Altogether Elsewhere

Fig. 1 Shack and Tulips

If Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther were to be illustrated, I can think of no better fit than Rocky Schenck. In fact, it would be easy to narrate Goethe’s work with Schenck’s luminous requiems. However, I want to avoid linking the two artists in that way. They share an aesthetic vision that evades our canon's ideological divisions. We could not label either of these artists purely Romantic; human despair (of the Modern mode) confounds their attemtps at pastoral. Yet there is an optimism that eschews the jeremiads of our twentieth century art as well.

Schenck’s Romantic inclinations are overshadowed by an awareness of mortality. It is what we might find in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: fear offset by glimmerings of hope. In that sense, the shadowness that pervades Schenck's world only serves to define the light, and not just the sun (is there ever a sun in Schenck's work?). Tulips pulse like fireflies; horses look like highbeams in the field; and children wear bright robes of ember--all evocations of innocence and joy, all Goetheian emanations.

To introduce the almost Whitmanic nature of Schenck's work, let me start with a passage that exemplifies those emanations and the pseudo-Romantic eye that receives them:

When the mist rises around me from the lovely valley, and the sun at high noon rests on the roof of my impenetrably dark forest, and only single shafts of sunlight steal into the inner sanctuary, and I am lying in the tall grass by the falling brook, discovering the variety of thousands of different grasses closer to the ground; when I feel nearer to my heart the teeming little world among the grass blades, the innumerable, inscrutable shapes of all the tiny worms and insects, and feel the presence of the Almighty who created us in his image, the breath of the All-Loving who sustains us, floating in eternal bliss—my friend, when everything grows dim then before my eyes, and sky and earth rest in my soul like the image of a beloved being—I am often overcome by longing and by the thought: could you only breath upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, so that it might become the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!—My friend—but it is more than I can bear; I succumb to the power and the glory of these visions. [I am using the definitive edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which includes his brief Novella: Trans. Elizabeth Mayer, Louis Bogan, and W.H. Auden, Random House 1971]

The passage is a manifesto of the Goethe/Schenck vision. Several key elements in their work reconcile the opposing nature of fear and bliss. The first is the oneiric quality (or dream-quality) of the “impenetrably dark forest” where “single shafts of light steal into the inner sanctuary.” In his photo, Shack and Tulips, the only reason we see the house is because of the field's effulgence. It is reverse photosynthesis: The flora feeds the eye with its own light. Like walking into a lit room from a dark hall, this light reveals the intimacies of even our bleakest dreams. In a very real sense, our dreams, like the snail's shell, are the manifestations of our self-home--a hibernaculum for our metaphysical identities. Behind the door of that home resides the mysteries of our being and character, which are also the mysteries that define our art. In his higly influential work, Poetics of Space, Bachelard explains this dichotomy:

For the real houses of memory, the houses to which we return in dreams, the houses that are rich in unalterable oneirism, do not readily lend themselves to description…All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively. (13)

Both Schenck and Goethe orient us toward their secrets and the wonderful rooms of their obsessions.

What we also notice is Goethe’s need to miniaturize. The "small" is easy to control. He lies in the tall grass among the “teeming little world among the grass blades.” By condensing the world, he intensifies both his amours and his anxieties. Contrary to the rational control it intends, the mind reacts radically, like a supernova. Goethe’s emotions rage brighter and brighter as his Humbertian fixation with Lotte goes progressively unrequited. And as we know, a supernova is but the dying of a star. Following the star's collapse, a consuming darkness pervades. The analogy belongs to Goethe's Werther and Schenck’s photographs as well, both verging on collapse.

I turn again to Schenck’s Shack and Tulips. The tulips, it is hard to conceive otherwise, become a stellar necropolis. Its residual darkness absorbs the domestic background of home and arbor. I can think of no other photographer today who captures the same dramatic, Goetheian intensity, not even Barbara Ess whose pinhole photographs evoke similar dreamscapes but lack Schenck’s photosynthetic eye.

