In the Norwegian Bible, the name of God is translated as jeg er den jeg er (I am who I am) and jeg er (I am); it may also appear as jeg er det jeg er (I am what I am). The Canadian critic Northrop Frye writes that some scholars believe a more correct translation to be “I will be what I will be.” This is a precise formula for the universe. The motionlessness by which we are surrounded is only seeming. Beyond the bounds of our senses everything is in motion. Some things out there move so fast, others so slowly, that we are unable to register their movement. Just as we cannot hear sounds above or below our own frequency range, and cannot see objects smaller than the eye is able to discern, we are unable to register movements outside our own time frequency. The growth of the tree, the rotting of an apple in the grass, the disintegration of the mountainside are all invisible processes identifiable to us only with the help of memory, either our own or that of the community. And molecules, atoms, electrons: such unfathomable speed. We inhabit a section of the world, a niche of reality, whose continuing processes of chaos, creation, and collapse reveal themselves in patterns we find predictable. The clouds, manifest to us every day of our lives in the sky some hundreds of meters above us, are an image of this. Formation upon formation drifting by in shapes never to be repeated. Their time is our time. We do not see this in them, for they are nothing to us in themselves, but we see it in our images of them.
Summer 1985, Kristiansand’s airport, Kjevik. I’m sixteen years old as I pass down the aisle of the aircraft that is to take me to Bergen and squeeze into a window seat in one of the back rows. So rarely have I flown that I remember each and every time. All my trips have been from Kristiansand to Bergen and back again. I’m nervous about flying, a plane can crash, which is why I’m sitting at the back, I’ve heard it increases one’s chances of survival. But it’s an adventure too, a bus trip in the sky, and I like everything it involves, from the weighing and tagging of luggage to the flight attendants’ safety demonstration as the plane taxis across the tarmac, the rush of excitement in the stomach when the power of the engines is unleashed and the great machine hurtles down the runway, shaking and shuddering, before miraculously leaving the ground to become airborne. It is at that moment I feel most scared, when the aisle is no longer horizontal but steeply sloping, and yet happiest too, because at that moment we’re flying and the world as I know it, in which I go about daily on foot, by bike, on buses, and in cars, falls sharply away. The beach at the mouth of the river, the campground just behind it, the housing estate slightly farther inland. The bridge over the sound, the houses and other buildings that line the city’s grid of streets, the sprawl of surrounding suburbs.
The aircraft ascends and then banks gently, arcing back in the opposite direction. My eyes trace the river to see the house where I live, now empty. There it is, on the fringe of the woods, there!
We continue our ascent, up and up we fly, the landscape below us growing smaller and smaller, until eventually all its details vanish and the earth becomes forest, lakes, fells, valleys, sea. Above us the sky is blue, below us clouds float in the air, wispy summer clouds, and between them the landscape, green and blue, lies bathed in the light of the immense sun.
I see this, the clouds, the landscape beneath them, and something happens inside me.
I feel something I’ve never felt before.
When you’re sixteen there are lots of things you’ve never thought, and lots you’ve yet to understand. But at the same time there’s not much you haven’t felt, for the simple reason that there aren’t that many different feelings. The same feelings stream through us when we’re five as when we’re fifty, less differentiated perhaps, but basically the same. Joy, grief, sadness, contentment, despair, power. Jealousy, anger, fear, passion, craving. All feelings are variations, shades of the same basic emotions. A new feeling surprises us. I was sixteen when I last felt something I’d never felt before. It was sensational. I was looking out the window of the plane, looking at the clouds, the landscape beneath them, when I got this intense feeling of the world. It was as if I had never seen it before then. The world was a planet surrounded by gases. That insight, which I cannot describe, filled me with happiness, but also with impatience and longing. The moment passed, the plane landed, and I caught the boat to my grandparents’ house, but I have never forgotten it. In my mind, I referred to it as my “sense of the world” and thought of it as an “artistic” epiphany, my first. Therefore I associated it with writing. That was how I must write, I told myself. I had to write something that in some way was connected to my “sense of the world.”
Twenty-five years later, I have experienced several similar feelings, but none that has surpassed the first in intensity, and unlike the first, those that have followed have been awoken by pictures of the world, not by the world itself. This is hardly strange, since that first sense of the world embraced two different, opposing aspects. One concerned a presence in the moment, the now revealed in its authentic form, without past or future, whereas the other concerned the opposite – remoteness, the feeling of being outside something and considering it while being removed from it, not being a part of it. And this, the concurrence of presence in the moment and remoteness from the world, is the place of art.
The meditative, religiously tinged experience of the now, this unprecedented concentration of the moment, which creates great emotional waves of connectedness and belonging to the world, and which perhaps says nothing other than “I exist,” is possible only when the world becomes visible to us as the world, which is to say as something other than the world of the I, and this happens only when the I stands outside the world. Seamlessly, art removes us from and draws us closer to the world, the slow-moving, cloud-embraced matter of which our dreams too are made.
