Years ago I attended an exhibition of late 19th- and early 20th-century architectural drawings. On the entrance wall the curator had placed a phrase lifted from the writings of the architect Louis Kahn. It read,
The joint is the source of every ornament.
The sheer clarity of that simple declaration struck me then, and still strikes me now, with great force. Of course today the word “ornament” is archaic in discussions of art, and we must look past its quaintness to the real insight of the claim, an insight that feels to me almost primal. What this statement lays bare is the generative dynamic that begets all manner of human making far beyond architecture. Indeed, what is revealed in this statement is not so much about the language of architecture as it is about the architecture of all “language.” I say “language” because I mean here every system for signifying human thought and meaning, whether verbal, plastic, aural, or gestural.
At heart, the observation is that wherever a “joint” exists between the meeting of two things there arises in the human psyche a need to mark that place of encounter. Apparently the human eye is not satisfied by simple, blunt juxtapositions. Nor is the mind willing to leave such encounters alone. It must offer some “ornament,” some “finish,” some mediation or transition. The “joint,” it seems, is too naked. It causes discontent in the human mind. The mind wants to clothe it.
This is abundantly clear in architecture. Where the plane of a wall meets the plane of a roof, the blunt encounter feels unresolved. Without jambs and moldings, the opening of a doorway through a wall feels like a gaping hole. The great architect Louis Sullivan said that such bare-bones structures amounted to buildings that were “nude.” For thousands of years the nudity of the “joint” has been clothed by the softening transition of cornice, entablature, molding, jamb, and pilaster. These mediate, reconcile, unify, negotiate. The mind likes a weaving together of the parts. Such ornaments are like the gracious hostess who softens the awkwardness between strangers at her table by naming people they know in common. In this way, she mediates the social gap between them, her words creating a transition between strangeness and friendship. Like the rows of jamb figures at the cathedral’s door, her introduction allows strangers to pass with dignity through the portal into communion.
The psychic dis-ease caused by the “joint” extends to matters far beyond architecture. “Joint” and “ornament” are both literal and metaphoric. We humans have designed an almost endless skein of “social ornaments” in order to negotiate the otherwise disjointed relationships between things and our experience of them. A simple oak threshold articulates the meeting between my house and porch; a fence adorns (but also resolves) boundary disputes at the property line; a surveyor’s plat articulates where the debt of one mortgage leaves off and the next begins; a guard, passport, and required stamp navigate the borders between countries; all these and more articulate and weave together myriad joints in the social, economic, and political architectures of modern life.
The same is true of more personal and intimate “joints” between persons. I involuntarily clear my throat softly in the library’s silence when approaching the circulation desk. To speak out loud might startle the librarian lost in her concentration. A man waits to see if a woman returns his gaze before bridging the gap between them with conversation. Or in reverse, a young lover cannot easily say goodnight and go home; parting requires the repetition of phrases and kisses to salve the widening joint of separation as they diverge. “Social ornaments” have a complex history, as when a teenage boy approaching an unknown boy on the street nods his head almost imperceptibly, this cool gesture signifying that no challenge is intended as they pass; this gesture itself being an understated grandchild of his father’s fathers, who would have tipped their hats to one another in greeting. And that tipping of hats, as Erwin Panofsky reminded us, is itself a descendent of the medieval knight’s gesture when he raised his helmet visor as a signal to an approaching knight that he intended no battle.
Whether it be threshold, boundary, phlegm, gaze, kiss, or noddings of the head, every ornament both graces and negotiates some joint felt between things. And despite the apparent smallness of so many encounters and their ornaments, there is always something large at stake. A tiny impoliteness embarrasses, upsetting one’s self or social standing. The most ordinary encounter between the sexes is, at some level, charged with powerful energies. Every encounter with an other involves primal instincts about mutual standing, is one more powerful or accepted by the other, might it come to a competition or a friendship? Absurd as it sounds on the face of it, there is in every meeting a powerful but latent set of forces. And these energies are primal, fundamental. They are about both the joy of being in relation to others and the fear of defeat by others. They indicate our constant though subliminal understanding that although we belong to the fabric of nature and being, we also feel like isolated fragments floating, and we want some notion of how things hold together.
There is a Leonard Cohen song that claims, “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” We know that suffering can bring enlightenment. But Cohen has not really gotten to the bottom of the matter. The “joint” is more fundamental than the “crack.” The crack is only one kind of joint, the one where things are broken. But the “joint” is prior. It is as much about the way the world is grown together in organic health, as it is about the way it is broken. A disjunction felt may be an alienating abyss of loneliness rooted in the fear of death, but it is equally the source of joy as separate beings seek consummation with others.
If “joint” signifies the gap experienced between our selves and the world, then “ornament” is the act of “language” formed in response. Martin Buber characterized the matter in his aptly titled essay, Distance and Relation. There he wrote, “An animal’s image of the world … is nothing more than the dynamic of the presences bound up with one another by bodily memory to the extent required by the function of life.” [1] In contrast, the “principle of human life is not simple but twofold. Humans are that “species of life [which], instead of being content like the rest with the perception of things and conditions, began to perceive its own perceiving as well.” [2] While other species live immersed within the involuntary fabric of the world, “human life lives by a twofold movement … . The first movement being ‘the primal setting at a distance,’ and the second being the ‘entering into relation.’ ” [3]
Whereas “an animal in the realm of its perceptions is like a fruit in its skin; man is … in the world as a dweller … who knows as one knows a house in which he lives … . Man is like this because he is the creature through whose being ‘what is’ becomes detached from him and recognized for itself … . It is the peculiarity of human life that here and here alone a being has arisen from the whole, endowed and entitled to detach the whole as a world from himself and to make it an opposite to himself, instead of cutting out with his senses the part he needs from it, as all other beings do, and being content with that.” By his incessant “acts of contrasting,” man “creates a realm that is removed, lifted out from sheer presence, withdrawn from the operation of needs and wants, set at a distance and thereby given over to itself.” [4] And from this position, this first movement of primal distancing, man is then impelled into the second movement, the seeking “to enter into relation … . Distance provides the human situation; relation provides man’s becoming in that situation.” [5]
The “joint” is the gap at the pith of our being human. It is that seam between perceiving as function and perceiving as self-consciousness. If our acts of contrasting create distance, and the experience of the “joint” is the experience of that distance; then in turn, the creation of the “ornament” is the act of language that addresses that distance in the urge to relation. Language, being literally physical (as acts of sound, plastic form, or gesture) and conceptual (as abstract conventions of signs) simultaneously, fills in or bridges over the spatial/psychological void between things. By its “ornaments,” language both defines and discovers the character of distance and relation, as well as creates the treaties by which we seek to live and function in peace within the wild territory of the “joint.”
An aside is necessary here. At the risk of naiveté, it seems that language has always managed to function in this capacity regardless of our theoretical models of language. Whether theoreticians have described language’s nature in ancient terms of natural versus conventional signs, as names we rationally conceive and “apply” to reality “out there,” as organically integral deep structures, as behavioral patterns of stimulus and response, as structures underlying our narrative logics, or as constructions of power where language itself is arbitrary, the place that language has always functioned is in what we perceive as the separation inside perception. The goal here is not to attempt an encompassing theory of language. Rather, I beg a certain poetic license here in using the term “ornament” which is equal parts archaic, metaphorical, and provocative. The hope, in fact, is that the very archaic quality of the term helps to make the issue at hand uncanny, keeping it just strange enough to allow us to see it afresh. My interest, working as an art historian and not a linguist, is not to settle the theoretical, but to let it roam free in order to observe works of art (acts of language), as it were, in action. But it must be admitted that this is actually part of my own theoretical posture. For it seems to me that there is no definitive resolution of theory in the otherwise useful tools of theorizing. Theorizing is not, after all, God. Theorizing operates at one pole of Buber’s distance and relation, its contribution being to secure distance, and to prevent utter romanticism in regard to relation. Theory is what Emmanuel Levinas warns about as being “the Said,” which threatens always to colonize the “Saying.” And the action of the works of art as they mediate the joint of self-consciousness always involves “the saying.”
What I mean by “works of art in action,” by borrowing Levinas’ term, “the saying,” is addressed by Buber in the same essay. He illustrates with an example from so-called primitive culture. When a primitive man uses a stone ax as a tool, and understands that he has set this stone apart for a designated use, he performs an “act of contrasting,” and thus establishes distance. But then that man takes a second stone and inscribes a picture-sign on the stone ax. What is the reason for this second act that is unnecessary to the functional purpose of the tool? Buber answers this question by turning “to the principle of human life in its twofold character”:
Man sets things that he uses at a distance; he gives them into an independence … . In this way, the first movement of the principle is satisfied … . [But] man has a great desire to enter into personal relation with things and to imprint on them his relation to them. To use them … is not enough; they must become his in another way, by imparting to them in the picture-sign his relation to them … . But the picture-sign grows to be a picture; it ceases to be accessory to a tool and becomes an independent structure. The form indicated by even the clumsiest ornament is now fulfilled in an autonomous region as the sediment of man’s relation to things. Art is neither the impression of natural objectivity nor the expression of spiritual subjectivity, but it is the work and witness of the relation between the substantia humana and the substantia rerum [substance of things]; it is the realm of “the between” that has become a form. [6]
Buber here identifies what I felt as a primal force upon encountering the phrase, the joint is the source of every ornament. It is what one feels when a work of art makes visible the experience of “the between,” of the “joint” or distance which is the predicate required to be human; but more, it is in how the “‘between’ that has become a form” makes possible—articulates by physical embodiment—a moment in which the poignant longing caused by distance is caught up and satisfied in the euphoric consummation of relation. This moment, this present, is a forgetfulness of distance, not by slipping back into animal pre-consciousness, but by a human rising ahead to touch what is felt as a consummation (even as something transcendent) during the ephemeral visitation of relation.
It would be misguided to list out some canon of artworks that make such a present possible. By the very nature and necessity of relation, no static canon could hold. By definition, the presence of the moment loses its life and becomes past in the very instant that we recognize it as a “moment.” There are, however, works of art that stimulate, often repeatedly, such moments. Something in their construction operates as a “thin place,” surprising the viewer if the viewer is responsive. But in the end, although there are criteria for artistic success, no formula guarantees epiphany and visitation is personal. At the same time, it is illuminating to consider a variety of works that seem, to me at least, examples in which “the realm of ‘the between'” has become incarnate in a “form,” and whose qualities deeply embody and, therefore, bear witness within themselves, to the “relation of substantia humana and substantia rerum.” Especially fruitful are works that not only “ornament” that “joint,” but are also about that joint.
