Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life

An instructive exhibition of the works of Joshua Neustein could easily have been organized in the spacious Potter Gallery of the South Eastern Center of Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina: drawings, models, and sculptural works arrayed along the walls of the gallery or set in display cases or on bases, together with wall texts explaining what one was looking at. That indeed is the standard form in which an artist’s work is exhibited, and it would be altogether consistent with this format that the exhibition travel from venue to venue, with no differences other than those imposed by local architectural circumstance and particular curatorial taste. One cannot, of course, overestimate the extent to which these differences affect our experience of the works displayed: Seeing Brancusi’s sculptures at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was palpably different from seeing them at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Admittedly, various strategies of display and illumination in both venues were calculated to enhance our experience of the work, but these did not, except in the eyes of professionals, call attention to themselves and respect the principle of neutrality entailed by the concept of the gallery as dedicated space. So neither site formed part either of the meaning or the reference of Brancusi’s works, which retained their metaphysical portability and could be set up in any suitably dedicated space. And so it would be were the Potter Gallery simply one venue for the aggregated works of Joshua Neustein.

Neustein’s Light over Ashes renounces this format by renouncing metaphysical portability. It is installed in the gallery, but in a very different way from that in which works are customarily hung or placed in galleries, for it seeks an internal relationship to the space and indeed to the site in which the museum containing the gallery is located. The internal relationship means that the work is not in the space the way an object is in a box: It incorporates the space into itself in such a way that one does not enter the gallery to experience an artwork separate and detachable from it. One enters the artwork itself, which incorporates the space as part of what it is. The space, one might say, has been rededicated, and is now—since work and space are, for the lifetime of the exhibition—as inseparable from the work as body is from soul. “I am not in my body the way a pilot is in a ship,” Descartes declares at the end of his great meditation on first metaphysical principles. Here, the work is not simply in the space—the space is in the work. The presence of the work transforms the space into a property of itself, vesting it with a meaning internal to the work, which sacrifices its portability to achieve this intimacy. One cannot thus experience work and space separately from one another. One can only dismantle the work, returning the space to its original dedication.

Let me attempt to distinguish transformation from transfiguration, using for this purpose the presence of chandeliers. There is a chandelier, familiar to anyone who has studied the history of art, in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding. It is in no way as opulently ornamental as the baroque fixture Neustein had fabricated for this work, but it is luxurious enough for its time and displays a high degree of artisanship in its facture. It is of fiercely polished brass, and, like Neustein’s chandelier, it seems to have moved into a lower register of its already low room, so that one feels that it is in the same space as the connubial pair, making, as it were, a third, bestowing light upon them rather than merely illuminating the space in which they stand. In truth, it hardly illuminates at all, since it holds only a single candle where there are holders for eight, and bright daylight, sufficient to illuminate the room by itself, streams amply in through the window. These two anomalies can, of course, be given naturalistic explanations—that the lit single candle is central to a ceremony in which a sacrament intersects with the law, no matter how bright the atmosphere. It can testify to a practice in Flanders in the fifteenth century, as the room’s expensive furnishings inform us of the scheme of interior decoration suited to members of a merchant aristocracy: Look at the bride’s elaborate and costly gown! But in fact, according to a famous article by Erwin Panofsky devoted to this painting, the single lit candle—“symbol of the all-seeing wisdom of God”—transfigures a mere domestic interior into “a room hallowed by sacramental associations.” Needless to say, this could be true of the actual bridal chamber as much as of the painted one, and what Panofsky is anxious to establish is that, in actuality or in art, we are dealing with “a transfigured reality.” It is a transfigured reality when it exists, as it were, on two planes at once, architectural and symbolic, when “the symbols are chosen and placed in such a way that what is possibly meant to express an allegorical meaning, at the same time perfectly ‘fits’ into a landscape or an interior apparently taken from life.” So in this remarkable work, in Panofsky’s view, “medieval symbolism and modern realism are so perfectly reconciled that the former has become inherent in the latter.”

