THE LIMITS OF LITERALITY

Expressionists began to approach the theodidact/prophet who speaks directly from the wellspring of all nature. While many artists have interpreted the Bible, these illustrations of narrative episodes are not as challenging— being textually dependent—as the non-contingent abstract works of the modern period. In such art we encounter painting (and sometimes sculpture) that consciously or sometimes inadvertently approached Biblical domains of sensation and occasion. Particular sanctions for this art are difficult to find in Torah but are nevertheless incipient, finding the opportunity for their expres sion only in recent times. Imagery does not require the structure of representa tionalism. For the most part, New York School painting (despite what we may learn of its autobiographical sources) was unintelligible to its audience. In its "non-objectivity" Abstract Expressionism was not alone. Many sorts of conception are non-symbolic. As a (perhaps doctrinaire) modernist corol lary to representationalism, non-objective art so clearly participates in dialogue with representationalism that it might simply be considered one aspect of it, a response. (That is, non-objective art defines itself as "not realist". Likewise, atheism is a strongly held religious belief.) Our standards of quality still derive from representationalism, although, paradoxically, the substrate for those emotions may reside in configurations beneath realist attributes. Schematic imagery represents no continuous visual field but solicits a conceptual understanding non-spatial in origin. Thus, the Tabernacle in the Desert, an architectural form dictated by God, is believed to present some sort of incomprehensible image, divinely projected into this world with human agency to reify it, but without explanation to justify its components. The literal, that is virtual form, is not the letteral, which in the arts is the realm of content. It appears that something of this non-discursive, and perforce, mystically holy, power of imagery was either sought or attributed to the New York School. In New York School art we encounter the response to a long history of literality deflected by letterality. The Egyptians inspired the early Greeks with an urbane standard that the Greeks—rude provincials when they encountered the civilization of the Nile—altered to their own tastes. The Romans, forever indebted to, and admiring of, the Greeks, fashioned their material culture within the shell of Greek forms.13 Generation after generation, antiquity expended vast energy and capital on the plastic arts, artifacts whose perfection staggered barbarian or medieval finders and which continue to ehcit our greatest admiration untinged by condescension for the otherwise cruelly primitive peoples who made these sculptures and building.14 When the tide of Roman culture returned to the mother city as the Empire contracted, massive Roman creations remained sprouting from the countryside. Within the former empire's limits, especially in Europe, the huge ruins taunted the native inhabitants to compete in emulating Rome. At first, cathedrals, then the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.99 on Sat, 26 Mar 2016 07:17:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 132 THE LIMITS OF LITERALITY whole panoply of renaissance art and architecture, rehearsed ancient forms. These antique forms perdured into the twentieth century when, after being briefly banished by modernism, they were again borrowed for "post modernism's" accoutrements. The history of western art revives a more-or less limited repertory, a canon of forms. Likewise, the history of western morals is, more-or-less, an ever-renewing revival and examination of Jewish values. Dubbed the "Judeo-Christian heritage" this letteral system is to Judaism what modem buildings literally are to Greek architecture. In Judaism, the healthy mind in the beautiful body, if individually admir able, are cleft and exist independently, with a distinct accent on a strong mind seeking the ways of righteousness amid complex daily exigency. That is, literal behaviour, virtual action with little discussion of exigency is gov erned by letters, not passion. Circumstances vary but moral relativism never arises. The theory of beautiful behaviour at the heart of Jewish life flows as a parallel stream beside the tradition of plastic form, of physical beauty. In such an aesthetic domain absolutes are unknown and all is derived from comparison. Both strivings, toward a superlative of aesthetics and ethics, account for the distinct culture of the west. Under the right conditions of tolerance which arose in the post-war world, Judaism's aesthetic of conduct is also capable of producing visible manifestation of powerful aesthetic effect. That is, virtual forms, the literal arose under the spiritual governance, and not as illustrations, of the letteral. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution