Andrey Tarkovsky on “the goal for all art”

Andrey Tarkovsky on “the goal for all art”

“The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good” (Tarkovsky 43).  The first part of the statement is unsettling in itself.  Then how do you plough a person’s soul and what the devil does it mean to “harrow” anything?  The ending is perhaps the one part that feels good about the statement.  Who doesn’t want to be rendered capable of turning to good, even for those who feel like it’s too late for themselves?  So, what is the renowned Russian film director communicating to other artists in that statement?  My main take-aways from this second chapter of his book Sculpting in Time are the reason for humanity’s appearance on this planet, the search for absolute truth, and the artist’s service.

What Are We Here For?

Early in the chapter, Tarkovsky postulates “that the goal for all art – unless it is aimed at the ‘consumer’ like a saleable commodity – is to […] explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet, or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36).  In other words, what is our purpose besides working, eating, sleeping, and repeating?  “Again and again man correlates himself with the world, racked with longing to acquire, and become one with, the ideal which lies outside him, which he apprehends as some kind of intuitively sensed first principle.  The unattainability of that  becoming one, the inadequacy of his own ‘I’, is the perpetual source of man’s dissatisfaction and pain” (Tarkovsky 37).  Art then becomes one means of trying to know “the ideal which lies outside” of one’s self, of coming to an experience of absolute truth.

Finding Truth

Science and the traditions of Western logic explain many facts, which are instrumental in coming to the truth, yet fall short as a guide to take us the full distance to finding absolute truth.  Tarkovsky gives the image of science being a staircase in which new knowledge is constantly taking the place of what we thought we knew before.  He pictures art as “an endless system of spheres, each one perfect and contained within itself.  One may complement or contradict another, but in no circumstances can they cancel each other out; on the contrary, they enrich one another, accumulate to form an all-embracing sphere that grows out into infinity” (39).  Each unique image, each “sui generis detector of the absolute” has the potential to allow others who are observing it to have an encounter with that which is outside of one’s self, “an awareness of the infinite” (Tarkovsky 37).

The Artist’s Gift Isn’t Just for the Artist

And that is the potential gift of artists, to allow others in their community the opportunity for transcendence, to make space for “momentarily felt truth” (Tarkovsky 43).  Tarkovsky couldn’t  “believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of ‘self-expression’.  Self-expression is meaningless unless it meets with a response” (40).  For him, art is communication, a sort of communion between the artist and the receiver of the artist’s “hieroglyphic of  absolute truth” (37).  Within the artist’s image lies not the ability to teach goodness, but “the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good” (Tarkovsky 50).  That shock is how a soul’s hardened ground is ploughed.  Catharsis is how the human soul is harrowed, the hard clumps left from the ploughing now broken up too and made ready for seeds to grow in, should the owner of that field decide to plant.  In that moment “the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed” (Tarkovsky 43).  But this is of course a relationship, as are all things human, and the receiver of the gift may reject it or plant it in order to see it to fulfillment.

Questions, Comments, and Concerns

  “Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being” (Tarkovsky 42).  How do we, in a world where personal agendas and self-promotion have become a human baseline of normal, resurrect within ourselves the idea that, “The artist is always a servant”, that we all may choose to be servants in aid to our fellow persons along their journey through this finite life (Tarkovsky 38)?  How do we balance the need to “make a living” with the need to live free, and the need for others to do the same?  How often do we sacrifice truth for monetary gain?  How often do we sacrifice monetary gain for absolute truth?  Are we, as Tarkovsky suggests, forgetting that “true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice” and because of that forgetting, are we “inevitably, losing all sense of our human calling…” (38)?  Will our art have the capacity to prepare our fellow persons for the infinite?  I believe we can choose it to be so.  It is not the well trodden path.

Works Cited

Andrey, Tarkovsky. Sculpting In Time. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Twenty-First University of Texas Press, 2023.