MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM

Dedicated to George Steiner

(Picture: art-days.com/Sebastião Salgado)

Does the Bible contain a an oeuvre catalogue, if not to say: catalogue raisonné?
With the scholar and critic George Steiner we might say: Yes. The Book of Job does contain such a catalogue. Because, asked why the righteous on Earth do suffer, the Lord does answer from the whirlwind. And he does, according to Steiner (Grammars of Creation, 2001), answer with enfolding his oeuvre catalogue.

The Creation Thought as Oeuvre Catalogue

(Picture: DS, after Genesis by Sebastião Salgado)

Theologians have never come to a consensus as to the question, if the Lord does actually answer the question raised by Job, and by the Book of Job. Some think that he does. By enfolding the oeuvre catalogue, by referring also to the mighty beasts, and by indirectly pointing to the fact that evil (or the possibility of evil) is being part of the creation (as is freedom, or because there is also freedom).
Others believe, and believing is to be understood here in its equivocal meaning, that the Lord does answer by not answering the question. By not debating with Job, but by showing the sublime of the creation. In sum: by enfolding his oeuvre catalogue. By overwhelming Job, who drops his question.
I do believe that, whether the Book of Job does stage the Lord as answering or not answering, the Book of Job does stage, within the Bible, the challenging of the Bible itself. Because, whether one does find the happy end of the Book of Job as reassuring, or on the contrary, as not reassuring at all, because too obviously staged: it does remain, on a literary level, but also on an ontological level (if the Book of Job is being taken seriously), the fact that the frame story of the Book of Job shows the Lord accepting Satan as the antagonist, or, if one does prefer: even as a partner. Allowing him to play with Job and to test him. To bring evil upon the righteous. To do anything to him. And with this ontology, which might also explain why the righteous do suffer on Earth, and which thus might also be taken as some answer to the question, the Book of Job (or the inclusion of the Book of Job into the Bible) did bring the challenging of the Bible into the Bible. Into the Book of Job, wherein the Lord does direct his word to Job when speaking from the whirlwind, if this is now considered to be an answer or not.
(And as George Steiner has pointed out most beautifully, the language of the speech from the whirlwind is most powerful, and the Book of Job, 39-41, does raise the everlasting question as to the author of these lines).
But the question does remain: Is this God who is playing games with Job, and with mankind as a whole (and with Satan), is this the God that men can accept? – We have come full circle. This is what the Book of Job is all about. No scholar has ever decided this question, because, perhaps, it is for every individual to decide anyway in the end. But with dismissing the Bible, the Book of Job, and every questioning of the kind that the Book of Job does present us with – what ontology do we have to replace it? What answers to the everlasting questions? What answers have scientists? And what answers have artists? If dealing with the Book of Job. With the creation. Or with the question why men and woman, and also innocent and righteous men and women, do suffer? What answers do we have at all?

(Picture: DS, after Genesis by Sebastião Salgado)

These are the all too big questions, but what remains within our reach is the observation that various artists, while generally not referring to the Book of Job and the questions it did and does raise, still operate with fragments of answers and strategies that already the Book of Job did present. It does not seem that our age has overcome the everlasting questions. But again: it still seems interesting to listen if there are remote echoes of the Book of Job in contemporary culture, echoes for example as to the regarding of the creation of a sort of oeuvre catalogue. Let us consider the examples of cinematographer and writer Werner Herzog and of photographer Sebastião Salgado:

One) Werner Herzog: Envisioning and describing a Landscape (as being unfinished by God and left in anger)

›As with the mad fury of a dog, having bitten into the leg of an already dead roe deer, rattling and tearing at the already bagged head of game, so that the hunter gives up to sooth him, a vision had clinged inside of me, the image of a big steamer over [probably: on top of] a hill – the ship under steam by its own force winding upwards a steep slope in the jungle, and above a nature which equally destroyed the self-pitying as the strong ones, the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the screaming of the animals from the jungle and extinguishing the singing of the birds. More correct: the screaming of the birds, since in this landscape, unfinished and left by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they scream out of pain, and puzzled trees, within the steam of a creation, that here is not finished, are clinging, like fighting giants, to each other, from one horizon to the other. Gasping out fog and exausted they are in this unreal world, in an unreal misery – and with me, utterly terrified, being present, like within the stanza of a poem in a foreign language that I do not understand.‹

