Art has often co-opted with desire. Without desire, we can say, there would no works of art. From the ancient cavemen of pre-historic France to the hard-core ghetto artist of the modern day suburbia, everyone expresses desire through their works of art. Freud, one is tempted to utter the name but it seems there is something far more primitive in man’s desire to express him or her through art. It is a commonly accorded phrase among today’s intelligentsia or a theory connoisseur that ‘man is a desiring animal’, an idea culled into existence by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In fact, desire or impulse as expressed in art is something far more primitive to be accorded some sort of theorization.
Nonetheless, the desire that profoundly influences artistic creation is both fleshly and spiritual in nature. By fleshly, I mean, the ID taking over, when sexual impulses play tendentiously with the artist’s virile mind creating images or spurting out lines of wondrous panache. We will always see such images or to say more bluntly, history is replete with creativity that had something to do with the body, the aching for the body, the maneuvers of the body, smittening of the mind by bodily gestures. Take for example the depictions of sexual intercourse in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lovers or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Candid as they are can be taken as manifestations of the sexual within the artist.
My argument hinges on the spiritual aspect of the desire that leads to artistic creation. Two forms of spiritual manifestation of art I would want to discuss here. Firstly, the Romantic manifestation of artistic desire in which impulses of a varied nature play a part in creativity and through which the creative mind give recognition to the impulses that play a key role in creating works of art. Secondly, I will try to discuss the long tradition of religious art of Europe which is quintessentially spiritual in nature, and is illustrative of a desire for spiritual freedom. From the discussions of Romanticism and European religious art, I will come to my conclusion where I would brief discuss Pahela Boishakh as a manifestation of the romantic ideals and religious desires which we have found in European art.
European Romanticism as it has been theorized by scholars like Maurice Bowra, Mario Praz was greatly a revolt against unfreedom. The other thing that made Romantic art possible was the artistic realization that the growing capitalism of 18th Century England is a revolt against the nature forces, against the Divine Creator in particular. Consequently, an insatiable desire to represent freedom became the leitmotif of Romantic art. As I have already noted, sexuality hardly played a role in a Romantic artist’s expression of desire. It was rather a freedom of the mind which they desperately sought. Without discussing William Blake, the poet-prophet of English Romanticism any discussion on the spiritual desire of Romantic art remains incomplete. Perhaps the best place to start is his ‘Songs of Innocence and Songs of experience’ that he identifies as ‘showing the two contrary states of the human soul’.
What makes Blake’s works examples of art-works manifesting desire are the heavy presence of loaded images where desire seems to be competing with institutions particularly inimical to freedom. The poems “The Sick Rose” or “Holy Thursday” are perhaps the best possible examples. The sickness of the rose in the first and the plight of the children in the second poem result from the shackles of institutionalization. The rose, symbolic of sexual violation would only cure itself once it gets rid of the ‘worm’ that is tormenting its innocence. The children, orphaned and possibly malnourished, will only be able to attain freedom once they have got rid of the Church representatives who guard their procession with jealous obstinacy, thinking a slight lax of their panoptic gaze would result into the unraveling of a desire that would bring destruction to institutions of all kinds including the religious ones.
Other romantic poets like Keats and Shelley consistently evoke desire for freedom in their works. Keats’ concept of negative capability, a theory that he coined to enunciate his free-spiritedness, is indeed worth analyzing. For Keats, man burdened by ‘the fever and the fret’ of daily life must try to escape the ephemeral through art. Keats’ negative capability is a vehicle through which the human soul can journey to the world of ideals. In “Ode to a Nightingale” and in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats undertakes such journey. Shelley is perhaps the most radical of romantic artists who would manifest the most potent of romantic desire. His “To a Sky Lark” is an audacious declaration of poetry.
For the Romantic poets, artistic impulse was a cerebral process. This play of the mind would only respond to the call of the heart once it is able to channel the desire to create into substantial will to creativity. And it is Imagination, a quality that the Romantics saw as having the quality of fusing a connection between desire and creation. Hence, imagination willed works of art. Something akin to Nietzsche’s Will to Power.
