“Freud saw the origin of the experience of «beauty» in the infant’s
perception of the milk overflowing the breast.”
Robert Fliess, Ego and the Body Ego(1)
“Eternal nature, where shall I grasp you?
Where are you, breasts, you springs of life
on which hang heaven and earth,
toward which the parched heart presses?”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I
(translated by C. F. MacIntyre)
“The relation to nature which arouses such strong feelings of love,
appreciation,admiration and devotion, has much in common with the relation to one’s
mother, as has long been recognized by poets. The manifold gifts of nature are
equated with whatever we have received in the early days from our mother. But she
has not always been satisfactory. We often felt her to be ungenerous and
frustrating us; this aspect of our feelings towards her is also revived in our relation to
nature which often is unwilling to give.”
Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation(2)
“For Beauty’s nothing
but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Duino Elegy, lines 4-7
(translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)
“From the golden avalanches of the ancient azure, on the first day, and
from the eternal snow of the stars you once took the huge calyxes for the earth
which was still young and innocent of disasters,....O mother who created in your
just and strong bosom, calyxes rocking the future phial, great flowers with aromatic
Death for the tired poet sickening from life.”
Stéphane Mallarmé, The Flowers, first and last stanzas
(translated by Anthony Hartley)
“I look at myself and see myself as an angel! And I die, and I
love--whether the
glass be art or mysticism--to be reborn, wearing my dream like a diadem,
in the
earlier prose where Beauty flowers!”
Stéphane Mallarmé, The Windows, last stanza
(translated by Anthony Hartley)
“The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern
man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so
profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief,
poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost.”
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel(3)
“But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible.”
Wallace Stevens, «Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction»
“...the tremendous significance that there can be in the interplay of two
curtains....One can think of the «electricity» that seems to generate in meaningful or
intimate contact.”
D. W. Winnicott, «The Location of Cultural Experience»(4)
“Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in reality when
once the conflict between objects, and the connecting of them together in the
mind, has begun.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology(5)
Healing The Object
Where do Joseph Raffael’s paintings stand in the history of art? I
think the only way to understand their significance is to understand what
modern art has done to the object, and how Raffael’s paintings try to undo
it while remaining modern art. Their standing has to do with their beauty,
and what beauty means. Raffael’s flowers grow in a very different way than
those of Redon and Van Gogh, just as his figures are far from theirs: it is
in that difference and distance that we must find Raffael’s meaning, and his
lasting importance. He turns the tide that began to go out with
modernism--that left behind a desert of suffering--back to the shore of
flourishing life.
After a century of negation, it is time for affirmation--time for
Raffael’s paintings, time to return to paradise with him. Freud once wrote:
«Affirmation--as a substitute for uniting--belongs to Eros; negation--the
successor to expulsion--belongs to the instinct of destruction.»(6) There
has been enough destruction in modern art, which since Cézanne and Gauguin
has struggled with expulsion from paradise, and dead-ended in the inorganic,
the ultimate statement of destruction.(7) It is time for Eros, for the
force that unites even the most incommensurate beings and forms, affirming
the life they inwardly share, celebrating the organic for its own sake. But
the task--the task that Raffael’s painting accomplishes--is to suggest the
simultaneity of the instinct of destruction and Eros, the oscillation
between them, and the way each seems to grow out of the other, with the
final triumph of Eros over the instinct of destruction in suspense.(8) It
is this moment that Raffael brilliantly captures--this «general wish to
negate» that belongs to modern art,(9) and that, while it offers a «measure
of freedom from the consequences of repression,»(10) can, when it becomes
pure «negativism,» as in the case of the «dematerialization of art,»(11)
become psychotically destructive--even as he strongly suggests the victory
of Eros and unity, and with them the renewal of integrity and return to
paradise.
When one looks at a Raffael flower one sees it whole: sees that it is
fulfilled, integral, self-consistent being, shuddering with life, however
often it exists in a field of intense black, a void of death that makes the
flower’s freshness all the more pungent and vivid. Its richness--the
flower’s inner abundance, declared by the overflow of its petals--defeats
that void. Surrounded by nothingness, it remains uniquely itself. Its
ecstatic presence defies all absence. Emphatic against the emptiness, it
becomes transcendental--»metaphysically remote,» to use Rilke’s
words(12)--even as it remains crisply empirical, terrestrial, particular.
Raffael’s flowers are pure being emerging from and conquering non-being. In
his images of flowers, we see art at its best: a fresh discovery of the
tangible and intangible, the immediate and the inevitable, the contingent
and the necessary, in all their untranslatable otherness and simultaneity.
Examples abound, from the lilies of the Renascence of 1980 through the
roses of the Renascence of 1996. The title is instructive: rebirth, a
triumph over death. Lilies occur endlessly, as though their life could
never be exhausted, but there are many other flowers, each fascinating and
inviting, from the Orchid and Hydrangea of 1976 through the flowers of the
Soyez Mysterieuses series of 1989--looking at them, one cannot help
thinking of Mallarmé’s remark that «every holy thing wishing to remain holy
surrounds itself with mystery»(13)--to begonia, peony, and iris images of
the 1990s. «Learn to fathom what a flower infers,» Rilke commands,(14) and
Raffael has done so. All his flowers are «too far for us and yet in fullest
bloom,»(15) and as such «pure contradiction.»(16) At the same time, they
«endlessly open» into «pure space,» for like «the free animal» Raffael’s
flower «has its decease perpetually behind it and God in front,» as Rilke
writes in the Eighth Duino Elegy. Seemingly «free from death» because so
intensely and innocently alive, «it moves into eternity.» It is the flower
that led Mallarmé to exclaim: «something other than known calyxes,»
something that is «an idea itself and fragrant, the one absent from all
bouquets.»(17) But the paradox of Raffael’s flowers is that, for all their
metaphysical eloquence, they are exuberantly physical.
But there is more to their fullness of being--their opulent, radiant
efflorescence--than meets the eye. It is a sign of their self-containment
and dignity--their good health and integrity. It is this that gives them
metaphysical aura. If we compare them to the flowers of Redon and Van Gogh,
as I have suggested we do, the point becomes clear at once: they are alien
and anti-life compared to Raffael’s flowers. Redon’s flowers are infected
by death, explicitly in the dark Marsh Flower: A Sad, Human Face, 1885,
implicitly in the iridescent Ophelia, 1905. It is the iridescence of
decay, the darkness of despair--the eerie glow given off by an unhealthy
body and mind: in putting «the logic of the visible at the service of the
invisible,»(18) Redon put life at the service of death. It is death that is
invisible, and which always seems illogical when it becomes visible, that
is, upsets the logic of the everyday visible with the unexpected ugliness it
makes visible. Van Gogh’s Irises of May 1890 are full, in his own words, of
«violently opposed complementaries,» an unresolvable «antagonism» that
almost pulls the flowers apart.(19) Self-conflicted--inwardly disintegrated
--they seem to be on the verge of dying, and not by a natural process. Some
are blackened shells of blue, as though rotted from within. Even Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers of August 1888 seem inwardly dead--prematurely dried out. Van
Gogh noted that «they fade quickly,»(20) which is perhaps why he chose them:
they represent his feeling of being psychically dead, however physically
alive.(21) The morbid, suicidal flowers of Redon and Van Gogh, symbolizing
anxiety about death--Mondrian’s weary, turn of the century chrysanthemums
complete the picture of premature decadence--are a far cry from the
vigorous, lively, end of the century flowers of Raffael. Where the former
symbolize suffering and psychic disintegration, the latter communicate
happiness and re-integration. It is the difference between the morbid
beginning of modern art and the joie de vivre that must subsume and succeed
it. Ironically, it is the difference between a utopian vision of death and
a realistic vision of life.
In his «Notes on the Dissolution of Object-Representation in Modern
Art,» Michael Balit writes that «the object has been losing more and more
its importance as an object; it has become a mere stimulus, unimportant in
itself, and important only in so far as it has stimulated moods, feelings,
emotions, thoughts, images, phantasies, ideas in the artist.»(22)
«There is, however,» as Balint argues, «a great danger inherent in this
narcissistic preoccupation, and this is the danger of regression,» that is,
the loss of a «mature,» «loving,» «genital» relationship with the object--a
relationship in which it is seen and valued for itself, its separateness and
autonomy and particularity respected.(23) Instead, the relationship becomes
more and more «immature» and «pre-genital.»(24) Balint believes this is
what has happened in modern art: «The treatment of the object, or the artist’s
attitude to it, i.e., his phantasies, feelings, emotions, ideas, images,
etc., when stimulated by his chosen object, are conspicuously on what
psychoanalysis would describe as the anal-sadistic level. The objects are
dismembered, split, cruelly twisted, deformed, messed about; the dirty, ugly
qualities of the objects are 'realistically’ and even 'surrealistically’
revealed; some forms and methods of representation in 'modern art’ are
highly reminiscent of 'anal’ messing; less and less regard is paid to the
object’s feelings, interests, and sensitivities; kind consideration for, and
'idealization’ of, the object become less and less important.»(25)
I believe we see the beginning of this regressive process of
dismemberment and deformation in the traumatized flowers--the objects,
indeed, selfobjects(26)--of Redon and Van Gogh. Both were conspicuously
narcissistic and all but isolated, suggesting the difficulty they had in
relating--let alone establishing a loving relationship--and subliminally
destructive, as is evident from Redon’s preoccupation with death and the
violence of Van Gogh’s painterly gestures. Both were death-in-life artists:
they render the death of the object, and with it their own sickness unto
death, to use Kierkegaard’s term for depression. For Redon death lay on the
surface of life, casting a conspicuous pall on it, while for Van Gogh the
death instinct erupted from the depths of nature, as though it was an
uncontrollable process inherent to it, threatening to break up its surface,
and clearly shaking it up. Van Gogh’s explosive paintings verge on chaos,
while Redon’s brooding paintings are entropically cloying. Neither artist
could trust the flowering of life and nature he saw around him, but, as in
Redon’s Ophelia, had to place death at its center, or, in the case of Van
Gogh’s flowers, had to show death sapping their life. Van Gogh’s flowers
are parched for all their painterliness, wrecked for all the energy with
which they are rendered.
Now Balint argues that «in the development to come we may expect a
return of interest in the objects as objects»--an end to «narcissistic
withdrawal» from them. Instead of «degrading the dignity of the object into
that of a mere stimulus and laying the main emphasis on the sincere and
faithful representation of the artist’s subjective internal mental
processes,» there will be «a concern for creating whole and hearty
objects.»(27) «This will mean a change of attitude» in the artist. He will
struggle to integrate «the discoveries of 'modern art’ with the demand of
'mature love’ for the object.» (Balint brackets «modern art» because its
disintegrative character is not uniquely modern, and «modern love» because,
as he says, it is always a «precarious» achievement.) The post-modern
artist «will have to learn to feel again regard and consideration for the
objects, but this time not because the objects can be used for the purposes
of projecting,» but because they will be «loved for what they are.»
I believe that Raffael’s flower represents this new, post-modern, mature
art of love: this new and necessary--for survival--attitude of maturity and
love. With it comes a new sense of dignity and unity--wholeness and
integrity--of the object. But also of the subject. Both can flower again;
neither will die. No longer possessed by the death instinct, both overflow
with life. Raffael’s flower is a double symbol: a symbol of the renewal
and flowering and wholeness the self experiences when it loves, and of the
renewal and flowering and wholeness of the object of love.
The paradox of the new mature attitude of love is that it restores the
object’s original power to restore us. Where we felt dead, and projected
our death onto the object, negating it, so that it seemed dead, when we love
the object--in effect recreating it after we have destroyed it--it recreates
us, making us feel alive, not only in an everyday sense, but as though we
were reborn. It gives us a completely fresh relationship to ourselves and
the world, for in the creative act of loving the object for itself it
becomes a new «first object»--a new mother, the beloved object of our
«earliest experience,» more particularly, in Christopher Bollas’s words, the
mother before she is personalized, the mother when she «functioned as a
region or source of transformation,» as what Bollas calls a
«transformational object.»(28) Thus the object repays our love by making us
feel as alive and full of potential as we were when we were infants,
carrying the modern artist’s idea of being like a child a crucial
post-modern step further. Of course, it was the Eros in us that came to the
rescue of the object, and ourselves: but what is unexpected is that it
returned us to our origins, as though in re-originating the object we
re-originated ourselves. It is as though we and it were so close to
death--so completely possessed by the death instinct--that we had to make a
completely fresh start, begin life all over again. Raffael’s flower conveys
the erotic originality of such new life. It is carries in it the mother’s
power to make experience seem original and radical: Raffael’s flower is
nature happening for the first time.
It is in effect Mother Nature’s «good breast»--the impersonal
transformational object.»(29) There is a tangled paradox here--paradox upon
paradox--an intellectual irony that is an emotional triumph: the paradox of
love. It restores the object to wholeness, and with it the subject, and is
thus «progressive.» At the same time, it is more «regressive» than
narcissistic regression, for the wholeness it discovers belongs to the
impersonal good breast, the benign «abstract» breast of Mother Nature.
Raffael’s flower is Mother Nature’s breast, restored and overflowing with
fresh life, that is, whole, hearty, and full of love--no longer frustrating,
the milk of compassion dried up. Moreover, it is beautiful as such, indeed,
doubly beautiful. The breast-flower is beautiful because it has been
renewed: it is no longer destroyed--wilting, inwardly rotten. As W. R. D.
Fairbairn says, beauty «conveys the impression of something intact, whole,
complete or perfect.»(30) Nonetheless, there is always a reminder in it of
«uncontrollable destruction»--the something strange in beauty, as the
philosopher Francis Bacon said. Thus beauty «depends upon the satisfaction
of a need for restitution,» but to be «emotionally convincing» it must
acknowledge the reality of «destruction» without which «the possibility of
restitution» makes no sense. Destruction lurks in the flower’s transience,
which is why Redon and Van Gogh may have used it to express their feeling of
mortality--their sense of impending doom and disintegration, rooted in their
depression. But Raffael emphasizes the flower’s freshness and vitality:
his flowers overflow with life, renew life perpetually, which is why they
are good, inspiring breasts--why they seem so perfect.
Raffael’s flower is a beautiful breast not only because it is bursting
with physical life, but because it teaches us a basic lesson in emotional
survival, further confirming its motherly character. It is a good breast
because it performs the «alpha function,» as Wilfred Bion calls it. Having
lost or outgrown the mother nature gave us, nature itself becomes our
transformational object. Hanna Segal writes: «If the interchange between
the infant and the breast is good, then the infant not only reintrojects its
own projections made the more bearable, but he also introjects the
container-breast and its capacity to perform the alpha function; the
mother’s capacity to bear anxiety that is projected into her by the infant
is crucial in this interplay. When the infant introjects the breast as a
container that can perform what Bion calls the alpha function of converting
the beta elements into alpha ones, it is a container which can bear anxiety
sufficiently not to eject the beta elements as an immediate discharge of
discomfort. An identification with a good container capable of performing
the alpha function is the basis of a healthy mental apparatus.»(31) The
good containing breast represents «the mother’s understanding,» as Segal
says, of the infant’s «raw, concretely felt experiences»--the beta elements.
They are too intense and incomprehensible to be mastered by the infant, and
must be mastered with the help of the mother, who, containing them for the
infant within her breast, transforms them to comprehensible
memories--symbols of themselves, that can be stored in the mind for later
development. The mother’s breast-container is beautiful because it shows
the infant that it is possible to contain itself--regulate and control its
crude experiences of its own aliveness and wild feelings--without losing its
liveliness, the vitality of its being.
Thus, Raffael’s flower is a breast-container: its petals are alpha
elements--raw feelings refined into memorable forms. Indeed, Raffael
approaches the flower with the wonder and expectations and anxious desire of
an infant, looking for loving succor. The flower returns his desperate love
of it by containing and soothing his intense feelings with its understanding
love, transforming them into manageable memories. In short, the flower
performs the alpha function, refinding raw emotional experience into
comprehensible art. Art is a form of memory: a symbolization of
experience, storing it for later cognition and contemplation, so that we
will not be overwhelmed and traumatized by it. In the terror of our need,
it becomnes an apotropaic source of comfort and consolation, for it evokes
all that is good in life. Thus Raffael’s hungry--cannibalistic--look at the
flower becomes contemplation of its beauty. The infant is no longer sick
with itself, but healthy and happy as it returns its mother’s love with
adoration of her beauty and perfection. In their intimacy, both are
transformed beyond ordinary recognition.
The Animals Of Paradise
The archetype of spirit in the shape of [an] animal appears in a
situation where insight, understanding, good advice, determination, plannin g, etc. are
needed but cannot be mustered on one’s own resources.
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious(32)
In myths the god often transforms himself into an animal, and frequently
into the animal that is sacred to him. It therefore seems plausible to suppose
that the god himself was the totem animal, and that he developed out of it at a later
stage of religious feeling....the totem is nothing other than a surrogate of the
father. Thus, while the totem may be the first form of father-surrogate, the god will
be a later one, in which the father has regained his human shape.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo(33)
Raffael’s representation of the object, I have suggested, is
fundamentally different in principle from its representation in modern art.
His flower imagery is the major proof of this. His animal imagery is also
exemplary evidence. Indeed, Raffael first came into his own as a painter of
nature in his animal pictures. As Thomas H. Garver writes, Release, 1970 is
«one of his first images dealing with natural phenomena, plants, animals and
landscape, and it is also autobiographical.»(34) The painting shows «a
young duck beginning its flight to freedom,» symbolizing the «new beginning
he was experiencing.» The human hand that releases the duck is visible to
the left, and the duck almost completely fills the enormous space of the
huge canvas (75 x 108»). Like Leonardo da Vinci, Raffael gives a captive
bird its freedom, symbolizing his own wish for freedom: outer freedom
symbolizes inner freedom--creative freedom.(35) But the moment is
ambiguous: the duck is not yet in fact free, but struggling to become free.
It is in a state of transition, half captive and half free.
The animal is remarkably poised, even as its wings beat anxiously. It
is confident and self-possessed, considering its vulnerability: totally at
one with itself, its fate is nonetheless in human hands. It is determine to
take flight, but it is not completely free to fly. It does not believe that
it is being released, even as it is being released. The duck has great
presence, much more so than the human presence--which is blurred and
vestigial, as though seen through the duck’s eye--that contaminates its
existence. Its life has been touched by man, but it remains untamed, full
of instinctive life, ready to take flight and forget man as soon as it is
free. The scale of the painting is cosmic--transhuman--yet the scene is
intimate: we see the duck close-up, down to the least physical detail.
Punctiliously rendered, it is nonetheless mysterious: light glistens on its
feathers, making them seem immaterial. Thus, touched by the painter’s hand,
the duck becomes intangible. However natural, it become preternatural.
Fact has become fantastic. The effect is startling, as though we are
witnessing a miracle. Raffael’s picture is an elegant conceit, that is, an
allegory of painting: we see the painter’s hand--an «old hand» at
painting--in the act of creating new life, implicitly the painter’s own.
Restoring the sense of the miraculousness of life, Raffael restores our
belief in the miraculousness of art: art as a miraculous creation of
miraculous life. Raffael’s Release is an act of faith, as all his nature
paintings are.
