In The Woods, We Return II

This is the official version of the research review - the one I handed in. I had written a lot more, and in a more stream-of-consciousness, freeform style and was basically told to boil it down considerably... Here you go.

In The Woods, We Return - Research Review

There are several different conceptual layers inherent in my Senior Project, and although the viewer doesn’t have to know them in order to have an inner dialogue with the work in a deep and meaningful way, I still believe that learning about them can only enhance the experience. The work is not about creating an illusion but rather about consciously stimulating the viewers’ senses, without necessarily trying to conceal the ways it does that. My research process led me across a vast intellectual landscape, and what follows is a basic overview of three major themes researched and considered for this project.

1. The issue of post-modern aesthetics

At the very origin of “In The Woods, We Return” stands a debate about one of the most problematic terms in all of art history: the term beauty. Since we are dealing with human minds and souls here, and since I had no interest in approaching the project purely from a scientific, analytical point of view, the issue of the work being aesthetically pleasing, or “beautiful,” soon came up.  

The project started backwards: Not with a thought about what kind of artwork specifically I wanted to make but rather with the question Could I control the environment in which my artwork is viewed? The idea was to create a silent room which would put the viewers within a surrounding that makes them focus on the artwork without distraction, and also explore the idea of how the human perception can be manipulated if it’s being put into a sensory-deprivation environment.

 I ended up not being able to realize the vision of literal, absolute silence. It would have required building a soundproof room with inner wall surfaces designed to swallow sound, and that was simply not in my budget. The perfect solution - creating a vacuum - would have killed the viewers, who need oxygen in order to stay alive, so very early on it became clear that inner silence rather that physical silence should be what I had to go for.  

Somewhere along the line my mother told me the story of how she and my dad took a trip to Ravenna, Italy before I was born. There, they visited the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, from the outside a rather small, unimpressive building but on the inside a spectacular sight and one of the masterpieces of early Christian art: “Mosaics cover every square inch of the interior surfaces above the marble-faced walls” (Gardener, 315). My mother recalled being so emotionally overwhelmed that when she came back out into the light of day and looked back at the unpretentious building there surrounded by trees, she started weeping. The fact that something made by humans can have that effect on other humans is, in my eyes, more than enough justification for choosing a life devoted to the arts. I started thinking “I want to create something as profound as a church, something sublime, something beautiful…”Confronting the term beauty was simply inevitable.

The natural course of the art world as well as the commercial world throughout the twentieth century made a precise definition of beauty more and more problematic. With the emergence of Duchamp’s readymades and pop art any notion of formal aesthetic guidelines became redundant. 

“As with the Brillo boxes of Andy Warhol […], aesthetics could not explain why one was work of fine art and the other not, since for all practical purposes they were aesthetically indiscernible: if one was beautiful, the other one had to be beautiful, since they looked just alike. So aesthetics simply disappeared from what Continental philosophers call the ‘problematic’ of defining art” (Danto, 7).

In a way, art was freed that way, freed from formal constraints, expectations and aesthetic standards. In another way, though, an absurd anti-aesthetic peer pressure oftentimes developed. In his book “Und das ist Kunst?!” (German for „And that is supposed to be art?!“), art critic Hanno Rauterberg describes a typical case of the kind of ridicule a well-trained sculptor experienced at the art academy: 

“Kay Winkler learned drawing and sculpting from a teacher who taught him refined artistic techniques. By the end of his training he was able to paint like an old master […]. Then he came to the art academy in Munich and was being made fun of. ‘Kay, the renaissance man’ they called him because he had dared to sculpt a reclining nude in a classical manner.” (Rauterberg, 78). The author compares this way of forcing oneself not to appear sophisticated with a “dress code that nobody put down yet everyone is obeying.” 

This is how we got to where we are now: The general public doesn’t understand contemporary art anymore – even worse: it expects not to understand art anymore, believing contemporary works have to be weird, random and essentially meaningless; there seems to be a kind of consensus that art can be anything and do anything, it doesn’t matter.

One main reason for this development away from aesthetic considerations and the craft aspect can undoubtedly be seen in the overkill of commercial “artwork” all around us on a daily basis. In a one-page ad in any magazine, the designer will try to appeal to our aesthetic sensibility in order for us to buy the product. This has become deeply engrained in the thinking of contemporary artists: “Beauty = pretty = unchallenging = easily seducing us = trying to sell us more stuff.”