Thus art does inculcate a will to power, we can say. And this is the point when we can discuss Romantic paintings of the German artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. In their art there is a constant desire to escape unfreedom. Andrew Graham Dixon, a celebrated British art-critic in a television documentary on German art discusses Friedrich and Runge as artists whose works are illustrative of the romantic ideal. Both artists express a penchant for freedom, a desire to break free from the shackles of institutions. Dixon is particularly effusive about two works, Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) and Runge’s The Hülsenbeck children (1806), both of which he sees as expressive of freedom. Friedrich’s work, Dixon shows is manifesting the German national possibility at a time when Germany was expressing its desire to expand and to be a powerhouse of Europe (Dixon 2010).
Runge’s work is expressive of a Wordsworthian notion, that is, children are sacred and they exist in a realm of absolute purity, free from the venomous aspects of adult life. One can discern a Blakean penchant for innocence in Runge. While Romantic art had a closer tie with the desire to break free, European religious art, a tradition long venerated as manifestation of God’s omnipotence, expresses the desire to elevate the soul spiritually.
The Hülsenbeck children, Philipp Otto Runge
However, within the bounds of religious art, there was always an intimation of freedom. Artists, reluctant to remain obsequious to the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church would often display resistances of various natures. Thus the most celebrated of Leonardo Da Vinci’s work, which have religious connotations, are often expressive of a desire to break-free of the normative paradigms of Renaissance art. In The Last Supper or in The Virgin of the Rocks we see Da Vinci giving expression to a religious theme in a tacitly manifested spirituality, illustrative of artistic freedom.
Pahela Boishakh with its carnivalesque intent has an innate spirituality and a desire to seek freedom that encapsulates the essence of both European Romanticism and European religious art as discussed above. Though plagued by contemporary bourgeoisie commercialism, the occasion in essence is egalitarian in nature. While seeking to escape the shackles of unfreedom, Boishakh reminds us of the realm of the beyond which is not religious yet akin to a pagan intimation of religiosity. Spiritual freedom is what Pahela Boishakh teaches us, but far more important is how the occasion challenges the European notion of spiritual freedom as illustrated in Romanticism and Renaissance religious painting. This spirituality is again a primordial human desire, to break free from tyranny, from mind-deadening parochial religiosity. More importantly, it is a challenge to the Eurocentric notions of spiritual freedom where religiosity and artistic expressions take on a different form.
The inauguration of the Bengali New Year is traditionally a rural festival. But gradually it became associated with the urban Bengalis who saw it as a resisting force to the Islamicist national identity of the Pakistan nation. Pahela Boishakh became a unique force giving voice to the growing resentment against Pakistani ideological hegemony since “Pahela Boishakh wanted to keep religion within the spheres of home and worshipping, and forbade the use of religion as a social and collective tool” (Choudhury 49) (my trans). In this sense, the desire as illustrated by the Bengali New Year festivities is that of the Bengali spirit.
Precisely for that very reason, different forms of artistic desires take over during Pahela Boishakh. The collective nature of the artistic expressions of Boishakh is suggestive of the rejection of the religiocentric collectiveness espoused by the national discourse of Pakistan. Consequently, the exuding of raw libidinous energy as well as spiritual thirst is a manifestation of a desire that seeks to overturn not only the neo-colonizing paradigms of Pakistani statehood but also the English colonizing values that imposed strict restrictions on the local and the vernacular. The occasion thus becomes celebratory and would continue to be reckoned with gusto and liveliness.
What makes this connection between Pahela Boishakh and European artworks-religious and romantic art illustrating spirituality-worth discussing is that both are revolts against the reductive features of life. It is only by fighting reductiveness art can free itself, and Pahela Boishakh as well as the European religious and romantic art, despite the clamorous gongs of discipline, form and order asking them to remain quotidian and conforming, has freed art by successfully upholding a spiritual desire to be free. To end, Serajul Islam Choudhury’s views of Pahela Boishakh according to which, “The main thing is to bring an end to discrimination … to break free from the cocoon of community and the difference of class also”, can also be aptly applied to the profound message of European religious art and the Romantic Movement which were aimed at breaking down the barriers that sought to differentiate and to keep Europe under the clutches of parochial rigors and rituals.
References:
Choudhury. Serajul Islam Punjibader Dusshason (Tyranny of Capitalism). Dhaka: Jatiya Grantho Prakashan, 2001. Print.
Dixon, Andrew Graham (Presenter) and Karen McGann (Director) Dream and Machine, The Art of Germany, Produced by BBC, 2010.
