That's also what separated me from Braque. He loved the Negro pieces, but as I told you: because they were good sculptures. He was never at all afraid of them. Exorcism didn't interest him. Because he wasn't affected by what I called 'the whole of it,' or life, or—I don't know—the earth?—everything that surrounds us, everything that is not us—he didn't find all of that hostile. And imagine—not even foreign to him! He was always at home . . . Even now . . . He doesn't understand these things at all: he's not superstitious!Then, there was another matter. Braque reflects when he works on his paintings. Personally, when I want to prepare for a painting, I need things, people. He's lucky: he never knew what curiosity was. People stupidly mistake it for indiscretion. It's a disease. Also a passion, because it has its advantages. He doesn't know a thing about life; he never felt like doing everything with everything. [PM, 11,13]
Now, one of the reasons why reading Africanisms in Picasso has continuously generated conflicts of interpretation is because many attempts to read his "Negro Period"—and even cubist phase—as both inside and outside European cultural history are imprisoned by what Jameson has aptly called the ideology of modernism, which "imposes its conceptual limitations on our aesthetic thinking and our taste and judgment, and in its own way projects an utterly distorted model of [literary or art] history." 30 The struggle for a pure Picasso, one uncontaminated by Africa, is ultimately a struggle to secure the aesthetic ideology of high modernism, especially the privileging of form as the mark of its breakthrough. It is not accidental, then, that many discussions of the influence of African in the making of Picasso's major works tend to revolve around the absence of a formal influence, or a style. And yet in their concern with substantive formal influence, these discussions start with a logic that is bound to fail because form is not what Africa had given Picasso. Indeed, one could argue that what made the African fetish attractive was that it would lead one away from forms of representation modeled on observable experience or reality. After all, as David Simpson has argued, what makes fetishism dangerous "in all perception and representation" is that "reality itself is open to construction." 31 My contention is that it is precisely the doubleness of the fetish—as a re that is located at the heart of culture and ritual and yet seems to appear to us only in its perceptual nature, against reality—that explains Picasso's enigmatic relationship to the African res he discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. This doubleness is worth closer consideration because it haunts some of the most influential attempts at both connecting Picasso to, and disconnecting him from, the primitive.
In "Picasso," an essay written for the catalogue for MOMA's controversial exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, William Rubin provided students of modern art with one of the most meticulous and detailed examinations of Picasso's engagement with tribal arts and more specifically African objects. Employing a combination of historical documentation and a systematic comparison of some of Picasso's major works and African art objects, Rubin establishes the centrality of the artist's turn to primitivism and his empathy for the artworks of the Other as one of the turning points in the emergence of modernism. He shows, convincingly, that Picasso's turn to the primitive had provided a way around artistic conventions that "had degenerated into a rhetorical and sentimental art": "By embracing primitivism in 1906, Picasso short-circuited the continuity of these inherited conventions, and his year-long exploration of increasingly remote and alien aesthetic correlatives permitted him to rediscover pictorial authenticity for himself" ("PIC," 241). In Rubin's account, the discovery of the tribal was an important bridge between the "soft modernism" that had characterized Picasso's art before 1906 and the "hard modernism" of his cubist period.
But underneath his acknowledgement of the affinity between the tribal and the modern, Rubin's project is also underwritten by a troubling surreptitious intention: the need to minimize the role of the Other in the emergence of modernism as a style and, in particular, the significance of Africa as an artistic model, even when acknowledging their overall affect. In other words, the majestic reconstructive effort in Rubin's essay was driven by the desire to acknowledge the role of Africa as the source of certain powerful unconscious forces while, at the same time, minimizing the significance of the continent as the source of emulous art forms, rather than simple spiritual objects. Thus in his reading of Africanisms in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Rubin sees the African masks on the demoiselles as instruments for accentuating the themes of sexuality and death rather than as models. His primary thesis is that the invocation of African res and women (both subjects of love and loathing in Picasso's psychic economy and behavior) enabled the "cohabitation of Eros and Thanatos" ("PIC," 253). More specifically, Rubin argues, the African faces would "finally conjure something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous such as Conrad's Kurtz discovered in the heart of darkness" ("PIC," 254). Rubin acknowledged that Picasso's turn to the tribal was prompted by the absence of a "Western precedent" for mask-like heads and other forms of representing the human body in distortion, but he was insistent that the precedence of primitivism lay not in the models it provided but its psychological connotations; the word "African," for example, evoked "something more fetishistic, magical, and above all, potentially malefic" ("PIC," 259).
From this interpretation we can discern two immediate issues, which, lie at the heart of the schemata of difference in modernism. The first one is how the psychologizing of the relationship between the artist and his primitive art forms depended on, or ended in, the sublimation of the perceptual in the conceptual. Building on Picasso's own claim that the tribal objects in his studio were "more witnesses than models," Rubin makes a crucial distinction between the kind of intertextuality that characterized Picasso's relationship to the works of other European artists such as Cézanne and tribal sculpture. In this scenario, tribal sculpture could function as a point of departure for Picasso, but its significance as an artistic source—a model—was militated by the fact that Picasso "metamorphosized" his objects of reference: "Picasso was impressed by aspects of its conceptual structure, principles that he could abstract from their sources and use to his own end" ("PIC," 260-2). It would appear that Rubin's goal here is to confer the power of psychological affect on Africa while, at the same time, denying it a formal influence in the making of modernism. But perhaps more important is the distinction he draws between Picasso's intertextual relation to tribal, as opposed to, European art. Why is it that Picasso's intertextual relation to Gauguin or Cézanne was considered constitutive (hence conceptual) while his relationship to African objects was perceptual, a mere starting point to something more profound than its degree zero?
We can clarify the issue at hand here by recalling that Picasso was one of the most intertextual of modern artists. Indeed, the moments in his career that have come to be considered epiphanic, such as the sojourn to Gósol, are marked by powerful repaintings of the works of other artists. It is in his distortion of the works of his precursors that Picasso established his difference and thus his modernism. When we consider Picasso's relation to, let's say Ingres or Goya during his Gósol sojourn, Gauguin during the "Blue Period" or Cézanne during the cubist phase, we are left in no doubt about the centrality of intertextuality in his project. It can easily be said that his paintings are, to borrow Jonathan Culler's words "intelligible only in terms of a prior body of discourse—other projects and thoughts, which it implicitly or explicitly takes up, prolongs, cites, refutes, transforms." 32
Nevertheless, in his study of the intertextual relation between the European modern and the African or Oceanic primitive, Rubin's categorical claim is that Picasso transformed the tribal masks in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon so radically that nothing on the canvass resembled "any African or Oceanic mask Picasso could have seen in Paris in 1907 in the studios of his friends or at the Trocadèro museum" ("PIC," 262). What makes this claim puzzling, however, is that it is not clear that a reading of Picasso's transformation of the masked res from African or Oceanic traditions was radically different from the transformation that the works of other European artists underwent in his hands. Indeed, the transformation of res and forms so that they could retain only a minimal relation to their artistic precursors was one of the hallmarks of the method that we now call abstraction. And as the structuralists used to argue in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the signatures of a strong, as opposed to a weak, intertextuality was the extent of the deviation from the original model. Strong intertextuality is evident when the "borrowed" textual unit is "abstracted from its context and inserted as if in a new textual syntagm as a paradigmatic element." 33
A second problem in Rubin's psychological reading of Picasso's Africanism is the emphasis he places on the subliminal and subconscious or unconscious. It is, of course, true that in foregrounding the perceptual dimension of the African connection, Rubin follows a long tradition (one encouraged by Picasso himself) in which the encounter with the primitive is defined by fear and repulsion and is hence connected to the forces that modern civilization repressed. This is, of course, the familiar narrative of primitivism in modernism. But to argue that the primitive art object appealed to the modernists because of its association with repressed psychological forces, and that those forces were the triggers for the revolutionary works of modernism, should not necessarily lead to a de facto negation of the more formal, conscious, conceptual influences tribal art had on Picasso and his contemporaries. The problem with Rubin's valorization of the psychological impact of the primitive on Picasso's artistic consciousness is that it is built on the rather dubious presupposition that subconscious or unconscious influences negate formal ones; hence his expenditure of much energy trying to show that the objects that were supposed to have influenced Picasso's revision of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—Dan masks, for example—were not accessible to the artist at a particular phase in his career.
Rubin's theoretical stratagem—the claim that African art objects had entered Picasso's subconscious but never rose to the level of formal models—reflects, perhaps more boldly than that of others', a significant feature of the conundrum of modernism in its relation to the Others that it considered part of its schema. Simply put, if we deny the Other as a model for new forms of art, how do we explain the resemblances between Picasso and African masks that he was not supposed to have seen? It is in response to this question that Rubin developed his influential—and quite controversial—theory of affinities:
The resemblances between the heads in the Demoiselles and the masks that have been compared to them in art-historical studies are thus all fortuitous—reflections of affinities between arts that communicate through conceptual signs, rather than through pictorial conventions directly derived from seeing. Yet the fact that so many more such affinities may be found between Picasso's art and that of the tribal peoples than is the case with the work of other pioneer modernists reflects, on Picasso's part, a profound identity of spirit with the tribal peoples as well as a generalized assimilation of the principles and character of their art. ["PIC," 265]
Here Rubin's argument depends on a fundamental distinction between influence and affinity. In influence (Ingres, Gauguin, or Cézanne on Picasso, for example) the relationship between the work of art and its model takes place on the conceptual level in terms of observed formal conventions. In affinity, the influence is perceptual, almost unconscious, functioning on "an invented projection of an internal, psychological state" (ibid). Rubin would simply not allow for "tribal" influences on the formal, artistic level so central to the identity of modernism. It was only through the unconscious that the Other would be allowed into a now canonized modernism. An unconscious influence would not be allowed to enter the surface where form is discernible. Thus, to describe or posit an influence as unconscious is to simultaneously acknowledge its constitutive presence in the making of the object under discussion but also to deny it visibility. Apprehended in its absence and read solely in terms of its perceptual, sensual influence, the African Other would be contained and then evacuated from the edifice of high modernism.
But what are we to do with those instances where Picasso visibly modeled his works on African objects and where the relationship between the two was quite formal, as in the case of the Guitar and a Grebo mask (. 9 and 10)? Rubin documents many instances of what appear to be conceptual African influences in Picasso's work, especially in 1907 and 1908, including Woman's Head and a Fang sculpture (. 11 and 12), but not even his own evidence was enough to convince him that these works constituted real models, sources of formal borrowings, rather than launching pads towards a cubism detached from its influences. Clearly, Rubin was not willing to concede African art forms the distinctive status of art; they remained—had to remain—artifacts (ritual objects) with the capacity for psychological influence, but not sources of a formalized aesthetic. And in a curious way, this confinement of African works of art to artifacts or ritual objects seems to ignore the fact that in his own relationship with African objects, Picasso tended to prefer those works which seemed to fit his aesthetic interests and sensibilities rather than simple affect. Indeed, if Picasso seemed to value African art objects over bodies, and quite often to privilege the former over the latter, as I argued at the beginning of this essay, it was because he was, in a very strict aesthetic sense, self-conscious and selective about the objects he found worthy of incorporation in his art. In short, Picasso had a clear idea about which objects, among his vast African collection, could be considered worthy of formal emulation and which could be consigned to the spectatorship of ritual.
It is now common to argue that Picasso was attracted to African art because of its capacity to generate terror or that he sought those subjects who would serve as what Bois calls "models for anatomical forms." 34 And yet the Africanist elements in Picasso's paintings only appear deforming to the extent that they call previous conventions of painting into question, not merely because they duplicate the syphilitics that he had encountered in French hospitals. In this sense it is striking that while he had in front of him some of the most deformed and terrifying res in the African pantheon, real fetishes as it were, Picasso chose as models those masks that seemed to be closer to a familiar European grammar about form and symmetry even when they challenged some established notions of representation. Consequently, Picasso's version of tribal art is one cleansed of the terror he seemed to have experienced in his first encounter with it, streamlined in such a way that they are no longer images of the deformity we are eager to ascribe to African ritual objects. Once we recognize that Picasso modeled some of his works on African objects but also departed from them significantly, once we reject the model or no model option, we can shift the significance of his relationship with Others elsewhere.