Release encapsulates the paradox of Raffael’s paintings, indeed, of his
nature imagery as a whole: invariably, they show, in what can only be
called a perceptual epiphany, a finite, elemental creature at
home--instinctively at one with--an infinite, elemental space. Or else, in
an even more rarefied perceptual epiphany, they show the great beyond--the
implicitly cosmic environment--itself, as in the extraordinary Water
Painting series of 1973, with their seemingly limitless, changing, luminous
water, a macrocosmos shown in microcosmic detail. Each is a morphology of
movement, epitomizing the incessant, incalculable movement of the whole
scene. Raffael dissects the restless water, as though to discover the
secret of its energy and freshness, but it remains unfathomable. It is the
fountain of youth--the elixir of life and the ambrosia of the gods. The
animal forms a natural bridge, as it were, between its own limited
environment and the larger environment. Through its mediation, the two
imperceptibly become one: the duck is one with the sky it flies in and the
water it floats on. Oceanic experience is suggested, in all its grandeur
and mystery. The natural becomes mystical, and the mystical natural. If,
as Sheldon Bach writes, «creativity is the language of serious paradox
accepted, understood, and grappled with,»(36) then Raffael is creatively
grappling with the paradox that in experiencing nature with mystical
seriousness we unconsciously accept and understand our animal nature. What
was once split off--denied, in all too human self-defense--is reintegrated
through the mystical experience of identifying with an animal, which in turn
makes us feel mystically at home in nature.
Raffael’s open Oyster and Salmon head of 1968, and Lion and Lizard of
1970--essentially portraits--seem confrontational: we are only a few inches
from these alien creatures, and the question seems to be who will blink and
bite first. This disturbing intimacy, and the extraordinary revelation and
exploration of detail it affords, with the accompanying sense of
presentational immediacy, is made possible by the photograph. But
photographs are only a point of departure: Raffael’s paintings are much
more than exact observational records--mimetic triumphs. Raffael is not
naively descriptive, indeed, description is not his goal, even
superficially: there are more details than are technically necessary to get
the perceptual point--to see the gestalt of the natural object, and to
recognize it in all its naturalness. Raffael is extravagant in his use of
contingent details, so much so that they seem more necessary than the
natural object, and even independent of it. Indeed, he gives us many more
details than the ordinary photograph: a comparison between the
matter-of-fact slide of A Frog in Its Pond and the lush 1977 painting of the
scene makes this clear.
In fact, in Oyster and Salmon--they are the touchstones of his later
painterly technique--detail almost overwhelms the natural object
represented, making it seem strangely unnatural. We must do a double take,
as it were, to grasp its objectivity beneath the spontaneous dance of
detail. Perceptual propriety is disturbed by the abundance of detail, which
becomes a veil on the familiar object, making it more mysterious and
deceptive. It seems inexplicable, even as it remains readable.
Paradoxically, in being overdetailed--overobjectified, as it were--it
becomes evocative, that is, unexpectedly subjective in import. And
unexpectedly abstract: no longer completely compliant to nature--being too
much for nature to handle, as it were--the details can be experienced as the
spontaneous gestures and personal ideas they are, and thus as expressions of
what Donald Winnicott calls the True Self.(37) It is this doubleness that
makes Raffael’s paintings visionary, that is, versions of transitional or
potential space, as Winnicott calls it, in which objects are at once found
and created, separate and intimate, parts of shared reality and radically
subjective.(38)
To say the same psychological thing in a cultural way, Raffael’s surplus
of independent detail turns a natural phenomenon into an aesthetic
experience. The excess of subliminally abstract detail makes it clear that
Raffael is not a conventional realist, representing objects in a practical
mannmer that conforms to ordinary perceptual expectations--which is why he
is not a neo-traditional painter, however traditional his paintings seem to
be at first glance--but a very modern painter. It is the difference between
seeing in the mode of having and seeing in the mode of being, to use Erich
Fromm’s distinction.
But abstraction is insufficient for Raffael, for it is denatured being.
It conveys a certain disillusionment with nature, which no longer seems as
mysterious and enchanted as it once did. Our relationship with it has
become too self-conscious and strained--abstract--to be organic,
spontaneous, caring, worshipful: we no longer instinctively believe in the
sublimity of nature the way Turner did, nor are we able to establish
Wordsworthian intimacy with it the way Constable did. The Impressionists
seem the exception to the modern rule, but their empiricism is
de-sublimating and distancing, and in fact sets the stage for the later
intellectualization of nature that emerged in late Cézanne. This
rationalist reification of nature was quickly ratified by Cubism. It
bespeaks a certain distrust of nature, or perhaps modern skepticism extended
to nature. It is no longer possible to respond to nature instinctively;
Duchamp explicitly repudiates instinct, inhibiting the natural response to
what is natural. In short, the modern artist shatters the «Vegetable Glass
of Nature,» as William Blake called it,(39) leaving in its place shards of
pseudo-natural gesture--which, however «radioactive» no longer had organic
credibility--and his own construction of art, that is, what Baudelaire
called the «artificial paradise» of art. In the twentieth century it came
to seem less and less of a paradise and more and more artificial. Nature is
vanquished by art, but it is not clear that it does art any good, especially
in the long run. Art has become a conceptual desert rather than a
perceptual oasis. It has become as brittle as nature. Both have been
ruined.
Raffael’s challenge is to re-naturalize being--to re-enter the natural
paradise, as the only saving grace and safe place in the modern world. He
knows that it is impossible to return to where Turner and Constable were;
nature has changed. It can no longer mirror our ideals and satisfy our
emotional needs, at least not as convincingly as it once did. Art has also
changed: it is no longer self-expression--an expression of human
nature--but «selflessly» constructed pure art. Raffael accepts the fact
that he is, however subliminally, a modern abstract painter. But he raises
the question whether abstract art has to be pure, and even look at abstract,
at least by conventional standards. He transforms abstraction, so that it
seems natural--bespeaks the richness and vitality of nature. Abstract
gesture does double duty as natural detail in a Raffael painting. There is
a kind of interplay between free expression and factual observation--an
entanglement of the invented and the given. Raffael is a participant
observer in nature, but also an independent creator. He balances the claims
of both nature and art--the found and the created, to recall Winnicott. He
is devoted to both, so that neither exists at the expense of the other.
Raffael, then, is a great technician, but his technique serves creative
observation. This is apparent in the use he makes of the photograph. It
mediates perception through a machine, implying that it is socially
constructed. Perception is no longer instinctive, that is, no longer
natural to our being--no longer located in the body--but mechanical, that
is, a technical rather than organic matter. Perception is no longer a
natural response to the given, and in fact the given is always in doubt. It
can be photographed in many different ways--perceived from many different
viewpoints, none of which is more valid or essential than any other--which
in fact casts doubt on perception. Photography makes it clear that there is
no hierarchy of viewpoints--no inherently prior «outlook.» Raffael
re-naturalized perception by giving the photograph a painterly
body--idiosyncratically repainting it, so that it reveals details of nature
that no photograph can ever show, and yet are instinctively apparent:
Raffael’s surplus--surge, painterly sea--of independent detail bespeaks the
inherent vitality of nature. Raffael shows nature from the organic
side--from the side of instinct. We are no longer at an intellectual
distance from it, but instinctively engaged with it, so that we feel
immersed in its instinctive flow. We can grasp it only by ecstatically
attuning to it with our own vitality. Thus it comes to seem normal for
Raffael to experience nature abstractly, for abstraction has become the
instrument of his instinctive experience of it.
Raffael’s parting of the ways with the Abstract Expressionists--he was
«nurtured» as one, as Garver says(39)--has to do with the meaning he gives
abstract gesture: it expresses the erotic ripeness of the naturally given
object--animal or flower--conveying an affirmative attitude to it. In
Raffael’s paintings abstract gesture is no longer the manifestation of the
death instinct it usually is in Abstract Expressionism. It is this that
makes Abstract Expressionist gesture more compulsive than spontaneous, more
impersonal than personal, more accidental than lovingly crafted--the exact
emotional opposite of Raffael’s expressive gesture. Raffael’s gestural
excess has an entirely different ambition than that of Abstract
Expressionist gestural excess: not to attack and shred--dissolve--the
naturally given object, but to vividly convey its integrity. Because
Raffael is not in conflict with--and conflicted about--animals, he can
acknowledge their difference, which allows him to have a more
differentiated--certainly less generalized--sense of them. Not feeling
alienated from them, he can present them in an unalienated way. At the same
time, Raffael’s excessive gestural details transcend the creature they
describe, and in so doing embody its transcendence of its environment,
however much it is nourished by it, and remains a part of it. The abstract
autonomy of the details bespeaks the animal’s peculiar autonomy, as well as
its embeddedness in its environment. The frog could not endure without its
pond--Raffael rarely shows any animal without its environment--but it is
also a unique being existing in its own right. The complexity of its being
is signalled by the complexity of its appearance. Indeed, once we see
beyond its gestalt to the level of microscopic detail, the animal is
unintelligible. And yet every detail is meaningful in terms of its own
being. We can only wonder at the organic details, as clues to its inner
life. Raffael paints them as though they encoded it.
For Raffael, the appearance of the animal’s skin, to which he is so
attentive, is a direct if cryptic manifestation of its inner world, and
above all, as its interface with its environment, of its relationship with
its environment. It is as though the animal internalized its environment,
transforming it in the process, and re-externalized it. The animal’s
skin--its external appearance--stands to this relationship, and thus to the
inner reality of the animal, as the manifest content of a dream stands to
its latent content. The animal’s appearance is its abstract dream of itself
in relationship to its environment. Raffael is determined to fathom this
dream, to enter the animal’s inner world, to get under its skin: he comes
as empathically close as he can to it. His use of the close-up symbolizes
this empathy, as does the excruciating attention he devotes to the details
of the animal’s appearance. He in effect interprets the details through his
painting, thus entering into the animal’s dream of itself. He identifies
with it; its being in effect becomes his own. It is as though he sees the
animal’s environment through its eyes, experiencing the environment as
instinctively as it does. In short, Raffael struggles to internalize the
animal’s awareness, its complex unity of being and inner harmony, and its
instinctive harmony with its environment--the ease with which it interfaces
with its environment: his art is the means to this humanly difficult if not
impossible goal.
