A Small Theory of the Visible - Essay Example

A Small Theory of the Visible How are we to reclaim the wilderness away from our walls and our zoos, and restore its ability to wake us out of the stupor of our daily lives? One way, according to both Berger and to Williams, is through a proper understanding of art, and through making sense of the wilderness through viewing the processes of nature as art. These two men both come to the same conclusions, approaching the reality of the artistic process from two varying perspectives that it is with the artist's true gaze that the world can be properly restored to its beauty and also to its final inscrutability. Reality, and not just the wilderness, is something that lies outside of what is practical, and can only be properly appreciated from a kind of receptivity that the artist's perspective can capture. There are profound insights to be had from taking this view (Williams; Berger). Williams in a way hopes to frame the wilderness as conceptual art, as living art, or as performance art, at any rate a form of art. This is not an empty exercise in highfalutin aesthetics, or an attempt to cultivate an elevated mind. This is not empty intellectualizing, but something rooted in the way the wilderness and its experience can be made more immediate. This is not to say that framing the wilderness as art is something that has some outward economic, financial, or utilitarian function, to improve humanity. This is not it at all. In the mind of Williams this has more to do with the proper framing of the wilderness in terms of a perspective that in a way restores its sanctity, its religious essence. Art is something that has no defined use in society, and it has the ability to jolt and to shock people into paying attention, away from their smart phones, their computers, their mundane interests, their conversations, and the business of life. Why shouldn't the wilderness be framed in the same way? There is something ultimately mysterious and indefinable about the wilderness, something that cannot be tamed and cannot be domesticated and caged in aquariums, or in natural history museums. There is something altogether alien about it, but in the way culture treats artifacts of the wilderness, such as the shark with its awesome and raw power, there is something there that is lost. The giant stuffed whale has ceased to be an object of wonder, but has rather become deadened and familiarized as an artifact of decoration. This is partly Williams' lament, that the wilderness, in the estimation of the general public, has ceased to attract awe, respect, and contemplation even. Yet framing wilderness as conceptual art may be a means to re-awaken a natural wonder towards sharks, whales, the awesome power of nature, of which we are part but of which we also set ourselves apart, in our human societies, in New York and in the great cities of the world. This is the heart of the thing. As Williams asks, rhetorically: “Can we not watch the habits of animals, the adaptations of plants, and call them performance art within the conceptual framework of wilderness?” (Williams 482). Williams often cites Hirst, the naturalist and artist, who in his various works, in the chopping up of a cow and the reorientation of its body parts in ways that make us confront the wild beauty of something that we take for granted as food, as cut up parts that we cook, mash, and make into patties: “…we confront the wonder of the organism as is, not as a continuum but as a design, the sheer beauty and texture of functional design” (Williams 483). How for example can this vision of the wilderness art manifest itself in the real world? In the case of an aquarium in an amusement park, where sharks are on display in mock-ups of the environment of the wild oceans, Williams comes up with a re-imagining of the aquarium, or offers alternative perspectives of the aquarium life as conceptual or performance art, as something that elevates the aquarium as a static concept but something that is a living reality, an unfolding creation of beauty that one must pay close attention to: “Call it a cabinet of fish preserved in salt solution to honor the diversity of species, where nothing is random. Or call it a piece of art to celebrate color and form...Colored dots in the wilderness. They're all connected” (Williams 482). Berger meanwhile, in developing his thesis on the give and take relationship between the painter and the model, the object being painted, quotes Shitao: “Painting is the result of the receptivity of ink: the ink is open to the brush: the brush is open to the hand: the hand is open to the heart: all this is the same way as the sky engenders what the earth produces: everything is the result of receptivity” (Berger 109).This quote is being made in light of a corollary argument of the painter, not as a creator, but a receiver, and as a faithful chronicler, if one can say that, of what exists, physical reality. The key word here is receptivity. The great painter is a great receptor, he is open through his eyes, through to his hands, and his heart receives and is open to the hands that paints and to the eye that sees. The object participates by offering himself up to the painter, in revealing himself, in the present moment. The great painter uses his brush and ink in order to see, and to depict, as close as he can, to the point for instance of even losing his very sanity. In the case of animals, he needs to get as close as possible to the point of putting himself in danger, in order to depict animals as close as possible to what is real. Painting is the art of capturing the real, and here there are no compromises. He illustrates this further in reference to Soutine and his works: “The poplars, the carcasses, the children's faces on Soutine's canvases clung to his brush” (Berger 109). Soutine is great because, despite outward appearances of being too rough and too unrefined, later assessments of his works have revealed how he clung to the truth, and how in turn his models, children to the remains of various living things, clung likewise to the painter and his instruments of art. There is a mutual attraction here, and a mutual faithfulness. To get to there Soutine had to risk being marginalized and of having to live outside of the conventions of his time (Berger 109). He had to live on the margins of what was considered good art, and what was considered to be tasteful art. His art was considered vulgar during his time, and he clung to the vision of his truth even at the risk of being vulgar, and maybe offensive to the tastes of his contemporaries. On the other hand, a less faithful artist would be a conformist, whereas to be a Soutine is to be non-conformist not by choice but by the necessity and the demand of what exists in reality (Berger 109). The participation of the object of the painting is also framed in terms of what Berger considers as the determinant of a good painting. The participation of the world is the mark of what is good and beautiful. It is a testament to