=envelope art=

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue. ---Henri Matisse




How utterly disdainful I used to be of statements such as those made by Matisse, who claimed that his art was meant to bring people ease and comfort. Art was not meant to be an avenue of escapism! Art, as far as I was concerned, was a take-no-prisoners endeavor with one purpose only. To really rub people's nose in it. To never let the audience forget, not for a single moment, just what a shitty horror existence was, a nightmare of inescapable suffering barely alleviated by temporary caesuras, that ultimately—and a lot sooner than one often expected—terminated in death and that death an oblivion that rendered everything we could ever do and feel in life irrelevant. If television and religion and sometimes even literature were pressed into service to produce fantasies designed to lure us into forgetfulness of these brutal facts of our existence, certainly pursuits such as art and philosophy shouldn't allow themselves to be so co-opted, certainly they were meant to bring us face to face with grim reality. 




Give me hopeless philosophies, fictions with no exits, and pictorial representation that cut away one's eyelids and pitilessly forced one to stare at life unmasked in all its paralyzing Medusan horror. That is what real art was for, dammit. It had no other purpose. That was my uncompromising position.




Now, I've come to think, it's more than enough just to be alive to understand how terrible life can be. What's the point of dwelling on it? What can be done about the horror, after all? A good five minute reflection upon opening your eyes in the morning will suffice, will take you as far as you need to go in that direction; indeed, as far as you can go along that route. No additional amount of brooding on the hopelessness, the tragedy of the situation will take you any further, will change a single thing about the conditions of our existence. It's good to remember the inescapable trap that we're in if only to dissuade us from wasting time we don't really have on stupidity, our own and others: we age, we sicken, and we die and so does everyone we love. But that much acknowledged, we  still have to get out of bed in the morning. 




So why not philosophies that make us feel better? Why not fictions that posit a way out, even if only in theory? Why not pictures that imagine a brighter, sunnier, happier world?  


Why not a cup of tea and a scone instead of a cup of gall  and a plate of maggots? Why not Matisse and his armchair art?