Now, one of the major criticisms leveled against the notion of affinity, the reigning paradigm in the study of modernism and primitivism, has centered on the implication that the tribal and the modern were bound together by what James Clifford called "a deeper or more natural relationship than mere resemblance or juxtaposition." 35 Clifford's major difficulty with affinity as "an allegory of kinship" is that in its universalizing claims it excludes the stories and experiences of the Others that modernism seeks to re-appropriate in its own image, that scholars of modernism are primarily interested in tribal art for its "informing principles" or its "elemental expressive modes." 36 True enough. But it is important to underline the point that if the proponents of affinity seem to have no difficulties mounting an exhibition built on allegories of kinship, it is precisely because the aesthetic ideology of modernism was itself driven by the same impulse, the desire to encounter the Other in its ugliness and terror and then purify it so that it could enter the modern art world as part of its symmetrical economy. The major difference between modern artists and their posthumous patrons is simply that the former were also interested in "conceptual displacement" while the latter were [Begin Page 474] invested solely in "morphological coincidence." 37 What makes Picasso such a central re in the history of modernism's relationship to its Others was his ability to make the primitive central to the aesthetic ideology of modern art while also transforming tribal art objects in such a way that they were no longer recognizable as models. This is how Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has come to be read, in Hal Forster's majestic phrase, as both the primal scene of primitivism—" one in which its structure of narcissism and aggressivity is revealed"—and also the site of disavowal of the very difference it considers a condition of possibility. 38
So, where exactly is Africa in Picasso's schemata? This question returns us to the problem that opened my discussion, namely the strict separation of African peoples and art objects in the artist's notion of the primitive. However, a set of more complicated questions needs to be posed: how could Picasso turn to Africa for its magic and art and yet avoid being entangled in its endangered cultures or the problems of its colonized peoples? How do we reconcile the terror and danger he felt when he first encountered African objects at the ethnographic museum with the symmetrical relationship he established between the tribal art work and abstract modernism so that the two seem almost to have been made for one another? The complaint that curators of modernism and primitivism seem to avoid tribal artworks that seem impure and asymmetrical in relation to the structures of Picasso's art is a familiar one, but I have been arguing that the failure of such curatorial endeavors as the 1984 MOMA exhibition does not simply arise from a yearning to rescue modern works from the aesthetic influence of the primitive, or even from the institutional necessity to wink at, yet displace, tribal works from their context. A larger problem concerns the imprisonment of curators and historians in the logic of coherence and symmetry favored by the practitioners of modern art. In the end, this logic ignores two major problems which need to be at the center of any discussion of the relationship between modern painters and their African sources, especially when we are discussing those crucial years between 1895 and 1922 when modernism emerged: the question of African definition and authority of sources.
The question of definition was raised most poignantly by Robert Farris Thompson in 1988: "what are the indigenous African definitions of the impact of African art forms on the artists of the cities of Europe (like Fang masks in Paris) at the beginning of this century?" 39 Berating the arrogance of Western art historians who never once consider that "the African priests and traditional leaders might have something of intellectual substance to contribute to this most important argument," Thompson concludes that "the final definition of the impact of African and Oceania upon modern art remains incomplete until we take large photographs of the Africanizing works of Picasso, Braque, et al to traditional Africa . . . and listen to indigenous comments and critical reaction." 40 We still do not have "indigenous" commentaries on works of modernism. In the few instances where indigenous artists have been given access to the institutions of commentary, they have been denied the authority of criticism. 41 Even the works of African art historians produced in the most prestigious institutions in the West, are not heard across the temporal and cartographic divide that separates the study of expressive and other cultural forms between the modern and everything before or after it.
But what lessons could we learn from African art historians that would be useful to modernism, to the relation between Picasso and Africa? For one, we could learn that Picasso has had a significant, though perhaps surreptitious, influence on the field of African art studies. Otherwise how can one explain the almost unquestioning assumption that the mask is the primary medium of traditional African visual expression? On the other side of the debate, however, a shift in contexts of reading—from seeing Africa from Picasso's perspective to seeing the modern artist's from the Other's angle of vision —can yield even more useful results. Consider the fact that in a large measure, the literature on Picasso and his African sources assumes that the mask in Africa was part of a unified and intelligible tradition and that its value lay in its ritualized form and function. Yet, the most detailed studies of African masks, their cultural contexts, and the views of their producers, recognize the intersection between the ritual fields in which they are produced (and out of which they perhaps cannot be understood) and the centrality of the meaning of the mask in motion. 42 Indeed, contemporary African writers and artists who have deployed the mask in their works recognize the significance of movement in determining the form of the mask and its interpretation. 43
A final enigma must be confronted if we are to rethink the role of the Other in the making of modern art outside the ideology of modernism: how do we transcend the established doxa that it was through the acquisition of the "mythical method" or "mystical mentality" inherent in primitivism that, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, art was made possible for the modern world? 44 What is the source of this idea, the unquestioned notion that the art of the primitive emerged from a mystical, preconscious mentality and found its ideal form in myth? Why, indeed, did the idea of the African fetish dominate Picasso's understanding of the African primitive in that initial encounter at the Trocadéro in 1906? We are, of course, familiar with the ethnographers of the primitive mentality and the mythical method, most notably Levi-Bruhl and Sir William Fraser, and countless studies have been devoted to the influence of their ethnography on the ideology of modernism; but we have not often paid enough attention to the ethnographers' sources. As a matter of fact, we seem to take it for granted that the ethnographers of modernism conducted field work among the primitives and that their powerful ideas on the cultures and myths of the other came from native sources. The real story, however, is different. The primary sources behind the idea of the African primitive were not the academic ethnographers but a group of what I will call the surrogate native informants: European adventurers such as Leo Frobenius, Emily Torday, and Mary Kingsley; missionary ethnographers such as Robert Nassau, John Roscoe, and G. T. Basden; and colonial administrative officers such as R. S. Rattray in Ashanti and Amaury Talbot in South Eastern Nigeria. These were the first Europeans to write about African cultures and to make art central to understanding the primitive mentality. They also produced their most important work in the foundational years of modernism.
Briefly, there are three reasons why these surrogate informants are central to any rethinking of modernism and its ideas of the primitive. First, while academic ethnographers were generally critical of the colonial enterprise, most often its methods rather than objectives, the surrogate informants conceived their work in the field as crucial to colonial governmentality and as a practical contribution to the theoretical work of the intellectuals of modernism. They assumed that the work of ethnographers at major European universities needed the authority of observations made first hand in the theater of colonialism. Indeed, surrogate informants cultivated close relations with the leading ethnographers of primitive cultures. Thus, John Roscoe, who wrote the first ethnography of the Baganda, was a protégé of Fraser at Cambridge, and Rattray who wrote on the Ashanti, was a collaborator of E. G. Selignman at Oxford. As agents in the field of colonialism, the informants premised their authority on their contact with those Africans who, in Roscoe's words, were "uninfluenced by foreign ideas." 45 Second, the surrogate informants were the first, in those crucial years between 1905 and 1922, to promulgate the notion that the mentality of the primitive was mystical and mythical, outside modern forms of rationality, and under the hold of fetishism. One could not understand the native mind or indeed any aspect of native religion and social organization without understanding the role of the fetish, the explanatory code that connected everything. Third, as is evident from the sheer amount of cross-reference, the surrogate informants existed in a cohesive field of discourse, and thus reinforced the idea of a core set of beliefs that were uniform across Africa.
As part of a generational project, adventurers, colonial officers, and missionaries referred to each others' work and used the parallels they saw in their respective fields of operation to reinforce the power of their ideas, to provide the thick description that made their evidence unassailable. This is why even when artists such as Picasso questioned colonial practices, they seemed to reproduce the colonialist model of African societies; they questioned the practice but not the theory of colonialism. This structure—the questioning of the practice and the acceptance of the theory—tends to be reproduced when we don't interrogate the idea of Africa in modern art, when, for example, we forget the brutality that accompanied the arrival of the African art object to the West, the amount of African bodies that had to be destroyed so that the objects would arrive safely at the art museum 46
Finally, three challenges remain to be addressed in greater detail. The
first one is how to restore the intimate relationship between the
brutality of late colonialism and the emergence of the ideology of
modernism and, the second, to consider more closely the role the surrogate
informants played in making Africa accessible to modernism. The third
one is how to displace Picasso—as the representative custodian of
high modernism in art—from the ritualized place that he occupies
in the modern museum.
47
It is my contention that we cannot undertake the work
of displacement and de-ritualization without changing the
language of commentary, the allegory of affinity, the contexts
for reading and—eventually—our understanding of
perspective and spectatorship. What were to happen, for example,
if one were to exhibit Les Demoiselles d'Avignon next to
Faith Ringgold's quilt, Picasso's Studio ( 13), instead of
traditional Pende Mbuya masks? Or if we examined Woman's Head not
in relation to an indigenous Fang mask but next to Mina ya Nnom
( 14),
a bronze sculpture by Leandro Mbomio Nsue, the contemporary Equatorial
Guinean artist, a modern representation of the Fang perspective on form?
[Begin Page 478]
Simon Gikandi is Robert Hayden Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Carribean Literature, and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and other works in the postcolonial literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and the "Black Atlantic."
1. Rasheed Araeen, "Conversation with Aubrey Williams," Third Text 2 (1987-88): 32.
2. André Malraux, Picasso's Mask (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 10; hereafter abbreviated PM.
3. Writing to Kahnweiller in August 11, 1912 about some masks he had bought, Picasso didn't hesitate to describe them as (stand-ins for) Africans: "We bought some blacks [des négres] at Marseilles and I bought a very good mask and a woman with big tits and a young black." Quoted in Natasha Staller, A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 2001), 318; hereafter abbreviated SOD.
4. The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), 16-50.
5. See D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xii. Here Miller is discussing how "modern social organization" has made even scandal "a systematic function of its routine self-maintenance." For my purposes one can substitute difference or primitivism in modernism for scandal.
6. See for example the debates in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, second edition, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), especially the argument between T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, 71-112.
7. My assumption here is that while the literature on black bodies and modernism has grown in recent years, as has that on race and modernism, most of it takes the African American, not the African, to be the representative black subject. See, for example, Michael North, The Dialectic of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and the essays collected in Race and the Modern Artist, ed. Heather Hathaway, Josef JaYab, and Jeffrey Melnick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
8. Kahnweiler's comments were made in 1948 at the height of Picasso's canonization; Dax was writing in the 1970s; both are quoted in Yve-Alain Bois Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1990), 69.
9. "Negro Art and Cubism," originally published in Prèsence Africaine, collected in Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art, ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 284.
10. See William Rubin, "Picasso" in "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 260; hereafter abbreviated "Pic."
11. See, respectively, Kahnweiller "Negro Art," 285; Rubin, "Introduction" to Primitivism, 17; and Bois Painting as Model, 73.
12. I pursue these questions in greater detail in Unmodern Subjects: Race, Art, and African Difference from which this discussion is excerpted. Discussing the way the "ghostly" makes its way into the movement of European history, Jacques Derrida observes that "Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe. It would open the space and the relation to self of what is called by this name, at least since the Middle Ages. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4.
13. I develop this argument in "Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic," Michigan Quarterly Review XL, no. 2 : 318-50. For the interplay of social ideals and ideas of pollution, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1966), 1-6.
14. "War-Paint and Feathers," originally published in the Athenaeum in October 17, 1919, collected in Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art, 122.
15. "War-Paint and Feathers," 122.
16. See "Chronology" in Picasso: The Early Years 1892-1906, ed. Marilyn McCully (Washington, D.C. : National Gallery of Art, 1997), 48; hereafter abbreviated PEY.
