MINIMALIST CHRISTMAS

(A response to “Why, Minus Everyone” https://medium.com/@revdancatt/why-minus-everyone-b3278319d8ff#.r4sgl0syo )

I had a cynical friend in seminary who would remark in some splendid place like Glacier National Park or the U of Chicago campus that was thronging with people, “This would be a nice place if they just got all the people out of it.” We could say that in most cathedrals except that in off-hours, the people were really gone.

One of those Manhattan conceptual artists (was it Rauschenberg?) got to thinking along those lines. He bought excellent pencil drawings and then erased them. The result sold for big prices — with an explanation, of course.

In ethics class we saw a film about surgery that asked, “How much can be amputated from a person without destroying them?” The answer was a soldier who had stepped on a mine and lost his lower half up to the bottom of his rib cage. Legs and intestines are not just mechanical but do a lot of molecularelectrochemical things like secreting and digestion, so the man was being monitored and supported intravenously. He moved around by using a trapeze hung over the bed. After months, he asked to be allowed to die. The real amputation had nothing to do with his body.

This post by Rev Dan Catt, "Why, Minus Everyone" refers to Garfield, the comic strip, and a derivative which is Garfield without Garfield. Everything is there but the cat, not even his grin. https://medium.com/@revdancatt/why-minus-everyone-b3278319d8ff#.1fcnl49zs The Catt’s emptied comics are very Zen, in a shallow way. 

In another, it made me think about a joke we used to tell about minimalism when all-white and all-black paintings were popular. We thought of an exhibit that was only frames, but someone had already done that. Then we thought of an exhibit of only nails with nothing hung on them. Then just the holes where nails had been or would go. Much more subtraction and there would be no gallery.

(Incidentally, I’m now very cautious about figuring out who people are. Rev Dan Catt is so cryptic that I won’t even try, but I suspect that “Rev” is just his first name and not a title.)

What all this exploits and explores is the human capacity to think of what’s not there, like Thoreau’s moose that was not present in a place so moosey that it was the same thing. And Peter Matthiessen’s snow leopard that was a powerful force you knew was there, even unseen.

Some people would take this ability to religion, but I wouldn’t because religion — as I define it — is not some theoretical idmiea at all. It is derived stuff focused on one culture that can be altogether too MUCH there. What people call religion is more about place, hierarchy and control — human institutions designed to persist. The Quakers tried to reduce that to silence. Various meditation practices move over to “spiritual,” meaning no dogma and a quiet mind. It’s not anthropocentric.

What if we applied this “minusing” to Christmas, what would it be like? The material culture of Christmas in the city as presented by those who want to sell things, is one of expensive decorations, gifts, parties, drunkenness, and the basic festival abandonment that was probably the basis of the original northern bracing for winter. Some of those historical winters were harsh killers, even for those who had resources in spite of summers so cold and dark that nothing grew. When reading about them, climate change becomes real. Luckily, most were temporary, due to volcanic eruptions that screened the sun out of the sky. But for illiterate people with short lifespans, the darkness seemed final.

In the desert Mediterranean where Abraham’s children lived when Jesus was born, the great concern was always water. There were stories of incredible plagues — frogs or blood falling out of the sky. They’re not included in Christmas. People are there: a population count, an overcrowded inn, and the addition of a new baby. It was a rigid, dominated time, but in that dry camel-and-donkey travel world where it was often best to travel by night, there was always sky. Where there is sky, there are stars, where there are stars, there are signs and flares and compasses. If the dogmatic content could be stripped from the experience, so that we could see the sky again, religion could be stripped back to the spiritual.

If the Christmas trees are plastic, why imitate real trees? If we take away all the Druid webs of meaning, what are the powerful symbols that remain? If our skies are obscured by smoke and light pollution, so that the birds smash into the skyscrapers at night, how can we read the stars?

Strictly in scientific terms, what we call Christmas is really the Winter Solstice and that, in itself, is marvelous if you happen to be in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan at the exact moment that the earth tips back towards spring and a musician from the Paul Winter Consort rides the Great Gong up into the high vault so as to strike it just then. You Tube has a lot of clips. There are a lot of people. But let’s remove them for a moment.

The equator doesn’t have a solstice you would notice because it is the poles where the tipping makes seasons, changing the angle of presentation to the sun. In winter whatever moisture is in the air falls out as snow, and what ever electricity is there shows up in great flashes seen from the space station. If you could rise through the layered atmospheres, so that you looked at the planet from far away, I don’t know whether you could see the planet tip. Maybe someone in the space station could do a time-lapse vid that’s a year long. But tipping is relative — what is the axis mundi — axle of the world — if all around is only the sun as the point of reference. Is the earth nodding to the sun? Or are we dancing on our plane of revolution?

Star nursery

We have seen, through our instruments, clear to the birthplaces of the stars and they are beyond description. We have seen novas exploding. We have seen to the beginning of the substrate of the cosmos. When we turn our instruments on ourselves, we see that we are made of stardust. Quite literally the elements that cleaved together and in time became us. None of us were there, and yet we were all there as potential and we continue that way, filling the world, exceeding the world, finding new worlds that are potential and possibly not corporeal.

Here’s my favorite comic strip for the moment, “Francis”. The Pope has to eliminate a lot of clutter before we get back to the Christian natal event. Maybe the Buddhists can help. 

http://www.gocomics.com/francis/2015/11/16

REFRAMING FRAGMENTATION

Giancarlo Biagi is the editor of “Sculpture Review” which is the official magazine of the National Sculpture Society.  In the Spring of 2013 issue his editorial was about this sculpture, which is called “Crouching Aphrodite.”  It’s in the Louvre, is a little bit over a yard high and was probably created about 250 BC.  Obviously, it is broken, but the particular way it is broken -- the woman losing arms and head and the child losing all but the little hand in the middle of her back -- is extremely evocative.