Installation artist Olafur Eliasson formulates the tricky balancing act that an artist undergoes when making aesthetically pleasing art. In one interview he gave together with a brain surgeon, he fully agrees after the surgeon dismissed the term beauty as a human-made, naïve concept that only distracts from real life: 

“As an artist I’m interested in working against this kind of essentialism because the arrogance that lies at the core of it is a danger to our social relationships. Also, a term like ‘beauty’ supports a very commercial handling of what I do. A designer for example searches for a commercial formula by searching for a formula for beauty. It is an advertisement term to say ‘this object is timeless’, meaning tomorrow it is worth as much as it is today. Yet by being ‘timeless’ the work loses its potential for change and criticism. I, on the other hand, understand art as a language for examining the human situation in the world.”

Eliasson’s works often seem like scientific experiments in the way that they’re based directly on physical or mathematic findings and in the way that he never tries to conceal their inner workings. Many of them, however, are indeed aesthetically very pleasing, like for example the huge setting sun he installed in the Tate’s Turbine Hall for his “Weather Project.” Eliasson, however, offers an updated definition of beauty today, in this dreaded age of commercialism and anti-aesthetic thinking in the arts. In his monograph “Studio Olafur Eliasson” he hints at the subjective nature of aesthetics: 

“Well, I don’t mind making things that that look great or seem very seductive, because to me, rationality and seduction are not mutually exclusive. For instance, you can be very rational about seduction, as in “The Weather Project” […]. The quality of the experience really depends on the combined performativity of the installation and the person; if the situation allows for a very individual experience, I’m not afraid of the work being called beautiful. I don’t think beauty can be generalized, even though many people seem to suggest that by insisting on a type of beauty that would be immanent to the works. “Beauty” is a very complex term: one version of it tends to create a discrepancy between where you think you are and where you actually are, whereas another version is more generous, in a way, because it creates an overlap between where you think you are and where you are in fact. [..] My concept of beauty is [..] focused on the individual experience.” (Eliasson, 75). 

Apart from that individual aspect, Eliasson points out another characteristic: “We then have to add the element of time. We need to see the experience of beauty as a movement.” (Eliasson, 76). In the case of an installation that would be the amount of time people are willing to spend in the space.

It seemed a very desirable thing to me, trying to understand the constraints of beauty today and then deliberately attempting to work around them on the way to creating an aesthetically profound experience. The lessons to be learned from Warhol to Eliasson are valuable and useful. If I would not create an object but a whole environment - an experience - I would be at a save distance to the commercial realm and could also provide a framework which would allow the individual viewer to have his or her very own, private experience of beauty, maybe even of the sublime, all depending on that individual’s feelings, emotions, patience, beliefs. My task as the artist would be to provide the framework that is then filled with meaning by the viewers who came to the work. 

Through these realizations I saw a realistic chance to attempt building my very own contemporary, secular, sacred space, my 2010 Galla Placidia mausoleum, my own chapel devoted to no God in particular but rather for worshipping life itself. The project is therefore, on its most idealistic level, a deliberate attempt at beauty and content, a turning away from the anti-aesthetic tendencies of the recent past and an exercise in artistic discipline and careful realization.

1. Inspiration from the  religious realm 

What I am trying to do in this project is apply human tradition that has developed over thousands of years (and that’s therefore engrained in our cultural subconscious) to a contemporary art installation. I’m talking about the literal framework - the physical shapes of religious buildings, observable features of spiritual rituals etc. I am in no way trying to convince the viewers of some sublime or spiritual “truth”. All I’m doing is displaying natural processes and basic material qualities as objectively as I can, and every single viewer can then fill what I give them with their very own version of meaning.

Making a Journey/ Ritual Aspects 

It would be useless to interpret my modern version of the old chapels through the content of the wall paintings. Content was, after all, the very thing I wanted to get rid of, and it simply wouldn’t work to just make up my own content because everyone’s response would be different and most likely the viewers would not be able to make the connection. 

The solution lay deeper: I had to understand the most basic features of the ritual experience which sacred places are built for and then construct a space that would “force” the viewers to have an experience based on these features. This would be the installation’s first objective.

Sacred places are usually never entered randomly or casually. They often require some sort of cleansing ritual meant to confront the seeker with his own humility. Muslims, for example, have to wash their ears and feet in public before entering a mosque. It is an action performed in order to re-adjust the visitor’s perception of where he is about to go, it prepares him for the experience. 

