Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays

NOTES ON SEEING

1. To look and not see: an old problem. It usually means a lack of understanding, an inability to divine the meaning of something in the world around us.

2. Cognitive scientists have repeatedly conducted the following experiment and, without fail, they come up with same results. An audience is asked to watch a film of two teams playing basketball. The observers are given a job to count the number of times the ball changes hands. I have done this, and one has to be very attentive to follow the motion of the ball. In the middle of the game, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the court, turns to the camera, thumps his chest, and leaves. Half the people do not see the great ape. They do not believe that he was actually there until the film is replayed and, indeed, a gorilla strolls in and out of the game. Nearly everyone sees the gorilla if he is not given the assignment. This has been named inattentional blindness.

3. Writing at my desk now, I see the screen, but this sentence dominates my attention. In fact, my momentary awareness that there is much around the words distracts me: the blue screen of the computer beyond the white edge of the page; various icons above and below; the surface of my desk cluttered with small Post-it squares which, when I turn my head, I can read, “Habermas 254–55,” “Meany et al., implications for adrenocortical responses to stress” scrawled on pink paper (residue of arcane research); a black stapler; and countless other objects that enter my awareness the moment I turn to them. What is crucial is that I don’t turn to them. For hours every day, I have little, if any, consciousness of them. I live in a circumscribed phenomenal world. An internal narrator speaks words and dictates to my fingers, which type automatically. There is no need to think about the connection between head and hands. I am subsumed by the link. Were another object suddenly to materialize on my desk and then vanish, I might well have no knowledge of either its appearance or disappearance.

4. Once, in an unfamiliar hallway, I mistook myself for a stranger because I did not understand I was looking in a mirror. My own form took me by surprise because I was not oriented in space. Expectation is crucial to perception.

5. There are days when I think I see an old friend in the street, but it is a stranger. The recognition ignites like a match and then is instantly extinguished when I understand I am wrong. The recognition is felt, not thought. I can’t trace what created the error, can’t tell you why one person reminded me of another. Was the old friend a subliminal presence in my mind on that particular day or was the confusion purely external — a jut of the chin or slope of the shoulders or rhythm of a walk?

6. We do not become anesthetized to horrible photographs of death or suffering. We may choose to avoid them. When I see a gruesome image in the newspaper in the morning, I sometimes turn away, registering in seconds that looking too long will hurt me. People who gorge on horror films and violent thrillers do it not because they have learned to feel too little, but because they indulge in the limbic rush that floods their systems as they safely witness exploding bodies. It seems that these viewers are mostly men.

7. We feel colors before we can name them. Colors act on us prereflectively. A part of me feels red before I can name red. My cognitive faculties lag behind the color’s impact. Standing in a room, I look first at the vase of red tulips because they are red and because they are alive.

8. My mother once told me about coming home to find our cat dead on the lawn. She saw the poor animal from many yards away, but she said she knew with absolute assurance that it was dead. An inert thing. An it.

9. Photographs of the beloved dead draw me in. I am fascinated. There is the good, dear face, one that changed over time. It is the picture that preserves the face, not my memory, which is befogged by the many faces he had over the years. Or is it the single face that grew old? Sometimes I cannot bear to look. The image has become a token of grief. And yet, there is nothing so banal as the pictures of strange families. After my father died, I found Christmas cards with photographs of unknown people among his papers — happy families — grinning into an invisible lens. I threw them away.

10. Galvanic skin response registers a change in the heat and electricity passed through the skin by nerves and sweat during emotional states. People in white coats attach electrodes to your hands and track what happens. When they show you a picture of your mother, your GSR goes up. Meaning in the body.

11. Is our visual world rich or poor? There are fights about this. People do not agree. Philosophers, scientists, and other academics ponder this richness and poverty question in papers and books and lectures. Human beings have very limited peripheral vision, but we can turn our heads and take in more of the world. When I’m writing, my vision is severely limited by my attention, but sometimes when I let my eyes roam in a space, I discover its density of light and color and feel surprised by what I find. When I focus, say, just on the shadows here on my desk, they become remarkable. My small round clock casts a double shadow from either side of its circular base, one darker than the other, a gray and a paler gray. There is a spot of brilliant light at the edge of the darker oval. As I look, this sight has become beautiful.

12. Why is a face beautiful?

13. If an image is flashed too quickly to be perceived consciously, we take it in unconsciously and respond to it without knowing what is happening. A picture of a scowling face I can’t say I’ve seen affects me anyway. Scientists call this masking. Blindsight patients have cortical blindness. They lose visual consciousness but not visual unconsciousness. They see but don’t know they are seeing. If you ask them to guess what you’re holding (a pencil) they will guess far better than people who are truly blind. Words and consciousness are connected. How much do I see of the world that never registers in my awareness? When I walk in the street, I sometimes glimpse a scene for just an instant, but I cannot tell you what I have witnessed until a fraction of a second later, when the puzzling image falls into place: that furry thing was a stuffed animal, and a little boy was dangling it from his stroller. The lag again.

14. We are picture-making creatures. We scribble and draw and paint. When I draw what I see, I touch the thing I am looking at with my mind, but it is as if my hand is caressing its outline. People who stopped drawing as children continue to make pictures in their dreams or in the hallucinations that arrive just before they go to sleep. Where do those images come from? I dreamed that grass and brush and sticks were growing out of my arm, and I got to work busily trimming myself with a pair of scissors. I wasn’t alarmed; it was a job handled in a matter-of-fact way. If I painted a self-portrait with bushy arms, I would be called a surrealist.

15. Some people who go blind see vivid images and colors. Some people who are losing their vision hallucinate while awake. An old man saw cows grazing in his living room, and a woman saw cartoon characters running up and down her doctor’s arm. Charles Bonnet syndrome. Just before I fell asleep, I saw a little man speeding over pink and violet cliffs. Once I saw an explosion of melting colors — green, blues, reds, and then a great flash of light that devoured them all. Hypnagogic hallucinations. Freud said dreams protect sleep. At night the world is taken from us and we make up our own scenes and stories. If you wake up slowly, you will remember more of that human underground than if you wake up quickly.

16. Deprived of sight, we make visions. Seeing is also creating.

17. There are things in the world to see. Do I see what you see? We can talk about it and verify the facts. Through my window is the back of a house. One of its windows is completely covered by a blue shade. But if I tell you I see a flying zebra you will say, Siri, you are hallucinating. You are dreaming while awake.

18. Sometimes artists can make a hallucination real. A painting of a flying zebra is a real thing in the world, a real thing to see.

19. Why do I not like the word taste when applied to art? Because it has lost its connection to the mouth and food and chewing. I don’t like the way this picture tastes. It’s bitter. If we thought about actual tastes, the word would still work. It would be a form of synesthesia, a crossing of our senses: seeing as tasting. But usually it is not used like that anymore, so I avoid it entirely when I talk about art.

20. Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object. Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised, and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression we saw. Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing me in your eyes and know that you like what you see.

21. I am looking at a small reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman, which hangs in a room at the Metropolitan Museum here in New York. It is a girl’s head and face. I say girl because she is very young. From her face I would guess she is no more than ten years old. When I look up the picture in one of my books on Vermeer, I see that there it is called Portrait of a Young Girl, a far better title. We should not turn girls into women too soon. She is smiling, but not a wide smile. Her lips are sealed. My impression is that she is looking at me, but I cannot quite catch her eye. What is certain is that she is answering someone else’s gaze. Someone has made her smile. She is not a beautiful child; it is her looking that is beautiful, her connection to the invisible person. There is shyness in her expression, reserve, maybe a hint of hesitancy. I think she is looking at an adult, probably the artist, because she has not let herself go. She looks over her shoulder at him. I have great affection for this girl. That is the magic of the painting; it is not that I have affection for a representation of a child’s head that was painted some time between 1665 and 1667. No, I feel I have actually fallen for her, the way I fall for a child who looks up at me on the street and smiles, perhaps a homely child, who with a single look calls forth a burst of maternal feeling and sympathy. But my emotion is made of something more; I remember my own girlhood and my shyness with grown-ups I didn’t know well. I was not a bold child, and in her face I see myself at the same age.

22. In some of Gerhard Richter’s painted-over photographs, he painted over his wife’s face and parts of her body. He covered the bodies of his children, too, in snapshots of them as babies and growing children. In these gestures, I felt he was keeping them for himself, keeping the private hidden. Other times, he framed them with swaths of color, turning them into featured subjects. I love those pictures.

23. Mothers have a need to look at their children. We cannot help it.

24. Lovers have a need to look at each other. They cannot help it.

25. Sometimes I like to look at my husband’s face in photographs because he becomes a stranger in the pictures, an object fixed in time. Over many years, I have come to know him through my other senses, too — the feel of his skin, the changing smell of his body in winter and spring and fall and summer, the sound of his voice, his breathing, and sometimes his snoring at night. When I look at him in a photograph, my other senses are quiet. I simply see him, and because I find him beautiful, his unmoving face excites me.

26. Looking at pornography is exciting but loses its interest after orgasm.

27. Reading the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses when Molly Bloom is remembering is erotic because she gives permission, gives up and gives way, and this is always exciting and interesting because it is personal, not impersonal. Isn’t it strange that looking at little abstract symbols on a white page can make a person feel such things? I see her in his arms. I am in his arms. I remember your arms.

28. When I read stories, I see them. I make pictures and often they remain in my mind after I have finished a novel, along with some phrases or sentences. I ground the characters in places, real and imagined. But I always remember the feeling of a book best, unless I have forgotten it altogether.

29. I do not usually see philosophy — with some exceptions: Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, because they are also storytellers.

30. Some people cannot make visual imagery. They do not see pictures in their minds. They do not turn words into images. I didn’t know such a thing was possible until a short time ago. They see abstractly. They remember the symbols on the page.

31. “I see” can also mean “I understand.”

32. There is a small part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is crucial for recognizing faces. If you lose this ability, your deficit is called prosopagnosia. It happens that a person with brain damage looks at herself in the mirror and believes she is seeing, not herself, but a double. It seems that what has vanished is not reason but that special feeling we get when we look at our reflections, that warm sense of ownership. When that disappears, the image of one’s self becomes alien.

33. I look and sometimes I see.

2010

THE DRAMA OF PERCEPTION: Looking at Morandi

IN AN INTERVIEW WITH EDOUARD Roditi that was published in 1960, Giorgio Morandi said: “I believe that nothing is more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. We know all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.”¹ This is a restatement of a similar comment he made in 1957 in a radio interview: “For me nothing is abstract. In fact, I believe there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality.”² This slightly earlier and more cryptic comment has been quoted by many critics who have written about Morandi, because it seems to reveal something important about the painter’s aesthetic position. The question is: What did Morandi mean?

Images are not words, and artists are not always able to articulate what they do or even what they hope to do. Nevertheless, we know that Morandi carefully revised the interview he did with Roditi. Presumably, then, he said exactly what he wished to say, no more or less. Reading the interview is a somewhat comic experience. While Roditi is positively garrulous, meandering in and out of various subjects and bringing up one artist after another, Morandi is terse and often contrarian. He will be led nowhere he doesn’t wish to go. I believe that nothing is more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. This is plainly a philosophical statement. We can take it back to Immanuel Kant, who argued that we, human beings, will never get to the thing in itself. Seeing is not seeing the real world, but seeing the world through our perceptions of it, perceptions steeped in our meanings and, as Morandi explicates in his philosophy, those meanings are at least in part produced by language: We agree to call that thing a cup and that other thing a tree. How does Morandi use the word abstract? My Webster’s give several meanings: “1: a Considered apart from any application to a particular object; as abstract truth. b: ideal, abstruse. 2: Of words, names, etc. Not concrete. 3: Dealing with a subject in its theoretical considerations only, and 4: Art. Presenting or characterized by nonrepresentational designs depicting no recognizable thing…” My thought is that Morandi is saying that beneath our myriad experiences of the world, under our perceptual images, our language and emotions is something out there, matter, which is like abstraction in art, a fundamentally unrecognizable reality, which is unavailable to us.

One may ask, should any of this concern us when we look at a Morandi painting? Do we really care about his abstract reality? I think we do, and yet it’s important to ground that caring in some sense of what happens when we look at a work of art. A painting is there to be seen. It has no other purpose, and we can see it only in the first person. There is no third-person view, no objective He hovering above the image looking at it. The first-person experience is an embodied one. I don’t only bring my eyes or my intellectual faculties or my emotions to a picture. I bring my whole self with its whole story. The relation then is between an I and an it, but that it partakes of the artist’s being as well, his entire being, which is why we treat art in a different way from utilitarian objects like forks, no matter how attractive those forks may be. My position is a phenomenological one: looking at art can’t be separated from our lived experience of the world, and the image exists in my perception of it. In his essay “Eye and Mind,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty quotes Cézanne, “Nature is inside us,” and then goes on to say, “Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and the body welcomes them.”³ This is the pleasure of art, and doodling elephants and monkeys aside, it is a uniquely human one.

A painting can represent or not represent something in the world, but it is always generated out of the artist’s experience of the visible. Morandi’s work hovers at the threshold between what I recognize, say, as a representation of a cup, and a quality of alienation in that cup that has lost the illusion of solidity and realness that I may find in Chardin, for example. Morandi loved Chardin, and what the artists share, besides the still-life genre, is that both of them enchanted their objects, but in different ways. The magic of Chardin is that the coffeepot and the garlic appear to be representations of ordinary things, and yet, as you look at them, they become emotionally charged to a degree that seems almost supernatural. I attribute this to the gestures in his canvases, which are communicated to the viewer as visible touch. In fact, looking at the best of Chardin’s pictures is almost like being caressed. The artist affects us at a deep and wordless level of human experience that goes back to infancy — being held and touched. Paradoxically, this feeling is more potent in Chardin’s still lifes than in his images of figures, where the illusion is that we are looking at living, breathing people. Morandi, too, understood that painting the inanimate had extraordinary possibilities, because the very humility of the things represented allows greater room for the artist’s expressiveness. But the spell Morandi casts over his objects is different. His bottles, cups, cloths, balls, and various other things he collected and allowed to get dusty and set up before him to paint were not chosen because they are objects of daily human life. Looking at a Chardin still life of a sausage, knife, and bread, I am drawn to the fact that here is food and a utensil, something we human beings use daily. I could have left those same objects out in my kitchen. They summon the absence of the person who cut and ate the sausage and bread. In a Chardin still life, there are human beings just outside the frame. Morandi’s groupings of objects do not resemble everyday kitchen scenes. The things he chose are solely for his perception. That is their only utility. In Chardin, I know that a glass of water is for drinking, the garlic for food preparation. In Morandi, a cup is to be seen. I can say, “that’s a cup” or “that’s a representation of a cup,” but I feel a certain uneasiness when I name it. The cup has somehow been denatured of its cupness, not entirely, but partly. Only we know that a cup is a cup, a tree is a tree. Language is of course far more than naming; it is a symbolic, intersubjective self-referential system of signs we use to structure a meaningful existence among ourselves. If you and I are standing in my living room, you will suspect I am hallucinating if I tell you there is a frog on the floor and you don’t see one, but not if I point to the floor and say floor, because we are sharing that entity in our visual field and we both speak English. Language is also internal. We use it to carry on our running monologues or private inner dialogues as we go about our lives.

In Morandi’s work, I feel a desire, at least partially, to unhinge the thing from its name, a desire that is closely related to Cézanne. Cézanne wanted to strip perception of conventional expectations, to see anew. Expectation, in its broadest sense, is vital to perceive anything. We see what we expect to see, which is shaped in part by our memories of having seen things before and in part by our brains’ innate neural wiring for vision. But we also see what we pay attention to, and we cannot pay attention to everything in an image at once. Anne Treisman, a scientist studying perception, has proposed a sequence for visual perception — a preattentive process: we are quickly able to scan a scene when elementary properties such as color, brightness, or an orientation of lines are present that make it possible for us to distinguish figure from ground. This cursory first look has obvious evolutionary value. If your eyes can quickly detect that the tiger is separate from the woods behind him, you are less likely to be eaten. Preattentive vision encodes qualities such as color, orientation, size, and motion. It is then followed by an attentive process which proceeds serially and more slowly. An example of Treisman’s work in the textbook Principles of Neural Science helps illustrate this. If she shows you a painting made up entirely of blue Ts interrupted by a single red one and asks you to identify the unique element, the red T will pop out almost instantly. On the other hand, if she shows you a painting of blue Ts and Ls, red Ls, and a single red T, the lone red T will not be apparent to you without a bit of searching. It requires a higher level of cognition to distinguish it. You have to shift your attention from one letter to the next to discover the lone red T.⁴

Visual perception is not fully understood. For example, it is known that the many visual areas of the brain specialize in certain kinds of recognition — color, form, movement — but how these various areas or neural pathways in the brain come together to create a coherent image remains a mystery and is often called “the binding problem.” What is known is that human beings are not passive receptors of the out there. Our embodied minds are actively both creating and interpreting what we see. This corresponds to a Morandian vision: We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. It is also not known how we become conscious of something out there in the world. There is unconscious vision, subliminal information that never reaches consciousness because it is seen too briefly, for example, but even an unconsciously registered image can affect us emotionally. The role language plays in consciousness is hotly debated, but it is safe to say that I cannot speak about something I am not conscious of (although, as Freud has shown, something may pop out of my mouth inadvertently into the light of day — a slip of the tongue that tells you what’s going on just below the surface). Nevertheless, I cannot identify a cup as such in a painting without a self-reflective awareness of that object.

Morandi, it seems to me, actively investigates the drama of perception, and he plays with both levels of vision — the preattentive and the attentive. He once said, “The only interest the visible world awakens in me concerns space, light, color, and forms.”⁵ These are what might be called the essentials of vision, but note that he does not mention content. The cups and trees he brought up with Roditi, which stand in for his two painterly genres, still life and landscape, are not mentioned. This is because the linguistic identities of the collection of things or the houses and gardens in the natural scenes don’t truly matter. It would be preposterous to say that Morandi didn’t know he was painting bottles, jars, cups, houses, and trees. He meditated on his still-life objects for years, made a world of them, shifted them around, put them in various lights, and painted them again and again. But if you have ever looked long enough at a thing, you will notice that one of the first aspects to vanish is the word for the thing. Other qualities come to the fore. I did a test with the Perrier bottle sitting on my desk. First I noticed its green color, the shape of its body and neck standing out against the clutter of my desk. Then I looked for a while at the vague print of its label on the other side. Then the light from my window illuminating its round side suddenly became a form in itself, as did a single ragged spot of light at the object’s base. The more I looked, the more I saw. I noticed tiny drops of water inside the round exterior and their pattern, the distorted line of my bookshelf seen through the glass as another shape with another color — a pale green. My attention transformed it. And that was five minutes. Imagine looking at it and some carefully selected cousin objects for years and then painting or drawing them. Even my brief experiment makes it clear that while looking attentively, I focused successively on the various characteristics of the bottle. My visual experience was one of roaming, moving my eyes to discover further qualities. It took time, and as time went on, there was an unfolding of the object in all its variety. And as I looked, the light in my room changed, so the glints, reflections, and transparency of the bottle were altered, too. This happened, and could only happen, in relation to me. As Edmund Husserl puts it in “Perception, Spatiality and the Body,” “The same unchanged form has a changing appearance, according to its relation to my body…”⁶

Deep concentration on space, light, color, and forms necessarily alienates things from their linguistic identities. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning, such as we attach to it. What my cursory attention gleans first, the figure of the bottle in front of my bookshelf, loses its importance as other qualities capture my eyes. After a while the shifting light has changed the thing entirely, creating what is almost another object, certainly a visually different one. Morandi’s still lifes, particularly his late works, the achievements of a master’s eyes, seem to depict the experience of perceptual duration inside a single canvas — that is, his art appears to include the shifts of attention that reveal various qualities of a single thing or a group of things in the narrative of looking, including what was with what is. The bottle illuminated by the light of a minute ago isn’t identical to the light on the bottle now, but the image can carry both. The painting can preserve the memory. And so Morandi creates ambiguity about both the where and the what in his images. There are many examples of this. When I first look at one of his pictures, I pick out objects against a background. I identify some things by name. My eyes see an object in front of another, but as I continue to look, I imagine that it has receded or that what I identified as a thing may in fact be a shadow. Shapes begin to bleed into one another or appear to push against the object next to it, invading its space. There are deep shaded areas between objects that pull me in and separate them, and other times I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins. A bottle begins to look as if it is teetering on top of another, or a box rests just at the horizon or table line, so the thing and the line merge. It is as if different moments of perception over time have been remembered in the same image. Gottfried Boehm, in his essay “Giorgio Morandi’s Artistic Concept,” refers to this as “the pulsation of pictorial elements” and notes that despite this illusion of movement, “a calm overall impression keeps reestablishing itself.”⁷ This is undoubtedly true. My ambivalence about where or what doesn’t create chaos or distress in me.

Boehm discovers a paradoxical reality in these images: “In his pictures Morandi allows us to participate in a temporal order that is optimistic and immaterial at the core of its experience. The objects are disembodied as they embody themselves. In the midst of fleeting time the artist is able to create a place with solidity and presence.”⁸ It is half of the paradox, the sense of the immaterial and the disembodied, which has led me to speculate about transcendent meanings in Morandi.⁹ The experience of looking for a long time at one of his paintings can begin to feel as if one is looking at the representations of ghosts of things, not of things themselves, but then it is also true that the objects may reappear again as representations of matter. Those fluctuations are also vital to the curious emotional world of the pictures, which I am not at all sure can be characterized as optimistic.

All perception is accompanied by feeling, even if we sense a kind of neutrality or equilibrium about what we’re looking at, what the neurologist Antonio Damasio calls “background feelings” that are always present in us as subjects.¹⁰ Good art necessarily has an emotional component, and because emotion consolidates memory, it also helps us to remember a work of art — take it with us in our minds, not an identical copy, but some version of it or recollection of the experience. Henry James articulated this idea beautifully: “In the arts feeling is meaning.”¹¹ Morandi does not produce in me the emotional waves I feel when I look at Chardin, whose work has brought me close to tears. The project is different. But, as with Chardin, the traces of Morandi’s brush on the canvases or the stroke of a line in a drawing act on me emotionally and are crucial to the dialectic of stillness and movement which in the end create subtle alterations in mood. Hints of disturbance and imbalance are here, quivers, hoverings, and somber colors that evoke melancholy. Color falls into the preattentive visual scheme. Before we can even name a hue, we have felt it as a sensory reality in our bodies. Blue and green affect us differently from red and yellow. As Kym Maclaren argues in an essay on embodied perception, “That the stimuli of short duration produce an effect in persons’ bodies before a color is explicitly sensed, suggests that it is our sensitive-perceptual motor body, and not a knowing, thinking subject, that senses colors.”¹² Color acts in us, and Morandi is a nuanced observer of color revealed by light and its essential instability.

To feel Morandi, it’s important to see the actual paintings and not look only at reproductions. And it is also, I think, vital to re-create to some degree the perceptual drama of the studio — to stand and look long and hard at a single picture and see what happens. Apparently, this is what Morandi himself did with his own works even after they were done. According to Janet Abramowicz, who knew the artist, after he had become famous and his pictures were in great demand, he made his collectors wait for them. Once he had finished a painting he did not let it go right away. Instead, she writes, he “would hang it on a wall with others that explored the same theme and observe the sequential development of that particular series. At that time he would often write the name of the future owner on the wooden stretchers of the finished painting, but the canvas would remain on Morandi’s wall until he felt he had studied it sufficiently.”¹³ He didn’t alter the images; he meditated on them.