17. For this argument I have relied on Staller (SOD) and the essays collected in Picasso: The Early Years (PEY).
18. Margaret Werth, "Representing the Body in 1906" (PEY, 277-88).
19. Werth, "Representing the Body in 1906" (PEY, 277).
20. After eighty sittings, Picasso gave up "seeing" Gertrude Stein and turned to the mask as an alternative way of viewing. The significance of this turn from the human model to the mask is discussed by Michael North in The Dialectic of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 59-76. For a feminist reading of the Portrait of Gertrude Stein, see Tamar Darb, "'To Kill the Nineteenth Century': Sex and Spectatorship with Gertrude and Pablo," in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, ed. Christopher Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55-76.
21. These works are discussed in detail by Staller (SOD, 296-301).
22. But in discussing notions of disorder, we need to keep Mary Douglas's dictum in mind: "Reflections on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death." See Purity and Danger, 6.
23. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1981), 280.
24. This is not to deny Picasso's interested radical anti-colonial politics; merely to raise the possibility that radical anti-colonialism might have needed the valorization of the primitive as part of its maintenance, a point that was to become more apparent with the rise of surrealism. For Picasso and French colonialism in Africa, see "Colonialism, l'art négre and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 77-103.
25. The quoted phrase comes from Robert Rosenblum, "Picasso in Gósol: The Calm Before the Storm" (PEY, 268).
26. My discussion here is indebted to Rosenblum's "Picasso in Gósol," 262-7.
27. As does Staller (SOD, 314).
28. Quoted in Staller, (SOD, 316).
29. It would be interesting to compare Picasso's Harem with some of Matisse's Orientalist paintings. For the latter, see Roger Benjamin's Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), especially chapter 7, 59-90.
30. Fredric Jameson, "Beyond the Cave," in Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 117.
31. Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination, 11.
32. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1981), 102.
33. Laurent Jenny, "The Strategy of Form," in French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, trans. R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 40.
34. Bois, Painting as Model, 72.
35. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1988), 190.
36. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 190, 193, 195.
37. Hal Forster, Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1985), 184.
38. Forster, Recordings, 182.
39. Robert Farris Thompson, "Fang Mask," in Perspectives: Angles on African Art, James Baldwin et al (New York: Center for African Art, 1987), 190.
40. Farris Thompson, "Fang Mask," 190.
41. The most notorious instance of this exclusion concerns the Baule artist, Lela Kouakou, who was invited to participate in a forum on African art but was allowed to comment only on works from his ethnic region because he was deemed incapable of providing "objective" aesthetic judgments, that is, those not bound by his "traditional criteria." See Susan Vogel, "Introduction" to Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 11. For a subtle discussion of this criterion of inclusion and exclusion see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137-9.
42. The literature on African masks is too extensive to cite here, but see Z. S. Strother, Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chapter six, 39-54.
43. Dramatic deployments of the mask in motion can be found in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964) and Wole Soyinka's The Road (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
44. See Richards, Masks of Difference, 204.
45. John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of their Native Customs and Beliefs (London: MacMillan, 1911), ix. For Rattray, see Religion and Art in Ashanti (London: Oxford University Press, 1927).
46. What, for example, is the structural relationship between the destruction of the Kingdom of Benin by a British Expeditionary Force in 1897 and the availability of Benin sculpture to the British Museum? Should it surprise us that the rooted sculpture is now housed in a modern wing of the British Museum, paid for by a family that made its fortunes in the confectionaries of empire, and named after Henry Moore, a leading modernist and connoisseur of African art? For the Benin Expedition, see Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1994), 7-28
47. I had suggested a similar act of deritualization, albeit too briefly, for T. S. Eliot in Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chapter 5, 157-89.
Like such contemporaries as John Ashbery and Barbara Guest, Denise Levertov expressed "an affinity with visual art," claiming that "looking at art" was a true and lasting love. 1 Remembering key moments in her artistic development, she mentions her early adolescence in London where, motivated by weekly drawing lessons with a British landscape painter, she frequented the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery and became acquainted with the landscapes of Cézanne, for which she had a lifelong passion (T, 106). As a novice she was mentored by the art critic and poet, Herbert Read, to whom she dedicated her first book, The Double Image, and among her unpublished juvenilia are many autobiographical drawings, full of humor and wit, which show the encouragement of her mother, who was herself an amateur artist. In fact, so strong was this affinity that, as a young girl, she dreamed of being both an artist and a poet—as well as a ballerina. 2 Thus, it is not surprising that, when she settled in New York City after World War II, her friends included artists associated with the Jane St. Gallery, such as Nell Blaine, in whose sketching group she participated, as well as Albert Kresch, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdotter, and, a little later, Howard Fussiner. 3 From the beginning, she turned in her poetry to the materiality of the visual arts to express spiritual energy and force. As she put it in an early poem, addressing artists in both media:
Incise, invent, file to poignance;
make your elusive dream
seal itself
in the resistant mass of crude substance. 4
Yet, the ekphrastic impulse, the desire to write poems about specific paintings, did not become strong until A Door in the Hive , after her spiritual quest had resulted in a turn toward Roman Catholicism in the early 1980s, inspired in part by the active opposition of radical clergy members to oppressive political regimes in Latin America. In this book, Levertov continued the work of social protest and spiritual contemplation evident in earlier poems written in response to the atrocities of World War II and the Vietnam War. In fact, the longest poem in this book, "El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation," combines these two impulses. It is the libretto for an oratorio about the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero and three nuns. Their sympathy with the struggles of the native poor led to their murder by right wing death squads aided by the American government in what could be construed as a continuation of earlier American foreign policy which Levertov opposed. In this book she included four poems about works of art and/or visual artists in the context of a perceived analogy between "the journey of art and the journey of faith." 5
Levertov's poems about works of art occur also in the context of her ongoing concern about how political resistance is to be expressed in lyric poetry. As Alicia Ostriker has written, distinguishing "the poetics of postmodern witness" from confessional poetry, some poets after World War II have reacted to Theodore Adorno's famous declaration that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz with renewed determination to continue the struggle with the self that is also the struggle with what Auschwitz stands for—"not only the Holocaust but also the ongoing concatenation of horrors scarring twentieth-century history." 6 They have done so, as Ostriker puts it, "by avoiding a poetics purely of the self," on one hand, and by refusing to abandon the lyric "I," on the other, lest they deny a consciousness "that desires, suffers and chooses," and thus provides an ethical and political model for the reader. 7 Ostriker does not include Levertov's ekphrastic poems in her discussion, choosing instead long poems by contemporary poets who employ the fragmented structures and polyglot allusions associated with Eliot, Pound, and Williams while regaining the autobiographical "I" rejected by these exemplars of high modernism. Although Levertov solves the formal problem in a different way in her ekphrastic poems, the main issue she struggles with is the same: how to mirror and transcend the confusion and angst of a person caught in a world of catastrophe. Thus, Ostriker's designation, "the poetics of postmodern witness," is applicable.
This essay will focus upon Levertov's poems about works by five visual artists, Anselm Kiefer, Chaim Soutine, Jean Duvet, Eduardo Chillida, and Emmanuel de Witte, the contemplation of which helped her to bridge the gulf between a despairing political awareness and an "imagined destination of faith" (NSE, 257). I will explore the ways in which Levertov employs ekphrastic poetry, the genre in which "texts encounter their own semiotic 'others,'" to negotiate the ground between self, world, and divinity that is her version of postmodern witness. 8 By turning to these "others"—works by visual artists with whom she feels allied—Levertov avoids indulgence in private malaise and indirectly expresses concerns about the limits of poetic language, her own medium. When we read these poems in sequence we find that her initial focus on the relative poverty of words (a coded medium) contrasted with the more direct power of visual experience shifts to a focus upon perspective, an attribute of both arts. This shift ultimately yields a poem, "The Composition," based on de Witte's "Woman at the Harpsichord," a painting from a golden age in Western culture, in which Levertov celebrates de Witte's ability to embody a timeless ideal of peace even as she laments the distance between then and now. In this poem Levertov expresses "ekphrastic hope," in that the estrangement of the image/text division is overcome by the evocation of a "a 'still moment' of plastic presence through language." 9 Yet her awareness that such an evocation is metaphoric, momentary, and burdened by the tragic weight of history, infuses this poem, and indeed the whole sequence of poems about paintings, with existential and religious pathos. Also, in these poems, Levertov serves as an intermediary between works of art and her audience of listening or reading others by converting fixed scenes into poetic dramas that we "see" in the mind's eye and thus experience vicariously.
We find Levertov's growing desire for a focus that is not merely confessional in the prefatory note to her 1978 volume, Life in the Forest, where she introduces a group of poems inspired by Cesare Pavese, with the following words:
Pavese's beautiful poems are about various persons other than himself; though he is a presence in them also, their focus is not autobiographical and egocentric, and in his accompanying essays he speaks of the concept of suggesting narrative through the depiction of a scene, a landscape, rather than through direct recounting of events as such. The poems I had been moving towards were impelled by two forces: first, a recurring need—dealt with earlier by resort to a diarylike form, a poem long enough to include prose passages and discrete lyrics—to vary a habitual lyric mode; not to abandon it, by any means, but from time to time to explore more expansive means; and second, the decision to try to avoid overuse of the autobiographical, the dominant first-person singular of so much American poetry—good and bad—of recent years. 10
Levertov's turn to ekphrasis was another instance of this impulse. It was also a means of distancing herself from the threatening historical reality of London before and during World War II. The art museum has been called "the shrine where all poets worship in a secular age" 11 and in the poem, "Winter Afternoons in the V. and A., pre-W.W.II," Levertov remembers seeking a respite from the unceasing rain in the "darkening afternoon streets" within the "lofty and vast halls" of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 12 She writes:
Here was historyas I desired it: magical, specific,
jumbled, unstinting,a world for the mind to sift
in its hourglass—now, while I was twelve,
or forever.
[CIB, 48]
In that poem the shoes of the girl in the museum "made no sound," and Levertov chooses a mysterious relationship between speech and silence as the theme of the first poem in A Door in the Hive, the book in which a cluster of her poems about paintings appear. It is an invocation, "To Rilke," in which she recalls a dream in which the poet stands at the prow of a boat in a state of receptivity, "all voice, though silent." 13 He is about to take the passengers on a "needful journey" (DIH, 3). That this need is for an experience of divinity is evident in the last poem in the collection, a variation on a poem in The Book of Hours, also inspired by Rilke, in which he distills his quest for an unmediated and intimate encounter with the heart of the universe. 14 In Levertov's variation of Rilke's poem, the speaker wishes to be part of "the vast mosaic—temple, eidolon," to be "imbedded in its fabric, / as if, once, it was from that we were broken off" (DIH, 107). In a different form, her ekphrastic poems also express this desire for a religious encounter unmediated by words.
A Door in the Hive is divided into six sections. In her notes on its organization, Levertov conceives its emotional curve as beginning in artistic quest and modulating into life journey and religious quest. She places in the second section poems about "world pain" from a variety of perspectives. 15 This is where the oratorio about El Salvador appears and her first ekphrastic poem, "The Book Without Words," inspired by a painting by Anselm Kiefer, follows immediately after it. Levertov described her admiration for Kiefer's work in a letter to James Laughlin written after she saw a Kiefer show in New York: "Kiefer is very impressive—the link with Paul Celan is more than superficial, I feel. . . . the images he creates are powerful and convey something about the 20th century as no other visual art has done." 16 She refers here both to Kiefer's Margarethe and Sulamith paintings, which draw on the poetic evocation of the Holocaust and the death camps in Celan's poem, "Fugue of Death," and to Kiefer's view of the dilemma of the artist in the twentieth century in such paintings as "The Book" (1979-85)," the source of her own poem. For if, as I mentioned earlier, Adorno's proscription left artists with an aesthetic ethics of visual absence and poetic silence, Kiefer's work explicitly thematizes that dilemma. Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer is not only driven by explorations of a specifically German identity in the postwar world, but also by the question of what it means to create in the aftermath of fascism and genocide. In Kiefer's work "the very act of creating, and the very fact of being an artist, is always bound up with, or founded in, its place in the present, a present shaped by the legacy of historical trauma." 17
Levertov was clearly interested in the critique of European culture that Kiefer's painting depicts, and she was probably also drawn to his reinvention of traditional forms, particularly landscape and history painting. As Simon Schama points out, "What he did was to collapse the one into the other, exactly reversing abstraction's metaphysical obligations to push the implications of painting beyond and through the painting." 18 Kiefer rejected the "uncoupling of painterly process and its ostensible objects" characteristic of some forms of abstraction with their implied insistence that "the only interesting subject left for art was art" (LM, 124). Where "Abstraction prized lightness, flatness, the airy, and the cerebral. . . . Kiefer turned back to German expressionism, for the raw texture, the gritty materiality, of historical truth" (LM, 126). His paintings returned compositional lines back to their narrative function. This formal position is analogous to Levertov's rejection of the captious wit of language poetry, notwithstanding the related political goals of its advocates. Certainly, in her poem, "The Book Without Words," she responds to Kiefer's compression of form and narrative, subtly employing point of view to interpret his use of perspective.
