The Hurtle of the Universe
The Critique of Pure Sculpture of David Rabinowitch
Page III
Frege’s theory of sense and reference
What is most likely of greatest significance in this theoretical construct for meaning is Rabinowitch’s adoption of Frege’s assertion of the intrinsic, objective configuration of the expression (sense) as determining its range of capable reference—not its capacity for truth value, even false assertions can be made without hindrance, but the expression’s internally specified possibility of making legitimate reference. In short, expression—and, for Rabinowitch, art—cannot legitimately be made to mean anything whatever. Its internal, factual configuration limits that to which it can be taken to refer: meaning as a function of form, and form as an intrinsic quality not interpretable, no more so than are the laws of mathematics.
The construction of the perceptible world
Here we come to the heart of the issue of the significance for Rabinowitch of the field of experience, and the application of his asserted universals: Are they laws of the perceptually real only or laws of reality beyond perception? The world as perceived is constructed by the conditions of perception—Rabinowitch accepts Kant’s analysis. There are three broad, categorically distinct approaches, or interpretations, for dealing with the implications of the constructive principle, the principle, by any specifications, of our constructing the world we perceive. What we perceive is entirely of our own making, for all intents and purposes a delusion, for it in no degree reflects the nature of things, including ourselves, as they are unto themselves. What we perceive is essentially accurate, in accord with the way things actually are, for the structural principles of mind and the structural principles of the world are completely in accord. And what may be characterized as the Helmholtzian model: our perceptions are sufficiently in accord with the world that what we perceive is an interpretable reflection of things as they are.
It is clear from some number of statements by Rabinowitch that he holds to the Helmholtzian model. What we experience is our version of the truth of things. It is not an internally generated invention, an idealism in the purest sense, and it is not an identity with a world whose principles of construction match precisely those of our thoughts. Our perceptions are constructions reflective of ontological authenticities and can be interpreted, like scientific data that is imbued with the laboratory conditions under which it was gathered—they can be “read through.” What we encounter is a grid through which the actual world is passed, a melody inspired by things as they are, a song of it that such as we are able to sing. The world in which we find ourselves living is not the function of and the evidence for solipsism.
Hence, Rabinowitch’s project is art as a philosophical examination of the conditions of reality in a specifiable sense. The point of his focus, as he testifies to it, is not the preconditions for perception, and thus his is not a phenomenological investigation, but the preconditions of—the structural principles that function as something like natural law for—physical or objective existence. Not ontological presence but objective existence: that which is perceptible but whose characteristics are not completely attributable to and dependent on the specifications of perception but are perceptually reconfigured aspects of actuality. For him, what we perceive is self-sustaining, even if in itself, in its raw form, it is unlike what we observe.
IV
And all of which takes us fairly far afield from folded metal sheets. And the question is forced: all of this, which has been obtained from Rabinowitch’s statements on his art, gives us what? Does all of this help us to see the sculpture? Compounded, these and other of his statements constitute his theory of his own sculpture, but do we encounter a body of sculpture that “speaks,” and does the theory help us to “hear” it? Do the sculptural works of Rabinowitch in themselves have a meaning in the sense he developed out of Frege—as a “reference” rooted in but outside of the intrinsic physical characteristics of the sculptures as objects?
What Rabinowitch’s statements constitute is a theory that serves as a compositional strategy. These are the thoughts that, by his report, motivated him in the making of the works, they prompted him to create the works we received in exhibition. But a compositional strategy, the thoughts that get the thing done, is not the same as a thematic strategy, a set of tactics for infusing works of art with detectible meaning, meaning detectible by the sensitive observer, detectible without the aid of anything extrinsic to the works themselves, including the verbal guidance of the maker. And as Rabinowitch has noted, to identify the meaning of a work with its maker’s intentions is “just a confusion.”
