PART 3

Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul Cézanne

NO ART CAN COMPLETELY CLOSE THE GAP BETWEEN THE UNPREDICTability or refractoriness of life and the order we so artfully impose upon it in the name of art, ritual, or religion. Our awareness of this gap is never completely extinguished.¹ There is always something that eludes our grasp, some experience that cannot be tamed and symbolized in language, and the memory of this remainder haunts us.² As Wallace Stevens puts it in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the singing ends, and, as we turn toward the town, our “blessed rage for order,” “the maker’s rage to order words of the sea,” gives ground to “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” In this view, art, like poetry, lies at the limits of language, on the threshold of what can be securely apprehended or embraced—an absent loved one, a dead friend, a country from which we have been exiled, an unrealized ambition, a utopian vision.

No artist better captures this inescapable tension between the world as it is and the artificial worlds we create in our attempts to mirror or master lived reality than Paul Cézanne.

It was during the winter of 1963–64 that I saw my first Cézanne. I was working among the homeless in London at the time, and art galleries were places of warmth where I took refuge from the streets and let my mind wander. The painting is of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1887), and it hangs in the Courtauld. There’s a pine tree on the left, leaning away, with a single bough extending across the top of the painting. You can feel it moving in the wind, actually see the effect of the wind on the pine needles and smell the resin. And then, across this breathtaking plain that reminded me strongly of the Wairarapa in my native New Zealand, the lilac mountain with its magical presence…

Did I realize, through this painting, the impossibility of ever finding such an idyllic region, of having to accept that the mistral is always buffeting, driving people to distraction or violence, the world a permanently unsettled place in which we struggle for refuge only to find there is no real shelter from the storm? In retrospect it is easy to read my own cross-purposes into this work, identifying with vagrants even as I searched for home, compelled to go to the ends of the earth in search of a place in which I could be happy yet nostalgic for the place I had left behind.

For forty-five years now I have returned, time and time again, to the paintings of Paul Cézanne, finding in them analogues of my attempts to artistically assemble the fragments of my experience without reaching for synthesis, closure, or final truth, since the whole, observed Adorno, turning Hegel on his head, is the false.³

On the wall in front of me is a framed reproduction of another of Cézanne’s landscapes from Aix-en-Provence.

A distant, arid, and sun-drenched landscape is glimpsed through overlapping pine boughs that extend beyond the frame of the painting. The trunk of the tree establishes a solid vertical to the left of center. In the words of one writer, the work seems to be conceived as a search for rhythm and perfect composition, a sort of intellectual abstraction.⁴ But this is to suggest that Cézanne was looking for a balance he found difficult to achieve, rather than deliberately choosing to convey a tension between order and chaos—the carefully painted planes that hint at houses,⁵ the edges of fields and lines of trees juxtaposed with gnarled and entangled branches, blurred patches of undergrowth or scrub, seemingly haphazard brushstrokes. Cézanne worked on this painting for almost five years—evidence of the uncertainty and care with which he painted—but his difficulty in completing his work quickly did not reflect his striving for geometrical order, symmetry, or tonal balance but a desire to capture the unstable relationship between the solidity of the tree and the wind that bends its branches and sweeps through its leaves, between the order of art and the wildness of the world. With Cézanne, order is provisional and tentative, never certain.

FIGURE 20. Large Pine Tree and Red Earth, Paul Cezanne, 1890–1895. Used with permission by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

Cézanne gave his all to depicting existence as ambiguous. Our being-in-the-world is neither a stable state nor completely fluid. A person can resemble a stone and the rocks in a quarry can resemble the naked bodies of a group of bathers. For Cézanne, we live betwixt and between consoling illusions of order, provided by our religions or our conventional worldviews, and experiences that befall us like bolts from the blue or seismic shocks, reducing our lifeworlds to ruins and leaving us shattered, uncertain, and afraid.

Consider Cézanne’s masterpiece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, entitled The House with the Cracked Walls (1892–1894).

When I visited the Met in the summer of 2010 and entered the room where the Cézannes are hung, this painting stopped me in my tracks. The wall of the two-story house is painted with the same care with which a plasterer would work, creating an unblemished surface. Blinding sunlight is reflected from the wall, in which is set a pitch-black window. From the tiled roof to the rocky ground on which the house stands, a dark gaping crack descends, cleaving the canvas in two. And while the left foreground is composed, in Cézanne’s usual manner, of curving planes, it comes up against blocks of granite on the right so that the crack in the wall of the house continues, as it were, into the accidented landscape below it. Behind the house there is a line of trees, agitated by the wind. I would later discover that Cézanne often painted abandoned buildings and quarries near his studio outside Aix, though he depicted this house only once. I would also read that this period of the artist’s life was marked by a series of crises.

FIGURE 21. The House with the Cracked Walls, Paul Cezanne, 1892–1894.

In the spring of 1885, the man who his friend Zola once described as passive in the face of love,⁶ not given to amorous conquests, fell head over heels in love. Cézanne was forty-six, with a reputation for being afraid of women, yet he enlisted Zola’s help in writing love letters to a young woman whose name and situation we may never know.

Here is the draft of one of his love letters.⁷

I saw you, and you allowed me to kiss you; from that moment, I’ve been agitated by a profound unrest. You will forgive the liberty of writing you taken by a friend tormented by anxiety: I don’t know how to excuse this liberty, which you may consider an enormous one, but could I remain in this depression? Isn’t it better to show a feeling than to hide it?

Why, said I to myself, keep silent as to the source of your torment? Isn’t it a solace of suffering to allow it to find expression? And since physical pain seems to find some relief in the cries of the victim, is it not natural, Madame, that mental griefs seek some assuagement in confession to an adored being?

I know that this letter, whose foolhardy and premature posting may seem indiscreet, has nothing to recommend me to you save the goodness of…

For six months Cézanne’s obsession brought misery to the artist, his common-law wife Hortense Fiquet, and his family, although there is no evidence that Cézanne’s love was requited or consummated. All we know is that within a year the distraught painter repairs his relationship with Hortense and marries her, though neither of them ever found happiness. Then, after four years of moving from place to place, Cézanne retreats to Aix, where he was born and raised, and absorbs himself in the landscape, as if this is his compromise between the emptiness of his domestic and religious life and the passion he’d felt for this unremembered girl.

The second crisis that year was Cézanne’s estrangement from his childhood friend, Émile Zola, following the publication of Zola’s novel, L’Oeuvre, in 1886. Rightly or wrongly, Cézanne regarded the central character of Claude, a doomed painter, consumed by self-doubt even as he dedicated himself to the creation of a new kind of art, as a mean-spirited commentary on himself. Given the painter’s distress and vulnerability at this time, and the domestic tensions of the summer of 1885 when the Cézannes imposed upon the hospitality of the Zolas in Médan, it is easy to see how misunderstandings could arise.

Then the third blow fell. Cézanne’s father died in October 1886.

It is striking how often commentators and critics describe Cézanne as an unstable man, racked by self-doubt, who sought to escape the chaos in his personal life by creating monumental and immutable forms with paint.⁸ But I see a man living in what John Keats called “negative capability,”⁹ simultaneously acknowledging the fractured, fragile character of the human world while applying himself to the repair work we may do through art, thought, and faith. If Cézanne came to be consumed by his art, it was not because he sought perfection or succumbed to despair, but because he sought to strike a tolerable balance between the disorderly forces of human existence and the ordering powers of art.

But consumed he was—by doubt in his ability to strike that balance. Like the Seated Peasant (1892–1896), the portrait of Mme. Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888–1890), and the apples rolling off a plate in Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants (1893–1894), or the pine boughs stirring in the wind in his numerous depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the painter himself is always caught off-balance, upset, destabilized.

In his Letters on Cézanne the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes the impact of a memorial exhibition of Cézanne’s work in the autumn of 1907, a year after the painter’s death.¹⁰ Rilke immediately embraced Cézanne as his tutelary spirit, returning to the exhibition day after day and writing to his wife Clara about his reactions. A few years before, Rilke had stood in front of an archaic torso of Apollo and been so moved that he resolved to dedicate his life uncompromisingly to art. He was convinced that if he expended all his love in his work he might one day produce something possessing the purity Cézanne had achieved in his.

But it was not purity that Cézanne sought, but images that captured the interface between contending impulses, between opposing forces. Ironically, and perhaps tragically, to achieve this, everything had to go by the board—home comforts, intimate relationships, even physical health. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of how Cézanne struggled to “make visible how the world touches us,” it is necessary to remember that the world touches us in contradictory ways. But it was not simply the copresence of stillness and movement in the world before his eyes that concerned him, but the division within himself between the demands of life and the demands of his work. Cézanne removed himself from everything that could “hook” him. Often he was so spent at the end of a day’s work, so angry, mistrustful, and frustrated at his failure to achieve what he calls la réalization, that he would take to his bed before six, after a “senselessly ingested meal,” and seek oblivion in sleep. He even stayed away from his mother’s funeral in order not to lose a day’s work—a precursor of Camus’s l’étranger. At the end of his life, he suffered from diabetes, headaches, and bronchitis, yet he painted outdoors every day, relying on his son to take care of Hortense as well as the day-to-day chores at home. Eight days before his death he collapsed while painting in the rain. He was brought home in a laundry cart. But even at death’s door he got out of bed and went to his studio, determined to work.

There’s a phrase in one of Rilke’s letters to Clara that I find particularly moving. The poet has just returned from another visit to the Cézanne room in the Salon d’Automne, and he’s describing how he usually finds the people walking about an art gallery more interesting than the paintings they are looking at. But the Cézanne room is an exception. Here, he says, reality is on his side, and he goes into detail about Cézanne’s dense quilted blues, his reds, his shadowless greens, and the reddish black of his wine bottles. The humbleness of the things Cézanne paints: the apples that are cooking apples, the wine bottles that belong to the bulging pockets of an old coat. It’s almost as if the painter has become one of the homely, shabby objects in front of him. As if his entire being has gone into his art, leaving only a shell behind. The tragedy was that he gave more life to these things than he gave his wife and son or the people he painted. “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness,” he once said.¹¹ And so his landscapes are really abstract portraits—worlds not of rock and pine but of the flesh. Look at Cézanne’s portraits of his wife Hortense Fiquet and you’ll see that the reverse is also true. This man who could not bear to be touched, and whose passion for landforms was stronger than his desire for human company, turned Hortense to stone. He spoke of “nature” almost as if it were a person—a person who was giving him “great difficulties.”¹² It wasn’t simply that Cézanne treated persons as objects; he treated objects as persons. And all the while he was becoming an object himself, pursued by the local kids each day as he trudged to his studio, stones thrown at him as if he were a stray dog, a butt of jokes, treated like the village idiot.

Meyer Schapiro has argued that Cézanne’s turn from persons to apples was born of a need to find a way of displacing, and later disguising, his erotic yearnings.¹³ Shy, fearful, and anxious in the company of women, he projected his sexual desires onto still lifes that calmed and disciplined his mind and gave him a sense of being in full control of himself. Subjective confusions were transmuted into objective forms.¹⁴

In my view, however, it is the copresence of sensuality and rationality—the flesh of the fruit and the geometrical arrangement of domestic objects on a table—that lends these paintings their power. It is not that erotic impulses are symbolically disguised, as if they had priority over the painted image; rather these two embodied forms are given equal weight, and it is this juxtaposition of things we normally regard as essentially different (organic versus inorganic), that stirs and surprises us when we see them brought so intimately together. One might say that Cézanne has it both ways. He can express and repress his amorous longings in a single brushstroke, a single image. He thus asserts control over a simulacrum of his real life. By drawing on intrapsychic elements, on the one hand, and external materials, on the other, he simultaneously paints an image and generates an experience of being a creator rather than creature of circumstance.

There is a long-standing romantic view of the artist, the scholar, or the priest as individuals who sacrifice their personal lives in order to create enduring works of art, scholarship, or spiritual perfection.

Zola’s L’Oeuvre belongs to this tradition.

But Claude was not Cézanne, even if Zola drew on Cézanne in creating the storm-tossed obsessional character of Claude Lantier. One can see the similarities—the ambivalence toward women, the perverse conviction that family life is inimical to art, the search for some transcendent object or idea that will outlast the centuries, the notion that art requires absolute devotion, and that a man must, therefore, choose between art and women. Why should Claude distance himself from women, distrust them, feel contempt for them, fear that they will sap his creative power? Why should his mistress have to choose between caring for the child she has borne him and caring for him, “her big child?” And this glorious ideal of the masterpiece, the masculine justification for the neglect of children, the sacrifice of our lives! Poor Christine, Claude’s mistress and model. She begins to feel trapped in a ménage à trois. The painting is her rival. Claude prefers the counterfeit to the real person. Only the masterpiece matters. When their son dies, he paints the dead child and exhibits the painting in the Salon des Refusés where it is met with indifference. She implores him: If you can’t be a great painter, at least life remains to us. But for Claude, nothing exists beyond art. She makes herself beautiful for him, seduces him, shows that the living flesh is more real than any painted figure.

You’ve made me pose for you; you wanted to make copies of my body, but why? Surely I’m worth more than all the copies you could ever make! At best they’re ugly, besides being cold and stiff as so many corpses…. But I love you. I want you. Don’t you understand? Why do I have to tell you all the time? Can’t you feel it when I’m always near you, when I offer to pose for you, when I’m always wanting to touch you? Do you understand now? I love you. I’m alive and I want you…. You can go on living because I love you. But he replies, Ah, but you’ll never love me enough!…I know that because I know myself. The only thing that could make life worth living would be something that doesn’t exist, the sort of joy that would make me forget everything else…You’ve already proved you couldn’t give me that, and I know you never will.¹⁵

The difference, as I see it, between Cézanne and Claude is that while Claude sacrifices his well-being (and those he loves) in an impossible attempt to create a perfect work of art, Cézanne ironically loses his grip on reality by attempting to strike a balance between the masterful artifice of art and the turbulent reality of life.

That this motif is often overlooked, both in cursory accounts and critical commentaries of great art, may attest to our all-too-human desire to find in art, the intellect, or religion a means of transcendence so that the world as it is rendered in paint, in words, or in ceremony eclipses the world as we know it in our everyday lives. Consider, for example, Pieter Bruegel’s Northern Renaissance masterpiece The Hunters in the Snow (1565).