The concept of transfiguration has had a great importance for me in thinking about examples of modern art in which the work so resembles an ordinary object that the question becomes acute as to where the difference between them is to be located, since it is inscrutable to visual perception. The perceptual textures of both are sufficiently indiscernible that one could easily suppose, while looking at the artwork, that one were merely regarding a quite ordinary thing. So one might suppose one were looking at the depiction of a room in the Arnolfini Wedding and admiring it for its realism, when in truth the ordinary objects arrayed within it carry so powerful a symbolic weight that the room is transfigured into a quite special sort of space.

It is part of the language of furniture that chandeliers declare that the rooms they dominate are ordinarily public spaces, and that their light is celebratory. They belong in ballrooms, in salons, in spaces of official reception, in dining rooms in which the faceted crystals of their ornaments catch the flames of candles set beneath them and are reflected in the stemware and polished plate with which the table is made ready: They sparkle in sympathy with brilliant conversation and scintillating wine. They transform everyone caught in their illumination into creatures of light, raised for this occasion to an exalted level of being, completing, like a singular accessory, the elaborate gowns, the radiant complexions, the dazzling jewels or medals or tiaras. The chandelier in Neustein’s work is an opulence of cut crystal and faceted beads, effulgent pendants and swags of interreflected light, which by rights belongs to the upper part of the room it glorifies, where it would define a luminescent center, the way the great chandelier does in Adolf Menzel’s 1852 Flute Concerto of Frederick the Great at Sans Souci, in which the virtuoso monarch is shown, in powdered wig, performing for a distinguished company in a mirrored salon, which reflects and rereflects its dazzle. “I only did it to paint the chandelier,” Menzel said, but it is clear that the chandelier is a metaphor of and a compliment to Frederick as the embodiment of enlightenment. The audience is bathed in the chandelier’s (and the monarch’s) light, which creates an ambient darkness around the favored personages, an outer darkness for those distant from the music and the noble presence. Menzel has elaborated a set of symbols that relate to the role of chandeliers in life and presents us with a transfigured reality quite as much as does Jan van Eyck. A chandelier performs the same tranfigurative role, with whatever success, in a photograph of a reception at the White House by Andy Warhol in his book America. Warhol, with his singular pitch for symbolism, created a work (1976–86) consisting of four identical photographs, stitched together with threads, of a set of chandeliers. There are chandeliers embedded in black paint in a number of works by Ross Bleckner, such as his elegiac painting, Fallen Summer, of 1988. The chandelier in these works is a symbol of hope, as light always is for us, but at the same time a sign for that aspect of the human condition which occasions hope, namely, its inherent and inseparable tragedy. It is the order of hope Saint Paul has specifically in mind when it forms for him, with faith and charity, a triad of what theologians designated “supernatural” virtues, to distinguish them from the “natural” virtues of classical moral philosophy.

The first mystery of Neustein’s installation lies in the fact that he has retained the symbolic connotations of the chandelier but lowered it, dramatically, so that it sits just above the ground, like a burning bush, so that there is no way for us to stand beneath it. It defines the visual center of the area the visitor traverses upon entering the space, and there can be little doubt that it defines the moral center of the space itself, radiating an aura of just the sorts of meanings the chandelier conveys in van Eyck and in Bleckner, or in Warhol. We enter from the sort of outer darkness Menzel paints so marvelously, and, because we have entered the work—because we do not stand outside it as in the standard gallery experience—we ourselves are “put in a new light,” which it is up to us to interpret. The position of the chandelier implies, I believe, that the light in which we are put is indeed new. We are drawn to the light—not a possibility if the light is above us and out of reach—and we have to make our way to it by tracing the paths of the mapscape, as if a maze. The experience, at a metaphorical level, is clearly intended to be transformative.

