Against rationality in art

I happened to read an interview of Mallika Sarabhai in today’s paper, in which she talks of how she can’t dream of performing something like the Geet Govinda or what she calls ‘the simpering woman’ in the present atmosphere of gender politics. She adds that she understands the spiritual significance of submission. But it is obvious she cannot stomach the more ordinary associations. Sarabhai is quite a prominent feminist and what she ‘thinks’ obviously effects her art.

Of course Mallika Sarabhai is entitled to her outlook and her particular stance but it brought me right back to something that always bothers me. It is a general question especially compelling to me in a post-modern world. (I don’t know but we may have turned post-post-modern while I wasn’t looking)

Where should art emerge from? From our sex? From the gut? From the heart? Is it a form of expression then? A product of our minds? Or do you let the spirit guide you?

Most ‘what is art’ essays raise these questions but it seems to me that in the main, ours is the epoch of the mind, and to my mind that is a shattering pity.

For a longish time now the western world and hence with grating promptitude the whole ‘civilized world’, has set the Human Mind on a ridiculous pedestal. The ‘thinking person’ is the highest creature, ‘thinking art’ then is most superior. Art as defined now needs a context, a history, information, and the scent of activism thrown in for good measure.

Any connoisseur worth his champagne wants to be made to think. Give him food for thought; make him wonder what you could possibly mean, keep a tally of the number of allusions you have made, let him count all possible symbolic references, throw in a signature style, make sure you have a surgically dissectible form – he will probably proclaim you a genius. If as a byproduct he has been aroused, or moved or uplifted, he will probably shuffle a bit in embarrassment or perhaps proceed to diagnose the exact ingredients that produced the effect.

All this I think is not only incredibly boring it is also reeks of a state of self-important adolescence.

Of all the faculties that we have been afforded the one in which we have been shortchanged the most is the Mind. It is self-deluding, very inaccurate, ineffectual, disastrously limiting and has an unfortunate tendency to smugness. And to choose this one power (if power it is) to bank so heavily on – that just seems plain stupid. Rationality really is the millstone of transcendence. With art we have our one of the few real chances of transcending our limitations and to lug it with the burden of rational thought…

Apart from this well-developed allergy for rational art I haven’t really been able to make up my mind where I like my art to come from. But one of the best takes I have ever come across is Ken Wilber’s. He talks of Integral Art, and I really think he has something going there. Very briefly, Integral Art is one which spawned by our sexuality and winds its way up through various levels of our consciousness to be distilled at every stage. If this is an Ideal-the most refined form, then there could be equally appealing raw forms directly springing out of either from say -the heart or the gut. Whatever the source, the impulse needs to be both ‘real’ and spontaneous. And pure rationality is anything but spontaneous and its realness is extremely suspect.

In fact I would imagine that art emerging out of any other level has a better chance of achieving its end that the art born out of pure thought. I am sticking my neck out a bit here but I really think toilet art is more honest and purely motivated than for instance Damien Hirst’s intellectual attempts at inducing whatever he generally wishes to induce or the entire gamut of niche-scoping ‘stylists’.

If all this sounds like I hate all things conceived by pure intelligence that’s far from the truth. The mind can be a fun tool, science for instance is a terribly exciting way to pass the time, and economy, planning and design are all damned useful things in ordinary life.

But art is about the extraordinary. What I am probably asking for is to be shaken and stirred beyond the limitations of my mind, not within them. I’d like to cease to relate to my world, however briefly, as a function of the mind.