:::Ονειροκριτικών:::
the Gold Room
(Installation by Lisa Tamiris Becker)
Preface: With all respect due to Suzi Gablik, I don't think art has to be re-enchanted -- I would argue that by definition, it never left the realm of enchantment. The question remains whether we are qualified to meet it there. Such a meeting will be feasible only to the extent we have learned to think through the object--a process I have discussed at length elsewhere[1]. This involves learning to shift from analysis into what the Greeks (and their descendants, the Lacanians) called anamnesis--recognizing art through the process of unforgetting it.2
First we must repair to the crossroads of anthropology and art criticism, an intersection that has seen some heavy traffic in the last decade. From the side of anthropology, one of the more important issues is the destruction of traditional cultures that has attended the expansion of international capital. It has been suggested that the easy assimilation of ceremonial and everyday objects into the category of art has abetted, if not accelerated this process. But we must understand that this flattening of cultural-into-aesthetic objects comes with a one/two punch: not only is the object stripped of its functional context, it is then inducted into a category that has had for our society only minimum sociopolitical importance: art.
Whereas anthopology has at least put forth some effort to resist the first part of this movement (cf Steven Levine, Ivan Ivansk, James Clifford), responsibility for the second rests with an art industry that juvenilizes 95% of its artworkers, and deifies the rest. To deal adequately with this absurdity means that we must not only change how we think and talk about art objects, but what we do with them. This essay maps a journey of 'counter-assimilation,' one which looks to an art that embodies ('bodes') a future we long for, whose roots are buried in a present we may yet learn to 'un-forget.'
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i.
Thresheld
Thresheld
In 1993 I made several
visits to an on-site sculpture by Lisa Tamiris Becker titled The Gold
Room. For the first viewing I went with a friend whose background
included more literature than art. Making our way through the
manufacturing wing of a University of Texas art building, we threaded past the
acetylene tanks and stacked canvases to a darkened corridor, lined to the left
by a row of industrial gates. I spotted Lisa's name and shunted the
boxcar door; we peered into metallic darkness.
The first impression was
one of great spatial pressure, which, after an instant of intensifying, yielded
to being seen. The cell dimensions, cinder-block construction and
industrial appendages delivered the image of a prison cell. My friend
said, "So, where's the sculpture?" "It's coming," I
joked.
After a few seconds our
eyes began to use the gilded walls as a source of light, and soon the
soft, black floor came floating up out of the darkness. Earth never
looked so insolid, the slight convexity of the surface triturated, echoing the
surface of the cinderblocks. This granular texture linked and separated the
surfaces, as the heavy horizontal gold of the walls massed around the rising
floor.
Over in the near left-hand
corner of this burgeoning floor, a ceramic embolism --which Lisa would later
describe as an omphalos[3] caught the heated color of
the walls, drawing it into the floor. This glassy knob, set out against the
rough texture of its enfolding angles, was juxtaposed to the awkward resident
of the diagonal niche -- the corner sink, being undetachable, had been painted
black and left to sulk in the corner. It's uncouth hunkering
demanded a name: I dubbed it 'diabolos' -- after the angel so awkwardly
(dia-) thrown (-bolos) from the heavens.[4] The
other foil to its laconic sinkliness was overhead, picked up by an ebony
lattice upon which the artist had stretched several meters of silk, a gold
darker than the walls.
Strangely, the rim of light
appearing at the edge of the lattice made me conscious of another line of light
at the bottom of my visual field. The threshold of the room was scored
with a rut the width of the industrial door and filled with a mysterious yellow
substance. To the touch it was as smooth as oiled glass. Sniffed: a
vanishing sweetness. "What via Lactea is this?" I
wondered. The ground had grown ruddy with the gloaming from
the walls, and little green sparks began to rutilate the field just over the
soil. I thought at first it was an optical effect, some coruscation in the
twilight of the room, but in focusing I saw that the grass seed in the
unsterilized soil had sprouted, sending tiny green filaments toward the
ceiling.
ii.
Blake vs. Yeats: Wynding the Helical Gaze
Blake vs. Yeats: Wynding the Helical Gaze
Shortly after my first
visit to the Gold Room, I came across an essay written by the artist's husband
and collaborator, Willard Uncapher. This meditation,
"Yeats, Blake and the Election of the Temporal" examined the
nature of choice in the work of these two visionary poets, and the
ramifications of choosing what may seem to lie beyond volition.
