Forty years ago, fifty Indians in the flat, dry desert; an isolated village in northern Mexico. My home for two years. - A rusted water tank surrounded by hide-bruised, thin-legged cows. A man, a stranger, an Indian, old, wary and stiff, riding a horse, a pistol stuck in the front of his belt like a silver buckle flashing in the sun.
I was on foot. The old man towered over me. I saw him drop the reins to his horses'neck; I saw his hands tighten just above them. I saw his hat move in a slow circle. I saw cows watching us. I saw the old mans finger twitch. 'Long ago', he said, 'Apaches came here once a year.' We ran; we did not fight. They look what they wanted: woman, cows, horses, corn. That's the way it was. The woman tried to hide; the man ran to the low rock mountains. We waited for the Apaches to leave. He lowered his voice. One year, not the first year, I stayed when the others ran. I became a cactus, out behind the mud house. No one could see me. I was quiet when I was the cactus; I did not move. I watched. His fingers no longer shook. He bent down toward me and the pistol shifted in his belt. The horse moved backwards, stiff-leggedly, awkwardly, double-diagonally back through cows that slid sideways to let him pass.
I was an anthropologist then. The job was to find meaning, to catch the boundary between the old man's reality and my understanding of that reality, to walk the tense line between my seeing and my knowing. His story confused me. My own reaction to his story confused me. The old man's failure to make himself a living cactus so overrode his success in making himself invisible that the meaning of his story changed completely. His sudden knifing of failure into the heart of success caught and held me. More importantly, it reshaped everything else he said. It re-made the world that he communicated; transformed my sense of it. I could not explain the extraordinary power that that instantaneous doubling of reality had for me. I could not explain what had happened to me or why it mattered so much. My own connection to his dilemma was what unnerved me. It sheared my interest away from everything I had thought would be the focus of my attention, the old man's shamanistic powers, the inter-tribal politics of past and present, his cultural and personal anger, his relationship to the rest of his people and now to me, and moved it directly to the evocative power of his ever-increasing frustration. I found myself wanting less detail, less meaning from his story, not more. I found myself unwilling to add anything, any comment or explanation to it; unwilling, I mean, to compromise its own numinous power in any way.
My reaction surprised me. My previous explanations seemed to explain too much. My theories skewed reality. My description distorted what I saw. My analysis destroyed what I sought. Description, explanation, understanding and theory were basic tools of anthropology, but they seemed to me its problem now. Understanding was no longer the solution. Theory, I realized, diffused observation. Acknowledgment, the simple acknowledgment of complex reality, was all I somehow needed, complex centripetal images, nubs of reality, instead of a flowing narrative. I needed a way to hold saturated images. I needed a way to use them. I needed a way to see them.
I transform myself into an artist. I needed to be an artist. Skewed theory changed me into a sculptor. Desperation, irritation, frustration, stubbornness – and the need for a better way to see – forced me into it.
I halved my vision to increase it. I saw that simple objects, physical things – an ax, a mountain, a box, two pieces of wood roughly shoved together – were nubs that could convey complex human emotion in an unmediated, undivided and instantaneous way that words could not; saw that they did it by the simple acknowledgment of their own reality. I saw that objects could be juxtaposed in such a way as to convey emotion with no story or detail attached to them; that objects could be made to bridge the gap of human separation, to jump sideways across the cut of cultural difference. I saw that some situations, some actions, some places could communicate meaning by their own physical presence and not by classificatory details; that their distance from language could filter specific differences back to more generalized human feelings in exactly the same way objects could. I saw that such strong and special things could function with the non-specificity, the looseness and immediacy of art. I saw that they could indeed be art; that the idea of art referred not to a group of objects categorized by the way they are made, used or displayed, but to a unique form of communication, a culturally sanctioned but only occasionally accomplished way around the limitations of language and culture. I realized that art is the name for what some objects, situations, actions and places can accomplish, not the name for those things themselves. Realized that it is the designation of a direct transmission of immediate illumination by such man-made or modified things, the possibility of instantaneous transference of charged and braided reality without it becoming unbraided and uncharged in the process. I saw that powerful familiar things could sometimes enjamb complex meaning and transmit it directly, that ordinary things could be made to transmit abstract understandings immediately and without language. I saw that numinous, man-made things could radiate an aura of just-readable meaning across physical and temporal gaps. I saw that that is what power in an object or situation actually means. And I realized that my reaction to the old man's story was proof of it.