You may not weep when you look at these pictures, but you will be fascinated by the delineated spaces, the muted colors with the surprise of a yellow or blue, the openings and relations among apparent objects, the wobbles on a fluted form that act on the body like a tremor, solid blocks that begin to vanish into blur, houses that resemble blocks, boxes or blocks like houses, bottles like buildings, dense areas that might be things and might be space, and with continued study, all of this does take on a spiritual quality. Spiritual is a difficult word, but I am not using it as a stand-in for the supernatural or God, although Morandi was a Catholic and did go to church. I am thinking of something far more common, which is that if I open myself fully and turn my whole attention onto these canvases for an extended period, if I shut out thoughts about what I’m going to have for dinner, or the book I was reading yesterday, or the fact that my shoes are pinching me, or the comments of fellow spectators, and give myself over to what I am seeing, there will be an accompanying feeling of strangeness and utter muteness, even transcendence, rather like what happens to people who meditate and speak of sensing their deep connections to things in the world, of an empty self, and vanishing boundaries. Indeed, if you look long enough at a single object, you yourself, your “I-ness,” will vanish in the fullness of the image you are looking at. I am not proposing Morandi as Zen master, but rather suggesting that the pictures themselves partake of a psychology of vision that occurs when the ordinary semantic meanings we ascribe to things have not disappeared entirely but have loosened their hold, and through an open embracing vision of what appears, the ordinary acquires the attributes of the extraordinary.

Morandi’s images do not dissolve into total abstraction, although some of his late watercolors get very close. The artist’s flat rejection of metaphysical realism — the idea that we can truly know the real—is not the same as saying that we don’t see the world, but rather that what we see is filtered through us. Subject and object are not so easily separated in this view. I think Morandi’s insistence on the abstract character of the real is a way to say: This canvas is my perception, is my reality. It represents what I have actually seen. From this perspective, Morandi is not clinging to the figurative but acknowledging that figure remains part of his understanding of what had been there for him in its fluctuating temporal reality, and which is now an immutable record or form of that experience.

Abramowicz writes that in 1955 Morandi confessed to her that if he had been born twenty years later, he would have been an abstract painter.¹⁴ Roditi pressed Morandi about abstraction and Mondrian in his interview, but Morandi refused to acknowledge any connection to the Dutchman or his project. But then he was reluctant to be linked to any artist he didn’t explicitly acknowledge as important to him, and actively tried to suppress a monograph that had been written about him by his friend, the art critic Arcangeli, because it placed his work in a historical perspective. Whatever the artist’s speculations on his fate had he been born later, by 1955 abstraction had had a long history, and Morandi was deeply interested in what his fellow artists were up to all over the world. If he had wanted to cut all links to representation, he would have done it. My belief is that Morandi needed objects of scrutiny, because the act of looking and painting, not the act of painting alone, is the true subject matter of his work.

When I draw a thing in front of me, I have always felt that it is as if I am touching it. My hand traces what I feel is its shape. I am not thinking about where my hand is moving. I am looking and rendering. The two acts aren’t separate but one and the same process. The work involves my whole attention. I don’t narrate the process usually; it doesn’t seem to need words in order to do it. Let us say I am drawing the Perrier bottle; that bottle becomes paramount, completely absorbing. The sight of the bottle and my hand on the paper merge in a single action. And I lose myself. As Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi point out in their book The Phenomenological Mind, “The body tries to stay out of the way so we can get on with our task; it tends to efface itself on its way to its intentional goal. We do not normally monitor our movements in an explicitly conscious manner, although … we do have a prereflective awareness of our body in very general terms … but this prereflective awareness is not very detailed. I can say that I am reaching out to grasp a cup, but my sense of this is oriented toward the goal or intentional project I am involved in and not toward the specifics of my movement. I can’t say very much about how I shape my hand in order to pick up a cup.”¹⁵ This is because we have a proprioceptive sense of our bodies, a body schema, which does not require explicit consciousness. If we had to think through every gesture, our lives would be a misery. Unlike reaching for a cup, art requires editing and thought as well, but finding the rightness one is looking for and knowing when to stop is a mysterious process and emerges from places in the mind that are often hidden. The result — the art we hang on the wall — becomes the tangible record of that dynamic embodied experience of perceiving and making. Nature is within us, said Cézanne. “We speak of ‘inspiration,’” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted.”¹⁶

Morandi’s cast-off objects, his bottles, cups, boxes, coffeepots, saucers, and cloths, often asymmetrical and worn, became vehicles in the inspiration and expiration of Being. The humbler, the blanker, the dustier, the more undistinguished the things, the better, because they offered themselves up to the eyes of the painter without context or assigned meanings. He knew he wanted to paint the unknowable — that abstract objective reality — which we have parsed and articulated for ourselves as cups and trees. When I visited the Morandi museum in Bologna, I looked into the small space where the artist’s workroom has been reproduced, and was seized by a terrible poignancy. The strangeness of the project became obvious. There was something withdrawn and retentive at the core of this bachelor’s personality, and stubborn, too. He did what he did. I looked at his chair, his hat, and the jumble of pedestrian objects that he had carefully gathered and saved to paint. They looked so abandoned, so unremarkable, so irretrievably banal that in that moment they summoned for me only the artist’s death, the great gaping absence of the man whose Being had enchanted them.

2008

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Art is not about art. Art is about life.

L. B.

A TINY, SLENDER WOMAN WITH LONG hair tied back in a ponytail, regal posture, a shrewd expression, and a forceful walk swept through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, an entourage of young men trailing behind her. She was dressed in black, something dramatic, and her presence acted on the room like a bolt of electricity. “Who is that?” I asked my husband. “Louise Bourgeois.” “Oh, of course,” I answered. A couple of years earlier, in 1982, The Museum of Modern Art had mounted a major show of her work. Curated by Deborah Wye, the exhibition brought the seventy-one-year-old Bourgeois, who had been showing painting and sculpture in New York since the forties, into the art world limelight.

That was the only time I saw her in the flesh. After a couple of minutes, she vanished, followers in tow. Although the details may not be perfect, my memory of what I felt as I looked at her is vivid — a mixture of awe, fascination, and amusement. There was a theatrical quality to her sudden entrance, as if she had staged it for our benefit. Louise Bourgeois is now ninety-five and still making art. The Tate Modern will show more than two hundred of her works in an exhibition that opens October 11 and will run until January 20. It’s a major retrospective that includes many of her most famous sculptures as well as less well-known pieces that were made during seven decades of intense artistic labor.

The story of Louise Bourgeois’s early life has become so enmeshed with her work that many critics have been seduced into biographical or psychoanalytic readings of the art, densely punctuated with pithy pronouncements from the artist, who is also a prolific writer: “My name is Louise Josephine Bourgeois. I was born 24 December 1911. All my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects have found their inspiration in my childhood. My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.”¹ Or perhaps more tantalizing (at least for someone with an analytic bent): “50 years old be kept in the dark — result rage result — frustration from knowing/10 years old unsatisfied curiosity — rage outrage result rage/kept out/1 year old — abandoned — why do they leave me/where are they/3 month old — famished and forgotten/1 month old — fear of death.”²

The second of three (surviving) children, Bourgeois began her life on the Left Bank, where her parents owned and operated a gallery. Later, the family moved to Choisy-le-Roi and then to Antony. Her father served as a soldier during the First World War, was wounded at the front, and after his return, the family opened a tapestry restoration studio, where Louise learned to draw in order to assist in the family business. She suffered terribly when her father brought his mistress, an Englishwoman, Sadie, into the house under the pretext that she was the children’s tutor, a situation his wife, Josephine, an avowed feminist, tolerated. Sadie stayed for ten years. Louise attended the Lycée Fenelon, and in 1932 studied mathematics for a short time at the Sorbonne. That same year, she cared for her critically ill mother, who died in her presence in September. Bourgeois left the Sorbonne for various art schools. At one of them she had Fernand Léger as a teacher. She knew the Surrealists, but understood they had little use for a woman artist and was frankly irritated by their preaching and antics. In 1938, she met the art historian Robert Goldwater, married him, and moved to New York, where she has lived and worked ever since.

Stories that are told and retold harden. Part of the pleasure we take in fairy tales and myths is that their forms are fixed, but family stories often turn rigid as well. Our narratives about tormented fathers or depressed mothers or suicides or lost money serve to explain ourselves. They order the chaotic and fragmentary character of memory, which is not stable, but dynamic and subject to change. Bourgeois’s tale of the family interloper has been reiterated time and again both by the artist and by her critics since she first revealed it in Artforum in 1982 under the title “Child Abuse,”³ but neither it, nor any other story or poetic utterance from her writings, can explain her art. The work has its own oblique vocabulary, its own internal logic or anti-logic, its own stories to tell, that resist placing an external narrative, no matter how titillating, on top of it. Its meanings are made in the encounter between the viewer and the art object, an experience that is sensual, emotional, intellectual, and dependent on both the attention and expectations of the person doing the looking.

Before I had read a word about or by Louise Bourgeois, I was fascinated by the emotional power of her work, how it stirred up old pains and fears, summoned complex and often contradictory associations, or echoed my own obsessions with rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, nameless threats, the comfort of order, and the distress of ambiguity. Bourgeois can take you to strange and hidden places in yourself. This is her gift. What may be deeply personal for her finds its translation in art that is far too mysterious to be confessional. Throughout her long career, however, there are repetitive themes and forms that appear in multifarious guises and mutations. From the paintings first shown in 1947 under the collective title Femme Maison to the mesmerizing Cells of the nineties, the artist has vigorously reinvented versions of the body/house — as refuge, trap, a bit of both — and she has done it with an eye and mind that interrogates the history of art as well as the human psyche.

The mind and its memories as a metaphorical place, topos, is ancient. Freud, too, was fond of a spatial trope — archaeology. Dig and you shall find. Repressed memories. Screen memories. Fantasies. For Aristotle, every memory has two parts: simulacrum, a likeness or image, and intentio, an emotional color that is an associative link to a person’s inner chain of experiences. Word association as a clue to unconscious processes would become an essential part of psychiatry in the nineteenth century, and today brain scientists know that emotion is crucial to memory. What we don’t feel, we forget. I have come to think of Bourgeois as an artist who roams the antechambers of a charged past, looting it for material she reconfigures as external places and beings or being-places. The house/women of Femme Maison are in and of the architecture that can’t hold their huge but vulnerable bodies. The debt to Surrealism is obvious. As in Magritte’s Le Modèle Rouge (1935) in which boots and feet are one, Bourgeois makes the container the contained. But while the impulse in Surrealism was always toward objectification— turning person into thing — Bourgeois’s does exactly the opposite. The inanimate houses come alive.

Her early sculptures, or Personnages, first shown in 1949, are thin, life-size rough-hewn wooden figures that have often been cited as an early example of installation art. These abstract tower/beings or “presences” inhabit a room in relation to one another and to the visitors who come to see them. “They were about people in my mind,” Bourgeois said in an interview. Stiff, hacked, and precariously anchored, one expects them to teeter or even topple. When I look at Sleeping Figure, I think of someone on crutches. Portrait of Jean-Louis is a boy-skyscraper. A work from the same period, the abstract The Blind Leading the Blind, with its long multiple legs, feels startlingly like an advancing crowd. But these objects also resemble three-dimensional signs or characters from an unknown language inscribed in space. Like letters, they are stand-ins for what isn’t there, tactile ghosts.

Bourgeois’s sculptures from the sixties, when she left wood and began to work in latex, plaster, bronze, and marble, look different but reprise her themes. The rigid anatomies and architectures of the fifties seem to have been melted down into organic forms that summon genitalia, internal organs, stones, fossils, caves, primitive huts, as well as the work of other sculptors from Bernini to Brancusi. Labyrinthine Tower (1962) is a phallic spiral. The Lairs, Cumuls, and Soft Landscapes are variously disquieting and comforting, suggestive of phallic outcroppings, womblike retreats, and baroque drapery. The suspended bronze Januses are phallic, pelvic, labial, mammary, and ocular. “Oh my God, it’s a penis!” becomes “Well, not really, sort of, but it’s also…” The unstable borders, sliding recognitions, aggressive sexual ambiguity, and visions of the body amputated, in pieces, or sprouting extra parts, evoke a world in which perception is not yet structured by language, a hallucinatory prelingusitic space of primal drives. A nod to Freud’s “polymorphous perverse,” perhaps? It’s not strange that critics have called upon the theories of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan to explicate the work of a woman who was once quoted as saying, “Psychoanalysis is my religion.”

The Destruction of the Father (1974) illustrates the difficulty faced by those trying to interpret Bourgeois’s art, because the object and the narrative that accompanies it have become inseparable. The thing looks like a stage with its frame, draped fabric, and internal red illumination. A gigantic mouth or maw with mounds above and below holds at its center cast animal bones, as well as lumps and protuberances. The story, told in first- and third-person versions by the artist, is that “we” or “the children” leap up onto the table and eat the father — an “oral drama.” Part Greek tragedy, part Totem and Taboo, the exciting fantasy of eating Dad may be implicit in what we see, but it is not explicit. Revenge for Sadie? Feminist politics through the language of Kleinian child analysis? These are just two proposed solutions that, however well meant, pinch the work and don’t begin to capture its wounded, raw, ambivalent feeling.

The artist’s intellectual sophistication, her mordant commentary, and the weight of the theory brought to bear on her work can quickly obfuscate rather than reveal what’s in front of us. Even when a visual reference is explicit, as in the Arch of Hysteria, critics are quick to jump to conclusions, which are then passed from one to the next. The body in most versions of Bourgeois’s arch is male. Art writers have repeatedly glossed this as a feminist inversion of Jean-Martin Charcot’s idea that hysteria is an illness exclusive to women. But the nineteenth-century neurologist (with whom Freud studied) firmly believed in, wrote about, lectured on, and treated “traumatic male hysteria.” In the Bibliotèque Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris there is a photograph of a naked man in the arc en circle. I am convinced Bourgeois knows the picture — the similarity is striking. Although the connotations of hysteria then and now are undeniably sexist, and the artist may have wanted to play with that assumption, her use of the image addresses something else: an ongoing fascination with psychic/somatic states, with explosive tension as well as its opposite — flaccid exhaustion and withdrawal.

One version of the arch is part of a Cell (1992–93), in which the man has lost his head and arms, perhaps to the saw that stands nearby in the enclosure. Under him, on his bed or covered board, I read the words Je t’aime written by hand in red over and over again like an incantation. I love the Cells, and there are several in the show. For me, they hold the attraction of forbidden places in my childhood — an erotic tug to see what’s in there. They both lure and frighten me. They beckon me in and keep me out. Sometimes I can peer through an open door. Other times I look through the cage walls. In Eyes and Mirrors (1993) I confront my own voyeurism. In Choisy (1990–1993) a guillotine hangs ominously over a marble house, and I imagine it being cut in two. My body. My house. I can’t help writing stories for these enigmatic spaces, in which I feel both violence and love. They are like mute, motionless narratives, and even when one doesn’t know that much of the iconography is personal — the house is a model of the Bourgeois family house in Choisy, the tapestries in Spider recall the restoration work of Josephine — its intimacy is palpable. And while the artist makes use of found objects — beds, chairs, spools, perfume bottles, keys, for example — their placement and proximity to sculptures of body parts or abstract forms create an atmosphere of only partial legibility and turn the Cells into machines of metaphorical association and recollection for the viewer. I clutch at the fragments of my early memories through the familiar architecture of my childhood house that allows me to locate my experience in space. Without that frame, the memories are suspended in emptiness. But memories change, too. Each time we remember an event, the present tinges the past, which is always also imaginary. The Cells gives us enchanted access to that fragile topos where memory and fantasy merge.

The most recent pieces in the show are made of fabric, more Bourgeoisian bodies, many of them injured, some of them unhoused or suspended. The rooms have vanished. One of the bed partners in the headless pair of Couple IV (2001–2002) wears a prosthetic leg. The Three Horizontals (1998), mounted one above the other, like diminishing versions of the same person, are amputees. Their soft anatomies appear to have been torn and mended. The aching expression on the face of Rejection (2001–2002) makes me want to reach into the box, take out the poor head, and cradle it in my arms. I know that these sewn, scarred figures are disturbing, but for me they are also among the most beautiful and compassionate works Bourgeois has made. They are dolls of loss and mortality. I am looking at myself. I am looking at all of us. The artist brings back the Arch of Hysteria (2000), this time as a woman. She hangs in the air, her wounds stitched up, but her body alive in its shallow arc. Louise Bourgeois is old, but the vigor of her imagination is clearly ageless. She once said that her sculpture is her body. If I could choose one work from her, I would pick Seven in a Bed (2001), a late piece of manic joy — sweet, erotic, and funny. But neither I nor the artist can choose. The body of Louise Bourgeois is multiple and potent. It borrows from and transforms the vocabularies of modern art. It is feminine and masculine, terrified and bold, soft and hard. It speaks in the language of space and form and plays with both recognition and strangeness.

In his essay for the Tate’s catalogue, Robert Storr proposes an “unreading” of Louise Bourgeois, the theoretical object.⁴ This is wise. I propose that you go to the Tate Modern and look long and hard at the work. After that, you may want to read what has been said by and about this extraordinary artist. And then, you may want to unread all of it, not excluding the words I have offered here.

2007

OLD PICTURES

PHOTOGRAPHS HAVE LONG BEEN SEEN as markers of the past, a way of preserving what was in what is. Unlike paintings, which can invent a subject, photographs preserve a subject in a real moment in time. Despite the fact that well before the era of Photoshop, camera images were manipulated (remember the Cottingley fairies), it is an idea that has had long-standing power. What fascinates me most about photographs are their personal and public uses as tokens of memory and the fact that their efficiency, or lack of it, in terms of seeing and remembering, works precisely to the degree that they are not like visual perception and memory in the brain. Photographs are produced mechanically, which means that, unlike painting, they are created outside human perception, but, like paintings, they exist as representations outside our bodies. At the same time, we look at photographs with our eyes. The vagaries of human vision apply to photos just as they do to all other perceived objects.

The visual and the linguistic occupy different sites in the brain. Roger Sperry’s famous studies on split-brain patients, people with intractable epilepsy who had their corpus callosums severed to end their seizures, a procedure that separated the language-dominant left hemisphere from the right, illuminate the complexities of perception. By briefly flashing an image on a screen to such patients, Sperry discovered that he could provide information to the right hemisphere that the left couldn’t access. For example, he projected pornographic pictures to a female split-brain patient, who blushed and giggled accordingly, but was unable to identify what she had seen or explain why she was embarrassed. Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, in their book The Brain and the Inner World, sum up the findings in this way: “For someone to reflect consciously on visual experiences, he or she has to recode the visual experience into words. This capacity is lost when the left (verbal) hemisphere is disconnected from the original visual experience.”¹

Perception and its crucial cohort, memory, are complex dynamic systems in the brain and have both implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) features. Although scientists once subscribed to a primitive notion of memory storage — you perceived an object and then lodged it intact in your memory — neuroscientists now believe that when you retrieve a memory, you are not retrieving an original memory but rather the memory you last retrieved. In other words, we edit. Memory changes. It is now obvious that the brain is not a camera; it is not a computer; it is not a machine. Despite the fact that new technologies are developing seeing-machines that can recognize people and objects, and many of us work with remembering-machines, our computers, every day, there is little lust for machines that, to use the neuroscience term, reconsolidate memories over time, that unknowingly rewrite or reconfigure the scenes and faces of the past. Digital alteration is a tool for the conscious, not the unconscious mind.

The “truth” factor in photographs is founded on the notion that the camera, unlike our frail and inaccurate brains, has what John Berger calls a “supernatural eye.”² This has been seen as the camera’s advantage and was the reason why it was hailed as a great scientific tool — and has proved to be one. When the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot wrote, “I am nothing more than a photographer. I inscribe what I see,”³ he was giving himself a high compliment. Albert Londe, director of the photography department at the Salpêtrière (Charcot’s hospital in Paris) called the photographic plate “the scientist’s true retina.”⁴ What Charcot and Londe failed to see was that photography, then still young, had already been codified by conventions, many of them borrowed from painting and sculpture, and that the images they took of the women in the hysteria ward to document what Charcot called the iconography of hysteria — a series of frozen, beautifully lit images of its postures, contractions, and seizures — now look both artificial and Romantic. The photography of science was as prey to ideology then as it is now. Whether its subject is a hysterical girl or Martian dust, the machine fixes what it sees and lures the viewer into the feeling that the static image or the bit of moving film is an avenue for retrieval, a way to get the thing or person back.

Every photographed subject becomes a sign of disappearance because it belongs to the past. That’s why each family photo, even if it was taken last week, carries in it a quality of bereavement, of loss. In Roland Barthes’s meditation, Camera Lucida, he confesses that he continues to stare at the picture of his dead mother in the hope that he may discover “what is behind.” “I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to know its truth (and sometimes naïvely I confide this task to a laboratory). I believe that by enlarging the detail … I will finally reach my mother’s very being.”⁵ Barthes longs to recover something of the living woman and what she meant to him, but as John Berger points out in “Uses of Photography,” “… unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning.”⁶

Berger elaborates by saying that to have meaning, a photograph must be rooted in time and narrative. We surround the pictures with our stories. My father died in early February last year, and since his death, like Barthes before me, I have repeatedly looked at a few photographs of him — one of him as a child with his sister, one of him grinning in his army uniform, another when he was somewhat older, by then a professor, whose hair loss was aggravated by the malaria that plagued him even after he returned from the Pacific, and a last picture of my father when he was dying. Before his death, I did not feel much need to look at these images, but now I do. I look at the photographs of my father because I have assigned them a meaning that is part of my story of him, but the pictures are distinct from my recollections. They are mechanical ghosts, a series of empty phantoms that nevertheless serve as traces of him, the man. Through them, I hope to remind myself of his plural appearances as he aged, because in my memory his faces have merged — the young father, the older father, and the eighty-one-year-old father near death.

Unlike photographs, living memory is exclusive, not inclusive. For example, when I remember an important conversation I had with my father years ago, during which he asked me rather pointedly if I really wanted to become a professor, I recall exactly where the conversation took place: on the lawn in front of my parents’ house. It’s early summer and the grass beneath our feet is new and green, and I feel the presence of my father beside me and have a vague sense that his expression has a certain kindly earnestness, but his features at that moment, when he was only a few years older than I am now, are lost. Classical theories of memory understood the importance of place as an organizing principle of mnemotechnics. According to Cicero, it all began with an episode in the life of Simonides, the pre-Socratic lyric poet, who identified the mangled corpses of people who had been at a banquet when the roof collapsed on top of them because he remembered where they had been sitting. Cicero writes, “He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (memory) must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities…”⁷ My memory of the place and the question my father asked are fixed — the rest is flux. In good Ciceronian fashion, I attached my father’s words to a locality and remembered what I wished to keep, namely that my father had no vested interest in my becoming a professor, that he rather wished I wouldn’t, and the words he uttered that day became in memory his tacit blessing for my writing ambitions.

This event is part of my extended consciousness, what neuropsychologists call “episodic memory,” and the neural networks involved depend heavily on the cerebral cortex, the language zones of the left hemisphere, and particularly on the superstructure of the left temporal lobes. In other words, episodic memory jettisons peripheral information in favor of a reduced but highly efficient version of what happened, which relies strongly on words. The episodic memory then becomes part of what Antonio Damasio calls “autobiographical memory”⁸ which is the ongoing narrative of the self. Episodic memory is that which says “I.” “I remember…” Obviously, a great deal more was going on at the time between my father and me, a foggy emotional and sensual resonance that I retain, as well as forgotten aspects of our talk that I can’t summon by saying, “I remember.” My father’s comments were often oblique and called for interpretation on my part, and that interpretation is not static; it may go on for a lifetime. Had someone taken a snapshot of the two of us that day on the lawn, the picture might have become a ground for memory. I might have included details frozen in the photo that are now lost to me. The image might have become a sign of the conversation, and rather than remaining internalized in my memory, I might have seen myself with my father from a distance as an observer rather than as an actor. I have also attached memories to the wrong places. Not long ago, I realized that an early memory I have from my fourth year was taking place in the wrong house. For years I had been seeing that little event unfold in a house that hadn’t been built yet. Somewhere along the line, the memory was reconsolidated, and one architecture replaced another. Like many people, I have also mistaken a photograph for a childhood recollection, an inversion that casts light on yet another problem: false memory.

