If you have been living in the Southern California area for a while, you’ll surely remember the Big Rock. It was a media frenzy in its day. News cameras greedily recorded every hiccup in the perilous journey of this massive, 430-ton granite boulder from somewhere in the desert to its destination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Like some captured lion, it was tied down and loaded onto the bed of a God-knows-how-many-wheeler truck and trundled inch by inch along the freeways and, finally, the city streets, to be converted from its imposing natural state into a Work of Art by Michael Heizer entitled “Levitated Mass.”
That was in 2012, ten years ago. I remember being disturbed about it at the time. I even commented on it in a blog entry, which I re-read today. Plonked down atop a long, sloping channel of concrete and steel, it did not appear (to me at least) to levitate. It just sat there. It had lost its magic. The Big Rock was more of a monument, I thought, to an artist’s ego—and a museum’s patriarchal ambition—than an inspiring artwork. I tried in vain to see it in the tradition of great monoliths and ritual circles of ancient history, Stonehenge, those giant Olmec heads, monumental Buddhas… It remained stolidly pedestrian.
That was an aesthetic judgment. My view these days is significantly less benign in light of everything that has happened in the intervening decade. I have been reading Aviva Rahmani’s “Divining Chaos”, where the renowned ecoartist and ecofeminist, gives thoughtful, informed, at times carefully argued scientific refinement to my own ill-formed perceptions. I find that I now feel a great depth of sadness for that poor rock, ripped unkindly from the womb of Mother Nature to serve the purposes of what the poet e.e.cummings nicely dubbed manUnkind. Rahmani helps me to see the exploitation of that boulder as an act of rape, a violation that is not excused nor excusable by any claim to the higher purposes of Art.
I’m thankful to “Divining Chaos” for helping to pull together a myriad of thoughts and feelings that have been worrying at my consciousness and my conscience for a good number of years. Rahmani makes it all so clear—the complex interdependence of intellect and emotion, action and reaction, neglect and responsibility in our lives and the life of literally everything in our environment. In view of the now imminent despoliation of our planet, she points to the culpability of the patriarchal heritage of entitlement, domination, ownership and exploitation, not only—but seriously, yes—of natural resources (land, oil, oceans, forests) but also of human beings less powerful than themselves. Especially, of course, women. An activist and ardent feminist, Rahmani seeks to liberate the idea of husbandry from the ownership of the female body and associated chattels to its original meaning of taking responsibility, taking care.
Divining is a way of getting to the source. The divining rod points us to the cache of water hidden underground. Rahmani makes much of what she calls “trigger points” as the cracks through which entry into complex problems becomes possible, even necessary. I think of epiphanies, but those are perhaps more instantaneous perceptions. Trigger points are more like Alice’s rabbit hole, inviting the in-depth exploration of new, surprising and revelatory worlds. In “Divining Chaos” she explores a metaphorical relationship between the chaos we have created—and are continuing to create, despite all evidence--in the natural world and the chaos (body, emotions) she has experienced in her life from childhood. Her narrative details her attempts to come to terms with maternal submissiveness, on the one hand, and paternal rage on the other—and having to confront both within herself. She tells us how she has survived—among other adversities!—rape and physical violence, two bouts of breast cancer and a debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome, and uses that life experience and the need to heal herself as the paradigm for the global crisis caused by human abuse: climate change, the exploitation of natural resources of all kinds and the mindless pollution of the environment with human detritus, from discarded, miles-long fishing nets to mountains of accumulated trash.
In all this, Rahmani is unsparing in her expression of outrage and stubborn defiance—and in her book her passionate commitment ensures they are contagious. Her empathy with all suffering beings and a suffering planet demands her reader’s matching empathy, and this is the urgent message of her book: like addicts in a twelve-step program, we must first allow ourselves to fully acknowledge suffering before arriving at the need to heal. Throughout the long history of her art projects dating from the 1960s, Rahmani is constantly refining that purpose and learning to realize it in ever more ambitious scope. The means she deploys to create her projects span an impressive breadth of human knowledge and experience, from indigenous medicine to physical, geographic and biological sciences in a process of restitution, recovery, restoration. Increasingly, she learns the essential value of cooperation—between human beings, yes, but also in the partnership between we humans and our common mother, nature.
I will say this: in her eagerness to say it all and say it right, Rahmani risked losing this one reader’s attention from her major theme in the meticulously detailed descriptions of the intentions and process of specific projects in the latter half of “Divining Chaos.” Having learned so much already from the big picture into which she had drawn me with such profoundly emotional appeal, I found myself getting “into my head”—and finding it hard to maintain interest, there, in all the (distinctly erudite!) intellectual discussion of aesthetic theory and practice. Others will find these passages fascinating. I hasten to add that I do believe that this is an important, urgently needed handbook for any artist seeking a path to work in the context of a social, global conscience and environmental responsibility. I also believe that, artist or not—I happen to be a writer—we must all be shouldering that responsibility in a world where inaction is no longer to be tolerated or excused. The rape of Big Rocks for aesthetic purposes is no longer acceptable.
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