Myth and Metaphor

McClintic, Miranda. Directions 1981. Hirshorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution
Press, Washington, D. C 1981. p. 36-43.

Myth and metaphor provide structures for experiencing the world. Imaginative models for determining meaning and order in life, they have informed art since primitive cave painting and remain much in evidence today. In visual art, as in literature, figurative language gives image to the mysterious power of natural phenomena and to otherwise incomprehensible conditions, practices, beliefs, and interrelationships in human society. The successful application of myth and metaphor depends as much on the artist's sensitivity to the immediate world that he or she inhabits as it does on formal or theoretical considerations. To be effective, myth and metaphor must also be founded on shared cultural assumptions, recognizable circumstances, and common images.

Accounts 'in which human experience and understanding, rather than objective truth, played the central role," myths and metaphors make use of suggestion. analogy, and association. A metaphor, in the sense it is used here, mediates between objective reality and the subjective perception of it. It 'is a matter of imaginative rationality. It permits an understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another, creating coherences by virtue of imposing gestalts that are structured by natural dimensions of experience [including color, shape, and texture]. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities."'

A myth is in many ways an extended metaphor. "Metaphor is a basic trick of language to cover the unfamiliar with familiar words on account of partial similarity. In this sense myth can be defined as metaphor at tale level. -3 A myth is "a reality lived. It is based on the assertion of an original greater and more important reality through which the present life, fate and work of [humankind] are governed and the knowledge of which provides [humanity] on the one hand with motives for ritual and moral acts, on the other with directions for their performance."'

"Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God's Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is all of these. The vanousjudgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age."5 Such multifaceted considerations are the bases of myth as it is exploited by current artists.

The use of metaphor by Thomas Rose, of both metaphor and myth by Lita Albuquerque, Vernon Fisher, and Michelle Stuart, and of myth by Earl Staley covers a wide range of intention, expression, and reference. 'Questions of human existence"' are central to the shared focus of their art. They are united by a belief that art can make the meaning of individual experience visible through allegorical representations of ordinary encounters, basics of human behavior, and elemental forces of nature. The role of the artist here is that of image-giver, poet, philosopher, transformer of raw material, mediator between art and life, and evocateur.

In Thomas Rose's paintings common objects, both actual and represented, are used as metaphors to construct visual orders of experience. Vernon Fisher takes a similar approach, depending more frequently upon photographic images than on depictions of objects- He sets up metaphorical relationships among images and between images and words, weaving mythic tales out of ordinary experience. Michelle Stuart's works are metaphors for material transformation and the passage of time, for the evolution of both natural and cultural forms. Revelation of the mythic significance of the earth itself is intrinsic to these generative processes. Lita Albuquerque uses elemental shapes and primary colors to establish metaphors for humanity's relationship to the earth and to structure myths of her own devising. Possibly inspired by the vitality of myth in contemporary Mexican culture, Earl Staley revives in his painting the classic myths of Western civilization, with a passion for the subject rarely seen in the past hundred years.

The use of neutral or equivocal symbols in these works produces multiple, ambiguous meanings. The "work is in part concerned with the possibility of things being taken for one thing or another-with questionable areas of identification and usage and procedure-with thought rather than secure things '117 as Jasper Johns once said of his own art. Although the imagery derives for the most part from specific situations, the juxtaposition of different realities (objective and subjective, contemporary and archetypal) and various modes of artistic expression (materials, styles, and scales) gives these works an indeterminate quality that is both timeless and universal.

Central to all these works is an intensification and heroization of ordinary experience that is affirmative of life in at least two distinct ways. Fisher and Rose see life as characterized by indeterminacy and endless possibility, whereas Albuquerque, Stuart, and Staley assert in their art the force of fundamental instincts and universal relationships. There is, for all five artists, a continuous exchange between their art and their lives. Deeply rooted in the biographies of each artist, these works are also well nurtured by literature, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and other art. They have in common a highly personal narrative quality based on "the appreciation of the transience of things and the concern to rescue them for eternity [that] is one of the strongest impulses in allegory."

Myth and metaphor depend on the transformation of familiar, nonart sources accessible to artist and viewer alike. These sources include natural elements, recognizable images, techniques and information from disciplines extrinsic to art, and a shared cultural heritage. Instead of fine art materials, Albuquerque uses rocks in her work and Stuart uses earth. The incorporation of images of either domestic or art-making objects (Fisher and Rose) and of images from mass media (Fisher) has a modern art history that goes back to Cubism and spans the work of Marcel Duchamp, Pop art, and New Image painting. Such images can be used as signs, consistently self-referential but with a potential for signification relative to particular contexts. These artists also borrow techniques and data from diverse sources. Albuquerque has worked with chemists to determine pigment toxicity and with an astronomer to chart the path of the sun for her Washington Monument piece. Fisher applies compositional principles derived from movies, advertising, comics, and television. Rose and Staley draw heavily upon literature and literary devices, while Stuart incorporates in her work the knowledge and methods of geology and archaeology. Because its systems of meaning depend on the recognizability of the constituent terms, all art of myth and metaphor requires a shared cultural heritage. Rose's emblems of place; Albuquerque's pictographic symbols; Fisher's commercial images; Stuart's Meso-American monuments and tools; and Staley's gods, goddesses, and saints are inseparable from Western culture.

Primitivism, as Robert Goldwater pointed out long ago, is selfconsciously adapted by sophisticated artists to their own needs, and the widespread rediscovery of primitive art in the 1970s has affected contemporary art as powerfully as it did art of the early twentieth century. This revival presupposes "new valuations of the instinctive, the natural, and the mythical as the essentially human."' The current appeal of primitive art is clear in the interest many artists evince in the relation between humanity and nature, cyclical passage and notation of time, linkage between time and place, mark-making, expressionistic gesture, and symbolism. Its influence is also found in the reverence for the beauty, mystery, and power of the natural world, evident in pieces by Albuquerque, Fisher, Staley, and Stuart. Staley and Stuart incorporate specific archaic styles and subjects into their work, while Albuquerque, Rose, and Stuart use elemental forms. Finally, there is a primitive quality to the immediate and direct handling of material, the simplified or pseudonaive rendering, and the schematic representation that characterize the works in this section.

The most important artistic precedent for these works lies in Cubism, particularly in its acknowledgment of the contradictions and complexities of experience through the combination of different orders of reality or modes of representation within a single work. The art of myth and metaphor depends on the concept of simultaneity, the incorporation of mundane references, and the means of collage and assemblage characteristic of Cubism. This art also builds on the illogical juxtapositions, apotheosis of the common object, notions of metamorphosis. and depictions of the realms of the mind that were central to Dada and Surrealism. A belief that the essential experiences of life could be transposed into art unites these artists not only with the Surrealists but with the Abstract Expressionists as well. Staley's work represents the most direct continuation of the latter tradition, stylistically and thematically, but we can sense sympathy with Barnett Newman's philosophy in Albuquerque's and Stuart's work, with Mark Rothko's chromatic transcendentalism in Stuart's pieces, and with Adolph Gottlieb's pictographic elementalism in Albuquerque's and Rose's works.

The works of John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg are crucial to works of myth and metaphor because they renewed interest in working between art and life. Their exploitation of inclusiveness, indeterminacy, juxtaposition of diverse realities, mundane references, wit, personal involvement, investigation, and attention to underlying orders are continued in these current works. Conceptual artists carried on the extension of art to include, among other things, philosophy, poetry, parable, and theater. The fact that language was returned to art provided the foundation for works in myth and metaphor.

Lita Albuquerque, Vernon Fisher, Thomas Rose, Earl Staley, and Michelle Stuart combine a wealth of influences and sources from their own lives, from contemporary experience generally, and from artistic sources to create new orders of reality-myths or metaphors-that are suggestive, demonstrative, emotive, slightly mysterious, and visually engaging.

1. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. x. In the book this statement referred to metaphor alone. 2. Ibid., p. 235. 3. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979), p. 28. 4. Bronislaw Malinowski, quoted in "Prolegomena," by C. Kerhnyi, in Essays on a Science of Mythology, by C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 5. 5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 382. 6. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse," October 12 (Spring 1980): 71. 7. Rolf Dieter-Hermann, "Jasper Johns' Ambiguity: Exploring the Hermeneutical Implication," Arts Magazine 52 (November 1977): 125. 8. Owens, "Allegorical Impulse," p. 71. 9. Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 200.39

How does your work fit between art and life? The best way I can describe that is by a diagram of what I consider to be the creative process: imagine an X shape with a dot at the meeting point. What comes in from the outside-all the thousands of sensorial stimulations and impressions come in from the outside into the funnel-is filtered by the brain and by our sensorial apparatus and then comes out and descends on the world-the earth, life, so to speak. I see my work as the physical manifestation of that filtering process, as the visualization of the brain and sensorial impressions manifested into visual form.

What world is drawn upon for the work? The world that I draw upon is the playing off of the relationship between the natural world and the construction of my subconscious. 1 can't escape the relationship between the two. The work is not drawn from society or from art-making. I am not interested in making a statement on society or on art, rather I am interested in the relationship of the natural world to my own subconscious..

What engages you most in your work? What engages me most in my work is the emotional involvement that stems from the process of the making of it. What initiates the work is an emotional desire, the finished product is a culmination of that desire, a joy. What do you think is the relation between art and life? If life can be described by more than one consciousness, then I can say that my art is a reflection of the subconscious life, that it is a reflection of what already exists in the natural world, of what affects us without being necessarily visible, that it delineates and becomes a subconscious filter on life. A good example of this is the piece I will be doing for the Hirshhorn, which will deal with the idea of the horizon as a container of memory or memory as a reflection onto our subconscious life. That within the horizon is the reflection! Memory of what we know on a genetic evolutionary subconscious stratum in our brains. I am interested in making that knowledge we "sense" but cannot "know" visible. I will be dealing with the earth as a sphere; cut in two, that plane will be reflective, it will also be the horizon and will contain the memory of our subconscious life.

L. A.
Lita Albuquerque is one of many artists today who work within the context of the natural world, either literally in her outdoor site pieces or metaphorically in her indoor installations. Motivated by the belief that our civilization has lost consciousness of the fundamental bonds that tie humanity to the natural world, she makes "an art that can point back toward an understanding of that relationship." Incorporated in her pieces are such powerful aspects of nature as the desert floor, mountains, the horizon line, and the earth's relationship to the sun. The verticals of humanity, horizontals of nature, and spheres of the cosmos that she refers to in her site works are represented in her indoor installations by geometric configurations. She bases her art on the conviction-implicit in writings by Plato and Leonardo, as well as in alchemy and psychic theory-that the human connection to natural order comes through geometric relationships. The triangle and the pyramid also play an important part in her art, as they have from Egyptian pyramids and obelisks to Gothic spires to the Washington Monument-all "symbols," Albuquerque has said, "of man's verticality.” She suggests the relationship of humanity to nature by establishing alignments, tracing shadows, and marking points of contact.

Incorporating elemental materials such as rocks, earth, and raw pigment in primary colors, black, and white, Albuquerque transforms the sun-baked desert floor into a canvas for her lively pictographic figures or turns an entire valley into a Tanguy-like environment of brightly pigmented rocks [see 1820]. She invests her stones with a power of meaning that echoes their use as boundaries or sanctuaries in many ancient and primitive societies, as well as in contemporary Zen Buddhist rock gardens.

Albuquerque's outdoor works begin with a natural site: "I tried to respond directly to the quality of each situation I was in, not to change it wholesale into a new idea or environment, but to attend directly to the nature of how it already was." She works to make palpable a particular space by creating forms that incorporate but do not permanently change the landscape. Just as she has interrelated her work with nature, so do the forces of nature interact with her art, altering the images she has projected onto the land and ultimately absorbing them. In light of Albuquerque's strong responses to places and her decision to root all her art in actual spatial contexts, one might note that for the first thirteen years of her life she moved frequently among California. Tunisia, Paris, and Florida, never staying in any one place for more than a few years.

In the Washington Monument project-Albuquerque's most publicly accessible large-scale work-her focus shifted somewhat toward the manmade. According to her vision, the Monument embodies human spatial and temporal relationships to nature. By depicting the tip of its arrow-like structure in red pigment and tracing the moving path of its shadow, her installation revealed the Monument as a marker of space (distance) and time (both as a memorial and as a giant sundial). As in her desert works, she constructed a specific situation that symbolized a more universal condition.

Albuquerque's indoor installations are representations in microcosm of such metaphysical relationships. They generally do not serve as maquettes for larger works but are fully resolved in their own terms. Although the indoor pieces are in a sense more illustrative than her site works, they are distinguished by the same distinctive use of natural materials and primary geometry, concentration of forces, and powerful suggestion of explorable space. Albuquerque's tableaux are metaphorical representations of human relationships to the natural world, carefully constructed to evoke an empathetic sensation of that relationship in the viewer.

Albuquerque's works, both outdoor and in, are constructed as if seen from afar or above. She paints strong figural silhouettes in the desert that-like the ancient linear earthworks in Nazca, Peru, and in Wiltshire and Dorset, England, that they recall-relate to vast spatial contexts and thus can best be grasped from a distance. Similarly, her Washington Monument project could be fully appreciated only if seen from atop the Monument itself as well as from the cardinal points she had painted on the ground. To understand completely the artist's conception of the Monument and. her demarcation of its relation to the surroundings, one really had to view the project from the vantage point of a plane. Indoors, Albuquerque achieves a sensation of distance through scale and placement, which sets up a symbolic rather than direct relationship between the viewer and the image. In addition, she keeps the viewer physically distant from the stones by her use of powdered pigment, which also gives them the presence of sacred objects.

Because she is involved with the depiction of fundamental natural forces, Albuquerque's work has much in common with primitive art. It is expressionistic and symbolic, the product of a private ritual between herself and the land. Her images carry an aura of myth, magic, and allegory. "It is," as Baudelaire once said, "indeed a strange art whose roots disappear into the darkness, of time and which already in primitive ages was producing works which cause the civilized mind to marvel.”

Lita Albuquerque
18a, b. Man and Mountain I, Death
Valley [outdoor installation, 2 views], 1978 Color photographs, 40.6 x 50.8 (16 x 20) Diane Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C.

19a, b. Rocks and Pigment, Mojave Desert
[outdoor installation, 2 views], 1978 Color photographs, 40.6 x 50.8 (16x 20) Diane Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C.

20a, b. Man and Mountain II, Mojave
Desert [outdoor installation, 2 views], 1979 Color photographs, 40.6 x 50.8 (16 x 20) Diane Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C.

21. The horizon is the place that maintains
the memory, 1980-81 Indoor installation with pigment, rocks, wood, and copper, dimensions of site 393.7 x 365.8 x 365.8(l55x 144x 144) Courtesy of the artist and Diane Brown Gallery, Washington, D.C.