What we have in these works is not sculpture in the traditional sense of the word, for they are not specifically art in the traditional sense of the word, but meditative objects—intellectual objects that are the results of deep contemplation. Perhaps akin to proposed results of scientific experiments yet to be made, or yet to be capable of being made, Rabinowitch’s sculptures are less like works by Rodin, or even David Smith, than they are like Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14, in which Duchamp simulated the appearance of a meter-long stick distorted by four-dimensional space—a visual object lesson of advanced thought, and an experiment that of course could not be truly conducted. Rabinowitch’s works are, in a sense, the remains of meditations conducted through the manipulation of objects, through the manipulations involved in their making. They are aftermath. They recall the exploration that was made possible through their being made, but only for he who was there for the exploration.
Yet, for the rest of us, they are infused with meaning, or the potential for meaning, at the least. It is not, in the traditional sense, aesthetic meaning—it is a rather more intellectual matter. But what of that? They are deeply intelligent, or they bespeak a deep intelligence, that which was brought to their fashioning, and what manner of criticality can bring that capability into doubt?
They are calls to meditate, by their nature and by the nature of their creation—they are self-evidently so. And they possess a valency, they are vectored, they direct the dreaming mind to speculations along the lines of those that brought them into existence. There is a mystery in this, but what of that? For the greater field of interest is to follow their lead, to dream out of them and away from them, and that is a direct contact with the sculpture and not with reports of their creation.
So, let us dream with them, and begin with their observation. The metal plates have a clean, sleek, polished appearance. Fold upon fold, they are layered in their look with an evacuation of the signs of decay. They are pristine to the gaze—there are no signs of rust, no marks, no wear, nothing of deterioration. They are sheathed the veneer of agelessness, and it seems the agelessness, the unageing validity, of the precision of their geometry—the mathematical clarity that does not take the marks of time, that does not credit any moment of existence, that does not grow or fall to the sere, the yellow leaf.
And there is a beauty to this precision, to these affections of clean, unbending lines and smooth curves, to this mathematical simplicity. There is a charm in the regularities, a spell in the rhythms of level upon level and the rippling of segment upon segment, in the harmonics of their resolutions in the completion or the promise of completion in the elliptical curve, in a set of lines not quite parallel mirrored by an adjacent set of lines not quite parallel. They are nearly harmonies, and one can almost hear the crystal ping, the perfect tone arising from the fillip of the goblet, from the perfectly cut, geometrically resolved carve of the glass.
Purely abstract, purely mathematical formulations—and there seems something intimately entrancing in them, something interior, something deeply human. But well there should. For we are more than feelings, we are as much and as intimately our minds—and thinking is as much a song as singing, and profundity of thought a symphony. And what could be more human than music—the completely abstract, thoroughly mathematical art? This, too, is us.
And there is more to this. There are suggestions of possibilities, potentially scientific conceptions, for these meditative works grew by means of scientific thoughts, and in some way they carry the tone, the pitch of their making. There are hints here, spurs to imaginings, of an altered worldview, of a different vision of things.
The layering of horizontal levels in these works has the appearance of ascending planes of light. Even more precisely, in their sheen and in the shimmer of the polished surfaces, in the swift smoothness of the laterals, there is the visual feel of their being rays of pure light, illumination shunting down their lengths. The exacting straightness of the lines and the gleam of their surfaces give the sense of sheer velocity, of rushing, vectored speed. And in art, straight lines are always the visual formula for rapid motion.
But there is no motion here, no sense of motion to the visual conception. There is the feeling of velocity, but it is speed that stands in place, velocity that has no movement, that has no rate of speed, that is immeasurable as movement. Less than motion, it is more like a tension, like a pressure, like an energy field, like a standing wave through which water pours but which never moves, and never falls, more like a grip—an impossible conception, but what we see, as palpable as light.
And one might speculate. Under Einstein’s theories of relativity, all motion is relative to the point of observation except, unlike Newton, that of light, the speed of which is invariant. Light measures out at the same speed for all observers, regardless of their velocity relative to each other or to anything else they observe. The speed of light is a constant, a universal, a non-additive degree of motion.
