Reflections on "Failure"

-- By Tom Phillips

The Virgin Spring

In 1960, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s film ”The Virgin Spring” shocked and outraged audiences  in Europe and America.  The film dramatizes a medieval Swedish ballad of rape, murder, and revenge – all shown with brutal realism.  It ends with a scene of penitence and prayer, as a spring bursts forth from the shallow grave of the young victim.  

The rape scene was censored in the US, and I saw the film in a truncated form in 1960.  Still, it took 57 years until I dared to look again.  “The Virgin Spring” is 89 minutes of continuous  tension, dread, shock, and only at the end, redemption. 

Bergman, wounded by the violation of his work, put out a brief letter defending its frankness.  He said the rape scene had an ethical significance.  “It shows the crime in its naked atrocity, forcing us, in shocked desperation, to leave aesthetic enjoyment of a work of art for passionate involvement in a human drama of guilt and grace…  We must not hesitate in our portrayal of human degradation, even if, in our demand for truth, we must violate certain taboos.”

Ethics trumps Aesthetics. 

In 2017, Laura Peterson will not be censored for her new version of “Failure.”  But in its way, it is just as shocking a violation of our usual aesthetic standards.  Refashioned in the wake of the 2016 election, “Failure” is a picture of just the “American carnage” that our new leader claimed would end with his inauguration.  In her program note, the choreographer calls it “a protest against the elevation of materialism and thoughtless accumulation of wealth at any cost.”

It does this by showing the cost – i.e.  the degradation of American lives, one by one, into the slavish pursuit of an illusion.  A great chasm has opened between the rich and the rest of us in America, and for the vast majority, there is no way to bridge it.  Working three jobs will not do it for the single mother.  Teaching ten courses will not do it for the PhD adjunct professor.  For-profit colleges with E-Z loan terms will not do it for the hopeful student.  Unpaid internships will not do it for the would-be young professional.  The reality for most is a new form of slavery. 

In the Realm of the Senses

Nansen-ji, Kyoto

-- By Tom Phillips

In college, more than fifty years ago, I was shocked to learn that the ancient Greeks gave Ethics a higher value than Aesthetics.  In my private pantheon, beauty was paramount, and included or implied every other virtue.  I believed instinctively in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn --  "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, -  that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

A few years later I became a student of Zen Buddhism, which seemed to treat the two as one -- beauty as a realization of truth. This year I fulfilled a lifelong dream, touring Japan and contemplating the beauty of  Zen gardens.  And it was there that I finally, sadly, laid Keats's romantic illusion to rest.

Feeling Beauty

--  By Tom Phillips

What is art for?  Does it have any use at all?  Does it give us anything beyond pleasure, or a momentary release from the cares of life? 

These questions have been around for thousands of years.  Today, there is a burst of renewed interest in them, because they have moved from the realm of philosophical speculation to the solider ground of scientific research.   Here the answers are confirmed not just by experience, but by pictures of brain activity.   And these pictures show us that the experience of beauty is central not just to human pleasure, but to human growth. 

In Feeling Beauty -- The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience,  G. Gabrielle Starr weaves together the language of neuroscience with a deep understanding of the arts, and makes a convincing case that by taking us out of ordinary experience, the arts offer us a window into ourselves – what we are, and what we can become. 

What Is Art?

Botticelli: Birth of Venus

Readers of this blog may have noticed the slogan above – “All legitimate art is protest .. a demand for a more human world.”   I wrote that in October 2011, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protest, describing the occupation of Zuccotti Park as “a continuous work of art.”  It was my closing line and while it sounds like a theory, it was just an emotional outburst.  I kept it because I liked it, it had a ring to it.  Now, is it true?  

No one has complained about my slogan, or even questioned it.   But as a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I felt all along that I should either defend it, or take it down.  After more than a year of rumination and several recent “aha” moments, I have decided it’s my final answer.  I’m sticking with it.