An impressive, even threatening installation by Zoro Feigl in W139 in Amsterdam, originally intended as an homage to the Zuider Zee, inspired Paul Groot to write a reflection on the relationship between art, God and string theory.
I
According to the intellectual communis opinio, it could not be. Since Friedrich Nietzsche, God has been dead, and after Ludwig Wittgenstein, there was nothing more worthwhile to be said about God.[1] Since then, God has fallen into a suspect category. But since the philosopher Cornelis Verhoeven commented that senseless and untrue statements have often made more sense than sensible statements, God's star has been shining ever brighter. Once again, He is being granted that ‘almost nothing’, as Verhoeven referred to it.[2] God is once again at home everywhere and the razor-sharp attacks by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) take nothing away from this.[3]
Dawkins thinks and feels like a dry biologist, who, in a utilitarian crusade, exchanges the creation of God for the evolution of Darwin. His efforts come across as painful to us, primarily because he demonstrates an overly apparent lack of artistic sensibility. Dawkins hates God, and has an equally grand aversion to artists and intellectuals, because they all too often use the mask of God as an alibi for their artistic self-awareness.
The fact that Dawkins has set himself so staunchly against the delusions of God is hard to reconcile with his earlier book, The Selfish Gene, published nearly 30 years ago, a bloodcurdling theory on how genes and ‘memes’ (a kind of spiritual gene) hold everything we do – our bodies and our spirits – in their grip.[4] The body is first and foremost a machine that, through its genes, is used to reproduce itself. We are merely a function of the physical and spiritual activities of the countless teeming, self-seeking genes that regulate all kinds of things, from lazing away our time to enjoying reading a book or listening to music. Whether or not we are atheists or prefer to believe, we are simply fulfilling the wish of a meme that will prevail in the survival of the fittest.
Nonetheless, the later Dawkins wants to be done with all semblance of that belief, because he cannot reconcile Him with Darwinian evolution, which he sees as the true soul of modern life. This also holds true for his ideas about art. Art is in fact just as dangerous as religion, because it often bears witness to regressive and religious undertones that lead our attention away from Darwin's evolution. The appearance of the sublime, as described by Edmond Burke and Stendhal, must also be a thorn in Dawkin’s side, although their vision produces a beautiful showcase for genetics, fully evolutionary in character. In the cases of Burke and Stendhal, nature and culture follow closely on one another's heels. They demonstrate how artistic experiences can interfere with bodily functions. Stendhal’s fainting after seeing an overwhelming work of art, his descriptions of ecstatic experiences in a sensitive soul, as well as the discovery of the sublime in the armour-clad soul of Burke, are the result of the rubbing together of memes and genes, soul and body, of nature and God, of inspiration and reality.
II
God does not let Himself be captured with a single net. At the opening of the installation De Branding (The Breakers) this spring at W139 in Amsterdam, this house of art proved a most appropriate place for a godly experience. This work by Zoro Feigl is an artistic reconstruction of a primarily lost natural phenomenon. It brings back memories of the Zuider Zee, not only as an ode to a long-vanished past, but also by way of a seemingly futuristic vision of an as yet untrodden universe.
The most exciting thing about the opening was the appearance of God as the inspiring spirit of the Zuider Zee. At W139, He who had once put the soul into the harbours of the towns along the coast now watched over a literally dead sea, a chimera, a place of fantasy, a phantom of a sea, because for almost a century it has been swallowed up by the IJsselmeer Dam.
My personal God of the Zuider Zee is a visionary God. It is a vengeful God, personified by the Grote Gaper, or ‘Great Yawner’, a sculpture on the façade of a chemist’s shop of the same name on the Kleine Noord in Hoorn, which once filled me with fear. Every day, on my way to school, I passed him. I quickened my step, because I knew for certain that from its terrifying and ghastly, gaping mouth came all the sulphurous odours and vapours that carried the sins of the world and brought the storms that blasted across the waters of the IJsselmeer. The Grote Gaper, as his frightening face proclaimed, was undoubtedly an offspring of God and the Devil.