the nature of things that where an artist's vision is true, and his loving gaze is sincere, then the world participates by baring itself in its truth and in its beauty. There is implicit in this assertion the maxim that the artist is after all capable of perceiving this truth and this beauty, and that the physical world responds in the act of creating the painting by baring itself. There is this quality too of the physical object responding by waiting, as it were, for the painter to actually set his loving and true gaze on the object. There is the quality in the good painting, in the words of Berger, for the flower, the rock, the sky, the beautiful woman, to engage the artist so, and to respond to the love that is thrown at it with its own kind of love and devotion. It is devotion through the waiting act. The beautiful flower and the beautiful woman want to be seen. They wait for the artist who is sincere, who has become a true receptor of the real, to cast his gaze on them and render them unto the canvas “There is a painting of roses in a vase by Morandi (1949) in which the flowers wait like cats to be let into his vision...There are dwarfs painted by Velasquez, dogs by Titian, houses by Vermeer in which we recognize, as energy, the will-to-be-seen” (Berger 110). In Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' this is true too. From one perspective one can attribute the beauty of the work from the genius of Van Gogh, but from another perspective the intensity of the beauty of the stars came out because the stars, the evening sky, also wanted to bare itself to Van Gogh, who had stripped himself bare of himself in order to capture that beauty. This too, in spite of Van Gogh and the dangers that it posed to Van Gogh's own sanity and sense of self. He had to get close to the beauty, and to dutifully capture it as truthfully as he could. There is the sense, moreover, in appreciating the work, where the stars and the night sky seem to dance, rather than just being static. It is the presence of the artist Van Gogh, one can argue, that makes the universe and the night sky move in the way it does. In fact, from the language of Berger, one can say that the night sky is ever alive, but that the night sky needed the true vision of Van Gogh for the sky to bare its aliveness and to swirl and dance before the painter (Van Gogh Gallery; Berger 109-110). From countless personal experiences too, and in ordinary life, this is true. Things come alive when we pay attention to them. Things go well when we pay attention to the things that we do with passion and love. The things that we love and pay attention to take us out of ourselves, and those things bloom and come alive. Reading Williams' account of the art of Hirst, for instance, and his cow exhibit, brings back memories of my own experience seeing a cow being milked for the first time. The raw experience brought me face to face with the reality of the cow, as an animal that was flesh and blood. Something about the sight and the smell of the cow and of the milking process, by hand, gave me an alternative perspective of what the reality of the cow's existence is, removed from my previous experience of milk as being something that was in cartons, bought in the supermarket, and of beef as food, in hamburgers. The processing removed me from the experience of the life that lay behind it, but seeing the cow and being present to the sight, I am at once awakened into a different reality. Another experience comes to mind, and that of the act of driving through rain. I was driving and suddenly the rains came, and for some reason my mind was not preoccupied with anything but what was in front of me. I had the radio off, and I was not thinking about anything important, and I was not rushing to get anywhere. At that moment it seemed to me that the rain and the outside environment seemed to present itself like a new and separate reality. The rain was pleasant and time seemed to move more slowly. The raindrops seemed to have some kind of special quality that escaped me when I was busier with other things. It is as if I was experiencing and seeing rain for the first time. It ceased to be something abstract, something with a name, a part of nature that was just there, a concept in my mind. At that point the rain took on a special reality. It became more present and alive (Berger; Williams). Both Berger and Williams are espousing two aspects of art that interpenetrate and that are both vital to getting at a kind of true vision of reality. In the case of Williams, there is the case that he makes for framing wilderness in terms of art. This is to wake us up from the stupor of living life too confined in what is predictable, too ensconced in the practical and in the daily details of life in society, in the cities for instance. We gain in efficiency and in safety, in assured food and income, and in being shielded from the uncertainty and horrors of the wilderness for instance, from civilization, but civilization also robs us in a way of being able to regard and to view the wilderness for what it is, something that cannot be tamed and ultimately very mysterious. Berger on the other hand makes a case for the artist and for the outside world as being in dialogue, and that where an artist's vision is true, then the world reveals itself for what it is. The world reveals itself to the painter and the artist. There is this confluence therefore between the positions of Berger and of Williams. Both reinforce each other. Williams says that if we frame the wilderness as art, then the world shocks us and wakes us up to its reality. The world then becomes what it is again, stripped of the conventions and the dull thought s and concepts that define our everyday existence in society. The cow to the artist becomes an object of art, and becomes again cow, rather than food, or an abstraction. It becomes itself again, and it becomes a participant in the creation of something true and beautiful. This is the languages of Berger and of Williams brought together. Berger posits that the artist allows for the outside physical world to become itself again. It strips away everything that stands in the way of the perception of things as they are, is what he is essentially saying. Williams comes from another perspective but basically comes to the same end point. To view the wilderness as itself again, then in a way one has to shed mundane perspectives that are useful in practical life but are impotent in the perception of things as they are. To view the wilderness and to appreciate it for what it really is, in other words, is to view the wilderness with the eyes of the painter and the artist of Berger's perception (Berger; Williams). Works Cited Berger, John. “Steps Toward A Small Theory of the Visible”. Left Curve 21. 2013. Web. 23 April 2014. Van Gogh Gallery. “Starry Night”. VanGoghGallery.com. 2013. Web. 23 April 2014. Williams, Terry Tempest. “A Shark n the Mind of One Contemplating Wilderness”. The Nation. 29 November 1999. Web. 23 April 2014. Read More