Art is a Rorschach Test

The following is a response to an article carried by the California Ventura County Times in the Spring of 2008. The article described a controversy developing in a community north of Los Angeles concerning the appropriateness of art displayed in a local government building. It was in reality just another recursive iteration of the old-as-civilization tension between cultural taboo and art that teases or questions it. Local defenders-of-goodness had taken umbrage at the apparent and implied human genitalia visible on a painting and a sculpture displayed in the foyer of the public building, and were anonymously but passionately agitating that the Conejo Valley Arts Council have them removed. One of the pieces happened to be an abstract bronze sculpture created by my wife, Kathrin Raab-Questenberg. Since the division of labor in our home is I write and she sculpts, she asked me to ghost-write a defense (those of you who are married will intuitively understand this means I was bequeathed in the writing with a lovingly attentive assistance). The following appeared as an editorial in the same paper on June 17^th, 2008.

Re: your June 14 article, "Nude art up, down, back up on a T.O. public wall: Officials deal with complaint plus the issue of censorship":

I am responding to comments concerning some pieces of art in the new Hillcrest Center of the Arts show, which some viewers found inappropriate.

First, let me say that it's always satisfying to see artistic reflexes in other human beings, reflexes that resonate to the symbols that breathe in good art, but are nevertheless missed by many as they burrow through the minutiae of daily living. Those taking umbrage at the sexual overtones of these art pieces understand at least that meaning hums from the center of art, and they express a willingness to mine that meaning for themselves. They are (laudably) engaging in the sacred artistic dynamic of filtering what they see in art through the complex of their own emotional experience.

But in the process they have become frightened, and I must say that was never my intent. They have pulled meaning from the pieces that burgeon far beyond their original implication, choosing to see in them a malevolent and lurid carnality that is simply not there. The pieces they malign are modeled on nothing more or less than the sublime biological opus of God, on the warm concavities and convexities found everywhere in the stunning repository of his creation. These are the same sexual (but not prurient) forms as those seen on the pistil and stamen of a day lily, or in the achingly stretched petals of a Phrag orchid, or in the fluttering and floridly orange edges of a Caribbean coral. If such forms mirror or telegraph what are (for the unnamed critics) disorientingly lewd themes, it is ultimately due to their own interpretation rather than anything intrinsic to the art itself.

There is a difference between sexuality and pornography, between God's creation and salacious human corruptions, and our critics seems to blur that distinction. I personally cannot explain their reflexive apprehension the pieces are sexually tainted, that they drip with lasciviousness, that even if they are, according to the newspaper article, "blatant genitalia," this automatically makes them sensual and corrupt. Ultimately, art is a Rorschach test, one in which viewers often wittingly (and unwittingly) morph the artist's message to fit their own preconceptions. That they construct from the radials and curves, pockets and hips of these pieces a suspicion of carnality is fascinating in its own right. It is exactly this predisposition of human beings to respond to art in personal and unusual ways that makes art such a magical pursuit.

In the final analysis however, at least as regards both my own and Rich Brimer’s original intent as the artists, the critics are simply wrong. The pieces they complain of, though frankly biological, transmit only the sublime innocence and grace of that biology. They are only echoes of the gorgeous movements of God's hand on the material surface of the world, reiterations of the god-caressed forms that float inside this space we occupy. They are just as lurid as an orchid, just as licentious as the apostrophe of skin that marks the edge of a human smile, just as indecent as the rounded "O" of a baby's mouth.

Of course the controversy in Thousand Oaks is not just about the theoretical substance and intent of the art pieces themselves. The members of the Arts Council are entrusted with representing not just art, but the interests and sensitivities of the community as well. Let me affirm for them that the accusers are wrong in their fear an epidemic of corruption will radiate from these pieces, one that dissipates and disorients our youth. I don't know exactly where their expertise regarding "the youth" lies, and I am sure they mean well, but I have surveyed the many children who tumble through my home on a daily basis (friends of my three young boys), and they have always seen nature and not naughtiness in these pieces. Children contain and funnel a natural awe with both beauty and the broad world, and are innately free of the neuroses that often complicate the intellectual and emotional inner life of adults.