The way I use my father’s photographs is intensely private. They are flat, silent tokens of my love for the living man, the man with whom I had a complicated relation for many years, the person I can never resurrect, but who exists for me as an essential part of the narrative of my own life, but they don’t function as catalysts for memory. They are aliens, which may in fact interfere with my remembrance of him. They simultaneously fascinate and hurt me because I can’t help but think of their kinship to corpses — those shells of nonbeing, the dead.

We necessarily assign meaning to pictures and use them, not only as documents of personal memory, but as imaginary objects to titillate, revolt, comfort, delude, or justify us. In the broader culture, photographs can become signs of collective dreams or traumas. For most New Yorkers, even the most boring shot of the Twin Towers triggers an onslaught of personal memories because we ground or place the image in the story of our lives. If the same shot were part of a montage, like the ones that appeared on television soon after the attack — a firefighter wading through debris, heroic music playing, followed by an inset of an American flag waving in the wind — there is suddenly far less room for private memory. Such a sequence of images is the visual equivalent of a slogan. The words that might encapsulate its meaning appear only as vague abstractions — courage and patriotism. Like a commercial, it is intended to create an emotional response. Our perception is being directed. As David Levi-Strauss writes in his essay “Photography and Belief,” “the first question must always be: Who is using this photograph and to what end?”⁹ He also argues that propaganda of this kind works because people believe what they want to believe. This is obvious. Those who are convinced that the earth is flat, that men never walked on the moon, that the Holocaust did not happen, that no Jews died on September 11, or that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the catastrophe on that day are not convinced by documentary films or photographs that “prove” them wrong. But then mass propaganda isn’t new, and its most forceful implementation remains repetition: show the same pictures and utter the same words over and over and over again. George Bush successively used this technique in the last American election. The public was inundated with footage of the president repeating the same phrases in front of carefully screened, cheering crowds. And yet, these images did not sway me, and I was hardly alone. Propaganda often reinforces a desire or belief that is already present in the viewer.

A larger question is: Has photography and its uses, both personal and public, altered our perception of what is real and not real? In her famous essay “On Photography,” Susan Sontag argues that “the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened.” It is so weak, in fact, that she declares, “It is common now for people to insist about their experiences of a violent event in which they are caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that it seemed like a movie. This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was.”¹⁰ But exactly the reverse is true. If people summon movies under such circumstances, it is precisely to describe how unreal the event felt. Terrifying violence often creates dissociated responses in people, an eerie sense of detachment from the horror, as if they are not participants but observers. The person who, after a car crash, sees herself lying on the highway from above; the soldier who witnesses his buddy’s horrific death but relates it as if it had happened to someone else; or the child who, after being beaten repeatedly, acquires the ability to “disappear” from his own pain all suffer from a form of adaptive unreality. Pierre Janet, the neurologist and philosopher, coined the term dissociation in the late nineteenth century for a psychobiological split within a traumatized person. As van der Kolk and van der Hart, two contemporary researchers on trauma, put it: “Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental schemas, and be transformed into narrative language.”¹¹ More simply stated, some horrible experiences are not taken in as ordinary autobiographical, episodic memories. They are qualitatively different, and in some cases, this results in numbing, or the feeling that you and/or your surroundings are unreal. Before movies existed, a person suffering from this sensation of unreality might have evoked the theater.

This notion, however, that “the real” has been degraded by our relation to photographic images, that we as a culture are numb to grotesque pictures of war and mayhem, has become a cultural truism, endlessly regurgitated, as if there were no need for further debate. Moreover, the explosion of visual technologies has caused us to lose the ability to discriminate between an object and its copy. In “The Procession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard writes, with considerable rhetorical flourish, that we (at least those of us who are citizens of the United States) are living in a culture in which “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation.”¹² It is important to point out that neither Sontag nor Baudrillard would subscribe to naïve realism, the idea that we can truly know external reality. They would agree that human beings gain access to the outside world through our perceptions of it, which is necessarily a limited view of things. And yet, a distinction remains between a life being lived and the mechanical images of a life being lived. Through a complicated evolution of poststructuralist thinking, it became fashionable in some circles to think that people have been entirely remade or “constructed” by our new techno world, that even our human needs have been altered. In an era of reality TV, celebrity culture, and ever-growing digital technologies, has modern life, as Baudrillard would have it, dissolved entirely into simulacra? At the end of his essay he urges readers to stage “a fake hold-up,” an action he argues is doomed to failure because “the artificial signs” will be mixed with “real elements.” If a police officer believes you are a real robber, he may shoot you. But this would have been true in 1730 as well. Confusion of this order is very old indeed.

There is little doubt that late capitalism relies heavily on an endless parade of images, which, while seductive, are essentially empty and intended to make sure that people consume more and more products. Indeed, Madison Avenue’s job is to create needs we didn’t know we had. Celebrity means turning a human being into a vacant commodity that can be bought and sold literally as image only, and it can proliferate — be everywhere at once — on the Internet. Reality TV is an oxymoron. Wars are sold (and unsold) to the public through the camera lens. A short list will suffice: Vietnam, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib. And photographs have now obtained what Walter Benjamin famously claimed in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” they did not have: aura. An artist’s photo, video, or film, despite the fact that it’s endlessly reproducible, may command a very high price. It has “cult value.” Artists are using digital technology to make art, another tool among many. Baudelaire’s diatribe against the idea that photography is not art because it is divorced from dream seems antiquated. All of this is true. It is also true that images affect us; they may even addle our brains with nonsense the way chivalric romance took over poor Quixote. Movies and photographs have entered both my dreams and my fictions.

There is something intellectually exciting about taking an idea and pushing it to its logical conclusion. It is also fun to make grand claims for one’s own era, for its singularity, its never-have-we-been-here-before quality, and ironically perhaps, there is visceral delight in pronouncements that things are truly bad now, worse than ever, and that people have become so stupefied by media they have lost all sense of a felt, lived reality. Of course, those who make these claims occupy a special position. They are not duped. They see it all clearly. I am not so confident. I do know I have a routine faith in the reality of my immediate sensory world that I do not have when I watch a movie or look at an image on the Internet, however much I may be caught up in it. At the same time, when I was faced with the catastrophe of September 11 and feared for the safety of my daughter and my two sisters and their families, I had to say to myself, “This is real. This has happened.” I also know that after a car accident, as I sat frozen in my seat, and the firemen cut me out of the wreckage with the Jaws of Life, I felt as removed and indifferent and distant from what was happening to me as I ever have. The whole thing felt unreal.

Like many New Yorkers, I do not like to see pictures of the towers on 9/11. A year after the event, I was in a museum in Paris, where I was to give a reading. I had a little time and wandered into an exhibition by the French theorist Paul Virilio, who is known for his speed and accident theories. Projected on the wall was the familiar film of the mass murder in New York. I felt nauseated and upset and left immediately. That evening at a dinner, my French publisher condescendingly explained to me that Virilio “is one of our great philosophers,” certain of course that I had not heard of him. I had, however, known about Virilio for years. I read his work in the eighties, and resisted his ideas. Virilio too believes that “reality” will cease to exist in our hypertechnological age. Personal experience itself, our relation to actual things in the world, are in danger of becoming dematerialized and virtual. According to him, scientific theories of light and speed have now replaced theories of time and space.¹³ Vision itself has been industrialized, and we are headed for an apocalyptic future in which these disembodied images will become substitutes for, well, us. The alarm in Virilio’s writings is palpable; his voice is pitched high, like a shrill scream. (I venture to say that had he been a woman his fate as a thinker would have been far more uncertain.) The man is serious and knowledgeable, but his ideas have run away with him. There are no brakes on his thought-vehicle as it races toward this horrible science-fiction fantasy.

To be fair, my resistance to his ideas is emotional as well as intellectual. In this, I am no different from other people. Our ideas are born of our emotional temperaments, of unreason as much as reason. It is easy to see how the spectacular character of the 9/11 images, their uncanny resemblance to Hollywood films, and the nearly instantaneous speed of their transmission would appear to be confirmation of these related theories. But there is something terribly wrong with these ideas, nevertheless. Realness, a sense of what is true and present, is a feeling we have, and it is not always fixed. I turned away from the images in the museum because they are not abstract for me. Their meaning lies in the personal narratives I have given them. They represent grief. My emotion will not diminish with repetition. Furthermore, looking at the films was not the same as looking through the window of my own house at the smoke rising from the first building after it had been hit, although the question of the real and unreal remains pertinent in this catastrophic context. But it is not pertinent because we have become tools of a technocratic system that has dulled our minds to the degree that we cannot distinguish an actual building from a picture or film of it. Some experiences have a shattering effect on the human organism, so devastating that in order to protect itself, it refuses to acknowledge their reality. Technology has not changed this. The people who suffered from psychic shock after September 11 looked very much like those who emerged from the trenches of World War I.

Particular experience is always part of collective experience. We who were in New York City remember where we were on September 11, and the memories have an almost uncanny vividness, forever attached to a room, a street corner, a garden, the place where we were that day. And their clarity is retained by our emotion, what we felt when we understood what had happened. I am convinced that even those who celebrated the carnage remember it with uncommon lucidity. Scientists sometimes refer to this as a “flashbulb” memory. It occurs when the extraordinary happens, when the expectation that is so deeply part of our daily visual perceptions is thoroughly disrupted. The memory of ordinary daily events falls easily into conventionalized visual categories that often blur together. Surprise and shock create a sharpening of pictorial recollection.

I am glad that I do not have a photograph of the car my husband, our daughter, and our dog were in that day we crashed. I never saw the ruined Toyota, but my husband did, and he said he could not believe that we had come out of that squashed, deformed vehicle alive. If such an image existed, it would have little meaning for other people, except perhaps as a warning to drive defensively. For me, however, it would remind me of a reality a part of me denied. It would also serve as an objective confirmation of the accident: I really was in that car. My perception of the picture would be complex and variable, and dependent on my mood. I am well aware that thoughts like these — ambiguous and meandering as they are — hold little attraction for most people. It is certainty that seduces many of us — the brash and/or scolding declarations that new technology has permanently and profoundly altered human beings, has made us dimwitted, or turned us into appendages of our machines. Sontag, Baudrillard, and Virilio are thoughtful advocates of this view. It is advanced by countless other far more debased and popular voices in books, newspaper articles, blogs, and in the media generally, many of them propped up by the “latest” brain research. These writers either misrepresent the science they cite or, if they represent it accurately, do so without any critical distance because they simply don’t understand it well enough to judge it.

I think it is useful to remember that in the nineteenth century the inhuman speed of train travel and its inevitable consequence, accidents, ushered in a new illness: railway spine. John E. Erichsen, a respected surgeon who published a book on the subject in 1866, declared that “… in no ordinary accident can the shock be so great as in those that occur on railways…”¹⁴ The idea is pointed: falling from a bridge or off a horse or going down in a storm at sea might shock you, but railway accidents are particular in their horror. The technology that had made train travel possible also created a unique, modern pathology that was much debated in the medical profession and heavily covered in the popular press. The mysterious affliction, which was often physically undetectable, was a testament to the fact that human beings had become the helpless victims of their own ingenious invention. As a chapter in medical history, railway spine is a complicated and interesting phenomenon, but for my purposes here, it may simply stand as a striking echo of contemporary ideas about the frightening changes wrought by our own new versions of speeding technology.

The truth is people like to believe these chilling ideas. They speak to their fears, and there is something exciting and enjoyable about being safely afraid. Paradoxically, for many (those in the New York art world who leapt on Baudrillard’s simulacra theories, for example), embracing this line of thought had the stimulation value of going to a science-fiction movie about copies of human beings growing in pods or replicants running around a wrecked city. And, like so many theoretical positions, it exempts those who advocate it: They, not I, have lost their hold on reality. Some skepticism might be in order here.

Pictures have always been steeped in the cultural ideologies of their time, and our perception of them is necessarily shaped by these historically mutable fictions. It is also true that often we cannot articulate what we are seeing, and some aspects of an image may have a subliminal effect on us that we will never fully understand. Indeed, an unconscious perception may shape us in ways we will never know. As part of our visual universe, photographs and films are subject to the vicissitudes of perception and to memory, desire and emotion. They gain or lose meaning, feel familiar or alien, real or unreal, depending on who is looking at them. But these meanings and feelings are often diffuse, difficult to categorize, and rarely simple.

2005

DUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA AT THE MET

EVER SINCE I SAW HIS Maestà in Siena in 1980, I have been haunted by the images of Duccio di Buoninsegna. When I heard that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had acquired a painting by the Sienese master, I couldn’t wait to see it. The Madonna and Child, painted in tempera and gold on wood, is a small work, 27.9 by 21 centimeters. Its provenance dates only to the late nineteenth century, but scholars have assigned the work an approximate year: 1300. A small, sober baby sits in his mother’s arms and looks intently into her eyes. Although she is turned toward him, her eyes don’t meet his. She seems to be looking inward. The lines of her molded brows and the turn of her small, delicate mouth create an expression that is at once sorrowful, resigned, and tender. This picture, like all devotional objects of the time, was a means to gain entrance to the sacred narrative, not through an intellectual understanding of dogma, but through emotion. In the classic fourteenth-century work Meditations on the Life of Christ, Pseudo-Bonaventure exhorts his readers to feel the story, to imagine “the very young and tender mother” on the flight into Egypt, the “wild roads, obscure, rocky, and difficult,” and then to contemplate the little boy who is with them. “Be a child with the child Jesus,” he writes. The successful image was one that facilitated empathy.

Seven hundred years later, Duccio’s painting remains one of powerful feeling.Why? Although its composition preserves the abstract character of a Byzantine icon with idealized figures who inhabit the gleaming nowhere of a gold background, and the unusual detail of a parapet below the two removes them even further from the viewer’s space, the emotional resonance between this mother and her infant is recognizable as profoundly human. The two bodies are linked through gesture — the baby clutches the veil near his mother’s face, while her fingers hold the hem of his red robe. But the real story lies in their facial expressions, in their eyes, in the exchange that takes place between them. What neurobiologists are now telling us — that the mother’s face, especially her eyes, is a primary source of visual stimulation for an infant and that the gaze patterns between mother and child are essential to the latter’s forebrain development — simply confirms what most mothers already know: you have to look at your baby. Duccio’s Madonna has withdrawn her eyes for a moment to think, but the child looks directly into her eyes as if waiting for her to turn back to him. The quiet sadness in her face implies what the viewer knows and must anticipate: the suffering of the Passion. And yet, beyond the Christian narrative is the ordinary one. Every child who grows up leaves its mother, and no child can be protected from the sorrows of the world. The fact that the image is so simple and unburdened by the details of a particular place enhances its stark subject matter — the love between mother and child. The spectator becomes witness to the essential dialectic of what it means to be human: I become myself through the eyes of another.

2007

KIKI SMITH: Bound and Unbound

YEARS AGO, I SAW A Kiki Smith exhibition somewhere in New York City. On the gallery floor were several sculptures of women who looked as if they were staggering forward. In memory the figures are black, and gleaming red chains of glass beads fall from between their legs. I recall that the blatant reference to menstruation took me aback, and I asked myself whether I, sophisticated urbanite and art viewer, remained influenced by the lingering taboo against depicting the menses. On hindsight, however, what interests me is the memory itself: the fact that a version of those figures stayed in my mind with a potency I could not have predicted.

As I looked at the works in the Smith retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the recollection of the bleeding women continued to haunt me. Those sculptures were not in the retrospective, but I noticed that many of the pieces had a strong emotional impact on me. Depending on the object, I felt uncomfortable, sad, anxious, calm, pitying, tender, sympathetic, and several times I actually burst out laughing. This broad range of feeling interested me because many artists have what I think of as a consistent tone: sober or witty, tragic or comic. In Kiki Smith’s art, on the other hand, thematic unity is coupled with a striking affective diversity.

Because so much of Smith’s art refers to bodies, I began with the problem of anatomies. One need only think of the immense variety of the human form in various tribal arts, waxworks, effigies, death masks, mannequins, votives, icons, Greek statuary, and dolls to understand that perception of the body is not a given, but a drama of perception coded in time and culture. The energy of Smith’s work is in part derived from looting traditions of representation and then altering them for her own purposes. The longer I looked at her work, the more I became convinced that hers is an art of shifting borders, an art that disrupts divisions, categories, separations, and definitions of our own bodies in relation to the world around us. The fact that her bodies and parts of bodies, human and animal, in two dimensions and three, are rendered in a profligate array of materials — fabric, paper, beeswax, bronze, hair, porcelain, latex, glass, aluminum, pewter, gold, wood, feathers, jewels, Plexiglas, pigment, and amalgams thereof — infects the spectator’s vision with the sense of touch. As I walked through the show, I continually imagined what it would be like to commit the forbidden act of reaching out and caressing the works.

A number of pieces refer directly to anatomy as a science and to the old business of dissection. Body parts are sometimes depicted as discrete units: an untitled plaster and pigment hand (1980), Teeth (1983), and Glass Stomach (1985). Nine Tenths of the Law (1985) made me think of the familiar anatomical charts found in doctor’s offices, but Smith’s chart defies pedagogy. It blurs not all but some of the nine forms beyond recognition and suggests similar shapes, not inside the body but outside it — stones, leaves, plants. The superimposed legal phrase forces the viewer into a wry consideration of what it means to own one’s body and includes the darkly comic implication that our organs and parts become isolated only in morbidity or death. Tongue in Ear welds the two named parts in a simultaneously repellent and humorous rendering that made me think of the strangeness of human eroticism. There are “pieces” of people and animals throughout the show: Inner Ear (1992), Tailbone (1993), the beautiful crystal breast called Little Mountain (1993–96), the abstract Skins in cast aluminum (1992), the frightening Daisy Chain of a bronze head and limbs connected by a steel chain, as well as Dewbow, fumed glass drops that resemble sperm (1999), Animal Skulls (1995) and The Cells — The Moon (1996) in bronze that explicitly binds the two named entities as metaphors of one another.

But the piece that made me pause, then laugh, and then further ponder the theme of bodily fragmentation was the untitled work (1987–90) of twelve uniform silver jars in a line, elegantly labeled: semen, mucus, vomit, oil, tears, blood, milk, saliva, diarrhea, urine, sweat, pus. Each container designates a liquid corporeal waste. In short, what we leak, secrete, excrete, ejaculate. All of them emanate from an opening in the body and cross its threshold. They are literally the stuff of our borders. Penis, mouth, eyes, nipples, anus, urethra, skin are all porous. Where the body begins and ends, what we find innocuous and what we find repugnant are ideas shaped by culture. In Smith’s list, all the liquids, with the possible exception of tears, are subject to one level of taboo or another in our world. As Mary Douglas points out in her book Purity and Danger, ideas about pollution vary. “In some [cultures] menstrual pollution is feared as a lethal danger; in others not at all. In some excreta is dangerous, in others it is only a joke. In India cooked food and saliva are pollution prone, but Bushmen collect melon seeds from their mouths for later roasting and eating.”¹ What is at stake is not germs but order — a symbolic structure with its myriad meanings that determines our perceptions of what is and what isn’t us, what we cast off as not-I-anymore. Why does urine, or any other secretion, cease to belong to me the moment it hits the air? Why does it cease to be mine?

All liquids, of course, are shapeless unless they are contained. They seep into the ground or evaporate and become part of the atmosphere. By neatly isolating and containing body fluids in lovely silver jars, each labeled with the name of what it holds, Smith offers us a wry commentary on language and identity. Words, after all, create the linguistic categories, which help dictate the separation of one thing from another. Openings and leaks in any structure are a threat to the neat outlines we construct for all beings and things and how we distinguish that person or object from what is around it. Broken and running boundaries destroy the clarity of form. Although humor is notoriously difficult to explicate, I think my chuckle when I saw this piece was generated at least in part by its beauty, the row of gleaming jars with their elegant old script designating pus or diarrhea was comic, not only because I often laugh to dispel disgust or uneasiness, but because the whole piece exposes our huge investment in symbolic containment and the anxiety about ambiguity that lies beneath it.

Symbolic divisions and categories fix what is by nature unfixed and unnamed. Smith plays relentlessly with the problem of flux in a given system. For example, exactly what constitutes a whole and what a part? Are her male and female Uro-genital Systems, for example, wholes or parts? In anatomy they may qualify as discrete systems, but in the living body they are merely fragments of a functioning whole. And what is one to make of the fact that these systems are bronze and summon nothing so much as archaeological finds, relics of a lost civilization and belief system? The empty bronze Womb (1986) resembles a vessel or bowl from a “dig” and simultaneously unearths a host of container associations, including small coffins or tombs. Smith’s work functions as an associative engine, in which one reference summons another, and then another, often shuttling back and forth between the internal and corporeal and the external and societal. The effect is to create doubt in the viewer. I like to doubt what I’m seeing because it inevitably generates multiple meanings and ambiguities that refuse to rest in a single unified totality, and this, I think, is why I keep looking.

Several years ago, I was asked by German Vogue to participate in a series in which an artist in one field talks to an artist in another. I thought of Kiki Smith. She agreed to it, and we had what became a printed conversation. At one point during our dialogue, I asked her about the influence of dreams on her work. She said that in the past there were times when she’d have a dream and then get up in the morning and “make it.” Although I wasn’t expecting an answer quite so direct, her answer didn’t surprise me. We all know that dreams do not follow the laws of waking life, that in our dreams familiar cognition is suspended, and things happen that could not happen in the world. Although the physiology of sleep remains highly controversial, and the biological reason for why we sleep and dream remains unknown, it seems clear that certain “higher” functions of the brain, including monitoring and inhibition of the self, are missing from dreams. In a fundamental way, we are freer in oneiric space than we are when we navigate the world as fully conscious human beings. The constrictions of waking logic do not apply when we sleep.

Smith is only one of many artists to borrow from the language of dreams, and whether or not any of the works in the Minneapolis show were generated by a specific dream does not matter. I have always thought that making art, whether it’s visual art, music, or fiction, is a form of conscious dreaming, that art draws from the boundlessness, brokenness, merging identities, disjunctions of space and time, and intense emotions of our unconscious lives. I often dream of familiar people who have unfamiliar faces. My body is subject to innumerable mutations — I’ve grown fur and extra eyes. My ears and lips have drooped, my hair has fallen out, my stomach bulged, and I’ve bled gallons. Such transformations are rampant in Smith’s work. Three powerful pieces in gampi paper and methyl cellulose (two untitled from 1988 and 1989 and one called From Hear to Hand—1989—as well as the papier-mâché work Hard Soft Bodies from 1992) summon for me the strange anatomies in dream space, its dismemberments and mysterious phantoms. The seemingly weightless work of a partial female body, from the waist down, that hangs in midair and dangles an infant from an umbilical cord, is at once awful and poignant — a birthing ghost.

