Why We still Need Human Artists
I was in London last week for meetings and found time to sneak in a visit to the Amish Kapoor exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Now there are to my mind, too many self-styled public intellectuals and cultural critics, and I really wouldn’t want to come across as aspiring to be one. I’m very happy toiling away as a brand strategist. Nonetheless it prompted a (very) strategy-adjacent thought. I hasten to add that my relationship with art is the same relationship I have with wine – I enjoy it, I love being introduced to new kinds, but I know next to nothing about it.
My hours with Kapoor made me think that we need human artists not for what they make but for what they keep alive in the rest of us. We can idolise, venerate and envy them, but an artist is not a separate species. The artist is merely the fullest working example of a set of capacities that live, in dormant and half-starved form, in everyone. To notice. To see. To find the ordinary luminous. To stand in front of what exceeds our capacity to comprehend it and not look away. The artist does these things at full stretch, on our behalf, and in doing so points back to the same capacities crouched inside the rest of us humans.
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Proust wrote: “The only true voyage of discovery… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.". At the end of the day I think that is what an artist hands us. Not a picture, but a pair of eyes not our own. New eyes. Dürer gave us a humble clod of earth and saw growing in (botanists have confirmed) cock's foot, creeping bent, smooth meadow grass, daisy, dandelion, germander speedwell, greater plantain, hound's tongue, yarrow… all in intimate detail. A density of observation on a piece of paper just 41 × 31.5 cm.
Albrecht Dürer, The Large Piece of Turf (Das große Rasenstück), 1503. Watercolour and gouache
This is what we humans can choose to see if (literally or metaphorically) just like Dürer we get down on our knees and don’t merely see, but look. That is his gift to us – a reminder that in us – both artist and viewer - lives the capacity to attend to the world around us differently.
The literary critic Viktor Shklovsky named the enemy a century ago. Habit, he said, devours everything and we stop seeing what we have seen before. Art exists to arrest that and peels the film of familiarity off the world and hands it back to us shocking and new. As Picasso said “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." It de-automatises (is that even a word?) our perception, renders the everyday world less taken for granted, and reminds us that – like the artist - we can choose to look through a different lens.
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Proust (again) wrote, at twenty-four, about Chardin with his still lifes of kitchen tables and dead fish, a glass of water, a heel of bread. His claim that Chardin had taught us that "a pear is as living as a woman" is not extravagant — for Chardin a scullery, a copper pot, the low light of an ordinary afternoon were as worthy of wonder as any palace.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, A copper saucepan, a pestle and mortar, a pitcher, a scallion, eggs and an onion on a shelf, c. 1730. Oil on canvas,
The artist here is not inventing beauty. He is redeeming it — pointing at what was always there, and that habit had rendered invisible. And redeeming the ability to see it in us.
This is the humdrum made luminous. Vermeer did it with a woman pouring milk.
Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid (Het melkmeisje), c. 1658–1660. Oil on canvas
Hopper did it with a diner at two in the morning and the particular loneliness of electric light.
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas,
Van Gogh did it with a pair of worn-out boots.
Vincent van Gogh, Shoes, 1886. Oil on canvas,
The point is always the same - this thing you took for nothing is not nothing. Look. See what I saw. See like I (human) see. You can. In fact, you are doing it right now.
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In his interviews with the art critic David Sylvester, Francis Bacon kept returning to the same theme - he wanted "to record one's own feelings about certain situations as closely to one's own nervous system as one possibly can." What he was after was not a depiction of the subject, but the nervous system's direct account of encounter. And we too, just like the artist have the capacity to attend not merely to what we see, but how it moves and works upon us. The panels of Bacon's Trpyitch May-June 1973 do not merely depict the moments before his partner's death from an overdose of pills in their hotel room. They're an evocation of Bacon's grief and anguish. Stand beore his Triptych and you’re having a conversation with Bacon about the devastation all of us will encounter or have encountered, in some shape or form. Because that's what it is to be human.
Francis Bacon, Triptych, May–June 1973 (1973). Oil on canvas
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Go and stand in front of Rembrandt's last self-portraits. An old man, bankrupt, outlived by most of the people he loved, painting his own ruined face. Simon Schama has written about what happens in those canvases - the refusal to lie, the refusal to flatter, the courage it takes to look that hard at your own decay and set it down without self-pity.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, 1669. Oil on canvas
Rembrandt is not merely depicting suffering, but metabolising it — turning the raw fact of a life coming apart into something another human being can stand in front of, three centuries later, face a shared mortality - and be a little less alone. Because when you stand before his last portrait you and Rembrandt are having a conversation about the most inevitable and universal human experience of all.
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Lucian Freud spent a lifetime regarding the human body with a savage honestly. Not the idealised body, not the flattered or filtered or averaged or "looksmaxxed" one, but the animal fact of it — the weight, the blemish, the slow work of mortality showing through the skin. He never airbrushed and never softened, and he painted the people closest to him in poses that did them no favours, because he wasn’t in the business of flattery and favours. "I want paint to work as flesh," he said. And it does.