The streets of Salem, in Neustein’s map, are pathways through ashes, but how the ashes are to be interpreted is the second mystery of the work. Like the chandelier, ashes constitute an evocative rather than a precise symbol. The artist wavered for some time between using what he termed “common clay”—the actual soil of the region—rather than the end product of burned local vegetation—“tobacco plants, hickory wood, cotton, stubble of any kind of the region.” Clay and ashes alike have both a metaphoric power and specific references to the site and history of Salem, but “Light over Ashes” and “Light over Common Clay” imply different meanings for the substance in which the map is traced. My sense is that the artist made the right choice, for though the actual soil proved suited to the manufacture of the bricks and tiles from which the town’s permanent dwellings were made, the idea of rising from the ashes connects the founding of a city with the history of persecution: Jan Huss was, after all, burned at the stake. Either way, the two dominant symbols—the chandelier and the map—are knotted together in terms of nationalist heritage and possible religious history. The chandelier is specifically Bohemian glass, and Bohemia together with Moravia was the soil that nourished the Unitas Fratrum. Since the Baroque was the style of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, it might just be thinkable that the Baroque-Bohemian style of the chandelier emblematizes Catholicism as the map drawn either in ashes or in common clay emblematizes Protestantism. This makes room for an ambiguity as to how to interpret the cast letters—the third component of the work—that Neustein has scattered over the surface and covered with ashes in such a way that their shape remains visible. Are the letters, half buried in the “soil,” driven underground by the lamp, or do they rise from the soil to be in its presence? In an earlier proposal, Neustein refers to the carpet of ashes as a “seed-bed,” which assigns to the letters the role of seeds. One of the leading exiles from Moravia, Bishop Johan Amos Comenius, expressed the hope that, despite the bitter repression, there might lie a “hidden seed” in the forests of Moravia, from which a rebirth of Unitas might come. That happened, of course, in Saxony and then in North Carolina, so it might be possible to interpret the letters, buried but half visible, as the “hidden seed.”

The complex symbolism of chandelier, ashes, and letters ought not to be treated merely as a code to be deciphered. Each evokes an aura of meanings, which overlap and interpenetrate to form an atmosphere of intersecting themes. Moreover, the meaning of the work cannot merely have to do with the circumstances of Salem’s founding in the eighteenth century; it must somehow speak to us today and have something to do with our own lives. One feels that the contrast between, on the one hand, the ashes and the map site of Salem, symbolizing the possibility of the pure and simple life, and, on the other, the crystal opulence of the great chandelier, must hold the key to this work. But it is very difficult to find the key, if only because of the extreme ambiguity of the chandelier and ash field as symbols. The chandelier implies hierarchy, power, and domination. Historically it emblematizes the Counter-Reformation and the Holy Roman Empire and the Latin liturgy. The map inscribed in ashes emblematizes a community of equals, passive resistance, the Protestant Reformation, and vernacular languages that make the Bible’s authority accessible to all who can read. But at the same time the lamp is what Wordsworth describes as “the celestial light” that is lowered to the level of “every common sight,” as if, as in Christian cosmology, God mingled his luminescence with the soil and ashes of human flesh, infused history with eternity to achieve salvation for us through enfleshment—and this tremendous drama is being enacted in Salem, the New Jerusalem! After all, the distribution of the letters is at its densest in the area of greatest illumination, just under the light. Not just we who enter the work are drawn to the light: Being drawn to the light is enacted by “the hidden seed.” The letters physically imply that there is some meaning beneath the ashes, which the light attempts to draw out. The letters, ashes, and lamp reenact in a way our own effort to uncover—to unveil—the meaning of the work we are experiencing.