Unconscious imagery — the stuff of dreams — is often coupled in Smith’s work with references to Catholicism: the votive in particular. Votive objects are offered to a holy site either to give thanks to a sacred figure for salvation from a perilous event or to make a plea for healing. An ex-voto painting, for example, might depict a shipwreck with the saved person bobbing above water. The countless votive limbs that hang from church ceilings, especially in Latin America, are mounted in the hope of a miraculous cure for the injured part. As David Freedberg points out in his book The Power of Images, the desire for verisimilitude plays an important role in the creation of votive objects. Wax, papier-mâché, clay, human hair, and clothing are all employed to make sculptural images as lifelike as possible. Smith’s Nuit from 1993 makes overt reference to votive limbs. The scarred legs and arms dangle from the ceiling on mohair threads that hold blue stars, signs of the heavens. Her extraordinary whole figures in wax, bronze, and paper from the nineties also evoke this sacred form of representation. The suspended woman and man who spill milk and semen, the seated woman whose back is raked with long thin cuts, the flayed Virgin Mary, the shackled and bestial Mary Magdalene, the black Lilith with her startling blue glass eyes, and the doubled-over hanging woman with real (horse) hair, her arms held in a position that resembles the crucifixion, are all variations on the Christian theme of the wound and suffering. Smith’s figures, however, are by no means identical to votive works; they draw on the religious imagery in order to reinvent the mythical narratives. Both her Mary Magdalene and Virgin Mary radically alter traditional Christian representations of these women in favor of a blunt acknowledgement of their feminine physicality. At the same time, neither of these images engages in ideology, winking coyness, or parody. Their sincerity is precisely what gives them their raw emotional charge.

The controversial Tale, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1999 exhibition, The American Century: Art and Culture 1950–2000, was not included in the Minneapolis show, but it serves as a vehicle in my argument that Smith relentlessly investigates liminal zones, especially the vulnerable corporeal territory between inside and outside, a threshold which when pressed hard enough begins to shift and alter both our vision and our understanding. Tale (1992) is a wax sculpture of a woman on all fours with a long “tail” of excrement behind her. Her buttocks and upper thighs are smeared with feces. The work so offended Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum, that he called it “simply disgusting and devoid of any craft or artistic merit” in The New York Times.² I mention this, not because I want to engage in the culture war, but because after a century of art insurrection — Surrealism, Dada, Duchamp’s ready-mades, Warhol’s adaptive commercialism — a representative of a major art institution felt called upon to defend himself (and presumably museums in general) from a representation of the turd.

To my mind, however, Tale is not intended to shock the viewer. Like the other bodily expulsions depicted in Smith’s work, feces have cultural and psychic meanings. In stark opposition to the divisive, retentive bottles, Tale creates a continuum between body and body product, merging the two in a single form — a tail that functions as a visual “missing link” to our mammalian forebears. The human/animal connection is one passionately explored by the artist in many works, and is, of course, real. The oldest part of the human brain in evolutionary terms is sometimes referred to as “the reptilian brain.” At the same time, the fecal mess in Tale violates what we think of as civilized codes of cleanliness and summons a period of infant oblivion, when we had to be washed by others. Literal “wallowing in shit” is also seen in some forms of psychotic regression. The piece is emotionally complex — both deeply disturbing and, with a little distance, rather funny. The pun, tale/tail, acts as the verbal equivalent of the many shape-associations the artist exploits in her work. The tail’s length implies extension in time as well as space. Syntax allows for the imaginative movement of the “I” backward and forward in time, and such complex linguistic forms are not shared by other species but are specific to human beings. We are the only ones on the planet who tell stories.

The tales that preoccupy Smith are the ones we share — the organizing narratives of religion and folklore. The multimedia work Daughter (1999) refers to Little Red Riding Hood. In the fairy tale, a child is devoured by a wolf, disguised as a maternal figure, the grandmother, and then released from the beast’s belly by the huntsman’s ax. The story recapitulates the universal narrative of pregnancy, birth, and ultimate separation when the umbilical connection between mother and baby is severed. Smith’s heroine is part wolf. She stands in her red cape and looks up at the (adult) viewer with an expression both innocent and alarmed, her face sprouting the hairs of the one who ate her. As in a dream, two figures are combined in one, but here the familiar story about maternal engulfment and release has also collapsed into a single body, which tells what has happened. Rapture (2001) graphically shows what is hidden in Daughter: a woman steps out of the opened belly of a wolf, and Born (2002) continues the birth theme with a woman emerging from a deer. The intrinsic strangeness and magic of fairy tales is reinvigorated in Smith’s piece because it addresses the truths that make children want to hear the stories again and again. We were all once inside a woman’s body, were part of that body, were born and cut from it. Umbilical connections, both overt and subliminal, recur repeatedly in her art. The paper Virgin Mary (1990), Puppet (2000), Getting the Bird Out (1992), Black Flag (1992), the womblike Revelation in paper with handwritten text on a long narrow scroll (1994), and Bird and Egg (1996) all include cords, strings, streamers, and threads that dangle from bodies or bind one form to another. The acts of binding, knitting, tying, and stringing together are means to repair or piece together what has been broken and cut. This is also the work of story that welds disparate elements into a whole and is essential to memory and to the construction of what we call a “narrative self.”

To look at Kiki Smith’s work is to enter a borderland where the articulated lines between inside and outside, whole and part, waking and sleeping, human and animal, “I” and “not I” are often in abeyance. It is territory of shifting associations and metamorphoses, both visual and linguistic. These fertile links, though not always conscious, create a ricochet effect in the mind of the spectator that may dart from the minute to the cosmic, the abject to the sacred in a matter of moments. I think these imaginative transformations account for both the strength of my feelings when I looked at the exhibition and the fact that the pieces linger in my mind. Like those bleeding women I saw years ago, they refuse to leave me. Emotion plays a vital role in memory. Indifference is the swiftest road to amnesia, and in the end, the only artworks that matter are the ones we remember, and the ones we remember, it seems, are the ones we felt.

2007

THIS LIVING HAND

WHEN I DRAW SOMETHING OUT there in the world — a table, a person, a tree — it is as if I am touching it. The pencil, pen, or chalk serve as an extension of my arm. My eyes see the object and my hand seems to move over its contours as I work. I do not need to tell myself what I am doing. In fact, words are often outside the immediate experience of drawing. I don’t speak to myself about “representation” or “likeness.” I don’t even have to name the object I’m drawing. Theoretically, someone could place an object in front of me that I had never seen before — a mysterious piece of machinery, say, or the organ of a being from another planet — and my hand would move on the paper, wholly oblivious to the thing’s linguistic identity, as I continued to see it and explore its appearance. When I draw I do not see everything about the object all at once. I see more over time, and my hand responds to that visual “moreness”—a shadow under a nose, a patch of light on a vase, a wrinkle in a particular organ. Drawing is an embodied motor action: my roaming eyes, my arm, and my hand, but also my breathing, my heartbeat, my thoughts, and my mood are part of a coordinated response to my perception of an object. It can only happen through me. I am sitting in a particular place, looking at a particular thing; if I move, it will appear different. If it moves, it will also change. In the final drawing, the artist-viewer and her seen object are no longer distinguishable. As M. M. Bakhtin argues, an aesthetic object is a “realized event of the action and interaction of creator and content.” Subject and object merge.

My emphasis on the experience of drawing is to insist that it has a proprioceptive character, not just a cognitive one — that it is part of the mostly unconscious system of our bodily motions. Drawing, like riding a bike or driving, is learned, but once learned, the artist no longer has to be consciously aware of every movement. All children draw. Holding a crayon comes early. At first they scribble, fascinated by the marks they leave on paper, and then they begin to represent their own worlds or imaginary worlds schematically (a yellow ball with lines coming out of it as a signifier for the sun). Whether children’s drawings have a universal quality that mirrors human development (as Piaget believed) or not is still a matter of controversy. The urge to do it appears to be a universal form of human play, but postscribble representations cannot be free of cultural meanings and conventions. Our visual perception is never solitary but steeped in an intersubjective, shared reality.

In June of 2008 I found myself deep inside the Niaux caves in Southern France, face-to-face with a bison, whose burning eyes I can still feel radiating into me. By no means the oldest cave drawings that have been found, these images are nevertheless about 12,000 years old and were startlingly “realistic,” a word I use advisedly to mean that I had no problem whatsoever identifying the image in front of me as a bison. The creature’s broader religious or aesthetic meanings for the people who created the pictures, however, are lost to us. What remains are the traces of human gestures, ones that I found deeply familiar and not at all alien. The particular artist who drew that animal created an illusion of aliveness that approached the frightful. Whether it depicts something out there in the world or something inside the artist, including abstractions, the image a viewer encounters is brought about through another person’s movement, a tactile, sensory rendering that brings movement with it, if only because these strokes are the product of a particular living being. Whether I am looking at a rendering of an open skull by da Vinci or a portrait of Jean Genet by Giacometti or a late drawing of a shoe by Philip Guston or the abstract rock drawings of the Hopi, I am aware of another mind and body, a “you” in relation to my “I.”

And I apprehend the artist’s image on paper as a communicative act, the mute expression of something known to her or him. My perception of the lines, the shading, the figures or things is created between me and it. And what I see there is also felt, not only for its content, but as an artifact of the living hand that once moved over an empty space and has left behind the marks of that intimate encounter.

2009

TRUTH AND RIGHTNESS: Gerhard Richter

WE ALL HAVE PHOTOGRAPHS AT home, pictures of our babies who become children and then adults, our parents and siblings, our husbands and wives, our friends, our vacations. They lie in boxes or are organized in albums or languish in a computer file. Over time, they become markers of our mortality, small windows onto earlier moments in our lives, some of which are remembered, some not. These images are suffused with personal meanings. My parents as teenagers. My child as a newborn. At her sixth birthday. At eighteen. My young husband before his hair turned gray. My father, now dead. But there is nothing so banal as the snapshots of other people’s families — strangers who stand on a mountaintop grinning or pose on the beach or hold up their infants to the camera. Landscapes documented by the family photographer, eager to record a moment of awe, are often worse — as dull and interchangable as postcards. Every once in a while, there is a felicitous shot, a well-framed instant that even an outsider can admire, but it is rare. The family photo is a document that stands in the place of memory: the mechanical alternative to the faces, views, and events that shift and blur in the mind that strains to recall them.

We don’t use these pictures the way we use art, if we can be said to use art at all. For me, a work of art must be an enigma. It must push me into a position of unknowing or else I find myself bored by my own comprehension. I don’t write about art to explain it but to explore what has happened between me and the image, both emotionally and intellectually. The act of looking, after all, always takes place in the first person. I see the object, but the very act of seeing it breaches the divide between me and it. At that moment aren’t subject and object bound together in a unified loop of perception?

Gerhard Richter’s history of using or referring to photographs in one way or another is long and complex, but whatever he does with an actual photo or the idea of a photo, it always feels reinvented. Looking at these small painted-over pictures, the size of snapshots I could shuffle through like cards in my hands were I ever to hold them, I thought: They’re so beautiful. What beauty is is anybody’s guess; it’s a response to what we see, some of which may be a genetically programmed attraction to symmetries, to light and color; the rest, no doubt, is learned. But I found myself entranced by the colors of both the paint and the picture underneath it and, as I continued to look, I felt wistful, sad, amused, mystified, amazed, and sometimes overcome with a feeling of poignant loss. A couple of times I laughed out loud. I was always fascinated. Why?

Before their transformation, these were the artist’s personal photographs, some of them of his wife and children. In many of them, the intimacy between photographer and subject is apparent. There are also landscapes and cityscapes. There are houses snapped from the outside and the inside. There’s an airport with a plane. There are windows and doors and parts of rooms, a few of which include Richter’s paintings in the background, looking a little distant and dull, not anything like reproductions in a catalogue, but which made me think of his own blurred canvases. All in all, what I can see of the “before” pictures isn’t so different from the rather pedestrian photos I’ve taken myself. These glimpses of the ordinary snapshot that lies behind, below, between, or above the paint are essential to the cumulative emotional effects of these works. I recognize their ground as part of a vast sociology of picture-taking, the passionate documentation of private life most of us engage in to one degree or another. The photographic instant in time: I see a girl lying on the floor of a room playing with a dog. She is wearing red tights and gray, red, and white striped socks. A red and blue object protrudes into the frame at the lower right corner. The shutter clicked then. I see her now. The cliché “capturing the moment” comes to mind: the illusion that time has frozen, and I can take back the seven-year-old, the eight-year-old, the child of the past, but it is always and only her flat representation in a little rectangle that I am left with. That is why every photograph, especially of people, simultaneously summons presence and absence. What happens when these images of what was are painted over? Their meanings change.

There is nothing arbitrary about Richter’s painterly intrusions. Above his daughter and dog is a swath of paint in colors that resonate with the child’s clothes — red, blue, greens, and touches of white — that lowers (or lifts) itself like a curtain over them, as if the picture has become a stage set. There are also a few tiny drips of red to the right of the figures, which remind me that my theatrical notion is a fantasy. In this particular picture, the essential subject matter of the photo — the interaction between child and animal — is revealed, not hidden. The painted section, however, changes my relation to the figures. Although my reading of the two retains an everyday, familial quality, the artist’s strokes intensify my interest in what’s happening by reducing my frame of vision, but also by turning the action into part of an artwork, an alteration that is almost ludicrously profound. It instantly catapults the image into another tradition, another mode of seeing which is placed inside the long history of painting. A painting doesn’t “save” a moment in the world. It isn’t a document recorded by a machine, but the trace of someone’s lived experience that may or may not represent things in the world.

Strictly speaking, all of Richter’s interventions are nonfigurative. They all resemble an abstract painting that finds its home inside the photo’s rectangle. The painted gestures, however, generate a host of meaningful associations that play with or against the image that lies beneath them — curtains, veils, walls, waves, snow, foliage, grasses, leaves, flames. The mind is a glutton for meaning, for making sense of things that may escape it, for resisting ambiguity, for naming. I smiled when I saw three winter landscapes: a hill of snow with a row of pines against the sky; a mountaintop with patches of snow; a group of skiers. They are all sprinkled with red paint, and those flecks become snow, an enchanted snow perhaps, but snow nevertheless, as if these pictures were slightly daffy Christmas cards. It doesn’t matter that the color is wrong, that no one says “as red as snow.” Verisimilitude is not at issue. Visual poetry is. As Paul Éluard wrote, “The earth is as blue as an orange.” Some of the beach photos are given what I came to think of as the wave treatment. A great form of blue, turquoise, gray, green, and white rise up over a woman and child. Her face juts over its edge against an intensely blue sky, her legs partly visible beneath. All we see of him is the top of his head and another bit of his skin below. The artist’s intervening hand has created a thing in the scene that connotes, but doesn’t denote, water. And by partly hiding them, the fluid shape has made the figures more intriguing, no longer the painter’s wife and son exactly, but creatures of an artistic imagination, transfigured by an embodied thought.

“It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into painting,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his essay “Eye and Mind.”¹ It is the motion of a man’s body, his arm, his hand with its tool that has come between me and the recorded image of a mechanical eye — an eye that takes in all that enters its frame. This is not how I see. As with all human beings, my peripheral vision is poor. I have to move my head to take in what’s at the far corner of the room. I see what I attend to. I miss things. And after the moment has passed, I remember what mattered, not all the flotsam and jetsam I don’t care about. Memory is emotional. I may remember my own daughter tussling with our now deceased dog on the floor of a room in our house, but I would not remember the schoolbag beside her unless it had some feeling attached to it. The camera, however, takes it in. I can’t help but feel that Richter’s motion—that is what it is, after all, the trace of a gesture or gestures — in these pictures make them more true to human feeling and to our visual experience.

I am only too aware that this is not a reading dear to a number of contemporary art critics, who have turned the artist into a rather cold business indeed, artist as supreme ironist and theorist of art. It is undeniable that Richter refers to genres, to periods, to art, to his own art, and to things in the world, that he uses the viewer’s expectations and then often subverts or complicates them. He is thoughtful and intelligent about his own work, but it seems to me that his statements are often misconstrued. In his essay, “Landscape as a Model,” Dietmar Elger quotes Richter, “When I look out of the window, then what I see outside is true for me in its various tones, colors, and proportions. It is a truth and has its own rightness. This excerpt, any excerpt you like for that matter, is a constant demand on me, and it is a model for my pictures.” Elger refers rather vaguely to this articulation as “an intellectual concept.”² I don’t understand that characterization. This is a phenomenological statement with all that implies, the intellectual, emotional, physical experience of a man looking out at the world beyond a window. What I see is true for me. This truth is not the truth of science, of an objective view. It is not the camera’s truth, nor is it an altogether private or solipsistic vision. I, too, can sit at the same window and point to a house we both see. That house can be shared, but the eyes of the painter will feel the demand of rightness in a way that I won’t.

The demand of art is always also the demand of the world, a demand of truth (with a small t). When I write novels, I am always thinking to myself, “No, that’s wrong. That’s a lie. Get rid of it.” And then I go further, more deeply into what I’m making. I find the rightness, and I know. But what is that knowing? I am living in a fictional universe with invented characters and imaginary stories, and yet the force of truth is compelling. It has nothing to do with realism. Magic can be true and right as well. In her paper “Towards the Source of Thoughts: The Gestural and Transmodal Dimension of Lived Experience,” the cognitive scientist Claire Petitmengin addresses the terrain of this rightness. She calls it “a prereflective dimension of subjective experience,” an internal zone which is both gestural and rhythmic, the terrain of “felt meaning.” The question is, when I’m working, how do I know that a turn in the story or a conversation between characters is right? Why do I choose one word over another? Petitmengin cites the simple example of searching for a word. “… A few minutes ago,” she writes, “I was looking for the word ‘to distil.’ I had an interior, global sense of it, very difficult to describe, and at the same time, very precise, because when a word with a close meaning came to my mind (‘to ferment’), I instantly rejected it.”³ This recognition that we have come upon the right thing takes place every day in our conversations, when we write, draw, paint, do research, but it is rarely discussed or studied. Something appears. It isn’t yet a thought or a word or a created image. It is there beneath what may later be articulated as a word, a formula, or the stroke of a brush. As Petitmengin points out, the vocabulary used to describe this strata of experience comes from a number of “sensorial registers: visual (shape, shadow, fuzzy, etc.), the kinesic and the tactile (vibration, pulsation, pressure, density, weight, texture, temperature, etc.), the auditory (echo, resonance, rhythm, etc.) and even the olfactory or the gustative.”⁴ These are metaphorical ways of grasping internal gestures, often not yet differentiated, categorized, or made distinct but felt nevertheless. This is the world of Richter’s “right and true” and of the “demand” made on him by his visual experience.

I do not mean to suggest that making art is unreflective or without intellectual content. All the artist knows is brought to bear in the work itself, but some forms of that knowledge remain hidden. They live in corporeal memory, which struggles toward a representation that feels right — verbal, musical, or visual. In an interview with Robert Storr, which was included in the catalogue for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002, Richter responded to a question about hierarchies of subject matter in painting by saying, “I never knew what I was doing. What am I supposed to say now? Now I could lie here, like I am on an analyst’s couch, and try to figure out my actual motives with the help of others and make sense of them. Is that what we want to do now?”⁵ It is the ongoing torment (as well as narcissistic pleasure) of artists to be interrogated and analyzed. Sometimes one answers directly; other times, to avoid what feels like a personal intrusion or a blanket assumption, one escapes altogether. Nevertheless, I never knew what I was doing does not strike me as an insincere response. Richter’s joking reference to psychoanalysis acknowledges the ambiguities that inevitably arise when one is called upon to interpret one’s own work. He resists answering why because part of the why simply cannot be understood.

I see a bald baby. I know it is the painter’s son, Moritz, who is now considerably older than he was then. This small person has disappeared. His head and shoulders and one hand are visible. The rest of him is hidden behind a white barrier I can’t identify. He is looking up, his eyes narrowed, his mouth open in an expression of unmitigated joy. Perhaps he is greeting a beloved person. He is not looking at the photographer but beyond him. To either side of the infant and touching his face there is paint that seems to fly — streaks of brilliant airborne colors that make me feel more joy, as if the marks soar to the rhythm of the child’s feeling. The spatial metaphor is up. An instant of wild happiness represented in a photograph becomes a work of art that expresses an internal movement — an ecstatic flight toward something or, more likely, someone. The relation between the abstraction and the photo don’t create a tension in mood. The child’s face isn’t hidden but displayed; its likeness to “a great shot” many of us have stumbled upon at one time or another of our own children remains intact, which means that a certain humdrum “cute, happy baby” quality is still present. And because it isn’t my baby, a picture from my own private life, my response is colored by the faintest hint of alienation that complicates the image and draws me closer to the curiously inert character of family pictures, even when they depict high emotion. Without the painted intervention, the image would die.

The dynamic between photo and paint becomes one of revelation and concealment, of seeing and blindness, of playing one dimension against and with the other, and of creating ambiguities between them. Where does the paint end and those leaves and branches begin? The colors of the photographed skies, of grasses, of buildings, of clothing blend or contrast with the paint, which opens, closes, or shrouds my view as I peek into the image that is given a new and startling sense of depth by the intervening strokes. The paint’s texture — rippling, striated, dabbed, layered, creates an illusion of motion that I can feel in those not yet articulated registers of my being — a sense of quiet, turbulence, a sweeping or ebbing. But I am also reading the pictures, creating an associative chain of thoughts about what is happening. I see Richter’s wife, Sabine Moritz. Her lowered head is visible, and she has an intent but relaxed expression, and I am able to make out that she is nursing an infant. The jumping veil of red, white, green over her body and the baby doesn’t cancel the subject matter but elevates it beyond an ordinary maternal act and inevitably conjures a reference to the many Madonna and Child paintings I’ve seen, but also the painterly intervention of covering seems to resist opening the private to the public. There is a dialectical tug at work between these two realms. The faces and bodies of people dear to the painter appear and vanish or reveal themselves only as obscured presences, or even ghosts, and there are also people and places I cannot recognize because they are strange to me. That they are in some way personal is implicit in the very idea of the underlying photograph: he was there. He took a picture of that. But it can’t be explicit for me as a viewer who comes to the gallery to see them. My recognition comes from a familiarity with the underlying form itself, which has then been utterly reconfigured or abstracted by the intrusion of the imaginary — a fictive act of motion and color that is both right and true.

2009

ANNETTE MESSAGER: Hers and Mine

SOME PEOPLE REMEMBER THEIR CHILDHOODS well. They remember what it felt like to play and pretend. Others don’t. Their childish personas have vanished behind clouds of amnesia. Still others, some of whom are artists, continue to play and pretend all their lives. The French artist Annette Messager is still playing hard, as is evident in the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective of her work The Messengers (March 2009), the first major show of her work in England. When looking at Messager’s art, I have always felt a strong pull back to my own early life, to my reveries, fears, cruel and kind thoughts, magical feelings, and fantasies that were part of play; not organized play or sport, but unhindered free play.

“I’m the captain of a pirate ship. You be the kidnapped sailor.”

“No, I want to be the captain.”

“Okay, we’ll take turns.”

The deep absorption of making something.

Scissors and glue and pieces of cloth.

Drawing eyes and mouths and bodies.

Dolls and figures and stuffed animals that talked to one another in different voices. They also hugged, kissed, hit, spanked, and sang.

The funeral my sister and I gave for a dead sparrow we found in the grass. The theater and ritual of that funeral. The pleasure we took from acting the parts of solemn mourners.

Wondering if my dolls came alive at night.

We all lived in that fertile, labile world once, and in Messager it returns to us with force. I am not saying that her work is unsophisticated or that many artistic influences are not present in it, or that her pieces are in any sense infantile, but rather that the impact they have on the viewer is connected to the universality of play.

