Why does everyone always associate the
notion of the individual with form? Is
there not an individuality in depth that makes matter a totality, even
in its
smallest divisions?
–Gaston Bachelard
In the latter
part of my preadolescence, my mother and I took residence in a white house on a
hill. It was there where I encountered many of the colorful characters whose
peculiarities scored many of the marks by which I measure normalcy (the
converse, set consequently by the Stepford inhabitants of the prior town in
which we resided). This new town was as a whole a bit destitute, and a strange
combination of underdeveloped and cheap new-ish development whose poor care and
quality betrayed it with premature decay. It found its balance in that for
which it was wont, harboring a populace of souls with jagged edges—armor, for
the most part, shielding their goddness from the rough social terrain we all
inhabited there. The laughter was proliferate, but often followed by a smoky
cough; the corner store (where my mother’s carefully doled petty cash afforded occasional
blue slabs of monster taffy and jars of cherries dyed redder than red) smelled
of dust and decayed saccharine. The popularly un-desirable atmosphere of the
town yielded remarkably cheap rent, granting me not one but two rooms. One: a
bedroom, the other: for play.
My memories of
that period are quiet, but missing nothing of cacophony, whose absence was
filled by the dreams that my other senses effortlessly conjured to fill the
space. I remember that world as the light colored it: the feeling and dying
yellowness of 4 o’clock in late spring and early fall; the sweet sadness of
these tertiary transitional periods in which ephemerality felt most acute. For
this reason I preferred the timeless hours, when light did not impose its
passage. Despite its loveliness, the constant arrival and departure of time
unnerved me, likely because it mockingly echoed my own constant state of
transition, arriving and departing from one home to the next. I wanted
something constant: the even, quiet blue of a rainy day; the muted, flat gray
of the winter light dying on the surface of the snow; and night, best of all,
for it was time stolen from presupposition. Any act in the darkness has always
felt like a harmless challenge of cosmological authority. It was a special
space populated by just me. No snack time or homework time, no chore time or
T.V. time to tell me how markedly long I had been away from the idea of day, or to beckon me from my land of
dream.
In my
playroom, the rusty orange carpet manifested as the head of a friendly giant,
upon whose Brobdingnag mound I perched myself, Indian style, carried through
Seussian lands of striped canyons and sweetly crooked peaks whose colorful
crags promised constant gratification of infinite ascent. Or otherwise, the
ruddy sanguine fibers dissolved into the sand of some distant Arabian desert
whose infinitely rolling waves of sand held promises of treasure, of intrigue,
of the certainty of limitelessness in its offering of sameness into the
distance—sienna sand below and a cloudlessly blue mouth of sky capping
existence into an Albertian kiss on the horizon.
The beauty of
these dreams is that they never go sour. They uphold their promises in their
inherent intractability, spared the speculation of relation to other things.
The giant never stirs, never threatens; the desert’s vastness delights with its
shock of blue and sunbaked undulations dancing effectively into the forever of
the horizon. It never leaves a thirsty traveller longing for an oasis, baked by
the sun and crawling in thirst. The immensity of these spaces cannot exist in
compromised space.
In the
compromised space of the real world, the things that are agreed-upon are
dictated by popularity, accessible to all whose placement with the magnetic
pull of a collective energy (that is, society) renders them proximally
favorable to the apprehension and involvement in the manifestations of it (i.e.
the various constituents of culture). There is a structure to society, and the
framework is dictated by the strongholds whose characteristics promise a degree
of sustainability. Things are upheld because they substantiate themselves.
Those on the periphery of society are not privy to the establishment of such
norms, though no one is privy to all, the difference is a marked one.
Children are considered too young to understand, and the elderly, too
old to matter; the other outliers—the insane, the unwell, the otherwise
unfit or unfit-able subscribe to a different set of standards, customs
subsequently fall or are cast aside.