James Turrell’s famous Roden Crater is a good example of an artwork that requires something like a humility-ritual. Turrell himself says:

“The main thing is to make a journey, so that you go to something purposely and have time to settle down and empty out the noise and distractions of daily life. [..] Most people by the time they arrive at the crater are pretty well set up for it. It would be wonderful if visitors could spend at least 24 hours, but it would be better to stay longer.” (Harper, 121). 

The artistic interpretation of this process in my own project is the dark tunnel that viewers have to go through before they can enter the space, as well as the low doorway. It forces them to re-adjust their every day habits and to get out of their comfort zone by making them duck down and enter a path that they can’t see the end of. It also asks for their trust which will then be rewarded as they enter the bright white room. Here, they can stand erect again, and the upwards motion of all of their senses marks yet another re-adjustment of their habits.  

Formally, I kept with the general familiar layout of a chapel – paintings along the sides, “altar” at the front side, triptych over the altar – but they are all just surface, just empty shells void of content. Everything is plain white and serves as a projection surface for the colorful abstract imagery from above. The not very obviously displayed forest part in pure, ascetic black-and-white requires people to kneel down in front of the “altar.” A nice unplanned little pun.

Nature and Light

“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” These are the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nature”), and I took the project’s title from the first words of that quote. Emerson feels like a kindred spirit to me and my endeavor, in the way that he puts into words the exact feeling I associate with the sublime. 

And we can also note another crucial point here: The importance of nature as a spiritual place. Religious artists from centuries past drew from that source, and painters like Caspar David Friedrich or Frederick Edwin Church are famous for their skies which “offered the perfect place to synthesize science and the spiritual. Filled with air, light and impalpable clouds, the sky suggested the eternal realm of the spiritual.” (Gamwell, 17).

Another group of artists who drew on nature are, of course, the land artists from the sixties and seventies – who can be seen as the most consequent developers out of minimalism and therefore the last truly innovative group of artists. It is again Turrell who says of Roden Crater:

“[…] I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces. […] I wanted to bring culture to the natural surround as if one was designing a garden or tending a landscape. I wanted an area where you had a sense of standing on the planet.” (Kastner, 219).

 That is why the second objective of my installation became filling the neutral, white, ritualistic framework with beauty taken from nature directly. By “directly” I mean that I did not attempt to reproduce it with my human hands - did not attempt to paint trees naturalistically for example – but rather made the paint behave in ways like water would behave naturally. I captured this ever-changing, ever-evolving abstract “painting” in the only possible way: on video, projected large-scale onto the ceiling of the room. That way, it also provides the light from above that can transcend a location, and that artists from Bernini to Turrell have been exploring since there has been artistic expression. 

1. Formal thoughts: Cage’s minimalism and silence

There can’t be a discussion on silence without mentioning John Cage’s name. The avant-garde composer kept returning to what he called his favorite sound. “In The Woods, We Return” was conceived largely in a mindset similar to Cage’s, one that seeks to find meaning in really far-reaching and consequential leaps of imagination. With “4:33” Cage eventually created the most complete piece of minimalist abstraction apart from Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings”. The composition was premiered in 1952 in Woodstock open air, and it consisted only of naturally occurring noises: The three movements of the piece don’t feature a single note. The performers simply sit still, yet they’re going through the motions – they’re opening the sheet music, the pianist puts his hands on the keys etc. A stop-watch tells when the piece is over. The way that Turrell simply frames the sky, Cage frames time. This device creates a fascinating hyper-awareness in the viewer: 

“Though seemingly bereft of content, 4:33 is, like the void, rich with possibilities. [..] during the first movement, listeners heard the sound of wind in the woods. During the second movement, there were raindrops on the roof. In the final movement, the audience added its own baffled murmurs and perplexed mutterings. ‘It’s one of the most intense listening experiences you can have,’ David Tudor later reported. ‘You really listen. You hear everything there is. It is cathartic: four minutes and thirty-three seconds of meditation.’ (MacAdams, 170).

It is this type of essentialism that connects me to Cage, and it has always been important for me to be inspired by other disciplines, most notably music. The minimalist ideals that Cage realized so beautifully here are what I should try to aim for in my piece as well. Especially the white paintings I’ve been producing are, in a way, equivalent to the musical framework for Cage: they are simply present for the projected color to interact with them from above. I managed to reduce my paintings to the mere gestures, yet just like the musicians being present for 4:33, it was essential that I painted them. They are fully justified as paintings yet they leave it all up to the viewer.