In Playing and Reality, Winnicott wrote, “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” Winnicott is talking about a capacity in all human beings, which requires relaxation and openness, and it is only in this state that people find what we call selves. Winnicott’s conception of a “self” is not rigid or even whole. He argues that the search for a me happens in “an unintegrated state of the personality,” or during what he calls a “desultory formless functioning.” In other words, when we play freely, there is a loose and unstructured quality in us that allows for exploration and discovery. This truth, I think, goes to the core of Messager’s art, which is born of play toward identity, or rather identities, a play which is never finished. Of course nobody becomes a self alone. It happens only in relation to others and within a specific culture and language. Messager’s work is also born of a resistance to her specific language and culture. Throughout her career, she has usurped given vocabularies and scrambled them to create new meanings, a process of articulation, disarticulation, and rearticulation. The word articulation must be employed in its double sense because in these artworks its meaning is verbal and anatomical — to articulate, to join segments together, in words and bodies, and also to disarticulate, to dismantle and take them apart. (One of her works is entitled Articulated-Disarticulated. Neither her wordplay or purpose is buried.) It is possible to argue that everything Messager has made is forged out of an intense dialogue with received ideas, familiar narratives, myths, and rituals. She does this, in part, through language, but also through her choice of materials and their manipulation. For example, she has frequently used knitting, embroidery, fabrics, stockings, veils, fishnets — all connected to femininity — in contexts where the association is both retained and subverted, sometimes with caustic precision. A simple but chilling example can be found in My Collection of Proverbs (1974). Onto each simple square of linen, the artist embroidered an old French saying, each of them about women: Quand la fille nait, même les murs pleurent. (When a girl is born, even the walls weep.) Centuries of misogyny are given expression in needlework, “woman’s work” now elevated to “art.”

Messager was born in Berk-sur-Mer in northern France in 1943. Her father was an architect passionately interested in visual art, and both her parents encouraged their gifted daughter. In the early 1960s, she moved to Paris, where she still lives and works. The Hayward show takes in almost four decades of her art, and the spectator is able to follow the evolution of a woman whose production, broadly speaking, has become both larger in scale and more dramatic as she has aged. In the art of the seventies, the viewer will find Annette Messager: Collector, Artist, Handywoman, Practical Woman, Trickster, Tinkerer, and Peddler. “I didn’t have any titles, so I gave myself some,” she is quoted as saying in the catalogue. “In so doing I became an important, clearly defined person. I found my identity through the wide variety of these characters.” Roles of becoming, becoming roles, playing a role, and fictive selves are central to this first decade. The collector gathers words and things. She tries out various signatures in Collection to Find My Best Signature and portraits, How My Friends Would Draw Me. She collects photographs, sewn objects, notes in her albums. She cuts out marriage announcements with photos from newspapers and pastes her own name over the bride’s, leaving the images untouched. The Practical Woman sews, knits, and hangs fabric on the wall. The drawings of the Trickster show her “terrifying” sadomasochistic adventures. This is a period of trying out and trying on various personas through multiple fictional biographies, a time of identifications and classifications in the third person, a view of her selves as if seen from the outside. That’s Annette Messager, and that and that and that. The viewer participates in the artist’s ongoing search for a perceiving subject by way of multiple objects. In these years, the feminist message inherent in the movement toward an “I” is overt. The usual female categories have to be reshuffled, rearranged, renamed, made ambiguous, and sometimes inverted. In Approaches, she shows a series of photographs of men’s crotches. (Women look at men, too.) In Man-Woman, we see a photograph of a woman’s naked body with a penis and testicles drawn onto it, a carnival-like borrowing of phallic power that empowers/plays with/jokes about art—look, all I have to do is draw one! By the 1980s, the third-person she has given way to the first-person possessive pronoun, which is used in the titles of a number of her series: My Trophies, My Illuminated Letters, My Little Effigies, My Wishes, My Wishes with Penetration.

This shift in perspective from outside to inside allows for a deeper register of play with stories, signs, and characters, not exclusively identified as me, but rather as mine. I do not mean to overdo this change in position or to imply that it ends the restlessness of the work because now there is a fixed subject or singular artistic self. I don’t believe this. Rather, I think that in the eighties Messager’s gaze turned toward other mysteries, and she began to draw from older pictorial traditions. In a series of exhibitions— Varieties, Clues, Les pièges à Chimères, Chimèras, Effigies, Veils, My Trophies, My Wishes, My Handiwork, as well as in other series, the cryptic image and sign replace the collector’s boxes and categories. Every series holds multiple references. In Clues, I feel as if I am looking at ideograms that contain messages: a razor blade, an eye, a knife, a mouth. Writing and picture merge. The “chimeras” take the shapes of things that nevertheless feel like hieroglyphs. A pair of scissors contains a distorted face; a key holds another. It is as if the viewer is being offered a dream vocabulary. The bodies in these works are usually in pieces — eyes, ears, hands, feet, noses, buttocks — but these are hallucinatory, Surrealist disarticulations, rather than ghoulish or violent ones.

Messager also mines the very old, popular world of the votive image. Historically, vast numbers of these representations were of body parts, especially of hands and feet, which people brought to churches in hope or thanks for a divine cure. The votive is not only low art; from early on, it carried a subversive quality — two facts which, no doubt, must have appealed to Messager. In 533 The Synod of Orleans formally objected to the practice, maybe because it had pagan origins, and in 587 the Counsel of Auxerre forbade it. These wooden or terra-cotta body parts were often suspended from the ceiling in churches, a crowd of loose limbs that dangled over the heads of the faithful. In ex-voto paintings, an inscription usually accompanies the image. I saw many of these small pictures by amateur artists in Mexico. I especially recall one of a boat tossed by huge waves. Beneath it were words of gratitude to the Virgin for having saved the believer from drowning. In My Wishes (1990), framed photographs of body parts, male and female, along with colored handwritten texts, hang together from strings — a direct translation of the ex-voto tradition. The mechanical representations of photography replace the sculptures and paintings. These wishes also continue her theme of blurring the sexes, here in a jumble of disparate corporeal bits and pieces, including genitalia.

The multiple allusions to sanctity, miracles, and wishes both mask and remind us of mortality, the deaths we hope to ward off, delay, hide from, or forget. A funereal feeling, a tone of mourning and memorial run through many of these pieces, most poignantly in her histoire des robes, History of Dresses, where the garments are displayed like fabric bodies in their cases/coffins, often with a sign or label. One says: trouble. But by claiming the fetish, the effigy, the ex-voto, and the child’s toy as her own, by embracing these as building blocks, as the “letters” of her visual vocabulary, Messager also acknowledges the eternal potency that these representations, symbols, and rites have over us. They have a force that sways not only children and those peoples anthropologists once called “primitive,” but all of us. We know that art is not alive, and yet it has a strength that acts on us subliminally as well as consciously. In his book The Power of Images, David Freedberg addresses the aura that haunts us when we look at representations, but which, he argues, sophisticated, educated people have been taught to suppress or ignore. “We too feel a ‘vague awe’ at the creative skills of the artist; we too fear the power of the images he makes and their uncanny abilities both to elevate us and to disturb us. They put us in touch with truths about ourselves that can only be described as magical, or they deceive us as if by witchcraft.” Messager takes the viewer into worlds that are variably enchanted and demonic, beautiful and sinister, or all of these at once, and she does so with increasing intensity and confidence as the years go by.

In the nineties, the toy stuffed animal enters Messager’s work as a character, a newer version of the taxidermy birds (literally stuffed animals) she used in her early series, Boarders (1971–1972), in which she created an aviary of creatures on moving vehicles and then strapped to metal tables, works that mingle poignancy, tenderness, as well as hints of sadism, of the sort children indulge in when they release their anger and frustration onto dolls. The taxidermy birds and animals take their place with the children’s toys in works such as Fables and Tales (1992), which includes tall stacks of books that squeeze piles of the soft creatures, while perched on top of the volumes are the once living animals, wearing masks or blindfolds. Animals are the speaking beings of fables and fairy tales most of us began reading when we were very young, stories that lured us with their magic and their cruelty. I shall never forget my horrified fascination when, at the end of the story, birds flew down and picked the eyes out of the heads of Cinderella’s stepsisters in one version of that classic tale. Messager populates her work with these soft characters and stuffed corpses to great effect. They are ambiguous beings who refer to the narratives we already know, as well as the hidden stories we cannot fully divine but only guess at.

Variations on the mask theme come and go, along with their multiple associations and underground narratives that summon carnivals, masquerades, robbers, S & M games, and torture victims. The adorable toy merges with the dangerous effigy, the celebratory with mourning. Spikes and spear forms appear with their allusions to ceremony, ritual, and revolution. And colored pencils enter Messager’s stage, pencils reminiscent of daggers, needles, porcupine quills, or teeth, depending on how they are used. These piercing forms contrast dramatically with the plump and vulnerable fur and flesh of the animals or the faceless humanoid forms Messager calls replicants in an homage to the movie Blade Runner. The artist’s tools metamorphose into weapons: aggressive, defensive, and protective. But these pencils, like many of her objects, are also visually witty, almost comic, an ingredient in Messager’s personal and self-reflexive art adventure. Her instruments for drawing and writing become metaphors for both armor and attack, and yet, they remain pencils.

“What we are driving at is this: that with each performance we are playing a serious game, that the whole point of our effort resides in the quality of seriousness,” Antonin Artaud wrote in an essay on the Alfred Jarry Theater. Messager’s work has developed into a form of theater, a spectacle of playing in earnest, of the deadly serious game, which has nevertheless kept its relationship with the pretend. Multifarious, sometimes kinetic elements are assembled to create paradoxes and ambiguities, as well as to combine menace with fun. In a late work titled Casino, first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Messager borrows Collodi’s familiar children’s story Pinocchio and his mendacious little hero with the mobile nose in a visual narrative that employs an alphabet the viewer has come to know — bolsters, birds, beaks, suspended masks, and nets. The nets in Casino remind us of the puppet’s miserable sojourn in the circus after he is turned into a donkey, but they (and all the recurring nets in her work) also function as a visual pun on the artist herself: Annette/a net, one she has pointed out in several interviews. In some way, Pinocchio serves as the perfect myth for this particular artist and the story of her own art, in which she is both puppet and puppet master. The naughty wooden trickster, who just wants to have fun and who is magically transformed from one thing into another over the course of his journey, recapitulates Messager’s deepest theme — the vulnerable, mutable, plural being whose grand theater plays with words and pictures toward a self-ness. A friend quotes Messager in the catalogue as having once said, “My own me is mine.” By walking through this exhibition, that me will become yours, too.

2009

NECESSARY LEAPS: Richard Allen Morris

THE FIRST TIME I SAW a group of paintings by Richard Allen Morris, I knew I was looking at tough, smart, and sophisticated canvases that were made because the artist had to make them. It is difficult to explicate what it means to see this need in the space of a rectangle that you can hang on a wall, but I gleaned it from Morris’s work right away. The desire to make art is both a physical and an intellectual urge — the translation of lived experience into something else, a thing outside the body of the artist. All good art is marked by this compulsion, and it is often the mysterious quality that distinguishes strong works from mediocre ones. When an artist’s goal is simply to produce a poem or a symphony or a novel or a painting, the work is shriveled and dead even before it’s born.

That first viewing happened on a Wednesday in November of last year. I had been asked to curate an exhibition for the CUE Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a gallery in the Chelsea district of New York City. It was established to show the work of deserving artists who for one reason or another had remained beyond the notice of the New York art world. And it was my job to choose an artist for the exhibition, so I began asking painters and sculptors and art editors about possible candidates. Among the people I asked was my friend, the painter David Reed, and it was David who laid out several small canvases he owns by Morris on a table for me to see. At the time, I had never met Richard Allen Morris. I wrote to him, spoke to him on the telephone, and then almost five months later flew to San Diego to visit him in his downtown studio.

Because I had never curated an exhibition before, I was nervous, but the mild-mannered, articulate man who met me at the door immediately put me at ease, and as he showed me one work after another, we talked for the next four hours. I asked Morris when he had decided to become a painter, but he couldn’t cite the moment his life turned toward art. Painting had always fascinated him, he said, even the kitschy images of the American West he was familiar with as a child. He recalled two pictures, which hung in a pool hall in Torrington, Wyoming, the “cowboy town” where his family lived during his high school days. One depicted dogs playing poker and the other a stag jumping over a log. But he also remembered Clement Greenberg’s piece on Jackson Pollock in Life magazine in 1949 and the overwhelming impact the works reproduced in its pages had on him. For the young Morris, Pollock’s drip paintings kicked open a door that would never close. And yet, when the artist finished his stint in the navy on an aircraft carrier during the Korean War and docked in San Diego in 1956, he didn’t move to New York City, the feverish center of Abstract Expressionism, and when Los Angeles became a city with a burgeoning art scene, he didn’t move there either. He remained in San Diego and stayed in touch with every turn in the wider art world through books, magazines, and catalogues. For years he has been cutting out reproductions of work by artists he admires from magazines and pasting them into blank books so that he can return to them at any time for sustenance. The artist’s mental residence then has often been at odds with his physical one. Although he has had many shows in the San Diego area and an exhibition in 1999 at the Chac-Mool Gallery in Los Angeles, his debut in New York came after his seventieth birthday last April. It took only a few minutes with Richard Allen Morris, however, before it became obvious that his ambitions for a “career” have taken a distant second place to his ambitions for the work itself and his ongoing need to make art.

During my conversations with him, I came to understand that the man whose work had caught my attention was a repository of thousands of works of art from the distant past to the present. The immense size of this inner catalogue has given Morris a startlingly rich vocabulary for his own work and an uncanny ability to loot, reconfigure, revise, and anticipate art history for his own purposes. In our conversations he mentioned, among others: Giotto, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Giacometti, David Stone Martin (as an influence on Andy Warhol), Ben Shahn, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Earl Kerkham, an artist I had never heard of. He also referred to classical Japanese painting and to the masks used in Noh plays. His relation to other artists, he told me, isn’t “scholarly,” but “hit or miss,” and he compared his gleaning of information from other works of art to a “detective agency,” a metaphor I particularly liked. Indeed, Morris’s vision has a Holmesian quality, a kind of radiant focus on what is essential to the case — the minute details that other spectators usually ignore. For example, he mentioned a painting of a girl in the San Diego Museum attributed to Rembrandt, but Morris is less interested in the provenance of the canvas than with a spot just above the girl’s eye, near her eyebrow. In the same museum there hangs an oil sketch of a woman by Robert Henri, not a very good piece, Morris told me, but the rendering of her brooch had held him like magic. Isolated, the brooch becomes a vehicle for thought, and then for gesture.

His own paintings are given the same scrutiny, and pictures he deems failures often become parts of new work. For example, strips torn or cut from old canvases reappear in For Cy Thomsby and Geoffrey Young (1979) and in the crosshatch strips of the untitled work from the same year. The delicate inner frames of the three untitled works, one from 1974 and two from 1987, play with a parallel idea — turning a single work into an arena of multiple foci — by cutting up a picture without scissors. The aesthetic and pragmatic are often ingeniously combined in Morris’s work. He uses what he finds and what he has near him in his ongoing project of prolific and ingenious production. He once created an entire show from chewing gum — premasticated by the artist himself, who had to take a two-day hiatus during creation to rest his weary jaw. Gum Map (1996) is a product of that noble chewing. Many years earlier, during his time on the aircraft carrier, a vessel he described as the size of “a small town,” Morris became known as the man who would happily take over unfinished paint-by-number kits that bored sailors had abandoned. These became the foundations for new works by Morris, who painted over and altered them at will. When his time in the service ended, he carried the reinvented paintings home with him in a cruise box.

Much of Morris’s art is small, and when I asked him about it, he explained to me that the size of many of his pieces is due to the fact that most of his studios have been small. A number of his early paintings, some of the heads, for example, are large, but the increasing restraints caused by an ever-growing body of work and cramped space have meant that his canvases and constructions have shrunk over time. His studio is now filled to bursting with nearly fifty years of labor. Morris has literally painted himself into a corner. In recent months, the limits on his space have become so severe that he no longer has the elbow room to paint and has been drawing only. As with a canvas, when he isn’t satisfied with an ink drawing, he sometimes cuts out a felicitous detail and pastes it into a blank book. These abstract cutouts are tiny. Most of them are no bigger than a small marble or the eraser at the end of a pencil. He explained to me that his plan for these miniature forms was eventually to enlarge them by means of a projector and use them as models for much bigger pictures. I was intrigued by this idea for the future because I had already remarked to myself that even Morris’s tiniest paintings feel strangely large. Not a single work I’ve seen, and I saw many during the two days I spent with him at his studio, had a diminutive, reduced, precious, or pinched quality. Any number of his small canvases could be blown up many times and lose nothing in the expansion. I think the secret lies in the boldness and complexity of his colors and gestures — the tension between freedom and constraint that is always present. In Morris’s work littleness is not the point. It is the result of necessity.

Sitting on the steps in his densely packed studio, I became a witness not only to a man’s oeuvre over time but to the geography of a particular imagination. Richard Allen Morris has done figurative and abstract canvases. His work includes collages, ready-mades, and constructions. He has used words inside a painting and has employed a variety of canvas shapes: classic rectangles, circles, and long, narrow bars — both vertical and horizontal. There are works that butt out of their frames like Vagabond’s Joy (1983); pieces with three-dimensional elements in them, such as Wet Paint (1962) and Blue Black (1963), as well as a double canvas that must be mounted in a corner, Untitled (1967). Morris reported to me that a reviewer in California once accused him of “being all over the place.” To my mind, the man in question was suffering from what might be called a provincial and prejudicial case of critical blindness. While it is true that many artists make careers from a single idea and repeat it with minor variations until they die, there are no rules for making art. Moreover, I can’t think of a single philosophical reason why sameness should be valued over variety or incremental changes over great leaps. Gerhard Richter, an artist Morris and I agreed we both admire, continues to explore a host of possibilities in his painting. Like Richter, Morris is unafraid to experiment, and like Richter, Morris creates work that is, despite its variety, the product of a singular, restless, and probing imagination.

Whether figurative or abstract, the work inevitably has wit, which Webster’s defines as “the keen perception and cleverly apt expression of those connections between ideas which awaken amusement and pleasure.” When he names a painting, the title works with or against his images to poetic and sometimes comic effect. The yellow canvas from 1963 is called Blue Black. The paint-encrusted rail from 1999 bears the name Fearless Chemist, and another round canvas from the same year forces the viewer to consider what self-reflection means with its title: Mirror. In purely visual terms, however, Morris’s wit appears in his tendency to plunder a known vocabulary and then give it an idiosyncratic turn or blur. The portraits of heads from the sixties and early seventies are works animated by reference: the haunting Expressionism of Philo and Stone (1968); the cartoon imagery of Pop Art in Brenda and Nigel (1969) and in the face of Alfred E. Neuman lifted from Mad magazine (1968). There is also the melting abstraction of a canvas like Chuk (1970); and the weird power of Cal and Argor (1968) that reminded me of ancient totems. And yet, despite their allusions, none of these images is a straight borrowing that creates pastiche, and not one of them can be situated firmly into a single artistic mode or moment. They feel like cultural masks — at once ironic and frightening. Their wit is derived from the tension created among the ideas present in these versions of a standard art historical practice — the portrait as bodiless head.

Although Morris abandoned painting pictures of heads, he has been making what he calls Transformations, filling blank books with cutouts from art magazines. The process is simple and, as he explained to me, necessarily fast. He removes the heads from reproductions of paintings and sculptures of the human body, and then in a single swift gesture, in which there is almost no lag between the thought and the motion of his hand, he assigns an existing body a new head. The results are comic, striking, strange, scary, lovely. They are also revealing. After closely examining the Transformations, I understood that Morris’s choices were as much about harmony as juxtaposition, and that this art historical game (I recognized many of the paintings and sculptures used in the changes) speaks to the work as a whole, which reshuffles the known into the unknown.

The guns to which the artist has returned during his career both as images in painting and as collage constructions partake of a similar reinvention. He described them to me as “a cross between children’s toy and African fetish.” These guns are, of course, fictions. They don’t shoot. They are vehicles through which the mythic meanings of firearms in the culture are unearthed: as symbols of war and the American West, as the omnipresent appendages to good guys and bad guys in the movies, and as signs of phallic masculinity. From the snub-nosed Gun for Tess (1965) that uncannily prefigures Guston’s late pictures to the sinister nail-spiked Prince, Morris’s guns can’t be easily interpreted. They conjure both real and fake weapons, the battlefield and the cinema, power and impotence. At the same time, because all of them look very different from actual weapons, they tease the border between iconic representation and abstraction.

In the nonfigurative works, to which most of his years as an artist have been devoted, Morris also draws on a variety of formal ideas: constructivism in Off Red (1961); abstract expressionism in the thick, lush density of Sunday in Paint (1991); and a primary minimalism in Hop, Skip and Jump (2003). Despite the role of allusion in the art, Morris has never been an artist hog-tied by self-consciousness or forced reference. He returns to forms that move him. The complex black-and-white figurative spaces of early works like Hero and Art International are revisited in abstractions such as the untitled work from 1979. The ideas present in the skinny portrait, Argor, in which the soft geometric planes of a man’s face are squeezed into near abstraction, recur over the years in Morris’s penchant for the long thin canvas. The totemic quality of Argor returns as well. The first time I looked at the startlingly beautiful and haunting canvas from 1988—two bars of unequal size, one whitish yellow, the other blue-gray, on an ochre background — I thought immediately of sacred tribal signs, perhaps an echo of images and colors I remembered from a book on Native American arts, but I’m not certain. The apparent simplicity of the composition becomes more intricate as you continue to look at it. The two neat bars are colored with immense subtlety, and their ragged painted edges with their suggestive striping have an eerie effect on me. It’s as if they are continually triggering a memory I can’t retrieve, as if I’m looking at a sign of something once known but now lost.

Morris is aware that even the most abstract images conjure people and things, that the mind insists on these links, and his forms play with the viewer’s desires. A title such as Find It speaks directly to this omnipresent wish in the spectator. Even without its title, To Read (1976) suggests the white haze of foreign script on a yellow page. The untitled work from 1999 also evokes a yellow page with brilliant lines of pure color squeezed straight from the tube, and the double corner canvas summons a book opened to pages of cryptic text glowing in neon color — the hieroglyphs of an unknown story. And yet these paintings aren’t rigidly coded. They aren’t riddles to be solved once and for all. My book, for example, may be another person’s landscape. But however ambiguous the allusions may be in a canvas, however simple or complex its composition, every color, line, stroke, or swath of paint feels necessary to the work as a whole.

“I’ve improved over the years,” the artist told the San Diego art critic Robert Pincus, who quoted his statement in the San Diego Union-Tribune on April 14, 2002. “That’s an absolute thrill. Sometimes painting seems effortless now and that’s an amazing feeling. My eye has improved.” Morris has a great eye, an eye trained by an ongoing hunger to do and to make. The more you look into his spaces, the more you see, and that is the single test of all art. It must allow the viewer time to wonder or it vanishes into the dullness of the immediately apparent and the readily understood. In short, it dies. Richard Allen Morris’s work is terribly alive. His paintings and constructions are a testament to over forty years of solitary creation, an enduring narrative of rigor, fierce intelligence, humor, and joy.

2005

MARGARET BOWLAND’S THEATRUM MUNDI

ONE NIGHT, LYING IN BED on my way to sleep, I was thinking about Margaret Bowland’s paintings, and this sentence came to my mind: Bowland stages confrontations. This felt right to me, but its rightness must be explained. I believe every encounter with a work of art is dialogical, that is, what happens when someone looks at a canvas or sculpture or any object that announces itself as art is created between the viewer and the thing viewed. Art partakes of the intersubjective because we do not treat it as just a thing but as an object imbued with the traces of another living consciousness. In figurative art, this intersubjectivity, this dialogue between viewer and image, is heightened. Not only do we encounter the artist’s intentionality as expressed in the work before us, we gaze at a representation of someone like ourselves, another human being. There is a form of mirroring at work.

