The Art That Broke The Looking Glass

THE ART THAT BROKE THE LOOKING GLASS

douglas macagy

There are at least two histories of thought and action in relation to art. On the one hand, there is the elusive history of the transforming act of the mind of the artist. On the other, there is the more accessible history of reaction in society to the produced work of art. The present exhibition offers a calculated glimpse of the two histories as they have impinged on one another. Between them they have created a third history; the evolution and the devolution of the pictorial object. That is the subject of the show.

The Introduction to an Exhibition by this title held at the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts in 1961. Reprinted by courtesy of the Museum and its Director.

The immensity of a darkening sky is more keenly felt when the first star appears in it.

But when a cluster appears, we are engaged at once by an arrangement of points.

Constellations provoke mental images, traced to accord with desire.

Moved by a cluster of luminous points

and wishing to see godly figures in the heavens,

the Greeks—frank in their poetic license—pictured them.

Like the Greek star-gazer, an artist may read an image into marks already there—

as Leonardo imagined battle scenes in stains on walls;

as Turner’s vision was stirred by children’s paint splatters;

as Moore saw figures in a random stroke or two of the brush;

as people see faces in the fire, familiar shapes in clouds, or

all manner of things and qualities in Rorschach blots.

Or he may be first faced with an undefined "space”—a blank surface.

Then it is he who makes the initial marks on the field which, in their own way— whatever the cause—stars make in the sky.

In this case the cause is human, although at times he has wished to believe it divine.

Here is an art of make-believe.

It is a wishful art, a craft of conjecture, a theatre to exhibit feelings and thoughts about things.

There is magic in it—in the older sense of the word, and sometimes a touch of hocus-pocus—in the modern sense, but its pretenses are not made out of thin air.

Through it objects appear where they don’t exist,

but they are recognized only in configurations that do.

Not made up of whole cloth, real cloth is used in their invention.

To fabricate them, unlikely material is shaped into likeness by the mind.

Here image-making is an art of wonder, but never a miracle— as was the apparition on the sacred sudarium.1

Devout photographers mistook wonder for miracle when they chose Veronica for their patron saint.

Their poetic heresy was committed in wonder at the sight, in a chemical bath, of an image developing on paper that had seemed empty.2

As an image-maker, the mind is no less innocent than sensitized paper. Nor is it so passively receptive to visual effects. But there is no less wonder in the ways it is treated to develop the stimulus of an image there.

Unmarked by human hands—if contrived by human ingenuity— the photographic image points with purity to a major factor in the art of representation.

This is the act of recognition.

A resemblance to something else is discovered in a few shades on a flat surface. The wonder of it has almost been obscured by custom.

On an impulse that may by now seem trifling, one thing is found in another.

If the original of what is recognized is believed to belong to the everyday world, identifications are conjured from clues that are likened by the mind with those supposed to define the objects in it.

A simple silhouette might be taken for a persimmon.3

So perceived, the simulacrum is a product of human nature.

The made-over realm is created by an act with at least two points of reference. Marks or shapes are looked at and their likeness to the mind’s version of other things is noted.

Reference to these other things—to the physical originals

of both the imagined and the consequent pictorialized shapes—

may or may not figure in the process. The third referral figure in the game of

make-believe, where there is an essential acknowledgement that the original

is subject to forces beyond the scope of human nature, while the pictured image

depends only on what the mind cares to make of it.

Even at its simplest, this shuttle between shapes outside and inside the mind, their conversion in the conformation of what amounts to another appearance is an act of wit.

In her dog’s-eye view of the Barrett and Browning households,

Virginia Woolf had the pet and its mistress look at a drawing.

What to Flush was merely scribble and smudge was to Elizabeth Barrett a whimsical representation she had sketched of Flush himself.

Her otherwise precocious cocker spaniel had missed, in the drawing, the witty resemblance. Yet, while it failed to interpret an image from sketched clues, elsewhere in the book the dog made the connection when glancing at a mirror. For its latter aptitude there was literary precedent.

Although Mrs. Woolf had later information about limitations in animal perception of drawn things, the powers of her puppy accorded with Aesop’s when he allowed his greedy creature to read the shimmer and glint of its reflection on water as a dog with a bone in its teeth.4

Used in the fable to admonish human nature, animal nature was made almost human by Aesop to expose a predicament that is perhaps more utilitarian than moral. He knew where the lines are drawn between make-believe and folly.

It is conceivable that Aesop’s respectable chide against avarice was a cover to condone a practical warning to the victims of an involuntary illusion. He might have intimated that, whatever the motive, a mirage is no better than hallucination in satisfying material needs.5 You have to stay awake in your dream.

Made less than bright, his gifted dog shared a human failing in betraying a lapse of wit at a crucial point in the basic play of make-believe.

In opening its jaws to snatch the reflected bone,

it was whole-heartedly mistaking the image for an original in life.

This slip from the grace of the game was not witless at the outset, since wit had produced the recognition. Touched off by the recognition, the engrossment of greed then overwhelmed the immediate memory of a signal point in the formulation of the recognized image.

In its pure state, the realm of "as if” requires an unfailing attendance upon the principal points of its origin. The play is dissolved when a point is forgotten.

Among men’s stories about man, the Narcissus myth has made the blind magic of involuntary illusion most familiar. Whether cupidity, ardor, or some other passion, in these tales strong feeling seems to have shorted the circuit.

But outside the lore people are less prone to be tricked.

On the whole they have been apt to admire the pretense, to have been amiable about the acknowledged deceit, or even to have desired the fraud as an apparent reprieve from the strain in a life it otherwise appears to reflect.6

Or they might still, at times, welcome an illusion that brings to a focus a state they would like to reject.7

Also, by the same token—since at its utmost this artifice can represent only selected components of an original in life—the art may have helped to narrow a field for attention when certain aspects of a thing or event were to be examined for the furtherance of knowledge.8

Yet individuals have been more involved in the less voluntary side of the experience than many are prepared to admit.

The camera-shy are not always motivated by a wish to escape being identified or to avoid the ravages of candor on vanity. Photographers for the National Geographic have had more than a passing acquaintance with primitive people who are wary of having their portrait taken. They are afraid that a part of themselves will be taken away.

Privacy, which is equated in law with private property, is still officially considered to be threatened by traffic in its image. Today, in some civilized countries, a person has legal rights to his likeness and may, under certain circumstances, permit or withhold its use in public domain.

A man’s fear that his image might be stuck with pins in his absence may have given way to his concern that he would not be paid for being filmed in a crowd for a commercial movie, but the identity of fact with fictive record persists.

The history of recognition in representational art is the story of a submission to illusion which ranges somewhere between the voluntary and the involuntary.

Taken one after another, two familiar legends may imply much of what has happened during the course glimpsed in this exhibition.

Transfixed by what he felt about what he thought he saw, Narcissus faded with the adored vision.9 In dropping its bone to grab the reflection thought to be another, Aesop’s dog lost more than the original. The splash scattered the prompting of its illusion.

Unattainable, a wishful picture of mankind passed beyond the tolerance point. An effort to make matter out of illusion caused the visual principles of illusion to disperse.

Before this century, the pictorial object was make-believe. During this century, the object has become a kind of make-believe picture.