I have become really interested in the ineffable in visual — both as a concept and as the ineffable itself. This is due to my being about to see and experience things in artworks to a such a high degree after studying art for fifty years. Maybe I’m slow, but I do sense that what is revealing itself to me is something I’ve achieved. I had a writing gig once that involved selecting artists sixty-five years of age or older and interviewing them. I asked each of them what they knew that they didn’t know when they started making art, and to a person they responded with some variant of realizing they knew nothing. I think the same thing applies to responding to art — that it’s possible to reside in understanding and break through to something not translatable into words, something transcendent.
We seem to agree that the mind/body dualism has had its day, but in the oneness and continuity of mind and body, that which we ascribe to mind can affect the body. This can be a framing of a physical experience or it can be a physical change in the body. If I sat in a chair once and was pushed over by a bully, I might have a different sensation upon seeing a chair than if I once had hot, mad sex in a chair. Emotion isn't something "raw" but an entanglement and learned. The relation of any individual and the physical world may be governed by universal principles but our experience of that relation is far more complicated. Then what do we do when we live in a society that is reductive, needs docile bodies, offers the “quick fix.” Maybe it’s a matter of recognizing the role that art has in teaching us how to feel, to experience being-in-the-world.
We now have access to a great body of works that we can view without attachment to their belief system or doctrine. As an independent art historian, I no longer am attached to the timeline that is typically taught, and I avail myself of how much art is now available online, delighting in artworks that speak to me as artworks. I can’t help but be taken by the limitless variety of what we have been able to come up with essentially are somewhat limited physical materials. One word that hasn’t come up yet in our discussion is “imagination,” and I would like to make that the power of imagination. If we want to consider art in its spiritual or ethical dimension, we are looking to art as something that allows us to experience something larger or greater than ourselves. How do we go through ourselves to get to something other or at least the not-I (to reference Fichte)? Rather than just the physical presence of artworks, there is a will to create that courses through the history of art that brings us with something touching on the divine.
6 comments:
What a moving and exquisite tribute to the ineffable. You have been well trained in that which is effable, so that come from makes this even more moving to read.
For many of us, that's where we spend most of our time. But how easily it is dismissed or edited out of the script. The session with Charles Eisenstein tonight veered into these difficult and in some cases untouchable zones as well. So between listening to that discussion and reading this, I'll be honest: I am blissed out.
Also, this is a question I hope others will join in answering:
"One word that hasn’t come up yet in our discussion is “imagination,” and I would like to make that the power of imagination. If we want to consider art in its spiritual or ethical dimension, we are looking to art as something that allows us to experience something larger or greater than ourselves. How do we go through ourselves to get to something other or at least the not-I?"
I don't have a cogent response crafted right now, but that's worth pondering.
Thank you for all of this.
First, to Deborah's "You have been well trained in that which is effable..." How I love this, Deborah -- thank you. I think all university science departments should rename their curricula "Effable Studies." And yes, art history tends to traffic only in the effables -- so unfortunate, and so very misleading.
Stephanie, what a beautiful statement you've ended with here: "How do we go through ourselves to get to something other or at least the not-I (to reference Fichte)? Rather than just the physical presence of artworks, there is a will to create that courses through the history of art that brings us with something touching on the divine."
You pointed to this "will to create" in last night's talk with Charles Eisenstein (alternately calling it, in a phrase I love, the "will to form"). As an artist, I certainly consider this tapping into the "will to form" a distinct move beyond myself into the sacred. (It's not that there aren't parts of me that are sacred too, but what draws me more are the apersonal forces beyond me.) But what I love here is hearing that your experience as a beholder is a similar, if not identical, moving out into that largeness. That is exactly what I want my work to do to people -- to effect a self-denudation *and* a dismissal of me as the maker that transports us both outward into the Great Beyond. I suppose our imagination is the thing that makes this possible -- and no small dose of empathy and courage and humility and openness. But most art these days has no interest in any of this. I always feel like if people were to *experience* this just once, the glut of anemic, concept-heavy, beauty-denying art on offer would seem in comparison a trivial, soul-deadening pursuit.
I think as artist, beholder, writer there is something about practice (as in having one) that makes "moving out to the largeness" possible, which is also the case with religious/spiritual pursuit itself. There are the hours of plodding through until somehow the forms sneak up and surprise you. Actually it's the very sameness that allows you to go travelling into parts seemingly unknown. I don't know whether in these times we can understand this process as something transpersonal, but it does have the quality of someone else "taking the wheel."
It baffles me as to why art has become so reductive. I think of it almost as a form of iconoclasm at once denying pleasure and the full range of experience. I do think there are multiple reasons for the banishment of beauty beyond the confrontational character of avant-garde art, but I think it has something to do with the identification of a beauty as a construct used as a normative principle as well as beauty associated with the female body as the object of the male gaze. It's an interesting question in regards our "humanness" in that some make the case for it being a inherent, even evolutionary, need of our species...that it is in our biology and our wiring. How has "beautiful" become a hollow descriptor? How can it regain meaning as something constantly re-shaped and not pre-determined?
Hear hear about beauty, Stephanie. My feeling is that (and this comes directly from Charles's talk) if more people understood -- no, *saw* -- the unfathomable beauty of fractal geometry, and if they realized that it's not just an abstraction but how nature is actually structured across all scales, beauty might make something of a comeback. Because however much the postmodernists want us to believe that all is relative, here's something that I'm willing to wager is universally considered beautiful. And it's the structure of reality! (I've argued before that those forms we see in cellular automata and the like also suggest the shape of consciousness. I could be wrong, but that's how it feels when I reflect on my own experience -- and it would *make sense*, would it not??)
That's why I referred to beauty as something that is not some Platonic ideal but something that is constantly re-shaped and not pre-determined. There is no doubt that beauty as the former had negative consequences as regards distinctions and stratification that extend well beyond the aesthetic, which has a lot to do with why it has become a dirty word; but that has ended up throwing the baby out with the bath in that the category itself has been rejected rather than taking it to be something that is far more dynamic. Perhaps the rejection of beauty has something to do with the rejection of form more broadly. The portrayal of other categories/qualities are tied to the standard of beauty.
Taney, this is so well stated:
"That is exactly what I want my work to do to people -- to effect a self-denudation *and* a dismissal of me as the maker that transports us both outward into the Great Beyond. I suppose our imagination is the thing that makes this possible -- and no small dose of empathy and courage and humility and openness. But most art these days has no interest in any of this. I always feel like if people were to *experience* this just once, the glut of anemic, concept-heavy, beauty-denying art on offer would seem in comparison a trivial, soul-deadening pursuit."
I too am exhausted by "anemic, concept-heavy, beauty-denying art." Meanwhile we live in an "e) all of the above" world, one where creativity cannot--and should not--be legislated. But just as we populate our lives with friends who hold political/moral/social beliefs similar to our own, we can populate our visual lives with art and artists who are also seeking a similar--as so well stated by you--"self-denudation *and* a dismissal of me as the maker that transports us both outward into the Great Beyond." I had instant recognition of that when I first saw your work.
Finding cohorts and building solidarity is not a stance that is separatist so much as a "start where you are" strategy. Find like-minded artists and steadily build from there. A bit like this symposium!
Ever reliable Dickinson:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
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