EKPHRASIS: Knowledge, Perception, Metaphor and Invention
An Excerpt from the Text
Chapter Five: Immense-Psychic-Space
Flat as images in a frame can seem, I think it’s safe to say there’s a kind of immense psychic space operating between the artist and the work, as well as between the viewer and the work. It’s as if the wall of the gallery were only the thinnest of scrims separating the histories and emotions swirling on either side. Think of all the life experience the artist brought to bear when painting, photographing, sculpting or constructing the work. Years of training, personal memories, shifts of styles, frustrations, manuveurings, luck, trial and error, risk-taking, rejection and re-beginnings. Moments when it was all clear, and long periods when it was not. And then consider all the histories swirling around that one individual life, whether it was the Great Depression influencing Walker Evans to apply to the WPA (and his subsequent engagement with James Agee during their work with sharecroppers in the South), or the Mexican Revolution and the exile of Leon Trotsky to Mexico during Frida Khalo’s mid-career. Expand that interchange to other centuries and continents and perhaps you can image that immense space to which I am referring even more. I often feel this way when walking through galleries, of whatever size or time period. The more the walls themselves are speaking, the greater the potential I will be drawn into the individual works. I might know some information about the artist’s life and times, or read about it, or I might not. Either way, its presence is there.
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Now consider the opposite side of the “scrim.” Isn’t there something of an equivalent storm brewing within the viewer of the art, the potential responder? Don’t we bring our own emotions, moods, histories, disappointments, wonder and background? This much seems obvious. And yet, how often do we allow ourselves to listen to the resonant echoes reverberating between us and the art? These two worlds intersecting provide, I believe, rich material for any ekphrastic writing.
I’ve tried to trace out various strands of this exchange in the following diagram:
Where do your own reactions come into play? Can you imagine what part of your own life steps forward to meet a Rembrandt, distant as his time period can seem? Or how about a piece from our time, such as an installation by Sandy Skogland? In her work, “Revenge of the Goldfish,” I can’t help visualizing the huge blue bedroom my brother and I shared in my parents’ first suburban house in the 50’s. And though we didn’t have tons of goldfish, he certainly killed our share of turtles, crammed into their little tanks, along with a rabbit, some crayfish and a captured frog. But I experience her work as more than a tongue-in-cheek commentary on tortured pets and more as a playful, semi-Freudian evocation of that time period, so sterile in its one-dimensional colors and its need of greater depth. I became a poet, I see now, to try to find those depths---and I bring that longing to her work.
Consider, for another ekphrastic example, this well-known poem by Rilke:
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, not turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast would not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise the stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell
Without venturing into biographical criticism, it’s still intriguing to consider the way in which Rilke’s own growth as a writer and observer of the world brought itself to bear within this poem. Written around the same time as his poem “Black Cat” and his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted earlier, this poem clearly reveals a writer re-engaging with each nuance of the visual. Dare we see in it Rilke’s recent past, where he spent hours at the artist colony at Worpswede, conversing with the sculptor Clara Westhoff (his soon-to-be wife) and the painter Paula Becker? For had he not at that time begun to change his life? And could we reach farther back, to his travels in Russia with his sometime-lover Lou Andreas-Salome and their troubled history? Clearly this is not mentioned in the poem itself, but the edge of change that Rilke had been applying to every aspect of his life surely runs throughout the poem. In essence, we face the torso itself in the poem, and the oddity of perceiving Hellenic beauty without its godly head. Where Rilke in his previous stages may have been accused (by Lou herself) as being too much “of the mind,” here he is shaping a potential sense of being “of the body,” or at least striking more of a balance. I believe he brought all of this to his seeing of the statue… and I believe we do the same.
Exercise #5: Entering the Space Between You and the Art
I love the phrase by John Berger I quoted earlier where he says, “Every painting begins with the word, ‘Here’”. Maybe every poem or story does as well. And don’t many essays, in a way, suggest, “Here’s a story I need to tell,” or “Here’s a question I need to ponder”? This chapter seeks to lay out a framework for living within the dimensions of that “here.”
But, to complicate matters, what exactly is meant by “here”? Might not “here” actually imply entering the immense psychic exchange between ourselves and the context of the art itself, as if we were suspended within the interchange of both sides of that wall? Below is a chart that I find useful for tracking the variety of “here’s” present in any art exchange. Taking some time with it can open up new dimensions for any genre, allowing ourselves to dwell in all the dimensions, as a first step before the actual writing begins. I include a bare-bones version and then one in fuller detail:
