Anand Amaladass S. J.
It is significant to remember that a group of artists initiated the process in the Western art history, to choose the not-so-museum-worthy objects like the empty bottles, dilapidated buildings, withered trees as their themes for paintings and made them museum-worthy. (e.g. Kurt Schwitters, d. 1948), Georgio Morandi, 1890–1964, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945).
That is what Jesus did by calling the marginalized/uneducated fishermen to be his ambassadors of peace and love. He wanted his banquet hall to be filled with people on the streets, who are not banquet-worthy and so not fit for royal treatment, thus creating space for the unqualified for the classical aesthetic sensibility.
Art and protest
Protest in human history is nothing new. But then why do people protest? When there is obviously a discrepancy between appearance and reality, then a civil intervention becomes a necessity. If one understands ‘protest’ as a loud and public statement, then implicitly a communication must take place in public, in social context; it means that the primary intention is to bring about a denunciation. The perception of this discrepancy presupposes that there is an underlying ethical sense that prompts this.
The artists are quick to perceive this. Only when one is sensitive enough to recognize beauty or justice, he/she will notice what is ugly and unjust. Every human being by nature is aware what is to be done and what is to be avoided. In some societies this awareness is highly developed through education or through inherited cultural value system. This is reflected in their literary history.
Basic modes of protest:
The protests of artists and poets are well-recorded in history. There are artworks which are obviously seen as protest artworks like that of Goya y Lucientes (1748–1828) who critiqued the social and political situation of his time. His “Disaster of the War” is a well-known protest-painting.
Humour is another form of protest, for example, The Great Dictator of Charlie Chaplin or the paintings of Mugilan (Tamilnadu). But humour requires some distancing, but it does not take away the pain of suffering. The victims could still laugh against their oppressive masters. After all humour arises when one laughs in spite of everything and that could be extended to philosophy as well: Philosophy is, when one still thinks in spite of it. (Odo Marquard)
Faith and humour
Reinhold Niebuhr points out that there is an intimate relation between faith and humour. It arises out of the fact that both are concerned with contradictions of our existence: humour has to do with contradictions confronted in our immediate surroundings of life, whereas faith deals with the final contradictions. In both the freedom of human spirit expresses itself to place its ability outside of life’s connections, outside of human being itself, to survey the entire reality.
Laughter is our reaction to contradictions surrounding us — such that they do not essentially touch us. Faith is the only possible reaction to the final contradictions of existence, which threatens the meaning of our life itself.
Faith is the ultimate triumph over the contradiction, the ultimate confirmation of the sinfulness of our existence. There is no other triumph and there cannot be another, however much human knowledge may be broadened. (Discerning the Signs of the Times)
Beauty is a value which is the universal need of human being. Human life is prone to chaos. But beauty is the remedy. The artists at times may distort or disfigure in order to protest, to show their anger. But beauty matters. It calls us to contemplate and not to possess. Beauty calls us to divinity. It lies all around us. We need to recognize it in ordinary things.
“There is just one art:
the art of de[con]struction [of art].
There is just one art history:
the history of war against authority.
There is just one aesthetic, one art idea, one art meaning, one principle, one force:
to be intolerant towards any authority,
any oppression, any exploitation,
any injustice, any chains.
There is just one truth in art, one change, one secrecy: the striving for liberation.”
(Alexander Brener &Barbara Schurz).
About the Author
Anand Amaladass S. J. after his Ph. D in Sanskrit (1981) started teaching in Satya Nilayam Faculty of philosophy, Chennai. His publications include a book on the Dhvani theory in Indian Aesthetics (1984), and five books in German: one on the Vaishnava tradition, two on the God of Dance, Shiva, the fourth one, on the Goddess phenomenon with a translation of Abhirāmi Antāti and the fifth one on Art and Religion.(2020). The Christian Themes in Indian Art (Documentation of how the Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians interpreted Christian themes in India) was published together with Gudrun Löwner (2012). His present research focuses on aesthetic spirituality and option for the least, Jesuit history in India and Tamilology.