When we first look at this painting, we are immediately struck by the weight of the forged lead book in the center of the foreground ( 1). We tend then to see details of the destroyed landscape around it, composed of acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas. In the body of her poem Levertov reverses the order of this visual experience and thereby intensifies the relationship between re and ground. She begins by placing herself inside the painting—on the horizontal line near the top—the "verge" of a "limitless ocean" (DIH, 40). The threatening "gray waves gnash / their teeth of foam" directly in front of her (DIH, 40). Behind her is "the barren plain, / seamed, fissured," composed not of earth but of "cinders" (DIH, 40). From this foreclosed position, the "dark and darkening" sky appears to "bear down," and the nature of the future is uncertain at best. Instead of offering "the ultimate direction" for a sea-voyage, the huge wordless book "levitates, close to the hiss of spume, / / immutable, desolate" (DIH, 40). It has no place on the burned ground. In her view it is a symbol of empty, failed civilization and/or of traumatized historical memory: no matter how they are manipulated its contents are "unresonant" . . . "void upon void" (DIH, 40). Levertov also employs stanza length and enjambment to reinforce her interpretation of Kiefer's painting and to bring its meaning home to us emphatically at the end. Reading the poem is a little like riding the waves: the units of sound gradually increase until we come to the last two lines, abrupt full stops: "You have come to the shore. / There are no directions" (DIH, 40). As if to distinguish human potential from the shame of the historical record, Levertov placed at the end of this section, "On the Mystery of the Incarnation," a contrasting poem about the word of God incorporated in the life of Christ.
If Kiefer records historical trauma and collective guilt in this painting and in others in which he takes as his subject, "Germany's now absent other, the Jew" (AK, 3), the same could be said of the paintings of Chaim Soutine, the subject of the second ekphrastic poem in Levertov's book. Except here her subject is that Other. For Soutine's Jewishness has always been central to the interpretation of his work. 19 This Lithuanian-born, shtetl-bred artist was one of the group, including Chagall, who settled in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, in flight from the menace of ill-treatment and racial hatred that promised to grow worse. During World War II, like many Jews in occupied France, he hid until he could hide no longer. Severely ill with what may have been a perforated ulcer, he made his way from his hiding place in the French countryside to a Paris hospital, where he died in 1943. In the aftermath of the war, his life and art came to be seen as a reflection and portent of the tragic events of contemporary history. He became known for his ability to depict the pathos of everyday life, its suffering and anguish, and for the intensity of his religious longing. Levertov's poem reflects both of these interpretations. Titled "Soutine (Two Paintings)," it is a verbal composite of two works, "Still Life With Herrings" and "Red Stairway at Cagnes" (1923-34) which, in Levertov's view, epitomize the artist's interior drama (. 2 and 3).
The essence of that drama, for Levertov, is an implied link between the abject and the sacred. Moving back and forth, in the first stanza, between Soutine's boldly expressive images of hunger, loss, desperation, and unbridled desire in each painting, she dramatizes their connection. With the repeated conditional phrase, "As if," she conveys the dream-like way in which the "desperate things" in both paintings—the "forks" and "red steps"—are sublimations of Soutine's feelings of being rejected and outcast (DIH, 54). "Avid," "famished," "clutching," they nevertheless resist the restraints and negation imposed on his subjectivity by the increasingly hostile outside world, represented here by desiccated mythic symbols of life and love—"dead scrawny fish," "dead-white plate," and "abandoned cup" (ibid). In two apostrophes, "O desperate things," and "O grey void," Levertov acknowledges Soutine's increasingly noxious situation in a world devoid of humane or even human content (ibid). The second stanza focuses on the second painting alone. Here Levertov underscores Soutine's desire to take possession of even this intolerable landscape: the skepticism of the leaning, "wavering" houses, expressed in a rhetorical question, "and what could there be / up there / to fulfil desire?" does not undercut nor deter the fervent urgency of his visionary climb (ibid). His gesture is that of an inspired mystic. In her notes on the book's organization, [Begin Page 526] Levertov explicitly recognizes the religiosity of Soutine's art. She places "Soutine (Two Paintings)" in a third section of poems that is "overtly religious," commenting that it reintroduces the theme of artistic quest in that context ("NOT").
Raymond Cogniat has compared Soutine's visionary message to a reading of the Apocalypse of St. John, "in that it makes us feel that we are experiencing an agonizing obsession with and affirmation of catastrophe couched in the form not of a probable future but of a visible, present reality." 20 He writes that Soutine's paintings have "the brilliance and intensity of medieval stained glass windows" (S, 68). In fact, Levertov also may have felt this connection: the next ekphrastic poem in this book, "A Woodcut," was inspired by an engraving in the Apocalypse series by Jean Duvet, whose works provide "an artistic odyssey through the worlds of late Gothic, Renaissance and Mannerist styles." 21 Born in Dijon in 1485, the same year as Luther, whose faith he was to follow, Duvet lived in a period when there was considerable French resentment toward Rome despite major attempts to consolidate the Counter-Reformation forces. To avoid religious persecution, he moved first to Geneva and, in his final years, to Lyon, a center of French Protestantism and the graphic arts, noted for its erudition and liberal thought (MU, 25). Here, at age 77, Duvet produced the Apocalypse plates, his last and major work. Its chief source was the Dürer woodcut "Apocalypse" of 1498. A man of many skills and interests, including theology and probably alchemy, Duvet established his own way of faith and his final images are "illuminated by a . . . sense of the isolation of man before God" (MU, 25). Saint John, Duvet's patron saint as well as the patron saint of printers, was viewed as one of the first alchemists because of apocryphal accounts of his transforming the pebbles on the riverbank to gold. Some art historians see the concept of the Christian alchemist as an aspect of Duvet's experience of the "Apocalypse" entirely in keeping with the intensely personal nature of his art (MU, 43). Levertov's poem, based on the engraving titled "The Angel Shows John the New Jerusalem," reflects this independent, personal aspect of Duvet's vision; she condenses the first part of the story depicted by the engraving and focuses on the second.
Duvet's composition is divided into two chief areas: the upper, curved section is occupied by the heavenly Jerusalem, while the lower part shows the haloed Saint John on the island of Patmos ( 4). His annunciation takes place within a rustic structure of apple trees, especially suited for the theophany. While in ecstatic slumber there, he is approached by an angel who tells him that he will take him to see the New Jerusalem. The angel's staff points upward toward the holy city. His elevation to a mountain top, from which he sees the heavenly Jerusalem, is shown at the upper left where he kneels at the foot of the pointing angel. The handsome city, inspired by architectural prints of the Renaissance, is before him with its many angel-filled portals and throngs of saved souls who gaze up at the miniscule re of the Lord at the top left of the plate. In front of the central gate, an angel with a rod is measuring the city, and Saint John reappears first on the right walking in the clouds, recording the angel's measurements in a book. The seashore at the extreme right may represent the sea and earth which will vanish from the Evangelist's vision during his spiritual elevation. The chain of clouds crossing the plate reinforces the barrier between new and old (MU, 290).
In the first stanza of her poem, Levertov places us almost directly into the upper half of this engraving. She describes John walking through the clouds "above the earthly orchards" (DIH, 67), writing as he walks. The "river's moored boats and conversing swans," which John has passed, warrant only her cursory attention (ibid). Instead of dwelling on John's annunciation on Patmos, in the lower half of the plate, she describes the scene at "burnished Jerusalem" in more detail, noting the "upward-gazing" throng of the blessed, some of whom even lean their arms on a balustrade "to dreamily scan implicit horizons / level with their celestial vantage point" (ibid). This focus on the adoration of the blessed presages Levertov's interest in John's ecstatic state of mind and its effect on his behavior. In the second stanza, she embellishes Duvet's vision, imagining John dizzy with a blissful confusion that appears to increase his range: he looks every which way—"upward, outward, / back at the angel (now behind him), downward, inward—" (ibid). Most interesting, his spiritual elevation has caused him to dispense with his old means of record-keeping: though his ink-bottle appears at his hip, his notebook has either "vanished" or been "discarded (ibid)."
This poem appears in the fourth section of A Door in the Hive along with another ekphrastic poem, also about dramatic shifts in perspective, titled "The Sculptor (Homage to Chillida)," about the work of the contemporary Spanish sculptor. Here Levertov is inspired by this artist's entire oeuvre as well by the particularity of sculpture itself. For "Heraclitus's maxim that conflict is the father of all things applies to sculpture more than to any other branch of the arts. The sculptor is in conflict with space, which he usurps and appropriates to his own ends, and with matter, from which the nascent form must struggle free." 22 Levertov may also have felt a bond with Chillida's hybrid spiritual heritage, since she considered herself both Jewish-Christian and Anglo-American. Born in 1924 in San Sebastin, the capital of a province in the Basque country, a region divided between France and Spain, Chillida claims origins that are legendary, even mythological. "He is very close to nature, in which he worships occult forces and the power of the elements," and he has a special feeling for metal, "allegedly introduced into the southern valleys of the Pyranees by the first blacksmith, Tubal Cain . . . 3000 years before our era" (C, 6). His sculptures "have a very close affinity with their material and acquire from it not only their plastic qualities, but also their symbolic and elemental character." Iron takes on the form of the unknown, "becoming the tuning-fork of unseen vibrations and the 'comb of winds'" in one sculpture (ibid). Chillida also speaks eloquently about his goals as a sculptor. On the wall of his studio is the saying, "'A cloud of birds in the sky is better than a single one in the hand,'" which he considers a challenge to achieve the impossible, something which lies beyond the form (C, 7). He says he is interested in the space created by the shapes, "'which dwells in them and is all the more effective when it works in secret. I might perhaps compare it to the life-giving breath which causes the form to swell up and contract and makes visible that inner psychic space which is hidden from the outside world'" (ibid). He compares sculpture with music: "'Sculpture and music exist in the same harmonious and ever developing space. The volume of musical sound fills the silence with tension; similarly there could be no volume in sculpture without the emptiness of space'" (C, 8).
Chillida's comments about the relationship between sculptured form and "inner psychic space" is analogous to Levertov's reflections about the relationship between speech and silence in her ekphrastic poems. In her tribute to Chillida, she begins with the psychological feat he performs in his work, which she gives a Jungian twist by using the word "shadow" in the first two lines: "A man who lives with his shadow / on equal terms"(DIH, 69). 23 Jung used the term "shadow" to refer to that part of the collective unconscious that has the most frequent and disturbing influence on the ego because "its nature can in large measure be inferred from the personal unconscious." 24 The next four lines, which in their pattern on the page imitate the tension she describes, also draw on Jung's ideas. He thought the shadow posed a moral problem for the whole ego-personality because "no one can become conscious of [it] without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real." 25 In lines seven to eleven, Levertov implies that the transmutation Chillida achieves is a result both of active will and of receptivity to his materials: he is the one who acts, of course, but he also understands the proclivities of the iron and stone he works with. In his hands,
iron accepting rapture, moving,
returning satisfied to its purpled
black density, secretly curved.
[Ibid]
And he "permits stone / to acknowledge the inward void it compresses" (ibid). Her last two stanzas refer to his "Comb of Wind" group ( 5) which, she imagines, were inspired by the sea, which she personifies, as well as by the wind. In her extrapolation, Chillida has made combs for the sea's "rushing tresses." These sculptures are "new gestures lifted / to the wind, new spouts" from which the enlivened water leaps, "shouting" (ibid).