Are the animal portraits Raffael’s spiritual self-portraits? The
portraitist of an animal invests in his subject as much as the portraitist
of a person, apparently imposing himself on his subject. In emotional fact,
he discovers repressed aspects of his own subjectivity in the subject, or
else projects them into it, so that they come back to him as though in a
distorting mirror. Oskar Kokoschka found himself in a mandrill, and Picasso
found himself in a chimpanzee. I am suggesting that painting is a kind of
shamanistic ritual for Raffael, in which he becomes an animal in spirit. In
doing so, he reconciles with his animal nature, becoming whole--no longer
split into instinctive and intellectual, irrational and rational sides. His
sensibility becomes whole. He also acquires the animal’s power to bridge
realms. Like the amphibious lizard, he is at home on land and in the water.
Like the oyster, he mithridatically transforms irritating, potentially
destructive impurities into priceless pearls--in Raffael’s case impinging,
overstimulating, almost emotionally overwhelming perceptions into beautiful
works of art. Raffael’s animal paintings are to my mind subliminally
didactic personal allegories, conveying animal wisdom. Each animal
represents a strategy of survival--an adaptive lesson in instinctive life,
indeed, a demonstration of the strength of the will to live. Each animal
embodies a necessary virtue--a positive value: the lion has the courage
necessary to survive in the jungle; the lizard’s flexibility allows it to
inhabit different environments without any difficulty; the salmon
aggressively fights for its life and freedom, rather than resign itself to
the fate implied by the ropes that hold it captivie, thus suggesting the
existential determination necessary to struggle against death; and the
oyster performs the existential miracle of making something very good out of
something very bad, thus offering what amounts to a natural model for art.
Each animal is triumphant over its circumstances, even as it is dependent on
them. It refuses to be defeated by the world, becoming peculiarly unworldly
in the process. It is as though Raffael has learned everything of lasting
value about life and art--including the art of life--from them, and more
broadly nature, which he always stays in touch with. Nature--whether it
takes animal, vegetable, or mineral form--in Raffael’s selfobject, as it has
been for many pre-modernist landscape painters.
To feel like an animal, in order to recover the animal in oneself, with
its instinct to survive and enjoyment of existence: this is the «mission»
of the animal paintings--and they are painted with a kind of missionary
zeal, not to say fanatic intensity. The same ambition is operational in
Raffael’s flower paintings, but the animal paintings are its first important
embodiment. It is easier to feel affinity for animals, because we ourselves
are animals, than for flowers, which we can appropriate as symbols, but find
more difficult to attune to as beings with a life and will of their own, for
their vegetable mode of life is biologically and thus emotionally alien to
us--and thus more difficult to identify with--than the animal’s mode of
life.
Like Franz Marc, Raffael prefers animals to human beings. «Very early,»
Marc wrote, «I found people to be 'ugly’: animals seemed more beautiful,
more pure.»(40) Like Marc, the goal of Raffael’s art is «to imagine how
nature is reflected in the eyes of an animal....It is a poverty-stricken
convention to place animals into landscapes as seen by man; instead, we
should contemplate the soul of the animal to divine its ways of sight.»(41)
This is why, as Marc said, he rejected «unnatural» modern style--he mentions
Cubism in particular--for it shows how modern man sees, not how eternal
animals do. Significantly, he began to show the animal world in a modern
Cubist way when it was threatened by destruction. Like Marc, Raffael
believes that animals «project their inner world»(42)--the emphasis implying
that we should not project our inner world onto them. Like Marc, Raffael’s
ultimate ambition is «to render the predicate of living things,»(43) in
order to recover the «inwardly genuine plasticity,» as Max Weber called it,
that has been lost to modernity, which makes this vital fluidity seem more
«mystical» and remote than ever.(44)
But where many of Marc’s animals appear to exist in a state of anxious
tension, while others seem passionately exuberant--naively buoyant with
life--Raffael’s animals are calm, collected, and self-contained. They have
the tranquil integrity of animals of paradise. They are not modern animals,
like those of Marc--animals reacting, with manic optimism or morbid
pessimism, to the disenchantment of nature that occurred in modernity.
Raffael’s animals exist in a prelapsarian state of being, which is why they
seem like marvels of nature. They are sacred animals, rather than creatures
profaned by the world. Above all, they have the fundamental attribute of
all prelapsarian beings: they are sacred because their milieu intérieur or
Innenwelt and milieu extérieur or Umwelt are in balance.(45) This is why
their appearance matches their surroundings, and why it can be read as a
sign of their consciousness: blending into their world, they are seamlessly
one with themselves. Their outer appearance, inner reality, and surrounding
environment are essentially the same, which is why they are beautiful.
It also explains their lack of aggression: there is no violence in the
garden of paradise. The lion and lizard live in harmony with one another,
as do the oyster and the salmon. The owl is no longer a predator, for it
has become a symbol of Eternity, 1985. Raffael’s cats--Claire, Fume, and
Tigre--do not scratch, and his fish do not bite. The fish in his garden
cannot be caught, unlike the salmon, and his cats will never pounce on any
bird, as the cat in Goya’s painting of a young prince is about to do. These
are clearly not the vehement beasts that exist on the trumeau of Souillac,
intense animals «twisted, entangled, and unbalanced by their own rapacious
energy,» as Meyer Schapiro put it, and trapped in «deforming oppositions
generated by impulsive movements.»(46) Their «divided posture» bespeaks
their «conflicting motives»--the «tense, congested struggle» in their inner
life and with their surroundings. They are clearly fallen even demonic
animals--animals at odds with each other and themselves and the world after
the fall of man, his expulsion from paradise into the hell of the world.
Indeed, Schapiro describes them as having «a human complexity and
inwardness.» Souillac’s animals are perversely realistic and all too human:
but Raffael’s animals represent a greater rebellion--the insistence on
living in a state of paradisiac harmony in defiance of and apart from the
world of human conflict, internal and external. Raffael’s animals represent
his revolt against the modern world, with its violence and unnatural style
of life. Their beauty is the ultimate rebellion against modern man-made
ugliness.
Only human beings are dangerous and harmful; they rarely appear in
Raffael’s paintings, and then only family members, as in Joseph, Reuben,
Robert, Rachel and Rachel, both 1984. Self-protectively, Raffael has
returned to natural paradise: San Marin county in California, where his
first nature paintings were made, was an early version of it, and Antibes in
France, where he has been making his nature paintings since, is a new, final
version of it. He wants to keep the destructive modern world--any hint of
destructiveness--out of his new French paradise, which is what most of his
later paintings represent. (Raffael will paint natural paradise wherever he
can find it, as Luxembourg Gardens: Faith, 1981 and Luxembourg Gardens:
Truth, 1982 indicate. His gardens are all the more poignant by reason of
what we do not see in them--the urban wasteland. In general, his timeless
gardens imply a profound rejection of modern society.) He insists on
keeping paradise pure. Destruction and constraint existed in his California
Eden, as Salmon and Release indicate: paradise was more of a possibility
than an actuality. But now he wants the actuality. Raffael is determined
to live in a state of prelapsarian grace.
Is he inhabiting a twilight zone? Is paradise a twilight state of mind?
Hermann Broch, describing our «animal heritage» in his «phenomenology of the
twilight state of mind,» remarks that while «the animal copes with its vital
tasks in a seemingly rational way, [and] in pursuing its purposes it chooses
the most adequate means available,» which makes it seem rational, it is in
fact «purely instinctive. The animal acts in a rudimentary twilight
conditions.»(47) That is, «animals live true to type.» They are not
individuals, which is the way Raffael presents them. They have little
choice but to «accept their environmental conditions»--the environment that
Raffael represents in such loving, careful, absorbing detail. The animal is
absorbed by the environment, as it were--he is nothing without it. He has
no consciousness of himself--if he has any consciousness--apart from his
consciousness of the environment. In contrast, «man is endowed with
consciousness of both his self and the world...which permits him to
penetrate the animal twilight imposed upon him» and transcend his
environment. He acquires a history: only man has «historical development
and cultural evolution,» both of which are «completely strange to animals.»
He creates his own environment, rather than depends on the environment
nature supplies. To be in paradise is to be without history and in no need
of history--to no longer develop and evolve, indeed, to have no need to
develop and evolve. One is complete and perfect: the end of history is to
return to the beginning of man--to return to paradise, the ideal
environment. But from Broch’s viewpoint this is to return to the twilight
state of mind, to lose one’s humanity, to give up consciousness, to lose
oneself in nature--to become like an instinctive animal, even worse, a
flower, with its vegetable instincts.
Why, then, do Raffael’s animals--and flowers--seem to possess
consciousness, indeed, self-consciousness? If, as Broch writes, the
«twilight state makes men into mass,» why don’t they belong to the mass?
Even when Raffael’s fish swim together they do seem to form a mass. Each
goes its own way, standing out from the mass, as is evident in A Secret
Path, 1981 and Summer’s Pond, 1994. Similarly, his numerous Cranes, 1987
behave like self-conscious individuals. Two Birds, 1974 makes the point
succinctly: they may look the same, but they are quite different, and even
have a different relationship to the environment. They are far from the
mass, and each faces a different way. «Man,» Broch writes, «when in a
twilight state of mind cannot discriminate natural from cultural
conditions,» but the radiant natural conditions Raffael pictures look better
than ordinary cultural conditions. Indeed, the garden environment is the
best of all possible cultural conditions--a fairly civilized place compared
to historical civilizations. Raffael’s garden is a carefully tended
cultural creation, as its subtly calibrated beauty suggests. It is a
psychosocial construction: a dialectical compromise between nature and art.
Raffael creates an illusion--yet it seems real: he suggests that it is
possible to be a conscious, cultured individual and still live in paradise,
that is, instinctively. Paradise, by definition, is a place from which
suffering and death have been banished, and happiness prevails. But how is
it possible to be a cultured, conscious historical person and still be
happy?
