Modernism and Esotericism

A widely held misconception about modernism contends that the movement is primarily an intellectual one. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding that miscasts the entire movement into an academic exercise. Modernism does indeed have a strong intellectual component, but that comes as a response to the essentially esoteric nature of the root modernist experience. It originates in the search for the unique individual voice, the new, the now, the idiosyncratic, the practical solution, the most functional design, the integration of materials with form, and the creation of architectural spaces that use materials to serve the cultural, social, spiritual and psychological needs of the users of them. These are all modernist principles but they are not intrinsically intellectual. At their root, they are experiential.

The operating platform of modernism is the direct primary experience of the work. One can read about Mies van der Rohe's architecture, but can one really get at what his buildings are about before walking through one? The personal experience is at the root of modernism and the intellectual response to that is an effort to make that experience more conscious and meaningful to the larger group. This intellectual response has been a necessary component in bringing the avant garde into conscious social meaning and debate, but it is not the source of the movement. The source is rooted in an esoteric spiritual experience of making the work. We know this because so many serious modern artists in the canon address it, either obliquely or directly, when discussing their creative process. That esoteric root experience gets lost in the criticism and the theory because it does not conform to either. It is irrational, and the direction of modernism is to start with the irrational and move towards the rational in interpretation.

In the case of modern architecture, the paradigm shift was to build to serve the needs of the users of the space first; and in doing so, to integrate the environment, to simplify, to bring the design into the moment, serving the needs of today rather than the decorations and conventions of tradition. At their best, these buildings take on an almost numinous quality with a holistic integration of interior and exterior, user and building, space and materials. The field of architecture came to understand that the space that one inhabits can shape the experiences within it. And the space should as much as possible be in service to the needs of the user. Those needs cross the spectrum from the purely pragmatic to the spiritual.

This esoteric nature of modernism is best pointed to in personal story. When I was 23 I made a week long trip to the National Gallery in Washington DC. I had been a huge fan of Francis Bacon's paintings. I had read about him, seen many reproductions of his work in books and I felt that I knew what his work was about. On my first day at the National Gallery, I walked around a corner in the museum and entered a room of Francis Bacon paintings. All I can say here is that the experience changed me. His work had been described to me before and I had seen it reproduced in many places, but the experience of being in front of his triptych "Sweeney Agonistes" initiated me into a secret society of Francis Bacon viewers. I could describe the experience of seeing the paintings, but that would defeat my point. They had been described in detail to me previous to my visit and yet the descriptions were so peripheral to the personal experience of the work, that I could not say that I knew Bacon's work until I stood in front of it.

I am also a great admirer of Marc Rothko and his color field paintings. I have seen them in many collections and spent time in the excellent retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But I know that my experience of his work is impoverished by the fact that I have never made the pilgrimage to Houston to see his chapel, where he created the most complete environment for viewing his work. In most contemporary art collections, Rothko hangs next to other painters of his time, and his work is curated and lit to fit the room. Unfortunately, Rothko intended his work to be hung closer to the floor and to be illuminated in a more dim and diffuse light than is usual for a museum. In his retrospective, the curators took this into consideration and it transformed the experience of his work. The paintings glowed with an inner energy that I hadn't seen so clearly in other installations. His chapel is said to be the realization of his aesthetic vision. Without going to see it, one can only get so far with the experience of knowing Rothko.

In this post I am calling these experiences in art esoteric, because they are individual experiences that are only available in the presence of the work, in a particular context and setting. As such, these experiences of the work initiate one into a kind of secret knowledge that cannot be achieved in another way. The knowledge is secret because it can only be achieved by direct experience. There is a gate that you must pass through. And once one has those experiences, theory and criticism can serve to illuminate, discuss their significance and put them into context. But theory and criticism are not the experiences themselves. This is an important distinction to make, because one might conclude by reading much contemporary criticism that the writing and the theory is the real content. Not so. It all starts in the making and the experiencing of the work itself. Without those basic experiences, modernism makes little sense and appears dense and impenetrable. It does then become an academic exercise. But if we stay close to the root of the movement; to the unique expression of inner experience, the manifestation of the idiosyncratic voice, the explorations of language and form, and all of the aspects of modernism that bring such energy, freedom and joy to the creative process, the intellectual and critical responses to the work become a useful tool for integrating the new work into the world. They become a guide for inner experience and the discernment of meaning. I believe that is what criticism, theory and the academy should aspire to.

"28 Weeks Later" and "The Day of the Triffids"

One of my favorite pieces of science fiction is a little known novel by John Wyndham called "The Day of the Triffids." In this prescient book, written in 1951, a contemporary plot explores the militarization of space, the genetic engineering of weapons and the breakdown of social order in a post-apocalyptic setting. The story starts in London when a large meteor shower strikes the earth, causing the explosions of military satellites in space that blind over 95% of the world's population. With most of the world suddenly sightless, order breaks down immediately and London becomes a wasteland of the dead and the recently blinded shuffling around trying to survive. Into this enters a ruthless predator, the triffids. They are a militarized plant that was engineered to be seeded into enemy soil where they grow quickly into a large carnivorous hunter. Using an acid laced whip, they blind their prey and drag it in to be digested alive. The triffids live off of human flesh, reproduce quickly and are tireless hunters who never need rest. As London devolves into chaos these militarized plants escape and begin to spread in England, feeding off of the living and blind majority.

All of this happens in the first few pages. The genius of this book is in Wyndham's exploration of the breakdown of social order as the remaining sighted survivors and the few blind who have help struggle to stay alive in a world where they are suddenly alone and hunted by an remorseless predator. The characters must leave London to try and survive in the countryside where they have a better hope of making it as they search for a weapon that will defeat the triffids once and for all.

Wyndham's particular genius as a science fiction writer is not in predicting the specifics of technology development, but rather in the implications of it on society and the individual. His work frequently explores the implications of world-wide technological collapse, and what that means for individuals suddenly isolated in an apocalyptic setting. In the post 9/11 West, Wyndam's books resonate with the underbelly of our collective apocalyptic fantasies. They seem to have a new relevance.

A couple of years ago my wife and I rented "28 Days Later" on DVD and sat down to watch. I had low expectations of it, but what I saw came as a complete surprise. Nearly the entire plot mirrors Wyndham's book, right down to the cinematic final scenes. Portions of the film so exactly match the descriptions from the book that is seems impossible that Wyndham doesn't get an adaptation credit. If you take the book, remove the blindness, substitute zombies for the triffids and jazz up the story to include a lot more visually driven effects, you get the film.

After it was over I turned to my wife and commented that the only thing they left out from Wyndham's book was the exploration of the small societies that band together to survive in a depopulated England. And now enters "28 Weeks Later," the follow up film that, no surprise here, explores how the survivors of the virus band together to try and survive in a depopulated England, with a ruthless predator still on the loose.

Check out A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times and then read the book. You'll have a great weekend and the films will never look the same again. Better yet, read the book first, then the review.

Photographs as Symbols: Part 1

In the weeks since my last post I have been ruminating on the quote from Joseph Campbell. It is a dense piece of writing which could take a great deal of unpacking, but I mean here to focus on one aspect of it, the relationship between symbol and history.

In Campbell’s language, symbol is defined as an image that has a life of its own, intrinsically alive within a culture, and operating outside of the conventions of history, science and biography. Campbell seems to think that this function is largely dead in the West as we have turned away from myth in favor of the factual and verifiable “truth.” He advocates a return to myth by looking back into the past, far enough that the boundaries between verifiable history and myth start to blur, and there he finds stories that operate alive and independent of history.

I would argue that this symbolic function that Campbell seeks in the deep past is currently active in the west, but is operating largely in the collective unconscious, and the field of photojournalism is an excellent demonstration of this operation.

Photojournalism has as its basic function a duty to report “factual” and “true” events. But, the very nature of photography means that still pictures are capable of creating an entire experience crafted out of the raw materials that the photographer had to work with. Those materials are the real events that take place somewhere in the world. But once those events are recorded, the pictures take on a life of their own that has a role to play in the world independent of the event or even of their own historical accuracy.

To examine how this takes place, we need to start with photojournalism’s interaction with the written word. Much has been written on the need for photographs to have context and captions to establish their meaning. It is a requirement that images are accompanied by written information that establishes and verifies the factual accuracy of the visual content. In response I would point out that the images that rise to the top of the field in part defy this need for context. They visually operate in ways that are independent of the historical information and context of the photograph.

Once we encounter a great photograph, one of the first things that happens is we ask a series of questions that involve a variation of who, what, when, where, how, why, etc. The questions are primarily engaged in an effort to categorize the photograph, and they are proposed by the individual ego, the part of the personality that wants to organize, contain, and maintain an established social order. But there is another aspect of the self that is at work here, and that is the unconscious, which has little need for the categorization of the work, but instead directly engages the photographs independent of history. While the ego is trying to contain the experience of the image by placing it in a category of some kind, the unconscious is directly relating to the visual content and has no concern for whether the image is “fact” or “fiction,” or whether it belongs to any other category, but sees the symbol instead. This symbolic function operates independently of the factual information and may even operate in opposition to it. Not all photojournalism rises to this level of aesthetic accomplishment, but we can find a pre-selected group of images that often do in the winners of the World Press Photo awards.

Over 80,000 entries each year are submitted for the awards and the images that make the final cut are remarkable indeed. If these can be seen as representations of what the industry of photojournalism was looking for in that individual year, we can assume that they are representations of how the field operates.

For a visual exercise in what I’m saying, follow the below link to the WPP Award website, and navigate through the winning photographs without reading any captions.

Take your time.

Discipline your eyes to focus only the images and the navigation links to the lower right of the page. Ego may complain a lot about this. We are deeply concerned with categorizing visual experiences, but I encourage you to let the visual experience take the lead and to let ego grumble in the background. If you do this, by the time you look at all the winners for the year, you will see another type of experience emerge, one that I believe is happening in viewers anyway, but without much conscious awareness.

Focus on the actual content of the images, and underneath that, the drama, the tragedy, the theatricality, the irony, the absurdity, the apocalypse--all the varieties of inner experience that the images evoke. What distinguishes these images is their inner content. There are hundreds of thousands of other images that have the same or similar "factual" content. These images have risen to the top based on something else.

The below link will take you to the winning image for the 2007 World Press Photo awards.

World Press Photo awards