Other poems in A Door in the Hive also refer to specific works of art, as well as attributes of the artist's vision, desire, and perceptual process. For example, in "Wings in the Pedlar's Pack," Levertov compares her father's experience of spiritual flight from Judaism to Christianity with that of his countryman, Marc Chagall. In "Nativity: An Altarpiece," she refers to an anonymous church artifact, positing that in this piece the "wondering animals" recognize the spiritual significance of Christ's birth before the wise men or the sleeping shepherds. In "Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell," she draws on the tradition of devotional painting in the Eastern Orthodox Church to interpret Christ's descent into the realm of the dead between the time of His Crucifixion and His Resurrection when, according to Christian belief, he brought salvation to the souls held captive. In this poem, written during Lent, she extends this religious idea, imagining the difficulty of Christ's task to be not only his rescue of the souls in Limbo, but also his painful return to life, where he must "walk / the world again" and patiently await the acts of human generosity that indicate communion and humble repentance (DIH, 106). In "The Life of Art," she analyzes the ecstasy of even a momentary change of perspective. Using the medium of "carnal paint" to stand for all artistic media, she claims that "the borderland" between one's medium and "fictive truth: a room, a vase, an open door / giving upon the clouds" is the desired place to live. It is an "immeasurable, elusive" psychological state, "an equilibrium" attainable sometimes, "when the attention's rightly poised," during which one feels "opulently received" into the world of the painting, and one almost sees "what lies beyond the window, past the frame, beyond . . ." (DIH, 85). However, the poem in which she most fully expresses this boundary experience is "The Composition," in her next book, Evening Train , published after her final move to Seattle, an environment that reminded her of her European home. Here ekphrasis enables her to fuse social and spiritual concerns with issues of form.
The poem's title—"The Composition"—prompts us to see the links between pictorial and poetic structure. As the epigraph indicates, it was inspired by "Woman at the Harpsichord," a famous example of Dutch genre painting in the mid-seventeenth century by Emmanuel de Witte, an artist associated with the Delft School, who specialized in painting church interiors. The painting depicts domestic life during what is often considered a "golden age" of Dutch culture, the period after the United Provinces of the Netherland, the first republic in Europe, had become a major power and intellectual center, despite its small size, in part because of its advanced shipbuilding industry, financial innovations, and social organization. By this time most of the population in its three most powerful provinces lived in small to medium-sized towns. While the other states of Europe remained primarily rural, the Netherlands was becoming a nation of townspeople, predominantly middle class. 26 Yet the particular bourgeois nature of Dutch society needs some explanation. As Simon Schama has written, "At the center of the Dutch world was a burgher not a bourgeois." 27 The burgher was a "citizen first and homo aeconomicus second. . . . the obligation of civism conditioned the opportunities of prosperity" (ER, 7). This distinction is important to Levertov both in her poem about the painting and in a letter explaining her choice of subject.
"The Composition" is dedicated to the French poet Jean Joubert and the American artist Howard Fussiner, both Levertov's contemporaries. Levertov had included translations of fourteen of Joubert's poems in an earlier book, Oblique Prayers , including a poem based on a painting by Holbein. She chose to open this selection with "Wind Script," a poem expressing the vulnerability and diminishment of language in the face of the "weight of blood" in recent history: "Words are vulnerable: / rain, fire, the errant hand, / confusion—all can assail them. . . ." 28 Joubert also deplored the prevalence of fracture and obliquity as poetic techniques in contemporary poetry: "Then there are left only splinters of language, / fallen letters, gray tatters / like voices far across the valley, / which echoes fracture. And sometimes nothing" (OP, 49). Her epigraph acknowledges Howard Fussiner because he was a close friend with whom she had been talking about paintings for many years. Fussiner remembers that, on one occasion they had talked about the particular formal qualities that made this painting of de Witte's a greater work than the average genre painting, how it surpassed the depiction of mere anecdote. 29 Further, in a note to the poem, Levertov distinguishes her interpretation of the depicted scene from that of the art historian, Witold Rybscinski, whose book Home: A Short History of an Idea, she had read.
In his interpretation, Rybscinski focuses on the res in the foreground of the story de Witte depicts, the woman playing the harpsichord and the man listening in the curtained bed near her ( 6). Rybscinski detects a hint of adultery beneath the surface of this idyllic domestic scene. He notes that closer inspection reveals that the woman is not playing for herself alone, but also for a man on the bed behind the curtains, whose clothing is fully visible on the chair. He writes, "The hilt of a sword that is barely within the picture and the casual fashion in which the clothes have been flung on the chair . . . hint, in a delicate way, that this may not be the woman's husband." 30 Since marital infidelity was frowned on in Holland, he sees the other re in the painting, the maid sweeping the floor in the distance, as part of a cautionary allegory suggesting "Cleanliness is next to godliness." 31 Levertov's poem conveys a different story which she asserts is "equally valid." She begins with the view "two rooms away, seen through the open door," where she imagines that the servant girl also listens to the music the young wife plays. 32
By beginning with the view in the distance, Levertov calls attention to de Witte's skillful use of perspective in this painting. She is also attuned to the evocative contrasts between light and shadow in his work, to the significance of the color red, and to the meanings of the wife's music making. In the painting, the direct recession into depth is balanced with forms spaced at rhythmic intervals from side to side. Zones of space are layered and interrelated by a continuous interplay of solid and void. This complex design is mirrored in Levertov's doubled point of view in her poem. Although at the outset she stands outside the painting, looking in through the doorway, to the extent that she identifies with the servant girl, "timing the strokes of her broom to the music's crisp / golden wavelets," she is also inside the painting, looking out. Levertov notes the particular quality of the sunlight filtered through the windows and the patterns of light and dark it makes on the floor:
. . . Autumn sun
and shadows well-defined overlay the floortiles,
antiphonal transverse strips over squares
of white and black . . .
[ET, 24].
She underlines the predominance of the color red, "red, / red is the lord of color here," repeating that "a glowing Indian red" is the color of the draperies, bedside carpet, ceiling beams, elaborate hanging lamp, a chair, and "above all, / with its canopy, valance, ample curtains, / the big four-poster" bed (ibid). In the context of this sequence of ekphrastic poems I have selected, we are reminded of Soutine's "red steps," and that this color often connotes violence and blood as well as fire and passion, as in the sentence, "he was caught red-handed." But in this interior, although Dutch colonies in the Americas are suggested by the phrase "Indian red," Levertov stresses domesticity. The man's sword is cast on the chair; he is "snug" in bed listening and not hunting and killing, or even trading. De Witte's use of this provocative color is not the desperate response to rejection and catastrophe we find in Soutine, Levertov suggests, but rather a "brave resplendent red," related to the "twang and trill" of the music, possibly a piece by Monteverdi, "ringing out" from under the wife's fingers (ibid). In fact, with such words as "antiphonal" and "counterpoint," words that refer both to the compositional lines in the painting and to the musical qualities of a harpsichord composition, Levertov turns the painting's reference to music to her own meta-artistic purpose (ibid). Through de Witte's "austere counterpoint of forms," the sentimental content of the painting is purified and sublimated by its transposition into the world of music; space and sound commingle (ibid). There are several subtexts here, she implies, not only social ones, but possibly an aesthetic one as well. In the shift in aesthetic thinking that marked the Romantic period to come, art is prized less as an imitation of reality, as it was earlier when the ut pictura poesis analogy held sway, than as an expression of the human spirit. 33 Consequently, in place of painting, music became the art perceived to have the most profound affinity with poetry during the Romantic period. By referencing both arts in this way Levertov detaches herself from her modernist predecessors and contemporaries who stress the impersonality of art. Instead, she makes art an analogue of the artist it expresses, and encourages our identification with the artist's point of view.
Levertov clarified the salutary aspects of the Dutch golden age she perceived in this painting in a letter to Howard Fussiner and David Eberly, defending it against their observations that de Witte's handling of the servant girl could imply elitism and that she might be idealizing and sentimentalizing his view of class structure. Levertov comments that "Americans are particularly liable to a lack of historical perspective on such an issue" since they are "brought up to identify the concept of democracy with that of egalitarianism." 34 Levertov explains that Americans forget that their kind of democracy offers "(theoretically) equal opportunity not equality," and that this unexamined egalitarianism "had the effect of undermining the working-class pride which (until recently) sustained European labor unions; a pride which wanted better conditions but didn't even dream of changing class, and did not desire it" (LFE). She continues: "Just as it is easy to sentimentalize a situation by idealizing it, so it is easy to sentimentalize by placing it in a negative light, such as assuming (by implication not in so many words) that all labor is alienated" (ibid). She goes on to explain that, in fact, at this time in Holland, "general prosperity" combined with "habitable architecture" and "liberality of social atmosphere made the lives of servants, and of women in general, much less oppressive than in many other periods" (ibid). Most important, she points out that in her poem, she "did not claim that that society was Utopia, in the sense of being the ideal" but rather a representation of what she perceives
as a historical moment that was an 'apex of civilized joy,' i.e. different from an exclusively personal moment of joy (such as a surge of 'animal spirits,' . . .) in being made possible, and being a part of, a historical, economic, architectural, material context. The painting records (but not merely as anecdote!—records in the character of its composition) a joyful scene involving primarily a couple, but participated in to some extent by the maid . . . which is at the same time (like the painting itself, so that the painting which records is itself part of what it records) a manifestation of a civilization: European civilization at a peak which has not been surpassed and probably will not be matched. . . . Definitely not Utopia because the merchant riches of that society derived in part from trades abroad involving oppressed workers in oppressive societies—including slavery. But domestically, relatively exemplary.
[Ibid]
That Levertov was interested in the linkage between issues of power and social governance and issues of form not only in Holland in 1660 but in contemporary America is clear when we consider that Evening Train also includes a section of poems titled "Witnessing From Afar," many of which respond explicitly to America's involvement in the Gulf War. The achievement of "peaceful joy" shown in this painting reflects a dream of social justice partially realized in the Dutch golden age, but always and everywhere a desideratum. Levertov's comment in her letter to Fussiner and Eberly that this joyful scene is recorded not only in the content of the painting but in "the character of its composition," reminds us that she employs ekphrasis in the service of a similar dream (ibid). The awareness of difference inherent in this genre, particularly the desire to connect with an "other," informs her poem's theme and structure. It is obvious in the overt connections Levertov makes across class boundaries, between the servant girl and the young wife, and across gender boundaries, between the happily married man and woman, both of which are in the "human scene" she depicts in the first stanza. These are expressed in a verse paragraph that is flowing, conversational, and also reflective, wherein the speaker addresses herself as well the audience.
The desire for connection is also evident in the second verse paragraph, shorter and more urgent, in which the speaker addresses her audience more directly:
But if
the same scene had been painted differently—
not only with other colors, but from another
distance, perspectives differently disposed, more curves,
less play of severe rectangles if it had been
a composition that lacked this austere
counterpoint of forms which evoke,
in brave resplendent red, the very
twang and trill and wiry
ground bass of the notes ringing forth
under her fingers—if it had been
reduced to anecdote—we'd never have known
that once, in eternity,
this peaceful joy had blessed an autumnal morning.
[ET, 24, 25]
Here Levertov supposes a comparison between de Witte's painting and other depictions of the same subject, which if "painted differently—not only with other colors but from another / distance, perspectives differently disposed," would be less powerful. The phrase "another distance" (heightened by the line break) suggests not only other genre paintings of de Witte's period but of other historical periods as well, including our own. It also reaches toward a timeless realm of no past or future which is associated with divinity. Levertov's aim here is connection with the eternal, or at least with de Witte's ability, through his painting, to preserve forever the aura of this glowing, domestic interior. She employs the "still moment," a literary topos in which poetry imitates the visual arts by "stopping time, or more precisely by referring to an action through a still moment that implies it" (CR, 40). The realization of her goal is, of course, impossible, given the ephemeral quality of human life and the fundamental temporality of poetry as structures of sounds in time.
