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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: January 15, 2005
Latest Update: January 15, 2005
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Transcendence

As I struggled through several texts on religion, morality, and spirituality for the Project on Religion as a Present Social Issue, trying to get lectures and readings up for the start of Spring semester, The New York Times published this mesmerizing drawing of a young woman. This drawing, on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a Rubens exhibition that opened today, January 14, 2005.

Michael Kimmelman's description of the drawing in his opening paragraph of the review of the show says so much:

" YOUNG, ethereal-looking beauty, big-eyed, rosy-cheeked, gazes down and off to the side, lost in thought, one hand to her breast. Her frizzy hair is a tangle of black and red chalk, a halo. White highlights pick out the light on her cheekbones and chin and around her mouth. The artist understands the nuance of skin as it stretches over bone, knows how to make flesh look silken and breathe.

"The artist is Peter Paul Rubens, and the drawing is in the Rubens show opening this afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum."
At p. B 33.

If I'd had a choice, I should have liked to be able to draw like that. I'd like to be able to capture such a gaze into the privacy of her own loves or of the nirvana of transcendence. I gaze at her, and know that life is beautiful; life is more than science and bureaucracy and greed. And I'm sorry that we have failed to encourage each of us to pick up chalk and paper and ink and record those special moments, albeit without the gift of a Rubens to capture "the nuance of skin as it stretches over bone, knows how to make flesh look silken and breathe."

Last week we spoke of photography and the multple perspectives it gives of truth. The photographer controls the perspective seen as she points the camera and chooses the focus and the frame The artist likewise controls the perspective, but may also bring skills for depicting beneath the superficial to what the camera cannot see on the surface, from any perspective. Portraits, especially, lend themselves, as in this Rubens drawing, to capturing the inner truth, that which cannot be seen, that which may be soul, or even just an idle moment of tranquility.

With visual sociology, I hoped that we would bring our students back into the world of making art, with cameras, with paint, with chalk and pen and paper, with structures, with found objects. For that, we need no permission from himan subjects boards. We're not relating to people as subjects, but as people. This semester, we'll need to think on that. At what point does a person with whom we are having an illocutionary discourse become a "subject?" At what point "should" our work become "experiment" and not "practice." And why are we teaching so much more "experiment" in our schools than "practice?"

Now, Rubens' young woman reflects the space I'm in. The questions are flooding over me. I'm not even sure they're the right questions. Why am I the one who keeps asking them, while so many others keep asking questions that seem irrelevant to me? And I look at Rubens' drawing, and all I can tell you is: That's what it feels like.

I want you to know that Rubens' drawing was a part of what helped me to express this anomic anxiety about somehow not fitting, not being in step with the dominant discourse. And so, for me, this drawing represented the whole need I feel to transform dominant discourse so that I can be included in our governanace discourse. That's a pretty powerful drawing. jeanne

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