The Aesthetic Rapture

May 10th, 2010

ecstasy

One of my very first educational experiences as an art student took place at the feet of a lecturer - we sat on the carpet and he sat on a chair - assigned to aid the First Year’s transition into this strange new world. He’d been a sculptor and conceptual artist but had moved into art theory and history. On our first day he told us that art, sex and religion, were the only areas our society sanctions as being legitimate spheres in which to experience ecstasy.

Wow. I really was at art school.

I’ve never forgotten his words - they intrigued me when I first heard them as much as they still intrigue me now, many years later. Discussions along these lines took place every day. I was expecting a little more emphasis on the technical side of art, but this was the early eighties and conceptual art had slouched into the nation’s art schools, an unfiltered Camel between it’s fingers and a copy of Baudrillard under it’s arm. Learning to paint was simply a matter of being tossed into a white cube studio space with the necessary materials and being left to figure it out in between tutorials on Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. So where was the ecstasy?

I’m not talking about the satisfaction of acquiring skills, or being overtired and spinning out on coffee and cigarettes or even completing a painting or other artwork to general acclaim. I never knew what that lecturer really meant until a couple of years later, when on an ordinary day, I stapled some paper to the wall, picked up a stick of charcoal and began to draw. About half an hour later, while totally absorbed by what I was doing, I suddenly understood what he’d been on about. I find it hard to explain but extinction of the self comes close, extinction of self and unity with the act or idea.

Three years later I had a similar intense experience, again while drawing. I don’t know the physiological basis for it; there were no paint or turps fumes around, nor chanting or drumming. I don’t want a reductionist explanation of it nor do I see it as having any mystical significance. But last week, after a long, hard day of writing I experienced a similar feeling. No, it wasn’t hysteria or relief or a lifting of pressure – although maybe that lent an edge to it - but more a rightness or unity, a submergence of the self in a creative act. It verged on the sublime. Three times in twenty-five years of creative work. Maybe I haven’t been working hard enough.

Those three occasions, particularly the last, reconfirm my own belief that whatever the outcome of the finished work, whether it hangs on a wall or whether it gets published, all the royalties and sell-through and rights sales and reprints and reviews can only stand in the shadow of such transformative creative moments. It’s why we do it, and keep doing it – nothing comes close, except, as my long ago lecturer said, maybe sex and the religious experience.

ecstasy1