Lucian Freud, Naked Man, Back View, 1991–92. Oil on canvas
Stand in front of a Freud and you cannot pretend and cannot look away - this is what a body is, and this is what you are. And you too – should you dare to — can look at it (and all of life) with the same raw, unsentimental, unblinking honesty. In fact you already are.
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Frida Kahlo went further, and turned inward. Where Freud fixed his unflinching eye on other bodies, Kahlo fixed hers on her own — a body a bus had broken at eighteen, and that a shattered spine, a steel corset, and a lifetime of operations never let her forget. But the pain though undeniable is not the point. Canvas after canvas she assembled a Frida out of the wreckage.
Frida Khalo, The Broken Column (La columna rota), 1944. Oil on masonite
She points to the capacity in all of us — to gather the pieces of the self from the blast radius of life and assemble them into someone you can own. In many ways it is the most ordinary act there is — we do it mostly without noticing, assembling an “I” out of everything that has happened to us. Kahlo just did it consciously, in public, in agony, and from the ruins of a wrecked body. A bracing reminder of our capacity to survive something and come out of it as someone we (fellow human) have to become.
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Rothko said the people who wept before his paintings were "having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." Not admiring the colour. Not appraising the composition. Weeping.
Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960 (1960). Oil on canvas
He said he was interested in the big human things — tragedy, ecstasy, doom. He wanted us to have that same human experience he the artist did and put us in a room with something that pressed on the part of us religion used to reach.
The theologian Rudolf Otto called it the numinous — the encounter with something wholly other, at once terrifying and magnetic — something larger than the self, that the self did not make and cannot command. Rothko says — and you too can encounter this, as I have. In fact, you already are. The only true difference between Rothko and ourselves is his capacity with the brush.
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Kapoor, I discovered that afternoon, does something similar. Niches cut into the gallery walls are painted with Vantablack that absorbs more than 99% of available light creating spaces that are as he puts it “full of what doesn’t exist”. It put me in mind staring up at the night sky as a child trying to wrap my young mind around the infiniteness of the universe. But (Fermi's Paradox notwithstanding) the universe is not completely empty and the canopy of stars gets in the way of apprehending the infinite. But Kapoor's voids are true and endless voids, and deeply unsettling for that.
I looked at those works longer than I meant to. I have been doing a fair amount of looking inward — the kind of stocktaking a certain point in a life forces on you, when you start asking what is actually there when you go looking for yourself. Kapoor says he has made a void. Standing in front of it, I can only agree. We both know what it is to stare and not find easy oven-ready answers waiting for us. He is just better with a brush.
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Seeing, choosing, attending, feeling, suffering, the redemption of the ordinary, the encounter with the numinous — every one is a relation between a living consciousness and a world it did not choose and will not survive. Every one requires a someone. A body. A stake. Mortality. Skin (and not just the metaphorical kind) in the only game there is.
The question a machine world confronts us with is not whether the machine can make the picture. The question it forces is a simpler and larger one — what are our capacities? What is it we can do, as human beings, at all?
To see — really see, and not merely look. To suffer, and make something of the suffering. to re-enchant the everyday world. To make a self out of the wreckage. To stand in front of what exceeds us and not look away… These are the shape of a human life lived awake — and they belong to all of us, not only to the ones who paint. Not to the machine, which has no body, no world, no death, and therefore nothing to say about life. The artist is simply a human being like the rest of us — just more determinedly awake, more honest, more unflinchingly in contact with existence, and moved to make. Pointing to capacities that are in all of us.
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Seeing is a skill. John Berger opened his book Ways of Seeing with the line "Seeing comes before words," then drew the distinction that matters — we see whatever is in front of us, but to look is a choice — a thing we do, and can therefore do well or badly, keep or lose. Perception is not a fixed endowment handed out at birth. It is a muscle. The capacity to attend, feel, wonder, the nerve to face what hurts… Use them and they grow.
So go and stand in front of something a person made — a Rembrandt, a Chardin, a Rothko, or the drawing your kid brought home from school — it frankly does not matter which. Look until it stops being an image, a thing, and starts being a summons. Until you feel the old machinery turn over in you — the seeing, the aching, the wonder — and sit with it.
Mary Oliver once left instructions for living a life — pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. The artists are simply the ones who never stopped doing it.
And it seems to me that we need them, and the shared human capacity they point to, perhaps more than ever.
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There. I got it out of my system, Next time I’ll be back in my lane and wanging on about the (mal)practice of brand strategy.
In the meantime — if you haven't already, and you're after some (work-related) holiday reading — my book's here.
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Martin Weigel is a brand strategist, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, and founder of EMDUB. He helps companies find their superpower - and turn it into action.