L

Marginalia IV.

“Art-as-subversion runs very deep, of course. If in Greco-Roman art it’s sometimes hard to catch the subversive notes, art was considered insidious enough that Plato, within a chapter of designing his ideal state in The Republic, was discarding whole poetic genres and musical scales for being too politically dangerous. But somewhere in the 19th century the notion develops that a work of art can be most effective when it’s ugly, when it deeply mirrors certain social realities and presents them in such a way that the audience is spurred to immediate action. Napoleon praised The Marriage of Figaro for instigating the French Revolution and Lincoln credited Harriet Beecher Stowe with the Civil War. Opera buffs have been inspired by how a vigorous performance of The Mute Girl of Portici in 1830 bled directly over into the revolution that created Belgium; and stage actors are always a little miffed that their performances, however great, do not lead to the sort of murderous riots that broke out between the partisans of the dueling Macbeths, Macready and Forrest, in 1849. […]And then—this is my contention—somewhere towards the 1960s the culture simply ran out of ways to shock. Modern art abruptly reversed course and became interested in things like Land Art and Warhol’s practical jokes. All kinds of people continued to do very shocking things for the sake of art, especially in the garish ‘80s—Chris Ofili threw dung on the Virgin Mary, a Russian man nailed his testicles to the Red Square, Ozzy Osbourne bit off the head of a pigeon, Dee Snider (worried that Twisted Sister was losing its edge) filed down his teeth—but the secret was out by now, none of this was stylish but annoying and exhibitionist. Caught flat-footed were people like Albee, Ginsberg, and Gary. The assumption had been that artists were entrusted with the sacred task of “pushing the envelope,” as Albee insouciantly put it, but they were finding that the culture had gotten way ahead of them. And at the same time—and this was really unnerving to a certain type of artist—the culture revealed itself to be shameless, tawdry, and grotesque in ways that were supposed to be reserved for the avant-garde. So, in other words, a dead-end—artists simply repeating passed-down wisdom about their expected social role as risqué exhibitionists without really considering what they truly wanted to create.”

Meticulous inch-high engravings of grasses and flowers, egrets, spoonbills, the wattled crane, the griffin vulture, the whale-headed stork—the vocabulary of hieroglyphic writing is uniquely drawn from an aesthetic delight in nature. The pictures that form hieroglyphic words represent not only the living thing itself but metaphorical dimensions that convey the essence of the living animal: a picture of the curlew with its scimitar beak in the sand defines the verb to find, the flamingo is the hieroglyph for red, the letter f in the hieroglyphic alphabet is the deadly horned viper that makes the spitting fff sound as it strikes. The origins of written language in the forms of nature show the evolution of thought from the tactile experience of the physical world. Hieroglyphs are a clear and detailed portrait of the timeless and the observable, and as such they have a stunning range of meaning and a startling immediacy.