From birth, infants treat other human faces with particular attention. A face is viewed differently from an inanimate object. Babies respond to a photograph or simplified drawing of a face, as well as to the mobile features of a living person. They prefer anatomically correct renderings to scrambled or distorted faces. Newborns are not predisposed to like cubist portraits. Discoveries in infant research have demonstrated that even before we become self-conscious beings, we mirror and participate in the actions of others. Looking at a depiction of a person in a work of art necessarily activates this mostly unconscious attraction and connection. It is precisely this face-to-face human drama that Margaret Bowland uses in her work. The viewer finds herself caught in a visual dialectic that is enacted on multiple levels — from the simple desire to continue looking at a beautiful face to the complex reading of imagery each one of these pictures demands. They are dense with particular cultural and historical references as well as more ambiguous allusions, ones that, variously, give pleasure and disturb. The static reality of these canvases opens into an emotional tumult created by the spectator’s need to understand what she or he is actually seeing.

The question, “What am I looking at?” should never be posed casually. Perception is a tricky business, one laden with expectations, both conscious and unconscious. This is an inescapable state of affairs. We all come to a work of art with thoughts and feelings, as well as with a history of experiences that have shaped our vision, both personal and cultural. Each one of us can, however, struggle against our own prejudgments by adopting a phenomenological attitude. After looking long and hard enough at a work of art, I have often seen what I couldn’t see before. Examining Bowland’s oil canvases and pastels in this exhibition, I began to understand how her work both exploits and undermines our expectations. We are confronted with multiple images of a single person. She has been rendered by the artist with such technical refinement we participate in an illusion of her reality, but she has been placed inside an iconography that demands to be deciphered.

The model for all of these works is the same child, Janasia or “J.J.” Smith, a girl who is now nine years old. She inhabits the world of what I like to call high middle childhood, the era before even a breath of puberty has blown over her body, the time Freud called “latency.” She is beautiful. What beauty is remains mysterious, but this child’s face is beautiful, and I was immediately drawn to her large eyes and delicate features. We look at faces first. But in many of these images the brown skin of the girl’s face has been whitened, dusted with a powder or masked in white makeup. The story of race in the United States and our legacy of slavery make her white face startling, if not shocking. Her fake pallor instantly summoned its opposite for me — blackface — the necessary ingredient of minstrel shows, in which a bewildering mixture of hatred for and envy of black people mingled to create the first wholly American form of theater adopted from black music. There were black minstrel troupes, too, who also performed with blackened faces. Indeed, the recurring white masking in Bowland’s images evokes myriad forms of the theatrical: Japanese Kabuki and Noh players, the white-faced clowns of the circus, and the high artifice adopted by members of the eighteenth-century French court with its powdered wigs and eggshell-colored makeup, directly referred to in Bowland’s canvas Party, in which our child in white wig, with posture suggestive of the court servant, holds out a black-and-white Hostess cupcake, a quintessentially American second-half-of-the-twentieth-century mass-market treat, while behind her on the wall hangs a painting that pushes the viewer into still another period. The picture inside the picture is a noirish canvas of a car and the headless body of a man in forties garb.

Skin, surfaces, artifice, art, signs, and objects that have become symbols — we are looking at works of art, but within each work we are lured into a drama of contradictory appearances. What am I looking at in It Ain’t Necessarily So? The child, in white face, is wearing a bikini, a garment designed to cover only female breasts, buttocks, and genitalia, but this girl has no breasts, an observation that becomes poignant when the viewer notices that the top of her bathing suit is twisted to one side. She is posed with her arms outstretched; one of her hips juts to the side; and one foot rests on the other. Despite the “itsy, bitsy, polka-dot bikini” and the potential eroticism of her posture, she exudes no sexuality. She stands inside an immense, opened watermelon — that icon of a specifically American racism — on the skin of which is written the title of the famous Gershwin song (about not taking the Bible literally) from Porgy and Bess. The text is not fully visible, but is not difficult to read. Behind the melon is a huge, menacing kitchen knife and, in the background, the seductive suggestion of more text — further letters or hieroglyphics that might be deciphered were we only able to see them better.

Bowland’s mastery of painting technique is on display in the rendering of the girl herself; this is not a slick photographic realism but a painterly, visual realism that draws on centuries of figurative representation in the West. The watermelon is subject to a somewhat different treatment; it is not “realistic,” after all, this gigantic melon and its seeds; it is fantastic, supernatural, a thing of our collective cultural nightmare. Although it is not known how watermelon became associated with black people in the United States, the fruit was featured endlessly in racist trading cards, postcards, figurines, and countless knickknacks for decades. A Victorian trading card from the 1890s for Sapolio Scouring Soap is exemplary: it depicts the head of a smiling black girl inside an opened watermelon. Grinning with satisfaction seems to have been an intrinsic and defensive part of the racist message. And let us not relegate such horrors to the past. In 2009, the mayor of Los Alamitos, California, Dean Grose, sent out an e-mail card of the White House lawn as a watermelon patch. The caption: “No Easter Egg Hunt This Year.” (The aptly named Grose was forced to resign, but has received Republican endorsement to return to public office and is seeking your contributions.)

It Ain’t Necessarily So borrows overtly racist imagery and complicates it — evoking iconic American music composed by a pair of white Jewish brothers for an opera about black people based on a novel about a black man, Porgy, written by a white man. The thematic material of the painting mingles race with childhood and femininity. We continue to romanticize childhood, a legacy of the nineteenth-century notion that early human life is a time of unspoiled innocence. Children and women were tightly linked in science and popular culture as pure, desexualized beings. This pivotal idea of innocence became the hallmark of the period’s sentimentality and its condescension to women. It is no accident that the fight for women’s rights was waged simultaneously. Infantalization was also, of course, a tool of racism. In the United States, the childlike “happy darkie” was essential to the argument for slavery, despite the fact that this creature of white fantasy was belied again and again by the reality of slave sabotage, insurrection, and violent uprising. Fear sharpens stereotypes.

A few passages from an article in Dwight’s Journal, November 15, 1856, I found in an anthology Jazz in Print: 1859 to 1928, edited by Karl Koenig, offer a gloss on this complicated history, a history Bowland forces us to recognize: “The only musical population of this country are the Negroes of the South…” the author tells us. Musically, the white North is a desert. “Even the gentler sex who ought to have most of poetry and music, seem strangely indifferent to it.” The Negro, however, is a “natural musician” and “the African nature is full of poetry.” Codes of thought, frames of reference, ideologies that shape us and produce a train of associations that become part of the iconography of Bowland’s work. Janasia wears a crown of cotton in The Cotton Is High. The extraordinary beauty of the girl with her steady gaze and erect posture stands in stark opposition to what we know is the brutal landscape of the plantation and enslavement. The crown of cotton is also a crown of thorns. The artist forces us to look, to confront what many white Americans would rather forget. The nearly nonexistent public discussion of reparations for slavery in this country is an indication of the degree to which this is true.

In Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a work which refers again to American popular music and a film about dreaming another world, Oz, Janasia stands, scissors in hand. In this canvas, Bowland visually quotes Kara Walker’s cutout images of the Antebellum South. Walker, like Bowland, has used racist forms to critique and explore the violence inherent in the images themselves as well as the history that created them. Some black artists, however, attacked Walker’s use of stereotypes as demeaning to black people and pandering to whites, to a white art world in particular. None of this is simple. What is certain is that references to race and to racist imagery remain dangerous in public discourse of all kinds. This was Walker’s angry response to her critics: “What you want: negative images of white people, positive images of blacks?” As the cliché goes, life is not black and white. Oppression deforms people; it does not, in general, make them better. And it is no guarantee of moral purity. Like Walker’s, Bowland’s work explores the fantasy that is race and its attendant cultural pollution. Each of these artists, one black, one white, unlocks a door and looks in on the monster that is us.

Such courage is rare, however, and a cult of both authenticity and repression has grown up around these discussions. In one of my novels I have a black character, a young artist named Miranda, who was born in Jamaica. Race and slavery are themes of her art and of the book itself. No journalist I spoke to nor a single reviewer, either in America or Europe, with a single exception, mentioned Miranda or her art or race. The man who did was a white Italian married to a black woman from Jamaica. I guess he felt he was on safe ground. My question is: What is the imagination if it is not becoming the other?

As the allusions thicken in Bowland’s art, so does the ambiguity. The black child of these works is not only whitened; she is variously adorned in the paintings with all manner of feminine frippery — lace and ribbons and full skirts — the stuff of sexual difference. How else can we distinguish children of that age if we don’t brand them with their sex from birth — in pink and blue and dresses and pants? In Murakami Wedding, the little girl, in flower-girl attire, occupies the center of an elaborate still life that includes balloons, a wineglass, china plates, a silver spoon and fork, a basket and rose petals, the ladder back of a golden chair. Weddings remain a fetish in our culture — the enactment of “every little girl’s dream”—a theatrical but also anachronistic event, with its virginal white symbolism and paternalistic “giving the bride away” as she moves from the stewardship of one man to that of another. The wedding in contemporary America may be thought of as the extravaganza of ordinary life, a ritual ceremony in which the bride becomes a momentary celebrity in a culturally scripted fantasy of femininity.

Again and again, these works articulate and then rearticulate the phantasms of crippling, simplistic ideologies, the fictions we live by. In Someday My Prince Will Come, Janasia and another girl, both untouched by white makeup, but dressed up in finery, stand in front of the bottom of a canvas, in which a black man, rendered in a cartoonish style, lies wounded or dead in this painting within a painting. The title (notably a song from the Disney movie Snow White), the somber girls, the image of a fallen man — together these make me unutterably sad. It is merely human to long for another person, to desire love and company, but romantic fantasies of love fulfillment, of princes and knights and heroes in films and songs and romance novels are, quite simply, corrosive. Girls are supposed to wait. Penelope waits. Waiting is a state of passive anticipation: “Someday…” The children look bored. Waiting is boring.

The reference to still life or nature morte in Murakami Wedding is pointed. Bowland “arranges” the girl along with the other objects in an elaborate, gorgeous, highly artificial evocation of the aftermath of a nuptial celebration. In Baroque still life, the remains of a meal on a table were depicted as a kind of study in chaos, an oxymoron that perfectly fits the form. These leftovers in the Dutch and Flemish paintings of the period were cautionary; their theme was vanitas, a reminder of our mortality — the ephemera of this world and its pleasures will vanish. But we also find in Bowland’s canvases an allusion to the theatricality of Baroque painting in general and the period’s idea of theatrum mundi, the world as stage, that resonates powerfully with the artist’s ironic references, textual and visual, to popular plays and music. Unlike the low genre of still life, the high genre of Baroque figurative painting was meant to break down the barrier between viewer and viewed, an illusion achieved by both technique and scale. The body of the spectator and the bodies on the canvas create a mirroring reality because the painting stages a form of corporeal mutuality. Through this device, Bowland allows the viewer no escape. She binds her spectator to the hallucinatory dream world of the canvas.

Standing in front of It Ain’t Necessarily So, I look directly into the girl’s eyes. She gazes back at me without any obvious emotion. Her expression is one of solemn attentiveness. It took me a while to understand that she is actually larger in the painting than she is in life. She is not nine-year-old size, but adult size. The scale of her body makes it literally impossible for me to look down on her. I am prevented from feeling the ordinary and comfortable condescension an adult has for a child. There is something in this girl’s face that resists the burden of both the trappings of gender — the silly bikini on her sexually immature body — and the broadly racist imagery in which she is so unmistakably framed. I am returned to the essential face-to-face reflection, the I and you dialectic of human exchange, the sense of seeing someone who is like me, not other. In work after work, I am confronted by this child’s dignified selfhood, neither fully open nor entirely closed to me. Who is she? I wonder. Is it the absorbing intensity of her gaze that has taken me in? Is it her posture? Who am I really looking at? The artist’s immense skill has rendered a personality, a being rather than an icon of a being, a defiant personage who shines through the riddled texts and myriad cultural signs of the theatrum mundi that surround her. In the pastels, which suggest forms of black-and-white photography, the girl’s face becomes a consuming focus; it is hard, very hard, to look away.

Margaret Bowland’s work orchestrates a visionary theater of difference, of differences that have cut so deeply into our cultural images and discourses, have become so critical to identity, that they may begin to seem natural rather than unnatural and artificial. It is crucial to remember that both skin color and sex have been defined and redefined in various ways over the course of history. In Bowland’s work, icons of the past and present are merged in the simultaneity of the canvas. And they may be read as dreams can be read through their relation to waking reality. The frightening constructions and constraints of race and gender — the lies of difference that have infected us — are also truths because their brutal divisions have entered us, become us. And sad to say, many of them are unconscious or suppressed. Do not be mistaken: there is rage in these pictures. But there is also the mute dialogue of human mirroring — the natural magic that occurs between us.

2011

WHY GOYA?

“I LIKE TO IMAGINE,” CHARLES Baudelaire wrote about Goya’s Los Caprichos, “a man suddenly faced with them — an enthusiast, an amateur, who has no notion of the historical facts alluded to in several of these prints, a simple artistic soul who does not know a thing about Godoy, or King Charles, or the Queen; but for all that he will experience a sharp shock at the core of his brain, as a result of the artist’s original manner, the fullness and sureness of his means, and also of that atmosphere of fantasy in which all his subjects are steeped.”¹

I continue to feel this jolt to my brain when I look at particular works by Goya, despite the fact that I have come to know them well. The drawings for and prints of Los Caprichos, The Third of May, the Black Paintings, especially Saturn Devouring His Son, the drawings for and prints that comprise The Disasters of War, as well as some of images in the Disparates series and late drawings, all deliver this blow. Interestingly, they are all works the artist either asked to paint (The Third of May) or made for himself after his serious illness and subsequent deafness. For me, they remain images so powerful they hurt.

Baudelaire called Goya “an always great and often terrifying artist.” He also called him “modern,” and many have echoed that thought since.² After visiting the Goyas in the Prado in 1932, the art critic Bernard Berenson commented, “Here in Goya is the beginning of our modern anarchy.”³ David Sylvester pronounced Goya “a forerunner” of modernism.⁴ Fred Licht⁵ and Robert Hughes⁶ have both argued that Goya brings something radically new to art. Time and again, Goya has been seen as prescient and anticipatory, a prophet of what was to come. In his opera Facing Goya, a complex work about scientific theory and its sinister uses in the twentieth century, the British composer Michael Nyman includes the line: “Goya saw Hitler before Hitler saw Goya”⁷—a temporal reversal that succinctly captures the notion of the artist as visionary. Over the years, Goya’s work has been copied, quoted, and reinvented regularly. His influence on Delacroix, Manet, Redon, and Picasso is well known, but Goya thrives as a touchstone for contemporary artists as well, people for whom the word avant-garde signals a long-lost past. Composers like Nyman, but also poets, novelists, photographers, filmmakers, along with visual and comic artists, repeatedly acknowledge Goya as a master whose work addresses current social and political realities. Marching with hundreds of thousands of other demonstrators in New York City to protest the policies of the Bush administration at home and abroad before the 2004 presidential election in the U.S., I saw raised high above the crowd ahead of me, not far from a placard with the notorious photograph of the tortured hooded figure from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, two reproductions from Goya’s The Disasters of War.

Why is it that Goya’s images of hacked and cut bodies, of torture, rape, cannibalism, executions, flying demons, and voracious monsters in drawings, paintings, etchings, and lithographs inhabit the present with such screaming urgency? Why do these pictures that Goya created out of his own roiling imagination and his personal experiences in a ravaged Spain two hundred years ago continue not only to move and frighten us, but also to shock us? Long after the invention of photography, which, after all, can document actual carnage, suffering, and horror, Goya’s pictures of subjects both natural and supernatural remain undimmed in their power, so much so that the work of serious photographers, such as Don McCullin, a man who has documented war, famine, and illness, is inevitably compared to Goya’s.⁸ John Berger compares the light in Goya’s Disasters to “film shots of a flare-lit target after a bombing operation,”⁹ and Gregory Paschalidis in his essay “Images of War and the War of Images” echoes others when he claims that the prints of The Disasters of War made by a witness of war are a “prefigurement of the close link that the technical image was to develop with the representation of war…”¹⁰

At the same time, it has become an intellectual commonplace to argue that images of violence, both fictional and real, are ubiquitous, that our television and computer screens have become arenas of spectacular horror and that we viewers are the desensitized consumers of the glut of pictures that assault us every day. Susan Sontag summarized this position in her well-known essay On Photography: “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised— partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror.”¹¹ For a theorist like Jean Baudrillard, image-making has evolved to a point where the real has been entirely submerged by simulacra.¹² Paul Virilio articulates an apocalyptic vision of technologies substituting a virtual reality for an actual one, a state that leads to “de-realization.”¹³ The force of these arguments is that human beings are being fundamentally changed by the images they see.

It is significant that when Sontag refuted her earlier thoughts on photography in a second book, Regarding the Pain of Others, she singled out Goya as an artist whose vision of atrocity is unprecedented. “With Goya a new standard of responsiveness to suffering enters art.”¹⁴ Although she gives a quick overview of the lack of background in The Disasters of War, and the use of captions, she does not address what this new standard is or how it works. Similarly, in his discussion of The Third of May, Robert Hughes states that Goya’s illuminated martyr is one of the “most vivid human presences” in art. “In an age of unremitting war and cruelty, when the value of human life seems to be at the deepest discount in human history, when our culture is saturated with endless images of torment, brutality and death, he continues to haunt us.”¹⁵ Both Sontag and Hughes feel what Baudelaire felt. They experience the same shock he gave to his imaginary viewer, and that electrical connection takes place between the viewer and the image seen. The spectator’s emotional response is essential to understanding both Goya’s potent images and their continuing influence on working artists.

Art historians often step around feeling, presumably because it is too ambiguous and subjective to be dealt with in a dignified manner, but consciousness without feeling is a pathological state that impairs normal functioning and intellectual judgment.¹⁶ Goya has frequently bewildered scholars who look for rational patterns, schemas, and coherent meanings in his work, as if once a logical key is discovered, all will be revealed. But as Nelson Goodman points out in Languages of Art, the cultural insistence on a divorce between cognition and emotion results in an inability to understand “that in aesthetic experience the emotions function cognitively. The work of art is apprehended through the feelings as well as through the senses. Emotional numbness disables here as definitely if not completely as blindness and deafness.”¹⁷ Feeling is essential to perception and meaning. If modernity or postmodernity truly meant humanity (or Western humanity) had developed anesthesia to pictures, especially violent ones, through overexposure, then why would we respond to the same subjects in art? Goya’s work would have little relevance for us, could not be held up as a “standard,” and wouldn’t be found on protest placards. And, although it is often overlooked when the artist is summoned for ideological purposes, Goya included images in The Disasters of War that are not first-person documentary drawings. The owls, bats, and bestial/human combinations he employed in Los Caprichos also make their appearance late in the Disasters. The monstrous creature sucking the breast of a dead woman in number 72 with a caption that reads “The consequences” is surely an indictment of war, but not a “realistic” depiction of it. The fact that the artist could not actually have seen this monster as he claims to have seen the events in number 44, “I saw it,” doesn’t undermine its emotional power. Similarly, the Black Painting of Saturn Devouring His Son, a mythological subject, isn’t made innocuous because it depicts a Roman god.

Images move us because we enter into an imaginative relation with what is depicted, and the neural foundation for this dialectical encounter is a topic of ongoing scientific research. The truth is that people have strong responses to images even when they are well aware that they are looking at a representation, not the real thing. In the forties, the neuroscientist D. O. Hebb demonstrated that primates in general respond with fear and avoidance to representations of bodily fragmentation — a model of a severed monkey head in this case.¹⁸ Cognitive and brain researchers who study emotion regularly use pictures and videos in their experiments. For example, a research group at the University of Florida concluded (not surprisingly) that their subjects had the strongest physiological responses to pictures of mutilation and attack. An additional finding of interest to art studies in general and to Goya’s drawings and the images of Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War specifically is that it made no difference whether the participants saw the pictures in color or gray scale.¹⁹

The discovery of “mirror neurons” in the ventral premotor cortex of monkeys has created waves of speculation both in and beyond the neuroscience community that this system can account for everything from language to empathy. ²⁰ The human equivalent of this dialogical/reflective system is now being studied. Very recently, David Freedberg, an art historian at Columbia University, collaborated with Fortunato Battaglia, a neurologist and neuroscientist at New York University, to experiment with viewers looking at a part of a painting (the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling). Simply looking at Adam’s defensive arm gesture in the painting engaged the same neurons in the cortex that are engaged when the gesture is enacted.²¹ Another study discovered that people viewing facial expressions of pain in photographs engaged the same cortical areas involved in the direct experience of pain.²²

Although the full meaning of this research is far from understood, it casts light on the affective power pictures have on and in the viewer. A good deal of our engagement with images is processed unconsciously, and what we come to feel consciously is not under our control. To some extent, this is simply a matter of content — pictures of broken and bloody bodies will stir primal defensive reactions that a landscape won’t. On the other hand, neural imaging and cognitive studies haven’t the subtlety to explain why pictures with similar content can feel so different. Rubens’s noble Saturn taking a bite out of his cherubic little boy as he stands on an incline, scepter in one hand, with drapery decorously hiding his genitalia, doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as Goya’s horrible painting, which both fascinates and repels me. And this is despite the fact that Rubens’s god and child are rendered according to the conventions of Baroque realism, infant flesh gleaming, aging sinew and muscle defined. Goya’s monster-god seems to come roaring out of the darkness into the viewer’s space as he clutches the waist of a small, headless, sexually ambiguous, and anatomically impossible corpse. This grown-up child is smeared with blood, its stump of an arm inside the howling jaws of the cannibal. Although the painting has endured hardships, what remains of it is enough to terrify anyone.²³

But what am I seeing? Why does Goya’s work feel so much more threatening than Rubens’s? Is it only because the later work has smashed the old rules and left the idealized neoclassical body of the past behind, as Fred Licht, Janis Tomlinson, and others argue? This is certainly true, but I’ve seen many bodies of all kinds in art and this one still startles me. I am not used to it. In my last novel, What I Loved, the narrator, Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, goes to an exhibition to see the work of Teddy Giles (an artist I made up) whose work includes bodies made of polyester and fiberglass that are dismembered, ripped open, decapitated, and smeared with fake blood and a photograph of the artist holding a remote control device. Leo comments:

The show repulsed me, but I also found it bad. In the name of fairness, I had to ask myself why. Goya’s painting of Saturn eating his son was just as violent. Giles used classic horror images presumably to comment on their role in the culture. The remote control was an obvious allusion to television and videos. Goya, too, borrowed from standard folk images of the supernatural that were immediately recognizable to anyone who saw his work, and they were also meant as social commentary. So why did Goya’s work feel alive and Giles’s dead? The medium was different. In Goya I felt the physical presence of the painter’s hand. Giles hired craftsman to cast his bodies from live models and then fabricate them for him. And yet, I had admired other artists who had their work made for them. Goya was deep. Giles was shallow. But then sometimes shallowness is the point. Warhol had devoted himself to surfaces — to the empty veneers of culture. I didn’t love Andy Warhol’s work, but I could understand its interest.²⁴

Leo, whose opinions about art are not identical to mine, is nevertheless befuddled by the same question: Why does one work feel powerful and another empty, despite the fact that they both describe horror? Later in the novel, Giles buys a valuable canvas made by Leo’s painter friend, Bill Wechsler, shoves a fake body through it, and displays it as an artwork. I finished my novel in August of 2001. It was published first in England, France, and Germany in January of 2003. Later that year, Dinos and Jake Chapman exhibited a set of The Disasters of War that they had purchased and altered by drawing gas masks and puppy and clown heads on the victims. They called the piece Insult to Injury. Whatever one may think of this work, the brothers were able to startle their audience, just as my invented New York City artist, Teddy Giles, startles his. My fictional premonition suggests only that turning an admired work of art into another work of art by defacing the former was in the art world air, and I smelled it. (In an atmosphere where self-mutilation and experiments in pain have entered the gallery, it hardly seemed a revolutionary step.)²⁵

The question of emotional power remains, however. Unlike their life-size sculpture of the figures in the plate from the Disasters with the caption “Great Deeds Against the Dead,” which is a remarkably tepid work (and that may be the point), Insult to Injury, partly because it includes so much of Goya’s original work and partly because it masks the victims, is genuinely disturbing. I suspect that the Chapman brothers’ ongoing obsession with Goya is connected to the blow Baudelaire described as inevitable for any viewer of Los Caprichos. In interviews, Jake and, to a lesser extent, Dinos Chapman are prone to a grandiose, peculiar, academic prose that borders on parody. For example, “We take the ‘monstrous’ to describe a noumenal or vampirical sublime which preys upon corporeality in moments of aesthetic bliss.” Their commentary is sprinkled with piecemeal allusions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and technology, and they often quote tag phrases from authors without citing their sources: “speed and image” (Virilio), for example, or “the spectacle” (Debord). They evoke Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” and then say, “psychosis suggests superconductive discharge because it is uninhibited.”²⁶ What emerges from this soup of references is a kind of excited adolescent nihilism and a voyeuristic interest in extreme states during which ordinary perceptual borders collapse. No wonder Goya has become a supreme object of their fascination.

