The Viewer/Reader as Co-Creator
Poor Adam and Eve. They thought that paradise was about doing nothing. Just lounge around and eat the fruitful bounty. They failed to sense that they could be not just the objects within a narrative but also the writers of the next chapter. The one who was eventually commissioned to propagate the insight that there is one Source for all existence was a shepherd and a digger of wells: Abraham. Seasonally he oversaw the grazing and the lambing and the sheering of his flock. To him was given the promise of a fulfilling journey. Paradise is not a place. It is attunement with the rhythms of creation. And such attunement involves our sustaining participation.
Attunement with the rhythms of creation also involves a lovingly challenging engagement with the Creator of all existence. This is the lesson of Abraham as he again and again confronted God: You would destroy the innocent of Sodom and Gomorrah along with the guilty? Must I banish Ishmael; can You not find favor with him as well? Could You really want the death of Isaac? To be a partner in sustaining creation requires initiative and a point of view, respectfully and forcefully asserted.
Torah asks for our initiative and point of view. It presents itself to us in a Hebrew written without vowels and without punctuation. Imagine the sentence: "I sat on a c_t and it squeaked." Sat on a "cot"? On a "cat"? We have to utilize our ability to contextualize in order to make sense of it. Consider a string of words without punctuation: "We dislike fools like you we consider them annoying." Am I one of the fools? Or am I one of those who considers fools annoying? It is with this degree of ambiguity and multiplicity of possibilities that Torah speaks to us each week. We are called upon to bring meaning to the offering of words.
Thousands of years before 20th century literary theory, the earliest rabbis taught that literature, even a divine text, has no meaning in the absence of a reader. Their enterprise of reading Torah engendered a multitude of possibilities for each story, for each word, perhaps even for each letter. This profusion of understandings does not undermine divine intent. It is consequent with it. The sacred is illuminated through our collective insights, as contradictory as they may sometimes be.
The power of the reader to create meaning is embedded in the life story of Torah's primary heroic figure: Moses. Upon first being called by God to free the Israelites, Moses says that he has a speaking difficulty. How can he, inept in the art of language, be the one to proclaim the sacred beauty of freedom? What is the source of this speaker's block? How might it be overcome?
When both Pharaoh and the Israelites fail to respond to Moses' speeches, he complains to God. The 19th century Hasidic rabbi Sefat Emet translates the Hebrew prefix vav not as "and" but as "therefore" and renders Moses' complaint as : "They would not listen. Therefore, I am of uncircumcised lips." Normally, we think of speech as creating listeners. In the Sefat Emet's commentary, the opposite is the case: Listeners create felicitous and effective speech. In the absence of a critically attuned audience, all that emerges from the shaper of words is a garbled weight that brings no uplift for either listener or speaker.
By enticing us to actively engage in creating meaning out of its words, Torah hopes to draw us into its words. It hopes that we will view its stories not as those of others, but of ourselves. We have been seduced out of our dispassionate detachment! Our interpretations and commentaries have become exercises in self-reflection. The dimensions of time and space collapse. We are in the picture! We realize that we can begin to write the next verse, compose the next song, paint the next brush stroke.
To Be In The Picture
Until the Impressionists, the dominant subject matter of art consisted of religious motifs, classical mythology, and great historical events. These were portrayed with the intent of imparting a moral message. In a word, they preached. Viewers were to be instructed and morally inspired. Edouard Manet launched a direct assault on that value system. His 1863 painting "Luncheon on the Grass" reworked a drawing by Renaissance artist Raphael by replacing figures from Greek mythology with mere mortals drawn from Manet's everyday life. Here is a detail from the engraving of Raphael's drawing:
Here is Manet's painting:
Manet's insertion of contemporary figures in place of three gods from Raphael's drawing, the full image of which portrays a scene from Homer's the Iliad, scandalized the established art world. It helped to ignite a revolution regarding the appropriate subject matter for art. For Manet and the Impressionists the ordinary elements of modern life inspired their artistic creativity: the shopper on the street; a dancer at a cabaret; a picnic in a park; a sower of grain; a steam engine pulling into a station. A whole new class of people found themselves in the picture.
To Help Create the Picture
The development of the camera in the mid-1800's influenced the framing of a picture by painters. A photograph conveys an awareness that there is more to a scene than what appears in the final image. There is activity occurring beyond the border of the frame. A painting might be cropped in such a way so that only part of a figure is seen entering the frame from its border. Degas in particular incorporated this effect in his work. He pushed to the edge of the canvass large sections of his composition. Many of the paintings by Gustave Caillebotte show figures who are seen either partially entering or leaving the canvass or looking at something beyond the painted image . The viewer's imagination becomes engaged in visualizing the painting's continuance. Here is his "Paris, the Place de l'Europe on a Rainy Day."
More generally, the techniques developed by the Impressionists, brushworks that conveyed mere suggestions of the objects before the artist, enlisted the viewer as an active participant in the design of the piece. The form before me is no longer immutable and absolute in its detail and meaning. I must now "read" the image and reconstitute it.
Some Post-Impressionists, such as Georges Seurat, abandoned the very notion of blending colors on their canvasses. Instead, they painted dots of paint next to one another and relied on the viewer to optically mix the colors. In this way, the viewer directly participated in finishing the work.
The political and social revolutions of the 19th century demolished the authority structures of the old order. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution replaced the power of royalty and the feudal lord with the middle class as the engine of economic growth and power. The individual was liberated and empowered to make choices and to influence trends as never before in human history. This elevation of the individual became an essential feature of modern art: meaning is not to be imposed on me by artists sanctioned by centers of religious or political control ; instead, I am to be offered pathways of exploration shaped by creative individuals embarked on their own searches. I read, I view and I too create.