Along these lines, a sculpture of Alberto Giacometti’s from 1934, Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), comes to mind. In this life-size figurative work, we encounter a young nude woman, both elegant and fragile, simplified and universal in appearance, who half-stands, half-sits, held within a geometric framework that contains her existence. Her hands reach out, fingers spread, as if she grasps an object, but no object is visible. She holds and yet does not hold something that is nothing. Suspended at chest level, the gesture of her hands seems to indicate something concrete yet invisible, while her face looks, not at the invisible object in her hands, but out into open space. The quizzical look on her face, her eyes wide open and mouth parted as if in surprise or on the verge of exclamation, suggests a presence implied and an absence felt, a void. She seems to hover on the very brink of identifying something longed for or feared. Her visage expresses wonder or dread, or perhaps both at once. Her stance feels, simultaneously, like she is about to stand up, even to step out like a sleepwalker into an abyss, and like she is restrained, the inexplicable plate leaning against her shins holding her back, suspending her eternally on the cusp of some enigmatic realization.
Do her hands hold—while her mind comprehends—life’s intangible mystery and meaning, which comes as an epiphany that she tries to grasp and retain, but which will in another moment elude her again? Or do her hands hold an empty void, alienating in the realization that what lies “beyond” is sheer nothingness? Does her look of wonder indicate the Mysterium Tremendum, the ineffable presence and beauty of God? Does she encounter the Other, the sacred? Or is her look one of shock, indicating disappointment and dread? Or do her face and hands signify the limbo of agnosticism as the ultimate “undecidability”?
Giacometti uses figure, face, hands, and a cubic foot of empty space to articulate an ephemeral moment between distance and relation. He makes us conscious of a “joint” in space by creating a sense of total suspension. But of course the gap experienced is as much temporal and psychological as it is spatial. He does this in such a manner that what remains invisible becomes the most compelling thing, though we would never have attended to that empty spot without the framing of it by this woman’s hands and mind. The artist leaves open what it is that she learns, for what she discovers there cannot be pictured or spoken. What she encounters, in Levinas’ terms, is “the saying” and not the “said.” Or to reach more deeply into Levinas’ wisdom, in his exploration of proximity (again the problem of the “joint” where two things stand in relationship to each other), he characterizes such living encounters in terms of the “joint” framed between “enigma and phenomenon.” [7] Although Levinas disagreed with much in Buber’s thought, there is nevertheless a poetic resonance between Buber’s distance and relation and Levinas’ enigma and phenomenon.
At the heart of his essay Enigma and Phenomenon, Levinas observes: “the Other does not appear within the world but is an interruption or disturbance of it.” [8] And the experience of the Present (the Presence of the Other)—the “saying”—recedes instantly into the Past (the “said”) precisely in that moment when one’s mind realizes an epiphany is occurring and tries to seize the mystery by closing one’s hand over it. The problem for the artist, but equally for any human seeker, is to allow that moment of suspension to remain open so that it may do its work.
Elsewhere Levinas articulates this dilemma with a different set of images in his discussion of “the face.” In the essay Meaning and Sense (again a “joint”) he says,
the phenomenon of the Other’s aspiration is a face—or, again (to indicate the entry, at every moment new, into the immanency and essential historicity of the phenomenon): the epiphany of a face is a visitation … . The Other who manifests himself in a face as it were breaks through his own plastic essence, like a being who opens the window on which its own visage was already taking form … . [It is] a “way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form, an openness in the openness … . The visitation of the face is thus not the disclosure of the world, [it is the interruption or disturbance of it]. In the concreteness of the world a face is abstract or naked … . The nudity of a face is a bareness without any cultural ornament, an absolution, a detachment from its form in the midst of the production of its form. The face enters into our world from an absolutely foreign sphere, that is, precisely from an ab-solute” [9] (emphasis Levinas’).
There is a fascinating, though surely not intentioned, resonance in reading Levinas’ words against the viewing of Giacometti’s sculpture. Indeed, Levinas’ discussion of the “face” is uncannily apropos when we remember that in the process of making The Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), Giacometti had been paralyzed over the problem of the head and face. For months he had tried to reconcile the simplified body (which, according to André Breton, was inspired by the stylized human shapes from a Solomon Islands Seated Statue of a Deceased Woman), with a rather classical head. [10] Breton tells us that Giacometti’s impasse was broken when he found a sharply angled, warrior-like mask at a flea market. The strangeness of the mask, for which neither Giacometti nor Breton could guess the origin or purpose, “seemed to help Giacometti overcome his indecision … serving the same function as that of a dream, in that it frees the individual from paralyzing emotional scruples, and makes him understand that the obstacle … has been cleared.” [11]
The episode with the mask seems fitting to our discussion for two reasons. First, the tradition of classical figurative sculpture (which was a powerful point of reference for Giacometti) is highly inadequate for expressing the meaning that Giacometti was after in The Invisible Object. A classical face is—by definition and experience—a “resolved” beauty. It is not the kind of face that lends itself to expressing what is enigmatic, strange, Other, or mysterious. “Classical” has come to mean “complete,” and it is “fixed.” It is, in Levinas’ terms, the “said.” It was, for Giacometti, the already known, as defined by the Greeks and maintained in Western sculpture for two thousand years. This was hardly the aesthetic for expressing something Other that enters the world as an “interruption or disturbance.” The classical face was so much the face of the past that it could never be “strange,” and certainly could never be “nude.”
