by Marcello La Matina.
When the ancient Greeks wanted to explain their artistic life, they used a mythological image: the Muses. These nine sisters, daughters of Mnemosyne, were the goddesses who governed the different artistic expressions: Calliope was the muse of epic and Terpsichore of dance, just as Euterpe was the goddess of lyric poetry and Melpomene that of tragedy. In actuality, the artistic field of the Greeks was broader than ours; for example, it included history and geometry that we place among the sciences. Despite the subject, geometric and historical knowledge were matter of song or the expression of a sovereign formal balance between magnitudes speaking of the beauty of the world, or what they called the Kòsmos. For the Greeks, art was never defined starting from the content, from the subject, as it is among moderns. Art was a constellation of phenomena linked to song, to voice, to beauty and harmony.
The Muses had taught men to sing. And there was no poet who did not begin to sing, giving thanks to the Muses – or more generally to the goddess – for having received both the song and the material of the song itself. In fact, the Muse sang through the voice of the poet or the dancer. We do not know when exactly humans learned to sing, but it certainly happened before writing taught how to fix the characteristics of sound and voice on durable materials. Before the invention of writing, poets passed down song and, with it, knowledge. Songs, especially epic ones, were their tribal encyclopedia. Homer’s poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, do not solely tell the stories of Achilles and Odysseus, but they merge descriptions of objects and activities that archaic man learned from tradition rather than from experience. Even those knowledges learned by Greeks from other civilizations (such as geometry taken from the Egyptians) ended up being attributed to a Muse. Urania was the goddess of geometry and astronomy.
Therefore, arts were ways of contemplating and recreating the beauty perceived by the Greeks in the external world and that they absorbed like a precious divine drink capable of restoring and feeding their inner world.
We moderns divide arts into two classes: arts of time and arts of space. The arts of time are music, poetry, and dance; the arts of space are architecture, painting, and sculpture. A piece of music or a ballet have a duration, without it they cannot be constructed as artworks. On the contrary, a Gothic cathedral or a statue by Phidias seem to stand before us motionless and immutable, like things that time cannot modify in any way. However, as a scholar Etienne Souriau shown, this distinction is incorrect. For example, the Parthenon. It is certainly a body extended in space. And yet, to be considered as an artwork, a spectator must contemplate it, “circumnavigate” it, and frequent it for a certain period of time. The same thing
could be said of a Gothic cathedral: to be recognized as an architectural work, its visitor must enter it, walk through it, and observe it for a certain period of time. No object in space is known in the blink of an eye and no object can be an artwork if it is not read, contemplated. The same thing happens to a painting or sculpture as to a piece of poetry or music: they must be executed in time, they require a certain
amount of time to be enjoyed, listened to, enjoyed and judged.
Souriau considers the time of contemplation as a sort of “time of execution”. A cathedral, but also a park or a garden are not only an expression of an ‘art of space’, but rather artistic objects embedded in time, as music. So, in the “plastic arts”, artwork have different ways of giving their own time. However, this time is neither a merely physical time nor a psychological time, but an intrinsic time to the aesthetic constitution of the object or of the event.
Let’s take a sculpture of Greek art, for example the Nike of Samothrace. For Souriau, it has an intrinsic rhythmic life: “it is surrounded by the sea, by the wind, by the waves rhythmically broken by the wake of a boat”. With certainly imprecise words, we would say that it goes beyond the confines of the matter to suggest a dynamic that can be grasped by the observer only incorporating himself into the rhythmic movement of the object of his contemplation. The classical sculptor succeeded in impressing a power of evocation of the surrounding space and time on the block of marble.
Thus, contemplating the object means starting a relationship with the rhythmic movement of its texture. You cannot appreciate an artwork without participating in its time and you cannot participate in this time without executing the plastic work without that our psychological present become incorporated into the time evoked by the work itself. The plastic execution creates a relationship between the time of the subject and the time of the object. Art is this relationship that indeed needs space, but which is not exhausted in space.
Now, let’s see what a museum can and must be. A Museum is primarily a space built to allow the transformation of this Subject/Object relationship. When the visitor enters the space of a museum artwork, he is present only in the space of the object but as soon as he begins to “circumnavigate” the artwork, he can be captured in its time breathing to the rhythm of the work itself. He will use all his sensorial strategies to “perform” the artwork. As a musician reads a score by converting the written signs into sound so our visitor will be able to translate into his sensorial grammar the features of the object he is “performing” like reading a score.
In summary, the artwork is not a ready-made object, it is not something made once and for all. Rather, it is an event that we are called to recreate each time and each time it can be given in new forms, stimulating new knowledge and enriching itself with the experience that the visitor manages in his sensorial journey of reading and performing. And this journey does not necessarily need to be visual.
The artwork reveals itself if it transmits a bit of its formal organization through a multisensory grid.
The senses of the artwork speak to the senses of the visitor and the languages of one are translated into the languages of the other. Art is a continuous transposition where the senses are a function of the meaning and its expressive organization. The museum is an immense vocabulary full of pages and they are filled and rewritten at each visit. And each of us is like a performer called to participate in the continuous creation of the world generated by the art of the Muses.