Although their direct allusions to and changes made to the Disasters are well known, they have borrowed more than that from Goya. Their sculpture, DNA Zygotic, which includes children with genitalia sprouting from their faces, makes use of the age-old associations (mouth/vagina, penis/nose), not by any means unique to Goya, but which, considering their obsession, may well have been inspired by the two drawings that were part of the evolution of plate 57 “The Lineage” in Los Caprichos: “He Puts Her Down as an Hermaphrodite” from the Madrid Sketchbook and a drawing for Sueños, both explicit renderings of genital faces that appear from between the legs of a masked woman being examined by a scribe, and the drawing for Capricho 13 also in the Madrid Sketchbook, which features a monk with a long penis for a nose. In an earlier essay on Los Caprichos I have written in detail about Goya’s treatment of corporeal openings in the plates — mouths, anuses, and genitals in particular — as vulnerable to both reversal (heads in place of genitals) and monstrous transformations.²⁷ In the Chapmans’ Tragic Anatomies, a female figure sprouts two heads, a deformity also found in Goya (Disparates), and in Zygotic Acceleration the brothers weld a group of children into a single body.²⁸

The Chapmans’ attraction is to the delirium in Goya’s work, the explosive, feverish, and unrestrained. In an interview, Jake Chapman said that Goya is an “artist who represents that kind of expressionistic struggle of the ancien régime, so it’s kind of nice to kick its underbelly. Because he has a predilection for violence under the aegis of a moral framework. There’s so much pleasure in his work.”²⁹ There is pleasure in Goya’s extreme images; his rendering of sadistic joy is direct, not censored or disguised. Castrating, raping, and mutilating the bodies of other people are not activities done reluctantly, without desire, and they are not activities we as human beings have left behind us. It is no secret that violence can create the paradoxical state of feeling more alive, and it is precisely this emotion that permeates the savage Goya in pictures both natural and supernatural — the two are not and should not be isolated from one another. As Baudelaire also pointed out, “the line of suture” between human being and beast or monster in Goya cannot be found.³⁰

The drawing called Saturnine Sorcerer, which clearly anticipates the image of Saturn in the Black Paintings, shows a grinning cannibal who has the leg of one of his children in his mouth. The satisfaction derived from cruelty of various sorts often reappears in Goya’s work: the genial smile of the tall thin man in plate number 69 “Blow” of Los Caprichos, for example, who swings a child in the air, buttocks outward to release a great gust of wind, or the infamous grin of the soldier in plate 36 of the Disasters. In an etched re-creation of the theme of that same plate, the Chapmans replace the soldier with a two-headed figure and the dead Spaniard with one marked by a swastika, all drawn in the style of a seven-year-old on a densely filled background. The twinned figure has an erect penis. As Goya did with himself in Los Caprichos, the fraternal team as two-in-one inserts itself into the familiar image to take the place of Goya’s perpetrator/voyeur, a frank acknowledgment of the potentially erotic relationship between artist and his own violent, abject, or pornographic image, a relation that necessarily implicates the spectator, if only for looking. My rather staid art historian, Leo, admits that many of Goya’s drawings affect him like an aphrodisiac:

I kept turning the pages, eager for more pictures of brutes and monsters. I knew every one of them by heart, but that night their carnal fury scorched my mind like a fire, and when I looked again at the drawing of a young, naked woman riding a goat on a witches’ Sabbath, I felt that she was all speed and hunger, that her crazed ride, born of Goya’s sure swift hand, was ink bruising paper.³¹

If the Chapmans mean to condemn a critical language that hopes to domesticate Goya’s images by wrapping them in a “greatness of the old master” mantle and then turning a blind eye to their profound ambiguity or their variously titillating, horrifying, and shaming effect on the viewer, then their small-scale re-creations and interventions (the larger works simply feel innocuous) have the effect of both glossing and returning us to the wild feeling of the original works.

The Chapmans’ use of and commentary on Goya, however, is circumscribed. Their work has force when the viewer feels an infantile, amoral, irrational happiness in making things and their pleasure in kicking ingrained pieties in the pants, a frisson they clearly feel but cloak in post-humanist theoretical ideas that insist on their political impotence and their place in the art market as willing commodities. Irrational joy and a spirit of insurrection exist in Goya as well, but in the Spanish artist there is a broad range of emotions that include pathos, rage, and empathy. Although we can’t know exactly what Goya saw during the Peninsular War, he obviously witnessed enough. It seems unlikely that the artist wandered about the countryside with a sketchbook as gruesome events were taking place in front of him. What he saw, heard about, and felt were realized afterward on paper and then in the plates. All conscious perception requires attention, and memory of that perception is both selective and mutable, but it is clear that emotion, especially strong emotion, keeps memories alive.³² In a situation of fear or threat, people become hypervigilant and focused. There is no leisure in such looking, a fact that contributes to explaining why horrifying memories often lack the contextual detail of ordinary autobiographical memories.³³

Many writers have cited the lack of detailed backgrounds in the plates of The Disasters of War (a schema also used in Los Caprichos). A comparison of drawing to etching often reveals further simplification and reduction of particulars for the final version. The drawing for plate 60, “There is no one to help them,” includes the suggestive outlines of figures to the left of the distraught figure who stands at the center of the image and the outlines of trees to the right. In the plate, these have been eliminated. The bodies now conform to the shape of the hill. The sky is pure abstraction, a cloud of light surrounded by darkness; the position of the living mourner’s hand that was below his chin in the drawing is now pressed to his face; and what remains visible to us is part of his opened mouth contorted in grief. His unheard cry becomes the searing focus of the picture. Similarly, in the drawing for plate 22, “All this and more,” an illuminated sky and visual information in the far left of the drawing are dropped for the etching: the sky is blank, and the ground follows the lines of the corpses with only a hint of buildings to the right. The spectator is given an emotional landscape. All peripheral information is dropped except as visual shorthand — the line of the sky or a building or a tree. Furthermore, the bodies seem to merge into one another and into the ground itself, and the viewer sees them as if he is above them, despite the fact that this makes no rational sense according to the rules of perspective. In the drawing for plate 63, “A collection of dead men,” the bodies are more fully articulated than in the later etching, where one cannot decisively locate where one body begins and another ends. They are war’s refuse — and will bleed and rot and decay into one another and into the earth. Goya used these same techniques in The Third of May. The corpses lie tangled together, and locating all the limbs of the dead isn’t easy. The spectator looks down on them, but up at the soldiers, as if he occupied two places at once.³⁴ This double vision, if you will, binds the viewer in empathy to the kneeling figure at the mercy of his looming executioners who will soon join his fallen comrades.

An argument can be made that Goya’s exclusions and multiple perspectives heighten his viewer’s perception of the terrible events he depicts in a way that is emotionally true. Terrifying events, if we don’t forget them altogether, may be retained as potent visual fragments or simply a rush of overwhelming and involuntary feeling — the shuddering horror of the flashback — not as full, detailed images that can take their place inside a coherent narrative. According to a scientist researching post-traumatic stress disorder, they are “organized on a perceptual and affective level with limited semantic representation, and tend to intrude as emotional or sensory fragments related to the original event.”³⁵ Photographs of the same events Goya renders would allow the viewer to see everything caught inside the frame and could not include a vertiginous perspective. The more inclusive, rational, and mechanical image is ultimately weaker as a representation of both the experience and its memory.³⁶

In my research, which included informal conversations with artists in different fields whom I knew already or was able to contact, forays onto the Internet, and reading or looking at Goya-inspired works of varying quality from all over the world, it became clear to me that it is the private, deaf artist, the man who showed us violence and dreams, who feeds the contemporary imagination and begs for artistic dialogue. Had he died from his illness in 1794, Goya would not exert the influence on art he does now. The visual re-creations and literary texts on or inspired by The Disasters of War, Los Caprichos, and the Black Paintings are numerous. There are well-known works, such as Sigmar Polke’s haunting take on Capriccio 26, This Is How You Sit Correctly, and the English painter Cecily Brown’s hallucinatory homages to Goya. “I have loved Goya,” she wrote to me in an e-mail “since I first saw a reproduction of Saturn Devouring His Son when I was a child. At art school I loved The Disasters of War and Caprichos best, and in a way still do. I have worked indirectly from Goya reproductions many times, and twice made ‘copies,’ though neither ended up looking anything like the originals … I have also openly ripped off ‘The Sleep of Reason,’ especially in my black paintings.” Kiki Smith, the American artist, was also first impressed with Goya as a child. Her aunt had a set of “the bullfighters” on her wall. “Of course,” she wrote me, “Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War are influential to me — most directly in the prints that I have made with hand-dropped aquatints.” Art Spiegelman, whose Maus, a comics version of his parents’ internment in Auschwitz during the Second World War, changed the way people regard the genre, also reworked “The Sleep of Reason.” He cited the profound influence Goya has had on those working in graphic art, a line that runs from Goya through Otto Dix and George Grosz to the present. But there are many less well-known artists who have also turned to Goya. An exhibition organized by the University of California at Berkeley called In the Light of Goya included artists like Victor Cartagena, Rupert Garcia, and Sue Coe, all of whom, despite the show’s title, took inspiration from the dark Goya.

In the literary arts I found numerous Goya tributes and tales, from a full-blown adventure novel Les Fantomes de Goya by Jean-Claude Carrière, to a series of very short stories written to accompany Los Caprichos by the American science-fiction writer Michael Swanwick. Again and again, it’s the strange and brutal Goya that writers summon. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See,” includes the lines: “they are so bloody real/it is as if they really still existed/And they do…”³⁷ The famous Voznesensky poem “I Am Goya” addresses the sufferings of Russians in the Second World War, and the Dutch poet Stefan Hertmans’s book Goya as a Dog refers to the poor canine in the Black Painting. In 1986, the Serbian author, Ivo Andric, published his Conversations with Goya. The narrator imagines meeting Goya in Bordeaux, where the artist spent his last years. The painter does most of the talking:

All human movements spring from a need to attack or defend. That is their fundamental, for the most part forgotten, but instinctive cause and stimulus … Every artist who wants to paint what I have painted, is obliged to portray an action which is a collection of … many movements, and this concentrated movement must inevitably betray the stamp of its true origin, attack and defense, fury and fear.³⁸

It is clear that Andric, who in his youth was part of the Young Bosnia movement and spent years in prison after the outbreak of the First World War, sees Goya as a spiritual comrade. The painter had seen the beast in human beings, as had Andric.

I saw principles and systems which looked more solid than granite disperse like mist … and form into unshakeable, holy principles, more solid than granite. And I asked myself what was the sense of these changes, what was the plan they were following, where was it all leading? And however much I looked, listened and wondered, I found no sense nor plan nor aim in any of it.³⁹

The roads back to Goya are many, but they inevitably pass by way of “the sleep of reason”—non-sense—which is why Goya’s commissioned art, his portraits, religious paintings, his work for the royal tapestries, or even his early treatment of supernatural subjects, are much less often referred to in contemporary art. Despite the explication and emphasis on Goya’s Enlightenment sympathies by historians, artists have little use for these readings, however insightful. Like Baudelaire’s sympathetic but ignorant art lover, they respond to the extreme images of Goya, in which dreams and war merge to spew forth monsters so hungry and alive they appear unlikely to be quashed by any form of reasonable discourse. The Enlightenment faith in a rational order, its encyclopedic yearning to contain all things within defined categories, also produced its opposite: a fascination with the grotesque — the chaotic body maimed, insane, and distorted. Therefore Goya’s preoccupation with terrible bodies isn’t unique, and this historical frame leads to speculations such as Janis Tomlinson’s that the Black Paintings may have been a fashionable phantasmagoria to spook the artist’s guests.⁴⁰ I don’t deny that this is possible, but what artists seem to understand that scholars often don’t is that whatever Goya may have thought, however much he sympathized with his Illustrado friends and opposed the superstitions of the Spain he inhabited, however much he was a bourgeois man of his time, the power of his awful images belie and overwhelm any such designation. They burst the category.

It may simply be that artists know they don’t control their work. When you paint or write or compose, things happen that you don’t understand. I have often felt that writing fiction is connected to dreaming, a state of altered consciousness, during which material I didn’t know was there begins to assert itself, to take over, which may help explain the bizarre feeling I have had on occasion that a text is writing itself. Far from being Romantic claptrap, this phenomenon is rooted in the now-indisputable fact that most of what the brain does is unconscious, that most of memory, perception, and emotional processing takes place beneath our awareness. As Freud knew, it’s under there, and sometimes it comes up.

The consuming artistic interest in Goya’s hallucinatory and violent works, Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War in particular, is a tribute to the “sharp shock at the core” of the brain delivered by these works, as well as the uncomfortable mirroring effect they establish between spectator and image. Despite its satirical intent, the vertiginous, gleeful, demented quality of Los Caprichos cannot be contained by moralizing commentary. Its greedy beasts and goblins have an intimate, disturbing quality I recognize from my own dreams. In his poem “Capriccio for/about Goya” the Bulgarian poet Konstantin Pavlov describes this queasy relation in his final lines:

Ah, it’s the smile that makes it so revolting,

makes it perverted

and mad.

I feel sick with a revulsion

as never before.

As if babies with beards and mustaches

were kissing me lasciviously.

The speaker cannot keep his distance; earlier in the poem he says, “[the terror] courts me and flirts with its own image.”⁴¹ He is tainted, as if he has been molested by impossibly mature infants. The prepositional ambiguity in the poem’s title “for/about” signals his suspicion; is this an homage or an indictment?

Although the tone is altogether different from Los Caprichos, the frankly depicted sadism in some of the plates of The Disasters of War has a fascinating as well as a repulsive aspect, one that plays on the feelings of an uneasy witness, torn between seeing and not seeing. The caption No se puede mirar “One [or we] cannot look at this” (plate 26) is the same text given to a drawing (#101) of a torture victim in the Sketchbook Journal. And yet, Goya made these images. Their sole purpose is to be seen. The caption refers to the picture itself and to the implied real brutalized body it represents. In her poem cycle “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Debora Greger describes the ambivalence inherent in looking at hurt bodies in these lines on Goya from the poem’s third section, “The Art of War.”

Nothing dared stand,

Not even the light.

It lay collapsed on the muddy boots.

It crawled up to the knees. It peered

Into the hands,

The faces gone dark.

I looked away. I looked back.⁴²

My uneasiness when I look at these pictures doesn’t vanish because I have seen too many unspeakable images, nor do the complex emotions evoked by them — the instant shock to my limbic system that comes from seeing a broken human body, the accompanying guilt and shame I feel for my fascination, which mingles with my empathy for the victim, whether he or she is imaginary — in an image or text — or documented in a photograph.⁴³ In the real world, we look, too. People gather to watch fires burning, ogle beheadings on the Internet, just as they used to rush to public hangings. On 9/11 my sister ran north with her seven-year-old daughter and hundreds of others away from the burning towers behind them, and just before she reached their street, she said to my niece, “Okay, now turn around and look.” They did. “I don’t know why,” my sister told me. “I just did it.”

My sister also remembers running past a man who had kneeled in the street to vomit. Like Goya’s man in the Disasters who spews over a pile of corpses, his body rejected the horror he had seen. On the battlefield, in a ruined city, when bombs fall, when buildings collapse, and subways explode, reason disintegrates along with bodies. “With or without reason” reads Goya’s caption for the second plate of the Disasters. It ceases to matter. There is a hallucinatory quality to the actual experience of disaster as well, a sense of unreality that psychiatrists call disassociation. Victims may feel remote and dreamlike. Some have the uncanny experience that they are hovering over themselves in out-of-body experiences. In Disasters 36, the hanged man in the foreground is echoed by two dangling comrades behind him. They are suspended in a curious receding landscape in which the ground itself appears to float. In Goya, plural human realities coexist and overlap. We see the reality of nightmare and the nightmare of reality united by senselessness: the terrifying Nada inscribed on a slate by the half-buried, gaping figure in plate 69 of the Disasters.

The ambiguities of Goya the man can’t be resolved. His legacy, however, is defiantly vigorous, and his artistic offspring continue to multiply. Although the mournful meditations of Ivo Andric and the bad-boy, post-Nietzschean works of the Chapman brothers have little in common, they were both generated by looking at Goya, and they were made in response to the shock they felt when they looked at the unbridled men and women and beasts and monsters he unleashed onto his pictures. Goya may well have been the first “modern” artist, but his images will outlive the modern and the postmodern and whatever comes after it, because instinctual “fear and fury” aren’t characteristic of any particular age, nor are violence, loss, grief, madness, and dreams. Context, vocabulary, ideology, and technologies all shift with time and surely play an important role in shaping our collective consciousness, but the Goya that continues to sustain art in its myriad forms is a person who felt the anarchic, unspeakable depths we carry within us and was able to make us recognize them. We find ourselves looking in a mirror. In Goya, we are the monsters.

2007

EMBODIED VISIONS: What Does It Mean to Look at a Work of Art?

HUMAN BEINGS ARE THE ONLY animals who make art. I have heard stories of painting elephants, drawing monkeys, and typing dogs, but despite the complexities of pachyderm, simian, and canine cultures, visual art is not central to any of them. We are the image-makers. At some moment in the narrative of evolution, human societies began to draw and paint things, and it is safe to say that the act of picture-making is only possible because we have the faculty of reflective self-consciousness; that is, we are able to represent ourselves to ourselves and muse about our own beings by becoming objects in our own eyes. This ability is distinct from what has been called prereflective self-consciousness, that immersion in everyday experience that we do not have to reflect upon to perceive, the smell of the basil on the kitchen counter, the warmth of sunlight through a window, the feel of my body in a chair. I am not unconscious of myself as I sit in that chair, surely, but I can sit comfortably for a long period without meditating on what it means for me to be sitting there, and I can stay quietly in place without having a mental picture of myself as Siri the Sitter. This form of subjectivity is a given of our experience. William James called it “the outward looking point of view” as opposed to what happens when we “think ourselves as thinkers.”¹ Edmund Husserl understood that even when we don’t think ourselves as thinkers, there remains a form of self-knowing, “To be a subject is to be in the mode of being aware of oneself.”² Although I can’t be sure, I suppose that my old dog, Jack, had a prereflective sense of himself, a feeling of Jack-ness, a bodily me-ness that allowed him to know that he was too warm or cold or hungry and needed to do something about it. But let us say that while I am in the same chair I get it into my head to do a self-portrait of myself in the chair, and I fetch a pencil, paper, and a mirror so I can see myself and begin to draw. The idea expressed in the words—I’ll draw me—entails a splitting of myself into both subject and object, and this self-reflective distance is an essentially human adventure.

But what lies beneath this reflective faculty — mirroring and recognition — is not unique to people. Elephants, dolphins, some of our fellow primates, and certain birds recognize themselves in the mirror. Dogs do not. At around eighteen months, it happens to children. Long before Jacques Lacan wrote his lecture on the mirror stage in 1949,³ the researcher William Preyer, who worked in Germany, published a book called Die Seele des Kindes (1882), in which he argued that before a child is able to use the pronouns I or me, she has a sense of self and that mirror self-recognition is a crucial aspect of her development.⁴ But prior to mirror self-recognition is mirroring behavior in infants, which appears to be innate. Babies as young as an hour old have been photographed imitating the facial expressions of adults.⁵ Their reflecting behavior seems to be an automatic response to the face of a fellow human being. Newborns do not have reflective self-consciousness. Hegel was surely right when he argued in The Phenomenology of Mind, “While the embryo is certainly, in itself, implicitly a human being, it is not so explicitly, it is not by itself a human being (für sich)…”⁶ This being there “for itself” arrives later in life, but it is preceded by earlier forms of intersubjectivity. Winnicott reconfigured Lacan’s mirror stage to include the mirroring looks between mother and child that are crucial to the baby’s growth.⁷ More recently, neuroscience has shown that these exchanges affect the way the infant’s brain develops.⁸ We find ourselves first in the eyes of our mothers, and we continue to have strong reflective responses to the expressions on the faces of other people long after we have grown up and ceased to imitate their facial gestures. The faces of others affect our moods, something that has been seen over and over again in what cognitive psychologists call “masking” studies. People are presented with images of faces frowning and angry, or friendly smiling, for example, but so briefly they cannot consciously register the images. Nevertheless, the subliminal pictures influence their responses to the questions that follow. Even though the face is not consciously perceived, it can affect a person’s thoughts, memories, and feelings.

The discovery of human mirror systems in neuroscience underscores what many psychologists and philosophers have long postulated about the dialectical relation between self and other, and this unconscious neuronal firing is at work in human beings whether we are looking at a real person, at a photograph of a person, or at a painting of a person.⁹ Furthermore, these shared systems that match an action and the perception of the same action are also involved in prediction, in what the movement is for. All of this takes place un- or subconsciously. The mutuality that happens between people is indisputably real, and it cannot develop in isolation. What becomes an I is embedded in a you. We are inherently social beings and our brains and bodies grow through others in the early dynamics between a child and his parents, but also within a given language and culture as a whole.

My argument here is that the experience of looking at visual art always involves a form of mirroring, which may be but is not necessarily conscious. This is fairly obvious to us when we look at a portrait or at any human figure — we see something like ourselves there — but it is also present when we look at a representation of a thing or at an abstraction. The reflective quality is there because we are witnessing what remains of another person’s creative act, and through the artistic object we find ourselves embroiled in the drama of self and other. This back-and-forth dialectic between spectator and artwork occurs despite the fact that a painting, sculpture, or drawing is also just a thing, an object like any other in the material world. It may be a canvas with oil or acrylic paint on it or wood or stone or a paper with some charcoal markings or fiberglass or rubber or any other material. It can last for centuries or burn up in a fire, but it is fundamentally different from the chair I mentioned sitting in earlier. It has no purpose other than to be looked at and thought about. It is not a tool. We can’t eat with it. Art is useless. I am well aware that with architecture, for example, this becomes murky. I also know that Picasso decorated some plates I’d be afraid to eat off of and that some designers of furniture have made objects I personally find more beautiful and even more interesting than certain works of art, but I am bracketing my discussion here to objects without utility. A famous example of a fundamental transformation from practical thing to art object is Duchamp’s urinal. Once it became Fountain, nobody, to my knowledge at least, ever took a pee in it. Ripped from its context in the ordinary world as a repository for human waste, turned upside down, and signed “R. Mutt,” it metamorphosed into a mysterious art object thickly wrapped in layers of cultural irony.