Of course the council could just play it safe; there are plenty of pieces of art the critics would not find offensive. But then, what are we saying to the panorama of God's creation? That only certain things are acceptable? That we will decide what is appropriate and what is not in the broad textures of this Earth? That anything that even remotely resembles something even remotely sexual will be condemned, making things as superficially innocuous as a rose garden (where flowers seek sexual reproduction) or a petting zoo (where animals sometimes do the same) off-limits to our children?

In such a brutally sententious framework some of the most wondrous artistic achievements of our human race would fail the litmus test of propriety. Michelangelo's David would languish unseen in a museum vault, revealed only to those deemed mature enough to view its lurid and excitable contours; Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man would be obscured behind the equivalent of the back counter at a local 7-Eleven, covered in an opaque folio seal so as not to corrupt adolescent eyes.

Here’s the thing: a world dissolved of everything humanly potent is a world dissolved of everything human. In the umbrage these critics take, in the folds of the cultural despotism they represent, we find the beginning of the sterilization of our children's lives, the first imperious step toward being so sure we protect them from everything bad, we end up protecting them from everything.

And that, frankly, is a world I think even our critics would abhor. Now, if they could only see that it is exactly such a world they are so assiduously trying to form.

Moral Certainty in the Texts of Alfred Ayer and Jean-Paul Sartre

In the wake of our prolific 20th century wars and violence, many intellectuals have become afflicted with unrelenting moral cynicism. Having long ago folded the terse apercu “if their lips are moving, they’re lying” into our strategy for dealing with the world, we view most statements of ethical belief as nothing but embryonic lies. Our dubiousness comes not of course ex nihilo—but rather because most of the devastation wreaked on the human race in the last 100 years came carefully wrapped in someone’s moral certitude. Nazism, Stalinism, Manifest Destiny--history is marked by a steady colonnade of jack-booted tantrums, all invoked to impose someone’s shining moral certainty on the world.
Philosophers have long plumbed the pathology of ethical certitude. From Socrates to John Stewart, iconoclasts have invariably excoriated human tendentiousness. In the 1940’s, two particularly cogent explorations of human moral delusion emerged in the texts of John Ayer and Jean-Paul Sartre. In both Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic and in Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, arguments were made for the cremation of old moral frameworks. Both writers contended that human ejaculations of morality must be probed until the folds of their mendacity are peeled back, and their untruth lay quivering in the glare of our persistent doubt.
Ayer and Sartre represent two approaches to a pressing question of our century: how are we to shape our human moral future? The question has cleaved a rift into the world, a chasm between two sides represented on the one hand by thinkers like Ayer and Sartre, who reject established morality as rationally corrupt, and a cabal of conservatives who rally the view that morality is god-given and immutable. We are in the teeth of a battle for the human soul, one raging between the old moral certainties and new interrogations of those certainties.
A comparison of the philosophical-ethical frameworks of Ayer and Satre, and of the plausible ramifications of those frameworks, presents its own significance. We are in the center-boil of a modern crisis, one precipitated in scientific explosions of knowledge that have turned old ideas of God and moral certitude on their head. Ultimately, Ayer’s and Sartre’s formulations of morality pose cogent nexi for considering what will be our post-modern moral future.
An interrogation of the moral frameworks of Ayer and Sartre would contain a natural intricacy, as both offer rich theoretical pockets which can be analytically rifled through. Sources would be almost limitless, as the ideas espoused by the two men were often controversial, and thus relentlessly parsed in the call-and-response deliberations of academia. Finally, the interrogation would offer a potential for reaping new conclusions: new quantum, historical and neurophysiological discoveries (such as that of human neurogenetic changeability) have exposed new contexts for judging and sifting both views. The discussion would be split into two halves: one side exploring the idea that traditional morality has become both theoretically untenable and realistically insufficient, and the other mediating an approximation of what a replacement morality would look like. This explication of morality, anchored as it would be to the positivism of Ayer and the existentialism of Sartre, and contextualized against our new scientific paradigms, would ultimately result in ideas for framing the human moral future that are both dialectically elegant and ultimately absolutely necessary for us to live, at least in perpetuity.

The Counterfeits of Consciousness

There is a fundamental cruelty that frames our lives as human beings -- a cruelty born in the benign but dishonest genesis of consciousness. We don’t appear here in a naked heap of full grown human flesh, sucking wet breath through our panic as the sun stabs our eyes and the unfiltered noises of an agitated world batter our newly-formed skulls. The human creature doesn’t arrive in the honest blink of an eye, but is slow-birthed to its place. Although a brain seems to pop from the ether and into the uterus like a little magical walnut, it then develops in maddeningly small increments, moving from incoherent jelly of grey to self-aware neurological capsule in a process so slow, the inching of the continents almost exhilarates by comparison. (Just ask any friend who has lumbered and staggered through the third trimester of human pregnancy).

The assemblage of consciousness is meant to be gentle, because the alternative would be too cruel: suddenly coming-to on the wet earth, weakly shielded in its eggshell atmosphere as it careens through a dead universe, air rasping through stuttering lungs while gravity pins us to the crust and stone. We would be incoherent, frightened by the animated human legions and their bead stares, terrified by their articulating limbs and spasms of intent. It is for this reason we inch into self-awareness -- the languid scaling of our consciousness saves us from the disorienting trauma of sudden corporealization. But the slow ascent of intellect also predisposes us to delusion, leading us to believe a constellation of existential lies. Such as that there is nothing impertinent in a universe that suddenly yanked us into being from the bottom of its cold black hat. Or that our viscous motion through dimension and time is normal and self-evident. Because of the slow arrival of awareness, we are continuously immersed in an incessantly refreshed hypnosis of normalcy. In a tragedy more compelling than any other, the process of our slow awakening prevents us from ever really awakening at all.

Denial of the fundamental absurdity of human experience is ubiquitious in the west. The persistent apathy in culture towards the begging question of living is supremely agitative to me...there is something malevolent in an hallucination of normalcy so jealously maintained by the apparatus of our politic. Being here, attached to a planet spinning through a solar system hurtling through a cosmos, three-dimensional and self-propelled, is solidly absurd. But it is an absurdity painfully minimized and dismissed in the culture at large.

But there have been in the history of our race others who have plumbed the same agitation, others hidden mostly in the margins who have sifted through the smoke of our dystopia and turned the mirrors askew. One feels it in the bones: somewhere in the frontiers of this place lie illumined and sinewed philosophies, and no seeker of truth can settle the restless inquisition until he’s shaken every last intellectual bush to find them.

I wasn’t always so dissatisfied with the paradigm. I started out like everyone else, fully complicit in it. Sparkling but illusory trinkets of materialism and religion held me spellbound. Like everyone else, I poured out obeisance to a prevailing cosmology, pretended that professing belief in God was equivalent to actually believing in God, and that believing in God was actually enough. I plodded through the days in this haze – until at some point my nose caught a sliver of wet stink, and I turned to see an elephant standing knock-kneed and self-consciousness in the middle of the room. Organized religion could only tell me why I was here, it didn’t even pretend to divine why here was here. And while it possessed incredible power to answer the yearning in my heart for meaning, it failed to answer the equivalent yearning in my mind – that for understanding.

Tracing my intellectual path since those days is like chasing the shifts in a quantum particle – it’s impossible to fix both its position and momentum simultaneously. Like most sweeps of the human imagination, Heisenberg’s epiphany plumbed more truth than he originally imagined. It turns out what is true for individual particles (as illuminated in the uncertainty principle) is jtrue for the collection of particles forming mind as well. It’s impossible to parse the growth of human intellect as discreet coordinates of revelation and movement. Too much information is lost in the trying. Like an electron passing through space, my mind’s been threaded into multitudinous of paths by a combination of forces that are impossible to untangle.

Still, there is always retrospection – that mystical operant of the limbic system that staggers clumsy and sticky-fingered into memory. Its loosely wielded auger can stab out samples of our past and lay them out in the flourescence of our scrutiny. But there is a danger embedded in the illusion this gives of understanding. Evoked memory is discourse untethered from context – meanings appear obvious that are often complete inversions of the originals. But you can’t know a man unless you know where he’s been. And though awkward, the evocations of memory are todo que habemos.