Pig Person
There’s an absolutely magical photograph by Cindy Sherman. It’s called Untitled #140 and belongs to her so-called Fairy Tales series from 1985. The picture is dominated by a head, faintly illuminated in darkness, cheek to the ground, face dirty and moist, only one eye visible, blue and staring emptily out of the picture. Part of a shoulder is visible too, and in front of the lower part of the face are two hands, both curled, one looks like it’s putting something into the figure’s mouth. The hair is dark and curly, the ground on which the figure lies is nondescript, but it looks like a forest floor. The nose is not human, it has the shape of a pig’s snout, and the mouth below it looks like a pig’s mouth.
The picture is simultaneously unsettling and alluring, it seems to touch on something important, fundamental even, although I can’t say what. The motif in itself is as old as the hills, art history is full of Pan-like figures, centaurs and other part-human, part-animal hybrids, but this one…it’s somehow as if Sherman has been able to dehistoricize the motif, drawing it into our time and bringing it to life, for if only one thought occurs to us when looking at a Pan figure standing in the forest in an eighteenth-century painting, for instance, or decorating an antique vase, it won’t be that the image is relevant to our lives today. It’s history, it belongs to the museum, to a bygone world. This photo, Sherman’s pig person, her American Pan of 1985, has all the same associations, but is so very much closer to us. Perhaps it’s simply to do with the way the picture draws us in physically, the way the camera has moved in on the figure, intruding almost into its intimate sphere, the way the creature puts its fingers to its mouth, how clear its gaze is to us, the focal point of the picture, and how distant, as if unattached to anything in its vicinity or in itself, adrift in the borderlands of dreams and death.
This sense of nearness to something is paradoxical and surprising, for the pig’s snout is so obviously a mask, we can so easily pick out the join between mask and face, and anyway most people who look at the photograph will be familiar with Sherman’s other works and know that she never uses any other models than herself.
So what we see is a fairly transparent photographic fiction, Cindy Sherman thinly disguised as a
pig person, and yet it’s unsettling and alluring, there’s no fighting it, because just like the fiction in a novel, it’s not the reality of the story that touches us, but the reality of the emotions it gives rise to.
The series of which the picture forms a part similarly depicts figures moving about the shadowlands of the human in a world that patently belongs to fairy tale, though its references are at no point explicit, at no point indicating any identifiable source. Another picture, Untitled #145, shows a half-length female figure lying on the ground, her thick fair hair crudely cropped, eyes staring out ahead, unfocused and half closed, a scar running down the length of her large nose, what looks like sand from the ground she’s lying on stuck to the skin around her eyes, and in her mouth, which is hanging open, we see blood. Her teeth are partly visible, smeared with blood. Another, Untitled #150, has a woman standing in the foreground with her tongue out, a grotesquely large tongue in relation to her mouth, sweat beading on her brow, eyes turned upward, irises and pupils in the left corner of their sockets, and below her tiny people are dotted about an open space, suggesting to us that the woman is a giant who towers above them. In this picture no attempt is made to uphold the illusion of reality, the figures in the background are obviously plastic miniatures.
This is play, an adult pretending to be a monster and taking photos of herself, with simple props such as masks and toy people. The transformation, always Sherman’s theme, is in itself instrumental and horizontal, occurring on the surface but always with depth, something unclear and indefinite that reveals itself in the change, the one becoming the other, and when the other is an animal or a nonhuman, that depth becomes a bottomless abyss. If you turn away from a small child, put on a mask and then turn around again, the child will be terrified, and it’s no use removing the mask, because the child knows by then that transformation is possible and that at any time you can turn into something else, a monster or an alien, that you possess that capability, and therein lies a primeval horror. It is the same horror that unfolds in fairy tales, where people are turned into bears or birds or stones, where the borderline between human and animal is blurred, for not only can it be erased by a spell or a curse, it can also be trangressed permanently in the many creatures that wander about the shadowlands of the human world: trolls, spirits, elves, dwarfs, ghosts. But the transformation not only opens up an abyss in the human world, it does the opposite too, pulling the beast into our sphere as if to estabish or indicate intimacy: the beasts can speak and are given certain properties, the fox is cunning and sly, the bear is a bit slow witted and good at heart, the hare is timid and afraid.
Sherman’s pig person invokes this world. The picture embraces horror and yet familiarity, and this is why I find it both unsettling and alluring. But this says little about the picture itself, only some small measure about the feelings it can provoke. So what is it with the mask? What is it with fairy tales? What is it with the half-human, half-animal?
Many years ago, in the early 90s, I worked as a caregiver in a mental institution. Nothing of what I had seen in life until then could prepare me for what I was to see there. Many of the patients were physically disabled, one man had withered legs with his feet pointing the wrong way, he moved around by swinging himself forward on his arms, another man had an enormous hump on his back, a third patient lay paralyzed in bed, unable to communicate. Another man, if he wasn’t stopped, would bang his head against the wall until the plaster cracked, another would wander off and walk until he fell down from exhaustion if no one kept an eye on him, another, incapable of moving or communicating, was once forgotten in front of a stove and was scarred from the burns. It was a place full of aggression and nervous tics, twisted limbs and screams, it was terrifying, so far removed from the middle-class reality from which I came, I had no idea such places even existed.