What it called up in me was a memory of several years ago when a friend was going through a very hard time.  I wanted to offer support, I was thousands of miles away, I knew this friend only via books and email, and I didn’t want to say anything sexual.  So I said, “Imagine that my hand is resting on your back.”  It became a sign-off: “my hand on your back.”  Sometimes “my hand on your shoulder.”  To me it was very real.

When we talk about paintings, we talk about “frames,” and we notice that a change of frame can make an image look different, so the phrase “re-framing” has been claimed by the counseling community to mean looking at the same thing in a new way, to see if this will give new insight.  Sculptures don’t have frames, but they do have points of view, and I once read a wonderfully insightful analysis of Rodin sculptures in terms of how they seem to move when you circle them, the sequence of points of view revealing potential shifts over time.  But I never read anything much about the effect on people of so many ancient sculptures being broken.  Maybe the Venus de Milo, the woman who is missing only her arms, is the most famous.  Biago continued to think about fragments and truncations and so the Summer, 2013, is also about partial sculptures of bodies.  Also, sculptures of partial bodies.

There are no headless people wandering around, but as wars and drunk driving take their toll -- particularly UED’s -- we become more used to people with limbs missing. In addition there is a whole category of people who were born without limbs, because their mothers took thalidomide during their pregnancy.  I recently saw a TED talk by Nick Vujicic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P2nPI6CTlc.  He’s a motivational speaker, but he doesn’t “tag” as thalidomide victim.  Because he doesn’t see himself as a victim now.  It was tough as a kid, because other kids bullied him.  But now he’s handsome, smart, married, and has a career as a speaker and resource. 

Alison Lapper and son

On the cover of the Summer, 2013, issue of “Sculpture Review” is Marc Quinn’s statue of “Alison Lapper Pregnant” and there is a major story inside about this series of works that are portraits of people with “phocomelia” which is the technical name for people whose limbs failed to develop.   They are white, in marble, to echo found partial sculptures from antiquity.  To some they are shocking and shameful; to others they are beautiful, full of hope and love.  Though many of the sculptures from antiquity had lost their sexual organs (in some cases it looks like penises were add-ons anyway), these statues of Quinn’s are intact.  These people have head, heart, guts and genitalia.  If you are the sort of person who becomes interested in the model as much or more than the portrait, Lapper is an artist herself, has written a book, successfully gave birth to the boy-child she was carrying and is proud of him as a normal teenager.  (If there is such a thing.)

Biagi asks us to consider the tradition of bust portraits -- just the heads.  He also reminds us of Rodin, who said,  “Recently I have taken to isolating limbs, the torso.  Why am I blamed for this?  Why is it allowed the head and not portions of the body?  Every part of the human figure is expressive.  And is not an artist always isolating, since in Nature nothing is isolated?  When my works do not consist of the complete body, people call it unfinished.  What do they mean?  Michelangelo’s finest works are precisely those which are called ‘unfinished.’ ”

Michelangelo: Slave

We might reframe “fragmentation” as a metonymy. (The formal name of using a figure of speech that is a part that stands for a whole -- Ogi Ogas says one of the problems with categorizing their porn-viewing data was that “pussy” stands for both a person and a part of a person -- evidently not many actual cats in the study.)  Then fragments could be sorted according to whether the part was once included in something bigger, whether it is part of something that is as yet incomplete, what it implies in terms of what it would be if it were completed, and so on.  Fragmentation is a real thing that points to a potential whole thing.

Is a person whose legs were amputated a fragment?   Is a person born without any legs a fragment?  What makes a person whole anyway -- most of us would be pleased to think that the wholeness of a person is a matter of mental and emotional development and not the state of a body.  Was the poet in “The Sessions” more whole after he had been initiated into sex?  He said so.  What are other markers of completeness?

Or is “whole” the same thing as “complete”?  We are happy these days to say that a person is a process.  If so we will never be finished until death: that’s as whole or complete as a person could get, and yet people don’t usually say they aspire to be dead.  They don’t generally even say they’re as good at whatever they do now as they could possibly be.  One is always a part striving to be whole.  But then age or illness or trauma CAN make you feel like a fragment.

How to hold your baby if you have no arms.

And yet there is something beguiling about a fragment: it is a puzzle piece.  Even the people born with no limbs can have an integrity and wholeness of purpose that we admire.  Nick Vujicic presented from a raised table or dais that he rocked back and forth on; he leaned, pointed with his shoulders, nearly danced with his torso.  He told about how something spontaneous happened with children who approached him.  They would put their hands behind their backs to imitate him, and then “hug” him with their necks, tucking their throats under his ear.  They “re-framed” themselves into being the same so they could relate to him on his terms.

Michelangelo’s unfinished works, formally called “non finito,” are usually slaves shown emerging from blocks of stone.  They may have been left that way on purpose.  Usually it is the front that is carved and the back is still in rough stone, so it’s impossible to rest a hand on their backs.  That’s a shame, because it was my experience that as much as I had intended to lend support, in the end a powerful current of life was coming back through my baby hand.  In the case of the Rodin torsos, a museum guard would have to watch carefully to keep me from putting my hand or even my head against those bronze chests, expecting to hear heartbeats.

Rodin torso