JUNE 2006

 
THE STATE OF TASTE
 by Patrick Pye

Forty-eight years ago I came upon the following statement by Lucien Freud in Encounter Magazine.....    

"The painter must give completely free rein to any feeligs or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn. It is just this self-indulgence which acts for him as the discipline through which he discards what is for him inessential and so crystalizes his tastes.  A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what is it suitable for him to do in art.  Only through a complete understanding of his tastes can he free himself of any tendency to look at things with an eye to the way he can make them fit in with a ready-made conception. Unless this understanding is constantly alive he will begin to see life simply as material for his particular line in art. He will look at something and ask himself 'Can I make a painting by me out of this?'  And so his work degenerates through no longer being the vehicle of his sensation. One might say that he has come to crystalise his art instead of his tastes, thereby insulating it from the emotion that could make it alive for others."    

This seemed to us at the time, a significantly modern way of saying that the painter is less than the apple before him. The word obsess suggests something incomplete, something we are haunted by. It is uncertain, agnostic :  a becoming of knowing and perception. Maybe it stands uneasily for those definitive traditional words - SUBJECT MATTER -  as what draws the curiosity of the artist's appetites. 

As the word applies to food the word 'tastes' is a verb. As it applies to art it is a noun, a thing we have or fail to have.  When I looked the word up in my dictionary I found the perfect description: taste is..."to try or TEST the flavour or quality of (something)..... to perceive or distinguish the flavour (character) of anything."   But why would you wish to test a form or colour or image?  To see wether it was authentic and appropriate to the situation of its circumstance. What is wrong with sentimentality? you may ask. Its chief fault is that it is cowardly; it usually means that the author has confused what he really feels with what he feels he would like to feel. Or worse; what he has spied out of fellow-humanity that others would like to feel.  

Our contemporary world is a world of enormous pressures and taste has suffered. Not only do we have overt persuaders; we also have the hidden ones.  We are cowardly of failure so....perhaps.... we pretend to "political correctness".  We must succeed in whatever it is so we sweeten the pill. We must have minds of the utmost originality, but we dress like campers so we will be camouflaged in the hurly-burly. We have euphemised the word 'taste' so that it is only taken to mean the subjective choice that every true unit of the Demos has a guaranteed right to in all his appetites. The only shortcoming in these appetites is that, as they have not been TESTED they have no warrent for their authorisation.  

Too bad ! Approximate taste rules ! All you have to do to know the truth is to travel by bus or frequent souvenir shops;  your eyes will be, as we say in Dublin, scalded out of your head.    

Now I would not be so rash as to forward  the RHA as an arbiter of taste. But implicit in the tradition of the accademies is the acknowledgement that these are objective values in the relations of visual form, and these relations are not merely subjective.  The painter or sculptor is above all a person who has "a conscience about form." Having a conscience about form is a necessary scruple, a discipline of work that will involve you in blushes but deserves the best you can give it. This conscience is indeed personal and so is the taste to be formed in it - but it also belongs to a universal language of forms that moulds the artist and the impersonal language of archetypes to which he responds.

Modernity has robbed us of so many of the humbler classes of men, of artisans as well as craftsmen - as well as an aristocracy who made it their business to possess taste - that the whole elaborate instinct for what is appropriate in the varied circumstances of life has been unravelled and then steam-rolled out of existence. the people who wear runners and track suits from morning till night would be amazed if you asked them were they "athletes or campering in the vicinity?"; they wear what all the others wear. They have just surrendered the whole tedious matter of choosing form.  In our world that is too much for our children of impulse.  

But taste's crisis in seeking appropriate forms for the different roles and circumstances in life is deeper still. Nietzsche's 'revaluation of all values' has done its awesome job more thorooughly that, sixty years ago, we would have thought possible.  Morality has been defused of its authority and values have been turned upside down. All the tenderness of our regard for ourselves and others as creatures 'of the Hand of a Creator' has, I suspect, broken into disillusion and, instead of wonder and prayer,  we are victims of a ubiquitous sickness of soul.... 

