THE SYMBOLISM OF THE FACE MASK
Here in South Korea more or less everyone in is wearing a face mask. According to the opinions of medical experts in the West, these people must be sadly misled or deluded, because a face mask is only useful in cases when we are specifically at risk or already diagnosed. Perhaps they are, medically speaking. But the judgment ignores the symbolic value of wearing a face mask.
The face masks says: ‘We are a beleaguered people who, confronted by a common and invisible enemy, have adopted the same persona – the same mask – as an act of solidarity.’ ‘Persona’ is a Greek word referring to the mask worn by an actor to portray his character. In psychology, ‘persona’ refers to the aspect of our character we often unconsciously present to others, or that is perceived by them. In this sense, the medical face mask is a signal that Koreans have suppressed the usual signs of individuality and position in the social hierarchy in the shared struggle against the virus. Through unconsciously announcing to each other their solidarity – their sameness when confronted by the threat of the virus - each individual is made to feel emotionally stronger as part of a greater collective.
The population of South Korea is about 51.4 million. That means there must be an awful lot of facemasks out there. The Western states, unlike South Korea, China, Japan, and other East Asian countries, have no tradition of wearing face masks in daily life (in these countries they are routinely worn against air pollution, and while one is sick and interacting with others) so there aren’t enough face masks available to clothe a whole population, and those that exist are sorely needed in situations where they can be of real medical value. Anyway, Western culture is far more inherently individualistic, and such an overt visual sign announcing that the the self has been subsumed into the collective is likely to be misunderstood and resisted.
But we Westerners do East Asians and others a great disservice by judging the face mask only in terms of its directly explicit and clearly denoted medical efficacy. We also do humanity as a whole a great disservice by ignoring the vital role played by largely unconscious symbolism in creating communal bonds, and nurturing hope and the spirit of rejuvenation. We tend to say something is ‘merely symbolic’, but this grossly underestimates the power of the symbol to construct, direct, and change lives. While Coronavirus will certainly be defeated thanks largely to medical vigilance and skill, the creative deployment of an effective symbolism will also play a vital part.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Joseph Beuys talks under the rose
Why had I never really noticed roses before that fateful day? And why, suddenly, did they blossom (apologies for the tired pun) into my life? The attempt to answer these questions is one reason for writing this book.
There’s a famous experiment by a group of psychologists in which participants were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and told to focus all their attention on counting the number of times one team took possession of the ball. Participants were so intent on fulfilling their designated task that they completely failed to see a man in a gorilla suit wander into the middle of the frame, perform a jig, and then wander out again![1] The psychologists wanted to test just how selective human vision is.
I thought of this experiment when I was trying to understand my own selective bias regarding roses and other flowers. But who was it told me to ‘keep my eyes on the ball’ – i.e. not get distracted by roses? My upbringing, of course. My culture. I was educated to consider flowers to be frivolous and ‘sissy’, the domain of females. My only contact with them should be as gifts, whereupon they could help me get what I wanted from the aforementioned females. In addition, I had been taught to believe that showing interest in flowers was a moral failing, a sign that I didn’t have my priorities right in the eyes of God and my peers. The virtue of frugality and the glory of the rose did not sit well together. If you compare a Presbyterian church interior, with which I was familiar, with a Roman Catholic one, you can see that, amongst much else, the Reformation was an assault on flowers – real, sculpted, and painted - and on the rose, the most sacred of all flowers to Catholics, in particular. But puritanism need not have a religious motivation. Any ideology will do. Most modern-day intellectuals are secular puritans because we focus on the ‘life of the mind’ and inevitably condescend towards the ‘life of the body’. In fact, anything deemed ‘beautiful’, that is, pleasurable and joyful, is likely to be suspect. And, as we consider ourselves custodians of ‘high culture’, we also tend to look down on something that is so pervasively embraced by ‘low culture’, deeming it kitsch, sentimental, commodified, and politically suspect.[2]
So, if I had to say in a very few words what it is that so fascinates me about the rose, it is the fact that it is both something I engage with as a plant, an intrinsic part of the vegetal world – of ‘nature’ - and also as an idea, or part of the human ‘culture’. But what is especially interesting is that with the rose both these roles are intertwined so completely that it makes the old familiar binary opposition ‘nature’ /’culture’ seem beside the point.