Peripheral
outer space, the fringes of society are set opposite the inner space to which
one can retreat, though arguably never fully divorce from the influence
of others. This inner space is owed in part by the fodder of the world, in the
same way that dreams contain elements of reality—either symbolic or, at times,
literal representations of daily life in the subconscious. The problem, for
those unpossessed by the unwritten rules, is the integration of dream and
waking life, inner and outer. There is a balance of connectivity here that
Bachelard touches upon throughout his Poetics of Space, one instance of
which is exemplified in this passage:
Some people ... are thrown into more or
less total inner space and time. We are
socially conditioned to regard total immersion
in outer space and time as
normal and healthy immersion in inner space
and time tends to be regarded as
anti-social withdrawal, a deviancy, invalid, pathological
per se, in some sense
discreditable.
My formative spaces, both external
and in-, were populated by me and the great orange beast upon whose massive
cranium I sat astride, stroking his fibrous pelt, fingers laced through his
autumnal locks to the place where the fibrous scalp knotted itself to my house.
It was there that I felt the physical limitations of my rented home, and thence
created a space of my own beyond the walls, the floor; the threshold to which
only imaginative jaunts of a daydreamer could take me. This non-place from
which my dreams sent half-empty (but then again, half full) postcard promises
of deliverance.
My
imagination carried me until the plateau of reality rose to meet us, my dreams
and I, offering itself in a quiet, cosmological welcoming to the comparatively
fogless land in which I now find myself. The clarity which I sought with such
consternation has yielded a landscape somewhat less satisfying than the one that
I had imagined behind the ambiguous plumes. It is a perfectly reasonable
landscape whose every constituent connotes a space within which one might find
satisfaction. The only wrongness here is the inevitable misalignment between
the limitless grandiosity of the mindscape and the inherent bounds of reality
outside of the self. The senses apprehend these somewhat dissolute elements and
the mind gives them unity, where the electrical impulses by which the brain
speaks to itself form thoughts, whole and more than words or images or the
impulses that make them. Imagination plays a significant role in which absence
is made amenable to the flatness otherwise, and whose presence lends the
delicious dimensions of unreality to which dreams and memory owe their fullness.
This fullness, this life that is greater than life in that it is boundless, is
the dimension that separates art from non-art. One thing is the quantifiable
composite of its parts, while the other, in their combination, becomes more.
It (the ambiguous thing) leaves gaps between its
woven fibers or applied swaths of paint—between lines, between words. This
between-space is where things become what they are. The physicality of objects
is a vessel for that which is ineffable; the latter, though undeniably given by
the former, is also the root of its engenderment. It is what it is, and becomes
more in what it isn’t by way of the space engendered in its diametrically
opposed dialectics of becoming.
The mind is never satisfied with unknowing, and thus it
answers its own questions when the world fails to or rather does so
unsatisfactorily. This answering of one’s own questions resides in the mystique
of the mind space that it engenders and effectively requires. It is a space
much like that in which one creates things for the world. Just as one makes
one’s answers in lieu of concretely apprehend-able ones by which one might hope
to find validation from the world, one has the capacity to answer the world
with a responsive thing. The imagination dons a cap so that the invisible can
make itself seen. This space is vulnerable, and for this reason it lives deep
in the psyche. In a densely wooded analogy, this place would exist at the hub
of the forest, where layers of deciduous foliage render an impenetrable (by light)
canopy, creating a cavity within, like the walls of a chest which protect the
heart that is secluded from even near neighbors, but upon which every member of
the organism is vitally dependent. Everything has its center at which life
locates its axis to turn upon; it is the distilled essence of its extremities,
much like the Judeo-Christian God whose text claims humans were made in His
image. The essence of the thing is itself, but it is what it is in part due to
the things that are what they are because of the former, each gives what the
other receives.
Art is this life force. It uses it, and in so
doing, it engenders it. It is the mechanics of the world, the blue-collar,
red-blooded, iron-fisted soul of all things. It is the most fortuitous (in that
it is grounded in itself) and most fragile (in that the world tells itself that
its grounding it where it is not) organ of being. Fundamentally imaginative, it
is childhood given eternal statehood. Living where memories and dreams do, it
can be lost, found, and felt; or everything, all at once. Here, one can safely
experience the sun of an ending day and the carpet patterns under my fingertips
and the canopy of tree shadows stretched like lounging phantoms across my
sky-painted bedroom walls—sunny with scattered clouds.
