mystical landscapes

visiting toronto from mumbai recently, i treated myself to the mystical landscapes exhibit at the art gallery of ontario. aside from any specific surprises, disappointments or expected delights, some more general impressions:

canada’s troupe (including carr and the group of seven) plunge into god as well or better than most of the rest of that presented world

the extra-thick crowds around van gogh, while not unjustified (the represented starry night is powerful) and not as wholesale an absurdity as the gaggling routine camera competition around the louvre’s mona lisa, remind of something mostly to be forgotten

humans (and other animals) – while thick as art voyeurs on the exhibit floor – are almost entirely absent from the art. yes, we can say this emerges partially from the period – mostly a century ago, the selection process, in which a certain strain of artists struggled with the increasing potency and pervasiveness of a technocapitalistic society by withdrawing from its human and industrial faces. but it is not just this (and related factors)

the divine vision – almost however we define it, palpably elusive in definition though it must be – places the human alongside the myriad creatures, without ascendancy … and how then can it appear in greater proportion than the entirety of creation – almost [but not quite] nothing, an aspect among teeming aspects of the creator, oneness, the universe, thingness, irreducible and vast complexity, love (call it what you want)

starry night has, for example, some humans, blurred individuals, hardly individuals, forms of sorts really, in the foreground, but small, more like re-shaped stars … and those other stars (the original ones, our likely destiny), those popping out like thoughts in god’s universal mind are the backdrop and centerpiece of the drama, the settlements and affairs of earth like icharus rippling into the sea in auden’s poem or bruegel’s painting … a reality to be sure, but one like a shutter being closed or opened on some lane in a village beside drying laundry in dusty-sunny air, clouds working nonchalantly as they do on their important projects

and now? a century later? 6 billion more humans, the urbanized percentage having risen from 13 to 58%,12 cities with more than 1,000,000 humans leaping to over 400, technology our skin and consciousness, god in an unmarked grave, capitalism like nero in an rpg of rpgs, art a useless caboose, a used tampon, a credit limit of vision, a dream journal, a cosmic rosary, a desert song … now … where are the mystic landscapes and those who paint them? with the soul made of garbage rather than numinous emptiness, how shall we ascend descend migrate to the forbidden light?

around the time nietzsche went mad, georges-albert aurier wrote – and this quote is prominent in the ago’s exhibit –

we must become mystics again. mysticism is what we need today; only mysticism can save our society from brutalization, sensualism and utilitarianism. the noblest faculties of our soul are atrophying … we must react.

is this sentiment even translatable in 2016?

(the journalistic reports on the exhibit in the dailies suggest in their expected prose thudding lightly across pragmatic landscapes that mysticism isn’t for everyone – a little out of place really – but that they’re glad at least the results exist even if the origins seem somewhat off to the orthodox)

does the more contemporary reel-unreel short shot in kabul (on the ago’s 5^th floor presently) hold hints?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IuEM4w7Gbc

do the films on https://vimeo.com/videovectors ?

the paintings in http://bernardlegay.fr/ ?

the sounds on https://thenidus.bandcamp.com/ ?

the dancing dead, holding hands across the waking world?

The Turin Horse

Bela Tarr, king of transforming existential bleakness into cinematic beauty, surpasses himself in his reputedly last film, The Turin Horse.  While the 7.5 hour Sátántangó remains his masterpiece and one of the crown jewels of cinema, Tarr’s finale consummates his grim vision and is, perhaps, the most relentlessly perfect depiction of monotony and futility on screen, blended through the bleak fusion of music, image and word.

Musically, the same droning bars drone in the endless wind—ponderous, becoming almost unheard in their heavy repetition, a litany of endless necessity.  Imagistically black and white with Tarr’s characteristic long takes, the unredeemable darkness of existence is redeemed only through the beauty of artifice the creator constructs, the gap being infinite—our source of irony, despair, hope and emptiness.  Verbally, silence dominates—a silence so rich in its persistent presence, so wholly aligned with the grave muteness of the father’s and daughter’s eyes, that dialogue between them, when it sparsely happens, broaches comedy.

Yet comedy, of a kind, assumes center stage during the three intrusions from the external world:  the vatic booze-obtaining Nietzsche-paraphrasing neighbour; the bawdy vaudevillian descent of the gypsies; and the rough reading of the book, seemingly a manual for cleansing violated sacred spaces.  Prophecy, violation, procedural cleansing—perhaps a mythic allusion to the 120 years between Nietzsche’s collapse and the filming of Tarr’s slow minimalist serene finale.

But little shocks from within the hopelessly enclosed world of the two protagonists remain scattered around the three larger ones:  the almost perverse eroticism of the daughter putting on her stockings, the endless potatoes and the variations of their eating, the reversals and blendings (the horse once leading is now led, the occasional merging of daughter and horse through empathy, the shift from looking through the daughter’s eyes through the window to looking through the window at her following the escape failure, the binding of father and horse through struggle, the insular union of father and daughter), and perhaps most intensely the father’s face (perfectly chosen, it embodies the film’s central theme of chiseled void and, like the theme, like the void itself, one encounters each time a kind of vertigo upon seeing it).

The six days of the film mirror the six days of biblical creation, but unlike the latter account—for which the final creative day is the climactic transcendent production of humans—The Turin Horse’s final day is brief, encased in darkness, portending death, the trees of knowledge and life withered and silent.

Tarr’s films demand deep empathy and attention; there is no escape, as in Hollywood, from the stark brutalities of existence.  Like reading The Four Quartets, one escapes instead to life’s poetic center—which only feels like an escape from life because we so frequently devote ourselves to sheltering ourselves from it.

Ostensibly, by being in the title and dominating the opening take, the horse that Nietzsche wept over (in Turin just prior to his descent into madness) is the film’s protagonist.  As the story progresses, however, the viewer begins to suspect that—no—the father and daughter jointly share the lead.  But by the end, when nothing has happened and everything has happened, it’s hard not to conclude that futility itself plays the central role—as in some of the great works of Western literature:  The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, and Blood Meridian.  Which curiously brings us back to the horse as the obscure center:  dumb, violated, forever irredeemably monotonously itself.

Does art, does beauty, provide the grace required to redeem necessity’s omnipresent horrors?  We know what Simone Weil would say.  But I might only allow Tarr to respond with his films.