As my professional background is in the making and studying of visual signs, and most particularly, painting., I’m used to working with representations, and am attuned to viewing cultural artifacts as signs within a social code, a system whose purpose is to facilitate communication between people, but also often manipulates and controls them. A sign is never definitive proof of anything. It can be ambiguous, and it can be false. I am attuned to approaching images with a critical, demystifying mind, and am on the lookout for the ideology hiding behind the mediation, the trickery behind the fetish. But then I look at the specimen of ‘Cecille Brunner’ growing over the pergola in my garden, and all the suspicion gets blown to the wind by its delicately pink and fragrant spectacle.
The philosopher Paul Ricœur wrote that we can interpret culture according to two broad attitudes: ‘suspicion’ and ‘faith’.’[3] Equipped with the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche Freud, and the work of their disciples, most contemporary intellectuals primarily think within an atmosphere of ‘suspicion’. This means that where the rose is concerned, we can’t simply celebrate its fascinating history, its celebrated loveliness, its ubiquitous popularity. We must also ask what human hands are manipulating it and why. What has the rose has been made to say, and to what end? Any sign functions on two levels: denoted and connoted. A denoted meaning is manifest, explicit, obvious. With connoted meaning, which is parasitic on the first, it less easy to recognize when some kind of manipulation is taking place. Connotation occurs subliminally, and often unconsciously influences our beliefs and actions. In fact, it is on the level of connotation that the power of the image resides. So any truly valuable discussion of the rose as a cultural symbol will need to think about how it is involved in both denoting and connoting, and how the latter is working to control us. For example, while the rose clearly denotes feminine beauty, it can be said to connote a misogynistic idea of woman as merely frivolous, ornamental, and sexually available. While in a patriarchal society, men are routinely compared to animals like the lion, bear, or wolf, women are likened to a pretty plant. We send bunches of red roses on Valentine’s Day to denote our love for someone special, but they connote our participation in the values of the patriarchy, and also as consumers of a commercial business. Roses lain at war memorials denote our remembrance of the dead in battle, but they can be said to connote the sanctification and sublimation of state sanctioned violence.
But the demystifying acid of ‘suspicion’ is obviously insufficient. In fact, it is dangerous, because it can lead to an excessive reliance on the powers of critical reason, and the value of concept formation, at the expense of feeling, emotion, and imagination. The connotative dimension of an image is not necessarily only tied to patterns of abuse. Th imagination can use connotation to generate associations that fly free of the interests of the powerful. For example, in By Any Other Names we will be encountering many examples of imaginative synthesis, of the original use of metaphor and other figures of speech which, through analogy - or the forming of an unlikely correspondence – between seemingly unlike things. For example, D.H. Lawrence writes in a poem: ‘ She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts / Sway like full-blown yellow / Gloire de Dijon roses.’ The simile woman’s breast=rose blossom was a very familiar one when, in the early twentieth century, Lawrence wrote his poem. But Lawrence succeeds in imbuing it with powerful new value that rescues it from cliché because, unlike other poets, he actually specifies which rose. He thereby makes tangible and concrete an analogy that was in danger of becoming febrile and idealized.
We can also approach the rose motivated by a commitment to the other interpretative model: ‘faith.’ While it isn’t possible to return to the naïve or simple faith of someone who has never heard of, or choses to ignore, the unsettling messages delivered by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, we nevertheless hope to restore meanings in spite of the critique justifiably unleashed by these masters of ‘suspicion’. This dimension of continuing ‘faith’ in the symbolic - faith even in a symbol that has undergone such banalization and commodification as the rose - seems especially important now because of the undertow of nihilism that pervades our culture. So this is the faith is of someone who believes that thinking about the rose will tell us something meaningful and truthful, and will only do this if, as Ricœur emphasizes, we remain ‘obedient’ to the symbol, if we proceeds by recollecting, recovering, and restoring the many meanings of the rose in history which undergird its complex reception today.
A portrait by Joshua Reynolds featuring the Damask Rose flower and bud.
A fresco from Pompeii featuring Gallica Roses and a nightingale.
Rose still-life by Henri Fantin-Latour.