The chandelier is not, as might have been expected, centered over the “commons” of Salem, even if it does define the space’s visual center. It is, rather, at one of the town’s boundaries, as if marking a boundary in its own right between the town and the wilderness out of which it is carved. The undifferentiated wilderness spreads edgelessly outward: The walls of the space in which the work is installed do not mark real boundaries—the wilderness is after all not a rectangular area—which is a further mark of the difference between the space of the work and the space of the gallery. The Stadtplan is like a grid stamped onto the Wachovian clay, implying in its regularity that sense of well-orderness that defined the life of the founders. The Moravians were aesthetically sensitive: “The proportions of the houses are good, and with their regular placing and their tile roofs, they make a not unpleasing appearance,” an eyewitness wrote in 1768. The form of life was austere but not ascetic. There was music, there was cheer, there was the sense of fulfilling Providence through founding a city, whether one saw this as rising from the ashes of history or through the imposition of a rational order onto the soil of wilderness. But whether through interpretation we can impose a rational order on the work as a whole is another question. Everything—the lamp, the ashes, the letters—is multiply ambiguous and powerfully symbolic. Furthermore, it must be remembered that we are not external to the work we seek to rationalize. We complete the work by entering it and making it our own. But each of us must complete it in a different way. And—who knows?—this may say something about using the Bible as the final authority for morality and truth. The readers complete the Bible by interpretation, and each interpretation is individual.

In the initial formulation of his proposal, Joshua Neustein wrote, “I shall look for testimony, for witnesses that will take possession of my piece. Maybe I shall discover a portion of my own missing history. Something that modifies belonging. Something belonging to me.” Well, the chandelier may be read as a fixture that evolves from the candelabrum, hanging rather than sitting, fixed rather than portable, as dwellings become permanent (like the brick-and-tile houses of Salem) rather than temporary, like tents or Salem’s first timbered cabins. There is a famous candelabrum in the Bible, one that a curiously finicky God orders Moses to construct. It is a very ornate candelabrum for what after all was a desert people, but it was to be placed in a sanctuary fit for God and to represent an offering and a sacrifice on the part of the children of Israel “that I might dwell among them.” Perhaps light and God are sufficiently one that where there is light there is God. The candelabrum was to be made of pure gold, and God specifies its structure in remarkable detail.

There were ten candelabra in the First Temple but only one in the Second Temple, to imply a continuity with the tabernacle Moses built and shaped to conform with the description in Exodus. This was taken to Rome upon the destruction of Jerusalem and housed in the Temple of Vespasian. We can still see it carried as a trophy on the Arch of Titus, as a symbol of the defeat and destruction of the Israelites. It is the emblem of dwelling and of diaspora. When one conjoins this potent symbol with the reflection that “Salem” is an ancient and poetic name for Jerusalem—the emblematic capital of what was for so long a wandering, the lost homeland, how should an Israeli artist not belong, and how should this not be a piece of his own missing history? Home and history, loss and recovery, oppression and overcoming, light and human darkness, beauty and ashes, politics and return, the darkness of Europe and America as the New Jerusalem—these are among the themes enacted here. The rest must be found by each who engages with the work.

For reasons already stated, these works require fairly large spaces. It is important that visitors be drawn into the work. The paths through the ashes must then be wide enough for persons to use them, wide enough, perhaps, that two persons coming from different directions should be able to pass. But beyond that, the space must be sufficiently high to convey the truth that the chandelier has descended, dramatically and surprisingly, as if from a higher to a lower realm—to the realm of those who virtually walk the streets of the city sunk in ashes. The two substances—light and ashes—constitute what Suzanne Langer spoke of as a presentational form, as distinct from discursive forms as pictures are from propositions. The presentational forms of Neustein’s installations demand interpretive response and require some application to the lives of the walkers. They project a message too urgent to be disregarded but too elusive to be paraphrased.