The question is why Raffael insists that it is. Does Raffael endow
animals with human consciousness out of the same inner necessity with which
Meyer Schapiro thinks abstract works of art can be endowed with more
humanity than human being than human beings ordinarily manifest--»full
humanity?»(48) I think so: it is ultimately out of the need to keep alive
an ideal that has never been realized. Virtue is displaced onto the animal
because it rarely exists in history: culture is not what it claims to be,
civilization and humanity --man’s compassion and consideration for man--are
rare. One needs a garden these days-- in every day and age--because one needs compensation for the horrors of history--one’s own history as well as that of society. Like Voltaire, Raffael vigorously tends his garden: it is a place where he can be
healed--liberated from social history, and free to work through his personal
history. The garden is the best of all possible worlds, and Raffael intends
to keep it that way.
Can he be criticized the way George Orwell criticized Henry Miller for
using sexuality as a panacea for history?(49) Is Raffael’s garden a new
form of avant-garde polymorphous perversity, as its sensuality suggests?(50)
I don’t think so. Raffael makes no utopian claims for it. It is just his
own private sanctuary--his own personal Cytherea--reclaimed from what
Cytherea has become in modernity: «the barrenest of lands, a rocky desert,»
in effect a new Golgotha on which to be crucified, as Baudelaire suggested
in «Un Voyage À Cythére.» Again, we see Raffael’s post-modernism.
Moreover, if not history, then suffering--the suffering inherent to
existence--remains visible in Raffael, if one follows the clues. It is a
perpetual perceptual potential--an oblique hallucinatory presence, often
diffused through the scene, emanating from nature itself, giving it a kind
of dark edge. Thus Raffael’s garden is a deceptive place--not exactly what
it seems at first glance.
In his own way, Raffael recognizes what Poussin did: there is the
threat of death in Arcadia. But in Raffael’s case it is the threat of
psychic death--not a twlight state of mind, but an insidious passivity and
sense of meaninglessness and valuelessness--a kind of subliminal depression,
perhaps endemic to being human, to consciousness. This threat appears in
the Sunset, 1977, however beautiful, and sometimes darkens the water of the
pond, as in some of the waterlily and duck images. It is an atmosphere that
casts a pall on the environment, even as it is inseparable from it. And yet
the threat of psychic death can be overcome by meditation--by the meditation
which perception itself becomes in Raffael’s pictures. Raffael’s garden is
a place of meditation, in which one learns to accept, with compassion, the
inevitable. Hard meditative work is carried out in his garden, as his
Buddhist imagery indicates. And the animals and flowers teach one how to
meditate, with Zen equanimity, but also recognition of the truth of being.
Meditation is the alternative to--the only promise of salvation
from--psychic death, a state of feelinglesness epitomizing the experience of
the helplessness and hopelessness that accompany consciousness of suffering.
There may be no remedy for suffering, but stoic meditation transfigures
psychic death. It becomes a necessary experience: meditation is rebirth
after psychic death, or rather than the experience of living through psychic
death. Raffael is one of the twice born people, as William James called
them.(51) What seems like a momentary epiphany, even idolization, of nature
in his pictures, is in emotional fact the residue of his conversion
experience--the trace of a profound spiritual passage and transformation.
But unlike the twice born James described, Raffael has a Buddhist rather
than Christian sensibility
The Garden as Buddhist Monastery
“As on a heap of rubbish upon the highway the lily will grow full of
sweet perfume and delight, thus among those who are mere rubbish the disciple of the
truly enlightened Buddha shines forth by his knowledge above the blinded worldling.”
The Dharmapada, chapter 4
“Forests are delightful; where the world finds no delight, there the passionless will find
delight, for they look not for pleasures.”
The Dharmapada, chapter 7
“Art can be described as a psychopathic reaction of the race to the
stresses of its existence....Art has a curative function in human experience when it
reveals as in a flash intimate, absolute Truth regarding the Nature of Things.”
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas(52)
For me, the major clue to the meaning of Raffael’s garden is not the
animals and flowers that are in it, but the fact that it is a place of
meditation, more particularly, Buddhist meditation. The garden is beautiful
because it is a monastic place of Buddhist enlightenment. It is a place
where the truth regarding the nature of things can be discovered, curing us
of our psychopathic reaction to them, brought on by the stress they cause
us. It has the two qualities of spiritual beauty that result from
meditation: not only is there no «painful clash,» emotional or physical, in
Raffael’s garden, but perfect harmony, that is, a synthesis of natural
details that makes for a sense of peace, with no sacrifice of the esthetic
intensity afforded by the details.(53) In Raffael’s Buddhist garden «the
superficialities of sense-experience» become «a message from the
Unseen.»(54) Paradoxically, the visible animals and flowers, rendered in
loving, exquisite detail, represent an invisible--seemingly
unrepresentable--truth.(55)
«Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality»: it involves «deep
metaphysical insight,» which brings with it «the removal of the stress of
acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself.»(56)
Without such stress--without the acquisitive urge--the soul becomes tranquil
and whole. This is exactly what Buddhism aims at: «a peace which the world
can neither give nor take away»(57) because it comes from metaphysical
insight into existence, radically changing one’s attitude to it. And to
other people: metaphysically enlightened, one has compassion for them,
rather than desire. Not wanting anything from them, they cause no stress.
One no longer selfishly believes they exist only to satisfy one’s needs--to
give one pleasure. Rather, one sees them dispassionately, in all the
integrity and pathos of their being, and tries to save them from
themselves--their acquisitive urges--as one was saved from oneself by
metaphysical insight. One’s integrity becomes the flash of truth in their
life. Free of suffering--painful clash, with oneself and with the
world--one becomes a model of liberation. One is living proof that it is
possible to be liberated from desire--the root cause of suffering--and thus
make peace with existence. Desire is attachment to existence, compassion
for existence is possible only when one is detached from it. Only from a
position of serene transcendence can one care for the suffering. As has
been said, Buddhism has «two major values»: «the idea of personal
discipline to gain freedom from craving in the ultimate tranquillity of
Nirvana» and «the idea of unselfish devotion to the good of others for the
sake of their deliverance from ill.»(58)
For Raffael, painting is a form of personal discipline. It is a display
of metaphysical insight. And it is compassionate: it is a free gift of
enlightenment, there for the perceptual asking--the fruit of his meditation
on nature, lovingly presented to the world. Each painting induces
meditation: not passive contemplation, but active meditation. The viewer
works through the details to understand the truth they represent. In the
process he gains insight into the metaphysics of his desire. Meditating on
a Raffael painting, one is liberated from desire: from, as the Buddha said,
not only «sensual desire» for nature, but «the desire for existence.»(59)
One learns to let it be--to acknowledged its ch’i or vital force, which
«surrounds [it] as water surrounds a fish»(60)--which concentrates the mind
marvellously. Meditation is a way of concentrating one’s mind so that one
can let life be. Only by doing so can on gain insight into its being:
«see» the metaphysical in its physicality.
Who is the Buddha for Raffael? I think the Buddha personifies the good,
helpful father the way animals do: «father» in Jung’s sense of the being
who offers «insight, understanding, good advice, determination, planning»
that one cannot muster «on one’s own resources,» and thus functions as a god
(or ego ideal, always out of reach yet profoundly influential on one’s
existence). As Freud wrote, the totem animal is «the first form of
father-surrogate, the god...a later one, in which the father has regained
his human shape.» The Buddha is the totem animal that has taken human
shape, but remains sacred, because of his wisdom--the wisdom, like that of
the animal, of another order of being, and thus a wisdom man cannot muster,
only receive in an intuitive flash. Raffael’s art oscillates between the
instinctive wisdom of the animal and the metaphysical wisdom of the Buddha,
conjoining them in the process of doing. Thus the wise Buddha parallels the
divine flowers that personify the nourishing mother. Buddha and flowers are
Raffael’s spiritual parents--the parents of his spiritual rebirth. Male
Buddha and female flowers co-exist in many pictures, each imbuing the other
with its own presence: the Buddha seems as natural as the flowers, the
flowers as sacred as the Buddha. They seem to possess his enlightened
consciousness, and he their organic vitality: they bring him down to earth,
and he lifts them to heaven. «Making art is...very religious,» Raffael has
said, in that it is an attempt to «hjave insights into the universal,»(61)
which is to apprehend the particular without aggrandizing it. If this is a
primal scene, it is one of joyous intimacy rather than violent clash.
Irreconcilables are reconciled even as they maintain their distinctive
identities.
A stone statue of the Buddha’s head, its hardness softened by light,
appears in a 1985 work, as does a more nuanced close-up of another stone
statue of the Buddha’s face in Le Crepuscule, 1995. In Gateway, 1984 the
golden Buddha--the Buddha clothed in his aura, an expression of his
enlightenment--appears, his «body...marked with many sacred and esoteric
symbols, radiating the golden light of Wisdom and Enlightenment,» as Joyce
Petschek says.(62) But, as she observes, Raffael paintgs only «part of the
Buddha’s body, that of the four chakras, the energy centers pertaining to
the physical, emotional, and intellectual vibrations. He paints neither the
clairvoyant Third Eye nor the mystical Crown chakra.»(63) And yet he looks
at nature with the Third Eye. It is within him, signifying his Buddha
nature--his achievement of enlightenment. Moreover, the Red Lily in a
Buddhist Monastery and the Two White Lilies in a Buddhist Monastery on an
Island in the South China Sea, both 1979, are in effect mystical crowns:
meditation reveals their aura--indeed, the lilies are on the verge of
becoming almost all aura. In a sense, the whole effort of Raffael’s
paintings can be understood as an attempt to make the luminous aura latent
in natural phenomena--the droplets of light with which Raffael covers them,
and which seem to arise from within them--manifest to the point of
self-evidence. The wise Third Eye--the eye traditionally in the middle of
the Buddha’s forehead, representing his metaphysical insight («second
sight,» as it were)---sees beyond their matter to the light («gold») of
their being, the luminosity that discloses their spirituality, showing them
to be «abstract.» Religiously painted by Raffael, a flower becomes a
transcendental icon, that is, the radiant object of transcendental
meditation. In short, the flower’s singularity is deepened by its
transcendental perception. (Buddha is often traditionally represented with
a flower, particularly a lily, which partially explains Raffael’s particular
fascination with lilies.)