The distinction between temporal and spatial modes, aural and visual media, are familiar oppositions of semiotics. W. J. T. Mitchell has pointed out that they put a special pressure upon the ekphrastic encounter. Since the visual work can never really be made present by the poem, it must be "conjured up as a potent absence or a fictive, ral" presence (PT, 158). In fact, the evocation of just such a potent absence or ral presence is central to Levertov's thematic purposes here. Her emphasis on the act of composition itself, in which matter is trans-substantiated by artistic form, is important to her, especially during this period in her life, because it is analogous to and derivative from the Christian belief in the "real presence" of incarnate divinity in the Eucharist. 35 Earlier she had based her ideas about "organic form" on "an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories" (NSE, 68). Although she had drawn on Gerard Manley Hopkins's concepts of "inscape" and "instress" to formulate this concept, she had couched this Roman Catholic poet's sacramental view of the world in Platonic language. However, by the time these ekphrastic poems were written she was a practicing Catholic, and though still frequently wracked by doubt, she had written other poems, inspired by passages of the Gospel or the lives of saints, that she described as examples of "do-it-yourself-theology" (NSE, 249). Perhaps most important, she had, through this poetry, "worked through to a theological explanation" of the theodicy problem—God's nonintervention in "the global panorama of oppression and violence"—by newly experiencing the implications of human choice. As she put it, "God's nature, as Love, demands a freely given requital from that part of the creation which particularly embodies Consciousness: the Human" (NSE, 251). The "imagination of faith" acted as "yeast" in her life as a writer, and composing poems became "work that enfaiths" (NSE, 257,255).
Levertov's awareness of the difference between de Witte's surpassing
vision in this painting and that of more mundane genre painters in
his time, as well as her knowledge of the gap between his social
context and our own, infuses "The Composition" with existential and
religious pathos.  The phrase
"reduced to anecdote" may refer not only to the stories told in other
genre paintings but to our contemporary tendency to dismiss religious
beliefs as mere myths or stories. Also, her words, "once, in eternity,"
introduce an important note of irony. The historical understanding that
coexists with the insistent otherworldliness of Levertov's desire here
only makes the desire more powerful as a form of postmodern witness. The
"still moment" achieved through this poem's expression of ekphrastic
hope has a radiance that is enhanced by the tragic knowledge behind
it, which Levertov calls our attention to in her phrase, "we'd never
have known." This is a knowledge amply attested to by the other poems I
discussed as well. Whether immersed in the tragedies of twentieth-century
history, like Kiefer and Soutine, or expressive of transformation, like
Duvet and Chillida, all of these poems, like the works of art which
inspire them, resist political domination in forms that are clearly
accessible to her audience. Although Levertov has grown increasingly
conscious of the darker levels to which human beings can descend and
to the vulnerability of language, she continues to draw from a deep
well of religious and humanist value. Her poetry remains answerable to
"what should be" as well as to "things as they are," as Seamus Heaney
put it recently, arguing eloquently for the power of poetry, even at
its most desolate, to "strengthen the individual's moral sense," as well
as his "feeling of personal dignity" and "trust in human solidarity."
36
Thus, she provides an ethical and political model for her reader. In
these ekphrastic poems, in the company of visual artists whose vision
she shares, Levertov maintains faith in human possibility. As she wrote
of her early experience of paintings in a museum, in a poem which
foreshadows her creation of comparable verbal structures: "Here was
history / / as I desired it" (CIB, 48).
Donna Krolik Hollenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of H.D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity and the editor of Between History and Poetry: The Letters of H.D. and Noman Holmes Pearson , and H.D. and Poets After . She is writing a biography of Denise Levertov.
Permission to quote from published letters granted by The Denise Levertov Literary Trust, Paul A. Lacey and Valerie Trueblood Rapport, Co-trustees.
Permission to quote from unpublished material granted by The Denise Levertov Literary Trust.
Permission to quote from letter from Denise Levertov to James Laughlin, bMS Am 2077 courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Permission to quote from letters to Howard Fussiner and David Eberley and "Notes on the Organization and Title of A Door in the Hive" courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
1. Denise Levertov, Tesserae (New York: New Directions, 1995), 79; hereafter abbreviated T.
2. Denise Levertov, Light Up the Cave (New York: New Directions, 1981), 244; hereafter abbreviated LUC.
3. Howard Fussiner first met Levertov in 1962. He and his wife, Barbara, were close friends of hers until her death.
4. Denise Levertov, Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960 (New York: New Directions, 1979), 130-1; hereafter abbreviated CEP.
5. Denise Levertov, New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992) 249; hereafter abbreviated NSE.
6. Alicia Ostriker, "Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness," American Poetry Review 30, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 35-9.
7. Ibid, 35.
8. W.J.T.Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 156; hereafter abbreviated PT.
9. Mitchell identifies three characteristic phases of realization accompanying ekphrasis. The first he calls "ekphrastic indifference," which grows out of a commonsense perception that ekphrasis is impossible; the second is "ekphrastic hope," in which this impossibility is overcome in imagination or metaphor; the third is "ekphrastic fear," when we sense that "the difference between verbal and visual representation might collapse and the rative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually" (PT, 152-4).
10. Denise Levertov, preface to Life in the Forest (New York: New Directions, 1978), vii.
11. James A. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 138.
12. Denise Levertov, Candles In Babylon (New York: New Directions, 1982), 48; hereafter abbreviated CIB.
13. Denise Levertov, A Door in the Hive (New York: New Directions, 1989), 3; hereafter abbreviated DIH.
14. Rilke's Book Of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 24.
15. "Notes on the Organization and Title of A Door in the Hive," ms. Special Collections, Libraries of Stanford University; hereafter abbreviated "NOT."
16. Denise Levertov to James Laughlin, 11 November 1988, ms. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
17. Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1; hereafter abbreviated AK.
18. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Random House, 1995), 124; hereafter abbreviated LM.
19. Norman Kleeblatt and Kenneth Silver, An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1998), 16.
20. Raymond Cogniat, Soutine (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), 68; hereafter abbreviated S.
21. Colin Eisler, The Master of the Unicorn: The Life and Work of Jean Duvet (New York: Aburis Books, 1979), 1; hereafter abbreviated MU.
22. Pierre Volboudt, Chillida (New York: Henry R. Abrams, 1967), 5; hereafter abbreviated C.
23. Levertov read a substantial amount of Jung's work.
24. Joseph Campbell, ed. The Portable Jung, (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 145.
25. Ibid, 145.
26. Witold Rybscinski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), 50-3.
27. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 7; hereafter abbreviated ER.
28. Denise Levertov, Oblique Prayers (New York: New Directions, 1984), 49; hereafter abbreviated OP.
29. Interview with the author, June 2001. I wish to thanks Howard Fussiner and Barbara Bank Fussiner for discussing Levertov's ideas about visual art with me.
30. Witold Rybscinski, Home: A Short History of an Idea, 68.
31. Ibid.
32. Denise Levertov, Evening Train (New York: New Directions, 1992), 120-4; hereafter abbreviated ET.
33. Wendy Steiner, The Colours of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 2; hereafter abbreviated CR.
34. Denise Levertov to Howard Fussiner and David Eberly, [1993], ms. Special Collections, Stanford Libraries; hereafter abbreviated LFE.
35. I wish to thank my colleague, Jonathon Hufstader, for helping me to understand this connection.
36. Seamus Heaney, "Poetry's Power Against Intolerance," New York Times 26 August 2001: A23.
The January issue of included a special section, "Eliot and anti-Semitism: the Ongoing Debate," featuring Ronald Schuchard's essay, "Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar," in which he argued that the correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Horace Kallen—a Zionist and philosophy professor at the New School—contained evidence vindicating Eliot of the charge of anti-Semitism. Followed by responses from several distinguished critics, this section largely debated whether or not evidence supplied by the Eliot-Kallen correspondence exonerated Eliot of the charge.
In the following short-essay/responses, modernist scholars extend the
debate beyond the question of whether or not Eliot was anti-Semitic
to consider how the (widely debated) relation of Eliot to Semitism
foregrounds aspects of modernism, literary history, and Jewish
intellectual history, including reflections on the current situation
in Israel.
Until you were born, robots didn't dream, they didn't have desires.
—Said to the robot boy David by his designer—AI Stephen Spielberg
The life of images has taken a decisive turn in our time: the oldest myth about the creation of living images, the fabrication of an intelligent organism by artificial, technical means, has now become a theoretical and practical possibility thanks to new constellations of media at many different levels. The convergence of genetic and computational technologies with new forms of speculative capital has turned cyberspace and biospace, the inner structure of organisms, into frontiers for technical innovation, appropriation, and exploitation—new forms of objecthood and territoriality for a new form of empire. In AI, Stephen Spielberg registers this change by telling a story about the invention of an image that is, quite literally, a "desiring machine." David, the contemporary answer to Pinocchio, is a robot boy with dreams and desires, and with an apparently fully elaborated human subjectivity.  To the question, "What do pictures want?" the answer in this instance is clear: they want to be loved, and to be "real."
The genius of AI is not in its narrative, which is full of clunky, implausible moments, but in its vision of a new world and its new objects. David is a perfectly photogenic, adorable simulacrum of a boy who is loveable and endearing in every way. The filmic point of view encourages us to identify with him throughout, and to despise his mother for rejecting him. Yet underlying the sickeningly sweet fantasy of mother-son bliss (a utopian resolution of the Oedipus complex?) is the horror of the double, the encounter with one's own mirror image rendered autonomous, a horror that even the robot boy is capable of feeling when he sees scores of his own duplicates on the assembly line, ready to be packaged for the Christmas shopping season. The fantasy of AI, then, is a kind of extreme exaggeration of the uncanny, when the old, familiar phobia or superstition is realized in an unexpected way. This fantasy was, of course, always already predicted from the moment of the creation of Adam from the red clay of the ground, the creation of the first drawing with the red earth of vermilion, the casting of the Golden Calf from Egyptian gold. In our time, the materials are organic substances, proteins, cells, DNA molecules, and the shaping, casting procedures are computational. This is the age of biocybernetic reproduction, when (as we suppose) images really do come alive and want things. What follows is an attempt to sketch out a thick description of this moment, and to assess some of the artistic practices that have accompanied it.
The current revolutions in biology and computers signified here by the images of the double helix and the Turing Machine (. 1 and 2) and their implications for ethics and politics raise a host of new questions for which the arts, traditional humanistic disciplines, and Enlightenment modes of rationality may seem ill-prepared. What good is it even to talk about the human if a humanist like Katherine Hayles is right in arguing that we live in a post-human age? 1 What is the point of asking the great philosophical questions about the meaning of life, when we seem to be on the verge of reducing this most ancient question of metaphysics to what Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life," a matter of technical means, a calculable chemical process? 2 And what about the ancient mystery of death in a time of neomorts, indefinitely extended comas, and organ transplants? Is death now merely a problem to be solved by engineering and adjudicated by lawyers? What is the structure of scientific and technical knowledge itself? Is it a set of logically validated statements and propositions, a self-correcting discursive system? Or is it riddled with images, metaphors, and fantasies that take on a life of their own, and turn the dream of absolute rational mastery into a nightmare of confusion and uncontrollable side effects? To what extent are the widely heralded technical innovations in biology and computation themselves mythic projections or symptoms, rather than determining causes? Above all, who is in a position to reflect on these questions, or rather, what disciplines have the tools to sort out these issues? Do we call on the artists or the philosophers, the anthropologists or the art historians, or do we turn to the proponents of hybrid formations like "cultural studies?" Do we rely on the genetic engineers and computer hackers to reflect on the ethical and political meaning of their work? Or do we turn to the new field called "bioethics," a profession that requires fewer credentials than we expect from a hairdresser, and which is in danger of becoming part of the publicity apparatus of the corporations whose behavior they are supposed to monitor—or as in the case of George W. Bush's Presidential Council on Bioethics, a front for the reassertion of the most traditional Christian pieties and phobias about the reproductive process? 3
I can not promise clear and unequivocal answers to these questions, a set of dialectical theses on the order of Walter Benjamin's 1935 manifesto, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." I can offer, however, a target for inquiry, the concept of "biocybernetic reproduction." The questions, then, are as follows: what is biocybernetic reproduction? What is being done with it by way of critical and artistic practice, and what could be done?
