The Hurtle of the Universe
The Critique of Pure Sculpture of David Rabinowitch
by Mark Daniel Cohen
David Rabinowitch: Phantom Group
Peter Blum Gallery, New York, November 16, 2006 – January 20, 2007
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007. Copyright © 2007 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self- Reliance”
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
—King Lear, Act V, scene iii, 16
. . . light is the limiting condition for the mass.
—David Rabinowitch
I
Those who peer the deepest are opaque. Those whose gazes seek into the bottomness of things, whose fingers scratch beyond the tissues of the ordinariness, beyond the protoplasmic pleasures, past the trite despondencies, take upon themselves the dim obscurity they probe. The blackness dabs their souls; they miss the sun. They distance themselves with distances and bring us secrets that evade our sense, that knot our wits, beguile our will to emphases. Their thoughts are like the runes.
They are sui generis: each a model of his making; each a fashioning of his own hand. For each, there is a field of intervention that finds analogy but in the quality of uniqueness found in comparable travail. Among these few, their opacity is the only thing they share. And if they are not opaque to each other, it is through no fault of proximity, for they travel distinct trajectories and are farther from each other than is any from the horde. They move out from the norm by different vectors; like radii stemming from a center, like radiation from the leaden dullness of the core, like sparks shot out by dying embers—scintillae from the closing eye—the farther they traverse, the farther from each other they acquire.
They are, observed, in silhouette. They dwell in isolation. We do not see the world they see, we do not see the world as they. The shortcoming is ours—for they are those who peer the deepest. The shortcoming’s our own.
Their blankness is no masking, their opacity no obfuscation. It is a false objection, a bristle of evasion, and it cannot be made with cogency, for obfuscation is a measure of the gap between expression and its meaning, and there is meaning here no one has yet encountered. There is no knowledge of where it lies, and how distant from the testimony it is found.
They are misunderstood, for the species has the reflex to digest, and if they are understood by each other, it is through no fault of proximity. Taken as innovators of phrasing and linguists of the imagination rather than breakthroughs of insight, as phantoms of the dive, they are accused through parochial result: their transcriptions are relayed to comprehensions in the common pool, to thoughts already thought, to common knowledge common minds demand to be confirmed, and the measures marked between what they have said and what we have to make of it. Their system of expression is their own; their uniqueness of reference refers to unique references; their cartography Ultima Thule. By implication, by reaction, we condemn their failure to say what we know. They are unreasonable, they do not compromise or weight received opinion. Yet they reason, they are rigorously rational, for what they wield is uncorrupted, uncontaminated potency of mind, and with thought heated to this degree, all alloys fuse—all thought is of a piece.
Their work is what we have taken to be art—the privacy of realization, the privation of common bonds. It has been art, until recently, until the turning point some decades back. We are now deep into the time of finding art not in the impulse but in the receipt, which is to say, art as a profession—art without the sense of mission internal not to its place in the social fabric as a life plan but to its intrinsic and necessitated conduct as a life commitment: art as an industry. Art has become what its recipients find it to be, and so it has become a professional classification, a field of economic endeavor—a thing responsive to marketplace demand—and has taken its place among the investments of entertainment, which is to say that it has become a sideshow for the general population as well as a financial instrument (which inevitably go together—consider how films are financed).
What art had been, what art is, and more than art, for the work of those who have made themselves opaque has not been suspended—they do not lose their nerve, they work by the resilience of insistence, without the need of approbation and beyond the discountenance of the reprove—is, at minimum, the approach of genius. It is the attack of adamantine curiosity, the assault on the unknown without curtail. It is the call of personal conscience, the call demonstrably to search for truth, the truth of some matter caught by silent urge, by inkling, by the soft demand that cannot be denied. It is a vapored pressure of the self that drives the mind and acknowledges no computations of reception or renown. Its principle of operation is investigation, discovery, for when art is art, it is not invention. It sets its value, and tells us what we do not know, but should. And they remain among us, inevitable as thought, discounted in the history we write, occupied otherwise, for they have courted no one.
Their thought is of necessity opaque because it does not go down easily the nearly all-consuming maw of popular taste, all consuming but for this. Art when it is art sticks in the throat of the imperturbable amorphous and thus humiliates those with access to an audience and who would think of no better occupation than to feed the beast of masses and of madness who can relish nothing but the bland and to protect their careers—as if in a world in which all will die, in which love is a lie, an infantile dream, in which everything touched turns to dissipating vapors, all of life a waking from a dream, in which life makes promises, and cheats, and everything is war, they had something to lose; as if there were anything left to obtain, as if anything left to betray, and the integrity of our minds were not the only object of true significance.
Art when it is art is significant, it is indispensable, for the beast of madness is constituted when people let themselves be led like cattle, be made the reliable audience requisite for investment strategies, becoming by their authority of judgment over art the tool of an industrial machine, for any power over what one does not create is a dependency, it is a slavery, and there will be inevitably “a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf.” Art when it is art leads nothing, when like a rock it splits the flow of masses, the current of the herd instinct, and breaks the savage back. It is driven toward a polestar no one knows, and inviolable intent, the soul of independence, relentless delves like sanctity the insoluble mystery of things.
Which is to say that art is one of the natural functions of clarity of mind, one of the autonomic resorts of those who will not be forestalled and do not ask appreciation, those who seek to hear the most profound hintings of their own thoughts, who work to hear the most distant of the inner voices. It is one of the fields to which the genius within us naturally flocks. And so what we find in art is not so much aesthetics—not in the sense of a program of thought at its essential level unique to its field of endeavor and found in no other—as the spontaneous expressive outcomes of purpose in life. It is shown to us that clarity of mind brings a superior form of existence, an elite dispensation available, as are all forms of elitism, by definition, to all those who choose to pursue it with sufficient, and that is lifelong and tireless, commitment—those who seek it above all other things. It is diagnosed as, for it is composed of, formal integrity with a purpose of functionality—thought turned through inestimable effort to accomplishment and realization in place of recognition.
For ideas are imaginative constructs of the mind. We know what things are by the principles upon which they are built, and ideas are built by the mind. It is the integrity of the idea, the coherence of its accomplishment, that requests the integrity of the manufacturing mind, and only the mind alone, the single mind left to its own resources, reliant solely upon its distinctive methods, principles of pursuit, and trust of realization, is integral. When minds are integrated in the attempt to formulate ideas, when people try to think in chorus, the result is nothing but muddle. The germinative mind is an opacity to others.
So, the mind that has become opaque possesses a protocol that is enigmatic—its points of focus, its questionings, its speculations are self-engendering. It is a species of one. Its investigations are not out of the established questions but are the inspirations of new inquiries born of new initiations, new examinations that proceed from taking nothing for granted, from going back to zero in some area of inquest, from beginning again. This is why the artist’s work, the thinker’s work, does not survive editing or interference, which is to say, why editors and meddlers don’t survive it.
The artist, when an artist, tolerates no impositions, accepts no forced assumptions. All of civilization is his to dispose; he takes no grants of culture. He is the agar of his own, and he goes back to zero. The artist when an artist starts again.
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