ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SOUL TODAY | AFTER “THE TREASURE OF THE HUMBLE” BOOK BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK
REPORT & STATE OF THE ART (READ ON THE ARTIST WEBPAGE)
“There really are centuries when the soul goes back to sleep and no one cares about it anymore.” *
Art is not only an exoticism of the living because it has a soul of its own. And our contemporary European and French society, for exemple, is so inhabited by a pervasive “sadness”, very dark and contagious, that it is difficult for us artists to float, whatever it takes, in the middle of this deleterious environment. Art and ourselves are like icebergs lost in the open sea, but buried, drowned by the non-salinity of this unsalty, burying water. This diluted brine no longer allows us to float proudly at 9/10 of our submerged mass, like any beautiful iceberg erected, horny, vertical, virgin, white and joyful self-respecting itself. This ratio having rather collapsed, we could bet that our floating level is now only around 99/100 of our submerged mass in this desalinated, poor, dehumanized sea. As for these poor and sad sailors of trinkets, without great hopes of distant horizons, without prospects of interesting human and artistic adventures.
This fact, very unfortunate, despite all our efforts, seems to have taken hold, little by little and insidiously, with capitalist logic and after the great shocks of the last twentieth century: the great artistic movements that shook Art and our ways of seeing life; but also and above all, of course, after the two great World Wars and the terrible human genocides, hardly comparable historically, except of course with the colonization of the Americas through the enslavement and almost extermination of its indigenous peoples. So, could Art really survive these great upheavals, this crazy artistic freedom? These deep historical shocks? As well as this new financialized, capitalized, commodified and even institutionalized Art Market, which transformed Art, like everything else, into a commodity? It would seem rather paradoxically that not, despite the astronomically high, edifying and never reached selling prices of this market! For Art seems to have lost its meaning, its vitality, its beauty and its “spirit”!
And even beauty**, if so then it remains only aesthetic, has completely disappeared from contemporary artists preoccupations; except perhaps for a few hobby painters… And then spirituality is of course itself, no longer evoked at all in our time, so aptly named post-cultural, so totally secularized. Does this mean, as Maeterlink so precisely put it, that the soul and its associated beauty would no longer be relevant anywhere?
“At a very remote time in India’s history, the soul must have approached the surface of life to a point where it never reached again. […] Remember Persia, for example, Alexandria and the two mystical centuries of the Middle Ages.”
Because, of course, nowadays, and this I know from my experience and long artistic practice: the soul (the vital energy) no longer touches, transcends, questions, moves, pierces anything or anyone. Neither the public in general, nor art world aficionados such as collectors, museum directors, gallery owners etc., nor even individuals in particular… Buried, repressed, lost, crushed, Art and soul welded together like fusional and eternal lovers, cursed perhaps? They have definitely sunk and are also thrown out to pasture, among an infinite amount of vulgar and suffocating waste of common consumer goods, simple minded thoughts, submissive acts and wills created by all human beings, now all of them having become and like the sheep of Panurge, very small ordinary and pathetic consumers, even when buying works of art worth millions of dollars… Just small consumers! No more! No less!
So when will there be a rebirth? An awakening of Art and soul? To be continued!
* The awakening of the soul, in The treasure of the humble, Maurice Maeterlinck
** “On the other hand, there are perfect centuries when intelligence and beauty reign very purely, but the soul does not show itself. Thus, it is very absent in Greece and Rome, and from the French 17th and 18th centuries. We do not know why, but something is missing; secret communications are cut off, and beauty closes its eyes. It is very difficult to express this in words and to say why the atmosphere of divinity and fatality that surrounds the Greek tragedies does not seem to be the true atmosphere of the soul.”
Jean-Pierre Sergent, December 29, 2020