Biocybernetic reproduction is, in its narrowest sense, the combination of computer technology and biological science that makes cloning and genetic engineering possible. In a more extended sense, it refers to the new technical media and structures of political economy that are transforming the conditions of all living organisms on this planet. Biocybernetics ranges from the most grandiose plans to engineer a brave new world of perfect cyborgs to the familiar scene of the American health club, where obese, middle aged consumers are sweating and straining while wired up to any number of digital monitors that keep track of their vital signs and even more vital statistics—especially the number of calories consumed. It is not limited to the pristine lab populated with white-coated technicians and electronically controlled media, but encompasses the world of the messy, chaotic computer station, destructive viruses, and carpal tunnel syndrome.
I adopt the polysyllabic tongue-twisting term "biocybernetics" rather than the more compact "cybernetics" in order to foreground a fundamental dialectical tension in this concept. The word "cybernetics" comes from the Greek word for the "steersman" of a boat, and thus suggests a discipline of control and governance. Norbert Wiener called cybernetics "the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or animal." "Bios," on the other hand, refers to the sphere of living organisms which are to be subjected to control, but which may in one way or another resist that control, insisting on "a life of their own." "Biocybernetics," then, refers not only to the field of control and communication, but to that which eludes control and refuses to communicate. In other words, I am questioning the notion that our time is adequately described as the "age of information," the "digital age," or the age of the computer, and suggesting a more complex and conflicted model, envisioning all these models of calculation and control as interlocked in a struggle with new forms of incalculability and uncontrollability, from computer viruses to terrorism. 4 The age of information might better be called the age of mis- or dis-information, and the era of cybernetic control is—if my daily newspapers are telling me the truth—more like an epoch of loss of control. In short, far from being technically determined in any straightforward way by computers and the internet, the digital age spawns new forms of fleshly, analogue, non-digital experience, and the age of cybernetics engenders new breeds of biomorphic entities, among which we must number intelligent machines such as "smart bombs," and those even more intelligent machines known as "suicide bombers." The final result of the smart bomb and the suicide bomber is the same, namely, the creation of a biocybernetic life form, the reduction of a living being to a tool or machine, and the elevation of a mere tool or machine to an intelligent, adaptable creature.
In invoking the concept of the "bios" as a zone of resistance and incalculability, I do not posit some reservoir of "vital forces" that stand against the mechanical and rational operations of cybernetics. My aim, rather, is to observe that within the very heart of the cybernetic the bios rears its head in very concrete forms—most conspicuously in the computational virus—but also in subtler forms such as the decay of information found in the phenomenon of "Lossy compression." 5 I also stress the two-way operation of the disintegration of oppositions between the mechanical and the organic. It's not simply that living things become like machines, but that machines more than ever behave now like living things, and that the line between hardware and software is increasingly entangled with a third zone that might be called "wetware." At the more global level of macroorganisms, it is impossible to ignore the emergence of a biocybernetic paradigm in the work of computer researchers such as Alberto Laszlo-Barabasi, who remarks that "internet researchers are like doctors trying to re out what their patient looks like." "Redundancy in the network" has reached a complexity "that resembles what biologists have found in living organisms," while (on the other side) "some biologists hope that such studies [of the internet] may help them find clues to the deeper mysteries of nature." 6 Internet artists such as Lisa Jevbratt take quite seriously the metaphor of the Internet as a living organism. Jevbratt, in fact, believes that it is a dying organism, and her work is devoted to making visible its vital processes and pathological tendencies. 7
It might be useful here to put biocybernetics in the larger theoretical and historical framework of semiotics and iconology (the study of signs and images). From this broader perspective, the relation of the "bios" and the "cyber" is a re-writing of the traditional dialectics between nature and culture, human beings and tools, artifacts, machines, and media—what we used to call the whole "man-made world." It also reenacts the ancient struggle between the image and the word, the idol and the law. The cyber-steersman is the digital code, the alphanumeric system of calculation and iterability that makes language and mathematics the controlling instruments of human rationality, from cunning calculation to wise estimation. As Northrop Frye once noted, the real gift to man on Mt. Sinai was not the moral law, which was already known in oral tradition, but the semiotic law, which replaced pictographic writing systems with a phonetic alphabet, analog writing with the digital. 8 The Cyber is the judge and differentiator, the one who rules by writing the code. Bios, on the other hand, tends toward the analogical register, or the "message without a code" as Roland Barthes described it in the context of photography. 9 It is the domain of perception, sensation, fantasy, memory, similitude, pictures—in short, what Lacan calls the Imaginary. Traditionally these categories stood in stable hierarchies: reason, the logos. The Symbolic was supposed to rule, and the image was relegated to the sphere of emotions, passions, and appetites. That is why admonitions against idolatry and fetishism are so often associated with accusations of materialism and sensuality. But here is the curious twist in our time. The digital is declared to be triumphant at the very same moment that a kind of frenzy of the image and spectacle is announced. Which is it? The word or the image? Raymond Bellour notes that "all French reflection for half a century has been drawn between the pincers of the word and the image," a pattern that he traces in Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, and Foucault. Bellour compares this weaving of word and image, discourse and re, fantasy and the law to a "double helix" of signs and sensations that constitutes the evolution of new media and new "image species" in our time. 10 As Bellour's metaphor of the helix suggests, the word-image dialectic seems to be reappearing at the level of life processes themselves. An image of this appearance is provided in a film still from Jurassic Park ( 3), in which a velociraptor is caught in the projector beam of the park's orientation film, its skin serving as a screen for the display of the DNA codes that were used in cloning the creature from fossil traces of living tissue. This image provides a metapicture of the relation of digital and analogical codes, the script of DNA and the visible organism that it produces.
I will spare you a detailed argument that something like biocybernetic reproduction is indeed the technical and scientific dominant of our age, that biology has replaced physics at the frontiers of science, and that digital information has replaced the physical quanta of mass and energy as dominant forms of imagined materiality. Anyone who has read Donna Haraway on cyborgs, or watched science fiction movies over the last twenty years cannot fail to be struck by the pervasiveness of this theme. 11 Films such as Blade Runner,Alien,The Matrix,Videodrome,The Fly,The Sixth Day,AI, and Jurassic Park have made clear the host of fantasies and phobias clustering around biocybernetics: the spectre of the "living machine," the re-animation of dead matter and extinct organisms, the destabilizing of species identity and difference, the proliferation of prosthetic organs and perceptual apparatuses, and the infinite malleability of the human mind and body have become commonplaces of popular culture.
The contrast between the mechanical and biocybernetic model is vividly illustrated by the "new model" cyborg of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2. Schwarzenegger plays the role of a traditional robot, a mechanical assembly of gears, pulleys, and pistons driven by a computer brain and the most advanced servo-motors. He is faced, however, with a new model terminator composed of "living metal," a shape-shifting chimera that is a universal mimic, capable of taking on any identity. By the end of this film, we are prepared to be nostalgic for the good old days of mechanical men who could express regret for their inability to cry, and to feel horror at the new re of infinite mutability and mutation, remorselessly pursuing the extinction of the human species. 12
I will state it as a bald proposition, then, that biocybernetic reproduction has replaced Walter Benjamin's mechanical reproduction as the fundamental technical determinant of our age. 13 If mechanical reproducibility (photography, cinema, and associated industrial processes like the assembly line) dominated the era of modernism, biocybernetic reproduction (high-speed computing, video, digital imaging, virtual reality, the internet, and the industrialization of genetic engineering) dominates the age that we have called "postmodern." This term, which played its role as a place-holder in the 1970s and 80s, now seems to have outlived its usefulness, and is ready to be replaced by more descriptive notions such as biocybernetics (although even as we move toward this more positive description, it will be important not to forget the project of postmodernism to go beyond narrow notions of technical determination toward reconstructing the entire cultural framework of an era). 14
If we pursue the question of biocybernetics in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," then every term needs to be re-examined. "Art" or "Kunst," as Benjamin already saw, does not merely signify the traditional arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but the entire range of new technical media (photography, cinema, radio, television) emerging in his time. The "work" itself is highly ambiguous as to the art object (the "Kunstwerk"), the medium of art, or the very task (the work as "Kunstarbeit") to which the arts ought to be committed. "Reproduction" and "reproducibility" mean something quite different now when the central issues of technology are no longer "mass production" of commodities or "mass reproduction" of identical images, but the reproductive processes of the biological sciences and the production of infinitely malleable, digitally animated images. What does it mean when the paradigmatic object on the assembly line is no longer a mechanism but an engineered organism? And how is the life of this organism altered when the medium in which it thrives is a fusion of digital and analogical codes, the "eyewash," as Friedrich Kittler puts it, of the apparent sensuous output, and the stream of alphanumeric ciphers that lies beneath it? 15
I focus here on three consequences of the new mode of biocybernetic reproduction, each of which has its counterpart in Benjamin's analysis of mechanical reproduction, which I will posit as three categorical claims: first, the copy is no longer an inferior or decayed relic of the original, but is in principle an improvement on the original; second, the relation between the artist and work, the work and its model, is both more distant and more intimate than anything possible in the realm of mechanical reproduction; and third, a new temporality, characterized by an erosion of the event, and a vertiginous deepening of the relevant past, produces a peculiar sense of "accelerated stasis" in our sense of history. 16
First, the issue of original and copy entailed in "reproducibility." Benjamin famously argued that the advent of photographic copies was producing a "decay of the aura"—a loss of the unique presence, authority, and mystique of the original object. Biocybernetic reproduction carries this displacement of the original one further step, and in doing so, reverses the relation of the copy to the original. Now we have to say that the copy has, if anything, even more aura than the original. More precisely, in a world where the very idea of the unique original seems a merely nominal or legal fiction, the copy has every chance of being an improvement or enhancement of whatever counts as the original. The digital reproduction of sounds and visual images, for instance, need not involve any erosion of vividness or lifelikeness, but can actually improve on its original material. Photographs of artworks can be "scrubbed" to remove flaws and dust; in principle, the effects of aging in an oil painting could be digitally erased, and the work restored to its pristine originality in a reproduction. Of course this would still constitute a loss of the aura that Benjamin associated with the accretion of history and tradition around an object, but if aura means recovering the original vitality, literally, the "breath" of life of the original, then the digital copy can come closer to looking and sounding like the original than the original itself. Indeed the miraculous programming framework of Adobe Photoshop even preserves the "history" of transformations between original and copy so that any transformations can be reversed.
This point becomes even more evident when we think about the manipulation of genetic copies and originals. Cloning is a process which, in principle, is meant not only to produce an identical twin of the original organic tissue or organism, but to produce an improved and enhanced copy. Our children or our cloned descendants will give the phrase "she is the image of her mother," a new meaning, with the implied promise that the child's genetic makeup will have been "scrubbed" of the flaws that made the parent a less than perfect specimen. The film Gattacca, whose title is composed of the four letters of the DNA molecular code, provides a vivid imagining of the brave new world promised by this process of an ever-improved copying of life-forms. Eduardo Kac's experiments with transgenic artworks promise to produce surprising new organisms by creating a web site which responds interactively to "hits" from visitors by producing mutations in micro-organisms. Kac's experiments in splicing rabbit DNA with jellyfish protein are designed to produce a rabbit that glows in the dark, a copy that has more aureole, if not aura, than its original.
