Outside the Frame: Art as Channel for Direct Experience toward Sustainable Transition
By Sarah Moon
In 1978, director Godfrey Reggio made a film, the first of a trilogy, that aimed to show, without language, what human society has become through the aid of technology. The film shows sped-up images of highway ribbons at night, grids of cities juxtaposed with close-ups of computer chips, and intimate slow-motion frames of individuals or couples as they make their way through frenetic cityscapes. Reggio explains the purpose of his film as
[trying] to show…that the main event of today is not seen. The most important event has gone unnoticed. That is, the transiting from the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation to a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment for life. Culture, language, education, all of that exists within technology. It’s as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.Reggio chose to make a film without words because he said, “From my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.” He didn’t want to have a title for the film, but forced to choose, he selected “a word that had no cultural baggage. [Koyaanatsqi is] a salute to a language that is more powerful in its descriptive capacity to describe the world in which we live.”
When the reality of what is happening in a society cannot be expressed in the language it uses, there is a great danger that the primary events and thus the overall trajectory of that society will exist outside of public consciousness. This is the case in today’s society. The “event” Reggio expressed thirty years ago, moving from a natural to a technological milieu, has only increased momentum. By considering the power of language, specifically to name what is around us, we can gain an understanding of the roots of our current disassociation from the natural world, a disassociation that threatens our ability to survive.
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy
An ancient root of our disassociation from the earth is the power we give to names. In the famous “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” soliloquy, Juliet expresses a frustration similar to Godfrey Reggio’s: that a name can never encompass the total being of what it represents. Romeo is her lover, yet his name marks him her enemy. When we put a name on something, what it is and can be are immediately limited by a definition and, over time, cultural associations. Our experience of the thing or person becomes subordinate to pre-conceptions. At a college where I worked, when we hired a tutor with a master’s degree in environmental biology to tutor microbiology, the microbiology professor was very upset. In the mind of this professor, the name “Environmental Biologist” precluded a very bright woman with a master’s degree in biology from being competent to tutor a sophomore-level microbiology course.
A child who has never seen a rose asks, “What is a rose?” and the dictionary answers, “any of a genus of usually prickly shrubs with pinnate leaves and showy flowers having five petals in the wild state but being often double or partly double under cultivation.” A child sees, smells, touches, and perhaps even tastes a rose. It is perfume. It is silk. It is sweetness. It is saturation of color. It is tenderness. It is bee food. And the child may not know this, but it is also dye, an aphrodisiac, and a medicine to stave the bleeding of a new mother. How could a name ever encompass all that a rose is? A name is like a snapshot catching just one angle of a person’s face. Names have bias. Names are not the truth.
David Abram, in his book Spell of the Sensuous, discusses how the Greek alphabet, an evolution of the semitic aleph-beth, created the original “virtual reality.” For the first time, written symbols were not connected to a real thing in the world. These letters put together could form words that were, likewise, disconnected. Whereas in early oral cultures, a trait such as honor would be understood through behavior in context, with the alphabet, ideas of things could now exist outside of real world situations. “Honor,” as a concept, became a thing in and of itself. Suddenly, one could create shields and adornments for one’s character with mere words.
The ability to “dress up” with words is most exploited in the world of politics. Names, taken as truth, are powerful tools for distorting reality. George Orwell understood the awful power of names when he coined the term “new speak” in 1984. In the book, government offices are given names in direct opposition to their tasks: “The Ministry of Peace” was in charge of running the never-ending war. 1984’s ironies-of-name foreshadowed our own political charades, like George W. Bush’s 2003 proclamation of “Mission Accomplished,” for a war with no clear mission and no clear accomplishment.
Two Ways to See
One key to overcoming the hegemony of names is to use our sense of sight, the sense most closely associated with naming, differently. In my college composition class, I assign two essays on seeing. The first, by Helen Keller, details what she would like to see if she had just three days of sight and the second, by Annie Dillard, tells the experience of those who have been blind their whole lives gaining sight for the first time. Each essay challenges how forcefully we place names on our world based on perceptions through our strongest sense. Dillard explains that there are two different ways of seeing: the conquering kind in which we name and divide, and the receptive kind, in which we let what we see tell us what it is. It is this second kind of seeing that becomes possible when we dispense with names.
To try to recreate the receptive sight experience of the newly sighted, I took my composition students outside one day and asked them to choose a discrete area of space. Then I asked them to write a description of what they saw in that space as though they did not know the names of anything in it. They could use words only to describe shape, size, texture and movement. What they wrote, unexpectedly, read like riddles. “It shakes when something falls in. I see myself in it,” for example, described a puddle. The exercise taught me that language can be used in two ways relative to perceiving the world: 1) It can be used to affirm the hard structure of names, or 2) it can be used to relate being, experience, and a posteriori truth.
