From the Beginning, What is Art?...

From the Beginning, What is Art?...

WHAT IS ART?
Art = Communication

We communicate so that we can express what is inside our heads. 

Why do we have to communicate?

Lacan‘s ‘Mirror Stage’ is the point in an infants life when they first look into a mirror and recognise their ‘other self’ traumatising because they are forced to recognise that they are not the most important nor the only person in the world. They are alone in these thoughts restricted by language and the symbolic order; and even if the rest of the world feels the same loneliness and detachment the infant will never know for sure. This recognition of ‘other’ makes the infant feel as if they have lost a feeling best described as ignorant contentment in the arms of the mother who cares for your every need. ). Lacan goes on to explain that the infant grows up to always unconsciously desire to find this wholeness or ‘thing’ they feel they have lost. Lacan believed we could find this ‘Thing’ in art and other people - ultimately in communication. 

Arthur Miller would agree. “I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone - Arthur Miller” (Driver, 1960). 

How do we Communicate?

To communicate we must philosophize/try to understand what is inside our heads. We also need at least one other person to communicate to.

We communicate using anything available: words, paintings, music, theatre. Art can often communicate more effectively than words alone because it can use more than one of these things.“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being - Oscar Wilde” (Notable Quotes, 2011). More so words according to Freud are a barrier in our way of communicating - they are less natural than other forms of communicating and their limitations (25 word alphabet) take away from expressing fully what one may mean. In other words, sometimes words are not enough and art helps to communicate when words fail.

"It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us-ANTONIN ARTAUD, The Theatre and Its Double" (Theatre Quotes, 2011).

What is the result of successful communication?

Communicating through art can also help transport us to a place which can affect us more strongly, a liminal space meaning “threshold” - a space of transformation, of possibilities, of the sublime and where adherence to the social world is un-necessary. 

If art successfully communicates is can make a person feel catharsis, a feeling of completement, total satisfaction and an unconscious state of feeling or in other words provisionally fill the 'lack' Lacan believes we have “an emotional release associated with talking about the underlying causes of a problem or seeing a dream” (Turner, 1982).