For Marianna Keisalo, in her project ‘The Anthropology of Comedy: Digression Doubled’, stand-up comedy is understood as ‘a digression from everyday life into a performance situation, where the actions and expectations of comedians and audiences are geared towards laughter’. For John Limon, the focus is on particular texts in global popular culture, such as the film The Sound of Music, which provide viewers with an escape from how they would ordinarily engage with the world around them, its tenets and its tensions.

My project, entitled ‘Life-Affirming: The Digressive Practice of Art Appreciation’ treats digression less as the entering of a different situation to the everyday, or as an escape from the everyday, than as intrinsic to how human beings function in the everyday. It is through digression that the everyday becomes meaningful, that individuals make sense of everyday worlds, find purpose within them and cause themselves to act. The project balances between a specific case study in the appreciation of a famous British artist, Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), and the wider issue of the ‘therapeutic’ effects of art.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth’ (1968:#822). Were it not for art, he continued, human action would be inhibited by nausea: by the knowledge of suffering, fate, chaos, and the meaningless and disinterested nature of things. Action requires the veils of illusion (meaning, power and value) that art provides: art is the great human means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, stimulant of life. On one level, the project is a testing of Nietzsche’s claims through an exploration of how viewers of Spencer’s paintings draw strength, purpose and value from the experience. How exactly is it that art is conducive to living? What precisely does art appreciation entail in the context of a life? On another level the project engages with Nietzsche and with Spencer’s art for insight into digressive practice. Art need not be hypothesised as a displacement activity; rather, it is by virtue of the ‘merely’ aesthetic activity that one advances into one’s life with purpose and direction. Were it not for the apparent digression, daily functioning would not be possible in the same way. Art appreciation offers an instance of digression as a routine and yet vital human practice: we live forwards digressively.

I have recently completed a monograph on Stanley Spencer (Distortion and Love: An anthropological reading of the art and life of Stanley Spencer (Ashgate 2016)), examining the metaphysic behind Spencer’s imagery and how his images have been received by a viewing public. The project on digression will see me returning to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham (Britain’s first gallery devoted to a single artist). Through a combination of interview and observation, especially among the Friends of the Gallery who run it on a voluntary basis and support it financially, I will endeavour to discern the effects of living with Spencer’s art. The art has been described to me as ‘life-affirming’ by people who have suffered personal tragedy and by those who chronically suffer from physical and mental illness. What precisely does this ‘affirmation of life’ mean to these people, and how does the art achieve such effect?

The study will provide insight into the digressive value of art, instantiating how human life may progress (towards knowledge, meaning or merely fortitude) only indirectly.