Taking her cue from Eli Siegel’s principle of “aesthetic realism” (“All beauty is a making one of opposites”), Nancy Huntting emphasizes the way Bruegel brings near and far, sharpness and softness, stillness and movement, into a single harmonious composition.¹⁶ But does this do justice to the work?

I purchased a fine Austrian reproduction of this painting in Wellington, New Zealand, when I was twenty. It was on display in an art supplies shop in Panama Street and cost me ten pounds—all the money I had in my pocket. I have lived with this painting for fifty years—as I have lived with the landscapes of Paul Cézanne—yet this painting, celebrated for its artful composition and visual power, points to a divided world. The people skating, fishing, or curling on the frozen ponds, or stoking an outdoor fire, are—like the peasants in The Fall of Icarus¹⁷—oblivious to the tragedy unfurling in the world beyond the mountains or outside the frame of the painting, though it was a tragedy that the painter himself was all too grimly aware of.

About suffering, the old masters were never wrong, W. H. Auden famously observed; “it takes place,” as in The Hunters in Snow, as children are “skating on a pond at the edge of the wood” or people are “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Even as we tend a fire, plow a field, herd animals, hunt game, carry faggots home to a hearth, or feast at a table, a tragedy is unfolding somewhere, to someone. How do we know that we are not also skating on thin ice?

Is Bruegel intending to communicate this paradox to us? Is it not only Auden who sees the poignant copresence in our lives of events occurring outside our comprehension or control and pedestrian events that so absorb us that we are blind to all else?

Some scholars have argued that, for Bruegel, the events beyond ordinary grasp belong to a realm beyond the senses, beyond the reach of rational thought, and outside our everyday understanding of space and time.¹⁸ This interpretation rests on evidence of Bruegel’s close association with a “heretical” Flemish school known as the Family of Love that repudiated the religious rivalries among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists in favor of a humanist and mystical vision of an “invisible church” unfettered by rites and doctrines. But when Bruegel’s friend, the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, expressed the view that Bruegel painted many things that cannot be painted,¹⁹ was he alluding not only to a shared commitment to Perennial Philosophy but also to the difficulty of holding in tension two perspectives on the world in the same frame? The tower of Babel aspires to join earthly and heavenly realms, but the tower is always unfinished, falling short of its goal. In the same way, the order we create in art is contradicted by our worldly limitations, our unbridled appetites, our foolish ambitions, our stupidity, intolerance, and shortsightedness.

Look closely and even The Hunters in the Snow betrays these disruptive forces. The sign outside the inn hangs from a single hinge, angled so as it lead one’s eye down the snowy slope into the frozen valley. But the sign’s placement is not solely determined by compositional requirements, for it depicts Hubertus, patron saint of the hunt, standing before a stag or hart that holds a crucifix between its antlers. Not only does the image recall Saint Hubert’s conversion in the Ardennes Forest in the late seventh century; it suggests that God may have withdrawn His blessings from the hunters in Bruegel’s painting. The unhinged sign is thus an oblique reference to the religious turmoil of the late sixteenth century on which Bruegel’s God must surely have looked askance—the excesses of the Protestant Reformation inspiring violent countermeasures by the Catholic Church, repressing heresies, and reestablishing papal authority. At the same time, a little ice age had descended over Europe. Glaciers expanded, warm summers were few and far between, winters were long and harsh, harvests were poor (1565, the year Bruegel painted The Hunters in the Snow, was particularly bad), and epidemics swept the land. Bruegel’s vivid depictions of death and of hell must surely have come from direct personal knowledge of the rape, killing, and pillaging that swept the Flemish countryside during this period. People are playing on the frozen rivers and lakes. But hunger and death stalk the land. Crows fly overhead as if waiting for carrion. Hunters return from the wintry woods, their dogs’ morose expressions and exhausted demeanor giving us a glimpse of what their masters were feeling as they trudged home with only the emaciated corpse of a fox to show for their labors. These ciphers of an unsaid suggest that hell is on earth and heaven unattainable unless it is through the lens of art,²⁰ which creates the appearance of a well-tempered geometry in a world where death and disorder are, nonetheless, always present and impinging.²¹ Michel de Certeau’s analysis of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights holds true for the work of Pieter Bruegel who, as a young man, was hailed as a new Hieronymous Bosch.²² The strictly ordered mise-en-scène coexists with an elsewhere comprising pathways of nonmeaning, disorderly combinations, and space without beginning or end, exits or entrances.²³ If there is mystery in the work of these sixteenth-century Flemish masters, it is in the negative dialectic that obtains between the order humanity brings to the world through language, geometry, or art and the world’s complexity, contradictoriness, changeability, and confusion that subvert that order. One hand gestures toward design—geometrical, theological, or cultural—while the other hand stays the first, pointing to all that prevents the completion or consummation of the initial impulse.

In W. H. Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles,” an idealistic young woman looks over the shoulder of the Greek hero, expecting to see on his shining metal shield vistas of vines and olive trees, marble, well-governed cities, and ships upon untamed seas. She finds instead an artificial wilderness, a sky like lead, and a weed-choked field where unspeakable scenes of violence and depravity unfold.

The genius of artists like Paul Cézanne, Wallace Stevens, Wystan Hugh Auden, and Pieter Bruegel lies in their capacity to create a space where opposites can be held or contained. To show all sides of the human condition without attempting to resolve the quandary of how we can accept the blind forces of history and circumstance even as we search for certainty and control in our lives. How, to quote Keats, we can live in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason?²⁴

I left the Metropolitan Museum and strolled up Fifth Avenue toward the Guggenheim. The day was hot, and tourists were milling around the gallery entrance, some eating snacks, others examining the postcards they had bought in the gallery shop or staring up at the facade of the building. A young woman asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking a photograph of her and her friend. They were anxious that the photo should have the Guggenheim in the background, proof, perhaps, that they had been there. What experiences they would take away of the art inside the museum I could only guess.

A friend of mine, Tyler Zoanni, knowing of my interest in Cézanne, had recently sent me a postcard from the Guggenheim—a reproduction of Cézanne’s Still Life, Flask, Glass and Jug (1877). Tyler suggested that if I was ever in New York City I should make sure I saw this painting, and he mentioned a mysterious female figure reflected in the jug. My first thought was that Cézanne might have smuggled a miniature portrait of his lover into the still life, but the dates were wrong and the surmise implausible. Nonetheless, I was eager to get a closer look at the image on the jug, which in the postcard reproduction was too ambiguous to decipher.

The jug is a Provençal olive jar, half-covered in a viridian glaze, and it appears in several of Cézanne’s still lives. Within this dark-green glaze is a rough square of reflected light, and on this light-blue ground a small silhouetted figure appears to be wading through waist-deep water, the reflection streaking the water in the foreground. The figure is exquisitely painted, left arm and hand outstretched as if pulling the body forward against the weight of the water, right hand trailing behind. And yet, one cannot be convinced that Cézanne intended to paint this miniature, but simply daubed some cobalt on the light-blue ground just as he smudged the reflection on the flask to add to its verisimilitude.

After leaving the Guggenheim, I found a place on Lexington and 88th Street where I ordered a lentil soup, organic bread, and espresso. I ate in silence at a communal table not unlike the one in Bruegel’s Village Wedding Feast. I was thinking of how the carefully prepared food in front of me carried no evidence of the place where the wheat was harvested, the environment in which the vegetables were grown, or the people who made their living out of growing them. Culture belies its origins in cultivation. Domestication denies the wildness of the world. Art abstracts itself from life. And even the food on our plate bears few traces of the fields and gardens from whence it came. Yet every day nature resurfaces, reminding us in the form of flood, drought, hurricane, or earthquake that it coexists with what we call culture and cannot be quelled.

At that moment my thoughts returned to the paintings I had seen that morning, particularly the blue figure in the Cézanne still life that appeared to be wading through water. This minor ambiguity—a random brush stroke giving the impression of a carefully painted figure leaning into a body of water—captured my wider theme, of how we live betwixt and between opposing moods, moments, and emotions, always in two minds, aware that there are always two sides to every story, the order we bring to the world confounded by the world’s invasions of our most carefully cultivated spaces, not to mention to perennial oscillation between our sense of being a part of and being apart from the landscapes, the lives of others, the still lifes, that encompass us—abandoned quarries, cracked walls, unfinished towers, broken hinges, ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Art and the Unspeakable

An accusation is sometimes leveled against artists and intellectuals that, lacking the courage and commitment to engage with the real world, they seek asylum in painting, writing, or thinking. William Faulkner underscores this point in The Unvanquished. “I realized then the immitigable chasm between all life and all print—that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.”²⁵ A corollary of this observation is that, despite being drawn to reality in all its harshness and seediness, artists hesitate, like voyeurs, to become too deeply immersed in it or inhibit the impulse to identify with the suffering of others lest this compromise their higher calling.

For John Ruskin, fidelity to one’s artistic vocation entailed the ruthless assumption that no other human being exists but oneself.

As the great painter is not allowed to be indignant or exclusive, it is not possible for him to nourish his (so-called) spiritual desires, as it is to an ordinarily virtuous person. Your ordinarily good man absolutely avoids, either for fear of getting harm, or because he has no pleasure in such places or people, all scenes that foster vice, and all companies that delight in it…. But you can’t learn to paint of blackbirds, nor by singing hymns. You must be in the wildness of the midnight masque—in the misery of the dark street at dawn—in the crowd when it rages fiercest against the law…. Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to note the colour of his lips; does a woman embrace her destruction before you, your business is not to save her, but to watch how she bends her arms.²⁶

There are troubling similarities between the voyeur’s desire to keep his distance, the concept of sublimity in religion, and the role of abstraction in art. For whatever reason we extoll the view from afar, it often implies a denigration of the view from within or from below. To become too involved in mundane existence is, allegedly, to risk losing one perspective and become a tedious literalist. While immanence is identified with vulgarity, distance lends enchantment, and transcendence entails truth.

Historically, it is difficult to disentangle this emphasis on what Wallace Stevens called “supreme fiction”—wherein “we collect ourselves, out of all the indifferences, into one thing,” and in which “God and the imagination are one”²⁷—with the rise of the bourgeoisie. The etherealizing effects of this emerging social imaginary were felt in all aspects of middle-class life—comfortable furnishings of the home, the idealist cult of inwardness, reveries of romantic love and spiritual adoration, pure images of angels, the doctrine of art for art’s sake, the cultivation of exquisite manners, a taste for refined foods, disdain for physical toil, and the repression of bodily functions, sexuality, and passions.²⁸ This critique of the Western tradition of art finds its most compelling expression in John Berger’s thesis that post-Renaissance European painting is increasing entangled with class snobberies and market forces, even though this mercenary determination of value is masked by a rhetoric of beauty, truth, genius, and taste.²⁹

Berger takes great pains, however, not to see art solely in terms of what happens to it when it enters the marketplace. The meaning of art lies, first and foremost, in the mysterious process of its gestation and birth within the experience of an individual artist. Although Picasso became wealthier and more renowned than any artist in history, he remained “single-minded,” working “like a man possessed; and all his relationships [were] more or less subservient to the needs of his art.”³⁰ This uncanny detachment, this apparent immunity to the world in which he lived, seems connected to Picasso’s tendency to see everything through the lens of his own imagination. Guernica is not simply about the destruction of a Basque town on April 26, 1937, by German bombers carrying out Franco’s fascist mission.

Picasso did not try to imagine the actual event. There is no town, no aeroplanes, no explosion, no reference to the time of day, the year, the century, or the part of Spain where it happened…. Guernica is a painting about how Picasso imagines suffering; and just as when he is working on a painting or sculpture about making love the intensity of his sensations makes it impossible for him to distinguish between himself and his lover, just as his portraits of women are often self-portraits of himself found in them, so here in Guernica he is painting his own suffering as he daily hears the news from his own country.³¹

If we are to speak of great art, we must reckon with this peculiar form of dissociation in which the objective world is so utterly subverted by the artist’s subjectivity that its forms of expression become irreducible to anything that might be said to lie without or within. This is the mystery of art, and perhaps of madness. If the Dionysian imagination throws up outrageous metaphors, provocative images, and radical ideas, it is not necessarily because the artist has decided to defy convention, for this is, despite himself, the only way he sees reality.

That artists are so often identified with an otherworldly sensibility may explain why they are regarded so ambivalently—dismissed as impractical and amoral, heads in the clouds, eyes turned upward or inward, indifferent to the claims of others or the tenor of their time.

In 1891, some six years after leaving his Danish wife and five children, Paul Gauguin embarked on his second voyage to French Polynesia, in flight from bourgeois Europe. Yet his paintings depict almost nothing of the disease, depravity, and cultural disenchantment of Tahiti at that epoch; they are, instead, works of imagination, expressions of his repudiation of colonial rule and his nostalgia for a lost Eden.

It is to my sister, Bronwen, that I owe many insights into Gauguin’s life and work. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that her scholarly engagement with Gauguin might account for some of the exotic vegetation that she has planted in her Auckland garden, including bromeliads, distantly related to the pineapple family, whose thick, waxy, multicolored leaves hold water for days.

Some years ago, in the course of researching her book on Gauguin, Bronwen discovered that Gauguin had visited the Auckland Art Gallery and Auckland Museum during a ten-day stopover in the city in August 1895. The French painter was particularly intrigued by a wooden Maori bowl (kumete), the work of Patoromu Tamatea of Rotorua. The intricately carved kumete is flanked by two clasping figures, while the lid is surmounted by a handle that comprises two entangled figures. Gauguin made no sketch of the vessel, though his notebooks contain numerous other drawings of Maori carvings. He may, however, have acquired a photograph of the bowl, which would help explain the fidelity with which he reproduced it six years later in a series of still lifes. In these paintings, European sunflowers are placed in the carved bowl, while mangoes lie on the table around it—signifying the fusion of two very different worlds. A year earlier, in Te Reiora (The Dream), Gauguin referenced the bowl as part of an infant’s cradle. “The child sleeps beneath a headboard which is the profile of an observing face whose head has hair which, on closer inspection, turns out to contain a number of figures in a configuration that comes directly from the Tamatea bowl. Likewise, the foot of the cradle is shaped into the form of a crouching figure which echoes the sleeping figure and is perhaps related to the two in the lid of a different Maori bowl.”³²

In making a garden or painting a picture, we have recourse to a fund of objects, plants, and images whose places of origin are eclipsed by the context we assign the borrowings and the meaning they take on for us. For Gauguin, all religions and cultures were essentially similar; they stemmed from a single primeval source. This was why he could juxtapose, with no sense of travesty, Christian iconography, Italian quattrocento painting, Maori carved art, and elements taken from Buddhist temples such as Borobudur. All pointed to an aboriginal source of all traditions.

