𝗪𝗛𝗘𝗡 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗞 𝗦𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗞𝗦 𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗜𝗧𝗬, 𝗪𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗗𝗢 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗗𝗢?

DISCLAIMER

I am not an employee of NAM (Nasjonalmuseet/ the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design). I work at NAM on behalf of an outsourced service provider, in which I have full-time employment. This presentation today is one of several literary creative inspirations that I have so far gotten whilst performing my formal duties at NAM. The presentation is unsolicited, and it is done with no inherent ulterior motives. It is done and delivered with but the best of intentions, without fear or favour. 

Neither NAM nor my employer can or must be directly nor indirectly associated with the thoughts, opinions, and sentiments I am going to express in this presentation. I alone am responsible for the contents herein. I hope, though, that the output shall be of a quality and standard that shall cause neither embarrassment nor disrepute for both NAM and my employer.

The inspirational moment, and its subsequent outcomes, i.e. poem, publication in a book, and the social media video recital here would have happened regardless of whether or not I worked at NAM. All that needed to happen was for my eyes to fall on the particular inspirational object. It could have been anywhere, at any time. It just happened to be at NAM, Oslo, on October 28^th, 2022 this time around.

As I walk through, back and forth, round and around in my professional errands in the various public exhibition spaces in the museum, the vast variety of objects on display works my emotions and thoughts in phenomenal ways. Many a time I feel like I see myself floating in this boundaryless enclosure that is an intermingled environment of what I’ve gathered of ideas of heaven and hell. In this environment, the material and the conceptual are all merged into one new reality that defies human speech for description. The opposites as we know them on the earthly plane cancel out one another in this strange new reality. And it doesn’t matter.

For example, in this temporary but recurring new reality, I don’t see the environment as I do with my eyes distinguishing between normal light and darkness. The sensory organs don’t work in the conventional way here. When I expect to hear a sound in my head, as from observing a painting depicting fire, somehow silence claims its space. It’s in conflicting but harmonic moments like these that I get lost in time and space.

And, in silent thunderous flashes of light, clouds of inspiration engulf my thoughts with darkness. Through this haze, I get to sense words in either written or spoken forms. In this state of mind, I lack a background upon which to base my experience of these words that I hear in what I perceive as silent sound in stationary motion. This is how my writings come to be. Preserving my sanity, thereby. I appreciate art for what its charming beauty and its irresistible goriness do to ever kindle my creativity. A work of art has not moved me if my response to it does not inspire an expressive textual idea in my head.

Immersed in the writing process, I do not create writing ideas from nothing. My writing ideas are stimulated through my responses and reactions to my actual interactions with events and attributes of my environments at any one time. It is not always that the writing idea shall be manifest at all. It is one thing to have an inspiration, and it is another to bring the inspiration to life – the mood, time, and space have to be right. That means that my literary output so far is only the tip of the iceberg concerning how much more I shall potentially produce. Every day I can’t help but get several concrete inspirational moments stored in my creative database in my brain. Therefore, I work at the right place at the right time. I shall live to see my 1000^th book published before I’m a hundred years old.     

Every piece of poetry, essay, or novel that I write helps me to hold my feet on the ground. The writing process cleanses my soul; it elevates my passion for living. This is so because, when I write, I get lost in a realm of being in which asking existential questions and finding functional answers are the imperatives for survival. This is the realm in which, with text, I get to materialize for life my dreams, my hopes, and fears. I am eternally grateful for the privilege of working at NAM for what immense value the workspaces add to my creativity.

Currently, and until January 14^th, 2024, NAM has a major exhibition of some of the works of Harriet Backer. The exhibition is called Every Atom is Colour. Whenever I’m in the magnificent exhibition hall, I get a sense of a warm, safe, homely feeling. This is reminiscent of the better part of my formative years whilst attending school in Lesotho, 1965-69. I feel and see so much of my late maternal grandmother’s aura throughout the space.

Harriet Backer gives me a reassuring, here-and-now sensation in my entire being. I see myself walking into a bright future standing still with time in Harriet Backer’s presence. This is much like seeing the visions of the kingdom of God that my grandmother used to tell me about. She used to say that I was a chosen child of God; when I’m grown up, I’d be king of my people. And, when I die, I’ll be headed to heaven, where I’ll sit on the right side of God, and live happily ever after. Amen!

I’m not quite ready to die yet. Heaven can wait.

I first met Harriet Backer in the northern spring of 2022, a few months before the official opening of NAM. Upon entering the room through its main entrance, I saw a portrait of a letter-reading girl hung up on the wall facing the entrance squarely from across the room. This was one of those love-at-first-sight moments that often make my heart sing throughout my body. The girl’s enthralling beauty reminded me of a girl that I once knew as a growing-up boy-to-man in South Africa in the early 1970s.

Each time I entered the room I’d daydream about the many, many love letters I’ve written in my time. The girl in the portrait is there but not there at the same time. I could bring her to life in my fantasies, but I could never have her in the flesh, yet I love her all the same. Hopeless love.

In the same manner, the girls I used to write letters to in many parts of the world were there in my fantasies as I sat down and wrote. The fantasies would get wilder tortuous during the replies waiting phases, which could be weeks to months in those pre-internet days. Upon receiving even only one reply after the long wait, I used to curse my fantasies for failing to bring in the flesh these girls home to me. But I kept hoping that one day, it would happen. I’m keeping the dream of love alive in memories of some of the girls now dead.

I’ve met numerous other new girls since. We don’t write letters these days. Social media and other modern communication platforms do the trick. But it’s not the same. I guess that’s how it took about six months before the poem inspired by the letter-reading girl came forth.

One day, as I stepped into, the Harriet Backer room, I marvelled at the especially silently exuberant nonchalance of my beloved letter girl on that particular day. Thinking that I saw the painting moving like it was being pushed towards the door, I feared she was shutting me out for once. At the same time, I felt welcome as I confirmed that the painting was attached fast to its regular spot.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t before thought about what the message in the letter could have been and from whom it may have come. I also realized that I had never gotten to look into her eyes since they were so fixed on the letter in her hands. Perhaps I should write her a letter, I thought. At that moment, then, I suddenly heard poetic words singing in my head; the poem Love Letter became the real-world outcome.

Before I read the poem, I have to make another disclaimer as I, in my words, describe what art is:

DISCLAIMER 2

I do not have any academic or professional training in art. My articulation of what art is a function of my layman’s instinctual appreciation of things beautiful against the ugly; both in the figurative and abstract manifestations as my senses perceive it in any given situation and space, at any given time. All I know is how to think and write, and write and think. Art is what I feel. If I feel it, I can think it. If I think it, I can write it. Writing is my art, my artistic expression. Writing is what I do; all attributable to my academic training.   

WORKPLACE OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS

People do from time to time visit museums of all kinds for all kinds of recreational, educational, and research reasons. I work at Norway’s Nasjonalmuseet. The institution has proved to be an awesome literary creative’s wet dream for me as an author and poet. I get at least one goosebumps moment each day I am at work. Tens of thousands of works of art are on display throughout the eighty-nine exhibition spaces at the museum. In all their widely variable expressive forms, these artworks move me in a way that ever fills me with love and joy like I have never experienced before. Working here is a privilege I am much grateful for.

At different points in all the exhibition spaces in the museum, there are rest stations comprising benches upon extensions of which are placed, amongst other items, wooden playing cards. The cards have various quizzes and games for the guests to have a go at as they sit and rest. I, together with Ole, a fine but ever condescending colleague young enough to be my grandson, happened to have been engaged in a discussion about various aspects of the museum when we approached one such station. Ole then unexpectedly reached out and randomly pulled out a card from the bench extension. It turned out to be a quiz card with the question: ‘What is Art?’; creating a gotcha moment that I saw Ole revelling in.

Talking about Ole’s gotcha moment, this was yet another one of those moments in which a person of European extraction comes to me with the pre-conditioned notion that Black people are not cultivated enough to appreciate the finer aspects of European culture. Anyhow, my immediate response in this case was, “Art is the capturing of an experiential moment in time and space in order to, perhaps, tell a story about that experience in the future. This capture can be in any form or medium according to the proclivities and talents of the artist.”

Ole, “I hear you. But you will have to elaborate more on all that you have just said!” 

Seeing as we had to attend to each our respective duties at work then, I replied, “I shall write an essay for you, then. Deal?”

