A MONA Moment We can turn to other kinds of artists to deepen our own understanding and responsiveness to the visual arts. Poets especially, have had a great deal to say about the visual arts. Keats contemplation, Ode on a Grecian Urn is a magnificent starting point.
That a Grecian Um is a work of art, has never been in doubt. And indeed, one of the epochal events in the history of western art took place on the planes of these vessels of clay.
It was on these olive-oil-carrying vases that for the first time a Greek artist painted a foot as seen from the front. Unlike the Egyptians and Syrian artists before him, he painted what he really saw, not showing it in simple profile like his predecessors. The consequences and impact on the history of art can hardly be overstated. It ignited the great revolution in Greek art: the discovery and depiction of natural forms and of foreshortening--the method of representing objects as if they were seen at an angle and receding into space instead of being seen in a strictly profile view. Without this discovery of foreshortening, the realism in art would have been impossible. Goodbye Italian Renaissance. But I digress.
Keats description of his experience of the Grecian urn is a baseline for our own openness, responsiveness to what we experience in contemplating art. Perhaps what is most helpful to us is the major concession he makes to the ultimate mystery of the artistic experience. He is content not to feel the need to definitively understand what he sees: "Heard melodies are sweet, he writes, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes play on." So says Keats, we must disengage ourselves from the need to know, and allow ourselves to be ravished by the delicious experience that is before our eves. Keats experience of art is the freely flowing associations he draws from his contemplation of the scenes on the urn, and the personal joy he experiences from making these associations, the openness and sensitivity to the resonance's of the smallest detail. The image on the urn is frozen in time, but Keats is carries on a dance of responsiveness around it, transforming its mystery into personal experience, inspired speculation, and delight.
Keats contribution to art theory was an idea he called negative capability. In brief, it meant that the artist, in a sense, was an empty vessel, a void which would fill itself with the meaning and the essence of the object contemplated. In our appreciation of art, we approach art with a self history and experiences which can clearly enrich our enjoyment of what we are viewing. But at the same time, it may bias us, limit the possibilities of our understanding and our search for meaning. In as light, the idea of emptying ourselves of the baggage of our pre-conceptions, attaining, as Keats would say, a "negative capability" has appeal and meaning. Without this ability to lose something of ourselves in the experience of art, learning, insight and growth are impossible. Listen to how Keats loses himself in the images of the lovers on the Grecian Um.
John Keats: A Negative Capability
By Ron Roth
Director
Museum of Nebraska Art
Thou still unravis'd bride of quietness,
Thous foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
what mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair?
