Friedrich Nietzsche in his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy (1872), suggested that art was what made life endurable and creative for the ancient Greeks who were fundamentally pessimists [Listen to a podcast interview on Nietzsche on Art] [If you have trouble listening to this, you can get it from the podcast series 'Philosophy Bites' on iTunes] Without their great art of tragedy, the Greeks would have been lost, Nietzsche believed. Dionysus was the god of intoxification and frenzy; Apollo represented order, beauty, illusion, dream, the prinicipium individuationis (division into individuals). Too much awareness of the Dionysian aspect of life would be unendurable. The combination of the musical theatre with the enactment of taboos that tragedy provided allow sufficient engagement with the Dionysian aspects of life while at the same time tempering it with Apollonian elements for the Greeks to emerge invigorated from experience. A predominantly Dionysiac art that acknowledges the death and terror at the heart of existence, but does not teeter into the abyss, allows viewers to experience a kind of solidarity and power that renews the spirit.
Nietzsche (influenced by Schopenhauer) believed (or feigned to believe) that at a deep level reality is simply a seething mass that is completely impersonal. Great art can give us a glimpse of that reality without destroying us. The Dionysian element in art is essential to its profundity, but without some Apollonian element the art would be too dark to endure.
In the Gallery
This week we were in of Tate Britain. There was a marked contrast between the apparently Apollonian work in 19 and the more Dionysiac in 21. The direct visible physical gestures in, for example Peter Lanyon's painting suggested the loss of sense of self-consciousness and a more direct expressive force than did the cooler work by Mondrian...But nothing there was completely Dionysian, there was always the sense that an artist was in control of the final result rather than simply in a frenzy.
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