NOTES
[1] The experiment was conducted in 1999, and is recounted, for example, in Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, Cambridge, 2008, p.49
[2] In the course of my research, I came across a painting by the little know Austrian Symbolist painter Maximilian Lenz (1860-1948) which sums up my, and many other intellectuals (male but also female), position regarding nature’s bounty. It is called ‘A Daydream’ or alternatively, ‘A World’, and was painted in 1899. It show an intellectual deep in thought taking a stroll across a flower-strewn meadow. Lenz was in earnest, but nowadays we can but smile at the blatant misogyny and biophobia. Here is Bram Dijkistra’s amusing description ‘ his mind quite obviously occupied with the exalted future of man, only to be beset by fiercely frolicking maidens and, worst of all, a bevy of transparently smocked young ladies carrying – indeed, becoming - huge stalks of blossoms. These decidedly daffy damsels personified tempting floral finitude as they urged the serious thinker to lose himself among their panting petals.’ ( Idols of Perversity, p.241, where the painting is illustrated).
[3] Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27.
'Seven Keys to Modern Art' published in Korean
I recently published a book called ‘Seven Keys to Modern Art’ with Thames & Hudson. I’m pleased to say it has just been published in Korean by Ahn Graphics, so I thought this was a good time to introduce the book in my blog.
“Seven Keys’ is aimed at anyone interested in modern art. It is the belated fruit of all the years I spent giving guided tours, talks, workshops, and short courses in various museums and galleries, mostly in London. In the book I discuss 20 works of art by 20 different artists, ranging from Henri Matisse to Doris Salcedo. Each work is approached using the same seven ‘keys’. These ‘keys’ are not meant to be compatible. A work of art invites multiple and often contradictory interpretations.
Here are the seven ‘keys’:
1. THE HISTORICAL KEY
In this approach, a work of art is understood to be involved in an ongoing, developmental dialogue with subjects and styles inherited from earlier periods. The new often has more in common with the old than is at first recognized, and so the best way to understand the former is to compare and contrast it with the latter. Therefore, in this key the artwork is seen in a context that views it as a sign or symptom of the broad socio-cultural conditions and stylistic norms that prevail at the time it was made, rather than as an artefact with intrinsic aesthetic or expressive qualities. Art is judged to be important because it has symbolic value and must therefore be considered in relation to changes and continuities through time, organized in terms of recurring codes and stylistic properties.
2. THE BIOGRAPHICAL KEY
Paying attention to the life of the artist is considered in this mode to be the best way to understand his or her work. The latter is the expression of the former. There are two versions of this approach. The hard version, often called expression by ‘contagion’, argues that the character of an artist is experienced by a viewer directly via an encounter with their work. The soft version suggests that the uniqueness of any work of art is intimately related to a specific personality and local circumstances that give rise to it and depends for its power on the emotional and intellectual life of the maker, through which we are given access to more general social and psychological issues.
3. THE AESTHETIC KEY
In this mode, a work of art is approached primarily as a visual artefact, consisting of specific plastic or formal properties to which we respond emotionally and intellectually. The focus here is on our emotional responses to line, colour, form, texture, and so on. This mode recognizes that, in responding to a work of art, we use the same cognitive and affective processes as when appraising ordinary objects and circumstances, but within the aesthetic state of mind, the object of perception – the work of art – is removed from the realm of practical knowledge and goals. As a consequence, the aesthetic experience will also involve a degree of detachment, and a reflexive attitude. Everything we experience has the potential to become art, because everything can have an aesthetic dimension. But what a culture defines as art will be determined by social consensus, and how a work is judged ultimately comes down to a combination of factors that include the biological, personal and cultural.
4. THE EXPERIENTIAL KEY
The main concern here is how a work can communicate across time, place and culture, touching on basic affective and psychological realities. There are two aspects to this key. One is subjective and phenomenological, focusing on how a viewer directly responds to the stimulus of the work as a multisensory experience. The second analyses these responses by drawing on research into the psychology of perception and the neurobiological foundations of perception, imagination and creativity. Social conditioning greatly affects the ways in which we respond to art, determining the meanings we attribute to the experience, and the brain functions in tandem with the body and the surrounding environment to generate the specific experiences that are derived from the encounter with an artwork.
