When words get in the way

Not asking why, I don’t know if blizzard is my son’s favorite word because of the associations to which the word takes him; to snow, wind, and frost; to imagine a cozy-inside-a-warm-house blizzard or an outside-in-a-snowdrift-dying blizzard. Or whether it is my son’s favorite word because of sound. The “bl” sound moving into the “z” into the final “ard;” phonics leading him to wizard, lizard, or gizzard, making sound precedent over meaning.

I don’t tell my son that one doesn’t choose favorite words; words take hold, forcing a person outward. Words command me to listen to them, make me take notice of a sentence, demand that I pick up the newspaper when I see a particular word in print.

The word landscape always pulls me to it. I am also constantly drawn to the words ocean, sea, abyss, quicksand, emptiness; words suggesting nebulous boundaries. The "ness" in emptiness describes an amorphous border that happiness can never imagine. It is vast.

Art is vast. And when I hear the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” I feel as if an act of piracy has been committed against art. It is the piracy of branding art as quantifiable and accountable to words; apparently accountable to a thousand words.

Most often, words are used for clarifying and validating (poetry is the exception in suspending understanding). The key word here is “used.” When words are used to validate art, I think of the birds in Rilke’s poem:

Like birds that get used to walking

and grow heavier and heavier as in falling:

the earth sucks out of their long claws

the brave memory of all

the great things that happen high up.*

Art loses its expansiveness in this cage of words. In turn, words used as control agents lose their magical power exchanging wayward vastness for clarity; like the snitch in a prison art class running to authorities when petty rules are transgressed — ready to give up all for a pat on the head.

Show, don't tell

Artists’ statements tell me that art is moving into words and academia for validation. I read words like palimpsest, diaspora, deconstruct, agency, empire, inform; words suggesting that cognitive concepts taught create more meaningful art than art created through the stumbled-upon visual discovery experience.

Concepts are based upon rules, and rules limit.

Diaspora, a good word, is merely an academic concept that can never match the unfathomable depth of being uprooted and left without a home. Homelessness has no boundaries and follows no rules. When diaspora becomes a redundant word thrown about to make art, it disrespects that which it is addressing and makes homelessness a cliché.

I tell my students in prison, “The pain in here is extreme, and the stereotypical drawings of crying inmates behind bars reduce this pain to a cliché.”

Furthermore, creating a visual experience from words or concepts makes art an illustration. Art turns away from itself, no longer complete, and points at what is now considered important — the concept or words.

Art needs no validation from words. Diane Collins’s sculptures are not metaphor for something else and do not need words for explanation. In her sculpture, art exists as mystery.

At the science museum, a two-year-old child is taking delight in watching the colorful ball as it floats over a jet of air. I listen as the mother explains the concept of causality to the child; how is it that the ball can float. In this explanation, the mother is teaching the child that the aesthetic experience of the colorful ball is not sufficient. She is teaching her child that the aesthetic experience must be validated by reason and words. Consequently, she is teaching her child that art based upon an aesthetic experience must also be validated by reason.

More experience, less judgment

Go to any museum and listen to those exhibition guide tapes. Art is explained away by a headful of information, forcing art to undergo a certain lobotomy for a viewer who is over-instructed.

Compensating for this over-instruction of the head, the heart is appointed as a guide to art.

A student in my prison art class tells me, “When I draw, I follow my heart!” I say, “Follow your heart or follow your head, and you end up in this dreadful place called prison.” I suggest, “If you are following body parts, try following your eyes. Eyes do not approach the world through thoughts, feelings, or value judgments. If you find yourself making judgments regarding right or wrong when drawing, then you know that the heart or head have taken over controls.”

The senses receive the world, and drawing becomes a multi-perceptual experience.

When I draw the armored horse at the Philadelphia Art Museum, I experience the armored horse through all my senses — my hand can only move across the paper in a certain way because my hand feels the rigidity of the metal. Eventually, in the intensity of drawing the armor, I taste the metal.

Creating art is more listening, less expression; more experience, less judgment.

Aesthetic experience can never be reduced to “mere aesthetic” because “aesthetic” stands in opposition to “anesthesia”; a numbness to the world. Perhaps the aesthetic experience is dangerous. It awakens the artist and viewer to a world beyond facts and information that is ultimately unknowable. And an unknown world felt in all its intensity through the authority of one’s own senses is dangerous.

Art is unknowable. It happens to me over and above my wanting, doing, and thinking. What I intend and anticipate is irrelevant. It is the happening where I discover “wow”; that borderless word where art exists without why and just because.

* Ranier Maria Rilke, "Fragments of Lost Days." From the collection Book of Images

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