Truth and Illusion

At the beginning of my illusionism class I often quote the line from Pablo Picasso,

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

Just like in literary fiction, the inventive fabrication can build a way of looking at things that promotes insight for the reader or viewer. The cubist portrait evokes an aspect of being, considered more deeply, perhaps closer to a truth about what a person actually is. The integrity of the truth is in the honesty of the observation.

Art of all kinds takes us beneath the reactive surface to a place where contradictions are the yin and yang of all motion. Truth moves with the scene and situation, always evolving and adapting. Art can give form to what goes unseen but alive beneath everyday concerns. Recognition of the power of art to stimulate insight in the viewer was acknowledged in the recently published letters of Alan Watts. In one, he ended a passage about the difficulties of expressing the realizations in spiritual experience with, “Perhaps the artist can show this much better than the philosopher.”

What the artist shows is not an explanation but a set of relations and qualities that can have the power to open up realization by the viewer. The artist filters the essence to show the viewer something they already know but have never recognized. Many kinds of things can be built on the same armature. The structure resonates with the viewer’s personal experience of that feeling offering a glimpse of the interior world that normally lies hidden. Associations from the past develop the meaning to the individual. A connection vibrates between the emotional state of the artist and viewer.

Younger generations already know the efficiency of showing rather than telling, Instagram builds banks of visual information expressing individual lives. That a picture conveys more information is a given. As visual communication becomes more widespread, education would benefit from spending time with the most developed expression of visual intelligence, fine art, to cultivate understanding of the language of emotional intelligence. Sensitivity to what might be wrong or what fits in a situation are based on concrete expectations about how the world behaves. It is easier to see when something’s out of balance than to read the data. What we can tell is barely a cipher compared to what we can show particularly when it comes to feelings.

The way that images open thought gives a sense of how visual relationships can contain so much which is why philosophical questions can be posed and contradictions integrated. Rather than choose sides, adding new information to the big picture, enlarging perspective.

The skills of illusion give more power to “convince others of the truthfulness of your lies”, to have the viewer enjoy the game of being fooled is momentary release from chronic preoccupations and open the brain to new thoughts.