5. THE THEORETICAL KEY
This mode encourages a language-oriented and intellectual relationship to art rather than an aesthetic, affective or expressive one. It emphasizes the potential of art to make us think, instead of treating it as a way of accessing the artist’s psyche, engaging our sensibility, or exploring our sensory and emotional faculties. There are two broad possibilities. In the first, the manifest theoretical positions adopted by artists and critics and voiced at the time of making the work are addressed. The work of art is understood to be involved in exploring abstract ideas or immaterial subjects, such as existence, causality and truth. This approach links art with examining first principles and ultimate grounds, and an artwork is understood to exist within the context of deep and timeless existential questions about the meaning of life. In the second approach, the work of art is judged to require comprehensive review and analysis in relation to unexamined assumptions about value and meaning. In particular, attention is paid to the institutional frameworks in which the work functions, and the ways in which meaning is socially constructed and politically implicated, and how the work includes, in often unconscious ways, traces of the prejudices of the society within which it was produced.
6. THE SCEPTICAL KEY
The consensus view can’t be accepted without question, and this mode emphasizes that the cultural credentials of a work should not be taken for granted. Value judgments are largely the opinions of elites. Although the work is in a museum, praised by the experts, and sought after for its economic value, this does not place it beyond constructive criticism. Furthermore, decisions about the value of the art in our own era are inevitably myopic, because only the passage of time brings the necessary distance from which real judgments can be made. History is full of examples of fashion influencing judgments. It is therefore valuable to maintain a sceptical attitude. This key encourages the reader to play the ‘devil’s advocate’, to seek different opinions, and to adopt constructively critical viewpoints.
7. THE MARKET KEY
Art is deeply embedded in a complex web of power relations, involving different kinds of exchange, and the status of the work of art as a commodity within the capitalist economy, and as a symbolic and political token deployed by the state system, are the focus of attention in this mode. The work functions within an economic system that it helps to sustain, but also, paradoxically, can also actively critique and subvert.
These seven ‘keys’ converge on the same object – a single work of art – but they choose to see different things. On occasion, they are also clearly incompatible, in that the point of view promoted in one is ignored, contradicted or even denigrated in another. Inevitably, some of the keys will be more enlightening than others in relation to the specific character of the work they discuss, and this is reflected in the different running orders in which the keys are presented. But this order is fairly arbitrary, and the keys could be arranged in other ways.
SIMPLICITY
Cistercian abbey of Fontenay, France. 11th Century.
The simple is almost but not quite nothing. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin simplex, from semel, meaning ‘once’, and plecto meaning ‘pleat’, ‘fold,’ or ‘weave.’ But simplicity is always relative. It only has meaning in relation to its polar opposite - complexity, or the ‘many folded.’
These roots suggest that the simple is very close to the untouched, unworked, or unmade, that is, close to nothing of apparent value. Often, simplicity is associated with the negative characteristics of naïvity, primitiveness, the childlike and untutored.
But within cultures characterized by constant activity and ever-increasing complexity, the intimate relationship between simplicity and meaningless has proven especially compelling. When a mystic, artist or scientist says they are seeking ‘simplicity’ it is usually in order to draw attention to the fact that they are searching for a revitalizing or clarifying essence. The relationship between simplicity and spiritual enlightenment was recognized long ago, as it was perceived that attention to the unadorned has a tranquilizing effect on the mind and the senses, relieving us from the ceaseless and painful task of thinking and doing.
In the West, Roman Catholicism embraced a complex theology, which manifested itself visually in prolific ornamentation and visual display, and theologically, in a complex metaphysics. But in teachings of the early Desert Fathers, and then in the Romanesque period within the monastic order, simplicity was highl valued. The architecture of Cistercian abbeys, for example, emphasise simple forms and the play of light upon stone surfaces, a reflection of the belief that the unadorned embodies God’s benign presence.
But the Cistercians were an exception with Catholicism, and the Protestants attacked what they saw as the carnality and idolatry of the Church of Rome. The demand for a return to the pure roots of Christianity meant the destructive purging of the many accretions that concealed the simple truth. Unnecessary visual display was judged to be vanity, and the appropriate relationship to the temptations of the world must be abstemious. Thus plainness in dress and in behaviour were encouraged.
Inspired by the spirit of the age epitomised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s faith in the simple virtues of the ‘natural man’, the French revolutionaries of 1789 rejected all traditional religions , and in order to demonstrate they had repudiated its decadently flamboyant values also adopted a simpler dress code to that of the Ancien Régime.