  Now appearing for the first time as what it really is....  

As a youngster I leapt on the words of Lucien Freud. They expressed the way we all felt if we had any spirit. Now I am not so sure. Lucien was speaking for the disinterested self; the self for whom everything is 'up for grabs'.  Self-indulgence acting as a discipline resonates of Romanticism.  Then there is the question of what may obsess you in life: 'life' is a very open word, life in the Demos.  But the word 'life' looks towards death.  Lucien was perfectly right about the need of the artist to understand his tastes - but having your tastes and understanding them are two very different activities.   Understanding our tastes has never in my lifetime been entertained in any art school of my acquaintance. It would necessitate art schools for the middle-aged.  Instead the schools have sold political and aesthetic Reductionism - the 20thCentury floating philosophy (from a sceptical patriarch) and that has been the sum of it.   That understanding has become so ubiquitous among the young as to be boring... In my young days all the artists who were 'modern' wrote in their CVs "self-taught"  At least we could assume that their rebellion was their own and not their professor's.

  I look in vain through contemporary criticism for some light satire of the Emperor's New Clothes. I cannot but ask myself how the cowardice before the new - when, after all, freedom of speech is guaranteed by the constitution - should have become such a habit.  I suspect that critics have lost the appetite for good painting and sculpture, and that they do not know what they lack. Critics of the written word at least know what they like.  After a century of Neitzsche's 'revaluation', we are suffering from plain exhaustion and a hiatus in taste is the outcome.

  Some 180 years ago Constable put he finger on the primacy of taste. Perhaps it surprises you that it should be an artist and not a member of the gentry or a critic. You should not be surprised, because if the painter does not know why he paints,  if he has not penetrated as far as understanding his own appetite for form, who ever will? I would say it is the first labour of the artist to develop is taste with intelligence and perception.  Shilly-shallying over this central process of making art is the sign of the amateur.  

If I may paraphrase the words of John Constable, he concluded that most people, not quite knowing what they want, have something approaching, maybe, a half-taste, or a quarter taste.  The true painter, however, has a whole taste; his appetite for form has become something with a life of its own. The advantage of having a whole taste, Constable tells us, is that all those souls who have the same taste will find full consolation in that taste that represents theirs.   That accounts for the deep loyalty, as thick as blood, that art lovers have to certain artists: the consolation of a consciousness of form more fully developed than the consumer has, as yet, managed to figure out.
 
Patrick Pye© Dublin 2006.

Patrick Pye: Born in Winchester in 1929, he was raised in Dublin. He started painting in 1943 under the sculptor Oisín Kelly, and later studied at the National College of Art in Dublin. In 1957 he received a scholarship to attend the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Holland, where he began working with stained glass under Albert Troost. In 1973 he began etching at the Graphic Studio in Dublin, and he has had many solo exhibitions in the city. He has completed many major commissions on religious themes, including Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick; Church of the Resurrection, Belfast; Convent of Mercy, Cookstown, Co. Tyrone (1965); Fossa Chapel, Killarney (1977); a triptych illustrating man's expulsion from the Garden of Eden at Bank of Ireland headquarters (1981); and Stations of the Cross for Ballycasheen Church in Killarney (1993). Recent commissions include an altarpiece, stained glass windows and roundels for a rebuilt church at Claddaghmore, Co. Armagh (1997-98); a crucifix for Our Lady of Lourdes church in Drogheda (1999); The Life of Our Lady, a six-panel painting on copper for the North Cathedral in Cork (1999); The Transfiguration, a 10-foot wallhanging for St. Mary's Oratory at NUI Maynooth (2000) and The Baptism of Christ, an oil painting for a new church at Drumbo, Belfast. The Royal Hibernian Academy exhibited Triptychs and Icons, a retrospective of his work, in 1997. Since the Millennium a large painting Theologian in his Garden has been acquired by St Thomas' University in St Paul (MN) for their Centre of Catholic Studies. In 2005 Patrick was invested with a D.Phil (hon.causa) by Maynooth University. He is a founding member of Aosdána.