SUNDAY, 30 MARCH 2025

Years ago, I watched a documentary about Ray Davies, the creative force behind the  Kinks. I remember him saying at one point that he felt Waterloo Sunset was better than the person he could ever hope to be in his everyday life, the better human being he wished he could be. I understood at once what he meant. As writers, painters and musicians, we step outside of our quotidian reality for a while: the messy, trivial reality of cleaning our apartment or making sure we have enough money to survive until the end of the month. Our art can be good, bad or ugly, it makes no difference: for a while we become Dorothy, leaving Kansas and landing in Oz.

I know saying this might sound pretentious, but it’s not really such an extravagant claim. It does not mean espousal of some transcendental realm or world of Forms where superior beings called artists explore landscapes of meaning and truth beyond the reach of the philistine masses. In one way, it’s nothing more than the distinction between our public and private selves, but at the same time it’s also more than that: it’s the difference between writing something in a diary which we never intend anyone else to read and forging a poem for public consumption. When something becomes ‘Art’ and moves into the public sphere, it gains a more general significance, an extra layer of meaning. It turns into a symbol or a metaphor and accrues a level of abstraction, even if it’s strictly representational and aims only to hold a mirror up to nature.

One idea that has been kicking around since at least the days of Baudelaire’s flâneur is that an artist can turn his life and person into his work of art (in those early days, it was always a ‘he’), an idea picked up by people like Wilde and Whistler and Dalí in their various times, and which then took full flight in the avant-garde in the second half of the 20^th century in the work of groups like Fluxus, one-off happenings, the theatrics of performance art, and the careers of working artists like Gilbert and George. But the distinction between the human beings and the work remained. The Ono of Cut Piece was not the Ono who brushed her teeth and put out the garbage.

How is something different when it takes on the mantle of Art? To return to the brushing of teeth, how is doing that on a stage or in a gallery in front of an audience different from doing it in the bathroom at home? First, of course, in the latter case it is essentially practical, something we do to stop our teeth rotting. We are not meant to interpret it as a metaphor for something else, as always happens once something has been singled out as Art. Then the brushing of teeth becomes a statement or a message – perhaps a comment on our contemporary obsession with hygiene and cleanliness, perhaps a satire on the meaningless routines of suburban life, perhaps a Freudian reference to the oral stage and our subsequent sexual development – you pays your money and you takes your choice.

The key thing is that there will always be this choice. It is almost impossible in this staged performance to see another human being brushing their teeth as a brute physical action and nothing more. It becomes metaphorical. One of the problems with people who criticise modern art for its obsession with theory is that it falls prey to the illusion that it is possible to have Art without a theory. Yet even if the critics and historians haven’t caught up with the work that is being produced, as perhaps may happen at first in low-status art forms such as early blues, there is still an assumption, a consensus, in the minds of the artists and the audiences who encounter it about what is being presented. If theory is rejected for so-called ‘common sense’ or vague claims about ‘human nature’, covert meaning still always remains, even when the artist, like Warhol in many interviews, attempts to avoid or deny it.

This is clear from a quick look at photography, an art form in which it might be claimed that a machine copies the reality that we see before our eyes with limited human intervention. But a glance at the work of a photographer such as Doisneau walking the streets of Paris and recording what he witnesses around him makes clear that a thousand choices are made: what to shoot, from which angle, with which lens, where to crop the negative, which ones to discard and which to keep and sell and publish, and so on. Even his most famous photo, Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville’, which captures a spontaneous moment of real life on the streets, becomes a symbol of young love or an expression of Paris the city, rather than merely a brief snatch of objective daily reality caught on celluloid. It is a testament to Doisneau’s talent that there remains a freshness, a sense of casualness, about his photographs, but it is not true that they are simply reflections of real life in all its haphazard flow. Everything which we choose to label Art is constructed at some level and then later decoded by its audience.

Art also, of course, takes place in special spaces designed in order to house it, despite various attempts – happenings, Land Art, graffiti, public murals, the wrapping up of buildings – to move it away from the galleries and concert halls and theatres. These venues signal very clearly that we have entered a world which is different from real life and we are therefore meant to approach it in a special way. This world is full of meaning, not the ordinary significance of events in daily life, but a meaning that is abstracted and collective and generalised. Many attempts have been made in modern Art to capture the randomness of everyday life, such as Tzara’s nonsense sound poetry in the Dadaist cafés, the automatic writing of the Surrealists, and Burroughs’ cutting up of text and rearranging it based on pure chance. But meaning tends to slip through even in these extreme cases as soon as an audience becomes involved and makes its interpretation. Art unfolds in a world removed from everyday reality and all attempts to dissolve this difference ultimately fail.

In the last part of this essay, I’d like to turn to more psychological aspects of this topic, which was probably closer to what Davies was thinking of when he made his statement. The person he was in his daily life somehow seemed to him a much less successful and worthy human being than the one who wrote Waterloo Sunset. And even if we never experience the success that Davies had in his career, there is a sense of wearing our Sunday best when we compose a song, write a poem, or paint a picture. We are transported outside of ourselves, and our self-centred desires are stilled for a while as we succumb to the rules of the material in our hands, be it words or paint or marble. We are no longer flawed and limited creatures struggling with the wayward trivia of daily life.

This ability of Art to transport us beyond ourselves when we create it forms the rationale for Art as therapy. There is something meditative about the state of mind we enter when we dance or paint or sing, even if in most art forms, unlike in meditation, the body remains highly active. This is more than just the joy of singing in the shower or the recapture of childlike play: it is blended with an adult seriousness that is working under rules that we don’t set. Nor is Art alone in this power to transcend the ordinary; doing sport can offer the same sense of escape, the same sacrifice of self to something bigger while we are doing it. Perhaps any activity can offer this if we undertake it with sufficient concentration. Our restless mind is silenced as we immerse ourselves in the activity, and for a short time we are possessed. Or, if this sounds too dramatic and other-worldly for those of a practical bent, we become rigorously focused. Or perhaps it is even simpler and our everyday mind is emptied, at least for a precious passage of time.

Anyone who has ever had anything published will probably recognise that sense of dislocation when we see our own words printed on a page, as if they no longer come from us, and this is even more true when we watch ourselves on video or listen to a recording of our own voice. This is a moment of shivery unease, as happens when we catch ourselves by accident in a mirror or a shop window. We are used to experiencing ourselves from within and suddenly we view or hear ourselves from without, as another human being sees us. This moment is truly uncanny. The unheimlich can be terrifying, of course, and our capacity to dream also gives us the power to conjure nightmares. The wonderful thing about Art is the structure it provides to tame these monsters, like Goya painting his Black Paintings. The discipline of Art can spirit the monsters away, at least for the period of time when the work is being created.

When we leave this total absorption in our act of creation, our loss of self vanishes in a flash and can feel like a passing illusion. We are back in our own skin with all the failings and anxieties of our compromised humanity. Davies is no longer the composer of Waterloo Sunset but a man who brushes his teeth and is full of parochial worries and agitated desires. The happiest moments in life, I would suggest, are those when we forget ourselves completely, and making Art is one way we can reach this emptiness and bliss. Our urge to creativity is truly a blessing in life as it nourishes us with these transitory spells of release that help to keep us sane.