Contemporary Maori writers resist these unauthorized appropriations, questioning the right of “this French bohemian” to drag “Maori imagery into a primitivist mythology and iconography of his own imagining…his placement of Maori imagery within exotic, tropical pictorial settings painted in sweet, high-key colour harmonies entirely at odds with the more earthly coloration of taonga Maori.”³³ One cannot declare that cultural mixing is a creative act when the terms on which this syncretism has occurred have been determined, historically, by one party muffling or muting the voice of the other. It is no good evoking equality and mutuality in the exchange of traditions when one tradition has always been dominant, and when the powerless have seen the very wherewithal of their being stolen, derided, and destroyed over one hundred and fifty years of colonial history. But one can, perhaps, make a plea for understanding Gauguin that sees him not as a typical colonizer, with disdainful views of the primitive Polynesians he made into objets d’art, but as a man oppressed by a longing that he could never assuage.

He was born in Peru in 1848, the first child of a liberal Parisian journalist who fled France with his wife and children after the failure of the 1848 revolution. His father died at Port Famine before the family even reached Peru, and for seven years Gauguin, with his mother and sister, lived in Lima in the home of a maternal uncle, Don Pio de Tristan Moscoso. “Don Pio had remarried at eighty and had several children from this new marriage, among others Etchenique, who for years was President of Peru.”³⁴ Writing in Atuana, Marquesas, only five months before his death, Gauguin would remember his Lima childhood with vividness and affection. That he had found fulfillment in the South Seas was because its luxuriant, Edenic, and sensual nature echoed the South American world in which he first came to consciousness. Indeed, one of his first Tahitian paintings included a portrait of his part-Peruvian mother as Eve in paradise.

Of those days in Lima, that delicious country where it never rained, Gauguin recalls with poignant acuity the large family of which he was a part, the lunatic who was kept chained on the terrace, the carved dome of a nearby church, a little negro girl who carried the family’s prayer rug to church, a Chinese servant who did the household laundry, an earthquake, and a picture of a traveler, with his stick and bundle over his shoulder, that inspired the nine-year-old child to leave home—the first of many radical departures.

I have no intention of condemning Gauguin for exoticizing Polynesia. But the questions may be asked: whether an artist’s fertile imagination may blind him to seeing things as they are, and whether there is a potentially tragic connection between his alienation from, or disenchantment with, his natal environment and a dissociative faculty of mind that dooms the artist to idealize or mask reality. It is not simply that the raw materials with which the artist works—ochers, words, objets trouvés—are artificial, for his way of seeing is itself a filter that fabricates and falsifies. The paradox of Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 is that the events and experiences they document are actually occluded by the aesthetic demands of the paintings, so that, while passions are stirred by the art, we cannot really engage with the realities that occasioned it. In brief, the art depoliticizes the events it depicts. “For many millions of people now, the name of Guernica accuses all war criminals,” writes John Berger. “Yet Guernica is not a painting about modern war in any objective sense of the term.” The same may be said of Goya’s Third of May 1808. Though Robert Hughes writes that “with this painting, the modern image of war as anonymous killing is born,”³⁵ the melodramatic lighting, in which the man in the white shirt resembles Christ on the cross, and the contrast between the heroic Madrilenian and the robotic French riflemen distance us from the shocking reality it appears to chronicle. As such, we have been made spectators, even voyeurs, but not participants.

“Thinking men and artists have not infrequently described a sense of being not quite there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were not themselves at all, but a kind of spectator,” writes Adorno.³⁶ Undoubtedly, this sense of detachment is exacerbated by the aesthetic impact of the work of art, which, while encouraging us to believe that it is doing justice to some human reality, is also persuading us that it is only a painting, a sculpture, an artifact, an abstraction. Art thereby reinforces what Adorno calls bourgeois callousness—“the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things,” often with the support of the rationale “What does it really matter?” or “What difference could I make; what can one really do about it anyway?”³⁷

Again we encounter the question of voyeurism. Presented with a graphic depiction of human suffering, we become so focused on our emotional reactions to it that our feelings for the true sufferers are partially eclipsed—a phenomenon that emerges in late eighteenth-century Europe as intellectuals engage with the problem of human inequality.³⁸

That this habitual indifference to others is occasionally transcended may momentarily restore our sense of what we sometimes call human goodness, though such ethical moments cannot be perpetuated or institutionalized as moral imperatives.

In the early evening of May 7, 2014, “NYU food service employee Joshua Garcia was standing on a Union Square subway platform with his coworkers and hundreds of other commuters when a teenage girl blacked out and fell onto the subway tracks. While everyone else gawked and documented the frightening incident, Garcia jumped down onto the track bed. “God put me in that situation,” Garcia later told reporters. “It was where I was supposed to be. It was adrenaline and the power of the Lord.”

The girl, Stephanie Xue, was unconscious on the tracks with a six-inch gash on her head she incurred from the fall. “You could see her skull,” Garcia recalled later. “It was terrifying to look at.” But apparently it wasn’t terrifying enough to stop everyone else from taking photos and videos with their cell phones. “It was amazing seeing all these people doing nothing,” Garcia said. “It was an eye-opener.”³⁹

It would seem that photography is often implicated in this kind of alienation, as if the camera’s viewfinder—like an artist’s overactive imagination—comes between us and a world that might otherwise draw us into a direct relationship with it. As Arthur and Joan Kleinman argue in their reflections on Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a vulture perched near a Sudanese child who has collapsed from hunger, images carry ethical demands that we ignore at our peril. “How did Carter allow the vulture to get so close without doing something to protect the child? What did he do after the picture was taken? Was it in some sense posed? Inasmuch as Kevin Carter chose to take the time—minutes that may have been critical at this point when she is near death—to compose an effective picture rather than to save the child, is he complicit?” An oblique answer to these questions is suggested by Carter’s depression at the work he did and his suicide a few months after winning his 1994 Pulitzer Prize.⁴⁰

But if images and concepts are, by dint of their very artificiality, always inadequate to the life they purport to represent, surely there are circumstances when they do not simply fail to justice to life; they actually betray or destroy it.

During the twelve years in which he filmed Shoah, Claude Lanzmann struggled to find a word for “it.” “The truth is that there was no name for what, at the time, I did not even dare call ‘the event.’ To myself, almost in secret, I said ‘the Thing.’ It was a way of naming the unnameable.”⁴¹ Nor would Lanzmann allow himself even one word of commentary or any voice-over to prompt the audience what to think. Everything is conveyed obliquely. No historical footage is used; instead, Lanzmann filmed stelae and stone in the fields where the camps had been. These “became human” for him; “the only trace of the hundreds of thousands who died [there].”⁴²

Just as Walter Benjamin bemoaned the fate of art in an age of mechanical reproduction,⁴³ so we might claim that great art recognizes the impossibility of representation. By contrast, documentary filmmakers and historians often persist in the illusion that meticulously researched reenactments of events and photographs of human beings in extremis may bring us to a cathartic and edifying understanding of them and even inspire us to prevent such events happening again. Lanzmann resists these assumptions.

In a particularly damning account of a photographic exhibition in Paris, entitled Mémoire des Camps, Lanzmann describes how all-too-familiar Holocaust images were aesthetically lit, with sweeping spotlights panning slowly over “four photographs, ripped from hell itself,” in “an immoral attempt at deconstruction with pedagogic pretensions, like some silent son et lumière in Birkenau, intended to piece the visitor’s heart at the end of his tour.”⁴⁴

But does this mean, as Adorno once said, that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz or simply that there can be no poetry about Auschwitz? Do areas exist that are, by their very nature, off-limits to art, because nothing we might say or do can grasp the truth of the experience or prevent such events recurring?

One may admire Art Spiegelman’s Maus for its comic-strip fusion of humans and rodents—its play on the Nazi view of Jews as vermin—and be moved by Vladek Spiegelman’s story, but the question still haunts us, whether irony, testimony, allegory, or even memory can recapture the truth of those who “bled history.”⁴⁵

Spiegelman’s response to this dilemma is not unlike Lanzmann’s. Both studiously avoid any pretention to represent past experience or draw any moral lesson from the original events.

Although I set about in doing Maus to do a history of sorts I’m all too aware that ultimately what I’m creating is a realistic fiction. The experiences my father actually went through, there’s what he’s able to remember and what he’s able to understand of what he articulated, and what I’m able to put down on paper…. Maus is so many steps removed from the actual experience, they’re so distant from each other that all I can do is hint at, intimate, and try for something that feels real to me.⁴⁶

As for “squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victim’s fate,”⁴⁷ Spiegelman is adamant that no “pedagogic impulse” motivated his work. “Are there lessons to be learned from the Holocaust?” an interviewer asks him. “I have no idea,” Spiegelman replies. “See, I would find it a cheap shot to try to give any moral to it. It would be kind of diminishing what happened.”⁴⁸

Marina Abramović and the Shadows of Intersubjectivity

Psychological studies of face-to-face interactions between mothers and infants confirm our intuitive sense that reciprocal eye contact, smiling, laughter, touch, speech, and other modes of mutually affectionate engagement are essential to the development not only of an infant’s capacity for sociality but also its inner sense of well-being.

To explore this interactional reciprocity, Ed Tronick and his colleagues asked mothers to interact normally with their one- to four-month-old infants for three minutes, and then, following a thirty-second interval, to look at their infants with a neutral face. The effects of the mother “remaining unresponsive and maintaining an expressionless face” were instantaneous and dramatic.⁴⁹ Initially, the infant would try to engage its mother with eye contact and smiles, but when the mother’s deadpan expression did not change, the infant would look away and become quiet, somber, and withdrawn. The infant would check back to see whether the mother’s mask had dropped, only to avert its eyes again, its body curled over and head down. Looking wary, helpless, and hopeless, the infant would then remain turned away from its mother. “None of the infants cried, however.”⁵⁰

The human infant’s response to the still-faced mother resembles a pattern that has been observed in other primates, suggesting that our need for affective reciprocity is innate and that denial of response in early infancy has psychologically crippling consequences. Moreover, the unresponsiveness of matter may also be traumatic, for human beings typically need to imagine that the world at large—in its material, social, and spiritual dimensions—is amenable to the same kinds of mutual interactions that characterize relations with caring parents and significant others.⁵¹

All these observations came to mind as I watched a documentary film on Marina Abramović’s retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

In 2010 the famous performance artist sat all day and every day, for three months, in the museum’s atrium as visitors to MoMA took turns to sit opposite her without talking, touching, or gesturing. It would be the most physically and emotionally grueling performance of Abramović’s long career—a bravura attempt to distill the meaning of her art into a single event in which, in her own words, “performance becomes life itself.”⁵²

If one is to take seriously this view that performance art, ritual, religion, and life itself are all of a piece, then we have to dispense with conventional distinctions between reality and appearance.

Let us return, momentarily, to Tronick’s research on primary intersubjectivity. As Tronick explains, the mother’s deadpan face violates the infant’s basic ontological assumption that the mother will invariably interact playfully and affirmatively with her infant. Yet she is simultaneously present and absent, there and not there, and this makes the infant feel trapped in a contradiction it cannot resolve except—should the mother continue to be indifferent—through a kind of displacement in which the infant effectively makes himself a transitional object and interacts with it in lieu of the mother. Thus, confronted with the mother’s still face, the infant “begins to finger his mouth, sucking on one finger and rocking his head, looking at his feet,” and “curling up into himself.”⁵³ In many ways, this behavior conforms to what D. W. Winnicott called the “false self,” in which a person compensates for a sense of being empty, unloved, and worthless by developing a mask or defensive armoring that hides her deep-seated narcissistic wounds.⁵⁴

FIGURE 22. The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Used with permission by the Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY., and Artists Rights Society. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar.

Psychoanalysis sometimes fails to recognize the fine distinction between maladaptive and adaptive behaviors. In other words, we must be wary of seeing the masks and artifice of performance art as pathologies simply because they resemble behaviors we readily write off as neurotic.

But what bearing do these digressions have on the art of Marina Abramović?

Let us begin at the beginning.

Her parents were ranking officers in Tito’s Partisan army during the Second World War, and following Marina’s birth in 1946 they imposed on their daughter a strict military regime. Her mother never kissed or touched her (“It would have spoiled me”).⁵⁵

I was punished so often as a child, I developed blue spots on my body, and very often after being slapped in the face, my nose would bleed…. My mother would come into my room in the middle of the night when I was asleep to make sure the bed was in order and not messed up. Otherwise she would wake me up to straighten the bed sheets…. In my family, most of the time my mother and father didn’t talk to each other. They both slept with pistols on their bedside tables…. My father always came home late at night. My mother would always wait and wait for him. When he finally came home, she would ask him questions that would in turn lead to them having a physical fight. He would start beating her, and to protect herself she would run into my room—never my brother’s—and haul me out of bed in front of her as a shield…. I was twenty-nine years old and I still had to be home by 10 P.M. every night.⁵⁶

This loveless, violent, punitive environment was redeemed by the presence of a caring grandmother who possessed a deeply spiritual sensibility, and Abramović speaks of her as constitutive of the person she became (“This is what makes me now”).⁵⁷

So basically you are looking at many Marinas. You are looking at the Marina who is a product of two Partisan parents, two national heroes, no limits, will power, any aim she put in front of her. And then right next to this one you have the other one who is like the little girl, mother never give her enough love, and very vulnerable, and unbelievably disappointed and sad. And then there’s another one who has this kind of spiritual wisdom and can go above all that, and this is actually my favorite one.⁵⁸

In Abramović’s artworks, she relives her past experiences in order to release their hold over her. Through abreaction, her thralldom to the past is momentarily broken, if only because she is now determining the terms on which that past will be played out.

Insofar as the past is associated with bodily pain, she will make her body the metaphor with which this ritualized reenacting and release will be achieved. Drawing an explicit comparison with the role of pain in Aboriginal initiation, Abramović says, “Pain is like a door. You have to enter through pain into that other space.” In tribal societies, this “other space” is the space of adulthood that one enters by overcoming fear and achieving control over one’s own emotions. But unlike the pain experienced by the uninitiated, who readily succumb to the vicissitudes of life, the pain of initiation is willingly embraced and decisively mastered. In the words of a Bagisu initiate (Uganda), “No one has asked us to do it. No one is forcing us. We ourselves have overcome our fear. Now it is my heart which wants it. No one is forcing me. Father has not ordered me. It comes from my heart alone. Let me explain it this way, even though I am here talking with my friends I feel like a spirit-shadow (cisimu).”⁵⁹

It is through her body that Abramović will give birth to this second self—a self that simultaneously conserves a memory of the ordeals she endured as a child and surpasses those earlier experiences because she is now calling the shots.

