A neighbour recently gave me the book by Richard Else and Brian Hall, entitled The Face. No: it’s not about portraiture, but my other interest …. rock climbing. (Stay with it. The art is on its way.) It gives accounts of six astonishing climbing feats in recent years. The chapter I’ve just finished reading is about the ascent of a remote Canadian peak by Barry Blanchard and Nancy Feagin. My imagination was stirred, however, not so much by the climb itself as by its general location. The group of peaks in which it is found carries the deterring name of “The Cirque of the Unclimbables”, so-called by the first expedition to explore this area in 1955.
It goes without saying in the world of climbing that as soon as anything is described as “unclimbable” this is taken as a general invitation to try and climb it. Since that date several new routes have been established there. Accounts of these big wall ascents usually turn me off, not only because of their unimaginable difficulty but because of the sheer sordidness of the living conditions entailed by spending several days on a rock face.* My brain was set in motion, however, by the idea of the “unclimbable”, or in other words, the “impossible”.
This is a term for which we never have a use in art. Let’s face it, resurrections, ascensions and angels have been standard fare in western painting for two thousand years. If the concept was still alive against the odds by the early sixteenth century Hieronymus Bosch must have killed it off. By the time that M.C. Escher made his name in the twentieth century the idea of “impossibility” was a joke, a plaything.** Can it be said that we have any use at all for the idea of impossibility in art?
Surely, however, that is precisely the point. Art necessarily and inevitably engages the imagination. My late brother Mike worked for several years a technical illustrator, and even there it is true that to convey the straightforwardly “actual” is often difficult without engaging the imagination.
Of course, it is true that some ideas would be extremely difficult to realise, for technical reasons. I do think that it tells us something about the mentality of artists, however, that I have never heard any artist say, “That’s impossible!”
*The easiest pitch on this particular climb was about at the limit of my own capability.
**My own early interest in art was stimulated by the marvellous sci-fi illustrations of Chris Foss. Why on earth does his name ever feature in reference works on art? There is no such thing as a “mere” illustrator.