We are drawn to the tulips the same way our eyes are lured by the stars at night. But it is not just the light that beckons. It has been argued that certain shapes provoke the human imagination more than others. Paul Valéry, in his essay, “Les Coquillages,” says, “A crystal, a flower or shell stands out from the usual disorder that characterizes most perceptible things. They are privileged forms that are more intelligible for the eye, even though more mysterious for the mind, than all the others we see indistinctly” (Bachelard 105-7). Surely the tulip is a “privileged form”—one need not expound upon its Hallmark associations with “perfect love.” But what we really see is the Whitmanic engagement of the celestial mind with the terrestrial body. It is cosmicity dreamed in microcosm. In these photographs, as with Goethe’s Sorrows, we read more than emotional travail. We are reading emotion as the primordial essence of man. That essence gives more than shape to the tulip. It conjures radiance, like Goethe on his deathbed when he said, More Light! More Light!

Fig. 2 Near Comfort

Like Shacks and Tulips, Schenck’s Near Comfort continues the Goetheian struggle between “vague perceptions and dim desires” and the “creative power and vital force” (12). In this “twilit world,” we struggle to retain a sense of lucidity. We try to remember things: relationships, vacations, the names of dogs and uncles. But contrary to popular science, memory too is a cog of the imagination, not documentation. We never recall things as they truly happened. Neither do photographs capture authentic experience. They merely reflect what we once saw through the eyes of the person we once were. Indeed many of Schenck's photographs look as if they are trying as hard as the viewer to remember. What appears can be discomforting. Change is the arbiter of our greatest sorrows. We come “near comfort” through our dreams and recollections. But as the title of Stella Gibson’s novel suggests, it is a “cold comfort.”

Here again is the house, perhaps where we grew up. But we no long occupy its space. Our experience has outgrown it. Our imagination has assimilated a universe beyond our clapboard domiciles. Its windows are dark. The light that once illuminated its rooms now illuminates the field only. Even the trees in which we climbed or pelted sparrows exclude us with a cosmic shadow of neglect.

Fig. 3 Daddy in the Woods

But such exclusion begs exploration. The eye is the navigator of the oneiric mind. Like a metal detector, it responds to the light within the shadow and triggers the photosynthetic vision. Like Proust, Goethe was sensitive to the shapes that were magnified by the turning lamp: “As soon as you insert the little lamp, then the most colorful pictures are thrown on your white wall. And even though they are nothing but fleeting phantoms, they make us happy as we stand before them like little boys, delighted at the miraculous vision” (47). In Schenck’s, Daddy in the Woods, the experienced mind encounters one of these lamps and bends over the object in delight and curiosity. Here we make the association between lamp and bulb, as in the tulip’s bulb. There is no elucidation without nature: “It is said that the Bologna stone, when placed in the sun, absorbs the sun’s rays and is luminous for a while in the dark,” says Werther. The stone is the same as the lamp. It withholds a light that can only be seen by a visionary. The miracle is not the transition of nothingness into somethingness. It is experience born of the eye’s inclusion of the object’s inherent light. That experience, that miracle, is art. It reaches into the microcosm for its universe. As Bachelard explains, “One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small” (150).

This dualism can be found in the earliest of human discourses. The fission of night and day is the first observation in Genesis. But Goethe’s and Schenck’s contributions to the conversation are profound. Because we are most active in the daylight, we attribute reality and the forces that drive reality to it. But Schenck’s photographs remind us that light is merely synaptic in the vast blackness of space, which makes light that much more precious. All illumination, then, is precious. But, as Schenck seems to suggest, there is more to it. The dream of life is electric; all life is charged.

First, my apologies for not posting pictures on this particular blog. The reason being that I think the collection should be seen as a whole, and the photos that are on the web do not do the book justice. Also, I will say that Deep South did not get rave reviews. In fact, many critics ridiculed and denounced this book as "derivative" and "cliche" in the sense that the stagnant and ruinous quality of the South has been over-romanticized. And I would agree with the critics in part. Certainly there are those photographs in the book that evoke, too emphatically, the Civil War and all the specters of that epoch. But much of the work transcends regional and historical legacy. What can never be exhausted in Southern artistic endeavors (when it's honest to its vision) is the mystery and supernatural quality inherent in the place itself. When I close my eyes and think of my Louisiana childhood, I find myself in the same half-light, the same blurred boundaries, the same kudzu-strangled dimension in which Mann finds herself.