 

Body as object in different situations

Examining frontiers of pain

Examining frontiers of heat

Examining frontiers of cold

Examining the instinct of self-destruction

Examining the possibilities of getting the body into a trance state / state of trance

Carrying out the idea of switching personas for a certain time period⁶⁰

 

When asked in an interview whether her early sound pieces were concerned with control, Abramović immediately recalled her childhood experiences of being under her mother’s thumb. “My mother always used to give me sets of instructions for what I should achieve every day—to learn a certain number of French words, for example, or what I should eat, what kind of books I should read, what time I was supposed to be home. That time of my life was based in a frame of discipline.” She then recalls the way in which she turned the tables, in her dreams and in painting her dreams. This dream work was, she says, “my earliest work…I had a kind of destruction in my head that I dreamt about, and then I would paint the dreams.”⁶¹

Soon, however, bodily gestures and rituals became the focus of her work. In her first performance (Rhythm 10, 1973), Abramović used twenty knives and two tape recorders to play a Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one hand.

Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation. After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body—the pain and the sounds of stabbing, the double sounds from the history and the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never do.”⁶²

In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas suggests that inner turmoil or disorder may be managed by “ritually” reorganizing one’s mundane environment—cleaning or redecorating a house, rearranging furniture, weeding a garden, buying new clothes.⁶³ In all these cases, transformations in one’s inner experience are “induced” by working on an aspect of one’s environment, including one’s own body, that is amenable to manipulation. But in all these cases the action is supplemental. It offers temporary respite, assists focus, and gives one a sense of being in control of one’s circumstances, even of transcending them.

However, should the ritual action become an end in itself, consuming all one’s time and energy, then, and only then, can we begin to speak in terms of pathology—for what defines an action as “obsessional” rather than normal, magical rather than realistic, is not the form of the action per se, but the extent to which one has lost oneself in it, leaving, as Freud puts it, one’s “whole world…under an embargo of ‘impossibility.’”⁶⁴ Indeed, obsessional neurosis implies that the means whereby one tries to vicariously reorganize one’s relationship with the world has become an evasion or flight from the world rather than a way of engaging or interacting with it. One gets stuck on the ritual, unable to move beyond the repeated ritual simulation of a real-life situation that one cannot cope with. A pubescent girl is oppressed by all kinds of external expectations as to how she should look, how she should behave, how she should feel, how she should think. These expectations as to how she should comport herself in relation to others might be visited upon her by an overbearing mother, by popular images of svelt fashion models or media celebrities, by the physiological changes taking place in her body, or by her peer group. Feeling she has no power to determine her own destiny, feeling she is a creature of forces outside her control, she falls back on her own inner emotions, her own body, her relationship with herself, as a domain that is within her control. She effectively makes her body a substitute for the external world and, by starving herself, or gorging and vomiting, she becomes an actor again, repudiating the social reifications that have reduced her to the status of a “mere appendage,” a mere thing, though in the process she may die.

Looking back on her earliest work, when still in Yugoslavia, Abramović, recognizes this danger.

I was always thinking that art was a kind of question between life and death, and some of my performances really included the possibility of my dying, you know, during the piece it could happen. I remember one of the performances which I never really got permission to do, though I proposed it to a few institutions in Yugoslavia. The idea was this: I would come on stage dressed like my mother wanted me to look; I would have my hair cut in a certain way, wear a certain kind of skirt or dress, gloves, the whole idea of being decent. I would stand looking at the public, then put one bullet in a pistol like Russian roulette, put it to my temple and shoot, and if I didn’t get shot then I would dress again in my own way and leave. That would be a kind of radical change of identity and would, I hoped, change my life.⁶⁵

Perhaps the most compelling thing about Mary Douglas’s work is that it reminds us that the building blocks of ritual and art are derived from the taken-for-granted activities of everyday life. Abramović defined her art in just these terms: “to create a cultural dialogue about and to reconnect with our need to ritualize the simple actions of everyday life…walking, standing, sitting, lying, eating, washing, drinking, dressing, undressing, sleeping, dreaming.”⁶⁶ These activities also provide the basic ontological metaphors we deploy in art and conversation alike, to redress the imbalance between the way the world is felt to act on us and the way we act on the world.

Mary Douglas points out that when we clean a house or hospital ward this does not necessarily make the place antiseptically clean; rather, it ritualistically effects a transformation in the order or arrangement of things that we signify as purification. A similar illusion obtains with bottled water. Even though the water we buy is biochemically no superior than water from the kitchen faucet, the bottled water has been subjected to a symbolic makeover, so that it no longer appears to be simply water but a sign of ecological order, personal health, purity and even holiness. The commercial labeling of bottled water and the religious blessing of water add surplus value to it in the same way that saying grace before a meal, or consecrating an animal before it is sacrificed to the ancestors, intensifies our sense of the wider web of relationships of which we are a part, including our relationships with the Gods.

These processes that transform mundane objects into valued life-giving, even sacred, symbols, radically change the way the world appears to us. This may be a marketing strategy, an advertiser’s way of pulling the wool over our eyes, but it is often something we submit to voluntarily, especially at critical moments in our lives, when our sense of ourselves has been undermined, our security threatened, our minds confused, our control over our circumstances momentarily lost. When overwhelmed by events that subvert our ontological security, stability, or standing, we tend to be initially uncomprehending, dumbstruck, thrown, and immobilized. Part of this response is incredulity and denial—this is not happening, this can’t be happening, it is a nightmare, a hallucination from which I will soon wake and find my life, my world, just as it was. These responses are, strictly speaking, unrealistic, for the lost object, the lost childhood, is irrevocably lost. But withdrawal into the imagination, or intense focus on one’s emotions and one’s body, are often not just symptoms of such trauma but means whereby the trauma is worked through, moving one from self-absorption to a reengagement with the world of others and a recovery of social bonds.

Sartre’s phenomenology of the emotions throws light on how, when we cannot act on the external world realistically or effectively we have recourse to magical actions, engaging with our own bodies, with our inner feelings, or with objects immediately to hand as a way of regaining agency.

Sartre’s argument centers on the strong emotions that are stirred in us when we feel that the world around us proves refractory to comprehension or control and we feel victims of circumstance. This emotionality may be considered in two ways. First, strong emotions spontaneously arise when we are frustrated in our attempts to comprehend and control others or objects. But second, and most importantly, we work on and play up these emotions, making them the means whereby we “magically” recover our sense of lost power over others or objects. Nursing ill-will toward an enemy, cursing an errant computer, kicking a flat tire, agonizing over global warming, or pitying oneself for one’s inability to stand up to a tyrant will not necessarily effect any change in the behavior of the object or other, but it may reverse one’s experience of one’s relationship with it. One becomes, imaginatively and retrospectively, the center of the world that one has in reality lost one’s grip on, a determining subject of the events that reduced one to the status of an object, even though, from an objective point of view, one may seem to have lost touch with reality and even lost consciousness. Thus Sartre speaks of the way a novice boxer will sometimes shut his eyes and throw himself at his opponent as a way of “symbolically eliminating” or neutralizing a situation he cannot bear to think about and cannot control. “These are the limits of my magical action upon the world,” Sartre writes. “I can eliminate it as an object of consciousness, but I can do so only by eliminating consciousness itself.”⁶⁷

In Abramović’s early work, these ritual stratagems are compellingly evident. She lies inside a blazing communist star, but loses consciousness as the flames consume all the oxygen she needs to breathe. She takes a pill that paralyzes her body. She invites members of an audience to manipulate her body and her actions, only to be alarmed at the violence that is visited upon her. Gradually she learns that performance is not a forfeiture of control, but an intensified form of “total control” such as yogis achieve after years of disciplined and dedicated practice.⁶⁸

In this respect, performance art and ritual are not merely social phenomena but ontologically “primitive” modes of action that play upon the emotions, manipulate the body, and change consciousness. One effect of such action is to transform subject-object relations, such that a person comes to experience herself as an actor and not just acted upon—as a “who” and not merely a “what.” In Sartre’s discussion of such “emotive behavior,” he gives the example of a bunch of grapes that is out of reach. “I shrug my shoulders, I let my hand drop, I mumble, ‘They’re too green,’ and I move on.” In this “little comedy,” played out beneath the bunch of grapes, Sartre argues that a person’s frustrated desire for the grapes is transfigured by the magical effect his gestures and words have upon him. In repudiating the grapes as “too green,” he “magically confers upon the grapes” the quality he desires and thereby changes his relationship with them. But, Sartre notes, the grapes are not really changed by this person’s actions, and his “emotive behavior” is, strictly speaking, ineffective. Though we “magically…invest real objects with certain qualities,” Sartre concludes, “these qualities are false.”⁶⁹

With this conclusion, I disagree, for, insofar as these ritual or artistic alterations in consciousness have real effects, surely it is beside the point to ask whether they are in essence real or illusory? Abramović makes a similar observation when speaking of the difference between acting and performing. “For me acting is taking on the role of somebody else, and you’re pretending to have the feelings that you are showing in front of an audience. Whereas performance is real…it is real every time.”⁷⁰

But since Abramović confesses to being “many Marinas”—from the discipline-hardened child of callous parents to the spiritual progeny of a grandmother who really cared for her—are we not entitled to ask which reality she is performing? And, given that her art gradually moves away from narcissistic and masochistic performances to dramatic enactments of the ambivalence that inheres in human bonds, may we conclude that her collaborations with Ulay (real name, Frank Uwe Laysiepen) began a process of healing and rebirth in which the focus was less on the past than the present, less on herself than on her relationship with significant others (in her own words, she ceased to take herself so seriously)?⁷¹

But intimacy with another is not only a source of energy and joy; it may presage the loss of one’s own sense of self. In Relation in Time (1977) Marina and Ulay sit for sixteen hours, facing away from each other yet tied together by their hair. In Breathing In/Breathing Out (1978), they kneel facing each other, her knees between his thighs. With nostrils blocked, they lock mouths as if in a deep and passionate kiss, inhaling each other’s exhaled breath. In this exchange of life-giving breath, their lungs fill with carbon dioxide and they risk unconsciousness and death.

In Nightsea Crossing (1980–1987) they sit opposite each other for sixteen days, seven hours a day, without moving. Though they appear to be together, they are cut off from each other. Seemingly mirror images of each other, “each of us functions alone…within, there is a separation.”⁷²

In 1988 Ulay and Marina performed the ending of their relationship by walking the Great Wall of China for three months from opposite ends. “We walked until we met…at Er Lang Shan, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi Province. We each took a 2,000 kilometer walk to say goodbye.”

Why am I moved by images of these two individuals, walking alone along this serpentine barrier of stone that has partially withstood centuries of weathering and warfare, crossing ridge after ridge in an apparently uninhabited landscape of rock and scrub? Is it a poignant reminder of our journey through the wilderness of this world, occasionally in the company of someone we love, occasionally alone, but always moving toward a rendezvous that might prove to be a new beginning or a dead end? I think it is our vulnerability in the face of this perennial uncertainty that moves me, and that explains why, as I watched Marina Abramović lifting her face and opening her eyes to yet another stranger, seated opposite her, in the “square of light” in the Museum of Modern Art, I felt I was bearing witness to a meeting between lovers, one of whom had returned from the dead. Being apart and coming together, falling out and making up—these are rudimentary and familiar rhythms of human existence. We have all lost a loved one. We all lose touch with the past while remaining haunted by it. We recover what we thought we would never see again, surprised by a piece of music, by the smell of cedars in the rain, by a photograph found in a forgotten drawer. But nothing is more overwhelming than the face of another human being, utterly open to us, unconditionally accepting of us, allowing us to bare our souls and be recognized for who we are. At such moments, time hangs fire. Words are not spoken. Gestures are not needed. Physical contact is out of the question. “There’s so many different reasons why people come to sit in front of me,” Marina said. “It’s not about me any more. Very soon, I’m just the mirror of their own self.”

The average time visitors spend in front of the Mona Lisa is thirty seconds. At least 750,000 saw The Artist is Present. Many people spent hours watching Marina Abramović in her Square of Light, and scores camped overnight in the street, hoping for a few minutes in her presence. Klaus Biesenbach (director of MoMA) explained Marina’s connection with her audience in terms of the “extraordinary lack she felt as a child. She desires to be loved, she desires to be needed…. She needs the audience like air to breathe.” He added, “She’s not in love with any one person. She’s in love with the world,” though every single person in the atrium felt that she was there wholly for him or for her.

And so we are brought back to the face of the mother, the face that is open to us, in which we come to see ourselves, and without which we are lost unless, through art, ritual, or religion, we find a face in the clouds or a form of communion that enables us to finally experience the meaning of that loving recognition that was withheld from us when we needed it most.

Exodus

For several years, one of Carola Faller-Barris’s graphic images has graced our house—a gift of the artist. Though this dark dendritic mass has reminded me of the stranglehold of vines or roots over the stone temples of Borobudur or a nest of compacted tendrils from which there is no escape, I am also aware that Carola has struggled with depression for many years and quit her teaching job in 2003, in part because of it. It was therefore impossible for me not to discern in her painstakingly drawn images a sense of being buried alive in a black hole and the defensive attitude of someone in retreat from the world.

In the fall of 2014 I happened to be in Basel, attending a conference. Since Carola and her husband Craig lived across the Rhine in Freiburg, only forty minutes away by train, I took the opportunity to visit them. It was All Saints Day, and when Craig met me at the station he commented that the unseasonably warm weather might dissuade some people from visiting cemeteries and remembering the dead. This offhand remark came back to mind five minutes later when we reached Craig’s apartment and Carola opened the door to us, relaxed and smiling. That a cloud seemed to have lifted was confirmed as I looked at Carola’s recent drawings, framed and behind antireflective glass in the living room. Whereas her images from the early to mid 2000s are tightly woven skeins of root, impenetrable balls, interior spaces defended by thorns, in her more recent work the entangled masses had been loosened, allowing the light to pass through. The woven containers were now open at either end, their sheaths were thin rather than thick, light in texture, and riddled with holes.