The second consequence of biocybernetics concerns the transformed relation between artist and work, work and model effected by new tools and apparatuses. In a striking analogy, Benjamin contrasts the era of manual and mechanical reproduction with the res of the magician and the surgeon, the painter and the cameraman: "The surgeon," says Benjamin, "represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient's body. . . . Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web." 17 In the age of biocybernetic reproduction, two new res have appeared on the scene. The cameraman is replaced by the designer of virtual spaces and electronic architectures, and the surgeon adopts the new techniques of remote, virtual surgery. The surgeon operates at an unnatural distance from the patient's body, performing his gestures in a remote location, such as another room, or perhaps even from another country. He moves his hands inside of data gloves like a shaman making passes over a virtual body, removing a virtual tumor with sleight of hand. He is able to rehearse his movements on a virtual body many times before the actual operation takes place. The digital miniaturization of his movements allows him to cut deeper and finer than any operation conceivable in traditional manual surgery. Similarly, the cyber artist operates simultaneously within a closer and more distant relationship to the real. In the case of a performance artist like Stelarc, the materiality of the work is the artist's own body, subjected to prosthetic surgeries that graft on additional limbs, while the actualities of performance may involve wiring the artist's body up to remote locations in other countries, so that an interactive performance may be conducted in which spectators control the movements of the artist's body. 18 The relationship of artist-to-work-to-corporeal reality is thus made more intimate than ever, at the same time the artist's subjectivity is simultaneously dispersed and fragmented across the circuitry of prosthetic limbs and remote control spectatorship ( 4).
But it is above all the sense of temporality that is transformed in the age of biocybernetics. The very notion of an "age" defined by technical determination has a different feel at the threshold of the twenty first century. Benjamin wrote in the uneasy interim between two world wars that had raised the technologies of mass death and extermination of civilian populations to unprecedented heights, a time of crisis and immediate danger punctuated by irreversible catastrophes and dramatic technical innovations. We live in a time that is best described as a limbo of continually deferred expectations and anxieties. Everything is about to happen, or perhaps has already happened without our noticing it. The ecological catastrophe of Don DeLillo's White Noise, is a non-event. The Gulf War, according to Jean Baudrillard, did not take place (although he has conceded that September 11th very likely was an event of some sort, but exactly what sort is still to be worked out). The human genome—the very "secret of life" itself—is decoded, and yet everything remains the same. The heralded new computer you bought last week will be obsolete before you learn to use it properly. The simplest conceivable mechanism for rationalizing political life with a decisive, calculable event (namely, a "free election") turns out to be not so simple, and the leadership of the world's most powerful nation is determined by a debate about whether human hands or machines should be trusted to count the vote. Needless to say, the human hands lost.
Even war, the most dramatic and defining historical event human beings can experience, turns out in our time to take on a radically indeterminate and nebulous shape. As I write, the United States is in a state of war, but a new kind of ambiguous, undeclared war in which the enemy is nowhere and everywhere, without a definite territory or identity, located in faraway places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but living among us in Florida, hiding in caves and secret bases, or dwelling in the open, driving their mini-vans to the mall, like "sleeper cells" that can awaken without warning to unleash plagues and destruction. The onset of this war was experienced as a wrenching, visceral catastrophe of mass death and destruction, and as a media event suffused by unreality and disbelief. The conduct of the war will range from espionage, to diplomacy, and commando raids to full-scale preemptive wars.  It already has established a permanent state of emergency designed to consolidate the power of a single political party, and indeed, of a small faction within that party. To call this a new form of fascism is not to engage in name-calling, but to call a situation by its true name
Meanwhile, at the same moment that terrorism is being defined as the greatest evil of our age, the most popular movie of our time is a film called Matrix, which glorifies a small band of hacker terrorists determined to bring down the entire world economic and political system because they resent the fact that computers are controlling human life. We live in a very peculiar time, in which more media circulate more information to more people than ever before, and yet when the phenomenon of "disconnection" has never been more dramatically evident. Polls of the American electorate show widespread discontent with practically every major policy position of the ruling party, at the same time that its leader continues to enjoy unprecedented popularity, and his party rolls to one victory after another. Every pundit expresses wonder at the "disconnect" that plagues American public consciousness (if such a phrase still has any meaning), and every analysis of this "consciousness" suggests that it has become so irreconciliably divided that Americans appear to be living on two different planets.
Walter Benjamin's prediction that the human race might be capable of viewing "its own destruction as an aesthetic experience of the first order" has come true in a long-running series of apocalyptic disaster films. 19 The scenes broadcast from New York on September 11, 2001, had, as many observers noted, been anticipated numerous times by Hollywood, and it was even suggested that the terrorists timed the second plane's collision with the south tower of the World Trade Center in the full expectation that hundreds of video cameras would capture the event live, and broadcast it over and over again around the world.
Every present moment has to define itself against some notion of the past, and ours is no exception. Benjamin noted that modernity and mechanical reproduction seemed to bring along with them a revival of primitive and archaic formations: that modernist painting, for instance, was riddled with traces of fetishism, and that modern cinema was fulfilling the ancient dream of a universal hieroglyphic language that would repair the damage done at the Tower of Babel. Our time has its share of fascination with primitive pasts, and the new literalizing of the living, desiring image is, as I've tried to show, the occasion for numerous revivals of archaic and pre-modern fantasies about the creation of life. But now our sense of the revived past is even deeper than the time-frames of archaeology and anthropology. Now paleontology, the study of ancient extinct life-forms (most notably the dinosaur), looms as the temporal framework for the some of the most innovative achievements in art, media, and technology. The still image of the raptor from Jurassic Park ( 3), like a petrified fossil extracted from the stream of living time, captures the paradox of biocybernetics perfectly. With its skin lit up with the DNA codes that brought it to life, it is a dialectical image of the most up-to-date and the most ancient forms of life—a technically engineered organism and a world dominant creature that predates the advent of mammals. Fused here in a single gestalt are the inseparable but contrary twins of biotechnology, constant innovation and constant obsolescence, the creation and extinction of life, reproductive cloning and the annihilation of a species.
Art historian T. J. Clark has recently written about the modern era, the time of Benjamin and Picasso and Lenin, as an era so remote from our present as to require an "archaeology" to understand it. 20 My own view is that the present is, in a very real sense, even more remote from our understanding, and that we need a "paleontology of the present," a rethinking of our condition from the perspective of deep time, in order to produce a synthesis of the arts and sciences adequate to the challenges we face. Artists such as Robert Smithson, Allan McCollum, and Mark Dion, who have pioneered the introduction of natural history themes into their art practices, have given us some guidance in thinking about the task of art in relation to issues of deep ecology and the spectre of extinction. Smithson saw his Spiral Jetty both as a cosmic hieroglyphic, a product of modern earth-moving technologies, and a geological trace, like the footprints of the dinosaurs, spiraling into a "deep time" which makes our own historical and even archaeological time-sense seem brief and shallow by comparison. Allan McCollum brought painted concrete castings of dinosaur thigh bones into the classical atrium of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh to evoke the way in which America's sense of the past has—at least since Thomas Jefferson—simultaneously evoked the classical past of Greece and the Roman Empire, and the even deeper past of a natural history that links our nation's past to the fate of the giant erect reptiles that once ruled the world (as America does now). Mark Dion'sinstallation Dinos R U.S. : When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, inquires into the obsession of typical American first-graders with extinct creatures that dominated the world 70 million years ago. Why is it that the most familiar, most highly publicized animal group on the planet earth at this time is a group of creatures that have never been seen outside of museums and movies?
The first conclusion of such a paleontology of the present might be summed up by Fredric Jameson's remark that "it is now easier to imagine the death of the human species than the end of capitalism." In Walter Benjamin's time, the greatest accumulations of power were located in the nation-state, the collective life-forms symbolized by Hobbes's Leviathan. Adorno called the dinosaur a monument to the monstrous total state, but in our time, it has become a re for a new monster, the multinational corporation, locked in a Darwinian struggle of survival of the fittest, in which new strategies of downsizing, flexibility, and rapid adaptation (the virtues of the Velociraptor) have replaced the emphasis on giantism of the old corporate giants (the power of the T. Rex). 21 Any critique of this mode of production, then, that does not address the corporation as life-form and Kunstwerk, and multinational capitalism as its habitat, will miss the outer frame of this subject. Capitalism is now the only game in town, a second nature that operates by and appeals for legitimation to the impersonal, Darwinist logic of a first nature that is red in tooth and claw. It is not merely that biotech corporations are rapidly appropriating the copyrights to genetic codes of newly engineered species of plants, animals, and foodstuffs, or that they will soon be copyrighting human genes and farming human embryos, but the deeper fact that these corporations are themselves biocybernetic "forms of life," collective organisms that must destroy or devour their rivals in order to survive. If cybernetics is the science of number and computation, it is perhaps the perfect modus operandi for the new-model corporation based in speculative finance capital (as distinct from innovative, entrepreneurial capital), exemplified by the dot-com bubble and the fabulous accounting procedures that made Enron appear to be so profitable. (The Enron "partnerships" that were designed to gobble up debt and improve the parent company's balance sheet were, significantly, called "Raptors"). Standing over against these legitimate or "normal" corporate entities, of course, are their dark counterparts, the cartels of terrorism and international crime organizations, complete with private armies and legitimate "front" operations. As Hyman Roth said so prophetically to Michael Corleone in Godfather II: "Michael, we're bigger than General Motors."
What, then, is the "work" of art in this era? What is its task in the face of biocybernetics, and the new corporate and physical bodies it is spawning? The sheer volume and variety of new artistic production that deals with the themes and issues of biocybernetics makes any summary very difficult indeed. When I wrote the first draft of this essay in the fall of 2000, a single show at Exit Art Gallery in New York was able to assemble twenty artists who had something to say or show on this topic. Since that time, scores of exhibitions and shows explicitly on this theme have been organized. There is little agreement on what exactly the "theme" in question is. For some artists, such as Janet Zweig, it appears to be an eternally recurring issue, one that is continuous with the first artistic imitations of life, the legendary cave paintings of Lascaux. Zweig transfers hand-painted copies of these cave paintings onto the side of a spool of computer tape imprinted with the genetic codes of similar animals, as if to say that the relation of the bios and cyber has always been with us ( 5). Others treat genetic technologies as the content of traditional media like painting and sculpture. Alexis Rockman's The Farm, 2000depicts a soybean field that, according to the artist's instructions, "is to be read from left to right. The image begins with the ancestral versions of internationally familiar animals, and moves across to informed speculation about how they might look in the future." 22 Laura Stein's Smile Tomatocarries the notion of genetically altered fruits and vegetables to its logical extreme. If we can engineer produce to maintain its fresh appearance (if not its taste) indefinitely, why not design fruits and vegetables with smiley faces? 23 Ron Jones's human-sized rendering of the genetic structure of cancer ( 6) in the mode of Jean Arp's abstract sculptures reminds us of the very specific role that sculptural modeling has played in genetic research. The double helix structure of DNA has been compared to a Constructivist monument, and biologist Robert Pollack (one of the pioneers of DNA research) describes "the leap from DNA to protein" as a "transit from line to shape, from signifier to signified . . . as if each sentence in an encyclopedia were folded into a unique origami sculpture that carried its meaning in its shape. . . . Bent, knotted, and folded, a cell's protein sculptures look like the animals in Alexander Calder's wire circus." 24 Sculptural magnification is also at issue in Bryan Crockett's OncoMouse, "the first patented transgenic lab mouse," which gives the engineering of designer laboratory animals a grotesquely monumental treatment. Crockett justifies the human scale of his 6 foot tall mouse by linking it to the Christ re, calling it Ecce Hommo Rattus, the principal sacrificial animal in the rituals of cancer research. 25
Perhaps the most disturbing and provocative sort of biocybernetic art, however, is work that does not attempt to represent the genetic revolution, but to participate in it. Eduardo Kac's installation, Genesis 1999, is a "transgenic artwork linked to the internet," an interactive work that translates visits or "hits" on the installation's website into instructions for random genetic mutations of microorganisms. 26 Transgenic art is, in Kac's words, "a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organism or to transfer natural genetic material from one species into another in order to create unique living beings." Kac's most notorious work is a rabbit named "Alba," produced by splicing jellyfish protein with rabbit DNA. Alba is thus engineered to be a fluorescent rabbit, though reportedly her "aureole" is only visible if one parts the fur and examines the skin under a special light. There is, in addition, a problem with actually exhibiting Alba, since the French government lab that engineered the rabbit has declined to release it to the artist.