Went to my first Bat Mitzvah. Upper East side synagogue. The cantor, Lori Corsin, has an incredibly beautiful voice. Wow. The congregation was led in some readings and heard some music and then came the ritual. The Rabbi turned and faced the elaborate bronze wall relief behind him. Slowly he walked towards it and, placing his hands on it, he slid it open — it was a little magical, as if a secret chamber were being revealed to us (though one could have seen that it probably opened.)
Inside were 3 huge Torahs, and behind them a brightly colored painted chamber. Two lions faced a crown, vines crept up underneath. Stylized flames flickered here and there. Huge images of classical columns ran up and down the sides.
Up above there was a stained glass image of a landscape with a half hidden temple on the top of a dirt hill. In the foreground were cypress and olive trees. Low green hills undulated in the background.
The Rabbi clutched the giant “book”, the torah scroll, as the ceremony proceeded. As if the book were watching the ritual, bearing witness, officiating — as if it was the book that made the ceremony real. The prayers and incantations were the usual Levantine injunctions against worshipping other Gods and the hope that this “true” God would eventually overcome the unbelievers. Oh jeez. Lori sang again, it was beautiful.
I walked home, through midtown. I stopped at the ICP museum on my way and caught their new show “Ecotopia” which I guess is some conflation of ecology and utopia/dystopia — as many of the works are about nature and the environmental wreckage around us. The similar world ectopia, which means a bodily organ in the wrong place, would have worked as well. It’s a large and powerful show, and some cool installation ideas — video monitors nestled in huge biomorphic shapes that looked like giant rubber versions of tree growths. Catherine Chalmers’s nature doc in one growth follows a cockroach (and many other critters) up close and personal, and it rivals the Attenborough BBC docs I love — her cinematography is that good. But does that mean that the BBC docs are “art” as well? Certain sequences in them — the slug-mating dance, the fish balls, the predator wasps — make a good case for it. And who is doing the foley work on these films? Both Chalmers and the BBC films have lots of crunchy and squishy sounds when appropriate. These sounds make a huge difference.
Other photographers — Mitch Epstein (Biloxi, post Katrina)
Robert Adams (clear cutting)
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (sites of “removed” Palestinian villages, now planted over as pine forests)
Simon Norfolk (evidence of the effects of war around Baghdad — there’s a missile in the woods):
and Sophie Ristenhueber (Iraq landscapes in ruins)
Pretty much all of the above images are beautiful. I find them arresting not because they make some didactic point about humans destroying the environment (though they may be trying to do that) but because they show us a strange and unexpected universe — our own.
In fact, if they are simply trying to make us aware of the damage we are doing to the landscape, of injurious policies and projects and then move us to action — they fail. Well, they do bring home some information that might be less moving merely as statistics — but the fact that they are beautiful subverts, for me, this possibly didactic intention. The images are simply gorgeous — you’d be happy and proud to hang them on your wall — pictures of devastation and destruction. How can anything so beautiful be simple agit prop? The two seem to contradict one another.
Somehow I think maybe the artists know this. I think in some cases (but not all) this contradiction, this cognitive dissonance, is what their images are about. They are about the fact that they can be beautiful and “ugly” and the same time — as many things can — and what does that mean? How do we deal with that? Does the beauty obscure, or are all these things partly beautiful and we have trouble reconciling the two?
In some cases, for some people, it seems to be a big problem. The well-known photographer Joel Meyerowitz took pictures of the aftermath of 9/11, near where he lives. He can’t help himself, I guess — the pictures are gorgeous, like images from a Spielberg epic that was never made. They’re romantic, like Caspar David Freidrich’s paintings — paintings that, in Germany, are seen as romantic kitsch, a precursor to the Wagnerian romanticism that some say led to (but cannot be said to have caused?) much Nazi propaganda and the mess that followed. Many admire Meyerowitz’s pictures, many others find them disgusting.
For many people these pictures cross the line — they beautify and possibly romanticize a tragedy that people see as different, closer maybe, than the Iraq landscapes or the clear-cut forests. Is it? I don’t know. I saw the very same thing as Meyerowitz, above (relief efforts were located there) but couldn’t take pictures. Maybe I was shy, maybe overwhelmed. Maybe it seemed wrong to be making “art” at that moment. How do photojournalists do it? (Well, they don’t say they’re making art, for starters — they’re letting the world see what is happening in far-flung places.) But I too was awe-struck and thought quietly to myself — wow, that is cool looking.
I remember a friend having come up to 12th St., where I lived then, from downtown on that morning. She was in tears, shaking, a wreck, and she kept saying over and over “It…it…it was beautiful.” She didn’t mean the former trade towers were beautiful — not many would claim that — but that the massive destruction was awe-inspiring, overpowering…and in a horrible way, beautiful.