The people there had manifestly been put aside; the institution was a huge place, situated out of the way in a forest some distance outside the city. Its nearest neighbor was a prison. I worked there for a few years without ever getting used to it, going through the door into one of the wards was like entering another world. I hated being there and was often scared, but at the same time it changed something fundamental inside me, to be there was to step apart from normality, which thereby became visible at the same time it became challenged, for the loathing I could feel at what I saw was impossible to accept or admit, even to myself. But when limbs are twisted and bodies severely disabled, one suddenly sees limbs as limbs and bodies as bodies, they belong to our biological reality, like those that are not twisted and disabled. Bodies are things that grow, the human is a biological entity of cells and tissue, and out of that biology, which we share with everything else that grows, animals and plants, our culture evolves. But being human is more than just culture, for here were people who had no idea what was going on around them and could only feel and sense the most primary of things, the touch of a hand, voices, food and drink, warmth and cold.
Those who worked there did their best to make the lives of the patients easier; they were given medicine to dampen their aggressions and fears, their days were divided into different routines, breakfast, lunch, dinner, the most capable had jobs, the others were taken out on trips. The patients had their own rooms and their own belongings, photographs and souvenirs, even those to whom such things meant nothing. The furniture and curtains were the same for everyone, their clothes were the same too, and in the evenings the television was on in the TV room. But since many of those who lived there couldn’t relate to any of this, but simply existed like aliens within it, a remoteness arose which applied not only there, I saw it in my own life too, the way furniture, curtains, photographs, clothes, habits all became arbitrary. When the patients were gathered to celebrate Norway’s national day or Christmas, the excitement that was so much a part of those celebrations always evaporated, it meant nothing to them – it was as if they were just dressed up, and it meant that I saw everyone else outside the institution in the same way, as if they were dressed up. It cut into me, I saw limbs and bodies everywhere, and I saw them dressed up.
Around that same time my maternal grandmother was seriously ill with Parkinson’s disease, wasting away by the month. She’d had tremors for as long as I could remember, but in her latter years she was gripped by seizures and became incapable of even the simplest task. She was in thrall to her body, it had taken over and assumed control of everything, leaving her helpless. Where did it come from? I didn’t know, other than it was physiological, some chemicals that weren’t present in her brain. That experience, reminiscent of what I saw at the mental institution, the foregrounding of the body, shoved everything else aside, what I saw was a kind of materialism of the body that I didn’t want to know about but couldn’t escape, it was like an exposure, something in the world that was being revealed to me, but also something in myself. The slobbering mouths and the guttural sounds they made, lacking any resemblance to language, the twisted spines and withered arms I saw at the institution were vile to me, some of what I saw made me positively nauseous, and the dressing up of such disfigurement to make it seem normal could sometimes fill me with rage.
Why such strong feelings? Why discomfort, nausea, anger, instead of sympathy and humanity?
Preconceptions are a way of seeing in which the nature of what is seen is already determined. The opposite would be seeing with an open eye that accorded everything the same value, be it blood, vomit, excrement, dawns, lawns, lynx, maggots, roe, owls, hearts, crowds, monkeys, chairs, tables. This impartial eye would be unable to see any connection between different entities and phenomena, since our perhaps most important preconception has to do with what belongs together and what doesn’t. It is how we organize the world, and what makes it possible for us to live in it. This, referred to by Foucault as “the order of things,” is something we take for granted and which eludes capture – it is the way the world is – unless we step outside that order and into another, only th
en will it become visible as what it is, an arbitrary system. In the seventeenth century other parameters steered the eye, creating a different order and different systems; in the tenth century others again. The order of things is evident at a quite elementary level in Linnaeus’s classification of the plants, or in our ideas as to what constitutes acceptable behavior in public as against in private, and it is evident too in a wider, more obviously constructed concept such as the nation-state. What these things have in common is not only that they connect and hold together the elements within them, but also that they are exclusive. The idea of the holy excludes all that is not holy, the idea of the rational excludes all that is not rational, Michel Serres wrote somewhere. The first logic tells us we cannot implant a pig’s heart into a human chest, it would be unethical, an impossible transgression, whereas the second logic, which sees the heart in functional terms, tells us it would be unproblematic, a heart is a heart as long as it does the job, no transgression. Personally any transgression scares the life out of me, anything that departs from what I experience as normal, the accepted state of things, the world the way it’s supposed to be, which of course is a moral imperative, makes me react strongly, often with disgust, I can’t get used to it. Apart, that is, from in art and literature, where it’s what I look for. Why? Because I want to see the world the way it is, which is something that is forever in the making, chaotic and incomprehensible, steered by laws we know absolutely nothing about and which also steer us; my search in such cases is therefore existential, in contrast to the practical realities of day-to-day life, which takes place in the social world, where other laws apply. And it is in this light, against this background, that Cindy Sherman’s pig person gives rise to such strong emotions in me, it is the desire for and the fear of transgression I recognize, and the pull of the thought that what we call human – and what makes us so forcefully deny what we call the nonhuman – is also arbitrary.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 2