This space is where I came into beingness
and it is by way of hermitic reveries such as this that I find the point of
synthesis at which import and export balance in delicate, ephemeral
calibration. It is here where inspiration meets creation; where things are
given and received, learned and taught, both between the world and me; I and
myself. The self is a medium, an epitomical mode of transit in which living is
an inherent occurrence.
Living is the act of engagement with the
world, dancing away from the beckoning coos of stasis. The stillness of
memories is afforded by their goneness—living only in the life given
them by the process of remembrance. The present is gone before “now” can be contemplated.
The idea of now becomes “then” and in that state it remains. There is no
stillness in reality, whereas in dreams, memories, reflections, it grants a
kind of clarity (though removed from the transparency which facts offer in
their illusion of concretization). Art, too, offers this kind of stillness that
one cannot have otherwise, really, in the fleeting moments of the day. An image
need not itself be still in order to offer this counter to the ineffable
characteristics of life. It is effable-adjacent; an embodiment: an attainment
of otherness.
A child experiences the world unselfconsciously, taking
delight in the night sky, head tipped to the heavens to bask in the luminous,
speckled exhalations of comfortably unreachable stars. A child’s nowness is
delicious, and the experience of placelessness is a place in itself, chartable
in the imagination alone. This unknowing sense of being grounded utterly within
the self lies at the crux of the magic of childhood. The magic is lost with the
curse of enlightenment so-to-speak, when one knows just enough to have a sense
of the expanse of that which he or she does not know. This wonderment,
lost, is replaceable only by the impossibility of knowing, which art offers; an
experience that is both inside of time and place and wholly outside of them. It
lives in memory, experience, and projection, in the synthesis of what was, will
be, and is. It evades the annihilation of the smugly calculative assessments
that logic tries to impose upon the meta-sensory organs of the adult imagination;
a daydream that not only coils within it self, but connects man with the
world—and in that, is unlike anything, doing far more than replace the lost
reveries of childhood. Occupied by the compression of the past, it is this
space in which we carry with us like flat files. Bachelard writes of these
metaphysical loci of memories and daydreams as “countless intermediaries
between reality and symbols.” These intermediates are the lived drawings
with which we canvas the world, exactitude of representation contingent not
upon naturalistic rendering of physical appearance but rather upon proper
rendering of the tone of inner space.
This discrepancy between depiction and representation is
a consternation whose age bears all the markings of time though unburdened by
the physicality of its passage: the lines of weathered form whose dissipating
life is qualitatively amenable given its deflated appearance. It is embedded in
power battles, in which one person or thing is subordinated to the proud
follies of another, whether the assertion of grandiosity is God over man, man
over man, strong over weak, insider over outsider, and so on. This struggle is
a dialectical one, an endless, self-engendering battle that becomes its own
being without equality which it asserts as a possibility, which a cessation of
itself might afford. There is no such thing as absolute balance; the constant
tipping of the scales signals, rather, that it offers a living means by which
balance is the ultimate gestalt. A summation of the undulations yields a norm
against which everything is measured though it is rarely, if ever, experienced
as such. An inferred mean or average abstracted from experience is somehow
codified internally as a concretized reality, the structure within which our
experience of reality is framed and subsequently colored.
In
aesthetics, this dialectic is eternally located within every image, movement,
and whim. It is manifest in the early Christian struggle between likeness and
presence: among other things, a debate over whether God could live inside the
image itself or whether the image was a token of symbolic representation—not
God himself but a purposive thing pointing to Him. This struggle, among other external struggle of power within the
church and between the church and state (God over man, godly man over
man whose political social status signifies an elevation and therefore power
over men [i.e. the State, etc.]), led eventually to the period of Iconoclasm—of
repudiation against the endeavor of (and perceived bastardization of) beingness
in an image.