In general, for Raffael representation is an act of sanctification and
meditation. In a sense, these are the sum and substance of wonder at its
most innocent or childlike. For children, ordinary things have an iconic
presence. They stand out with sacramental significance. Thus, Blackfoot,
1970, Navajo Brave, 1972, and Ganesh, 1990 (the Indian god of the threshold)
are iconic presences--to my mind they are explicitly «godfathers»--but so is
the Mallard, 1976, the Orange Fish, 1979, the Spirit Bird, 1985, the moth of
Re-Entry, 1985, and Le Papillon Vert, 1992, among many other totem animals. Every
last flower is an iconic presence--an empirical phenomenon spiritualized by
meditation. Or rather, Raffael’s meditative Third Eye brings out its
inherent spiritual qualities. Meditation turns an empirical phenomenon into
a numinous presence, that is, transforms the sensuous into the sacred, or
rather acknowledges that there is no difference between them. This is
primary enlightenment--metaphysical insight at its deepest: it is very much in the
spirit of the Buddhist sutra which denies the difference between noneternity
and eternity, the finite and the infinite.(64) «Everything is relative,»
states the sutra, which means that empirical «Plurality» and ultimate
«Reality» are not separate. In Raffael’s case, this means that there is no
difference between painting the plurality of beings and sensations, and
meditating upon them. If, as the sutra suggests, Buddhism dissolves
philosophical antinomies, then Raffael’s paintings dissolve perceptual
antinomies. It is an accomplishment of the Third Eye, which sees natural
phenomena as the mystical crown of being.
From my point of view, the most Buddhist of Raffael’s paintings are his
four Japanese paintings: Passage, 1985, Haven and Marriage, both 1986, and
Threshold, 1987. The struggle for enlightenment--the attempt to turn an
observed phenomen into a sacred icon--seems evident in them; in the animal
and flower paintings, enlightenment has been achieved, as their overt iconic
character suggests. The frame within the frame of Marriage and Threshold,
and the divided character of Passage and Haven, suggest a divided
consciousness: what is seen is still partly of this world, and partly
«otherworldly.» In other words, it is on a spiritual threshold--observed
for its details as well as meditated on, that is, appreciated as a spiritual
whole. Sight is on the verge of become metaphysical insight, but it is
still profoundly physical.
These paintings, the fruit of a trip to Japan, where Zen Buddhism
developed--there are famous Zen gardens in Japan--have a complicated
personal import. Like most of the paintings of the mid-eighties, they are
related to the 1980 death of Raffael’s son Matthew as well as to his divorce
from his first wife, Judith, whom he never painted, and his marriage to his
second wife, Lannis, whom he has painted many times. They document
Raffael’s changing outlook--his transition from everyday perception in a
state of psychic death to empathic perception in a state of spiritual
aliveness. Haven and Threshold represent Raffael’s discovery of the
garden as a space of monastic consciousness, a spiritual hortus conclusus
shut off from the outside world. But the wall is focused on, not the
interior space of the garden, suggesting that Raffael is still attached to
the outside. The wall is almost dissolved by nature in Threshold, but it
still remains a disruptive presence. There is a certain irony in these
paintings, for in traditional Japan the practice of breaking down the wall
between nature and society, suggesting their reconciliation, became a high
art. The figure in Passage is a godfather, but an alien one from a strange
culture.
Marriage seems to me the most crucial of the works, by reason of its
blackness. Garver writes that «black is almost never used» by Raffael,(65)
but here it dominates the picture, giving substance to the trees and their
reflection in the sky blue water, and also to the lower part of the temple.
The issue of the painting is whether the nature colors of the surrounding
inner frame, and the flickers of snowy light on the trees--they have an
uncanny resemblance to those painted by Lucas Cranach at the height of the
development of Danube School landscape (1505-10)--can dialectically
transcend or at least counterbalance the blackness. Like the garden wall in
Haven and Threshold the inner frame is an «edge where two forms meet in
union,» as Raffael says, but in the Japanese paintings they are dramatically
opposed. The boundary marks a split--a radical difference. Can the
contraries --including those of structure and process--be married, if only
in occult symmetry? Can nature absorb the alien and mysterious yet alluring
temple? Can the separation be overcome? The answer is unclear.
Return Again, 1985 has the same blackness, even more omnipresently
dense. It now forms the frame, dominating the image inside it--the
black-and-white picture in memory’s eye, which is not yet the Third Eye.
Physical detail blurs in memory. It is tantalizingly out of focus, as
though irrecoverable. But that does not mean that memory is a blinding
flash in the darkness--the strange, seemingly unnatural flash of the
vulnerable moth that covers the right third of the inner picture, but does
nothing to restrain the darkness. The moth seems to be bleeding from wounds
to its dusky white wings; each grim spot of murky red color is a sort of
visualized death rattle. (The same moth, looking embalmed, fills the canvas
of Re-Entry, 1985.) Psychic death has the upper hand; rebirth is not in the
offering. The moth will succumb to the light toward which it flies; it does
not hold its own in the light while being inspired by its life-giving force,
the way Raffael’s many butterflies do. From a surrealist perspective the
butterfly is a flower that has uprooted itself from the earth to fly in the
sky to become enlightened about the earth from which it has escaped. The
same perspective of wonder suggests that the moth is a winged skull, a
symbol of false, self-deceptive enlightenment.
The work made during this period are very tense, even anguished. Light
and dark are at odds, with the outcome of their gnostic struggle unclear.
This is also evident in Out of the Thicket and The Clearing, both 1985, and
in the other works from the period, including Listening to the Evening,
1984, Owl, 1985, and Eternity. Lannis symbolizes Raffael’s rebirth and
enlightenment. Two Vases, Two Bouquets, Spring, 1990, an allegory of their
marriage and harmony, is full of radiant happiness. Darkness is contained
by light, indicating its triumph. The promise in Marriage--painted in 1986,
the year Raffael married Lannis and moved to France--has been fulfilled.
The darkness in the center represents Raffael, the colorful brightness of
the margin symbolizes Lannis. Ancient Longing, 1985, in which Lannis
appears as Botticelli’s Primavera, her colorful brightness the center of the
picture, with the blackness relegated to the margin, suggests the same
triumph of light over darkness. The work is a reverie on marriage, full of
reverence for existence--Lannis is its final flowering for Raffael--as all
of his works are. Passage, 1985 is crucial for Raffael, for it suggests his
passage out of brooding darkness into loving light. The theme of passage,
and with it self-transformation, occurs again and again in Raffael, from
Secret Path, 1981 to the 1992-93 group of paintings depicting flowers--a
begonia, iris, and peony--after a rain, making them all the more beautiful
and fresh.
Raffael’s paintings of Lannis are the grand climax of his art--a tribute
not only to woman’s power of resurrection and renewal, which becomes man’s
own, but to art’s power to regulate our perception of the world, making it
seems better and safer than it is. Raffael portrays Lannis as a garden unto
herself, as well as an integral part of his private garden. One can’t help
but recall Goethe’s remark about the «Eternal Feminine that draws us on» in
the mystical chorus that concludes Faust. Primavera, after all, is a time
of rebirth, and Lannis is a symbol of Raffael’s spiritual rebirth. In a
psychopathic age such as ours--an age of emotional regression, as Broch
says, whatever its scientific and technological progress--true love and a
garden of one’s own are essential for emotional survival. More than any of
Raffael’s animals and flowers, Lannis is inseparable from the garden
environment, and as such a truly facilitating environment. Raffael’s 1988
series Lannis in Sieste, perhaps his most astonishing pictures, makes this
explicit: for the first time nature and the human figure seamlessly
integrate in his art. The decorative richness of these works--it reminds
one of Raffael’s remark that «his first experience with art» was the
«interweaving patterns» of the decorative wallpaper in his childhood
home--is the vehicle of this unity. Lannis becomes the personification of
nature as well as uniquely human. More precisely, she embodies nature in
spring, when it renews life, and nature in summer, when it is at its ripest.
Her double meaning is especially clear in Lannis’s Garden with Butterfly,
1994: the butterfly, blooming flowers, and green leaves are all symbols of
renewal. Raffael never depicts nature in decay, its flowers wilting and
leaves worm-eaten, as Carravagio, attracted to the death instinct, does.
Even the flowers in Raffael’s Autumn Bouquet, 1989 are alive and intact, as
though there is no tomorrow of death. Spring: Amazement, 1994 confirms the
depth and intensity of Raffael’s love for Lannis, and of nature. Both
suggest the strength of tenderness.
Donald Kuspit is a professor of Art History and Philosophy at SUNY Stonybrook, and the A.D. White professor-at-large at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books including Reflections of Nature: Paintings of Joseph Raffael.
Notes
(1)Robert Fliess, Ego and Body Ego (New York: International
Universities Press, 1961), p. 255
(2)Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945
(London: Virago, 1988), p. 337
(3)Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and
the Imagination
(New York: Knopf, 1951), pp. 170-71. Thomas H. Garver, «Before California,»
Joseph Raffael: The California Years, 1969-1978 (San Francisco: San
Francisco Museum of Art, 1978; exhibition catalogue), p. 12 notes that
«Perhaps the most important non-art experience of [Raffael’s] Yale years was
the discovery of poetry, an art of metaphor in another medium, and he felt
particularly close to Wallace Stevens.» In a letter to Garver, Raffael
quotes the words of the thirty-second section of Stevens’s «The Man with the
Blue Guitar,» declaring that they «have filled me with their meaning....They
have been really helpful to me and my work.» The stanza begins: «Throw
away the lights, the definitions,/ And say of what you see in the dark,» and
goes on to speak of «the madness of space» and its «jocular procreations.»
