A Portrait of Britain in Expressionism

To paint what one imagines, or perceives or feels is all very well, one creates a painting where real motions, affects, and imagination blend. One looks on unaware of whether one is looking at fact or fiction, reality or fantasy? The painter paints what the mind feels its world to be, a feeling that includes a very special place for the feeler, and those near them. One paints then the world which we warp into our perceptions – the world we perceive ourselves to be within.

  However there is of course absolutely no reason why this move is restricted to painting. On the contrary pretty well most of national debate or a country’s news stories are merely yet another version of this blending of the felt, of fiction and fact: The world turned into a massive, collective morality play.

  On one level one might say of course that it has always been thus. What after all is organized or imposed religion but the institution of a collective world of the felt and the fact? Or again what else was ‘Britain’s Finest Hour’, or the Empire, or ‘Being a Gentleman’? Social lives are always fiction, or at least they always are in large part fictional. Or to perhaps be truer, being a society paints on a large canvas, feelings which we all share, feelings that in their sharing become real, become something we all find ourselves within, and find a place in. The society creates then its own world, its own collective expression of itself and allows individuals to find their place: Or at least it ought to do; or at least it does so when it is functioning.

  And yet there is a partial difference between previous modes of behaving and our own. In previous times there was always a recourse to a spiritual plane, in which the other (i.e. the society which is bigger than all of us) could be very safely ascribed to, or to which the entire endeavour was meant to be spinning. Religion then formed the backdrop not just to itself, but also to Empire or even to the manners and modes of being a gentleman. What is more this religious aspect was not itself neutral. On the contrary it created rules within the system, rules of composition of feeling and aspiration (what one was meant to aspire towards in feelings). Rules which then made the strange collective world of expressions behave according to strict causality and moral principles.

  So great indeed was this set of moral principles, that they actually provided the rule kit of understanding our world. They were the standard to which all, including actual events, and not merely feelings, were meant to conform. What is more, so great was this power, that it could form the nursemaid to science: Or better the rationalisation of the world according to material and scientific principles was originally carried out in the name of this religious meta principle (this argument was first put forward by the nineteenth century sociologist Weber). Reality as we know it, that is as a series of material agents, was then itself formalized as yet another form of expressionism, this one pointing towards a rational, but removed God.

  To say then that human’s Gods reflect man, is trite, and factually wrong. Humanity’s Gods rather reflect the way that we as individuals, and even more as a society, can and indeed must augment our world with passions, and imaginations, and so create more of it that we can ever perceive. Gods thrived in the fact that the world must be collectively felt (in affects – feeling pitched between humans), and in the worlds which they spun individuals into or though. Gods never reflect humanity, but rather exist in the whirl of felt fact, and fiction, from which individuals pull out their world (a world which has room for them within, and their feelings). Gods are the name that guarantees this process, and gives it the stamp of reality. 

  The problem of modernity is then that we have lost the immediate and assumed nature of this divinity. Any of us might believe in God still, or Gods, but those Gods are forced to share their native land, with other theories be they psychology, or marketing. The effect of this sharing is that that old land which guarantees simple rights to pull as one’s own world, a world with room for feelings and a soul, has becomes rather a tricky phenomena. It is course still there, still demanding to be painted in expressionist colours, and yet no longer simple, no longer merely present, and no longer necessarily leading beyond this world.

  This last point of course is the clincher. In the old system, the divine at some point was pitched way beyond human feeling. The feeling was then a pointer towards something beyond. Humanity might create our own worlds, and feel them as an individual or as a society together, and yet this creation was always part of a hidden divine purpose with a function beyond it. We created our world in the name of that other world from which morality fell, and to which we could only aspire. Our very ability to create our own world was then abstracted, and became a reflection of God’s greater ability to be creating another world or following another purpose within this one.

  Hence in the old model, the system of creation was defined as ‘even as I create a world then that creation is guarded against my own excess or vanity’. I am aware that I must not be too proud of this creation or too in love with it. I am aware then that the very act of creation opens me up to the danger that I might very easily fall into the world which I create, and mistake it for the only possible reality. A move which then blinds one both to God’s purpose, and even more importantly to the fact that the world which I create is other than the actual world.

  To live then in a ‘godless’ age (in which very many people paradoxically perhaps think of themselves as spiritual) is to live in the consequences of this move. As humans we cannot really help being spiritual, in the sense that to be human is to be an expressionist artist. It is then to paint one’s feelings across the colours of one’s imagination and perception. Our worlds then reflect the minds which we are building for ourselves, and the relationships which we are creating beyond ourselves, and we shuffle that which echoes across the two. The problem of course is that without that transcendental root in something else, some othering purpose, we slip into the trap of vanity, and become enamoured of our own created worlds (or else become unable to escape them or tell where factual reality on the one hand ends and the fiction of the other begins). The world itself as itself, as it is for us, becomes echoed into collective feeling, and mass hysteria, which takes the place of Gods.

  Take for example the current crop of stories of the Big Freeze. This crop includes four of the deepest current peccadilloes that are inherent to this immanent creation.