            “Deal!”

My definition of art shall be both conceptual and functional. Conceptually, I know art when I perceive it. I do not have to be told. I do not have to be instructed. I know art when my senses register it. Regardless of the representational form, the sentimental response that I get from experiencing any manifestation of art that I consider as beautiful is a constant. Conversely, an unattractive, unpleasant artistic form as I experience it emotionally affects me in the same way relevant to it irrespective of the form or the representational style.

Whenever I read a storybook (or even write one) that I enjoy, my breathing rate slows down, the total bodily relaxation I get gives me a wonderful warm feeling all over; I get goosebumps, and my palms get warmer and moist. This kind of feeling brings me immense joy. The dreamy state it gets me into sends me into a fantasy world of all things possible. If I had been, for one reason or another, going through hard times, this state brings hope home; it fills me with a sweet sense of freedom. In this state, I am invincible. This is my subjective domain for defining what beautiful art is for me as my perceptive senses – eyes, ears, skin, tongue, nose, intuition – register it, feed my hormonal system (feel-good hormones), and the latter instruct my nervous system to induce my being to act accordingly. Pure joy.

Whilst recognizing it for what it is, art that is repugnant to me is exactly that. If it makes me cringe, if it casts a shadow of pessimism over me, if it fills me with negative thoughts and associations, if it gives me a cold sweat, then it is bad art for me. There are times when I can see beauty in bad, ugly art, though. I think about the hands, or some other body parts, that created the work. Every hand shall tell its story according to its owner’s neuro-hormonal wiring and physical capabilities. One man’s apparent gory art may be another’s depiction of heaven. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Functionally, art is a conveyor of messages, a storyteller; a courier of generational narratives in humanity’s dances with nature and itself over time. Art can be an instrument of change. Art can repair the once broken. Art can inspire hope, faith, trust, and love. To the extent that art is a personal expression, art may speak for its creator. Art creators have the potential to make or break society. Ask God, man’s most divisive, master-of-carnage creation. God may have created man instead, her most complex work of art. The outcome is not any better.

Art is identity. Identity may be deception obscured in art. From the outset, art may be true by intent and purpose. But when human perception and interpretation of reality are as polychotomous as there are so many people on earth, art shall be true or fallacious as to the perceptive state

and cognitive capacity of the observer. Therein lies the mystique, the intrigue of art. Who am I? I am a man in love with art.

Art is some powerful stuff. Art is a human creative potential deserving to be handled with tender, loving care. At its best, art is an instrument of peace; art has the potential to stimulate reflection on the human condition. We rise, we fall; art captures all that. Art is beauty. Without beauty, life is not worth living.

Beauty moves humanity forward and higher on the scale of qualitative and quantitative improvements in life. It is not for nothing that nations of the world, interest organizations of all sorts and sizes, wealthy individuals, and many others invest heavily in the promotion, conservation, preservation, and storage of some of our most impactful of artworks over the epochs into the future. Art immortalizes human experience.

WHAT IS ART WORTH?

Your eyes see what they see. Your brains process your perceptions as to their inherent OS programming, i.e. the brain in concert with the hormonal system, which affects behaviour, ultimately influencing our decision or choice-making processes. Your expressive potential is manifest through your creative skills and particular materials and work tools preferences.

The expression of your observed reality or conjured fantasy isolated in your creative expression of choice shall, then, manifest the outcome we see as a work of art in its unique presentation that only you can tell it like it is. It’s up to the eye of the beholder to see or not to see the beauty, the function, and/or the worth of the work. 
Simon Chilembo, December 29, 2023

LOVE LETTER: A Poem

I’ll write you a letter
Etch my words on paper
If it’s a crime to love you
Here is the evidence

My love for you
Is not
A judicial affair
For courtroom theatricals
For juries’ deliberations
For judges’ adjudications

I’ll etch portraits
Of my love for you
On canvas
Lock them in frames

We’ll want to meet again
The other side of
A thousand years ahead

Hanging on walls
In art museums
Of the world
For a billion eyes to see
I couldn’t hide
My love for you
For your eyes
That could never see
My love for you
In plain sight
END
©Simon Chilembo 28/10-2022

SIMON CHILEMBO
Oslo
Norway
January 07, 2024