Realized, I mean, that the shaky presence of unresolved meaning I felt in his story is itself what pulled me to it; that, and not the particular ethnographic facts that it carried. Realized that his story moved me because it was charged with meaning in the same immediate way that my most intense personal experiences of life were. Understood that the powerful physical presence his story expressed was what led me to those unexpected realizations, just as the strangely thickened physicality of some ordinary moments of my own personal existence occasionally did. Realized that those moments were always experienced physically; experienced as single and complete things I could neither explain nor deny, and that that was their strength and importance, the way they tested reality. Realized what my job in the face of those overwhelming and transforming situations, whether triggered by life, love, art or artifact, was simply to not deny the thing that carried it. Realized that the stubborn and ambiguous dignity of powerful things lay in their unbridgeable otherness, and that that insistent mystery was what drew me to anthropology and also to art. Realized that the deepest connection I could have to anything comes through the simple acknowledgement of that charged gap.
I realized, I mean, that what pulled me back to that old Indian was the strange idea that traits as human as power, dignity and stubbornness were actually embedded in things, the idea that over-embodied man-made things charged by their makers with more meaning than they can conceivably carry, could sometimes not only carry it, but also instantly communicate it across unimaginable gaps of time, space and personal understanding. Realized that everything hidden by that special process of communication could still actually remain. Realized that pathos, the confusion of knowing and not knowing at the same time, was always the medium and expression of that impacted transmission, and that the terrifying juxtaposition of accomplishment with inevitable failure was necessarily implied by it. Realized that the transmission of pathos is itself the act and fact of act. Realized that I, as receiver of the old man's story, am as implicated in it as he is; that I remain part of the same ancient, flawed and gloriously absurd pan-human project that he was engaged in, the re-defining them as human. And that the only way his project can be continued is the way he himself finally did it, by transforming the deadening mystery of otherness into the living pathos of art.
But the problem was to build an immediate single thing. The problem was to catch that singleness. The problem was to enter each sculpture's already existent history, to cross into its immediate existence. Sculpture is not an addition to the world; it is an attempt to replace a part of that world, to mark it over without obliterating it. Each work un-does, and re-does, our understanding, our present and our past. Each is closing as well as an opening; each destroys as much as it adds. Each builds a new reality. Each locks us out but also in, crosses out part of ourselves as it pulls us in. We are, finally, everything we preserve and everything we cross-out. We live by constant canceling. Every change changes everything. Making is marking-over. Marking makes the world. Sculpture cancels and re-marks. Sculpture builds by erasing.
The problem is to hold each newly made reality separate without too quickly explaining it away, without too completely generalizing it away; without, I mean, allowing it to immediately become the analysis of something else, the art-part of everything else, the tacked-on addition to other discussion and discourse. The problem is to prevent art from becoming a prop to anything but its own surprising existence. The problem is to keep it indigestible for as long as possible, to delay its use as critical formulation. The problem is to let art alone, to slow its devolution to rhetoric. For art meant to break categories soon establishes new ones. Art is transformed to argument. It becomes domesticated; it loses its disorienting jolt. It slides us back to certainty; It becomes theory.
But the essence of art has always, everywhere, been its unpredictability, its position just outside the usual range of experience and explanation. Art must always be an outside to the inside of everyday life. It is never ordinary; that is what we mean by separating it out, what we mean by calling it art. Art is everywhere differentiated from the rest of human communication, separated exactly by the disjunction and ambiguity of its own essential breaking of the rules of language. Disjunction and ambiguity are its defining characteristics, the shocks to the system of culture that allow art, force it, to speak and be heard differently. Yet the turn-about gesture of domestication enforces the subjugation of art to highly specific non-art projects. It is a narrowing and hardening of art's crucial openness. It is a denial of art's strange centrality, its separateness, its self-contained completeness. It is the way we intentionally limit the outside function of art, the way we force it to work for us at the expense of its most unique function as art. That process is the weakening of what is most important about art, its ability to subvert the conceptual boundaries with which we usually bind the world.
Art's indefinable otherness, its separateness, has always been its point and weapon, the paradoxical proof of both its radical discontinuity and its ultimately conservative role as cultural safety valve. Definer and safety valve, that functional complexity it itself art's cultural importance. Ambiguity is the strength which underlies and propels whatever specific meaning art may be made to carry. That expansive self-doubling power is always art's most meaningful message. Art is the acknowledgment (and not, as is often said, the denial) of the chaos we know surrounds us. It is what ties us back to a world beyond us. That is art's difference from what we call entertainment, craft, design, journalism or propaganda. Art is the way we puncture our own complacency. Art is culture's uneasy acknowledgment of an outside always there within itself, an outside already found within. It is the way we stab impending, impinging confusion into our culture-bound lives.
Art is the way we trick ourselves into more. Not into change, or improvement, but simply into more. More, for the sake of more. More, as the edge of possibility. More as confusion not fulfillment. More as hope. More as the shifting boundary of both human culture and specific culture. Not better but more. More, because we cannot live without more. More as the meaning of being human. Not more of some specific thing, of money or love or freedom or energy or silence or even life. Just more, just generalized and unrealizable more. Art is the way we scare ourselves with just-unreachable dreams, the way we do not forget them. Art is the way we acknowledge our edgy drams of more. And domestication is how we explain them away.
Let me be clear: I am talking about most artists and most art. And I am talking about all culture, the beliefs and behaviors shared in any human group. I am talking about the place and meaning of art in culture. I am talking about the ways in which the idea of art and artist are used by a culture to explain, preserve and shape the world, our world and also the unknown worlds of people different from us. I am talking about the utility of art anywhere and everywhere, its actual use. And I am speaking from the point of view of both artist and anthropologist; an artist and anthropologist who has seen the meaning and being of his own work changed radically from place to place and time to time even within his own culture. I am speaking as who knows that the meaning of his work shifts in terms of the external needs of society itself, what society at that moment defends, or denies, or destroys, or builds. I am speaking as an artist who pushes against that, fights against it, conspires to force his work around it, but is affected by it still. And I am speaking as an artist whose work is twisted and sometimes destroyed by the pressure.
For we measure art against particular dreams, our dreams of meaningful life, our dreams of a meaningful art, our dreams of an art that can itself make lives meaningful, an art that can immediately explain old lives away; an art that transcends, that sucks the world outside of us back in for us to use, and then transform it into our own world by simply answering it back, by defining it back, by forcing it back into just those particular terms and concepts we at that moment need, an art that can absorb anything by translating it into the language of meaning things, the only language ambiguous enough to transcend the limitations of language that convinces us of its truth by evoking the smell and feel of the ultimate unarguable outside, the physicality, the materiality, of nature itself.
Our dreams of art's encompassing use are what drive art in all cultures; that, and not the aesthetics or style of the art itself nor its immediately literal or even symbolic meaning (through many in our own culture would deny that too). Each artwork is an attempt at some actual dream of more, dreams not just by artists but by the audience. The power of art is embodied in the special communication between artist and audience that art initiates. The audience is the necessary inside to arts outside. The audience completes the fact of art.
Art is culture's strongest acknowledgment of an incalculable important social bond, the bond of shared unease. Art is the continual re-waving of outside hope into inside doubt. That is why there is art in every culture we know. Art exists everywhere because it is the most direct institutionalized way out for both artist and audience, and also for the society itself; a safe and available way out from the immediate ideological, intellectual, psychological and linguistic structure of culture. Art is a way out of each culture's narrow surety of the way the world is and must be, the very surety that all culture exists to enforce; a way out of the predictability of the culturally defined categories that art challenges yet inevitably (and even intentionally) goes on to reinforce. Art is always that shaky and fallible transaction by which we ambiguously acknowledge temptation, then pull ourselves back to safety again.
But safe or not, the artist always speaks from the outside. That is the artist's job, the only platform he is granted. The power of art, its strangely ambiguous force, depends on that starting point. The yes/no doubling of social reality by art is what is important and unique about it. Art is our culturally sanctioned method of having it both ways, our back-and-forth realization that culture is both arbitrarily given and freely chosen too.
That is true not only of the art made and used within a single cultural tradition, but also of the art displaced, or simply moved, from one living context to another. The audience's acceptance and use of an object as art is crucial in either case. The way in which both familiar and exotic objects are made into our art by us, the way they are shaped, defined and, in the process, literally re-invented by each new audience, determines which dreams of art and life that art will illuminate. Artists and their audience always find the art they dream of, the exotic art, the traditional art, as well as the new art they need; the art they need to tell them what they wish to hear at that moment about themselves and the world. We invent our own traditions, even ancient or exotic ones, that draw the lines we wish to see drawn, the lines between our own shifting contemporary notions of inside and out. We build the art that challenges, that crosses and re-crosses, exactly those lines that are then appropriate to the message, the dream we want to dream.