Though Nietzsche was our preeminent nihilist and discounted the Romantic notion that man and nature were fundamentally good, he understood the necessity for illusion, or delusion, as it has helped us to cope with existential despair. Nothingness and the illusion of life, or vice versa depending on your half-full/half-empty glass, seem to me the essence of our Gulf Coast culture—a people's way of existing in the moss and miasma of bogscapes and decay. So we celebrate on the streets, slinging cheap bullion and bearing our breasts in defiance of death. But when that's done, the coruscating fete is once again eclipsed, and the insects have their way. A nothingness persists.

Unlike Nietzsche, however, there are those of us who consider ourselves proselytes of this strange beauty, a beauty that non-natives might miss on their linear tours of I-10. Viktor Shklovsky noted (and I think correctly) that the splendor of art stems from a kind of strange-making, a de-familiarization of the familiar. Indeed, the Gulf constantly de-familiarizes itself through a regimen of creation and destruction, which is a kind of mimesis of the imagination. What is the imagination if not a strange-maker? It is the only sensory tool we possess to probe and test the unknown.

Too many of our contemporary artists, especially the poets, dismiss the metaphysical. Workshops preach the doctrine of concreteness, promptly revising out all abstraction and replacing it with kitchen utensils and boat motors, which, don't get me wrong, is not a bad thing for beginning writers. But god and myth and mystery bore the current judicial board of poetry. I am, as you might imagine, of the opposite opinion. Only when we've moved beyond the facts, as one critic put it, can we get at the truth of things. The museums these days are pageantries of smug self-assurance, which is worse than a naïve belief in Romantic benevolence because it denies the chaotic authority of nature.

At this point, I realize that I have heaped on myself the burden of proof. But it is not my intention here to amalgamate what is obvious in most journals, nor do I mean to generalize about all art. Certainly the metaphysical tradition is alive in that subcurrent that exists beneath all major movements. However, it is not, for the most part, in poetry that we see artists bolstering Nietzsche's necessary illusion. Instead, we find an exciting renaissance of the metaphysical in contemporary photography, the likes of which I have written about on this blog already.

But to marry illusion with the essence of what originally prompted this thought—depictions of the Gulf Coast—I offer the photographs of Sally Mann's collection, Deep South. Sally Mann's reputation as a photographer precedes her. Known worldwide for her controversial (and beautiful) nude portraits in At Twelve and Immediate Family, she displays an unparalleled tenderness and understanding of her subjects, a softness that awes us. Her book, What Remains, follows Ulysses into the underworld where we come face to face with memory and dream. Deep South is the culmination of her previous explorations: a Swedenborgian vision of the Southern landscape, an osmosis of what is self and what is place—those essential quandaries of the human species that have defined our art for thousands of years.

Perhaps Mann makes a mistake in her essay that draws upon antebellum nostalgia and postbellum defeat. If so, we cannot dismiss the photographs out-of-hand because of what triggered the compositions. And to see only a rural redundancy is to disassociate oneself with the magnetism of uncertainty which pervades these photographs. I think much of the negative reaction comes from the fact that this place does not care if we see it or not, if we understand it or not, if we even exist or not. In art, we empathize with what is human. But in Sally Mann's Deep South, we become acutely aware of the illusion that we've conjured for ourselves. It is a bitter medicine.

What can one say about Jamie Baldridge's photography that can possibly contend with the enchantment that speaks for itself, or rather mystifies and awes us dumb. The Everywhere Chronicles, published by 21^st Editions is a stunning work of the imagination. Because of its limited publication, it has been hoarded by the Library of Congress and Cornell and other vanguards of the immaculate arts, so I have not had the opportunity to read Bardridge's story that accompanies the photographs. Apparently he has written an Alice in Wonderland tale of sorts, which seems appropriate given such images as this Mad Hatter-type (or Mad Papist?) with his…eggs?

..

Well, there's no accounting for the logic of the imagination. But for those of us who, like the Hatter, could care less about reason and are drawn to art on a purely sensual basis, there is much to admire, such as the softness of form that pervades the scene. Or maybe not so much a softness as a sheen, almost plastic, which verges on the sinister. It is the same creepiness we get when looking at one of those beautiful porcelain dolls with the eyes that want to roll back into the head. Why do I keep thinking of the Inquisition?