It was as a poetry of linked symbols that I sought to analyze The Message in the Ashes, in which the inscribed city was Salem at around the time of its founding—a form and order imposed on the American wilderness by refugees from the religious wars in Europe. What I had not especially thought of at the time was the possibility of the work moving from venue to venue. It seemed too linked to the specificities, cultural and historical, of the Moravian Brotherhood, who had founded Salem as a New Jerusalem. I thought of these links like roots, drawing meaning from the soil. And though I realized that it was not a permanent installation, it seemed to me that the work could be moved only if uprooted and could hardly draw sustenance from an alien soil. If the symbols meant what I supposed they did in Salem, could they carry that meaning over to Cleveland, where the work was installed in the Museum of Contemporary Art? Neustein replaced the map of Salem with a map of Cleveland, to anchor the work in the reality outside the museum. But would that make it specific to Cleveland as it had been to Salem? It would have seemed to me that the symbolic components were too interreferential and organic not to sacrifice their meaning when the work was made to denote Cleveland. Just the name Salem—a fond way of referring to Jerusalem (like the apple in the case of New York)—has connotations that do not carry over to Cleveland, named after Moses Cleaveland, who led the first surveying party in the Western Reserve, laying down a plan to which downtown Cleveland still conforms. The chief highways of the early settlers were originally Indian trails. So a whole new set of meanings would have to be generated in the new site. There is of course a natural connection between ashes and Cleveland, as a city of blast furnaces and prosperous manufacture fallen on harsh times. But maybe thoughts of just this kind would have occurred to those who sought ways of capturing a presented meaning in words. My own interpretation of Light over Ashes perhaps went beyond any meaning planted in the work by Neustein, and it may be part of his artistic method to employ evocative symbols to prompt interpretative responses that will be different from site to site. Ashes in which the map of Berlin is inscribed must mean something different from those in which Salem is inscribed. To think of Berlin is to think of a city of ashes, a bombed and burned wreck of a city, from which the present Berlin has risen like a phoenix. The ashes of Salem imply no such history, nor do those of Cleveland. Nor, of course, do those in which the Israeli city of Bene Beraq is inscribed in a new work, Domestic Tranquility. However much one installation looks like another, each entails a different interpretation, drawing on history, on religion, on the meanings of settlement, security, and the language of social being. It was the interdependence of its symbols that caused me to feel that Light over Ashes was specific to its site. And yet, so powerful are the components in the complex—city, lamp, and ashes—that one is given the sense that each installation has some higher and more transcendent message than “The Message in the Ashes” I made central to my analysis of Light over Ashes.

A second video image alternates with the artist addressing the sunflowers. This shows a woman, wearing some folk costume, ironing a garment. Her dress connects her to a culture somewhat alien to those who experience the work. The native dress is a declaration of where the woman feels she belongs. Ironing belongs to the fundamental human project of keeping disorder at bay. The ironed garment is an emblem of domesticity and civilization. So the woman herself is domestic tranquillity personified, performing her duties in peace, secure in her traditions. Neustein thought he might put a sunflower in a vase on a shelf behind her. Even if that were a mere decorative touch, it would transcend its meaning. The mere thought of decorative touches goes with a sense of home and of peace. “Domestic” is defined as whatever is “of or pertaining to the family or the household.”

When I was gathering some thoughts for this piece, I came across a curious photograph in The New York Times. It showed a man and a woman seated on the floor next to a street map painted on the floor. It is a map of a razed town. The map is in a museum dedicated to the town’s memory. It had been a place in which members of different races lived together in domestic tranquillity. And it was destroyed by an apartheid government that decreed it must be replaced by another town, in which only whites were permitted to live. To this end, the original town was destroyed, and another town—interestingly named Sonnenbloem, which is Afrikaans for Sunflower—was superimposed. Sunflower never prospered. Sunflower is today an urban wasteland, but beneath the ashes of its demolition the old town acquires a deeper and deeper meaning as an emblem of a criminal disregard for domestic tranquillity. That meaning would have been deepened and raised to the level of moral poetry had the street map been made in the ashes, in a large darkened space, lit primarily by a chandelier suspended just above. Ashes and chandelier do not constitute a formulaic device for transforming tragedy into elegy. But together with the political memory they would have given visitors to the museum the kind of evocative experience of which art is capable.