Marveling at this sea change, I mentioned to Carola that I had sometimes compared her skilled and surreal drawing technique with Escher, but while his metamorphoses were conceptual in character hers were heartfelt and profoundly organic. Carola acknowledged the changes in her work, using the word Entfaltung (development, gradual growth, opening) to describe it, though a recent exhibition had been called Metamorphosis.

FIGURE 23. Shoah, Carola Faller-Barris, 2005.

“To what do you attribute these changes?”

Carola had been in analysis for several years. This had made a difference. But her religious sensibility had also played a significant role. She had been raised Catholic and still kept the faith, though her interests had ramified and diversified—a headlike shape encased in a network of brushwood or briar, entitled Christus; a ball of entwined twigs resembling an enclosed nest, called Shoah; two standing cylinders woven from similar material, respectively called Oratory and Jacob’s Ladder (Himmelsleiter).

FIGURE 24. Untitled, Carola Faller-Barris, 2014.

Carola’s studio was in a building that had been a barracks for French troops after the Second World War. Another metamorphosis, I thought, as we entered the building. Indeed, I would soon realize that allusions to the Holocaust occurred in several of Carola’s works, as if the suffering of the Jews, of Christ, and of refugees from Gaza, Syria, Libya, and sub-Saharan Africa were deeply connected and echoed her own existential struggles.

After Craig had carefully unpacked several large drawings (the dimensions are generally about 4’ x 3’), Carola unwrapped a sculptured work called Entbindung (birth, delivery). Suggestive of a broken egg or skull, it is made of wax and fleshlike in color. Across the top of the egg is a stitched wound; on one side is a gaping red wound from which a carelessly applied bandage (binde) has come away. There is also a tattooed number, such as were inscribed—Carola said—on the forearms of the inmates of Auschwitz. “I find it fascinating,” Carola said, “that people who see this work are irresistibly drawn to touch it, as if in sympathy or out of compassion, as if they wanted to make whole what had been so cruelly broken.”

I too touched the surface of the broken egg, moved by what Carola had shared of her own experience of emerging, unbound, from a dark and confined space and by the historical analogues of rebirth—a nation returned to life and redeemed or refugees escaping tyranny or a war-torn homeland and finding a new life. Earlier that morning, Craig had pointed to a line of dark hills beyond the spires and roofs of the city and told me that Feiburg lay on the western edge of the Black Forest. Naturally, I thought of Husserl and of Heidegger, who had taught at Freiburg. Of Heidegger’s three-room cabin (Die Hütte), some sixteen miles away, where he wondered at and pondered the nature of being and wrote the bulk of Zein und Zeit. A few months ago Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) had been published, raising anew the vexed question as to how an edifying philosophy could issue from the same mind that harbored racist fantasies and became infatuated with National Socialism. It isn’t simply that light and shadow are mutually entailed, as Carola’s drawings compellingly demonstrate; it is our naive conviction that a person is or should be a seamless whole, and tell a single consistent story, that makes it difficult for us to accept that each of us, as Fernando Pessoa observed, “is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.”⁷³

As Carola leafed through a photographic catalog of her work, I was arrested by a piece that made use of the Trinity (God as three consubstantial persons or essences) to communicate her compassion for the migrants who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean in the hope that a new life awaits them in Europe. Though originally entitled Lampedusa, after the Italian Pelagie island where thousands of migrants first set foot in the promised land, Carola now called this work Exodus in order to make explicit the connection between this migration and the biblical migration of the Israelites out of Egypt.

The work involved three elongated shapes, placed side by side. Carola explained that the one on the left was a blue sleeping bag and intended to evoke a migrant sleeping rough somewhere in Europe, homeless, perhaps in fear of his life, and vulnerable to the cold, the hostility of locals, and the police. The middle shape suggests a coarsely woven shroud, slightly torn open (has the person escaped or been discovered and taken away?). The right-hand image resembles a mummified body, wrapped in bandages in preparation for burial at sea. “Those that drown,” Carola said, “are often never found, and never receive a decent burial.”

I told Carola that my most recent fieldwork had been among African migrants in three European cities, and I had often been told that suffering was the price a human being has to pay if he is to enter paradise or even receive his due in this world. The sentiment was reminiscent of Nietzsche’s conception of freedom—that “the value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in which one pays for it—what it costs us.”⁷⁴ “In many ways,” I said, “we are all migrants, metamorphosing from one self to another, but often—as in these recurring images in your work—cocooned or wrapped in a chrysalis, waiting for release [Waiting for God is the title of one of Carola’s pieces].”

Another image in Carola’s catalog was of an upturned boat in winter. “In spring,” Carola said, “the boat will be turned the right way up and people will take it out onto the river.”

I wanted to connect many of the comments Carola made about her art to her own biography, observing that the black raven had flown, that she had come out of her shell, left the nest, taken her boat out into the stream of the world. But I did not want to risk reducing her work to a form of personal therapy, because it clearly transcended her own situation and spoke compellingly, one might even say archetypally, to the human condition—these images of the reversibility of things, dark forms diffusing into pure whiteness, tightly woven forms being teased apart, cocoons opening, wounds unbandaged, threads unspooled.

In Carola’s work, religious, mythological, and metaphorical figures merge. Trinity morphs into triptych, while three shrouded shapes mark an anonymous migrant’s passage from birth, through going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it, to death by misadventure in a place far from home. In another work, entitled Jonah, the vague shape of a whale encloses nothing, as if the scapegoated sailor who has spent three days and three nights in its belly has been freed from his confinement.

It was Craig who enlightened me as to how Carola’s graphic work was a devotional practice, whose work recalls the story of Abba Paul, the desert father who spent the whole of Lent alone, eating only one measure of lentils, drinking one small jug of water, and working at a single basket, weaving it and unweaving it. This method of religious mindfulness in the midst of ordinary work was known as syntaxis. “What seems like a senseless repetition of labor is a description of his constant prayer, his keeping close to Jesus. His ‘work’ is a timeless action…as he prepares for the feast of the resurrection.”⁷⁵

Craig’s comments resonated with Carola’s comparison between her own devotional act of repeating, in minuscule writing, a single verse of Psalm 130:6 (“My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning”) and her reference, during our conversation to Penelope’s fidelity to Odysseus, fending off suitors and arresting the passage of time by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father by day and unweaving it at night.

These fusions of religious and mythological figures helped explain why I had always regarded Carola’s imagery as archetypal—or, in Durkheim’s terms, “elemental.”

Spinning and weaving are perhaps humanity’s oldest images of intersubjectivity—the ambivalent interplay of self and other and the dynamic relationship between one’s own inner world (eigenwelt) and the worlds that surround and impinge upon one (mitwelt and umwelt). Carola’s knotted, entangled, and woven forms have analogues in cultures ancient and modern. Relationships with other people, with gods and spirits, with material possessions, and with abstract ideas such as history, society, fate, and destiny all tend to be conceptualized as bonds, ties, or strings, while wider fields of relationship are compared to networks, webs, and skeins or the warp and woof of woven cloth. Even anthropologists have recourse to such images in their analyses of social relations. One reason for the ubiquity of these images may be that spinning and weaving are closely associated with clothing, which is itself a core metaphor for social being, as in the cognate terms costume and custom. That these same metaphors are commonly used of luck or fate also suggests an intimate link between a person’s destiny and her primary relationships with parents and close kin, a link that begins with the umbilical cord through which nutrients flow from the mother to the fetus and continues as a symbolic “tie” or attachment after the cord is “tied” and severed after a birth.⁷⁶ Among the Yaka of southwest Congo, the person “is seen as a knot of kinship relations.”⁷⁷ Becoming a person (wuka muutu) involves “tying together or interweaving” the various forms of exchange that transmit life, emotions, energies, and knowledge among agnatic and uterine kin, as well as between the living and the dead, human beings and nature spirits, people and nature.⁷⁸ Among the Kuranko, a person’s most immediate social field is compared to the network of ropes that is placed over a rice farm when the crop is nearing maturity. One end of the main rope is tethered to the foot of a high platform on which children sit with slingshots to scare birds away from the ripening grain. When this rope is tugged, the tributary strands shake, frightening the scavenging birds. So it is said that “one’s birth is like the bird-scaring rope” (soron i le ko yagbayile) or “one’s birth is like a chain” (soron i la ko yolke), since one’s fate is inextricably tied to the fate of others. Alluding to kinship relations, it is said that the main rope is the father, its extension is the mother, and the children are the secondary strands. Kuranko also share a well-nigh universal belief that kinship, fate, spells, curses, and duty are binding. Such bonds often derive from one’s birth. They are in the nature of things. They cannot be revoked. One’s duty (wale also means “work”) is “that which you have to do”—the actions and obligations that are alleged to follow naturally from being male or female, chief or commoner, father or mother, first-born or last-born, etc. But while Kuranko invoke the notion of innate essences to explain why certain roles are binding and inescapable, classical Indo-European thought takes the notion of human bonds more literally. In Homer, for instance, fortune is “a cord or bond fastened upon a man by the powers above.”⁷⁹ At birth the gods or fates spin the strands of weal or woe that a man must endure in the course of his life as invisible threads.⁸⁰ And man is bound to die. Comparable images appear in Norse mythology, where the gods are called “the Binders” and the Norns spin, weave, and bind the fates of men at birth.⁸¹ For the Anglo-Saxons, too, fate was woven, while pain, age, and affliction were spoken of as bonds.⁸² Yet in all human societies we find a dramatic contrast between necessity,⁸³ conceived of as that which a person is bound to do or that which is bound to happen, and freedom, construed as the possibility of loosening, unbinding, or escaping the constraints placed upon a person by virtue of birth and situation. Intersubjectivity is vexed and unstable—a matter of both bonds and double binds, of fulfillment and frustration—a point that Carola made in referring to her parents’ indifference to her talents and her struggle for recognition. But even a breakdown of communication, a loss of contact, a violation of trust and an absence of love are elements in human bonding, as Aristotle reminds us, citing Heraclitus’s adages that “it is what opposes that helps” and “from different tones comes the fairest tune” and “all things are produced through strife.”⁸⁴

As Craig began rewrapping the framed drawings and returning them to their racks, I told Carola a little about my book project and how I hoped to include a chapter about her work. Not only was I fascinated by the religious elements in her work; I had been moved by the strongly autobiographical preoccupations that also found expression in it. Craig had mentioned to me that the compacted nestlike forms that she developed in the early 2000s were at once “protective” and “imprisoning,” and it was this ambiguity that I found compelling, for it spoke to the anxiety that inheres in all human relationships as we seek to be open to the world while defending ourselves from its dangers. For Freud, this “anxiety” is present in the most primitive single-cell organisms. Even the lowly amoeba needs to draw nourishment from outside its body boundary, yet it also needs to be able to filter and control traffic across this boundary, defended against invasive and life-threatening forces.⁸⁵ Human beings, of course, may imagine external dangers where there are none or live in fear of invasion because of some trauma suffered early in their life. Psychological anxieties also spring from social inequalities. There are few situations more demoralizing than when one finds oneself in an unequal power relationship with someone who acts as though he has the right to invade one’s privacy, make demands on one’s time, or determine the course of one’s life, leaving one no option but to suffer in silence, denied the right to react. In such situations, one has recourse to ritual or magical strategies for recovering a sense of being in control of one’s own destiny and changing one’s experience of an oppressive relationship. Storytelling, drawing, and writing “magically” alter things as they are, as in Carola’s repetition of a line from a psalm and the playful way in which, shortly before we left the studio, she took a small swaddled bundle, loosely bound with twigs, and placed it in lap of a porcelain Buddha she had recently purchased.

As we prepared to go, I cast one last look at the abstract wooden crucifix on the wall, the miniature icons of the virgin and child, and the papier-mâché “papyrus” that Carola had folded over on itself to resemble a chysalid.

Over a lunch of cheese, prosciutto, ham, salami, artichoke hearts, and focaccia, Carola said that she would like to spend some time in New Zealand, Craig’s homeland and mine, to inspire her creative work. Perhaps she might study Maori weaving. I liked the idea of Carola learning tukutuku weaving, which requires two weavers, seated on either side a latticed panel, passing strands of dyed plant fiber through the lath to create intricate patterns, named for various landforms, fish species, bird life, dance forms, weather patterns, star formations, and moral values. And I was tempted to speak of the reciprocal movement of the weavers as an image of harmony—between inner and outer, past and present, self and other. What I did say, however, was how important it was for my own work to acknowledge the plurality of the human condition, the dialectic at the heart of all experience between what lies within us and what we project beyond ourselves in spoken or written words, in works of art, in marriage, and in collective endeavors. “This,” I said, “is why Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys have been seminal influences in my present work.”

Hardly had I said this than Carola moved to a pinboard on the dining room wall, moved aside a cloth that had obscured it, and showed me the portraits of these two individuals that she had pinned there—figures equally important to her. And it was then that I remembered that in Carola’s studio she had taped to the wall a sketch she had done of one of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, which Bourgeois once described as “an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” With its resonances of spinning, weaving, nurturance, and protection, Bourgeois’s Maman also recalls the Greek heroine Arachne, a skilled weaver who challenged Athena’s own abilities at the loom, only to be cursed and transformed into a spider.

On the train back to Basel, scribbling notes, recovering snatches of conversation and fleeting impressions, I kept coming back to Heidegger’s comment on Dasein as always understanding itself “in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself,”⁸⁶ and of his image of a clearing (Lichtung) and of the spaces of light and illumination that sometimes appear in the darkness of our lives, moments when we can lower our guard and fully accept, and perhaps wholly embrace, the world in which we find ourselves thrown.

As the train crossed the Rhine, I put my journal back in my briefcase and made my way to the carriage door, ready to alight as soon as we pulled in to the main station. Two blue-shirted border guards (Grenzwache) were standing over a young African woman who was struggling to insert a tiny key in the padlock of her bulging suitcase. One of the guards held the women’s passport in one hand and his cell phone in the other. Spelling out the woman’s name, letter by letter, he then waited for a response from his controller. The other guard continued to observe the woman, now wrenching open her suitcase in the cramped space so that it could be rummaged through. I thought of the thousands of individuals risking death to cross the Mediterranean from Syria or West Africa, desperate to leave a place of darkness, danger, and despair and find their way into a promised land, a world of light. Will they make it? Will they see the land of milk and honey of which they have dreamed? And who will be their Moses, leading them out of bondage?

I had observed this humiliating scene many times before, but this time, possibly because Carola’s Exodus was still fresh in mind, I found it unbearable to remain passive as this woman suffered the indignity of being searched and suspected of being illegal, while I crossed the border as though innocent of any crime. But was I not complicit, simply by being white, in some great travesty of justice and was I not guilty of shrinking back into my self, lips sealed, hands tied, safely cocooned like the invisible pupae in Carola’s art, while another dark age descended on the outside world?

Making It Otherwise

Arguably, artists are afflicted by a more than ordinary inability to accept things as they are.⁸⁷ This is not simply the result of an unusually critical or skeptical cast of mind, for its source is often some traumatic experience that has broken one’s trust that life will give one at least as much joy as grief, as much acceptance as rejection, and on balance be worth living. Disappointed in the shortcomings of the external world, one may draw solace from the world within, and what one creates for oneself by other worldly means—including the work of art. If the artist is like a refugee from the world where most people find a secure niche, then art is her sanctuary. If the artist is compared to someone who risks madness by living beyond the pale, then art is her asylum. And if the artist is someone whose devotion to work takes precedence over everything else, then art resembles the monastic life.

In its methodology, however, art resembles ritual.

Consider, the collaborative work of Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon. Their invention of wrapping as a form of art has its origins in mundane activity. “Babies are swaddled, corpses have shrouds. Mummies are wrapped. We are wrapped, in clothing. Bandages wrap. And, really, since Christo, many of us have come to see our cities in different ways, as life imitates art…. Every time we see a giant building wrapped in plastic, our attention may well have been alerted because of Christo.”⁸⁸

Art and ritual share one compelling element: they avail themselves of mundane images and activities in order to transform the way the world appears to us. Eating and drinking provide a basic repertoire of behaviors that are elaborated in rituals from the Eucharist to animal sacrifice and libation. Washing, weaving, spinning, stitching, and masking are primoridal metaphors. And inducing vertigo through swinging or swaying is a means of altering consciousness among children in playgrounds everywhere, as well as Turkish dervishes, krishnaite swingers, and South Italian tarantists.

The Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) beautifully illustrates the way in which the kinds of heightened states of awareness that we associate with transcendence and religious awakening have their origins in everyday practices—in this instance, preparing, pouring, and drinking tea.⁸⁹ Thus the injunction “just heat water and prepare tea” resonates with key expressions in Buddhist thinking such as “just sit” in Zen practice, just implying actions free of all instrumentality and worldly distraction. In this vein, one might remark the way in which the host sprinkles water on the shrubs and flagstones outside the teahouse just before his guests arrive, so that the first sensation for the guests will be the aromatic smell of rain-rinsed cedar leaves. As for the details of the ceremony itself, every gesture and moment assists the consummation of a sense of intimate being-with-others, of harmonious relationship and an appreciation of mindfulness and simplicity. A cardinal rule of tea preparation, for instance, is that heavy, sturdy utensils should be handled as though light and fragile, and light utensils as though they are heavy. This method imparts a quality of momentousness to the handling of the bamboo tea scoop and ease to the taking up of the iron kettle or filled water jar. The implication is that the utensil and the practitioner are united in the act of lifting, so that the conjoined act is a reality in which they coexist. In this very Heideggerian view, the essence of the object is revealed in the way it is taken up and deployed, while the essence of the person is revealed in the way in which he handles the object.

A late sixteenth-century poem by Sen Sotan captures this mode of apprehension in this way:

 

If asked

The nature of chanoyu

Say it’s the sound

Of windblown pines

In a painting.

 

With gongs and incense, the warmth and bitterness of tea, and the sounds of steaming kettle and whisk against bowl, chanoyu engages all the senses, and every movement in the enclosed space of the tearoom is felt in the subtly changing air currents and shifting shadows. Sotan’s poem suggests that the heart of the experience of chanoyu lies in moving beyond a one-dimensional, intellectualized grasp of things. An ink painting, when regarded as a work to be viewed, remains simply a perceptible object, distant and impersonal. What Sotan appears to be saying, however, is that when one ceases to externalize the object as something to contemplate and enters fully into it, one may savor it as an extension of one’s own body and soul. The sound of the wind in the pines suggests an elusive depth beyond the surface of the paper and the ink.

Chanoyu is neither ritual for ritual’s sake nor art for art’s sake; it is an art of life that may transform our sense of objects and of ourselves in relation to objects, as well as our sense of ourselves and of ourselves in relation with others. In chanoyu the immanent is fused with the transcendent. The everyday becomes, through mindfulness and care, something so unfamiliar and extraordinary that we feel disposed to speak of it in spiritual or religious terms. But this transcendent experience is not, and cannot be, arrived at through conceptual thought or even put into words. It requires the suspension of thought and complete immersion in the actions themselves, such as using a whisk with minimal expenditure of time and effort in order to preserve the temperature of the water and the fragrance of the tea.

Attention to bodily movement, posture, gesture, and the senses—which are the basic building blocks of all ritual—helps us understand that ritualization works largely outside reason and cognition. Indeed, the goals of ritual could not be attained through logic and language, for what ritualization enables are transformations in our experience that may be rationalized after the fact, and even put into words, but are not predicated on cognitive certifications and verbal scripts. “Rites,” observes Pierre Bourdieu, “more than any other type of practice, serve to underline the mistake of enclosing in concepts a logic made to dispense with concepts; of treating movements of the body and practical manipulations as purely logical operations; of speaking of analogues and homologies (as one sometimes has to, in order to understand and to convey that understanding) when all that is involved is the practical transference of incorporated, quasi-postural schemes.⁹⁰ Ten years before Bourdieu penned these lines on the force of habit and of practical mimesis, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott also argued against the notion that an activity springs from “premeditated propositions about the activity” such as the grammar of a language, protocols of research, canons of good workmanship, or moral codes. His example of the cookery book succinctly summarizes his view: The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cookery can spring; it is nothing more than a retrospective abstract of somebody’s practical experience of cooking; it is the stepchild, not the parent, of the activity, and already presupposes a knowledge of how to boil or braise, how to mix and measure, how to dice or slice, how to stir and season, how to judge when a meal is done.⁹¹

Can we see art as the stepchild, rather than parent, of an activity?

Some years ago, the ethnographer Stefania Pandolfo met a forty-one year old Moroccan man who was suffering from a psychotic illness that had lasted two years. During his months of “despondent seclusion,” Ilyas had painted murals on the walls of his room depicting some of the hallucinatory images that had seized him during his periods of madness. When not ill, Ilyas painted “ordinary things”—realistic scenes, landscapes, and geometrical motifs—but during his bouts of illness, serpents, swords, jinn, and mermaids drawn from Maghrebi mythology dominated his murals. Ilyas gave Stefania to understand that he painted in this way when not in an ordinary state of mind, though the Arabic term hala (condition, state) can imply mental illness, spirit possession, or a state of trance. While susceptible to mythological suggestion, Ilyas would speak of the paintings as “his,” albeit in an altered state of consciousness. “Ilyas says: ‘kan ‘abbar fil-luha,’ I express, give form, in the painting, to what agitates inside me.”

Art is a means of recovering a life—a struggle, as Stefania says of Ilyas, for an ethical life (jihad al-nafs)—under conditions in which one’s life has become compromised or has failed one or been unfairly denied.

Though one cannot fully accept the world as one finds it, or even as one suffers it, it may be accepted under the terms that one imaginatively responds to it. This transition from passivity to activity is crucial.

Consider the work of the environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy.

None of these artists has sought to put a stamp on the world as he or she finds it—whether a bridge across the Seine, an extinct volcanic cinder cone in Arizona’s painted desert, or yellowing elm leaves in a Scottish wood. Rather, the aim of these artists is to reveal aspects of the world that most of us never notice. “The best of my work,” writes Andy Goldsworthy in a Zen vein, “sometimes the result of much struggle when made, appears so obvious that it is incredible I didn’t see it before. It was there all the time.”⁹² The artwork is, however, transitory. “I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain,” observed Christo who, with Jeanne-Claude, wrapped in synthetic fabric the coast of Little Bay in Sydney, Australia, the Reichstag in Berlin, the Pont-Neuf in Paris, and created a twenty-four-mile fence across Sonoma and Marin counties in California. Curiously, a disarming modesty accompanies these monumentally difficult projects. For Goldsworthy, his ephemeral sculptures of snow, ice, bark, stones, leaves, grass, petals, and twigs are not ways of making his mark on the landscape but of working out how one may collaborate with nature to reveal its essence. “By working large, I am not trying to dominate nature,” writes Goldsworthy. “If anything, I am giving nature a more powerful presence in the mass of earth, stone, wood that I use.”⁹³ Turrell’s philosophy of art is almost identical. Of his work at Roden Crater in Arizona, he said, “I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I did not want the work to be a mark upon nature, but I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces.⁹⁴

Art visits on nature a momentary order that nature will ultimately reject. “Process and decay are implicit.”⁹⁵ And though the artist seems, for a moment, to be in command, it is the nature of things that she will also disappear. Not even photographs will bring back the immediacy of that moment when iris blades were pinned together with thorns and five sections were filled with rowanberries, for even as Goldsworthy created this delicate arrangement fish and ducks were trying to get at the berries. The appearance of Roden Crater changes with the seasons and the weather, and the impact of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental wrapping is blunted when all one can see of them now is between the covers of a coffee-table book.

In our struggle to accept transience and loss, religion and art are copresences. Consider, for instance, Turrell’s memoir of his father, whose love of birds was equaled only by his passion for aeronautical engineering. “He loved to call in the birds,”⁹⁶ Turrell writes, in order to feed them, and he succeeded in mastering a variety of complex calls.

In 1942, not long after America declared war on Japan, antiaircraft gunners around Los Angeles opened up a barrage, thinking that their city was under attack. It was in the midst of this real or imagined air raid that James Turrell was conceived.

Around this time, Turrell’s parents were putting the finishing touches to a bird-feeding room that would later become James’s bedroom. “I had to surrender my room to my father when he needed to call in the birds. The room was inhabited by my father’s presence and the birds’ song” (11).

Because of the fear of air raids, blackout shades had to be placed over the windows at night, though as James grew older he could draw the shades during the day, to darken his room. “When I was six years old, to assert my own presence in the room, I took a pin or needle to these curtains and pierced them to make star patterns and the constellations…These weren’t just holes in the curtains, they were holes in reality. By changing the reality of the conscious-awake state of day, one could see further into imagined space to the stars, which were actually there but obscured by the light of the sun” (12).

As the years passed, the curtains, riddled with many holes, became torn and tattered. When his father died, Turrell returned to the room to find it “no longer vital. But I heard a mockingbird. It sang my father’s song.”

If I have cited Turrell’s memoir at length, it is to make the point that though we carry the past in our genes and in our memories no one can know for certain what will endure of any individual life. Turrell inherited his father’s passion for flying, his parent’s Quaker faith in “the possibility of direct, unmediated communion with the Divine,” and a desire to see the world with the same lens he had used to see the stars through his tar paper curtains as a child—to create spaces “with a similarity to the camera obscura. I wanted the spaces entered to be an expression in light of what was outside” (21–25).

Roden Crater was the culmination of a life’s work that Turrell describes, not as a process of making art out of nature, or even of communicating his vision, but of enabling people to place themselves in contact with nature—its ever changing light and weather, its diurnal and seasonal cycles—so that it becomes their experience (61, 62). For some, this experience will undoubtedly be construed as religious or spiritual; for others it will be aesthetic or place them at a loss for words. But, for all, it will mediate a novel understanding of familiar things, natural events, and unanswerable existential questions.

A great sadness descends on me when I think of the artworks I have studied and revisited in the course of writing this book. Those who created them have, for the most part, passed away, and many have been indifferent to the durability of their work or deliberately made it degradable. What lifts my spirit, however, is the awareness that even as one artist’s work crumbles or fades from our memory, or ends up in an archive or museum, new work appears, drawing on whatever materials come to hand—whether these be dead leaves in a wood, ochers in a jar or tube, blocks of marble, heaps of scrap metal, discarded clothing, pages torn from a book, iPhones, or video recorders—addressing someone’s inner imperative to enter the world not merely as physical presence but as a creative figure who contributes to making that world new again. This is a process in which we participate, for it is the nature of being human to seek ways that our inner lives can find adequate expression in relation to others and our environments. Despite our occasional disenchantment with other humans or with nature, the world around us offers raw and renewable material for helping us think through our lives in a language that transcends the personal. But it is only in the world beyond us that we can ever know or find ourselves, let alone be redeemed.

Art and the Everyday

In the antipodean spring of 2014, I visited Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery with my friend Souchou Yao to see an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art called Commune. The first work that captured my attention was a visual diary compiled over a nine-year period by Xia Xing (b. 1974) from pictures he had clipped from the Beijing News. With the extraordinary technical skill one associates with Chinese art, whether classical or contemporary, Xia Xing had reproduced sixty of these images in oil paint. Each documented a dramatic event that, despite having made headline news, had been quickly forgotten as the “blind river of history” swept them into oblivion—a man whose lower arms had been amputated in an industrial accident; two woman holding up a photograph of loved ones who had disappeared in the Cultural Revolution; a man arraigned in the street by plain clothes’ police; an elderly man with an indecipherable petition; a man staring into a polluted pool; a wall being erected down the middle of a suburban street; a group of dispossessed farmers haplessly watching developers occupy their land; a woman sitting on the ground, the debris of her demolished house behind her, clutching her knees and crying in anguish. Though these images suggest a critique of the political and economic landscape of modern China, they can also be seen as a kind of disinterested witnessing. Westerns who flock to see the terra-cotta warriors entombed with Emperor Qin Shi Huang as part of his grandiose scheme to perpetuate his earthly power beyond the grave, do not, as a rule, reflect on his totalitarian regime, the sacrifice of so many other lives in creating his necropolis, or the hubris of his dream, for the abstracted and breathtaking beauty of the art precludes such political reflection. In a similar vein, as Souchou pointed out to me, the Ming dynasty treasures and the blatantly political art that attract so many contemporary buyers deflect attention onto the past, targeting Mao and “historical” events like the Cultural Revolution rather than the present party or politburo. Generally speaking, artists avoid visiting ignominy on their nation by feeding the West’s appetite for cases of human rights abuse or social malaise. The critic or protester is tolerated as long as he does not attract a mass following or seek to implement his vision through revolutionary action. Ai Weiwei is more of an exception than the rule; few artists are prepared to follow his example and “pull the whiskers of the tiger.” Besides, Souchou explained, most people are struggling to cope with quotidian adversities and to meet familial demands; they have little energy or time for the politics of the state. As in life, so in art—abstraction is a luxury the poor cannot afford. “My parents are always incredulous,” Souchou said, “when I share with them anecdotes about my anthropology teaching, the talks I give in China and abroad, and the books I have written about my childhood in China or colonialism in Malaya. Practical matters have governed their lives. Like peasants everywhere, the focus is on survival, not introspection. They are suspicious of newfangled things.”

