ART & CULTURE

ART and culture interact
by Shannon Flynt

I constantly remind art history students that art is not created in a vacuum. This is not an original or maybe even monumental statement but it is an essential concept to understand for anyone who hopes to appreciate the role of art in the world. Art has always enjoyed a constant give-and-take relationship with culture, and the dominant ideals of a given time, place or group of people influence the use and appearance of art. The physical objects that surround people affect how they think about the world around them. This relationship between art and culture perhaps is most visible when the art under consideration is controversial. Consider a few brief examples.

When the French Impressionist Edouard Manet first displayed his painting The Luncheon on the Grass, featuring a naked woman casually relaxing in a park, Parisian viewers were scandalized. Even though the female nude had a long established history in art, a contemporary audience could not forgive the fact that this nude woman appeared in a picnic setting, with two fully dressed gentlemen. There were cries of outrage in 1863, while today’s women’s magazines regularly offer more frank considerations of the naked female body.

In 1913, at the New York Armory Show, the American public experienced its first large-scale exposure to French Expressionist art. The subjects on display were in no way unusual or provocative; it was the color used to represent them that stupefied viewers. There were landscapes with blue trees and portraits of women with green noses. Some art students who saw the show were so horrified by these visions that they burned effigies of the artists and imitations of their paintings. Their view of the world had been threatened by works of art that today you probably would not give more than a passing glance.

One of today’s most respected American monuments was originally received in a manner similar to these paintings. After winning the commission to create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Maya Lin designed a black granite wall inscribed with the names of almost sixty thousand dead and missing soldiers. This Minimalist construction was greeted with heavy public criticism, strongest among some veterans’ groups. Expecting a more traditional monument that standardly would have included some sculpted human figures, they were offended by this stark, plain, “black gash” across the landscape. Now, the monument has become so familiar that it is known simply as the “Wall.”

In the 21^st century, large segments of the population seem to spend less time with the more traditional art forms of painting and sculpture, and more time with a strictly modern form of artistic display: the movie. A much-anticipated convergence of art and culture will appear in such a form later this spring when the film version of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code makes its debut. Once again, viewers will have the chance to observe the complex relationship between life and art. At the heart of the story lies one of the most well known paintings in the world: Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Leonardo, the quintessential Renaissance man, created a vision of that last meal that accorded well with the expectations of his time, even if he did experiment with the materials that he used. In the painting, Jesus sits at a long table, surrounded by his disciples in a room carefully created to showcase the use of linear perspective, a newly developed illusory device.

In spite of its traditional appearance, Leonardo’s Last Supper lies at the heart of much of the controversy surrounding Brown’s book. However, this time it’s not what the art looks like, but what it means that is the issue. Brown created a story of intertwined fact and fiction around the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child together. Imagine: just changing Leonardo’s scene slightly, turning the figure at Jesus’ right hand from a beardless Saint John into a demure bride, alters the work’s significance completely – challenging some of the most fundamental ideas of Christianity. Readers of the book may have rushed to view images of the painting, as one of Western art’s most familiar scenes suddenly became strange and mysterious. Once again, audiences are confronted by what has been deemed radical artistic expression, and viewers will have to decide both individually and collectively whether or not such expressions are acceptable.

Throughout history, art has played this central role in reflecting and communicating the ideas of a world faced with such anxiety and rapid-fire change that people sometimes can hardly keep pace. Societies and cultures never fail to leave some record of their most deeply held beliefs, and it is those beliefs and the struggles that surround them that find their most tangible expression in art.