Brain Food #846: Patterns of meaning
Behind the cotton wool
Thoughts of the day
Life, as they say, imitates art, in the same way that art imitates life, the two constantly feeding into each other, creating a loop with no apparent starting point. And if art is largely split into the figurative and the abstract, the parallel in life is similar to that of a linear narrative and one that is more obscure, ambiguous, and often messy.
Figurative paintings are like stories; they place things where we can see them, in a way that helps us comprehend a situation or scenario, even if our memories might trick us. Abstract art, on the other hand, is harder to penetrate, being more about feeling than fact, with no clear narrative or heroic characters. Thus, paradoxically, it becomes a more realistic representation of life.
For after one’s neatly arranged earlier years, life begins to lean towards the abstract, not a series of lamps, but a ‘luminous halo’ as Virginia Woolf described it. Sometimes the luminosity is dialled down, and it becomes hard to see or remember what it is all about, to derive an obvious meaning or story, or direction.
But it is exactly through the repetitiveness, or lack of obvious direction that may arise out of daily life, that one might begin to see the patterns form, and our place in the grander scheme of things, even if these are not immediately obvious:
“From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings— are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”
— Virginia Woolf
And so embracing the abstract becomes a necessary act of self-preservation. A repetitive life without an obvious beginning and end may at times seem dull and meaningless, echoing the endless task of Sisyphus. But, as Damien Hirst said, “I think you get meaning through repetition.”
Or, as Yayoi Kusama said, “My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots.” Perhaps we cannot be anything but a dot.
Yayoi Kusama’s earlier series of paintings is known as the Infinity Nets. You can almost imagine the artist sitting there, painstakingly repeating the same move again and again, for hours on end. Painting those patterns was her way of exorcising the hallucinations she had since childhood, of her surroundings being covered in patterns. Eventually, she did not fight the patterns; she let them out by letting them in.
“Through patterns human beings come into a world beyond their normal ken. Through good patterns we see the secrets of beauty.”
- Soetsu Yanagi