Modern Monk

My first impression of The Getty Center is how much the space reminds me of a college campus. Several windows decorate the buildings, their frames white and beaming and overlooking the Pacific. Light dazzles the haunted rooms of archaic faces and religions. Stairs, many stairs, to get to the main entrance of the Pavilion, North that is. The view is sublime, expansive, wrapping my eyes in the width of immortal memory. The first exhibit is where God resides in anachronistic formats: giant frames of wood where gold leaves decorate the backgrounds of the Holy Trinity, flattened thin sheets honoring the first sacrificial family. There is the haunted face of Jesus in the Entombment, Rubens brushes his flesh with ghostly pale valor and addresses his eyes towards heaven, as if to wonder why this is happening. There is so much meditation on pain, from the ghastly crown to the crucifixion, the Lance of Longinus, and the betrayal in the garden. An image, a painting, justifies what the eye cannot witness but reflect upon. Like a scholar I come here to meditate on sacrifice, and what it means to willingly die for what one believes. Here I am, centuries later, taking a digital photograph of a painting from 1612. Divides widen evermore, and I am further away from an act as sublime as sacrifice than anything else. A picture of a picture of a mental image means nothing but an echoing meditation, a preamble to the first thought. I wear the costume of a monk here, simulating asceticism as I wander through each room imagining the minds of these painters and the images they conjured so freely.

The divide widens. I am no monk. I eat meat, I drink, I fuck, I piss and shit, all the while my mind racing about NFL scores and my Tekken 7 ranking and what I’ll be eating that night and how I’ll survive on 130$ for the next two weeks. Sacrifice is nothing to me but a measurement cup, what I choose to give up in my daily habits. Medieval and Renaissance painters disturb me, Rubens haunts me. He and his fellow workmen’s paintings rear up through the darkening stagnant pool of water that is my mind, and strike my eye with ritual. This is all anyone understood: ritual, routine, ceremony and sacrament. Everything revolved around the blood of Christ, his flesh turned to sustenance, nourishing the soul. Colors swirled and circulated around the ultimate sacrifice of flesh for sins. There is something to clutch upon here, old memories of faith and love. If one floundered in their commitment they would be lost, heretical, perhaps unjust and amoral. Am I without morals? Or is it that I pretend to care about justifying my morality? I exist and then I am dead in the span of a universal second, and yet here I am, contemplating my suicidal offer to humanity in the form of writing. I excoriate myself to locate something sacred, yet all I find is tender flesh and muscles and an ivory cage. No wine in this blood. Jesus died for our sins and I will die for nothing. Bleeding out on the floor of the North Pavilion. while my mother steps over my body to get a closer look at Mary’s torment.

I make my way from the North Pavilion, away from sacrifice and suicide, to the Exhibition Pavilion. A series of stairs and intertwining bridges connects each building, but neither house is the same. Divine fate is calling to me from this room, where providence has led, to William Blake. My eyes suddenly become the acid dissolving all subjectivity and opinion for pure energy. This is Blake’s intention. Active throughout the 18th century, deemed both genius and lunatic, Blake tended to his forge of creation with a childlike wonder and the skill of a master draftsman. What is it that I feel when looking at Los, or “The Tyger,” or his drawings of Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy,” or his mythological formation of creative energies and the logical/rational force of angels who stymie carnal urges? The feeling I get is one of invigoration. Blake nourishes that most primal aspect of the human condition: the questioning and hopeful for answers, the fear of uncertainty, the light of desire and the pit of reason.

When viewing Blake’s art I am reminded of his unflinching eye, roving though it may be because his eye sees what no other can see, but immovable once it crosses a divine reflection and waits for the image to catch up with what his eye already knows. When I look through his eyes I find his mythology, his own creation story. He broke free from the constraints of conventional religion, relying solely on those most primitive qualities of life: pleasure and creativity. Together they attack the priests and the popes with their flimsy logic like tarnished golden halos. Hope doesn’t lie in prayer, nor in gold, but lies in the hearts and souls of humankind. It is in action, and revolution, that the spirit of primordial vitality takes flight. This is what makes Blake different from those Medieval and Renaissance painters, they had to reflect the true intention of God through a limited view, relying on religious mythologies to assert their image. God could only be seen in those most holy and spiritual of moments, otherwise presence was illusory. Conversely, Blake sees the Holy Spirit in the real world, in a blade of grass, a humble shepherd, an old man, in the clouds and trees. He acknowledges that through the divine entity known to us as flesh and blood, known to us as nature, there is a semblance of celestial animation known to us as God. Who’s to say Blake did not know the true name and face of God? He conversed with flowers, architects, and saints, surely he departed from these conversations with more knowledge than the average person. Why should we say he did not know the true name and face of God? I believe God is art, existing in everything we do, as energy and as a mirroring of true and just intention. Thus this writing and Blake’s drawings converge somewhere beyond time and space, in a cellular void, a pocket universe, collapsing as soon as the pen is taken off the page and the eyes have moved on. God’s concern is longevity, so through us is constructed infinity, and we then translate our immortal memories upon a blank page.

From one infinity to the other, I make my way from the Exhibition Pavilion to the Research Institute, and to the plains and islands of Venezuela. Alfredo Boulton is here. His photographs honor the rich cultural history and topography of Venezuela from the 1920s-80s. This is another form of mythmaking. The camera is the other seer, the oracular mechanism. A lens dissolves boundaries, cutting reality into finite pieces. Observed here is the anthropologist and historian’s muse: time and memory. Medieval and Renaissance painters relied primarily on stories to direct their eye, and Blake used his inner eye to see what was under these stories, lifting the letters and peering into the abyss. Boulton, centuries later, then used another invention. Not oils and acrylics, nor acid and copper engravings, but celluloid, and film. Pictures are immediate, quicker than the brain assesses, they have a rapid notion of existence because they tell with exactitude the reality of a situation as it is. Even in photographs that take on characteristics of painting, such as staging or modeling, light and color, there is an urgency to its craft. Boulton makes this evident when he highlights the cultural tapestry of Venezuela, its belleza criolla, the racial mixture of Indigenous, Spanish, and African backgrounds. His subjects stand proud, bold chested and baked under the sun. They appear as Gods in their own right, and this stems from the reality of the frame and what it centers our focus on. Eyes are naturally attracted to harmonious composition, and Boulton ensures that each subject captures the viewer in their celestial vitality. These are pictures that had never been taken before! No one thought to document the llaneros of the Venezuelan plains, or the fishermen of Magarita Island. Venezuela was like that little known solitude, Macondo, both the center of the universe and not, both brutalized and left for dead yet also thriving and beautiful. Boulton suddenly puts forward with bold actuation the faces and bodies and mountains and plains and grasses and islands of Venezuela for the beholder. He is a miner, a purveyor, and archaeologist, searching for his face in the faces of others, in the landscape of bodies.

Like a modern monk I’ve studied what I’ve seen. My spectacles were clean, the illumined manuscripts vibrant, and the art was restorative. I’ve taken it all in, consumed beauty and horror, now and then. I’ve condensed these rhythms into verifiable proof of the sublime. Divides widen, time stretches ever further beyond reach, and I am of that length of cloth, one of its threads. I’m closer to God now than I’ve ever been. How is it that a piece of art moves us so? I peered with Blake into his visionary conquest, and watched how his magnificent eye danced on the page. I examined the look of Jesus as he gazed towards heaven in wonderment, and I wondered whether he was afraid. I witnessed the stoicism, the magnetic grandeur of “El Diamante Negro.” I sailed with fishermen along the Caribbean Sea. I was there to study and to wander. I know nothing else.