Philosophically as well as
scientifically, Western civilization has drawn firm lines between
perception and cognition, limiting choice to cognition: I see three colors, I
choose one. "Election of the Temporal" not only situated
choice in the space before cognition, but pulled it back even farther, to
experience before perception. In the primary layers of
awareness, percepts are limited to two 'bases': three dimensions giving
us space, and with the addition of the fourth dimension,
space-time. Our relationship with space-time --though highly variable--
almost always seems compulsory, our senses reporting it as a 'pre-existing
condition.' Yet we do exist --both spatially and
temporally -- 'before' the senses (the very word present derives
from the etymology 'pre-sens,'-- anterior to flow or direction).
Thus the essay explored a volition that may be literally insensible.
It begins: "Yeat's
work is dominated by a struggle with temporality." The author had once
characterised the essay as 'mean' but as I read, I understood that its brevity
--some five pages-- did not signal parsimony so much as an insistent
translation of its terminus (the meaning) into its procedure (the
means). The recursiveness was strategic, forcing the reader to
re-enact a passage through the spiral lumina of William Blake's imagination.
First, there was the irresistible present tense of its voice, as the
writer placed Blake and Yeats' work on contemporaneous ground, then drew
them into the epoch of the reader. This was done by explicit
invitations to enter each literature as a conceptual order, and, more
intimately, as a way of being in the world.
Yeats felt himself to
be 'elected' and therefore compelled to report from a position beyond
time. Yet as a participant in history he also felt obligated to
"rescue this [privilege] from a transcendental solipsism in which the
power of words ... decrease as their truth ('their original unlimitedness')
increases."5
This struggle with
temporality caused Yeats to vacillate between vision and history,
privilege being implicit in the former, corrupted through the latter. Yet their
separation meant enforcing a rigid exclusion of 'common' experience. In
desiring to place himself 'beyond' time, the poet created a time conditioned by
that refutation, so that its passage was experienced as a steady not-now,
not-now, not-now, Such repudiation by definition obscures its orgins in
the present moment, since 'here' under this dispensation, is never allowed to
fully arrive.
The alternative was Blake's
helical time, produced when one imagines (desires) desire. Helical time
"factored the temporal" into the visionary equation, as a
"portion of our own rejected, unregenerated vision." This
inclusiveness came from within the visionary stance, by actively eliciting the
revitalizing powers of time: "For Blake, the imagination precedes desire,
informs it." Yeats, arguing against his time, is
revealed as Modern to a Postmodern Blake, who radically collaborated
(with) his milieu.
Like circular, dialectical
time, helical time is based in repetition, but it is the repetition of a
trialectical movement between the environment, "the image of the observer
(within that environment) and the actual observer." Unlike
dialectical or circular time, helical time does not merely produce
consciousness of the 'other'; rather, it includes the other's
other. Not the reflected self, but the charisma, the shine of the
self in the other. Otherwisdom.
***
**
*
Shortly after my first
expedition, the Gold Room came under
review by a string of visiting critics as a part of the nomination process
for a Univerity fellowship. I wasn't surprised by this development; but
oddly, the visitors had not shown any interest in the uses of
such a space. This seemed especially inattentive given the alchemical
cast of its elements. I, on the other hand, jumped into the breach
this 'critical' oversight had created: "Lisa, would you consider letting
me spend the night in the sculpture?" "By yourself?" she
laughed, then quickly consented.
On the following Saturday
evening, I entered the building through a door marked "Peligro: Art".
iii.
Intraview
The grass was gone. I
stepped over the clarified butter (ghee)[6] rather unceremoniously and . . .[redacted].
iv.
Alice in Syllogism Land
Dialectical (circular) and
trialectical (helical) movements can be distinguished through the following
allegory: in the dialectical situation it is as if one were looking into
a mirror with an opaque backing. At first, one looks and sees his or her
own image. In the trialectical, one is beckoned to the reflective
surface, but upon closer investigation, the mirror transluces into a
window. The key distinction is not in what one sees, but rather in
the 'turning' itself; what I am calling helicity or the trialectic
appears in that evanescent moment when
one's face and the environment flare upon the same surface.
In Modernist mythology, we
have sought the presence of the artist in her touch upon the canvas-- since
Impressionism associating the physical mark of the brush upon the pictoral
surface with authenticity, presence, decision. But in the context of a
sitesculpture, where arrangement of the component elements (usually) replaces
the brushstroke, choices become the 'mark'; decision, the artist's touch.
It is the
dual-orientation of this choice that compells the tropaic moment I am
calling helical. In the moment that an artist focuses (peers)
through her own image to distinguish its larger context, one is not only
seeing, but (consents to) being seen. Thus in the trialectical
moment, one is not only choosing, but agrees with being chosen.
Yeats and Blake shared the sense of having been chosen by their time, but only
Blake fully presentified the moment by electing, in turn, to be in time.
Do these choices show us
the interplay between the artist and her environment? or between the elements
in that environment? The answer is both. Choosing to prolong into
form the instant in the mirror when the self gives way to the opening
other, this choice records both the feeling of privilege (or more
basically, becoming visible) and the artist's desire for the present moment
that discloses this transaction. In other words, the choice to be in time.
v.
(AKA: five)
The trick to remaining in
the hypnogogic state is in [redacted]
[. . .] There was no ineffable quality to this instruction, no feeling of grandeur or mystery, just the smooth, insistent translation of attention from one interstice to another: water falling into water waiting. All in.
###
Notes
1.
"Art is only going to be as accessible as our critical objective
allows; and this 'objective' must become fundamentally iambic: a) to disable any ideological structure that would seek dominion over the
object, by b) the creation of an opening (a space) in our attention to
accommodate its larger effects. . . . [I]n order to comprehend a
work, one has to invent a relationship with it, bypassing the
mechanisms that produce the appearance of objectivity in the
critic. It is not that such objectivity doesn't exist; rather,
it inheres to the object under investigation, and has to be mimetically
conceived by the critic. " Mysti Easterwood,
"Cybersoma/space: Touching on Reflection," fn 1, (Sarah Zupko
Cultural Site), 1994.
2.
"[I]n psychoanalytic anamnesis it is not a question of reality, but of
truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by
conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are
constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them
present." Ecrits:
Function and Field in Speech and Language, p. 48. That 'little
freedom' is the space which arises in the moment of anamnesis.
3. Omphalos (literally,
"navel") is a sacred oval or hemispherical stone in Delphi, situated near
the temple of Apollo. To the ancient Greeks this stone was the center, the
'navel', of the earth. According to legend, Zeus
determined the spot by sending forth two eagles simultaneously to fly from the eastern and western ends of the earth, and they met at Delphi. Keep in mind this theme of sheering forces moving toward the omphalos as we enter section iv of the essay.
determined the spot by sending forth two eagles simultaneously to fly from the eastern and western ends of the earth, and they met at Delphi. Keep in mind this theme of sheering forces moving toward the omphalos as we enter section iv of the essay.
4.
Speaking of flying from opposite ends... Diabolos, Latin for
'devil' means 'thrown at an angle,' presumably a reference to the fall of
the archangel Lucifer. Curiously, 'angle' shares an
etymological root with the word 'ankle' as well as the more obvious
'angel.' The ecclesiastical Greek word 'angelus,' meaning
'messenger from heaven,' is derived from the older 'oneiros'
referring of course to that earlier messenger from the dreaming heavens,
Hermes. You remember Hermes, the lad with the wings on his ankles and the
lie on his lips? Evidently the Byzantine Greeks did, since the later
Greek diabolus came to mean 'slanderer.' Thus we
can see how whole heavens (and the sacred spaces that refer to
them) include their fallen others.
5. "Yeats, Blake and the Election of the Temporal." Willard
Uncapher. Unpublished paper, Columbia University, 1985.
6.
Ghee (clarified butter) is one of the five substances derived from the sacred
cow used in for ritual purpose in Hinduism; I suspect that the other four
follow the alchemical schema that underwrites Agamic practices. For now,
I can only say with certainty that ghee represents 'atman,' the imperishable
aspect of human being. Throughout India, ghee is normally used to anoint
the lingam, sexual symbol of the god Shiva. To pour it into an earthen
rut was a bold complementary gesture; a decidedly non-traditional offering to
his wife and consort, Parvati.
7.
Detecting the movement of thought takes a kind of wry attention to its
constant, objectless hankering. This takes knowing how to hang out in the
slur between perception and thought. Anywhere but Austin this might have
been a challenge. Here, where Linklater's Slackers was filmed, the
ability to go into a deconstructive trance is practically a residential
requirement.
8. See "the Ambassadors" (1533) by Hans
Holbein the Younger. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the
screen.
Copyright©2001, Mysti Easterwood, all rights reserved.
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