Something of this stoic attitude informed the comments of workers in a cloth-dying factory in Shanghai as they shared their workaday experiences with Li Xiaofei. Speaking against a backdrop of deafening machines, conveying screeds of fabric at high speed across immense rollers, one woman said that she had worked in this factory “since the beginning” of its operations. Choosing her words carefully, she added, “I wouldn’t say that I like it…I just go along with what I’ve started.”

Can one take these words at face value and question whether Marx’s “immiseration thesis” holds true for every worker within a mode of production that she does not own and from which she derives no profit commensurate with her expenditure of time and energy?⁹⁷ That this worker “owned” her own story and had evidently found a life of her own within the limits of a factory worker’s lot suggests that there is always more to an individual’s experience than is captured by the discourse of social science.

If, as Marx argued, the creator is consumed by his creation, then might not this be the case for artists as well as factory workers?” May we therefore draw an analogy between Li Xiaofei’s Assembly Line project, which “highlights the interplay between human and machine,” and the anonymous workers who talked to him about their jobs, their lives, their hopes, and their dreams? Can we sustain a distinction between the creative genius and the mere drudge or between the soulful character of art and the soul-destroying nature of labor?

For me, one of the arresting things about Commune was that such distinctions were bracketed out. Artists and workers alike were seen to be engaged in their livelihoods, generating life through whatever they turned their hands to, whether this was a machine one tended, a household one maintained, a meal one prepared, or a painting, photograph, or installation one produced.

A recurring motif in Commune was the place of the personal in a social field that Westerners are all too prone to see as prevailingly collective. Despite the collectivization of land under Mao and communal living (in which possessions were shared and even private cooking was banned), people found ways and means of doing some things on their own terms and in their own time. It was a little like the ostraka produced by ancient Egyptian workers who toiled all day on the strictly traditional tableaux of pharaonic temples or tombs but in their spare time sketched magical formulae or witty, freestyle, irreverent images of a mouse, not a sun God, holding the reins of a chariot or portraits of a favorite dog or of a beautiful, slender woman in a see-through dress, her dark hair falling across one shoulder as she plays a lute. As Alastair Sooke puts it, this particular image resembles something Modigliani might have done.⁹⁸

There is a tendency for academic thought to find more truth in sweeping generalizations than in the minor details of lived experience. Undoubtedly, this tendency has its origins in the universal human bias to perceive the world stereotypically, rather than idiosyncratically, and explains why scholars of religion so often reduce religious experience, in all its variety, to monothetic categories (Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, agnosticism, etc.) and why social scientists persist in assimilating the personal into the collective. But art resists such reductions and assimilations, and Commune offered moving examples of this. Li Wei’s uncannily lifelike fiberglass figure, for instance, testifies to the artist’s need “to place herself as someone else…to become that somebody else completely.” While traditional Chinese art seldom portrayed human individuality, preferring “stylized emperors, warriors and Buddhas,” social realism favored triumphant and heroic caricatures of peasants and soldiers. By contrast, Li Wei creates unique figures, “with posture, hair, wrinkles and freckles rendered in meticulous detail.” Naked before the world, these figures seem self-absorbed and utterly alone. But they are “real people—human beings different from us in every way, yet in essence just like ourselves.”⁹⁹

Gao Rong (b. 1986) is at pains to recover personal memories from the austere and impersonal period through which her grandparents lived. Using her superb skills with needle and thread, she reconstructed the cramped thirty-square-meter house in northwestern China where her grandparents lived and raised their seven children. In this labor of love, Gao Rong brings back to life the joie de vivre that permeated this house; in recreating it, she said, “I’ve enabled [my grandparents] to live forever.” In Jiang Jian’s Orphan Files, a similar resistance to the forgetfulness of history and the depersonalizing discourse of the state finds expression in his photographs of one thousand orphan children juxtaposed with photocopies of the bureaucratic documentation for each child that effectively writes their individual lives and experiences out of existence by providing only spare details of name, date, and place of birth, state of health, date and cause of parents’ death. Not simply content with bringing these children back to life in his art, Jiang Jian regularly visits them all and takes an active interest in their welfare. Finally, Michael Lin (b. 1964) rebels against the “timid neutrality of contemporary décor” by assembling 320 wooden stools in the form of a large table painted with bright peonies. But the stools on the perimeter of the table have been displaced and jumbled, suggesting that the collective assemblage is unstable and perhaps illusory. “What is the individual’s relationship to the community? it seems to ask. Are we part of the pattern whether we like it or not? If we are shunned or exiled, so we still belong?”¹⁰⁰

FIGURE 25. Human Being, Li Wei, 2008. Used with permission by David Williams, Li Wei, and White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney.

There is an intimate relationship between the personal and the everyday, for both evoke experiences or events that do not wholly conform to any general worldview, whether this be historical, theological, or sociological. Indeed, both the personal and the everyday often subvert these overviews. A graphic example of this was Wang Cheng’s installations of a pigsty and a communal oven that had been built with mud bricks taken from the Great Wall of China. Even the most monumental expressions of statist thought and practice cannot endure for all time. But in the quotidian ingenuity and creative energy of ordinary people the old is made new. In bringing these structures to Australia, Wang Cheng participates in this perennial capacity of the work of art to mediate transformations in the way the world appears to us, converting what is given into something we alone choose.

When I shared with Kathy Golski my impressions of the Commune exhibition, she observed, “One cannot find much interest in people who represent themselves as perfectly happy or secure. Who hide their uncertainties and vulnerability. The human condition is imperfection and struggle, not perfection and rest.” Kathy then asked me if I had seen Song Dong’s Waste Not when it came to Sydney. If I wanted to explore the personal and the everyday, this was a work I really would have to see.

The backstory to Song Dong’s installation is as moving as the artwork itself. Song Dong’s mother (1928–2008) was born into a wealthy family that fell on hard times after the communists seized power in 1949. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution brought even greater hardships on the family, and Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, “adopted the habits of frugality and thrift in order to make the best of what little she had.” Song recalls that, when he was a child, “my mother always brought scraps of fabric to make clothes, because they didn’t need to be purchased with the government-distributed clothing coupons. She continued to collect them even in better times because she feared that the shortages might some day return, seeing the habit of ‘waste not’ as a fabao—literally a ‘magic weapon’ to guard against a return to poverty.”¹⁰¹ In the wake of her husband’s death in 2002, Zhao’s hoarding became compulsive and obsessional. Song saw this as his mother’s way of filling an emotional void. After initial efforts to break his mother of her habit, he accepted her survival strategy and, with Zhao’s blessings, began to create a work of art that incorporated ten thousand of the everyday objects his mother had collected over half a century, and which chronicled one woman’s struggle to make a viable life for herself and her family in the face of grinding poverty, persecution, and social suffering.

Art, like life, avails itself of almost anything in achieving its goals. The clothes, books, cutlery, school supplies, shopping bags, rice bowls, dolls, medicine bottles, umbrellas, bottle tops, ballpoint pens, toothpaste tubes, old radiators, and bars of soap that Song Dong included in his installation testify to how mundane objects, like ordinary people, can have a second life, born again through some kind of transfiguring event or process of remembering and displacement. Song said that when his installation was opened in Beijing in 2005 “many people came who had a similar life during the Cultural Revolution and talked to my mother for half a day at a time. They told her: ‘It’s not your home, it’s my home.’ It got my mother out of her sadness—she said she had a second life.”¹⁰²

But the second life of art is ultimately no more permanent than the first. Though it prolongs memory, sustains connections, and promises transcendence, its orderly arrangements of found objects or its painted images on canvas are subject to the same processes of entropy and loss that obtain in nature. Perhaps more arresting than the art of saving and recycling things that the Chinese call we jin qi yong (waste not), is the Taoist principle that from nothingness all things come and into nothingness all things pass.

In 1995 Song Dong began keeping a diary, writing a brief account of his daily life on a flat stone. But he chose to use water rather than ink. Consonant with this acceptance of the ephemeral nature of things, he arranged to have himself photographed in Tibet, repeatedly striking the surface of the Lhasa River with an archaic Chinese seal whose stamp of authority left no imprint. A year later, on a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve in Tiananmen Square, he bent over the pavement for forty minutes until his warm breath had created a thin sheet of ice that shimmered on the dark pavement for a few hours before disappearing. He later attempted to do the same thing on a frozen lake called the Back Sea (Houhai) in a Beijing park, but his breath made no impression; one cannot create ice on top of ice.

Something of the spirit of Song Dong’s evanescent work is present in Angela Zito’s compelling documentation of a group of retirees that meets every morning for several hours in a Beijing park to practice calligraphy. Using long-handled, sponge-tipped brushes, they write not in ink but in water. Does calligraphy only count as art, asks Angela Zito, when it is written in ink? And she “poses the question of where cultural tradition takes shape and where it acquires value, in the writing hand or on the thin, crackling paper in ink,” or in the “imitation” of an ancient art in a mundane, contemporary and “amateur” form.¹⁰³

Closing the gap between what we think of as art and not art, work and leisure, religion and reality, these works deconstruct our hackneyed intellectual categories into the common soil of human existence. The characters that are rhythmically drawn on the pavement with water-soaked brushes are metaphors for the human body, flowing from the practitioner as naturally as blood flows from a wound, language from the mouth, or a gift from the heart.¹⁰⁴

The Work of Art and the Arts of Life

I can imagine no greater contrast with the crowded and driven urban-industrial life of contemporary China than the landscapes of Central Otago, although, as I would discover, Song Dong’s Taoist-inspired artworks would resonate with many of my experiences in the Ida Valley.

After hiring a car in Dunedin, I headed north with my old friend Vincent O’Sullivan to spend a few days exploring a part of New Zealand that I had never before visited and to look up our mutual friend Brian Turner. At Oturehua Brian’s close neighbor, Jillian Sullivan, generously offered Vincent and me her straw bale house for the three days and nights we planned to stay there, and each evening the four of us gathered before a roaring fire of pine logs to drink wine and share stories. Though we were all published poets, our interests were as diverse as our personalities. Yet we readily found common ground, Vincent regaling us with irreverent anecdotes, Brian sharing his concerns for the natural environment, threatened by wind farms and irrigated dairy pastures, and Jillian explaining how she had built her house from hay bales, earth, mud, river stones, and timber.

FIGURE 26. Up-On-The-Downs, Grahame Sydney, 2006.

On our first morning in the valley, we clambered into Brian’s four-wheel-drive vehicle and traveled to the foothills of Mount Saint Bathans to meet Brian’s and Vincent’s friend Grahame Sydney. I considered myself fortunate—reunited with two kindred spirits, driving through a breathtaking landscape of tussock plains and snow-covered ranges, and about to meet a painter whose work I had long admired.

Within seconds of stepping into Grahame’s living room, I was introduced to a hale and engaging individual some seven years younger than myself who, without prompting (or so it seems in retrospect) spoke of the postpartum sadness that sometimes oppresses a painter who, having labored on a work for many months, will dispatch it to a dealer or buyer only to rue the day he parted with it. “You writers always have your books,” Grahame said, “but we painters have only a photograph or a few catalog details to remind us of what we worked so hard to create, then lost sight of forever.” Grahame thought it would be a good idea if paintings could be leased for a few years and returned to the painter from time to time. But prospective buyers had not taken kindly to this idea. “They need to possess the painting,” Grahame said. “They want the security of legal ownership. For them, it’s often an investment, and they like to feel that no one else can gain access to what they have.” I told Grahame that his nostalgia for work that has passed out of his hands reminded me of the Maori concept of the hau of the gift—the spirit of the maker or giver that enters into and imbues the object so that, as it is transferred or traded far beyond its place of origin, it yearns to be returned one day to where its life began. “I certainly feel this way about New Zealand,” I said. Despite having made my home and formed lasting friendships in Australia, Denmark, Sierra Leone, and the United States, I admitted to a perennial need to touch base with the country where I spent my first and formative years and revisit the friends I made before I went out on my own into the wider world.

Later, writing in my journal about this moment, I would find myself reconsidering Umberto Eco’s notion of the second life of art, not only as signifying a transition from interiority to exteriority but as connoting a transformation within the artist himself whereby he passes from being a producer to being a consumer of his own work, appraising it as if he had not made it but it had been made by someone else. It is through the eyes of others that we come to see ourselves.

As I strolled around Grahame’s living room, its shelves crammed with books and walls covered with his paintings, lithographs, and etchings, its large windows affording a view of the Cambrian Valley and the Hawkdun Range, I was struck by the recurring theme of emptiness and desertion in his work: a group of letter boxes in the middle of nowhere, light from a window falling on a chair that appears to have been only just vacated, a glint of sunlight on the wall of an unfurnished room, a red shed on a tawny plain; a flight of birds in an empty sky. I was also overawed by Grahame’s technical mastery, so reminiscent of Chinese art.

“So Sydney’s a realist?” asks Brian Turner in an essay on his friend’s painting. “Yes,” he answers, if that means that “he faithfully records and represents what most of us believe we have seen. I’m not sure about that, personally the more powerful reality is in the feelings his work evokes and releases in me.”¹⁰⁵ Continuing this train of thought, Brian questions whether “Sydney’s world, his wilderness where the spirit is tested and strengthened by a pure airiness, great space, is almost always unforested?” Again, his answer is illuminating: “If you can locate yourself here it is in a forest of loneliness, temperamentally, where you are exposed to yourself and everything else. You need strength of purpose, of character; you need courage to stand up here and not avert the eyes. Only through distance can you find yourself. Beyond the far blue, gold, or dun hills and mountains, beneath cirrus edged with gold, there’s a self to be reckoned with.”¹⁰⁶ The remark is reminiscent of something Marc Chagall said when he first came to Paris. “What I wanted was a realism, if you like, but a psychical one.”¹⁰⁷

Such insights would sink in later, when I learned more of the biographical background to Brian’s and Grahame’s lives in the Maniototo (from the Maori Mania-o-toto—plain of blood), and reread Janet Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo, in which an analogy is drawn between a writer’s compulsion to explore the innermost mysteries of a person’s life and the Central Otago landscape itself, whose surfaces have been stripped away to disclose jagged schist and water-polished graywacke stones.¹⁰⁸ But right now it was time for a cuppa, and we sat around a long table as Grahame and Vincent discussed the contemporary art market and poured scorn on art theorists who decree that painting is passé and realist painting even more so. Though Grahame sells well, he has dispensed with an agent. Art galleries are reluctant to add to their few examples of his work. And art writers largely ignore him.