Matter
embodies more than its material existence. Matter engages us on a deeper level. It calls forth
from us a response—be it a material response or a spiritual one. But the artist’s
engagement is a spiritual one—make no mistake. Even if that artist sees himself as
agnostic, his activity in the world is spiritual. He is engaged with matter on a spiritual
level. He not only looks to matter to feed his imagination, but also uses matter to speak
again of what he has seen and felt.
A
similar, though perhaps less grandiose argument around the same fundamental
issue is that between Illustration as a field within art and an aesthetic thing
with a purpose, and Fine Art, which asserts itself popularly as a thing which
is transcendent of purposiveness (in the sense in which giving the image a job
effectively would be a debasement to the form “art” which is capable of much
more than task completion). Just as the Iconoclasts burned man-made images of
God-made things for not only was it impossible, in their perception, to
represent something well, but impermissible to try:
Beware lest you act corruptly by making a
carved image for yourselves, in the
form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the
likeness of any animal
that is on the earth, the likeness of
any winged bird that flies in the air, the
likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the
likeness of any fish that is
in the water under the earth. And beware lest you raise
your eyes to heaven,
and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host
of heaven,
you be drawn away and bow down to them
and serve them,
things that the
Lord your God has allotted to all the
peoples under the whole heaven.
In
a battle between a depiction of an idea or image as companion to an idea
(illustration) and an embodiment of the thing, a difference between telling and
conveying, in a sense, or rather—what’s at stake is the transmission of a
greater truth, as it were—the gestalt.
The Christian
institution responded to this, and is still doing so in various ways, though
the answers to the persisting questions of representational means and
manifestation are primarily still pictorial in nature. Though terms, at the
nexus of popular culture in an around western society have relaxed now, images
were once held under constraints as extreme as a qualification of
self-completion (for if a portrait were perhaps begun by a man but divinely
completed, it would have granted itself proper sanctification as a vessel for
the entity who in most cases was a Saint post mortem or Virgin Mary). At other
times, it was thought to have had to self-duplicate as well (an imprint of
itself as a being in and of itself and a copy onto the fibers of the material
world.
Islam has historically responded to this
quandary rather differently: Allah is inherently un-imagistic, and is therefore
conveyed through the sanctified text of the Qur’an. His words alone are
considered apt to represent Him (and in that sense, he alone can represent
himself as opposed to portrayal or depiction dependent on perception which is
unreliable and external to the source). A man is not considered equipped for a
task of such impossible grandiosity. Man’s task and the height of allowance and
capacity lies in the arrangements in which text is presented. One may decorate
its physical presence, thus yielding elaborate handmade tapestries and palatial
texts, illuminated tomes whose symbolic presence in the home was itself a
representation of Allah and his immense divine regality.
It is in this loci, this space—a room in the house that
humanity occupies—rests the work of Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), a particularity
whose nature was in fact nurtured by her formative context—as an
Iranian-American woman, as a person who has experienced violence of a magnitude
thankfully unfathomable to me, though regretfully a heartbreakingly heinous
reality to a considerable portion of humanity. I do not know the oppression,
the violence, the binding limitation of womanhood in the Middle East that she
depicts, but I do sense that which she embodies in her work—a human
experience.
Her rhythmic Farsi lines screen the faces and
fragmentary bodies of her photographic subjects: Iranian men and women. Her
subjects are from the country of her own origin, and through this shared
heritage she connects to them—a connection, I find, part of that which I myself
connect to in her work—I connect to her connection, for she opened a channel in
her artwork. It, the work itself, is
open. And her practice of writing over the otherwise unadorned visages of her
subjects alludes to the Islamic tradition of text as image. When not direct
portraiture, her work manifests in statements on violence, on the subjugation
of women in the Middle East, on war, all with an undertone of religion, the
presence of ritual and tradition in more than her direct, textual overwritten
allusion to Islam—all from a point of view unique to her and her visual
language is a breathing result of her navigation through and between cultures
rather than absent from them. It evolves with her, assimilating each moment,
and will do so as long as she remains actively engaged with life, and it will
find its way into her work as long as she remains actively engages with it; in us,
as long as we remain actively engaged with her work (and in our own lives,
which enables us a sensibility for living through which the expression of the
experience of life is transmissible.