It climaxes in the assertion: «Nothing must stand/Between you and the
shapes you take/When the crust of shape has been destroyed.»
These words, descriptive of the creative process, are Raffael’s credo.
In creativity the object takes on the shape of the self, and vice versa, in
a kind of symbiotic intimacy. Painting and poetry are one and the same for
Raffael and Stevens, whatever the difference in medium. As Stevens said,
they «move in the same direction.» (Holly Stevens, ed., The Letters of
Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 593.) In other words, Raffael
is what Baudelaire called a «painter-poet,» «one of the rare elect»--an
«imaginative» rather than a «positivist» artist. (Charles Baudelaire, «The
Salon of 1859,» The Mirror of Art , ed. Jonathan Mayne (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor, 1956), pp. 246, 241.) Raffael’s garden imagery is
incomprehensible without comprehension of its painterly poetics. His garden
space is «mad,» and the animals and flowers that inhabit it are «jocular
procreations,» their different shapes, reflective of their different
relationships with their environment, emblematic of the changing shape the
self creatively is by reason of its identification with its objects.
Implicit in Raffael’s approach is the Symbolist conception of
correspondence, perhaps most eloquently articulated by Baudelaire in his
poem «Correspondances,» whose first chapter read, in English prose
translationby Francis Scarfe, «Nature is a temple, in which living pillars
sometimes utter a babal of words; man traverses it through forests of
symbols, that watch him with knowing eyes.» Raffael seems to return the
notion to its Swendenborgian origins while reconceiving it in modern terms.
Enid Starkie, Baudelaire (New York: New Directions, 1958), pp. 227-28
writes: «Swedenborgians are convinced that material objects exist in the
world only because they have their origin in the world of the spirit, and
the hidden relation between things here below and in the invisible world
they call «correspondences.’ We cannot see the objects in the world of the
spirit except indirectly through their worldly 'correspondences,’ through
their symbols....The true thinker will be the man who can decipher the
hidden writings of nature, and interpret the mysterious book of the
universe. Swedenborg said in Divine Love that hitherto the world had not
known what 'correspondences’ were because it was ignorant of the spiritual.»
The whole point of Raffael’s art is to make the spiritual character of
nature 'perceptible to the senses,» which can only be accomplished by divine
love--the artist’s religious kind of love. At the same time, if, as I
think, what Swedenborg calls «spirit» is the unconscious, then Raffael
suggests the correspondence between nature’s material appearance and its
meaning in the unconscious. Raffael clearly has an intense investment,
conscious and unconscious, in nature. This is why his images of it
«vibrate» with «energy,» as he himself says. As he has stated, his «inner
world» and the «outer world» of nature «join and merge.» For him the issue
of art is to articulate the «edge» where they do so. It is the «moment»
when natural phenomena reveal themselves to be spiritual symbols. (Quoted
in Joyce Petschek, «The Knowable Becomes the Unknowable,» Joseph Raffael
(New York: Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 1990; exhibition catalogue), p. 5.)
(4)D. W. Winnicott, «The Location of Cultural Experience,» International
Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 48 (1967):24
(5)William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt,
1890), vol. II, p. 301
(6)Sigmund Freud, «Negation» (1925), Standard Edition (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), vol. 19, p. 239
(7)T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984), p. 311writes that «Nature poetry is passé not only because it is
losing its subject matter, but also because its truth content is vanishing.
This helps explain the anorganic character of the poetry....Art’s ability to
incorporate undespoiled nature--perhaps it never existed--has been lost.»
Raffael’s nature poetry refutes Adorno, suggesting that images of «despoiled
nature»--the «dead anorganic matter» of the industrial and post-industrial
world (p. 312)--are not inevitable.
The whole tenor of Raffael’s garden imagery is to conquer the myth of
vanishing nature--the modern pessimism that amounts to a decree that it must
vanish. He does not naively regress to the older myth of spiritual nature,
but shows that nature can still be a «living experience,» to use his own
words, however much it must be contained in a garden. Such experience is
the truth content of Raffael’s nature poetry. The image of undespoiled
nature--really nature under the best of conditions, that is, cultivated
rather than exploited, protected rather than abused--is necessary to
counterattack the self-fulfilling prophecy implicit in the notion of
vanishing nature. For Raffael the modern issue is not only the despoilment
of nature, but loss of the capacity to experience it as alive, a consequence
of the inability to establish an organic connection with it. It is this
failure that is conveyed in the anorganic landscape of modern nature poetry.
It is a failure of modern man, not of ghettoized nature.
Gauguin attempts to return to paradise, but can only acknowledge his
expulsion from it--he can never recreate it, not even in Tahiti, because it
has become too death-infected (as Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where
Are We Going?, 1897 indicates), like Baudelaire’s modern Cytherea, the
proverbial island of love. In contrast, Cézanne, having been emotionally
expelled from the paradise of nature by his destructiveness, picks it
apart--ingeniously spoils it. Demolished stone by stone--sensation by
sensation--it becomes a mirage--peculiarly vacuous--an insubstantial
content. The Greenbergian notion that Cézanne’s late works are mosaics in
all but material is an aesthetic gloss on the fragmented illusion nature has
become in them.
(8)Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York:
Norton, 1945), p. 60 writes that for Freud «the proneness to destructiveness
on the archaic levels» is due to the fact that «death instinct and eros are
still 'defused’...they fuse gradually during maturation, eros neutralized
death instinct.» Raffael represents maturation--ripeness--in creative
process, and while eros seems to triumph in his work, destructiveness
remains far from neutral, however sublimal.
(9)Irving Howe observes that «the modern must be defined...as an
'inclusive negative’,» «an adversary stance» involving «the need to negate»
everything, including itself. (Quoted in Daniel Bell, «Beyond Modernism,
Beyond Self,» The Winding Passage (New York: Basic Books, Harper Colophon
Books, 1980), p. 276.) To my mind Marcel Duchamp epitomizes this nihilism.
He was a deliberate «negator,» contradicting whatever was affirmed, as he
acknowledged. He was anti-life as well as anti-art. (Pierre Cabanne,
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking, 1997), p. 32.) Strip the
veneer of
irony--a very thin veneer, hardly a serious facade--from Duchamp’s negation,
and one realizes that it--and all the aesthetics that celebrates negation
(especially Adorno’s)--is emotionally nothing but the death instinct of
modern society. Irony is a refinement of it: the instinct of destruction
in intellectually pretentious--quasi-intellectual--disguise.
Raffael’s nature poetry is an important alternative to Duchamp’s
readymade, the epitome of his negative spirit. It especially negates art:
the readymade has been found not made--it is not a work of art--and then
intellectualized, which is not exactly a creative transformation of it. Its
intellectualization is not particularly convincing: the industrial object
stays visibly the same, suggesting that, in dressing it in intellectual
clothing, Duchamp perpetrated the same cynical fraud as the tailors who gave
the Emperor his invisible new clothing. (The clothing may be fashionable,
but one has to suspend all reality-testing, in an act of dumb faith, to
believe that it keeps one warm.)
An irony has been perpetrated on the readymade, de-ironicizing it:
becomes a sacred cultural icon, it has lost its power to provoke--its
profanity. Institutionalized by the same society it mocked, the readymade
has become what it always clearly was: matter-of-fact--positivist rather
than imaginative. Thus Duchamp’s fraud has been uncovered--his mock
intellectuality mocked---however unintentionally. This suggests that the
readymade is less negative than he thought it was. Indeed, it ratifies
society’s ideology of denaturalization --the readymade is just another
denatured industrial product. It conveys, to the unconscious, the living
death which modern life has become. It seems significant that Raffael’s
nature poetry, with its ecological affirmation of life, has appeared just
when Duchamp’s negation, along with the modern world, has
negated--discredited--itself.
(10)Freud, p. 239
(11)Raffael’s paintings are part of what Matthew Kangas has eloquently
called «The Rematerialization of the Art Object,» Sculpture, 15 (July/August
1996):24-27. What was signalled by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler’s 1968
essay «The Dematerialization of Art» has clearly come to an end, although
the psychosocial meaning of the dematerialization has yet to be clearly
understood. As I have suggested, I think it is the climax of the spirit of
negation that is inseparable from avant-gardism, which is now at an end (as
its self-replication and unwitting self-caricaturing in neo-avant-gardism
suggests).
(12)Quoted in Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria
Rilke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 408
(13)Quoted in Mallarmé (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), p. xi
(14)Quoted in Prater, p. 408
(15)Ibid., p. 238
(16)Ibid., p. 383
(17)Mallarmé, p. xxviii
(18)Odilon Redon, A Soi-meme: Journal (1867-1915) (Paris: Henri
Floury, 1922), p. 30
(19)Quoted in Frank Elgar, Van Gogh (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1958), p. 181
(20)Ibid., p. 120
(21)For the concept of psychic death see Michael Eigen, Psychic Deadness
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996). Meyer Schapiro’s argument that
avant-garde art initially developed as the response to a characteristically
modern «sense of helpless isolation in an anonymouys indifferent mass» can
be extended by recognizing that avant-garde art both encoded and resisted
the unconscious--and not so unconscious--feeling of psychic deadness that
tends to accompany that sense of helpless isolation. (Meyer Schapiro,
«Nature of Abstract Art,» Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York:
George Braziller, 1988), p. 193.)
(22)Michael Balint, «Notes on the Dissolution of Object-Representation
in Modern Art,» Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 10 (June 1952):324.
Schapiro, p. 191 says essentially the same thing: «Common to most of [the]
movements after Impressionism was the absolutizing of the artist’s state of
mind or sensibility as prior to and above objects. If the Impressionists
reduced things to the artist’s sensations, their successors reduced them
further to projections or constructions of his feelings and moods.»
