'Exactitude is not truth', again

 

‘Exactitude is not truth’

I’ve been thinking about this quote from Matisse for many years. Matisse felt that there was an inherent truth about a person or an object in the world, which he felt lay beyond its outward form. My interest is not this notion of inherent truth, but something which is neither the exactitude of  naturalism, nor the relative abandonment of real world objects which occurs in abstraction.

The internet is awash with art which impresses non-artists with its technical proficiency...‘ I thought it was a photo!’ etc. This model of art has been with us in Europe and America for quite a few centuries, and is what you might call a conduit model – there’s an object in the world; the human receives the object through their perception exactly as it is, and reproduces it as accurately as possible; resulting in piece of art that is a clever and accurate reproduction of the original object.

Other cultures often have a different history of intentions and purposes in relation to making things. The makers of ancient artefacts, for example, don’t appear to have been  interested in whether the proportions of a clay goddess were much related to a real female in the physical world; they seem to have been more interested in conveying, or summoning, or creating, or placating, or even just playing with, some kind of world energy which they could feel moving through their lives. 

Similarly with Indian miniature paintings. Leaving aside theoretical discussions about rasa (Indian aesthetics), or the complex symbolism of ragamalas/raginis (musical modes represented as paintings, sometimes personified as women etc), a simple example of this summoning of world energies can be seen in the plants in an Indian miniature painting. If you study these, it’s clear that the painter didn’t care about exactitude, but was doing something else.

Rather than coming about through the conduit model (object passes to human, human makes accurate reproduction of object, human puts reproduction out into the world) the miniature painting plant seems to come about through a process of transformation which occurs as the human’s feelings and perceptions work upon the object they receive from the world.

So....object in the world – enters human through organs of perception and becomes mixed with feeling, playfulness, visceral response to colour etc – and eventually something new appears. This new thing has the recognisable features of a plant, but it’s been changed by its passage through the human. Perhaps it has the feel of a plant. Perhaps it’s a simplification of what a plant actually looks like. It’s something which doesn’t exist in the natural world, something that can only come into being by means of this route through a human. Our culture ‘allows’ this in illustration or design, but has historically looked down upon this kind of interpretation/transformation of worldly objects in the world of painting (‘primitive’, ‘folk art’, ‘outsider art’ etc).