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Last Issue: #31 The Journey
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (1825-1905). This book is the answer to my thoughts on travel. It certainly anticipated the saga...Read more
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Loading ...A sketch comes into focus beneath the scrutinizing eye of a camera lens, revealing an error. Promptly corrected, a new and different figure appears, materialised and dematerialised by strong, alternate strokes of pencil and eraser flaying the surface. That’s how William Kentridge works, by fine-tuning and adjustment, dynamically, hesitantly, step by staggered step, stumbling along but lifting himself up and moving on after each fall and correcting each blunder. The road he travels down is certainly not straight and even, nor does he move along it steadily; it’s more of a rough, obstacle-strewn dirt track with lots of bends in it.
The mind and heart of those artists who allow motion to break into their works have been the most open and tolerant to errors. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, for instance, shunned fixity in his metal sculptures. By placing them under flashing and flickering lights he obtained a special effect of movement thanks to the ever shifting play of light and shadow.
His book, Vision in motion, tells us of his artistic achievements in this field. His great friend and collaborator, György Kepes, has also left us with a book, The new landscape in art and science, in which images of things large, small, and colossal even, go to make up a original landscapes normally concealed to the plain, unaided eye.
We’ve always known that our senses can err. Ancient Greek philosophers have dwelled on such flaws; optical illusions have always intrigued us; our deficiencies, be they of sight, hearing, sense of orientation and so on, are always there to remind us of our proneness to error. Perhaps we’ve never been so aware of such defects as when we started correcting them with increasingly sophisticated instruments in the twentieth century.
These, not so long ago hardly imaginable aids, have permitted us to overcome our perceptual inferiority and largely recover our normal perception. Normal, that is, in human terms, for our sense capacities diverge considerably from those of most other species. But the real discovery has been when these technological helpers have enhanced our standard perception and widened our horizons. As when in the Vienna, where psychoanalysis had recently allowed women and men to cast a scrutinising eye beyond the curtain veiling that obscure realm of brushed-aside errors known as the subconscious, Gustav Klimt invited a biologist to come to his studio and show him and his collaborators living cells magnified under a microscope. He was awestruck and inspired by what he saw; after making sketches of these cells invisible to the naked eye he painted them onto golden mantles draped over his female models, a memento as much mori as vivi, musing on how much remarkable natural beauty is lost to our senses, especially that of sight, when they are left to make what they can of the world about them all by themselves.
It’s the sort of sensation anyone looking through a microscope can have, and it’s not unlike that of a skin-diver suddenly coming face to face with a whole new and breathtaking world just below the surface. In both cases it’s a discovery that brings home to us the realisation of how much of the physical world escapes us because of our makeup, thus limiting our quest for knowledge, understanding and sensations. That’s why we’ve no alternative but to look through special lenses or dive deep into the depths of the ocean aided by special devices if we’re to satisfy our deep urge for exploration and discovery.
Magdalena Abakanowicz is a famed sculptor. Her artistic achievements include such startling works as life-size statues of beheaded men; embryos made of sack-cloth; platoons of ceramic babies. But she’s also a skin-diver, and she still feels the need and desire to plunge into distant seas, as when she started skin-diving over seventy years ago, to behold the wonders this underwater world holds in store for her. Only the colours of the watery deep can offset her inner visions, grim and grisly as her past life, spent amidst strife and conflict, a helpless witness of the physical and spiritual torture endured by members of her family, living in apprehension as to her possible fate simply for the fact of being rich, poor, an artist, a communist, the wife of an anticommunist, or for her decisions in life, hotly disapproved and thwarted by all those who would know better.
Rarely does one learn from one’s mistakes, or at least not self-consciously. After recovering from a serious illness, Rebecca Horn had to learn to walk all over again. She put this experience to good use in her first performances following her rehabilitation. But it was chiefly her body that taught her which way to go, not her mind. Perhaps errors correct themselves, with no need for any deliberate action on our part. There’s really no way of going back over lost footsteps. As borne out by common experience, even our most determined resolve will sooner or later be set upon by shades of misgiving, when hindsight and afterthoughts rise up and we catch a glimpse of things as they might have been from different and wider angles.
How much easier and sensible it is then to learn to live with our mistakes, be they engendered by our sense of inner or outer sight, individual or collective. Consider, for instance, the medical profession: a GP is liable to make errors at every turn, from diagnosis to therapy. Who better than physicians then can know that the surest way to prompt changes and bring about a recovery is to stop dwelling on one’s errors and to move on in spite of them?
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