(23)Ibid., p. 326
(24)Ibid., p. 327
(25)Ibid. W. R. D. Fairbairn, «Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art,»
>From Instinct to Self: Selected Papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn (Northvale,
NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), vol. II, p. 390 says the same thing: in modern
art «the objects represented give the impression of having been grossly
distorted or broken up into fragments--or else subjected to both these
mutilating processes...giving the impression in no uncertain terms [of a]
sadistic, 'tearing in piece’ tendency.»
(26)For the concept of selfobject see Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of
the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), especially p.
185. The selfobject is an object which gives the self a sense of identity.
To survive, the self needs empathy from the object. Empathy can take the
form of mirroring, or the equally narcissistic form of idealizing the
object.
(27)Balint, p. 327
(28)Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), p. 28
(29)Klein, p. 263 observes that «from the beginning the ego introjects
objects 'good’ and 'bad,’ for both of which the mother’s breast is the
prototype.» «What one might call the 'good’ breasts become the prototype of
what is felt throughout life to be good and beneficent, while the 'bad’
breasts stand for everything evil and persecuting» (p. 291).
(30)W. R. D. Fairbairn, «The Ultimate Basis of Aesthetic Experience,»
>From Instinct to Self: Selected Papers of W. R. D. Fairbairn (Northvale,
NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), vol. II, p. 408
(31)Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London: Tavistock/Routledge,
1991), p. 51
(32)C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 216
(33)Freud, «Totem and Taboo,» p.148
(34)Garver, p. 19. My reading of Raffael’s art assumes that he meant
what he said when he declared that «the life and the work are not separate.»
(Joseph Raffael, «Interview,» Joseph Raffael: A Dream Remembered (New York:
Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 1986; exhibition catalogue), p. 7
(35)The release of the bird is a «token of freedom,» to use Meyer
Schapiro’s phrase, like the apparent «randomness» of Raffael’s brushstrokes.
(Meyer Schapiro, «Order and Randomness in Abstract Art,» Ibid., p. 253.)
The modern artist is desperate for such tokens of «inner freedom,» as
Schapiro argues: «The pathos of the reduction of fragility of the self
within a culture that become increasingly organized through industry,
economy and the state intensifies the desire of the artist to create forms
[and images] that will manifest his liberty in [a] strking way.» («Recent
Abstract Painting,» Ibid., p. 222.) As Schapiro said, «painting [became] an
ideal domain of freedom» because it seemed to escape the «stultifying,»
«demoralizing» character of modern society. («Nature of Abstract Art,»
Ibid., p. 192.)
But for Raffael, not painting alone, but painting in conjunction with a
return to nature--as its instrument--can restore the feeling of free life
after the psychic death that is the outcome of the avant-garde negation that
unwittingly reflects the reduced, fragile sense of self in modern society,
with its confining controls and determined attempt to organize one’s life
for one. In a sense, Raffael, while acknowledging and assimilating modern
pure painting, returns to its impressionist origins--its
«unconventionalized, unregulated vision» of nature as «a constantly changing
phenomenal outdoor world of which the shapes depended on the momentary
position» of the spectator, thus implying his subjective involvement in
them. As Schapiro says, such a vision was an «implicit [moral] criticism»
of modern society, all the more so because it conceived of art as «a field
of individual enjoyment.» (Schapiro, Ibid., p. 192.)
(36)Sheldon Bach, The Language of Perversion and the Language of Love
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), p. 71
(37)D. W. Winnicott, «Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,»
The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York:
International Universities Press, 1965), pp. 140-52
(38)D. W. Winnicott, «Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,»
Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 1-25
(39)Quoted in Garver, p. 13
(40)Quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968), p. 182
(41)Ibid., p. 178
(42)Ibid., p. 179
(43)Ibid.
(44)H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 148. Weber is in effect describing the
sense of deadness that is the psychic byproduct of modernity.
(45)Innerwelt and Umwelt are Jacok von Uexküll’s concepts. See Thomas
A. Sebeok, «Prefigurements of Art,» The Play of Musement (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 232. There is an art to achieving this
balance, as Seebeok suggests, art being «a kind of cybernetic device for
keeping the organism’s milieu intérieur, or Innenwelt, in balance with its
surrounding (milieu extérieur, or Umwelt).»
(46)Meyer Schapiro, «The Sculptures of Souillac,» Romanesque Art (New
York: George Braziller, 1977), p. 116
(47)Hermann Broch, «A Study on Mass Hysteria,» Erkennen und Handeln:
Essays (Zürich: Rhein Verlag, 1955), vol. II, pp. 258-59
(48)As Schapiro says, the abstract work of art is «a feeling-charged
whole,» «affirming the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of
ordinary experience.» «Recent Abstract Painting,» pp. 215, 218.
(49)George Orwell, «Inside the Whale,» Collected Essays (London:
Mercury Books, 1961), pp.118-59. Orwell describes Miller as «fiddling while
Rome is burning» (p. 151), «a sort of Whitman among the corpses» (p. 159).
(50)I am thinking of Daniel Bell’s discussion of «the polymorph
perverse,» «the unfettering of all instinct,» which he regards as «the
herald of the postmodern mood.» «Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self,» p. 292.
The polymorphous pervert conceives of a world of «unlimited subcoital
intimacy, the pleasures of childhood» (p. 295), in which «all
boundaries...any distinction between the self and the external world,
between man and woman, subject and object, mind and body» are erased and
obliterated, resulting in a «mystical» sense of body (p. 296)--the ultimate
achievement of «‘concrete’ or perceptual thought» (p. 297). There is no
doubt a polymorphous perverse dimension to Raffael’s nature poetry, but it
is a means to an end--the revitalization of the self, deadened by
modernity--rather than an end in itself. In fact, in Raffael’s painting
animals and flowers are in harmony with the garden environment they inhabit,
which does not mean they are indistinguishable from it. A Raffael painting
may be simultaneously male and female, objective and subjective, consciously
and instinctively made--artistically created and naturally given--but this
does not mean that the opposites cannot be distinguished. They are in
osmotic intimacy, rather than reduced to an undifferentiated blur. Raffael
does not so much erase and obliterate boundaries, as play--dance--on them.
(51)William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York:
Modern Library, n. d., originally published 1902), distinguishes between
«the healthy-minded, who need to be born only once, and...the sick souls,
who must be twice-born in order to be happy.» According to the latter,
«pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher
excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken» (p. 355). I
think Raffael’s nature poetry achieves this «higher excitement.» James
definition of religion also goes a long way toward helping us understand
Raffael’s nature poetry: it is «the feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to
stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine» (pp. 31-32).
Raffael might add: an animal or a plant can be divine, if it is seen with
higher excitement.
(52)Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Mentor
Books, 1955), p. 271
(53)Ibid., pp. 251-52
(54)Ibid., pp. 270-71
(55)Raffael has said: «I want to paint what I feel and cannot see. I
want to make the invisible visible. I don’t know what the invisible is, but
I know it’s not appearances.» Quoted in Joyce Petschek, «Cutting through
the Clouds: A View of Joseph Raffael’s Recent Paintings,» Arts Magazine, 59
(Nov. 1974):80
(56)Whitehead, p. 283
(57)Clarence H. Hamilton, ed. «Introduction,» Buddhism: A Religion of
Infinite Compassion: Selections from Buddhist Literature (New York:
Liberal Arts Press, 1952), p. xxviii
(58)Ibid., p. xxiii
(59)Quoted in Ibid., «Pali Literature: The Life of Buddha,» p. 22
(60)Garver, p. 9. It is in Raffael’s «water-related imagery,» as it has
been called by Ellen Simak, that ch’i is most evident. Raffael notes the
«flow and merging of colors, forms, gestures and movements in Fish Dream,
1979. The flow is emblematic of vital force. Many of Raffael’s works are
in watercolor, which, as he says, «expresses flow, life as transparency, the
ineffable, the transient...air, motion, life moving. Watercolor is itself a
force of nature.» Quoted in Simak, «Reflections: The Water Related Imagery
of Joseph Raffael» (New York: Hunter Museum of Art, 1992; exhibition
catalogue), p. 5.
Raffael’s idea of the vital force or flow can no doubt be understood in
terms of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. It arises from the
feeling of «being carried away by a current, everything moving smoothly
without effort...our whole being [focused] in a harmonious rush of
energy...lift[ing] is out of the anxieties and boredom that characterize so
much of everyday life,» thus affording intense happiness. Csikszentmihalyi,
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium (New York: Harper
Collins, 1993), p. xiii. See his Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), for a fuller account of the
feeling of flow.
(61)Quoted in Garver, p. 21
(62)Petschek, pp. 82-83
(63)Ibid., p. 82
(64)Hamilton, «Examination of Nirvana,» p. 155
(65)Garver, p. 9. Black is evident in many water paintings, from Black
Crag, 1974 to Summer’s Pond, 1994, and especially in the Galactic Water
series, 1996. For Raffael, as for Matisse, «black is a color,» which means
that it is part of the flow of nature, rather than, as it was for Kandinsky,
the static dregs of nature, «something burnt out, like the ashes of a
funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse,» or, as he said, «the
silence of black is the silence of death.» Nor is Raffael’s black pure
«negation,» as it was for Ad Reinhardt--the ultimate abstract expression of
the «theology of negation» at the root of his conception of art-as-art.
(Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977), p. 39.
Reinhardt, «Black as Symbol and Concept,» Art as Art: The Selected Writings
of Ad Reinhardt (New York: Viking, 1975), pp. 86-88.) Raffael’s black is
not only inseparable from nature, but, like light, contains every possible
color. As Dying, 1984 suggests, it can foreshadow new growth of life. For
Raffael it seems to a space of transition between death and life.
(66)See Irene McManus, «Joseph Raffael’s & Lannis Series, Part One,» Arts
Magazine, 63 (March 1988):26-28 for an account of the Lannis paintings.
(67)Garver, p. 11