Conversely, the power of names reveals itself in absence, reflecting back to us the things, feelings and phenomenon considered inconsequential in our culture. If you doubt the power of names to define and fix our perspective, our culture and politics, consider how tolerance of injustice can be achieved simply by not naming it. In the 1960’s, Betty Friedan wrote, “The problem that has no name – which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities – is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.” In the past year, the Occupy movement has given a name to what had been invisible, the American underclass majority: the 99%. If we rely exclusively on what is named to determine our reality, we miss what is really happening around us.
Howard Kunstler explores the power of a name to perpetuate today’s cultural dogma in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. He points out the controlling danger that lies within a name’s subtext:
I don’t like talking about “solutions.” I prefer talking about intelligent responses. My beef with the whole “solutions” thing comes from my travels around the country, talking on college campuses and such; there is this whole clamor for “solutions.” The idea is, if you’re not optimistic enough, you should shut up. But there are subtexts to all these things. And the subtext to that particular meme is, “Give us the solutions that will allow us to keep running our stuff the same way we’re running it now, except by other means.” They don’t really want to hear about other arrangements. They want to keep on running all the cars, only differently. You know, like hybrid electric cars, or electric cars, or cars that run on algae secretions. But they don’t get that we’re done with that way of life. The mandates of reality are telling us something very different. They are telling us we have to inhabit the landscape and move around in it very differently in the future.
To be in touch with our reality, aware of its most important events and trajectory, we need to question both the named and the un-named. We need to ask: What is un-named and thus overlooked? What is wrongly named? What is limited by its name? We must use language as a tool, retaining the right to reject it when what it suggests opposes what we know to be true. The name “Montague” made Romeo something he was not to Juliet. Taking that name away allowed him to be everything he was.
Science Says
I am a human animal. I can learn the names of things and I can learn not to see the things that do not have a name. I have learned that everything that is real has a name and some names are more accurate than others. “Homo sapien,” for example, is more accurate than “person.” It is scientific. It has a quantitative definition. A homo sapien possesses 46 chromosomes. Our genetic make-up is 3% different than that of a chimpanzee. I am a homo sapien.
Unfortunately, this name and its definition cannot help me navigate the tremendous avalanche of mounting evidence that my kind may be doomed. It may even encourage in me a fatalistic point of view since it encourages me to see my species as just one iteration in a long line of evolving, ape-like beings. Scientific studies can tell us in paralyzing detail the impact of our species’ behaviors on the environment and offer technical solutions to our problems of energy and pollution, but they cannot tell us how, culturally and psychologically, to overcome our dangerous disassociation from our sustaining environment. Between Western society and true sustainability stand two obstacles: the cultural obstacle of aligning our norms and expectations with a sustainable ethos and the practical problem of meeting our energy, shelter, food and water needs sustainably. Science can help with the second, but not the first, and we will never have the energy, financing or political will to get to the second without the first.
Along with the hegemony of names, an obsession with the unseen realm, made accessible to us only through reports of scientific research, has dulled our senses to the world to be known directly through them. There is a political concern, to be sure, in removing so much of the power innate in the human mind and body and giving it to an elite, well-funded few (How many of us will ever see the Higgs Boson particle?). We have been so acculturated to marvel at what science can do, at the names for things that we never even knew existed, we have overlooked the potential of all that we can do and perceive through direct experience.
A current PBS promo blatantly reveals the worshipful, unquestioning stance our culture encourages toward science. In the advertisement, a father relates a story of a rainy day on vacation in Montauk with the kids. Not sure what to do, he turns on the TV and found the NOVA series The Elegant Universe on the air. The father describes how the kids quickly become transfixed by the programming. Shortly after, they become fascinated with the study of the universe and the father says create “altars to science” in their bedrooms. The commercial ends with the father, tears in his eyes, expressing his thanks to this programming for steering his children in such a worthy direction. While a childhood interest in science is not a bad thing, the way the father speaks about it in the commercial and the fact that the interest is sparked through a TV screen and continues through the construction of an “altar” is unsettling. If these children were not watching a program about physics and building altars to it in their bedrooms, they might be outside, studying the soil, bugs, the sky and everything else they can perceive directly through their own senses. They might become bonded to and attuned to the natural world and more aware of the challenges that they will face in their lifetime.
In our struggle to right an out-of-balance world, we stumble now, not like the blind, but like a perfectly sighted woman who has spent her life indoors, hinged at the waist, looking at the world through a microscope. How do we right our posture and regain our sight? We start by questioning our dictated worldview and our worshipful attitude toward a form of study dependent on technology as an intermediary. We must acknowledge all that we see with the naked eye, hear with the naked ear, touch with the naked finger, taste with the naked tongue and feel with the naked heart.
Art as Channel
In order for an individual’s shift to valuing direct experience to affect society, he or she must have ways to share it with others. Art is what allows humanity to explore and deepen our appreciation for all that is perceived directly through the human senses and heart. Through sculpture, painting, music and drama, humans have given testimony to their experience of the world for millennia. Through art, we find the power to make the un-named visible and question misleading names.