It is for this reason I offer up two events in my life that have helped bring me here. If I could take an axe and hew my head in two bloody halves, the pieces would be vaguely recognizable stumps of spirit and intellect. And when I raid roughly into the sleep of my cortex, the following two ghosts are what bubble up, each a faint representation of these halves:

When I was eight years old I was baptized a member of my church. My father packed me in his rough veined hands and pinned me to the shallows of a white-tiled pool. Though Christians stress the process of rebirth that emerging from water signifies, my epiphany lay equally in those moments beneath the surface...lay equally in the seconds of counterfeit death that ticked away as I lay feebly vised to the watery floor. There’s no way I’d have lived had my father decided to keep me there...no way I could have ripped my monkey frame from his stone grip and fought my way to the surface. A few collections of a few seconds were all that separated me from turning pale, than blue, than irretrievably dead. But there I was – submerging thick terror of death for something as nebulous as the concept of God.

In a public place, instinct was servile to mind, brainstem yielded to cerebration. It didn’t matter if I was yielding to faith in God or simply to faith in my father. In either case, the deep organs of my brain should’ve shotgunned fear into my vessels, driving my organism to flee. But the reflexes for survival remained eerily mute. I simply lay there, squeezed by the flat weight of water, heart tapping lazy beats, until my father twisted the fold of my shirt and heaved me to the surface.

No animal on the planet possesses a shadow of this power...this mad gift for yielding instinct to idea. It is what defines us fundamentally as human, and is the only aspect of character capable of redeeming us from base nature. I’ve understood the power of intellect for a long time, and have always been frantic to expand it. It alone can dissolve the tyranny of our animal fundament, paroling us from the linear predictability of evolution and the hell imposed on conscious beings by the despotic caprice of natural programming.

Whereas a religious event invigorated my concept of the intellect, an intellectual event refined my concept of the spiritual. According to the tenets of Taoism, the force of Yang is balanced by the force of Yin. In the broad swirl of my mind, the spiritual not so much balances intellect as teases and persecutes it. It knows full well the limits of mind, and makes no bones about driving the shortcomings home. In a dynamic and vigorous cycle, intellect and spirit vie to surpass each other in illuminating dark corners of the room, and each have become equally important in the doing.

The universe is expanding. It’s difficult to find any statement in the human realm less controversial than this – including the elegantly incontrovertible claims that Liberace was gay or Elvis had supple hips. The thing is, at one point in my life I would’ve insisted the fact belonged to science, coldly separated from the heat and passion of the spiritual. The world was neatly bifurcated into things of the spirit and things of the mind, the universe halved and inelegantly shoved into one or the other realm. But the tension created by this division couldn’t last, and eventually led to the second epiphany that drives my interest in humanities – namely, the knowledge that the division of truth into spiritual and material categories is absurd.

Like most revelations, this one came on “little cat feet,” sneaking through a side door before slithering through the gap at my ankles. The moment itself was prosaic – indistinguishable to an outside observer from the millions of mundane moments that fill a life. Just another minute in another hour, sitting yet again in a lecture hall during another undergraduate year. A sentence had been formulated and sent into the room, packaged adroitly by the professor for easy digestion and commitment to memory: “The universe is expanding. It is a fact, proven in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and in the ubiquitous electromagnetic red shift for every object in space.” I like to think my mind is as disciplined as any other, but at times it chomps at its tether and bolts free to fetch a marvelous little thing from my memory. And what it brought me this time, dripping with adhesions of slobber, dropped happily at my feet, suddenly froze me in my chair. “He who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.” Something from my catechism, Isaiah I think. A twenty-five hundred year old spiritual text belying knowledge of the 20^th century scientific truth that our cosmos is racing for its own peripheries. My mind whirled with the realization of the interconnectedness of things, and of the unity of spirit and mind. Of the possibility, no, the truth, that things of the spirit and things of the mind are neither. That these divisions are arbitrary. That truth is exactly what it pretends to be. That, in the words of a high school friend of mine, waxing philosophical in the haze of a marijuana fugue: “Everything just is what it is.”

And so here I stand, knocking at the door of the humanities program at Cal State Dominguez Hills – hat in hand, knock-kneed like the elephant in the room, self-consciously kicking at the dirt with the tip of my shoe. A man, a corporeal manifestation of spirit and intellect, seeking to expand both provinces under the aegis of your university. I admit to a little concern. I look back on what I have spilled out here and find much that is wrong -- a stream of thought often awkward, poorly worded, and inordinately complex. But in the end I’ve decided to leave it as it is, because as such it is mirror representation of its author. Who, after all, just is what he is.

