Escapist
Do you ever want to be lost?
To me, what started as a strong taste for Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical art has become a lifelong rabbit hole, through which I’ve encountered and collected some key pieces of art and media across the years that - as I found perfectly stated on a random YouTube comment - "all managed to touch on the same something".
This is my first blog post, and it is about escapism.
A bit of context on de Chirico first:
Giorgio de Chirico was a Greek-born Italian artist whose career peaked in the early 20th Century (in the years before and around WWI). At the time, his work was nothing short of odd. During a period where art had a heavy emphasis on the human figure, with acclaimed artists such as Klimt, Schiele, Picasso, and Matisse, de Chirico's work was centered around classical Italian small town plazas devoid of people and hardly any life. His paintings at the time are quite similar to one another, featuring stiff white structures and buildings on a orange-yellow ground with a dreamlike greenish-blue sky by the horizon. These places are always empty, yet don't seem to be abandoned.
Rare exceptions where we see very small figures limited only to their simple black silhouettes aside, the plazas are completely devoid of life. When I saw "Ariadne" at the Met for the first time, I could almost hear the wind, feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, and the hardness of the sand-covered ground beneath me. I wasn't looking at a landscape painting - I was looking into a portal, which despite being right in front of me, felt impossible to go through. I believe this one experience was my unintentional introduction to the notion of escapism, and its influence in modern popular culture.
Escapism is a very vast topic and one that is hard to define for that very reason, but in its essence, it is the human desire to escape.
Escapist media, such as books, films, paintings, and videogames provide us with escapist experiences by letting us leave our reality for a while and dive head-first into imaginary worlds through whatever tools we have to create and explore them, and although the technology has changed over the last centuries, that same desire to escape - to wander - has remained unchanged. I made that connection many years after first seeing Ariadne, when I stumbled upon the videogame "Ico", launched in 2001 by Sony, directed by Fumito Ueda, and it features a cover art strikingly similar to the paintings made by de Chirico some 90 years before.
The cover shows two tiny human silhouettes roaming a barren world of colossal structures, with the same yellow ground, the same dreamlike green sky at the horizon, and the same feeling of warmth and desolation. It was no surprise after doing more research on the game that I found that indeed Team Ico was inspired by de Chirico in the design of the cover art. What's more interesting is that after watching the full gameplay (I unfortunately didn't have a compatible console and was too lazy to run an emulator) I noticed that despite a different plot and characters, the atmosphere of the game felt exactly like the paintings.
In this game you play a young adventurous boy who is set out to rescue a girl from a huge fortress in the middle of the ocean, fighting ghostly beasts and solving puzzles in the process. What struck me about this game, however, was that it felt lonely. It's an offline solo game, and shortly into the gameplay I was in a sort of meditative mode, finding myself calm. It's you and the fortress. Yes, the occasional enemies and challenges are necessary for the game's narrative, but they're not the star of the show; who takes that title is the map itself.
There is something oddly pleasing about being alone in a massive ancient castle in the middle of the ocean. No job, no family, no responsibilities. I mean, how will a Slack message from your coworker find its way to you when you're in the middle of nowhere in a world that doesn't even exist? If my internet coverage is spotty in the middle of New York it sure wouldn't be any better under those circumstances. That's what escapism is all about; it's not about a fictional world without problems or challenges, but one without the problems and challenges that you want to avoid in real life.
At some point you turn off the videogame. You leave the museum. You close the book. You go back home and get ready for work the next day. The experience can make you nostalgic, clinging to the slice of a world you had on your plate, but the fact that we can't truly be in those worlds is what makes them so elusive in the first place.
I could go on about this for countless other pieces that deeply relate to this niche but maybe not so niche topic, but I'll keep it blog-length and wrap it up.
Here is a list of great media and people that have fascinated me on this topic:
- Giorgio de Chirico — painter, 1888–1978
- Ico — video game by Fumito Ueda, 2001
- The Tartar Steppe — novel by Dino Buzzati, 1940
- Blame! — manga series by Tsutomu Nihei, 1997
- Ozymandias — poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
- Minecraft — video game, 2009–present