Whit and a Hawk

Two giant Modern and Postmodern selfs

What do you think of when you read the word “genius?”

Most likely you think of people. Einstein, Aquinas, Da Vinci, and Rowan Atkinson of course. In the past, sometime before the Renaissance in the 14th century, the word genius was used to describe places, not people. The Renaissance began the humanist movement in the west; a philosophical and sociological move towards valuing the individual. The power of the individual echoes through history, except, instead of fading each echo seems to be getting louder.

Take Walt Whitman for example. His long poem Song of Myself has 52 parts. Can you imagine singing about yourself with a stanza per week of the year? Here is the just the beginning of the poem:

Song of Myself (1892 version)
By Walt Whitman

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

Friday’s Reflection post will be about the Avant-garde. Artists like Whitman are considered a part of that movement. How so? By diving into the realm of the self. Look at the date of his poem. This is the time of the burgeoning field of psychology as we know it. The navel-gazing of contemporary artists is rooted in the Modernist turn inward.

Which is not inherently bad. Look at some of the statements Whitman makes in celebration of himself. “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,”. The turn towards exploring the self helps humanity acknowledge what it is made of.

Whitman’s long poem of his “self” reminds me of another gargantuan “self.” Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan:

Überorgan, 2000 (Installed at Mass MoCA)
by Tim Hawkinson

Here is how the museum described the work:

“Possibly the largest indoor sculpture ever created, Überorgan was a massive musical instrument, a Brobdingnagian bastard cousin of the bagpipe, the player piano, and the pipe organ. It consisted of thirteen bus-sized inflated bags: one for each of the twelve tones in the musical scale and one udder-shaped bag that fed air to the other twelve by long tubular ducts.”

The whole organ was controlled like a player piano by a light sensors programed via dots and dashes:

Why does Whitman’s poem remind me of this piece? Because of the songs that were played. Hawkinson collaged hymns, hits, even advert jingles. The massive 300 foot room became a living breathing wind instrument humming and honking songs that stuck in the artist’s mind. The sorts of songs you wake up singing for no reason.

The whole organ is not just a pipe organ, it is lungs. It is breath. It is song. The whole room is like a body lying on its back belching songs. The atoms of plastic sheeting and the notes of all the songs Hawkinson ever heard merge into one huge installation.

It is a giant song of Hawkinson’s self. The songs that make him up. The songs that congeal into one huge organ. (Is that a musical organ or is it a bodily organ?) The Überorgan is like Gulliver tied down mumbling tunes as he wakes:

Gulliver Tied Down by the People,
By Mary Evans

Both of these artworks make me wonder what I am made of. If the tiny people tied me down, what would they find in me?

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
C.S. Lewis

Certainly much of the work made by self-expressive artists is narcism. But some of it reveals the deep layers of what it means to be human.