Category: language

A Lighthouse for Dark Times, Maria Popova (The Marginalian)

“Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible.

[…][Hermann] Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. […]

Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”

FM: Well, phenomenology as a kind of philosophical discipline, I think, implies some very specific ideas about spatiotemporal coordination and three-dimensionality. It implies a kind of separation of the subject and the object. The object comes into view. The object comes into consciousness for a subject as a function of that separation and hopefully what the object does is, in a way, both confirm and also mirror the assumed three-dimensionality of the subject, of the viewer. When we talk about a well-developed character, in a novel or in a play, the complement we like to give such a character is that they are three-dimensional. And I think there’s something to be said, there’s much to be said in praise of two-dimensionality. There’s much to be said that’s in praise of what people ordinarily, I think, misrepresent as flatness. And for me, I would maybe begin, if you have a chance to visit the gallery, by encouraging a stance towards the works, particularly to the wall-based works, to encourage a stance that isn’t, let’s say, full-frontal. Don’t stand up in front of it or stand against it as if it were your object. It’s a really cool thing to walk carefully and respectfully up to the side of it so that if you can imagine not looking at it, but looking with it or almost looking through it. And especially in those big, huge wall paintings, what you see is all this texture. And you see all this richness. And you see all this shape. And you see the intensity with which color doesn’t oppose itself to shape, but folds into shape. And all of a sudden, it turns out that this two-dimensionality, this sort of holographic reality that he’s giving us, is immeasurably and unimaginably rich, which I think allows us to begin to imagine how rich all of the things which we ordinarily would dismiss as two-dimensional must be, right? Including, for instance, let’s say, the generally understood to be two-dimensional lives of, say, Black folks in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935 or something like that. It makes me want to really, really think hard about the rich, deep, syncretic, two-dimensional richness of Black Tupelo, Mississippi, which must have been the deepest possible flat place that anybody could ever imagine if it turned out to produce both Sam Gilliam and Arthur Jafa within thirty years of one another. That’s a mystery that somebody needs to try to figure out right there.

Sam Gilliam’s Latest
A Roundtable Conversation-Hickey, Martin, Moten
Pace Gallery, recorded on December 16, 2020

  But her power of enchantment is on us,
           We bow to the spell which she weaves,
          Made up of the murmur of waves
           And the manifold whisper of leaves.

Loon Point, Amy Lowell