The second reason that the mask is fitting to our discussion is that what Giacometti needed and found in the strangeness of the mask was an aesthetic of the Other. That is, for Western eyes in the 1930s, “primitive” art of other cultures was still new or unfamiliar enough to be experienced as a rupture or a “joint.” Even better, Giacometti’s breakthrough was inspired by a mask. A mask not only implies something strangely other, it also speaks of the layers of a face, of the mystery of one face sensed behind or through another. In this regard, Levinas poignant imagery of “the phenomenon of the Other … [as] a face, [which] is a visitation,” and that enters the world as “the Other who manifests himself in a face [that] … breaks through his own plastic essence, like a being who opens the window on which its own visage was already taking form … coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form, an openness in the openness”—this imagery collaborates profoundly with what Giacometti sought to express in The Invisible Object.
His final treatment of the face as an abstract, masklike form gives exactly the right distance between the concrete phenomenon of human faces in the ordinary sense, and the enigma required to evoke the meaning of the Other. And that evoking of the Other succeeds by remaining abstract enough as to make no presumptuous claims about the identity of the Other. Giacometti’s solution for the face is as close as an artist could come to what Levinas describes as the “face [that] is a bareness without any cultural ornament … abstract and naked,” entering “into our world from an absolutely foreign sphere, that is, precisely from an ab-solute.”
Giacometti’s capacity to make us feel this sense of “suspension” in The Invisible Object is remarkable. The sensation is literally physical, which is appropriate to the art of sculpture given its intense physicality. But that sense of physical suspension (almost a holding of one’s breath) corresponds to an internal suspension that is emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. This evocation of the moment belongs to Buber’s notion of “the between,” the artist having discovered an exact form as analog between the experience of the body suspended in space and the mind in wonder.
The art of sculpture has this capacity because its symbolic function appeals to the mind while its sheer physicality occupies the same tangible space as our bodies. But other art forms that bear less physicality are equally capable of achieving such a suspension in the terms of their own medium.
Denise Levertov’s poem “Suspended” is a case in point:
I had grasped God’s garment in the
void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to
remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted. [12]
This poem shares considerable imagery with Giacometti’s sculpture: out-reached hands, fingers extended to grasp but feeling nothing, a body upheld, as it were, in an ambivalent stability by what “frames” it, a sense of awe or surprise about something Other which is nevertheless doubted, and at the center, a void. All of these are found in both works, but so is another more crucial ingredient—a moment of epiphany or visitation in which the Other sought seems actively to enter the world and yet cannot be grasped, or known.
There are telling differences between these artworks as well. Giacometti’s involvement in Surrealism (still in 1934) and Levertov’s Christian faith focus the idea of the Other differently. Though Levertov embraced doubt and struggle as deep partners in what faith meant, and as a poet resisted cliché and presumptuous language at all costs, she could still speak of “God.” Depending on the reader’s own beliefs, this may be seen as intellectually and aesthetically too literal or it may be viewed as actually more rigorous. The artistic problem of creating an effective artwork that uses a more direct language for God is that the poet has lessened distance by using a more loaded word. If the word used thus diminishes the suspension of the poem (giving readers the sense that they are closer to knowing the Other as familiar, as Levinas’ “said,” “same,” or “colonized”), then the poet must find other means to retrieve or charge that distance, lest the aspects of the work which then pull toward relation become trite.
Readers who are comfortable in their Christian faith may feel an objection to this need to always distance belief. But for the artist, this issue was long ago articulated in the commandments of Moses. There we are told to have only One God, and to love Him; but immediately in the next two commandments, we are forbidden to use either images or the Name of God in any way that colonizes God under the anthropomorphic presumption that we possess or “fix” God through the power of our languages.
To avoid such presumption—not to mention the risk of boredom—much early 20th-century art used extremely abstract language to express the Other. In this strategy, the Other is expressed only as a very generalized sense of spirituality (or in Surrealism’s case, psychology), but without any overtones of orthodoxy. While appealing, when measured against the moribund state church systems of Europe and in light of the systematizing of “God” in theology (as often as not in the polemics between denominations claiming superiority), this inevitably left the Other side of the equation so amorphous as to be little more than each person’s invention of an idiosyncratic Deity.
Despite their many failures to maintain the difficult tensions inherent here, the great monotheistic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are called to avoid either an over-speaking of “God” or a dissolving of “God.” They claim that this reality, which is unseen and ineffable to human understanding, is far more real—far larger—than what we call the concrete phenomena of nature and history. The elements on each side of the “joint,” as it were, have far greater distance and yet require a far more exacting relation than do those compliant spiritualities or self-reflective psychologies which think it unsophisticated to say, “God.” But they also require far less of the chatty clarity about God that is all too common in fundamentalist and evangelical circles.
In the “grounded” spiritual traditions of monotheism, to say that God is unknowable, or Mystery, is not at all the same thing as Theosophy’s claim that God is “abstract.” Nor is the unknowable vague, general, and self-invented. But it is also the case that to dare to say “God” does not entail the arrogant human wielding of dogmatic theology that claims to speak for God and impose his will on society. Distance and relation is a theological mystery. The artist interested in what Annie Dillard has evoked as Holy the Firm must use language that achieves a concrete precision and a rich contingency all at once. This, it seems to me, is the sort of difficult “ornament” engendered by the “joint” felt at the seam between God and our selves. In Christianity at its best, the distance between God and humans is infinite and unbridgeable, but the relation between them is immediately at hand and available.
This is in no way to make a dull argument that Levertov’s work is, from some orthodox point of view, superior to Giacometti’s. The point is to discern the different aesthetic problems set for each based on how they perceive these matters. For Giacometti, who was an agnostic, The Invisible Object bears witness in the most profound and integral way to the question of Being. For Levertov, agnosticism was not an option, but doubt was a deep and crucial dimension of belief, one which gives belief integrity.
In Levertov’s art then, her use of more tangible words to evoke the Other must be mediated in some way that avoids both cliche and presumption, while still not abandoning a firmness. She achieves this by placing those concrete words at precise angles within their syntax, such that the mind cannot obtain a white-knuckled grip of certainty on them. She does not say “God” but rather “God’s garment,” and then quickly pits the smallness of her “hand” that seeks to grasp it against the vastness of the “void” on one side and the slipperiness of “rich silk” on the other. And when she speaks of “The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember,” she once again deflects our grasping desire for frontal possession by shifting the voice of the one who would name God from herself to her sister. The “naming” is further distanced by quotation marks, indicating a well-worn cliché lifted from hymnody more typical of low or folk religion than of high church. (We might note how this folk quality echoes Giacometti’s release from the orthodox beauty of the classical head by way of primitive art.) And finally, all this is distanced yet again by nostalgia, that is, what her sister “loved to remember” but not necessarily what she could overtly “believe” dogmatically.
This distancing of “God” by familial, folk, and nostalgic sentiments establishes a dynamic between what is familiar and yet strange, which holds the reader in suspension. And so the more harsh and naked images of “leaden weight,” “falling” and “clawing at empty air” can credibly heighten the drama, to the point that, given the real intangibility of what is on the Other’s side of the equation, to say she has “not plummeted” succeeds.
It is also possible to consider Levertov’s use of line breaks (for which it’s helpful to see the poem as published in book form, free from the constraints of narrow magazine columns). Her essay on how an effective line break amplifies a poem’s allusiveness makes clear how the physicality of the poem’s body on the page is crucial to how a reader inflects the meanings encountered inside the word’s contents during the act of reading. “Suspended” is no exception, for in it the three lines that most directly image a “reaching out” towards God are the longest lines. Each extends farther into the whiteness of the page than the lines that follow them; these shorter following lines give voice to the doubts that always accompany the mind’s assertions of belief. At breaks of the longer lines, each leaves the reader with a word (“void,” “remember,” “empty air and feel”) that matches the sensation of being suspended over empty space.
In thus shaping the physical body of the poem on the page, Levertov is like a sculptor who expresses by constructing forms in open space. The suspension felt in Giacometti’s The Invisible Object, as the forms of a woman’s body caught in a framework and hands reaching to grasp empty air, is the plastic artist’s equivalent to the poet’s line on the white page, which also house a woman’s being caught within a syntactical framework with her hands reaching into empty air. Above all, it seems to me that the masterstrokes of both artists lie in their capacity to cause this sense of suspension in the context of artworks that ask the questions, “Where do we exist?” and “Is there something more out there to encounter?”
No less masterful is the more abstract, “pure” suspension experienced at the heart of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Whereas Giacometti used literal three-dimensional space and Levertov the white plane of the page, the musician Barber uses silence. Space, white page, and silence are, as it were, the very “grounds of being” most fundamentally inherent to the “languages” that are plastic, verbal, and aural respectively.
In his Adagio, Barber erects an architecture of sound in the medium of silence and time that lifts his audience gradually from the warm and soothing opening notes played pianissimo at mid-range to a climactic, shrill chord played fortissimo at high range some fifty-three measures later. Through long series of rising three-note sequences played legato, the Adagio builds so gradually as to carry the ear up without resistance, first by the violins, then the violas, and finally the cellos, all ascending on harmonic thirds, until a height is reached a full octave and some six minutes later. At the pinnacle of the climactic chord, the tone shifts from a structure based on harmonic thirds to a jarring tension of notes just half steps apart and sustained with twisting of slow half-step movements for four long bars. The ear is carried from sonorous depths to harsh and anxious heights. And then, at the precipice of that height, Barber suddenly and sharply silences every instrument, leaving the ear in utter silent suspension as the echoes and overtones float, then fade into a void of silence.
The effect is like being carried gently up a gradual mountain slope to the peak, only to discover too late that the pinnacle is a sharp cliff edge straight down on the other side, and one’s momentum has carried one over that edge and out into a void of empty space. There, by sheer momentum (the resonance of echo and overtones), one continues to rise for several seconds into thin air, as the sound of the strings slowly fades into silence. At the arc of this rise one then begins to free-fall. Barber does not catch the plummeting ear from out of this sublime but terrifying musical void until it has dropped a full octave. Then, in the softness of pianissimo, the full texture of strings (violin, viola, cello, and bass) extends a warm, rich chord built of the same comforting harmonic thirds as the Adagio’s opening chord. The free-fall is over, and the Adagio’s final 16 bars carry the audience back to earth safely.
During the climactic silence, the listener finds herself literally and figuratively holding her breath, and the final descent feels like a long, slow exhalation. Breath, pneuma, is life, and the suspension of breath that Barber’s Adagio creates feels like a dangerous plummeting into death. That silence is a “joint,” a distance created, and the ear desires to return to relation, to life. This is equally the case in Levertov’s poem, where the subtext is whether or not God is there to catch us in death’s descent. And it is equally the case with Giacometti’s sculpture. Death is a religious question as well as a physical fact of nature, and these are in the very best sense “religious” works of art. Carl Einstein, the critic who discovered Giacometti and did the most to foster his critical acclaim, wrote: “The religious work of art is, so to speak, a product of the invisible, caused by the disappearance, the nonexistence of a being” in its death. The suspension between life and death, sustained in our capacity to perceive our own perception of such moments; this is Buber’s “realm of ‘the between.'” The alternation between substance and nothing, between tangible hands and a void, between words printed and the blank page, between musical notes played and silence, is the aesthetic embodiment of the breath-stopping dread we feel between life and death. And each of these artistic shapings of material is an example of “‘the between’ that has become a form.”