Serbian-American
performance artist Marina Abramovic (b. 1946) is a friend of Neshat’s, and
wrote the foreword to the latter’s 2010 book in the form of a letter which she
found befittingly a more personal structure. In it, she commended Neshat for
her work: “I am reminded of how much energy it takes to translate personal
experience into universal meaning. The images you produce ask difficult and
fundamental questions even as they immerse us in stories that can seem weirdly
familiar.” This familiarity is a haunting recognition of a humanness shared by
all, showing itself through something that is not explicitly interred within
its specific form. The form is the vehicle for the meaning, and is not
arbitrary. Neshat’s work is what it is as a result of its form because of who
she is a product of her experience, an aesthetic manifestation of her—what her
nature made of her nurture so-to-speak (and that of which she makes
things externally apprehensible). Her decisive activation of artistic impulse
says something of the world, to the world. This mechanism is wholly human, as
Abramovic notes of Neshat’s engagement with her subjects and the art product
that ensues, describing them as “a variety of characters” who “enact scenarios
derived in part from personal experience and in part from shared mythology”; whose
roles “carry a weight of history but maintain both an extraordinary
accessibility and a rare and unforgettable emotional heft.” Strikingly,
Abramovic notes that Neshat’s work began more broadly ambiguous, but contrary
to what one might expect of such specificity, as it grew increasingly personal,
it grew correlatively more near the haunting universality to which she referred
(i.e. “weirdly familiar”; “shared mythology”).
The
danger of personal work is that it may be read as “diaristic,” which, beyond the
niche of commendably compulsive documentation, is generally received as
un-relatable and is therefore undesirable. The distinction to be drawn between
personal work and work that is diaristic lies in the universality, or, as in
the instance of the latter, a lack thereof. Neshat’s work uses the form as a
means and an inextricable embodiment of her human experience, whereas diaristic
work uses the form, the surface, arbitrarily to tell a personal tale in a way
that does not reveal its inherent relatability. It tells about the thing rather than being
the thing itself, however general or perhaps fragmentary. It lacks the
power of which art is characteristically capable of harnessing to bypass the
surface, the skin, the calculation, and the societally colored glasses through
which we view the world. Art can be a probe, a vehicle for a human cry from the
caverns of one soul to the caves of another. This cry can live in and between
the words and lines of a poem, swim in the notes of a concerto, seep through
the vast swaths of paint scoring and building surface, and it can live in the
shades of a photograph, exposed to the surface, in the forms, scrawled over in
text, perhaps—or otherwise sit in the maker, un-infused, still alive but a
failure of conveyance, unburdened, bound in the mortality of internal reality.
That which is diaristic bears the mark of an
overabundance of specificity without a tunnel outwards, a vessel of
self-entombment in which the expression of life defeats itself, limiting its
imaginative powers to their own bounds. It is the silently falling tree: for a
sound to be heard, to have been considered a thing whose existence is real, its
reality depends entirely upon whether or not it is penetrable whilst
simultaneously allowed utterance, allowed to at once escape itself and be
escaped into.
The opposite of a thing whose fortifications effectively
nullify that which is contained is a thing which offers no containment, no
mystery—like a house whose doors and windows are wide open, rooflessly welcoming
the wind, the rain. It is of no import because it is incapable of containment. Practically
such things are vacant; they are artifice alone. There is mild but fleeting
satisfaction in such things whose surfaces allude to interiors that are either
absent or, in the case of misalignment between exterior and in, the thing is
inherently deceptive. In the case of the latter, a practical example would be
advertisements offering false promises, an unreachable ideal, much like
propaganda; a better future, hope with a vote; better teeth after two
brushings; and so on.