Oh yes, perhaps the arrows have something to do with it. But no matter. Like Alice, we are always drawn back to our childhood curiosity when looking at Baldridge's pictures.

Or perhaps a better comparison could be made to the Polish writer, Bruno Schultz (1892-1942), whose book, The Street of Crocodiles, fuses the alchemy of a child's mind with the facts of an adult reminiscence in order to "liberate [us] from the tortures of boredom." To do this, as Schultz's father tells him, "we wish to create man a second time—in the shape and semblance of a tailor's dummy." And what are Baldridge's characters if not the tailor's dummies enameled in the mind's gold? So too is Schultz's prose enameled:

On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passers-by, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat—as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces—the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.

Or we have some strange Lady of Shalott, weaving and unweaving a very different kind of Camelot. Sweet Lady of the Industrial Age, what utopia do you darn for us? I'm not sure if I want to know.

Baldridge's photographs do what all great art does—take us out of ourselves, out of our own realities, and set us down in the evocative and mysterious world that has always been here, behind the veil of history and science and time. It is what we demand of art—liberation from boredom.

The previous post on ParkeHarrison was, I realize, a little wordy. Hopefully I tone it down in this post. I stumbled upon Lartigue's photography on Graeme Mitchell's blog a few months back and have been somewhat hypnotized by his art ever since.

Bichonnade Leaping © Jacques-Henri Lartigue Foundation

"Innocence" is the word most often cited regarding Lartigue's work. Adults, children, and dogs splash and leap and crash and are captured in their most explosive moments of life and energy. Of course, when thinking of our childhoods, we remember motion. We recall ourselves diving headfirst into a pool or getting tossed from off our bikes. We think of sliding down banisters and racing one another in the yard.

1921 © Jacques Henri Lartigue

But we grow slow. We sit more. We run less. We fear speed and avoid danger. Experience is a great exhaustion from which we never quite recover. But Lartigue's eye is one of those unique and visionary lenses that sees beyond the slowing of time; it sees reversal, or I should say, our inevitable return to youth.

Sala Au rocher de la vierge. Août 1927. Biarritz. ©Jacques Henri Lartigue.

Lartigue, though having lived and worked in the infancy of the Modern Age, harkens back not to Victorian optimism, but to what M.H. Abrams called the Romantic "Natural Supernaturalism." Within his photos, we glimpse creation in reverse, or the body pulled by its toes back into the emanating light from which it sprang. A woman is stopped, mid-summersault, as if to be rolled back to her girlhood. A boy is hooked by his heals mid-dive. A dog is launched across a ditch but has come to the end of the invisible rubberband to which he is attached. The creatures of Lartigue's photographs verge on being jerked back to that original joy of the imagination before the act.

What it all comes down to is the miraculous response of the body to the human mind—an energy propelling nature's cycle forward from origin to experience and back to origin. We leap and fall and spin over and over again because the joys of our bodies refuse stasis. We are not trees. We are not stones. We are what Wordsworth describes as "transitory Beings." Lartigue, then, is a master of transition—a term best suited for Eliot's own compulsions of "vision and revision." I am reminded of Robert Bly's poem, "Why We Don't Die":

In late September many voices

Tell you you will die.

That leaf says it. That coolness.

All of them are right.

But he stresses what Lartigue tells us in his photography:

The body doesn't agree. It says,

"We buried a little iron

Ball under that tree.

Let's go get it."

Karl Marx argued that the difference between what bees construct and what men construct is not in the complexity of the thing built (I think we can concede that both are capable of magnificent intricacies) but in man's ability to improve upon the knowledge he passes down. I am not so sure, however, that men have the upper hand, or that our studied designs outweigh the bees' simply because they can be improved. We have to consider the possibility that bees have long perfected an architecture that is communal and economic, comfortable and practical, non-invasive and renewable.

Of course, Marx was writing of man's alienation from his work. And in that regard, the bees are vastly superior. Whether or not the bee enjoys his work the way we understand "enjoyment" is irrelevant since enjoyment suggests an ideal state of emotion—an emotion to which very few of us are privileged anyway. We can say with some certainty, however, that bees partake of their labors in a direct fashion. The cycle of their lives afford no waste, which is the nature of biological mechanics—the mechanism of dependency within all levels of the biosphere.

