneries, but none of the abstract or surreal ones.

I don't blame people for not wanting to see pictures of naked people swimming through a starry sky when they're eating their morning cereal. I wouldn't. Only I couldn't understand why the abstract art didn't sell. Few people today are so visually challenged as to not be able to appreciate abstract art at some basic, purely aesthetical level.

Whatever the reason, by way of summary: art and its message lose sight of each other as soon as a work of art is sold to a private person. The message withers away, and in comes comfort and normalcy. So does art have to create imbalance, to unsettle? Does conventional, aesthetically purely instrumental art gnaw away at the foundations of "serious" art, simply by being commercially more viable?

I hope not. Art with a message is usually more fun.