In art, where the betrayal of advertisement finds an
equivalent in the vacancy attributable to the majority of travel images—such as
(though an instance more highbrow than, say, family vacation slides) John
Singer Sargent’s watercolors. Though I find that perhaps they bear the
aesthetic of hobbyism, but they may have been some of the only work he enjoyed,
for as much fame as his portraits gained, he admitted to feeling quite
indifferently towards them. They were commissions, his nine-to-five; he punched
in and punched out effectively. The attention was, I find, a reaction to
flourish, to well-applied paint (skill, essentially). He struck gold with style
and rode the wave of success. The lack of import, of essence penetrable or
eminent from these images was subsumed by the rolling popularity borne from the
gratification of seeing one’s self rendered in such a manner. As his popularity
grew, the loci of satisfaction moved projectively into the delight of being
painted by someone whose fame preceded him. Here, the experience bolsters the
souvenir substantially enough to elevate a very good, genuinely gratifying
portrait to a popularly agreed-upon placement in the canon of significant art.
The very real import of these images is one that they themselves produced as
opposed to living behind the aura facade that was built culture built around
them.
The
self is contained. There is a within (that which is contained, the self)
and a without (that which is outside of the self); the junction where
they meet lies a point of punctuation: where the skin kisses the air; the ways
in which the physical forms to mediate between internal world and external
world, giving manifestation to thought.
Thoughts
need form, and no longer living within us, they need a proxy, a thing that can
hold their presence, giving them a space within which they may be entered. To
that end, art is an embodiment that consists of the space made possible by the
triangulation between artist, art object, and receiver. Illusions depend on the
subscriptions to unwritten, internalized rules to maintain their farce. These
rules become so internalized in a culture—in norms according to which it
defines itself superficially, in the mechanisms of family life; the rituals of
tradition, religion; in the terms of appropriateness, acceptability; those tied
to expectations, of self-control, of hiding that which lies behind. Closely
linked with order, the thing is born where its deficit lies, the facade that
states itself as such—a street of brownstones, sidewalks dappled with the
filtered light of implanted trees, squared flower boxes tessellating moments of
color, breaths of fragrance no less controlled than the piped waft of sandwich
smell that is recognizably Subway’s, a Pavlovian emission to the perambulating
masses.
We are trained to be trainable so that we may
internalize the cultural gestalt, embody the norms in which we find meaningful
consequence, and live in well-enough collective cohesion. The cycle perpetuates
itself in an evolutionarily supported natural progression of fitness, balance
between chaos and stillness. Routines are behavior enforced by a draw, a “hook”
that is, followed by a behavior, and a satisfaction or fulfillment as resultant
of the action.
These routines, formulated in our engagement with our
respective environments, are formed by external forces, but these external
forces are those that we created as a human race, and the propensity to meet
these things engendered by our collective power as a species is a mechanism
wholly human—this routine is a neurological trait, evolved to repeat things
that are “good,” things from which we find rewards.
Negative results are, in the simplest sense, treated as
harmful; positive ones are safe, proven—propagative even—so that any
reinforcement to repeat is in itself, as a mechanism, meta-enforced. Those who
learn to repeat good tasks, historically, were more likely to experience
prosperous results, therefore yielding health, happiness, and subsequent
reproduction, yielding similarly prosperous offspring.
Art, like all else, is both external and internal; a
supra-bodily manifestation of that which comes from the depths of within, that
taps into that same place in another as that from which is came. And it does so
in a specific way, with a universal, unwritten truth. It is utterly human:
evolution, nature, spirit; it is the zeitgeist that vibrates in the atoms of
the earth; it’s everything—and in that it is nothing, and it uses this
nothingness, the transparency of it, to show the opacity beneath, the utter
truth that is sense-able by way of body and mind and that which is in-between
body and mind; the self—the most universal particularity. It does this by using
things in which it can take form, as water takes the form of the vase in which
it lies. The vase is a vessel, which gives the particular instance for
viewing, experiencing, or using the water.