Man, on the other hand, deafens himself to the mechanism of which he is also a gear. He revs the engine, increases volume, and hammers through his lunch hour. He cannot hear the bees who have spent their day in the fields among sweeter things. He does not listen to the inside of the hive, that resonance of proximity which denies alienation. It is the music of functionality, which is the blueprint for any good structure, especially a nation.

Joseph Campbell said that poetry is the keeper of myth. And what is myth if not the magic and the mystery of being? Indeed all good art preserves that which is sacred and inexplicable, or as the poet, John Wood, would have it, that which "a thousand thousand saints / have said they've known / but called by other names" ("Definitions"). The names that come to my mind—"Flying Lesson," "Restoration," "The Marks We Make," "Kingdom" and so on—can be found in the photography of our most accomplished contemporary myth-maker, Robert Parkeharrison.

"The Visitation" copyright Robert Parkeharrison

The photos, at least of his collection, The Architect's Brother, capture the ruin of a world adjacent to our own—the post-apocalyptic desert of Yeats' "The Second Coming": "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"—or the terra nullius of McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Road. Always there is one man, identified by most critics as "Everyman," doing something strange and wonderful within the picture—an adamic husbandry where the imagination manifests itself in a very physical, very tangible way. I'm thinking of "Pollination" where seeds are sung from off a giant pistil, or "Tree Sonata" where Philomela is replaced by a violinist—an attempt to move away from the terror of Modernism, if not toward hope, then at least a new accord—a notion that Ezra Pound defends in his essay, "How to Read": "[M]usic is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even the sentient universe."

"Suspension" copyright Robert Parkeharrison

When I first saw Parkeharrison's work, I was so enamored and so deeply moved that I immediately scrapped together every photo I could find on the web. It was, and still is, a freeing experience to look at these compositions. His art allows us to breathe in a world that is becoming more and more analogous to a hive. He captures the Western ideal of open spaces, devastated though they may be, and literally plows them anew with the ram-horn of the imagination ("Restoration"). We have assessed the naïveté suggested of our kind in Eliot's wasteland. It is inevitable that the "bats with baby faces" have their way for a time. But Parkeharrison sees this not as New Testament finality, but Pentateuchal re-creation—what Yahweh must have done a million times after those barnyard hoedowns with Shiva (read John Wood's "The Kālī Yuga").

I see more than "everyman" in Parkeharrison's wandering, lone ranger. I see one man and, subsequently, one man's possibilities illumined by the "emanating light" of the imagination. He is Odysseus, done with war, beached upon an era desperately in need of a hero.

Parkeharrison's work has, in recent years, become more blatantly environmental—a less interesting, though still relative, kind of didacticism that he avoids in The Architect's Brother. I'm hoping this is a kind of chrysalis stage. But he has already given something to the art world that is exceptional and powerful. America has always identified the power of the demiurge within the self (Emerson's "Self Reliance"). That is what distinguished the American Transcendental identity from British Romanticism whose creative glory was ideologically external (read Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"). But with Parkeharrison, those identities are congealed into a sense of self that anchors the body to its place in the world ("Suspension")—a statement that I find poignant and intensely relevant to 21^st-century art.

Steven Brown

A preemptive apology: My track record for maintaining blogs such as this one is quite poor. Whatever part of my brain that is responsible for discipline suffered a faulty installation in the womb. That said, I promise to post until I stop posting.

As for the purpose of this blog, I wish to yalp barbarically about that art which I find moving, relevant, necessary, and beautiful to the extent of my own understanding of beauty. Unfortunately, most of what I discuss in this blog will be without an immediate referent. Copyright laws prohibit my posting of media which is not my own--a prohibition that I find particularly indecent considering the life-changing value of art and the historical benefit of its dissemination to mankind. (More rants later!) So I will link all the discussions to their appropriate source material. Maybe it will be enough to link the picture to the site from which it came. I'll give it a try.

Addendum: If you wish to use any of the information from this blog, please give credit to its source or, if it is my own criticism, to me.

All best,
Steven