»Wie bei der irrwitzigen Wut eines Hundes, der sich in das Bein eines bereits toten Rehs verbissen hat und an dem erlegten Wild rüttelt und zerrt, so dass der Jäger ihn zu beruhigen aufgibt, hatte sich in mir eine Vision festgekrallt, das Bild von einem grossen Dampfschiff über [sic] einen Berg – das Schiff unter Dampf sich aus eigener Kraft einen steilen Hang im Dschungel hinaufwindend, und über einer Natur, die die Wehleidigen und die Starken gleichermassen vernichtet, die Stimme Carusos, die allen Schmerz und alles Schreien der Tiere aus dem Urwald zum Verstummen bringt und den Gesang der Vögel verlöscht. Richtiger: das Schreien der Vögel, denn in dieser Landschaft, unfertig und von Gott im Zorn verlassen, singen die Vögel nicht; sie schreien vor Schmerz, und verwirrte Bäume krallen sich wie Riesen im Kampf ineinander, von Horizont zu Horizont, im Dampf einer Schöpfung, die hier nicht beendet ist. Nebelkeuchend und erschöpft stehen sie in dieser unwirklichen Welt, in einem unwirklichen Elend – und ich, wie in der stanza eines Gedichts in einer fremden Sprache, die ich nicht verstehe, befinde mich zutiefst erschrocken dabei.«
(Source: Werner Herzog, Eroberung des Nutzlosen, Munich 2004, p. 7; my translation)

*

Two) Sebastião Salgado: Showing the Creation, Showing Genesis

(Picture: DS, after Genesis by Sebastião Salgado)

With his recent photo book Genesis, photographer Sebastião Salgado, who claims himself to be a Darwinian, has left other projects behind (Workers; Migrations). Other projects that were dedicated to show and to document human suffering on Earth. And this turn of the artist, according to the photographer’s own statements, has to do with a coming to terms with having seen and documented an almost unbearable amount of suffering.
Genesis does show the overwhelming beauty of nature, it does, even if it does show the Amazon basin, a completely different view of nature, if compared to the nature that Werner Herzog does envision, reflect, describe. But even if based on a Darwinian view, the project does not drop the link to the Old Testament, in explicitly referring to the Book of Genesis, and to a ›journey through the Old Testament‹ (pp. 296-307).
What is now the relation of Genesis to the former projects of Salgado? Does Genesis represent an equivalent to the Speech from the Whirlwind from the Book of Job? Is Genesis to be seen as a kind of answering/not answering by enfolding a magnificent and visually powerful book, similar to the oeuvre catalogue enfolded by the Book of Job?

(Picture: Wilson Dias/ABr - Agência Brasil)

Or does it seem unnecessary and unjustified to relate these projects, since human suffering can be explained by human evil, men exploiting other men, using direct or indirect means (structural violence) of exploitation. And Salgado did even study economics at some point of his life.
But why then dedicating a book to the overwhelming beauty of the creation (without showing its uglier, its violent and merciless sides as Herzog does) and to call it Genesis? Is this meant to be a secular narrative by a Darwinian, in analogy to the Biblical account? Or is this, and here we have again come full circle, the suggestive method of answering by not answering. Because there is the overwhelming beauty of nature, and because this might be enough? Because the being overwhelmed by beauty does reassure?
Or because there is no answer to the question why there is evil (exploitation, violence, disease) in the world. As being part of the creation?
One might criticize Salgado for showing only the beautiful and overwhelming side of the creation. But it seems to be more appropriate to see the various works by Salgado in its perhaps rather hidden relation (and in its perhaps less visible relation to his personal ontology). Which would seem also to be a more adequate method of not leaving the everlasting questions behind, and to see the Book of Job – as the cited examples of regarding the creation as being a sort of artist creator’s, or the evolution’s oeuvre catalogue – as only, or as just elder and newer human attempts to deal with the everlasting questions. Mutually enlightening perhaps, even if not answering questions at all. But by still asking, while not implicitly or explicitly pretending that one might leave the everlasting questions raised by the Book of Job, as one of the peaks of human culture (and perhaps in particular of poetry, if one is capable to read Hebrew), simply and thoughtlessly behind.

(Picture: DS, after Genesis by Sebastião Salgado)

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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