Writing
It has often been held that Painting is a narrative art, but this is just a conceit. Painting is only narrative if the viewer already knows the story, or if the story is being explained to the viewer, in words, at time of viewing. “Narrative Painting” can only illustrate something already known. Although painting has often been representational, her representations are not narratives. The experience represented in traditional painting is symbolic and/or allegorical experience, but painting is deeper than mere representation.
In his Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Romantic poet John Keats famously writes that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. In The Origin of the Work of Art, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the nature of the relationship between Truth and Beauty. Heidegger says that “Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is” and that Beauty is the appearance of Truth in the work of art. Since Truth is the revealing of itself, the arising of Truth and Beauty is not a fixed matter of fact, but rather a process or an opening. I relate this opening to the way in which Heidegger defines the word phenomenon in his central text Being and Time:
In the twenty first century, we live within an overwhelmingly complex international web of cultural conceptions and technologies. Our cultural artifacts are mostly electronic. They are noisy, brutal and addictive, designed for instant gratification, and they are ubiquitous; they are also largely based on photography (and variant moving-image derivatives of photography), which means that they consist of disembodied images. This disembodiment reinforces our materialism. As materialists, we do not seek out the work of art, our need is for the product. Unlike the work of art, which embodies physical being in the world, products are representations of ideas, ideas like ‘status’ and ‘power’. We are therefore unable to be present to the beauty (or otherwise) of things in the world, since we have no feeling for “the thingness of things”, only feelings and ideas about what things mean. To dwell in culture such as this, the nature of our own being is more than just hidden, it is entirely unknown to us.