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Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Letter to a friend: Rendering the invisible
Left: Sistine Chapel, Right: Painting by Cy Twombly
Addressing an acquaintance named Stephen presents a dilemma. What if you cannot remember if he goes by the phonetic 'Steve', or 'Stephen'? If he goes by Steve, the use of "Stephen" becomes formal. On the other hand, most "Stephens" don't want to be called "Steve". The ultimate product is the same, but there are slight distinctions in those unquantifiable things we call mood or feeling.
One way to resolve this dilemma is to explicate the problem. This is much the same strategy as that adopted in the ethnography and anthropology of the post-1980s. When the observer is an irreconcilable distance from his subject, when there is no practicable way to overcome this distance (no 'quantum leaps', so to speak), the strategy that remains is to be explicit, to include this ambiguity and subjectivity into the work. Thus an archaeologist may do well to include in her discussion of the past her own identity in the present- an identity which by necessity is entangled with and colors all relations to the past. The same is true of the anthropologist who wishes to understand culture- whether it is a culture at great geographical, temporal, or conceptual distance or a culture right under one's nose. The same is true also of the individual who wishes to understand another. An assessment of identity, both mutual and specific, and of all the historical and affective circumstances which contribute to that identity, must be made.
In regard to the minor and inconsequential Steve-or-Stephen dilemma, in the practice of the everyday these sorts of thoughts are supposed to streak in an instant across your mind, if at all, and not be said aloud. "Seen and not heard". But they are the kinds of things that in art or science can be seized upon for elaboration. This phrase is a borrowing from the anthropologist Margaret Mead. In a 1933 article titled 'More Comprehensive Field Methods', she discusses conceptual strategies in ethnography:
What can be said of puberty can be said with equal justice of childbirth, which is dismissed with a sentence if there are no religious or social rites, or immediately observable and striking customs; of marriage, to which pages are given only if the particular culture has happened to seize upon marriage for obvious elaboration. The field ethnographer in the past has too often been prone to describe culture only in terms of the conspicuous, the conventional, and the bizarre. It is at his door that many of the most characteristic errors of the arm-chair theorizer must be laid; there is small wonder that Levy-Bruhl sees the native as pre-logical, or Crawley as obsessed by ideas of sex, when only the cultural elaborations of the unusual are presented for their consideration.
I hesitated to include her specific examples 'puberty/childbirth/marriage' without larger context, because it's the general point that I wanted to point out. Somehow those terms have a larger gravitational mass in our field of meaning, and can act as distractions. But the point is that the 'invisibility' of things does not render them insignificant. By 'invisible' we mean 'not seized upon for elaboration'; the things which elude our familiar concepts or observations.
I like what she writes though, especially if you apply it to art. A lot of lay people think of art as something that is purely about technical wizardry, good art is judged to be such by the lay person if some kind of dazzling craft is available for immediate observation. I'm talking about the kinds of people who will marvel at the Sistine Chapel but will say of a Cy Twombly painting, that familiar phrase 'my child could do this'. This is not so much a complaint as a problem that demands solving since the ultimate point of art is to communicate or reveal. It cannot be done in a vacuum; audience is a part of the equation.
At the same time, there are people who now call themselves artists but only 'seize upon' what Mead calls the 'conspicuous, the conventional, and the bizarre'. This may be best exemplified by the photography student or amateur photographer who will photograph a homeless man on the street, or a close-up of a flower, and if the lighting is dramatic or pleasing enough they will consider it an artistic achievement. But is art about looking, or seeing? I say it is about both. The goal is to make someone see something, by getting them to look. An image of a homeless man or a flower does nothing to reveal the nature of either. It may function as a crowd-pleaser, but the things themselves remain mysterious and distant, without reverence given to either. In these cases they are merely appropriated for their superficial aesthetic value.
The success of any art or science depends on this ability to render the invisible. I think that the reason why certain comedians (who can also be considered artists) like Jerry Seinfeld are so successful is because they have done the comedic equivalent of Margaret Mead's approach to ethnography. They have seized upon the bits of culture or reality that are not considered to be an 'immediately observable and striking custom'. The achievement is not in being 'technically funny' or having produced a snapshot, but in identifying some part of a common reality that has thusfar not been elaborated upon, or in the case of art, revealed.
Monday, December 6, 2010
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