19th Century French poet Stephane Mallarmé worked consciously through his poetry to challenge to power of names. He was keenly aware of the limits of language to get at the invisible mystic experience of living. He wrote: “We do not write, luminously, on fields of darkness, the alphabet of the stars; [in writing,] humankind pursues black on white.” Mallarmé biographer Thomas Williams furthers this notion: “To name a thing is to lead away from the unique reality at hand, the living presence, and into the more familiar field of concepts and definitions by which we normally order our thoughts….” Mallarmé’s solution to the marring quality of language was to use it obliquely. Williams writes, “Mallarmé believed that a certain vagueness of language and deliberate blurring of the outlines of sense and image so free the mind of the reader that he is able to look into and through rather than at a poem.” In poems like L’apres midi d’un faun, Mallarmé succeeded in using potent sense experiences to point to an internal, mystic consciousness.
Contemporary visual artist Chris Johanson writes about his work: “Life is about looking at and being a part of life. We need to be a part of each other. If we are separate, we are alone. That is a world of walking dead people. That is why I make art, to talk about how important it is to stay in the now and look at life.” He calls his work “documentary paintings,” saying they act like diaries – reflecting discussions and thoughts from his daily life. His paintings often feature brightly colored 2-D figures with speech bubbles revealing inner thoughts, the surroundings they inhabit suggestive of spiritual, rather than actual places. At a 2006 Tokion conference on creativity, asked whether dissatisfaction with the world around one can be used to fuel artwork, Johanson answered quickly yes, and that he often felt rage toward the world: “This country is so mean-spirited and fried…. It makes my blood boil.” Johanson uses his artwork to criticize the destructive tendencies of American culture while never condemning humanity itself, but honoring the moments in which it blooms uncorrupted, outside the social construct.
Another contemporary artist, Toronto-based Tania Love, uses sustainable principles to create art that explores her relationship to the natural world. Her entire process is influenced by her desire to be connected to nature. She says, “Over time I have begun to think of the various places I live and studios where I set up as a ‘habitat.’ Nest building, like a bird collecting twigs and lint from the area, I collect materials and visual cues that lead to the work. It is a way of exploring an interdependent relationship to place.” In a recent piece, Tania employed a Japanese technique of marbling paper called “suminagashi.” In her words, we can see an artist intensely involved with her materials and process:
The process, while simple, is delicate and extremely sensitive to the conditions, temperature, state of mind and hand of the maker. I begin with a shallow vessel filled with clean, room temperature water, add a dab of ink [ash, soot and vegetable binder] which floats on the surface and repeatedly part the ink circle with a twig or the back of a brush carrying the residue of oil from the skin. I feel myself grow quiet with each subtle gesture. I see cell structures growing before me. They remind me of repeated patterns seen in life, from water bubbles to salt stains on the pavement to microscopic images of body tissue. I am reminded that water is a connective and fundamental source in all of life. Once the floating drawing is complete, I lay a sheet of kozo paper on top to soak up the ink patterns, then let the paper dry. Selective holes are cut with an exacto blade to create a play of shadow and light, volume and transparency.
Love’s description of her delicate interaction with the ink in the water sounds not unlike the work of a scientist. Yet, unlike a scientist, her goal is not expressly to understand how something works; instead, understanding is a concomitant of a greater purpose – to develop a relationship with the natural world and its materials.
Conclusion
Alongside science, our culture must acknowledge art as an equal, crucial means of transitioning to a sustainable future. Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda has advocated for this perspective with STEAM, “an initiative to add Art and Design to the popular national agenda of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education and research in America.” In a 2010 Guardian article, he explains, “Art helps you see things in a less constrained space. Our economy is built upon convergent thinkers, people that execute things, get them done. But artists and designers are divergent thinkers: they expand the horizon of possibilities. Superior innovation comes from bringing divergents (the artists and designers) and convergents (science and engineering) together.”
Building on Maeda’s argument, art provides a forum for the championing of direct human experience which must re-emerge as the foundation of culture to avoid a deepening disassociation from the natural world and our own intuition. By advocating for STEAM, we balance the controlling, organizing power of science with the anarchic, contextual truth of art. We may also remind the public that science is not only about dictating absolutes to provide “solutions” that drive economies, science too is a field for creativity and for exploring that which moves and inspires us in our daily lives.
Approach our world, armed with names, or viewed through a scientific lens, we risk objectifying that world and dividing ourselves from it. Lovers are enemies. Smart people are dunces. Cars just need a different kind of fuel. Though expedient, this way of being is accelerating our extinction.t,has the power to remove our distorting or objectifying lensesIn a society in which we are bombarded with emails, texts, and tweets, and in which scientific studies are considered more reliable that what we know through our own experience, we are in need of reminders that the world is bigger than the frames our culture puts on it.
In Walt Whitman’s “The Learn’d Astronomer,” published in 1900, the speaker finds himself stuck in a lecture hall, listening to a professor talk about the stars. He is shown proofs, figures, columns, charts and diagrams, but soon finds himself, “tired and sick.”
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
In striving to know everything, we’ve forgotten to know this thing and that thing and him and her. Like long-distance love, long-distance knowledge lacks a solid foundation. To build up, we have to get close, use our senses and see outside the frame.