The Brooklyn Rail

Something that might serve as a speculum mundi, or mirror for our times, comes to us, aptly, via a mirror. Since it began sending information back to Earth in the summer of 2022, the James Webb Space telescope has presented us with images that embody the ambiguity of depiction, perception, scale, the sublime, beauty and artifice, and, most of all, of comprehensibility. Reflected into the telescope by groupings of gold-plated beryllium mirrors, crafted with an almost impossibly perfect precision, infrared light from the most distant parts of the universe is turned into images that are on one hand stunningly gorgeous—bringing to mind the immediate visceral aesthetic impact of color-based abstraction—and yet at heart so out of sync with ordinary perception, that they fly away from us the moment we try to bring them into focus. Beautiful colored forms seen as adjacent on the photograph’s picture plane, and thus visually interacting, can be a hundred light years (nearly six hundred trillion miles) apart—or even orders of magnitude more. We sort of understand that. That partial acquiescence is lulling, yet at heart truly disconcerting—more so than the quantum world of the impossibly small, where the basic laws of nature that we take for granted (and can perceive with our senses) are upended and must be translated into a language of mathematics available only to a relative few; and are thus turned, for the common person, into a kind of metaphysics—accepted as true because we are told it is.

The Webb’s astronomical images, manipulated as they are to translate the invisible infrared spectrum into the visible, are certainly artful, yet they are not art per se. Our understanding of them parallels our perceptual approach to a certain kind of modern and contemporary practice, one that posits a degree of complexity that resists the three ordinary compositional reads: the straightforward iconic ordering of a centered (or key) object or objects; the relational reading that places a set of forms into intuitive balance; or an overall composition that gives the various elements of the artwork equal valence, creating an evenly weighted perceptual field that allows for many things to be put in play without giving any one of them an overriding importance. These common strategies, when placed alongside accessible historical reference, render much modern and contemporary art—especially abstraction—comprehensible to the willing viewer.

But what happens when the work of art is simultaneously too complex for the iconic or relational read, but too perceptually discordant (or in a manner of speaking, lumpy) for the overall read? And how do we deal with art whose form is appealing, but whose meaning or referential frame remains inaccessible to us? We can see this in modern Australian Aboriginal dot paintings, Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s for example. These are complex, coded, map-like paintings, abstractly narrating myths of the land and the sky, but whose precise orderings and references we are forbidden to know. Not conceptually far off are Alfred Jensen’s thickly-painted gridded aggregations of partially comprehensible numerical and philosophical systems—works which simultaneously invite us in and force us away. Something similar is happening in the Facteur Cheval’s Palais Idéal (1879-1912)—a very large, marvelously intricate, exotic, and mysterious architectural concoction built in southeastern France over the course of thirty-three years by Ferdinand Cheval, an untutored postman, who picked up the rocks and pebbles for his project on his daily rounds. The work, admired by André Malraux, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Max Ernst and the other Surrealists, is now a classified monument but is as bizarre and intriguing a referential mélange as ever.

This resistant complexity is also found in works as diverse as Gerald Murphy’s seductive yet impenetrable precisionist painting, Watch (1925); Fernand Léger’s unnavigable cityscapes; James Ensor’s allegorical but scarcely decipherable crowd scenes like Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888); or Joan Miró’s “Constellations,” his moving yet elusive suite of twenty-three small paintings on paper from the war years 1940–41. Sculptural installations are also good sites for this interpretive discord, especially oddly constructed and unstable looking polychromed works like Jessica Stockholder’s accumulations, or Franz West’s mashups of base and object, his impossible furniture or his aggressively awful colors adorning papier mâché or intestinal-looking metal sculptures.

While crisis seems to be in the very air that we breathe these days, for an image to serve as an illustration of or an antidote to the state of current unrest seems simultaneously to be too big a burden and a hopelessly inadequate strategy. Art follows its own mysterious paths, and redolent images push up against received perception—aesthetic, physical, and physiological—every bit as much as received ideas, ideologies, and politics. It is a case of how we see as well as what we see. This challenge may be a subtle one, a perturbation of scale, density, or referential frame, but in the end, it is art’s enduring job to make us pay close attention to such things.