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.