Although works of art are things, they are also strangely alive, animated by a mysterious power, and this thought brings me round to Friedrich Schelling and to his thinking about art. He too recognized that works of art are particular, finite things, subject to the laws of all objects. Nevertheless, art cannot be finally determined or pinned down, because for Schelling works of art were the result of a fusion between the unconscious creative energy or “drive” in nature and the free conscious efforts of the artist, and therefore something in the artwork always remained hidden: its unconscious roots. Unlike other philosophers, Schelling did not oppose Nature and Spirit. He was a monist, not a dualist, who believed that the world was made of a single dynamic stuff — nature and intellect are one and the same, but they represent different stages in the development of that force — intellect and self-consciousness become possible in the human being when he is able to reflect upon himself.¹⁰ It is not necessary to embrace the whole of Schelling’s philosophy or his Romantic idea of “genius” to acknowledge that he identified something essential about art. Although I’m convinced he would have been appalled by Duchamp’s urinal, not even that scandalous ready-made can be said to have been created from purely self-conscious cognitive activity. Where do thoughts come from, after all? There is an underground to thought, a place of incubation we have little access to. And just as no artist brings only an idea to his art, no viewer perceives art only through his intellect, not even if he is staring at the urinal or at Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. I can articulate several sentences about Kosuth’s three kinds of chairs, which I believe would be true, but there is more to my experience than those sentences. I also have a physical relation to the three chairs, one that is immediate and felt, and I have a keen sense of the artist’s dogmatic presence and his desire to overturn old notions of the aesthetic. I may sympathize with this, but the man standing next to me might find himself irritated. He might say, “That’s not art. I could have done that.” But there is always an emotional component that is part of a viewer’s response to the work, and what generates that emotion is not easy to understand, describe, or quantify.

Art requires an artist, and that artist is, or was, a living, breathing human being with an embodied self that functions both consciously and unconsciously within a larger world of meanings. For some reason that person is driven to make art. This urge, one I have, is not explicable to me. I am aware of an urgent need to write, to make something, to push forward, but where it comes from or why I have it is unknown to me. Most of what I am at any given moment is hidden. We have explicit memories — the ones we can pull forth at a moment’s notice — but also implicit ones that may return as an association to something else or remain forever buried. For Freud, making art was a sublimation, a kind of translation of fundamental human drives, for him sexual, that were then turned into something else. It is not hard to see the influence of earlier philosophers on his thought — Schelling certainly, but also Schopenhauer, with his will to power, the blind force that drives human beings. I think the German word Trieb, or drive, rather than instinct, as it has been translated into English, describes this push best. All animals have drives, most notably to survive, but making art is not about survival, despite the fact that many artists feel that if they couldn’t do their work, their lives would lose meaning.

Art, it seems to me, must be distinguished by a kind of intentionality. Franz Brentano, his student Husserl, and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty all used this word, and it is now essential to the vocabularies of people working in phenomenology, as well as to Anglo-American analytic philosophers. For Brentano intentionality was a characteristic of all mental acts. He described it as “reference to a content” or “direction toward an object.”¹¹ Although Husserl disputed aspects of Brentano’s definition, he also mostly employed the idea of intentionality as a conscious directedness. Merleau-Ponty, influenced by Gestalt psychology and neurology, had a far more embodied notion of intentionality, one that included a prereflective intentionality, a motivational force toward something that is not necessarily self-conscious in that thinking-ourselves-as-thinkers way. For Merleau-Ponty the sphere of lived intentions was much larger than conscious thought.¹² Long before research unveiled a subliminal neurobiology of intentionality, Merleau-Ponty included it in his theory. Works of art exhibit traces of this embodied intentionality. In drawings, the feeling of the hand that once moved on the page is present. When looking at a painting I am often deeply affected by the remains of the artist’s gesture or the sense of his motion now stilled — in a Jackson Pollock action painting, for example, or in a work from Gerhard Richter’s series Sinbad. Not only do I feel the movement of the lacquer on the glass, I want to start dancing. This sight, with its colors and the now stopped motion, affects my limbs as if I were listening to a rock-and-roll song. But even when there is no trace of the artist’s hand, brush, or movement, intentionality is present, albeit in a more cognitive form, in an upside-down urinal or a simple chair. It is this quality that turns an “it” into a form of a “you.”

Producing art includes a drive to make something, an embodied intentionality. But art is not possible without intersubjective human experience because art is always a gift made for another, not a specific other, but a generalized other person who is asked to read or listen or look. Art necessarily establishes a relation between the artist and an imaginary reader, viewer, or listener; it is inherently dialogical. Therefore, all visual art implies a spectator, even when that other is part of the self, the viewing self, as was the case with Henry Darger, one of the so-called outsider artists. When he died in Chicago in 1973, he left behind him the immense illustrated saga of the Vivian girls, over fifteen thousand pages of narrative and several hundred watercolors that include hermaphroditic girl armies and their often violent adventures. He was his own voyeur.

The artist presses something of himself out into the world — the fantasies of a man bruised forever by his childhood. Darger’s mother died when he was four. Then he lost his crippled father, and the boy, deemed defective, was sent to a mental institution, from which he escaped when he was sixteen. In his art, he created an epic of children enslaved by sadistic adults, a narrative of suffering and insurrection that finally ends in triumph. And the story and the pictures are at once of him and not of him. Darger was an urban hermit. It is doubtful that he spent much time in art museums, but his pictures draw from visual representations he knew well: advertisements, comics, and illustrations from children’s books. I am using Darger as an example, but what I am going to say is true of every artist, for this is where inside and outside collapse. No artist lives in a vacuum, not even Henry Darger. The perceived world becomes part of us in memory, but we are also immersed in that world. Much of what we take in becomes part of our vast implicit understanding of things once it is learned, becomes the body’s knowledge, and this knowledge can’t be separated from our engagement with people and things in our particular environment.

When I am drawing my self-portrait I do not think about where my hand is on the paper; it moves because I know how to move it. My hand responds automatically to what I am seeing in the mirror. I don’t rehearse drawing any more than I relearn how to ride a bike every time I jump on one. I might mourn my skills and wish I were Leonardo da Vinci, but what I am able to do is present in my hand’s motion. Living is movement. Thoughts are in motion, and when I think, my body thinks too. While writing I find the words not only in my mind but in the feeling of my fingers on the keyboard. When I’m stuck, I stand up and walk around the room, and walking often jogs the sentence loose. There is a powerful connection between vision and motor-sensory circuits in the brain, and visual perception cannot be separated from our knowledge of the world gained through our movements in it.

We are proprioceptive beings. Broadly, proprioception, which comes from the Latin word proprius, meaning one’s own, is our ability to sense the position, orientation, and movement of our bodies and its parts in space. Much of the time we simply don’t have to think about this; it is unconscious. As with so many things we take for granted, it is only when this sixth sense doesn’t develop or is lost to injury that its absolute necessity is made clear. Children with a defective proprioceptive sense may fall down or intentionally bump into walls and doors to get a better idea of where they are. People who suffer a brain injury and damage this faculty cannot feel where their bodies are in relation to a chair, for example, and will have to actively evaluate their spatial relation to it in order to sit down.

If you are throwing up your hands and saying, “But what does this have to do with art?” my answer is that every encounter with a work of art is an embodied, subjective one. Our phenomenal experiences of Duchamp, Kosuth, Richter, or Darger are not objective, third-person experiences. I don’t fly out of my body and my personal story when I stand in front of Duccio’s Madonna and Child at the Metropolitan Museum. What happens happens between me and the image. Even in science there is no such thing as perceptual neutrality.¹³ This doesn’t mean that looking at art is a solipsistic experience either or that any response is as good as another. I can imagine flying out of my body and examining the picture from another perspective, say as an old childless man, but I know that my excursion is not real. I can also use my learning about painting in Siena at the turn of the fourteenth century to inform my vision. We cannot help but be part of our language and culture, which shape our beliefs about how things are. And we all engage to one degree or another in consensus-making, and intersubjective consensus precedes us. Nevertheless, we all have a genetic makeup — some scientists call it temperament — that will be expressed through our environments. The temperamentally sensitive will be more vulnerable to shocks and blows than the temperamentally robust. This applies to art as well. Our temperaments in tandem with our personal stories as we grow as human beings will affect our responses to a painting and become part of the dialogue.

We are born into meanings and ideas that will shape how our embodied minds encounter the world. The moment I walk through the doors of the Prado or the Louvre, for example, I enter a culturally sanctified space. Unless I am an alien visitor from another galaxy, I will be permeated by the hush of greatness, by a sense that what I am going to see has the imprimatur of those in the know, the experts, the curators, the culture-makers. This idea of grandeur made physical by big rooms, rows of paintings and sculptures, affects my perception of what I am going to see. An expectation of greatness is apt to be part of my perception, even if I consider myself unprejudiced and am not aware that my view of a work of art has been subtly altered by where it is.

Art’s meaning is created at every level of our experience. Sensing color, for example, appears to be prereflective. Red, green, or blue will affect us — we will feel their impact — before we are even able to name the color. As the Gestalt theorists argued, we will also distinguish foreground from ground prior to a recognition of the objects on that ground. This has been called “preattentive” vision.¹⁴ A large work of art will immediately strike us, as will a very small one, before we can articulate largeness or smallness because, if our proprioceptive sense is working, we will engage with its size instantly, before we can meditate on it. And, I think what we see has emotional or affective value, not after we have contemplated the object and named it, but in the earlier subliminal stages of vision. In an article “See It with Feeling: Affective Predictions during Object Perception,” L. F. Barrett and Moshe Bar argue that before an object has even been identified, we respond bodily to its perceived salience or meaning through past experience. Depending on the prediction about the thing’s value, our breathing, muscle tension, heart rate, stomach motility, as well as vague or potent sensations of pleasure, anxiety, or distress will be present. Merleau-Ponty referred to this kind of expectation as a stereotype.¹⁵ Barrett and Bar write, “When the brain receives a new sensory input from the world in the present, it generates a hypothesis based on what it knows from the past to guide recognition and action in the immediate future.”¹⁶ Aside from the fact that the authors turn the brain into a subject, which is rather silly, their point is well taken.

A vivid and conveniently prolonged example of stereotypic ways of seeing can be seen in something that happened to my husband, Paul Auster, and which he included in his novel The Book of Illusions. He was walking our now-deceased dog Jack down a street in Brooklyn one misty night, and in the blurred light of the streetlamps saw a small blue object glowing on the sidewalk. Pleased and curious, he leaned over to investigate. It was a stone, he guessed, or a piece of cut glass, or perhaps a moonstone or sapphire fallen out of a ring or necklace. Part of the passage from the book reads: “And so I started to pick it up, but the moment my fingers came into contact with the stone, I discovered that it wasn’t what I’d thought it was. It was soft, and it broke apart when I touched it, disintegrating into a wet, slithery ooze. The thing I had taken for a stone was a gob of human spit.”¹⁷ Needless to say, disgust quickly replaced pleasure. Our earlier motor-sensory experiences order our vision and become predictors of what we are going to see when we pay close attention to the object. This is why when blind people recover their sight physiologically — their primary visual cortex is functioning normally — they nevertheless cannot “see.” Years of perceptual learning that create expectation and orientation are missing and their vision is chaotic, blurred, and incoherent.

Looking at a work of art engages this prereflective expectation of its value — of pleasure or disgust or boredom and their bodily concomitants. But this is usually instantaneous, and once one has stopped to look properly at a work of art, forms of reflective consciousness are also brought to bear. Indeed, almost all writing about art takes place at this level of the experience. We read about the historical period of the painting or sculpture or about the artist’s biography or about what x-rays reveal about its creation or perhaps a complex theoretical argument about the avant-garde or capitalism and the art market. If I know, for example, that Kosuth was interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this information will affect how I “read” his chairs, just as knowing about Darger’s childhood changes his work. The Tractatus and years of boyhood spent in a mental institution are part of the intersubjective and linguistic fabric that clothes my perception as I think about what it is that I am actually seeing.

Despite significant advances in research on the visual areas of the brain, there is a lot of disagreement about how we actually see. It is known, for example, that there are as many as thirty areas in the brain dedicated to vision, that some of these areas or rather neuronal networks appear to be for specific functions: color, motion, depth perception, etc. Interestingly, there is also a part of the brain in the temporal lobe crucial to face recognition, the fusiform gyrus. Face recognition is a particular neurological event, and it too can be lost. But none of these discoveries constitutes a theory of vision. There are still many scientists and philosophers who cling to a computational model of perception. We are like computers with serial inputs and outputs, and our brains operate according to logical rules. In this view, seeing is largely passive. All we do is receive images from the world that are then represented like reflections in our brains. Another view, one I find far more compelling, is a phenomenological one. We are not computers, and we are not just brains. We have bodies that move in space and we have emotions and a vast unconscious, and our perceptions of people and things are active and creative. It has become increasingly clear that a large part of the dynamic patterns of neural connectivity in our brains is not predetermined genetically. They are not static but are shaped by our behavior and our motor-sensory and cognitive experiences. Learning changes the brain, and its plasticity continues throughout our lives.

Despite the scientific zeal to atomize experience, to break it down into comprehensible bits and pieces, this approach often results in a frozen view of reality. In recent years, parts of the scientific community have been influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl, and, more important, by Merleau-Ponty, to challenge a paralyzed, purely third-person view of perception. Neurobiologists such as Humberto Maturana and the late Francisco Varela,¹⁸ the cognitive scientists Shaun Gallagher¹⁹ and Claire Petitmengin,²⁰ as well as philosophers such as Alva Noë²¹ and J. J. Gibson²² argue for an enactive theory of perception founded on our motor-sensory abilities and have embraced a whole-body-in-relation-to-its-environment understanding of vision. Although there is no unified front and there are many disagreements among them, my reading of these thinkers has led me to the position that viewers are not merely passive reflectors of the out-there, but embodied creative seers. Two researchers at the Max Planck Institute, Andreas Engel and Peter König, articulated the position well in a paper called “Paradigm Shifts in Neurobiology: Toward a New Theory of Perception”: “What neuroscience has to explain,” they write, “is not how brains act as world-mirroring devices, but how they serve as ‘vehicles of world-making.’”²³

Let us take a very simple example of active visual perception. One day last spring, I was walking down the street with my daughter, Sophie, in lower Manhattan. She had just moved into a new apartment a few blocks away, and we were shopping for household objects to put in her new place. The sun was shining. The sky was blue, and we walked along arm in arm. I felt like singing. I looked up, saw a sign and read: HAPPY ORTHODONTICS. I turned to Sophie and said, “Look, isn’t that the craziest name for an orthodontist’s office?” I pointed to the sign, but when I looked again, it said: KARPOV ORTHODONTICS. This simple error is illuminating. My misreading was subliminal, active, and creative. I projected my emotional state onto the text and proceeded to garble the letters. Similarly, it has been shown that clinically depressed people respond to pictures of neutral, unemotional faces in a far more negative way than people who are not depressed. Mood acts creatively on our perceptions.

The first time I saw Zurbarán’s Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose, which is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, I had a very strong reaction to the picture, and I stood in front of it for some time. It’s neither tiny nor huge: 60 by 107 cm. Its size did not overwhelm me, but I had no feeling of its being diminutive either. Its colors are vivid but muted against a dark background. I cannot track the initial unconscious milliseconds of my response to the picture, but I know the image hit me instantly and bodily, and had some person been there to measure the activation of my sympathetic nervous system that had sped up my heart rate and increased the sweat levels in my skin, he would have pronounced me in a state of heightened emotion and attention.

Why? How can four lemons on a silver saucer, oranges in a basket, a rose, and a teacup filled with water sitting on another silver saucer create such a physical charge? Naming the contents of the painting gets us nowhere; it is simply a banal recitation of ordinary things. And if I arranged these objects for you on a table, I could make a lovely still life. There would be a pleasant contrast of colors for the eye, but the visual experience would be very different. First of all, the real fruits, china cup, and flower would exist in three-dimensional space and have a backside that could be explored. Part of your perception would be that you could, if you dared ruin my construction, pick up a lemon or an orange and eat it. I could declare it my artwork, and it would be one. But you would never see the objects in my piece as this work by Zurbarán sees them. They appear to be in hyperfocus, to be more defined, more perfectly clear than things in the world, despite the shadows. It is as if we have improved our normal vision with specially made glasses, and the objects are illuminated by a light that represents no time of day or light source we could ever name. We do not imagine a window or candle somewhere in the room lighting these objects. The initial “pop” of this picture is not because we are experiencing realism or naturalism, but precisely the opposite. They are fictions in a fictitious world, an imaginary elsewhere that has opened up before our eyes. We recognize every thing in the painting, but each of these objects is forbiddingly removed from any idea of use or consumption, not because they are painted but because of the way they are painted. They are enchanted by the artist’s intentionality — a force that is prereflective and reflective, one that I engage with as a distinct presence of another human being, albeit the ghost of that other, that absent you.

The longer I looked at it, the stranger and more mysterious the image became. The words lemons, saucer, oranges, basket, teacup, and rose detached themselves from my experience as I tried to pin down what was happening and discovered that I couldn’t, or rather, that whatever I said to myself seemed inexact. After that initial startle response, my nervous system quieted down and the stillness and silence of both the things represented (lemons and oranges are not animate) and of the medium itself (painting does not move in a literal sense) acted on me like a balm, and I fell into a kind of reverie typical of art viewers, an active, ongoing, shifting, physical, mental response to what I was seeing, one that included emotion — but which one? A form of awe, I would say, a sense that the world we live in with its fruits and cups and tables and chairs and animals and people becomes increasingly alien the more closely it is examined. It is a feeling I often had as a child and still have from time to time, and on occasion it is accompanied by a strong lifting sensation inside me, as if I am rising up and out of myself. This Zurbarán brings me back to that emotional state, and so a part of my response to the picture is an active projection or, to use the psychoanalytic term, a form of transference of my memories and my lived past onto the painting. This transference is subtler than my misreading of KARPOV ORTHODONTICS but is nevertheless a related phenomenon. Subject and object, I and you, begin to collapse in my viewing. What part is the Zurbarán picture, and what part is the spectator?

When I saw the painting for the first time, I did not know that the objects in the work are symbolic offerings to the Virgin Mary, that lemons are an Easter fruit, that the rose signifies love, purity, and chastity, and the table an altar. I read that later. It did not fundamentally change my feelings about the picture but rather added to what I had already felt in an undogmatic way — that there is something unworldly about the things I see here, that they are objects suffused with transcendent feeling. Much scholarship about art is in the business of explaining these sorts of meanings: the oranges and their blossoms signify the renewal of life. Other academics write long discourses about technique to explain how a work was made, and there is high theory about art as well, the philosophy of art. In my reading of these philosophers I ran across this:

O is a work of art-e = df O is an artifact and O functions to provide for aesthetic appreciation.²⁴

This is part of a much longer analytical argument, in which James C. Anderson gives the reader a definition of art. Every definition is under siege, and there is little agreement. I have no problem with logical formulas as a way to get at meanings and, in the course of his essay, Anderson modifies this definition to include a second qualifier as a subcategory of appreciation: “art self-conscious art,”²⁵ but what interests me here is the way “aesthetic appreciation” appears in the formula. The words imply an abstract viewer, a general appreciator, and that something happens in that “appreciation,” but the particular embodied dynamics of appreciating are missing, although Anderson suggests that even disgust can be subsumed by the word appreciation. I am not saying that Anderson is necessarily wrong. I am offering here an addendum to theories that have left the drama of creative perception and embodied feeling out of the discussion about art, theories that have largely forgotten that art lives in a viewing subject, in the person who stands in front of whatever the thing is and looks at it, sometimes appreciatively, sometimes not. We might ask how much appreciation does it take to make a work of art. Why do we appreciate art at all? Why do I love the Zurbarán picture? Why am I not alone in loving it? Where and how and when does that love I feel take place? There is no art without the imaginary, and the imaginary is not a given; it arrives at a moment in human development, and it begins in play.

All mammals play, especially young ones, but imaginative play — taking on other roles, being the mother or the father or the baby, building sand castles, making mud pies, drawing a house with a big sun shining over it — belongs to human children and the ability develops over time. Vygotsky argues that in early childhood “there is a union of motives and perception. At this age perception is generally not an independent but rather an integrated feature of a motor action. Every perception is a stimulus to activity.”²⁶ This comment resonates well with my earlier discussion about our proprioceptive, motor-sensory abilities that underlie our visual perceptions of things. Children learn through their active exploration of space, which in time develops into a sixth sense. Around the age of three pretending begins. In imaginative play, the child detaches the usual meaning of a thing, stick, for example, and gives it another significance, horse. The new meaning horse determines the child’s action — galloping across the floor with the stick between his legs. That gallop has been severed from the ordinary meanings of what he sees around him. Dogs romp and play with each other, but they do not indulge in the fantasy of another world. And where does pretending happen? It occurs in an imaginary space that exists side by side with actual or real space. This human flexibility to be two places at once is a function of understanding time and symbolic representation. Because at some moment in my childhood, through my acquisition of reflection — in mirroring and then in language — I developed the ability to remember myself in the past and project myself into the future. I can leave my immediate circumstances and pretend that I am elsewhere or that I am someone else: the old man looking at Duccio, for example. I can imagine myself in the third person and as someone who is not me. Without this there is no art.

Merleau-Ponty writes, “In the case of the normal subject, the body is available not only in real situations into which it is drawn. It can turn aside from the world … lend itself to experimentation, and generally speaking take its place in the realm of the potential.”²⁷ Art happens in this potential space — I would say fictional space of human life, the world of play and its transformations, which Vygotsky refers to as a “realm of spontaneity and freedom.”²⁸ And it always involves some form of intentional motion outward into the other and otherness, not necessarily a specific place or person but an active seeking toward them. In Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (1914), Freud uses the word playground in connection to the transference, that mysterious fluctuating space between patient and analyst, which he also calls “an intermediate region” where “almost complete freedom” is possible.²⁹ Winnicott elaborated on Freud’s playground as the essential space of creativity: “This area of playing,” he writes, “is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual, but it is not the external world.”³⁰ Its origins are deep and bodily. They begin in the first relations between child and mother, in mirroring, in our physical explorations of space and our ability to posit an imaginary zone of experience, which Winnicott also refers to as “potential space.”³¹ This is the ground on which art lives. It is also where appreciation happens and where love can happen.

When we come to a work of art, we are not only witness to the results of another person’s intentional play in his or her fictive space, we are free to play ourselves, to muse and dream and question and theorize. As spectators, we too find ourselves in a potential space between us and what we see because perception is active and creative, and artworks engage us, not just intellectually but emotionally, physically, consciously, and unconsciously, and that relation, that dialogue may be, as Schelling believed, finally indeterminable. But when we love a work of art, there is always a form of recognition that occurs. The object reflects us, not in the way a mirror gives our faces and bodies back to us. It reflects the vision of the other, of the artist, that we have made our own because it answers something within us that we understand is true. This truth may be only a feeling, only a humming resonance we cannot put into words, or it may become a vast discursive statement, but it must be there for the enchantment to happen — that excursion into you that is also I.

2010