The Art of Janet Amiri

There is contained in the crisp or sullen edges of all figurative sculpture a symbolic comprehension, an idea, that begins in the chambered belly of the piece and gnaws persistently outward. It is the artist’s idea, one that consumes the quantum-gaps stitched into the medium of the sculpture itself, and then ravenously continues, lancing and swallowing the flesh of space formed beyond its own borders. Through the talismanic power of the sculpture the artist’s idea punctures the boundaries in everything, moves through all interstices, finally tearing out chunks of the infinite distance that had once alienated the artist from the art-viewer and the art-viewer from the artist, ultimately forming what is the numinous truth of art—a mystical, interminable and limitless communion of mind.

The communication, the idea, is in most art unified-in-itself, fused into an ingot of singular epiphany that, after it is done consuming the span between us, glows hot and centered like a phosphorous shard on the brain-pan. And we submit to its cauterizing truth. But the art of Janet Amiri ups the ante, ratcheting its power by splitting that ingot of meaning into a stunningly sublime contradiction. The contradiction is this—The atoms of bronze are cold and heavy, but in the still inertia, in the recalcitrant heaviness of that metal, Janet manages to tap out a dancing spinning looping epiphany of contentment. The trick works—stunningly. The contradiction of lightness from heaviness, of mind from matter, forms oppositional shards that both undergird and antagonize each other . Janet orchestrates a dizzying paradox, on the one hand channeling a light and warmth-stoked enchantment with this place, with the fundamental rightness-of-living and breathing and gathering the heat of the sun from our harvested human days, and on the other hand doing it through what seems the thick and sullen stems of bronze, spun as it is from stubborn atomic knots of copper and tin and contained in its own metallic self-possession. The result is a stunningly mesmerizing contradiction, one which teases the viewer into recursive eddies of meditation that all end at the same place: at the center boundary of the heart, where friend and family and spirit all dance and stretch beneath the star-spackled cosmos and chant with one voice: “This life, this place—it’s exactly what it is supposed to be.”

The world of art forms a broad and high-canopied tent. There is for instance art that arrests us, stopping us mid-step with an instinctive apprehension of the intellectual menace and social disruption . There is art that shocks, compelling us in the grip of our unease to titter and grin into upturned palms. Such art forms like an anvil bolted to concrete floors, on the flat of which our existential illusions are hammered and twisted and made to give up their ghost. But the art of Janet Amiri is forged differently—shaped calmly but persistently into warm ingots of symbol, gently warped into curves of attraction and meaning that reflect the truth hidden in the crease of meticulous second-by-second days. It is an art that rests like a real and tactile weight at the center of thought, like a beach-milled stone, sun-warmed and smooth, begging to be gripped and turned and shifted. What was once a hissing and steaming first-formed bronze has cooled in the quenching steep of her intent, solidifying as sculpture that bears, in the molecular subtext of its focus, a soothing and balanced heft of contentment. It is contentment that accrues in each of her pieces one-by-one, in the dancers and the dogs and the lips and the portraits, one that warms the corners of the soul, chasing out the cold that bears down in the steep of a science-gnawed century.

It is there in her dancers, queens who spin pirouettes from tuned and lightly tensed sinew, who barely press a toe to the ponderous mass of earth, who seem to shed gravity from their shoulders like a heavy robe in order to tense and spin and dance unencumbered in the warm light of being here.

It is there in her family pieces, where boundaries fuse between parents and children, husbands and wives, where the despotic material concept of "she ends" and "he begins" is obliterated beneath the weld of her artistry into one coherent epiphany--that the only real truth is that it is a we, stitched together at a single human root, who exist.

And finally it is there in her series of bronze human lips, which together form a frame-of-view she has progressively tightened, and cyclically resolved into a revelatory synecdoche--that the part, in the final analysis, is often greater than the whole. They are lips that hang in the viewer’s perception like sharded anatomical medallions, lips so effulged with tense cords of self they seem to contain everything important for the transmission of the human animus. That the carved out anatomy of a human mouth, decontextualized from the totter of the human corpus, can channel truth and god and spirit as tersely and as powerfully as a torso or a face says something vital about the nature of us. By turning the viewers gaze through the stunning detail and surprising intimation of soul contained in the swell of the human lips, Janet ratchets us in towards ourselves, causing us to shed successive illusions of what it is that makes us human. We arrive then where she takes us—disassembled and deconstructed until only the quivering truth remains: that the soul and the self sift through the very shred and tear of our watery flesh, that the essence of who we are is etched like shards of DNA into every atomic piece of us.