One does not need to know the circumstances in which Giacometti created The Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void) to arrive at these matters. But it is compelling nevertheless to know that its making came at the time of his father’s death in the summer of 1933. Christian Klemm observes, “His father’s death made Giacometti head of the family, and as the eldest son it was his duty to provide a memorial stone. Hands Holding the Void is a monument to Giacometti’s father: the hieratic large woman who holds the deceased’s soul, the Egyptian kâ.” [13] As Klemm points out, “the soul or kâ, is indicated by the hieroglyph of the soul bird, or death bird, that the artist placed on the side of the woman’s ‘throne’; the following year Giacometti positioned the same bird on his father’s stone for the cemetery.” Later, Giacometti omitted this hieroglyph in casts of the sculpture, having moved past the specific incident of his father’s death, but the originating power of death, the “joint” that is the source or cause of every ornament, is still felt there even in its absence.
Similarly, although Barber’s Adagio for Strings was originally written as a purely instrumental work, his audience has adopted it as music inherently suited to the context of death. It has been chosen many times for state funerals, two of the most poignant being the funerals for Princess Grace of Monaco and President John F. Kennedy. And years after composing it, when Barber set words to this music as a choral piece, the text he chose was the Agnus Dei, from the Mass: “Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, grant us peace.” When performed in Latin the great suspension of silence occurs between Dona nobis pacem (Give us peace), sung in a chord that is held at a shrill and fortissimo fever-pitch, and then again, after the silence and drop of an octave, in a harmonic and pianissimo chord, Dona nobis pacem. From the harsh pinnacle of dissonance, which is the anxious cry beseeching God, to the gentle plain of consonance, the grateful prayer of thanks, the long break of pneuma carries the hearer from death to redemption.
What Giacometti, Levertov, and Barber achieve in these works is to make mystery sensible. To make sensible, palpable, is not the same thing as to explain. It is more to make present by embodying, than it is to make clear by rationalizing. It is the office of the arts to thus bear witness to the terms and dynamics of being, more through the analog of form and sign than through the proving of logic and analysis. This is part of the distancing needed by self-conscious beings to finally perceive themselves; it is the predicate required to establish the properties of existing, so that the subject—our selves—might be enabled to determine their relation to it.
Considered together, what Giacometti, Levertov, and Barber make sensible or palpable is a complex set of responses to the vulnerability of existing as self-conscious beings. These three works evoke awe, wonder, and hope. But they also convey dread, doubt, and fear. More importantly, they bind these opposite emotions together. What they make visible is the psychological space of the void felt in the terms of suspension between being caught and embraced in Otherness and being dropped and falling through Nothingness. These works admit (as confession, but also as an allowing to come in) to mystery and silence. They are about the sacred and the ineffable.
It is possible to use religious words such as “sacred” and “ineffable” without being unduly romantic or mystical—especially given the hardheaded reservations that each of these artists (Barber the least so) shows regarding trusting the Other. Indeed, the ancient meaning in these words has a hardness more than a softness. For in referring to what is beyond language, “ineffable” includes both the unsayable sublime and the unspeakably obscene. And “sacred,” from the Latin sacrare, implies both what is set apart as holy and what is cut off as cursed, sacrare being the root for “sacrament” (offering up in consecration) as well as for “sacrifice” (offering up as victim to be killed).
This dark and mysterious “joint”—where the setting apart as holy and beautiful in honor of the divine Other meets the violent killing or cursing in blood sacrifice of the other in appeasement of God—eliminates all sentimental forms of piety or mysticism. Ironically, though Barber’s work seems to bear the least hardness or reservation, it is his work here that overtly introduces the problem of guilt, shame, and killing in blood sacrifice to the discussion. For in his setting of the Adagio to words, the words chosen are precisely about The Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world through blood sacrifice, and about the Jewish and Christian concept that “peace” is only attained through appeasement of God’s anger at evil and violence.
This does not mean that the troubling dynamics of shame and guilt as part of Mystery are limited to overtly religious belief. As Rosalind Krauss has shown, Giacometti’s interests certainly involved the same issues, though not in orthodox Christian metaphors. Giacometti’s friends in the 1930s were the Surrealists. Their interest in Freud, Nietzsche, and primitive art involved them in a parallel understanding, via the avenues of surrealist and Freudian theory, instead of Christian theology. For example, in his examination of cave artists’ portrayal of human beings versus animals, George Bataille asked why animals were portrayed with such care, “such perfection” of naturalistic detail, and yet humans were portrayed with such “crude and distorting … ignoble caricatures.” [14] Bataille concludes—and Krauss argues that Giacometti resonated with this judgment—that “there is an irremediable doubleness at the root of things.” Or more precisely, when it came to early man’s self-representation, animals belonged seamlessly to the fabric of nature, and hence were represented in noble detail, but man was more fraught within his self-consciousness, and therefore portrayed himself with crude and distorting forms, indicating a desire for “a primal vandalism wrought on the images of man … proceeding from a wish to destroy or mutilate.” [15] Hence, in Krauss’s paraphrase, “the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme.” [16] This truth, he thought, was most vividly imaged by the Aztec sacrificial practices in which the living victim’s heart was cut out of the body and held up, still palpitating, by the priest at the altar, Bataille stressing the “astonishingly joyous character of these horrors.” [17]
Of course these examples return us to religious thought, even though the Surrealists might have revised it through the more “scientific” paradigm of Freud’s psychoanalysis. But as we have seen, Giacometti’s champion, critic Carl Einstein, put it in explicitly religious terms: “The religious work of art is, so to speak, a product of the invisible, caused by the disappearance, the nonexistence of a being” in its death.