Art has always been used that way; used I mean, to test, to set, and to justify the margins that shape our dreams, and though those dreams, our lives. Art exists in human culture to accomplish that cultural doubling, that testing, changing, and, at the same moment, reinforcing of basic boundaries and nature. Art is the way we acknowledge our belief that we can indeed shift those lines, re-set them ourselves, and thereby change our world without actually destroying it. It is the way we, artists and audience, constantly re-make the categories of a world too complex to grasp as a whole. Art is the most generalized, the most abstract, the least linguified way we can do that. It is probably the safest way too. But it is the most insidious way as well, for it is, in its ambiguity, the most unpredictable.
Art, I mean, is our attempt at a human way out, out of language, out of our own constant contextual control. Art is our acknowledgement of the unsettling limitations of all language and culture. Art is the way we acknowledge the paradox of a world opening and then closing again. Art is the way we point to human limitations, the way we confront them. Art is our acknowledgement of the impossible existence of alien nature in an already human world. And art is our ambivalent acknowledgment of each culture's, inevitable destruction of the natural world. Art is our leap at a silence outside us, a silence of distance and difference. It is our doomed attempt to build a substitute and unnatural silence of home. Art is our futile dream of a human silence. Art is the silence of our dreams.
Art does not deal in facts. It does not illustrate reality. Ethnographic or historical truth is rarely the point of art. The point of art is its edgy acknowledgment of distortion, and of our need for distortion. Yet that function can, of course, be undermined. It can be lost by forcing art back from its confrontation with culture's limits. Art is denied by pulling it too quickly down to specific, illustrative use. Some uses of art destroy art's central power of discomfort. They make unease easy. They make arts outside into home.
The power of art slips away when we too easily accept it. The meaning of art shifts when it becomes too familiar, when we no longer distrust it, when we no longer acknowledge our distrust of it, our unease in the presence of its confusions and confrontations.
For we should, in fact, distrust art. Artists should distrust their own work. Distrust is the acknowledgment of what art actually is, of arts outside edge, its structural thrill. Distrust is what allows art to function as art. It is what creates art cultural force. Distrust is what fuels art's particular power over us. It is the recognition of art's ability to move us and change us (if only temporarily and in small ways). Distrust is our most immediate way to admit art's difference from the rest of life, to signify its confusing and sometimes frightening importance to us. Distrust is the way we mark the distance out to, and away from, those dreams. The domestication of art, the familiarization and instrumentalization of art, the embrace of it, is what leads to, and even defines the weird strategy of using art as something other than art. Using art, I mean, as the denial of art.
Trust in art makes no sense to me at all, except as an attempt to destroy art. I can find no other way to think about that. I must, it seems to me, distrust the very idea of art, any art. I must distrust the mark, the seal, the imprimatur of art. I must distrust the pretensions of art. I must distrust art's answers. I must distrust the questions art asks. I must distrust the people who speak for art. I must distrust the names and the name givers of art. I must distrust the message and messenger. I must distrust my own need for art. I must distrust my own readiness to find and credit art. I must distrust my constant use of it, my need to speak and write about it. I must distrust art and everything around it. Art threatens me, and is meant to threaten me. Distrust is my defense. Yet, distrust is also my most intimate connection to that threatening outside. Distrust is the closet I can come to meeting art on its own aggressive terms.
But I fear art as well as distrust it. I also love to fear it. And that too is part of the paradox culture builds into art. I deeply and lovingly distrust all the art I know. I fear and distrust even the art that moves me most, the art whose making, and being, is finished immediately, the art of the instantaneous presence of changeable things, of objects as objects in a present and immediate world, things unified precisely by their mysterious ability to instantaneously transcend their pasts, to instantaneously undermine and deny even their own parts. I fear and distrust the art I love the most, the art that is the suppression, or destruction, of everything it effects, the art that is the tyranny of its own changed boundaries wherever those boundaries fall in the new world it has made, the art that is the aggregation of juxtaposed part less parts instantly transformed into larger part-less wholes, the art that immediately coalesces into unique and flashing single-thingness, that jumps to newborn separateness. I distrust and fear the art I myself want most to make, the art that is immediately and wholly there, the art that means its specific world by instantaneously becoming it, the art that does not grow, but simply appears shuddering like a knife stabbed into wood.
But I must tell you that I also distrust and fear the art I most disdain, the art based on exoticism, borrowed archetype or the sentimental evocation of nature, the art that idealizes process, duration, or growth, the art that romanticizes the primitive or the sacred, the art that does not silence the clutter of its own creation, the art that insults its audience, the art that needs a separate text. And I tell you now, more than anything else, I distrust the fear the art that worships art, the art that denies the function of art, the art that transforms another man's living world into dead architectural decoration, the kind of art, I say, that submits itself to the tyranny of its own probably hyphenated name.