Humanities and the Resurrection of Human Be(ing)

Scholar and WWII bomber pilot John Snell once opined that the humanities are essential “to constructing the village of man, after all the villages of men have been destroyed.” Like William Golding, Snell peered through the smoke collecting over 1940’s Europe and suddenly comprehended the truth of us. In the heat of that war’s industrially calculated destruction, he sniffed a dystopic truth: that empirical science was not what it was cracked up to be, that it repulsed its messianic promise; that it would never alone convey us into a benign and rational human future. Despite over a hundred years of faith in its promise, science alone—even minced and calibrated, dissected and pinned to a spreading board—was not enough. Ultimately we had to recognize that when knowledge is torn from moral human substrates, it becomes at best a dead and at worst a disintegrative thing.

Enlightenment thinkers had been right in maligning the overbearing mechanisms of culture, which for centuries shackled us to a counter-rational superstition. But the belief that scientific truth would dissolve our pathologies, conveying us on empirical wings to some final utopian end-station, turned out to be (like rumors of Mark Twain’s death) grossly exaggerated. In the steam of blood that hisses from our wars, in the teeth-grind of dysentery that tears at the bellies of our poor, in the angst that taints faith with a brutal existential cowardice (one breathless to sell freedom as wage of security) -- in all this we find the dereliction of the enlightenment promise. “Science did,” says Mortimer Graves, “what we never before dreamed possible…only to find itself floundering, frightened and confused, on the road to self destruction.”
So now we stand at a wobble in the once headlong rush of history. There is a point in “The Cry” by Jean-Paul Sartre where the stage goes quiet. Garcin enters, accompanied by the valet, and glances around him: “So here we are?” VALET: “Yes, Mr. Garcin.” GARCIN: “And this is what it looks like?” VALET: “Yes.” GARCIN: “Second Empire furniture, I observe... Well, well, I dare say one gets used to it in time.” VALET: “Some do, some don't.” In this exchange Sartre roentgens the abysmal spiritual abandonment that lurks in our “second empire” science. We have toggled the world over to the truth-shoveling of science, but in our hearts we sense no bottom in this constant excavation of empirical truth, no place where a human being can ultimately plant his human feet, no house, in the words of Henrik Ibsen, “fit for human beings.” So here we sit, stuck in our persistent war-stained catharsis, one raging to exorcise a final dismal apprehension--that science has torn out our centers and then wandered off.
It is the year 2008, and the clash of science and religion has disintegrated to a floor-match. Both sides twitch with fatigue, and press out a grunt or two, but none owns the advantage. The arena has frozen, history seems to have stumbled and comes to a standstill. A voice crackles over the loudspeaker: “What we need now,” laments Saul Bellow, “is a grand synthesis.” An adumbration of who we really are; a mechanism that folds us into ourselves; one that congeals the flexed core of the human spirit with the bold trajectory of the human mind.
Is there such a thing? Something to warm-fuse the intellectual and spiritual aspects of our world? Something that can solve our 21st century human crisis, preventing our annihilation, allowing us to remain for a few more orbits of this earth around this sun? John L. Snell offers that there is, and that it is nothing less than the humanities: “In an age in which thought is increasingly expressed in statistics…the humanities remind us, in the words of a parody of e.e. cummings, that nothing measurable matters ‘a very good God damn.’ "
We must now concede, as the 20th century snaps shut and the 21st opens its gaping star-strewn abyss for us, that nothing measurable has annulled our hate, that nothing measurable has even marginally apprehended the mystery that afflicts us—the mystery lurking in what it means to be human. It is only in the humanities that we approach this conundrum, only in the humanities that we even cautiously form a Saul-Bellow-prodded synthesis of our meaning, one that forms our last hope for assembling plausible human futures. Not only are the humanities relevant in these our nascent 21st century days—they are probably no less than absolutely necessary.