These references, which were inspiring for Giacometti, are not as far afield from the mysterious dynamics of the sacred in the Judeo-Christian sources from which Levertov and Barber draw as it might seem. In the Bible’s mythic portrayal of early history in Genesis, the animals are represented as unselfconsciously part of nature (the Garden), while Adam—even before the Fall—bears a profound doubleness at his root. While the animals God created seem benignly folded into the fabric of creation, Genesis 2:15 says: “YHWH, God, took the human and set him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to watch it.” [18] Although here Adam is still “naked and unashamed,” already he has a doubleness to him. He is part of nature’s fabric (in the garden “to work it”) and consciously set apart from that fabric (“to watch it”). The text (vs. 16-17) then relates that Adam alone is given a different kind of command. He is told that he lives in the vicinity of the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He is told that he may eat of Life, but not of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And he is told that if he eats of the latter, he will die. Even in this pre-Fall innocence, there is a deep “joint” that is too naked to leave unadorned or unarticulated.
As if this were not intense enough, verse 18 quotes God: “Now YHWH, God, said: It is not good for the human to be alone.” That Adam is “alone” in his consciousness and moral awareness of the joint between death and life is an enormous weight. What suspends him in this void is nothing less than choice. Is this not the beginning of being one who “perceives his own perceiving”? Even more, the awareness that it is YHWH, God—who is good, who is sacred—that would punish Adam by killing him in his aloneness secures the doubleness at the root of Adam’s existence and guarantees the ambiguity of blessing and curse within “the sacred.” This proximity of life gift and violent death within the sacred lies at the heart of the Bible’s first representation of the human figure. Already Adam is ripe with distance and relation; already the fabric of Adam’s psyche is latent with multiple “joints” where opposite elements meet in troubling and unresolved ways.
What follows next in the Genesis text completes this dynamic. In the effort to salve Adam’s aloneness, “God formed from the soil every living-thing of the field and every fowl of the heavens, and brought each to the human, to see what he would call it.” As Adam meets each animal his consciousness towers over theirs. They remain mute and, in Buber’s phrase, their “perceptions [are] like a fruit in its skin.” But Adam, we are told, though he names them all, “finds no helper corresponding to him.” “Naming,” of course, is mythic shorthand for “language.” As Adam, in his greater consciousness, meets every creature, the “joint” or gap between them is felt as a lack of correspondence. Language is the tool by which he seeks to address that gap. It is the “ornament” that would give articulation to this fresh new world until he feels at home. But, again in Buber’s terminology, the “principle of human life is not simple but twofold,” humans being that “species of life [which], instead of being content like the rest with the perception of things and conditions, began to perceive its own perceiving as well.”
In terms of the Genesis account, the tension between distance and relation in Adam is still latent until he and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. It is then that humans shift from “being naked and unashamed” to “knowing they were naked and being ashamed.” It is then that man ceases to live “like a fruit in its skin” and begins to live “in the world as a dweller … who knows as one knows a house in which he lives … . Man [being] like this because he is the creature through whose being ‘what is’ becomes detached from him.” At this moment, the “joint” between man and all things ripens and becomes an abyss, a void. At this moment, the ornament of clothing is initiated, first as leaves, but soon as the skins of an animal, requiring violence in their slaying. And at this moment, awe, wonder, hope, fear, dread, and doubt are welded together into the “sacred.” Surely this is the biblical counterpart of what Bataille observed about the “vandalized” way that ancient cave painters portrayed the human figure.
This ancient root still provides nourishment to the imagination in the modern period, as is evident in the works by Giacometti, Levertov, and Barber considered here. And so it feels right to conclude with something else ancient which stands like a sculptural ancestor to Giacometti’s Invisible Object and a conceptual predecessor to Levertov’s Suspended and Barber’s Adagio: the Ark of the Covenant. In the sense of Hans Belting’s study of sacred images created before the aesthetic self-conscious era of art, this work would not originally have been thought of as “art.” [19] But it powerfully embodies the essence of what this essay has sought to make visible in self-conscious works of art. It is, in a very original sense, an “ornament” made to mediate a “joint.”
The Ark of the Covenant—or the Ark of the Testimony, as it might also be called—was built by the artisans Bezalel and Oholiab, according to the instructions given to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is described in great detail in Exodus chapters 35–40. This “Ark” was essentially a box, or coffin-shaped structure, built of acacia wood and covered with gold. On its top was the Mercy Seat, or “Purgation-cover,” made with gold. On that cover were two golden Cherubim flanking the Mercy Seat, facing each other across its open space, their wings spread, “overshadowing” the Seat. Inside the Ark, Moses was to place the Testimony, the Tablets of the Law.
On those Tablets were written the Commandments, the first of which made clear that Israel was to have no god besides YHWH, who in his mercy had brought them up out of slavery in Egypt. Moses knew something about this YHWH from his encounter at the Burning Bush many years earlier in the same geographic spot, as recorded in Exodus chapter three. And what he knew from that earlier event is relevant to the nature of the Ark of Testimony. For it was when he encountered the Burning Bush that he first heard the “name” YHWH.