It is defined by its potential containment of something
other whose otherness is likely to be perceived as favorable, and of amenable
importance. The latter is that which is cradled, held, and given form. It is
the passive taker of space, like a baby swaddled in the nook of a mother’s
softly fortuitous woven arms, like a royal whose position is superficially
aggrandized by the symbolic ornamentation around him or her, concurrently
substantiating the space, concretizing that which is made important by his or
her presence. The role that defines the woman is reliant entirely upon the
infant. It is formed in her body, first, and in decreasing and shifting relations,
formed by her now external being. This dependent being, whose vitality
to connectedness dwindles in the onset of years, just as the rising sun burns
the fog of early morning, welcoming the child into the blinding day that is
maturity. This is where the price of clarity of one sort (knowingness) is paid
for by the sale of mystically ambiguous innocence, the blissful wisdom of
ignorance. The arc formed by the cradled arms serves no purpose beyond gently and
with quiet fortitude, holding the indefensible young life.
Without the ordained, the head of the state, the
genetically or politically endowed person who represents the power of the
collective peoples under his or her jurisdiction, the surrounding grandeur
falls into superficial vacancy. Without the presence of that which gives
meaning to the space, the space itself is essentially, in the physical sense,
no lesser, but is effectively reduced to a mere shell of what it was; of ghost
of the breath of beingness.
The world gives itself meaning through a web of woven
lives; active self-definition which one disseminates inwardly in order to
present a mediate-able, unified front. Nothing is spared this interrelatedness:
not the sky whose blue is reflective of the ocean whose containment, like water
in the vase, is defined by and in many ways defines the
continents whose climate is contingent upon the movement of the water and the
rain, the warmth, the cool and snow, the wind that it brings, which affects the
plants, the disposition of the people who harvest the plants, building lore
around these rituals reflective of and subsequently affective to the
surrounding environment.
Tools of craft
and the art objects are brought about by their use in the depiction of scenes
as well as embodiments of the temperament with and in which they
are given form. Images populated by imagistic symbols, representatives of the
makers whose skin is colored similarly to their representations of man; visual
doppelgangers of not the person per se, but of their ideas—another instance of
containment; an instance of humanness whose pigmentation is resultant of the
sun and the atmosphere and the lifestyle defined by their place and the genes
of their ancestors who stayed where they were or left where they had been,
bringing with them lore and images and sensibilities of other times and other
lands, build by other seas and suns and peoples.
These cycles define the earth which man inhabits and
forms and is formed by, and who in turn form art: that which contains all that
is implicit, in the air and in between air, inside and outside of time; using
the fruits of the soil to create these things, punctuations not unlike man
whose instance of being is a moment in time, a breath that is but one breath.
It is the only breath of its kind in that no other will have occurred in quite
the same arrangement or particles, at quite the same time, through quite the
same lungs. But all breaths share these qualities. And in that they are all the
same.
If Neshat’s only audience were Iranian-American women
whose experiences aligned very nearly with the artists, she would not be
represented by Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Her work’s strength is intrinsic to
its particularity—though located entirely in that quality, it is laced
throughout the pieces. It is of her just as red was of Rothko
(who borrowed redness of Matisse’s studio painting, a very different use of
redness); manic drips were of Pollock. The vacancy in dental office
paintings is that they are fluff. They are of nothing other than a desire to
engender a serviceable surface. There is a purpose, and it is served, though
not artfully. They use the aesthetic elements that carry an art connotation,
thus rendering occasional conflation between the two somewhat plausible. They
hold vacant gratification, just as many elements of popular culture are dubbed
the debased albeit gratuitous title: guilty pleasure. The guilt comes from the
enjoyment of a thing, which has no depth—its import is inherently dictated not
by singularity (the particular) but a collective sensibility. It is a response
to the framework by which society abides, and in that it inherently carries
much that is amenable with popular spirit. The guilt is also in part due to the
lies that people tell themselves to justify the compromises they make to be a
part of society. They play along and pretend, telling themselves and telling
others that this farce is natural.