  First and foremost, there is a desperate need for specialness, a principle that ought to be confirmed by reality. It is below freezing at the moment, and that is odd (but not unheard of in winter – if this was June, then that would be another matter....) and yet this oddness is not enough; it must be record breaking (in some way), and generalized. We are not undergoing a cold snap, but the ‘coldest winter for thirty years’ (in spite of the fact that it is not over yet, and so we are not in a position to judge). Likewise temperatures are not allowed to be low, they must be record breakingly low; they must be the exception, and we must be the heroes living through these times of legend and record. Without Gods to guarantee our souls or ourselves, we have only the record book, and with it the desperate need to live as heroes, struggling with the exceptional (Is this our finest hour? - is a very modern question). Linked to this, the entire way in which we approach the story is centred not on fact, but on fiction. It is cold. That is the story. There in nothing more. All other facts are then managed or mangled according to the pressing need to express in snippets of events or fractions, stories about the fact that all of us are a little cold. We are told then that it is a record breaking cold snap. This is true for parts of the north of Scotland, but not for Devon (but this fact is lost). Or again we are told it is all going to get colder yet, and colder, when what actually is meant is that in the east, there will be a significant wind chill factor (which is not the same at all). The entire sense of individual stories (experiences in different parts of the country) is then lost in a collectivisation of experience, and a sharing of the exceptional. Those who have had it hardest at one point in the cold snap are then held out as heroes or at least as objects for a story. Their experience is then given to us all, and infuses itself within our own little experiences of being cold. We are not then merely a shivering individual, but are sharing in that shiver with genuine hardship. Perhaps underlying this sharing of shivering is not that it has been cold, though real enough, but that it actually contradicts another one of our expressionist tales. We assume that in the height of technology and modernity, life ought to be getting easier all the time. The fact then that it isn’t necessarily, is something. Or rather, that sometimes the idea that the weather, or something beyond us, has a power over us comes as a great shock.

  So great a shock that it leads to the third point. We reflect on the abnormality of the occasion, by ourselves stepping beyond the norms of society. We do not then go to work, or children do not go to school, or people panic buy or mope at home, and all in the name of the cold. Now some of this is valid. Roads are more dangerous, but with a bit of care most are fine. Likewise some schools probably did need closing, and some jobs are untenable in the cold, and yet these are probably the exception and not the rule. The point is not that these decisions are made on rational grounds, but rather the very fact that the weather has reminded us of its power, leads us to re-question everything we do. We cannot behave as we were, we cannot merely carry on living in the face of the cold, in the fact of that other reality, the weather, and what it forces upon us. The result is a mass skive, as individuals blame the snow and head for the pub…

  The final aspect of the cold which is so much a part of modernity is the inverse individualization which worry can cause. That is, we assume that the State ought to be able to provide for us. It ought, whatever the consequences, be able to salt roads, or pavements, staff hospitals, and manage the superstructure so that we can continue our everyday existence, free from hiccup. (Almost to the point where at times we behave as though we imagine the government to be responsible for the weather itself.) This is of course impossible. If snow is everywhere, then we will slip, and accidents will happen, (especially if we do not take it upon ourselves to at least try to clear it away). And yet this fact is made to resonate, it becomes ‘someone’s fault’. ‘Someone’ - say for instance the government or local council or whoever - is not doing their job properly because we slipped on ice or because a roof collapsed. Our own individual feelings of worry or anxiety are then painted into the colours of society. If we are scared, then ‘someone else’ is to blame for that fear. There might not be a God behind all things, but there is a society, a state, a government to blame. These then take on the role of a ‘negative’ God. They exist as the hidden reasons not of order, but disaster.  If we cock up, it is the council that ought to be blamed: someone in some hidden way ought to have worked to prevent our anxiety or fear or misery. It is their fault (in the same way as it is also always God’s fault).

  The entire cold snap then, leaves the realm of reality far behind. We are together creating a great expressionist portrait of what it is - as godless if spiritual beings - to be cold, together. A portrait that is far from comfortable or reasonable, a portrait which howls its truths real and imagined to the heavens. A portrait that in a sense needs to exaggerate everything that it holds, all of its feeling and fears, and so make itself special, to give itself a place in the universe, a place that it might otherwise lack. Expressionism was always about this. That is, about how our feelings, our passions pattern the very stuff of our perceptions. (I.e. this house is not any building it is my home, these are not small snotty individuals, they are my children.) - And create for us our own world, and include us within that being. The problem which we all face is that these feelings then increase in their strident power the more we feel our place under threat, and not a natural part of things: Be that expressed in the form of the economic superiority of other lands, or in the wider problem that the world could very easily do without us.

  We live then in an expressionist country, where facts and feelings blend, as we paint a portrait of our own importance in the world, and demand the world responds. Our trouble is of course that the clarion voices that once derided expressionist art as a distortion, apply with more justice to this portrait we paint. All the more so as the real Master artists of this painting, are the media, who need quick cheap stories, and so do not care how exaggerated the painting is: They need to paint with our feelings, to sell their products, and do not care if the paintings are any good, or where they might lead….The philistine never understood painting very well, and yet with a media as expressionist artists, we probably all need them to return once again, and critique our modern paintings of ourselves – our news-based myths.

  And the problem for us all is then, do we really have a right to this self indulgence, this demand for importance? Or is the world slipping away from our grasp far too fast for that, as ice shelves melt, and currents shift? A problem which might lurch us into quite a different tragedy (and one where the weather again is central). A tragedy we are at the moment merely aping or gesturing toward, or perhaps merely rehearsing….