It can be argued that background conditions possess, as their defining characteristic, the same apparent qualities from the viewpoints of all emergent properties. They are the unchanging conditions, and all unchanging conditions are background conditions. Whereas not discretionary or interpreted, background conditions and emergent properties may well be perspectival—each from its viewpoint may witness the other as background. Even if so, they are, as are all essential dichotomies, a matched pair. Each is the precondition for the other. Given changing conditions of any kind, there will always be an unchanging background, and whatever is unchanging always is background.
What if—we conceive of light not as moving at a universal speed but, since movement is a relative concept—with two things moving past each other, either can be designated as stationary—we conceive of ourselves as moving relative to light? Light then is universally unchanging, since it is equally and currently conceived as universally of constant speed for all observers—it is then stationary for all observers. Light then becomes the background for all else, all that changes, all that is not light. Light becomes the background for change, the reference plane—the Being for Becoming.
If so—then the geometric simplicity, the harmonic resolution of form, becomes the mark of background, of the unchanging condition, of the agelessness of the math. As things become geometrically more complex, as we degrade from the smooth precision of simple forms, from the perfect balance of them, we slow from light—or, attributing the movement to us, we speed away from it, we rush into change. The light appears rapid to us as we deteriorate into complexity of form, and it is complexity that seems to congeal into the seeming solidity of a stop against the seeming movement of the background—into the supposition that it is light that moves away from us, that it is light that changes.
If so—then the background condition of all that is, the precondition of it existing at all, is the hurtle of the universe, the universal pure velocity standing in place, what appears to us as light, as the constant and universal motion, but the motion is ours. The background of the universe, the givens, are then not space and not time, not the elements of the Transcendental Idealism, not as givens in reality and not as universals in our perceptions—for this, then, is what Rabinowitch’s work is showing us. In it, we see the background condition as light, as velocity that does not move, that does not traverse space, that does not transpire in time, velocity that just is—velocity per se, the universal condition of existence. All else, as foreground against light, against this limiting condition, against this universal pertinence, is a slowing into geometric complexity, into tangible existence, into the object. But the slowing is an increasing rush away from the essential.
V
But then, this is just a thought, daydreaming off a shining polished surface. And it may well be nothing more than a mild self-hypnosis—to look at a folded metal plate and see whatever one is inclined to see—just a song one sings to oneself. But ideas begin this way. Before they are put to the rigor that justifies assertion, ideas are the free play of imagination, things we toy with to see where they go, what they will do. And they want a certain absurdity, for otherwise they have stepped away from nothing already known, and they can hold no promise. They want a certain opacity, a certain residence in silence, an incomprehensibility from the viewpoint of the already emerged properties of the mind, else they cannot be pregnant with chance.
And these speculations, and any others that from anyone else similarly arise, are rooted in the hard intellectual labor of Rabinowitch: the background conditions of his sculpture. His works have no ready lexicon, no established code by which they can be read, they do not resort to the available legend of traditional art, but they are rich with the workings of his thinking for a sensitive eye of another kind, perhaps an unknown kind—an eye that dwells in isolation, that is the model of its own making, that remains open. There is a ready audience for Rabinowitch’s art, a set of eyes prepared by their solitude for his hermetic realizations. Perhaps they are unlike him, but they are like his works, and apt to envision with them. Such visionaries know, in the face of the facts—that people die, that love is impossible, that there are no simple pleasures and all is battle and duress—that there is art, and knowledge: as appropriate a recess for adoration as is virtue. Such visionaries are as often as not despised by others, but through no fault of proximity, they are uniquely capable of seeing each other. And to them comes the light, the limiting condition, as it becomes the greatest profundity of all, as it becomes the music, as it becomes the silence.
© Mark Daniel Cohen—Nietzsche Circle, 2007
(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007)
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