It is in our nature as complex organisms to contribute
to the composite hierarchy of society by believing, in part, that every action
is an act of expression, of nature, and all else is a decision, a way to get
by. To like something, however, is to genuinely or apparently genuinely feel a
natural inclination to enjoy it. If one ultimately enjoys something that they
tell themselves is only enjoyable superficially as a placeholder, a vessel for
socially conditioned affinity to bind people together, one feels a
self-betrayal, a fear of shallowness. It’s not officially okay to like
these things; but it is essential, in many social circles, to appear to
appreciate it.
Similarly,
there is no quantifiable “near” or “far” but rather internal concepts and how
they are projected onto the world. This collective sense of an abstract
concept, in this case a linguistic one, is contingent upon proximity itself, a
nearness, as it were, of like things whose co-mingling engenders a need for a
group gestalt—a largely acceptable external punctuation of that which is
essentially un-punctuate-able in order to establish a framework through which
to navigate the world.
A
strong proponent of Outsider Art or “Art Brut,” French Painter and Sculptor
Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) worked arduously in support of work (and the artists
who produced it) which society cast aside for its un-conformity to
institutional standards. He rebelled against the popular, narrow conceptions of
art, reality, even sanity, staunchly asserting the legitimacy of all
perception. Each man’s reality is real in that it is real to him, and no
one has the authority to discredit another person’s perception simply because
it does not align with his own. After all, no one’s perceptions align
absolutely; popularly accepted norms are merely an amalgamation of compromises
negotiating between internal realities. It was those whose internal realities
were vastly incongruous with the norm that Dubuffet found most interesting,
perhaps more pure for the evident absence of compromise embedded in their
perceptions and the visual manifestations/expressions of such. Whether outside
of influence due to situational external isolation from popular culture or
incapable of assimilating such influence due to internal obstructions, these
“outsiders” perceive the world as it presents itself to them, without the dint
of colored vision (the tint of society), without censorship or internalized
mores, without knowing the right way to articulate a hand, or the symbolism
behind a hand. Unburdened by the collective memory that is culture, these
peripheral beings build their own visual vocabulary, based on arbitrary, felt
decisions, reactions, and understandings.
In
the connectedness of all things, even contradictions are closely linked. They
not only ride along the same boundary, essentially sharing the same skin; their
mass co-mingles in a yin and yang relationship, one’s positivistic
self-contained definition existing as a direct mirror of its neighbor’s
negative. One is what the other isn’t, and in this relation, they are
essentially the same. Thusly, the comparative antithesis of Dubuffet’s Art
Brut, effectively, that which is thoroughly, inextricable grounded within a
particular culture, has the opportunity to afford itself the same purity in
form and expression as offered in the work of Shirin Neshat, for instance.
Art
exists in an in-between, or perhaps, rather, as an embodiment of the form of
that which is in-between, a summation of gaps—a becoming of the gestalt. It is
not a thing to be apprehended but rather that which is inextricable from
apprehension itself. By converting a void (that which isn’t) into the
antithesis of negative space (that which is), it buys its own presence by
calling upon this absence to assert itself as an extant thing between its
neighboring forms rather than a space between them, it defies the illusion of
concreteness by playing by different rules. In mediating between navigable realms,
both physical and psychological, spiritual and phenomenological, art embodies
the connectivity in all things. In not being grounded in time or place but in
using them to appeal to recognition, it pretends specificity whole all the
while presenting the universal.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of
being truth.
–Theodor W. Adorno
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Gaston, and M. Jolas. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print.
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Gaston, and Edith R. Farrell. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination
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Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art.
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Danto,
Arthur Coleman. Shirin Neshat. New York: Rizzoli, 2010. Print.
Duhigg,
Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life an Business. New
york: Random House, 2012. Print.
ESV
Study Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2008. Print.
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R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1967. Print.
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Judith. "The Transformative Aspect of Matter." Web log post. Attentive
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