Linguistically, this was not a normal name. A normal name is a noun, signifying things and persons that have limits and boundaries. In his essay on translating the name of God, Martin Buber shows that the root of YHWH is not a noun but a verb, derived from the first-person form of “to be.” [20] In the third-person form, YHWH means “he causes to be.” Thus the name does not so much indicate God’s eternal being (as thing or person with boundaries) but rather his eternal action and presence in historical affairs. Buber suggests it would be more accurate to have Moses ask “Who is your name?” instead of “What is your name?” Further, Buber argues that the root of this word traces to the prehistoric “Hu,” the unnamable, coupled to “YA”: “YA-HU,” a cry, a primitive sound that later develops into a corresponding noun. This “name” preserves the elemental cry itself; it is more of an action or a shout than a word. It is a word that, so to speak, is an action, a word as close to “Being”—creative dynamic, burning, being—as words can take us. “I AM that I AM” thus suggests “I am and shall be present with you,” or “I am present and it is not necessary or possible for you to conjure me.” It is about a “Presence Among You Wherever You Go.”
In other words, the “name” YHWH is a linguistic act which, in Moses’ circumstances, simultaneously expresses the infinite distance and the intimate relation between God and man. Years later, after the Exodus and now at the base of Mount Sinai, (actually Moses’ second ascent, following the debacle with the golden Calf), YHWH again asks Moses to do something extraordinary, and again Moses asks for clarification. Instead of asking for the “name” of the One who sends him into Egypt, he asks if he can see God’s face, his glory. God tells Moses that he cannot see God’s face and live; but God will let Moses see his “back” as God passes by in the “proclaiming of his name.” Once more the “name” is associated with action or movement, as if uncontainable by anything static. Once again, the Other is present as “the saying” and not “the said,” as a visitation only.
Thus when Moses, hidden in the cleft of the rock, experiences the proclamation of that name, it is “pronounced” as a string of actions and dynamic conditions of existence. In preparation, God says, “I will make my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, YHWH, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.” To Moses, hiding as instructed, seeing only “God’s back,” the pronouncement of YHWH is, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness … forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will not clear the guilty.”
This reality that God is understood by humans not as some static “name” or systematic theology, but only in the active movement of love, mercy, forgiveness, anger, and justice, tells us much about the “joint” uncovered in Adam’s experience and the void where we are suspended in the works by Giacometti, Levertov, and Barber. And it also says a great deal about the inadequacies of language to “fix” any notion of God, or to stand as definitive “ornament” in the gap of our experience. All of which is relevant to the last work of “art” considered here. In keeping with the dynamic language of pronunciation, the Commandments placed inside the Ark not only say that Israel shall have no other God than YHWH—they add that no images shall be made of God, nor shall God’s name be taken in vain.
These prohibitions may suggest a severe attitude towards art (both visual and literary), and they have often been taken to intend just that. And yet, in the description of the Ark of Testimony, images are used. On the Ark was the Seat of Mercy, that very quality so central to the proclaiming of YHWH. And flanking the Seat of Mercy were two images, the golden cherubim. Over the Seat of Mercy itself, there was to be nothing. There only a void existed. Here was the presence of God’s glory, the being that cannot be pictured. But of course, it is only because the two cherubim frame that open space that we know it is indeed full. Like those jamb figures on the cathedral portal, they articulate this void, this “joint,” with the “ornament” of gold figures with spread wings. Here distance and relation, enigma and phenomena are suspended in the realm of “the between” precisely by forms that articulate—imply—what is beyond form.
It was precisely in that void that ancient Israel was to find mercy and redemption in the face of guilt and death. And it is from within a modern counterpart of that void that Giacometti, Levertov, and Barber craft their ornaments. Ornaments caused, as it were, by the “joint” which is at the source of every ornament.
Wayne Roosa is professor of art history at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. This essay first appeared, in slightly different form, in Imagination and Interpretation: Christian Perspectives, edited by Hans Boersma (Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing), a volume based on the LambLight Lectures delivered between 2001 and 2003 at Trinity Western University and sponsored by the Geneva Society. Used with permission.
1. The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher D. Biemann (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2002), p. 207. Hereafter, MBR.
2. MBR, p. 206.
3. MBR, p. 207.
4. Ibid.
5. MBR, p. 209.
6. MBR, p. 210.
7. “Meaning and Sense,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernascom (Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 65-78. Hereafter, BPW.
8. BPW, p. 65.
9. BPW, p. 53.
10. See Rosalind E. Krauss, “No More Play,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, 1985), pp. 43-45 & ff. Giacometti’s early effort with a more classical head can be seen in the background of a photograph of him in his studio, reproduced in Alberto Giacometti (The Museum of Modern Art /Kunsthaus Zurich, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 285.
11. Krauss quoting Breton, op. cit., p.43.
12. Reprinted in Denise Levertov, The Stream and the Sapphire (New Directions, 1997).
13. Christian Klemm, plate commentaries in Alberto Giacometti (The Museum of Modern Art /Kunsthaus Zürich, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 111.
14. Krauss, p. 53.
15. Ibid., p. 54.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 55.
18. The Five Books of Moses, translated by Everett Fox (Schocken Books, 1983). My emphasis.
19. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).
20. Martin Buber, The Burning Bush, reprinted in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Schocken Books, 1982), pp. 44-62.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