When we had finished our tea and cookies, Grahame invited us to see his studio—a short walk away from the house. The wind off Mount Saint Bathans was bitterly cold (fresh snow had fallen on the ranges overnight), but I found myself looking up at the cloud-swathed peaks as if I had never seen their like before. Only a few times in my life have I experienced this particular altered state of consciousness. It was as though Grahame’s paintings, that had so absorbed me only minutes ago inside the house, had opened my eyes to an outside world that I had allowed myself to take for granted. Landscape and sky were utterly transfigured by the art.

On the wall of Grahame’s studio I glimpsed a Vermeer reproduction. On his easel was a canvas just begun of one of his recurring motifs—a hawk impaled on a barbed wire fence, its freedom to take wing lost for all time. This potential of art to transform our perception of the world—even though, paradoxically, art draws its raw material from some external reality—had been one of the leitmotifs of my book. In speaking of “the work of art,” I did not want to focus on the object produced by an artist but the process of producing it—the mysterious interplay of inner and outer realities and the existential imperative of finding some way of integrating these realities lest one become either alienated from oneself or narcissistically self-absorbed. In exploring the hidden forces that prefigure our everyday lives, I had sought to show how art and religion share, with such mundane practices as building a home or sharing a meal, the power to change our experience, so that we come to feel that we can do something about things we also believe we can do nothing about. For me, no writer has better captured this paradox than Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, where he touches on the difference between being oblivious to the absurdity of our condition and becoming lucidly aware of it. It is in Sisyphus’s clear knowledge that his task is interminable that it becomes his task and no one else’s. The great stone ceases to be a curse placed upon him by the gods; it is a human burden that he takes up, and in doing so he becomes more than the rock; his life belongs to him and he “silences all the idols.”¹⁰⁹

I continued to ponder these questions as we drove back to Oturehua across a ceaselessly changing landscape, tussock to pasture, vast river terraces and stone river beds, eroded hills above abandoned gold diggings, cottages among trees. That Grahame had so vehemently defended his work against those who would write it off as merely realist,¹¹⁰ made me more keenly resolved than ever to acknowledge the infinite variety of artistic techniques, mundane materials, ecstatic visions, subjects, and styles that characterize the world of art. While theorists create finite categories and credos, insinuating their own prescriptive and limited understandings into this diverse world, the artists themselves are working at the limits of what is deemed possible or fashionable, struggling to articulate their diverse understandings and help us see our world as if for the first time. Indeed “the shock of the new” is more likely to be felt when those making “art” are not self-conscious “artists” but people compelled to create, against all odds, the conditions of a viable life.

I would experience this within days of my return to Sydney when I went to see an exhibition of Martu women’s paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art. These women had resisted the desert painting movement for many years, doubting they would be able to control the presentation and representation of their work in the world beyond their Western Desert communities.¹¹¹ The paintings are eye-opening—in their originality, their incandescent colors, their large scale, and the skill with which underground, surface, and ethereal dimensions of Dreamings are depicted on a one-dimensional linen canvas. Executed collaboratively and painstakingly over many weeks or months, the paintings also attest to the remarkable way in which idiosyncratic and collective understandings of color, country, style, and substance can be brought together and harmonized.

Another thing that struck me about the Martu paintings was the family resemblances between the Aboriginal notion of the Dreaming and classical Chinese notions of “emptiness” or “nothingness” (koan). Moreover, both these visions of ultimate reality converged with the afterimages that still haunted me of Grahame Sydney’s Central Otago landscapes. In every case the art leaves “the wind and dust of our lives behind” and enters into that nature from which we emerge and to which we will return. It therefore addresses the indescribable—things beyond our empirical reach, things that cannot be grasped conceptually but may be hinted at obliquely. Seeing the Martu paintings also brought me back to the elemental forms of religious life. Just as many writers seek to classify, categorize, and compare art movements or individual artists, as if the identity of each is quintessentially different, so many students of religion will work with conceptual definitions that belie the infinite variety of religious experience, even among those who identify with a particular faith. Credos and cultures are widely shared, and our inner struggles all bear a familiar resemblance to the struggles of others, but the relationship between these external and internal realities will always differ from one person to the next. Moreover, if we expand our conventional notions of art, religion, storytelling, and ritual to include practices we often regard as too banal to dignify with such labels—building and furnishing a house, writing a letter to an absent loved one, listening to a piece of music that moves us to tears—we may arrive at a way of understanding our humanity that does not reduce its nature or worth to the words with which we represent it. It was this deeper, existential realism that I had glimpsed in Grahame’s paintings and that echoed the theme of my book.

In seeking to go beyond conventional, institutionalized, or monothetic conceptions of religion, some scholars prefer the more neutral term spirituality. But if religion is too restrictive, spirituality errs in the other direction by being too diffuse. How is it possible, then, to avoid focusing solely on experiences that can be conceptually grasped and, without necessarily abandoning conceptual thought and language, hope to capture experiences that lie on the margins of what can be definitively known? While a cogwheel and a prayer wheel are both wheels, engineered to maximize efficiency, their ends are very different.

My argument is that the phenomena we label religious, ritual, rational, or spiritual may be understood as sensible technologies for making life more fulfilling and more viable, both for ourselves and for others. They are, accordingly, arts of life. Despite the legitimacy or warrant they acquire from being associated with a divinity, a charismatic individual, a liturgical form, an empirical method, a scientific or a faith tradition, they all have one thing in common; they heighten, deepen, and expand our relations with others and with the world in which we live by engaging, cultivating, and altering the senses. Working within the sensorium, these strategies and practices often bypass conceptual thought; they privilege emotions, not ideas, the body rather than the mind. Whether it is a matter of a gourmet’s sophisticated palate, a painter’s revolutionary palette, a healer’s sensitive touch, a perfumer’s highly developed “nose,” or a musician’s “ear” for original sounds, we acquire the means to savor, see, smell, touch, and hear things hitherto unremarked, unappreciated, or undeveloped. We become, as William James might have said, radical empiricists, for whom the conventional horizons of what is discernible and doable are pushed back, and the mundane is rendered strange, while the old is transfigured by the new. The art of life is thus an art of making the world appear perennially new by what Rimbaud called “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens”—an endless play of light and dark, bitter and sweet, sound and silence, hard and soft, acrid and fragrant. Against the grain of inscribed habits of thought, action, and perception, art—whether graphic, sculptural, musical, verbal, gestural, or kinesic—involves a honing, a practicing, a play of our sensibilities, which bring us to a place that seems to surpass the familiar, the known, and the expected, surprising us, taking our breath away, opening our eyes, transforming our understanding, and, ultimately, re-creating ourselves.

When we got back to Oturehua, Vincent and I went out onto Jillian’s porch to absorb the view. A small creek ran through some marshland. Beyond was a stand of pines. On the horizon the Hawkdun Range defied description, though, since words are my métier, I attempted to do just that. Unlike many mountains, the Hawkduns do not rise steeply from the plain or jaggedly become a series of peaks. Rather I was reminded of figures lying on their backs, knees drawn up into their chests, shrouded by snow. The tops formed a tableland under the impress of a cerulean sky in which strange clouds shape-shifted before one’s eyes, now flour-covered loaves, now wisps of smoke, now misty plates.

Out of the blue, I asked Vincent if he was still a Catholic. He had been raised in an Irish Catholic home, but what had become of his faith over the years?¹¹²

“I’m not a Vatican Catholic,” Vincent said, and he recalled the words of the New Zealand painter Tony Fomison, who said, “I judge a religion by its compassion,” regarding it as a means by which one evolves and takes “a journey through life.”¹¹³ For Vincent, an institutional order, with its theology and decrees, were less real to him than religious experience, which may take its point of departure from doctrine, but is, more imperatively, grounded in the struggles of our everyday lives—to make ends meet, to survive a broken marriage or the death of a dear friend, to withstand the degrading effects of prejudice or willful misunderstanding, and, yes, to repudiate those ideologies that do violence to life as it is lived.

“For me,” I said, “what matters is not what one believes in, or even what one thinks one knows, but the existential question of how one can cross the threshold from our singular and solitary humanity to something greater than ourselves and to feel not only that this engagement fills us with more life than would otherwise be the case, but that this fusion with otherness remakes and redeems us.” And I was thinking, at that moment, of the Hawkduns under their coverlid of freshly fallen snow and their blue shadows; of Grahame’s allusions to the hidden histories and past lives he discerned in the seemingly empty land; of Brian’s indefatigable commitment to preserving the environment he so loved; of Jillian’s devotion to finishing her straw bale home; of Vincent’s celebrations of the divine spark of love in the smallest gestures and most fleeting things (“joy’s the word I want, and say it…‘Joy’ catches the sun”).¹¹⁴

A question had been running through my mind every day I spent in Maniototo—could I live there? I had only to gaze at the mountains to close the gap between my life in America and the life I led in New Zealand so many years ago. An occasional vehicle went down the road. A bird piped up in the marshland. A dog barked in the distance. And then the enveloping silence. Grahame Sydney and Brian Turner were at home in this environment and fighting to protect it. But could I endure the isolation without falling into melancholy, pining to be elsewhere? Vincent had described Brian as being “wedded to the place,” a phrase that recalled my own childhood, when, lacking friends, I found solace in the physical landscape, a surrogate society of spiritual presences, even as I yearned for a cosmopolitan world of intellectual companionship far away. Vincent had a similar sensibility, and we talked at length about the wilderness in which Colin McCahon wandered most of his life, his paintings mocked and reviled by critics as well as the common man. I told Vincent that I so deeply identified with the plight of men like McCahon, Lowry, and Mason,¹¹⁵ that when I went to London I would frequent the National Gallery and glimpse their troubled lives in the face of Christ, as painted by Hieronymous Bosch, surrounded by leering bullies—an image echoed in Lovis Corinth’s Ecce Homo, painted in the last year of his life (1925).

FIGURE 27. Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), Hieronymous Bosch, circa 1510.

FIGURE 28. Christ Bearing the Cross, Titian, 1560.

Vincent responded by showing me a reproduction of a Titian masterpiece in which Christ, weighed down by a cross on the road to Calvary, looks out at us from the painting as if to ask why we are not coming to his aid.

This sense of vulnerability and bewilderment can be felt in Samuel Butler’s writings from the period following his purchase of a sheep run at the Rangitata Forks in 1860. Though the twenty-four-year-old English emigrant is exhilarated by the harsh light, the open horizons, and the prospect of living “beyond the pale of civilization,” he experiences moments of desolation, longing to see “some signs of human care in the midst of the loneliness,” some glimpse of Europe. Even more onerous is his intellectual isolation. New Zealand seemed “far better adapted to develop and maintain in health the physical than the intellectual nature. The fact is,” Butler wrote, “people here are busy making money; that is the inducement which led them to come in the first instance, and they show their sense by devoting their energies to the work.” While admiring the shrewd, hardheaded intelligence of the settlers, and their freedom from the pretensions of the old country, he missed his Handel and Bach and grew weary of conversations about “sheep, horses, dogs, cattle, English grasses, paddocks, bush, and so forth.”¹¹⁶ Isolated in his cob cottage at the Rangitata Forks, he found that “the solitude was greater than I could bear. I felt increasing upon me that dreadful doubt as to my own identity—as to the continuity of my past and present existence—which is the first sign of that distraction which comes on those who have lost themselves in the bush. I had fought against this feeling hitherto, and had conquered it; but the intense silence and gloom of this rocky wilderness were too much for me, and I felt that my power of collecting myself was beginning to be impaired.”¹¹⁷

In Grahame Sydney’s paintings there is a Zen-like acceptance of the contradictions and paradoxes that Butler struggled to reconcile and that confront you throughout New Zealand. The almost deserted Cambrians where Grahame lives was, during the gold rush days of the 1860s and ’70s, a populous and boisterous mining town called Welshmans Gully. The predominantly empty and iconic landscapes in New Zealand art galleries are, ironically, evidence of how profoundly generations of painters have peopled those landscapes with their quiet thoughts and wild imaginings. As Grahame Sydney observes of his own work, “although the painting’s subject matter is landscape, they are fabrications in a great many ways. They are like this because of the sort of person I am. Paintings, like first novels, are always primarily autobiographical. They’re not so much a sense of the place but a sense of about me.”¹¹⁸

One must insist, however, that both perspectives are entailed. The mystery of the work of art arises from the indeterminate relationship between one’s external environment and one’s inner world. When these are integrated or balanced, one becomes at home in the world. But where a painter like Grahame Sydney or a poet like Brian Turner have found a physical environment that enables them to articulate, albeit obliquely, their personal preoccupations, others—among whom I include myself—have felt the need to seek an environment abroad, even though the old adage will hold true that “you can take the boy out of the country, but you cannot take the country out of the boy.”

Not long before he committed suicide, the New Zealand writer John Mulgan wrote to his friend Charles Brasch from Northern Ireland. “What a lonely desolate place NZ seems now. I fell [sic] sense of tragedy in all the people I like there much more keenly than anything over here.”¹¹⁹ Katherine Mansfield died among Russians, saying she had found her people at last. And, toward the end of his life, Tony Fomison elected to do “something few contemporary Pakeha considered attempting. He would undergo the physical trauma of extensive tattooing, and immerse himself in Samoan cultural values and custom, as a bridge towards what he most respected and was drawn to in the Pacific he shared with them. It was not a claim for identity, but for a shared communal bond.”¹²⁰

In these words, Vincent O’Sullivan sums up the course of action that made me an ethnographer and took me to the remoteness of Northern Sierra Leone and Central Australia—where not only the physical landscape would leave its impress upon me; the people whose lives I shared would change me in ways I could never have been changed had I remained in my natal country. In order to feel at home anywhere, I had to go elsewhere. In order to be someone, I had to become no one. In order to practice art I had first to learn how to live.