The Brooklyn Rail

The Surrender of Man, an atheist’s memoir, ends with a recollection of churchgoing. Enduring services one Sunday as a child, author Naomi Falk finds herself equal parts bored by the contents of Christianity and thunderstruck by its aesthetic qualities. The King James Bible holstered in the pew before her seems a lovely art object, the prose on its “[a]lmost translucent” pages humming with “musicality and tonality.” Later, leaving the service, Falk is handed a palm frond and marvels at “its stem tender like a mouse’s ribcage.” She proceeds into the church lobby, which is “filled with noon light … Golden incandescence dipped in violet of the divine.” It’s a fitting finale for a work of secular worship.

The Surrender of Man locates in art an alternative source of the meaning, community, and numen traditionally supplied by religion. An editor and art book designer who has worked in galleries and museums, Falk offers up her own existential and emotional bildung (education) as a case study in how artistic experience might help nonbelievers grapple with earthly suffering and injustice—questions to which God can serve as a one-word answer, for the faithful.

As waystations in that philosophical odyssey, Surrender assembles twenty artworks that comprise Falk’s personal “mind palace.” The book pairs each piece, in color reproduction, with Falk’s protean readings and personal memories thereof. Surrender’s red and black cover and font selection evoke the harsh yet lush visual sensibilities of heavy metal, a subculture eternally in contention and conversation with Christianity. The resulting volume is a work of experimental ekphrasis that intoxicates at the level of prose and design alike.

Surrender gleefully hops the fences of artistic medium, interspersing selections of sculpture, painting, film, photography, and other objects. A chapter on Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting [seven panel] (1951) is followed by one on Edmonia Lewis’s marble rendering of Cleopatra, The Death of Cleopatra (1876); reflections on a topaz gemstone housed at the American Museum of Natural History adjoin Falk’s musings on a fantastical short film, Juan Antonio Olivares’s Moléculas (2017). Likewise does the book flout conventional divisions between prose genres, comingling personal narrative with formal analysis, dream sequences with art history.

This voracious writing style lays the groundwork for, and also enacts, the main polemic of the book: a call to transfuse the hot blood of our own subjectivity into art criticism. Falk views this reorientation as a matter of honesty, for one thing: inevitably “we bring our baggage to any interpretation of a work of art; any interpretation that matters, anyway,” she writes. But it is also essential, in her view, that we counterbalance a Western male art critical tradition that prizes thought above feeling.

And so, for instance, Falk’s essay on Wendy Red Star’s Spring (2006), from her “Four Seasons” series, takes as its jumping-off point the writer’s affective reactions to viewing the photograph. The image, in which Red Star poses in ceremonial Crow regalia against a hypercolor natural landscape—provocatively turning herself into an Native visual stereotype—raises “a familiar and uncomfortable feeling in my chest. Degrees of guilt and shame … A rage that asks to be turned into action.” In another chapter, while walking through Bruce Nauman’s video installation Going around the Corner Piece (1970), Falk “indulge[s] the angular feeling his work evokes. Its eeriness is pornographic, gives you the creepy crawlies.”

Falk’s somatic attunement does not come at the expense of observational acumen. In a segment on Kiyomi Quinn Taylor’s drawing Problems of Feeling II (Sink) (2020), for example, Falk hones in on the artist’s chosen instrument, a blue ballpoint pen that gives the image a “slight, chemical translucence.” This tool “reminds me of documents and formalities, of bureaucratic oppression.” Those formal associations, in turn, parallel the crushing rules and isolation of the COVID pandemic during which the drawing was made. The painting’s subject, a shrunken human figure, cowers in a sink drain as water pours down on her, but this “cleansing doesn’t seem to bring catharsis … Something torturous takes place within the domestic realm.” Here and elsewhere, Falk shows that feelings and form are equally generative gateways to ideas. Other artworks throughout Surrender become interlocutors in vibrant conversations on language, women’s rage, and mental illness.

Falk’s prose style and metaphors are unabashedly goth, and may skew too decadent for some, particularly the Poe-ish nightmare sequences that bookend the memoir. “The ocean rose to meet me and into it tumbled each house on the cliff, where the white caps told of stormier weather and a whale expiring on the shore,” reads a typical sentence from those sections. But Falk is simply modeling what it’s like to make oneself a porous surface before a work of art, breathing in and bleeding out feeling. Surrender’s excesses, in other words, are inseparable from the book’s call for more passion and personality in art writing.

Despite its visual and tonal commitment to gloom, the content of Surrender is warmly inviting: Falk’s analyses are accessible, her Stendhal’s Syndrome contagious. It’s an invigorating combination likely to win over new converts to the appreciation of art—and to help jaded connoisseurs rekindle the spark, too.

You can tell that Falk’s life has been saved by art many times, just as it has prepared her for death. Even within these darkened chambers, though, Surrender finds the light, suggesting that, in a seemingly desolate era, “the antidote to meaninglessness [is] art.”