The problem is finding and maintaining immediacy, directness, totality. The American poet William Carlos Williams spoke in the 1930s of two kinds of culture: one an opposed or secondary or unconnected culture, and the other a primary culture. For him, primary culture was everything which dealt directly with immediate and specific situations in their own terms. Secondary culture was everything that did not, everything that treated each new situation as an example of an already known category; treated it in relation to a literary, cultural or historical precedent. Williams' choice of examples is extremely interesting, for it shows what he was actually driving at, the way in which an American art could and should differ from that of Europe.
He started his analysis with the first American colonial experience, the problem of survival is an unknown and dangerous wilderness. Primary culture, he said, was any behavior developed to deal specifically with the unique and life-threatening situation those first settlers actually faced in the new world. Secondary culture consisted of habits and understandings brought from Europe, behavior which did not fit the American reality and led to disaster and death. What the primary culture always focused on, he said, was immediacy, and immediacy was itself an American invention. It worked. The need for cultural continuity, the secondary culture, was European. It did not work in the new American world. The difference was life or death.
Williams' own primary culture as a man and as an artist in the 1930s also had to be that American culture of immediacy, he said. Yet he found himself surrounded and threatened by the dominance of the secondary culture, both English and French. Most of the visual and literary art around him was indirect and convoluted. The work of some of his closest American colleagues like T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound was built from secondary culture; more English and French than American, shaped by intellectual fashion, not immediate necessity. Williams' aim was to build a poetry on the base of his immediate culture, his American language and experience. Directness, immediacy and pragmatic abstraction, he claimed, could and would be the basis of a new and powerful American art.
It was. For fifty years. And no longer is.
Much of the art associated with New York, from the 1930s through the 1970s was meant to communicate the taste of totality itself, the taste of Williams' immediacy, the taste of complexity compounded by sheer physical presence. What our art demonstrated was our unwillingness to actually codify, classify or analyze anything; our unwillingness to linguify our world. The power of art for many of us was its final directness, its irreducibility to anything else. We separated art from explanatory purpose; separated it, not from the details of life, but from the detailed necessity of analyzing, categorizing or explaining anything at all. European art, we thought, separated itself from nature, from non-culture, from the possibility of an absence of culture; from uncultured man as well as unworked nature. It denied everything unmediated, unexamined, untouched and unworked by man. Art in Europe seemed to us the glorification of convoluted human culture, human thought, human skill, human manipulative power, the bulwark of civilization, its proof. European art looked like an escape to us, an escape through analysis, intellectualization and abstraction. It was the sign of cultivation.
Which was not what we wanted or needed.
Our art separated itself from everything given categorically, in nature, in culture, in art history, in art itself; separated itself from the primacy of reasoned, compartmentalized thought as such. Art for us was acknowledgment, the acknowledgment of the distortions, confusions and limitations inherent in all explanations or understandings. We aimed our art against all that was culturally given. We believed in its pore of instantaneous conceptual discontinuity, a power that could change our perceptions of everything. We stabbed life and unmediated movement into things. We sliced the imploding simultaneity of doing into the immediate inexplicable presence of physical being.We did it by filling anything with everything.
We separated art from both problems and solutions, both past and future. We moved away from ideas towards things, no ideas but in things, Williams said. We built an impossible world that skirted specific human culture. We turned words into things, and things into places. Our acknowledgment of our own newborn separation was most important to us, our separation from even the things we were surest of, the things we trusted and needed the most. Our losing battle against culture was important to us. Our failure, I mean, to satisfy or even truly address our own unquenchable need for a new Americium more.
American art, New York art at least, became the acknowledgment of our world's failure, and of our necessity to continue in the face of it. It was a declaration of joy at the war between man and world, joy in the battle itself, in life itself, and in the failure and death that would end it, and us, and all our accomplishments together.
Americans, De Tocqueville long said, wanted neither a culture to stand on, nor a past to build on. Just freedom, and the freedom to conditionally and continually redefine what we mean by freedom.
Our art was that freedom for fifty years, our proof that powerful physical things were the only dependable source of both ideas and definitions; proof, I mean, that we ourselves were still engaged in the same direct and immediate struggle to survive as our ancestors were. And still we were doomed to fail.