As industrialization and urbanization spread, belief in the intrinsic value of simplicity as a way of drawing close to a more pure and untroubled way of life, spread. In England, the painter John Constable explained that his subject-matter was to be found under every hedgerow. It wasn’t necessary to take a degree at Oxford, fill one’s head with obtuse philosophy, or journey to Rome to look at masterpieces. All on needed to do was look humbly at the world around you. The American writer Henry David Thoreau declared from his hide-away beside Walden Pond: ‘simplify, simplify.’
To create the blueprint for a purer, more elemental and universal, and hence less troubled, world, one that lay behind or hidden within the complex one we inhabit, it was necessary to seek a ‘condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)’, as T.S. Eliot put it in ‘Little Gidding’. Bereft of the old securities, we must learn to contemplate a more primal world. ‘After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things’, as Wallace Stevens writes.
But the importance of simplicity has been more clearly recognized beyond the West. In the austerely beautiful temple gardens of Kyoto, Japan, the importance of simplicity for Zen Buddhism is made tangible through carefully unforced arrangements of stone and raked sand. In Confucian Korea, simplicity was also highly valued. Even the households of the ruling elite were characterized by an austerity that is in stark contrast to the ostentatious display of Western aristocrats.
‘Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.’, writes the contemporary American designer and theorist John Maeda. But fertile simplicity is just a thin hair’s-breadth away - a single ‘pleat’ away – from the meaningless, and the creative use of simplicity therefore involves much more than merely the removal of the apparently superfluous or decorative, or the reliance on pure primary forms. As the German designer Dieter Rams declares: ‘Less, but better.’
Ryoanji temple rock garden, Kyoto, Japan.
A Korean hanok, home of the yanbang ruling class of Joseon Korea.
A radio designed by Dieter Rams for Braun in the 1950s.
NOTHING MATTERS
A mysterious black square symbolizing nothing and everything, from an occult tome from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd called Utriusque Cosmi maioris salicet et minoris metaphysica...
What is greater than God, but more evil than the devil? What do the rich need, and the poor have in plenty? What if you eat it will surely kill you? What, according to Socrates, is the only thing you can be certain you know? And what must you stop at if you want to find the answers?
‘Nothing,’ of course.
I’ve been thinking about ‘nothing’ recently, as I’m planning a new book on the subject. It’s a kind of sequel to a book that’s coming out with Reaktion in the spring of next year entitled The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art (more on this in future posts). The word ‘nothing’ usually refers to a state of nonexistence, or the property of having no property or of not being anything. By its very definition, ‘nothing’ is therefore boundless and eternal, beyond time and space. It eludes the coordinates that could turn it into something graspable. If you consider the idea of ‘nothing,’ you soon discover it cannot be conceived. If you try thinking about nothing at all, or try to do nothing, you also find It is impossible. Because the insertion of the word ‘nothing’ in a sentence usually implies that attention is to be given to the ‘something’ that has been negated, it’s necessary to place ‘scare’ marks around the word when it is meant to be understood as the focus of attention. Consider, for example, the difference in the meaning between the following: “I’m interested in nothing” and “I’m interested in ‘nothing’.”
‘Nothing’ is a constituent but inherently indefinable part of the reality we inhabit, and can incite potentially widely different conclusions about life’s purpose, spanning the extremes of hope and despair. In thinking about ‘nothing’ we must shift the usually unnoticed background to our thinking to the foreground. There are many things that concerns us that remain unsaid and unexpressed. Much of the time we dwell with absences, non-beings, nonexistence - the opposite of things actual and positive - but we rarely make them a manifest part of our thinking. Contemplating ‘nothing’ will mean getting acquainted with everything that is barely registered in our conscious and reasoning minds, but is nevertheless powerfully and sometimes violently experienced. We must redirect our attention away from a world dominated by the positivity of knowing and doing, of graspable things and bodies, and move into one that verbal language can only designate with negations or denials - not knowing , not doing, not existing, not being.
So, in some of the posts to come, I will be thinking about ‘nothing’ in particular. It is a surprisingly interesting subject. Here’s some Kierkegaard to get you thinking:
‘But the genuine subjective existing thinker is always just as negative as he is positive and vice versa: he is always that as long as he exists, not once and for all in a chimerical meditation…..He is cognizant of the negativity of the infinite in existence; he always keeps open the wound of negativity, which at all times is a saving factor (the others let the wound close and become positive–deceived)…..He is, therefore, never a teacher, but a learner, and if he is continually just as negative as positive, he is continually striving.’