This was the God that immediately showed Himself as one entered W139. There, out of nothing, rose the cast-off head of an open-mouthed ‘gaper’, tucked in amongst the carefully staged junk. The ‘gaper’ had lost none of his absurd power. From the ‘almost nothing’ of that great, gaping mouth, storms still bellowed and new, filthy vapours rose like smoke. I thought I heard voices, secret voices. They proved to be an introduction to an even more drastic vision being presented that evening.
In the large space at W139, Feigl had staged the Zuider Zee, exactly the way I imagined that I remembered it. The smell of the harbours, the mood of the sea on spring evenings, the voices of the skippers, the quotes from the poets once again came alive. In the distance loomed undulating ships’ ropes, which were moved electronically, like an indefatigable, waving carpet of water. The undulating ropes across the floor shoot their way through your brains. Looking up, I was blinded by the construction of two revolving, vertically hung ships, with two strong lamps in the centre, high in the building, like a lighthouse casting light and shadow all around it. A little later, I discovered a revolving magnet driving a handful of compasses to distraction.[5]
Suddenly, I thought I saw something odd up there in the collar beams of W139, so I once again looked up. I tripped forwards over the waves, restored my balance, again looked up, and believe it or not, witnessed the re-enactment of God. Time stood still for a moment. Eternity approached me, His gaze met mine. Did those eyes perhaps look like Feigl’s eyes? I took a photograph with my mobile phone. Then everything was normal again, or at least it was until the primitive ambience of open collar beams once again appeared to be broken, now by the shining marble atmosphere of the tabernacle, of a temple, adorned with an Ark of the Covenant created by the revolving boats. I took another photograph with my mobile phone.
III
I first thought that my imagination had run away with me and Feigl’s installation, but later, I remembered a visitor who had suddenly appeared, one whose extraordinary religious and artistic personality must have put all this into motion. That this was truly an apparition, I have no doubt whatsoever. Just as the etchings by Jacob Luyken prove that he saw the heavenly Jerusalem from his studio near the Zuider Zee, so too had that apparition of a visitor used his genes and memes to bring about the sudden metamorphosis of W139 into Solomon’s Temple. He must have been the one who had entangled me in the dream of Solomon’s Temple, not so much in the way of a religious fundamentalist attempting to rebuild the temple, but as a parody of that, in the style of the archaeological work done by Indiana Jones. [6]
IV
Feigl’s work raised questions. Can meaningful things be said about artistic visions? What do true or untrue statements about the reality of metaphorical truth actually mean? Is it still possible to meet God? Or is that the exclusive provenance of religious painters, such as Marc Mulders, who has invested a great deal of paint in Verhoeven’s ‘almost nothing’?
Feigl must also have asked himself if he was able to recall God from that ideal nothingness. What happens to a viewer in the face of God? The answers ultimately went well beyond those expectations, because that evening proved that you can short-circuit everyday experience with a sharp flash and an unexpected shock, that you can create ‘everything’ from the tension between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’, just the way Verhoeven had predicted.
Feigl’s work reached further, going through Verhoeven’s ‘almost nothing’ to arrive in a contemporary, multidimensional world that is known as the space of ‘string theory’. The lighthouse was also equipped with extra physical dimensions, and can more specifically be seen as one of Howard Georgi’s ‘hallucinations’.[7] This theoretical physicist has made waves with his suspicion that the very smallest particles in nature can be studied as ‘fractals’. In Feigl’s re-enactment of God, one could not take Georgi’s ‘non-particles’ literally, as they were invisible, but the God of that evening raged about in a Dadaist lighthouse, like a phantom of magnetic powers intended to invoke religious ecstasy.
Will Feigl have been aware that his rope construction, with the mechanically generated coming and going of its waves, was such a beautiful illustration of string theory, as an almost literal translation? [8] But that doesn't much matter. Perhaps it was just an instrument in the hands of his artistic genes and memes, or even more strangely, a vehicle of my own. I dare not draw a conclusion.
V
How long did that vision of God actually last, on that evening of the opening? The question is not really relevant, as a vision is as eternal as it is fleeting. What matters is not how long it lasts, but the spiritual fruit it bears, and here, that fruit is considerable. The visionary Zoro Feigl has succeeded in binding the God of the Old Testament with the newest insights in the world of physics. His metaphors had little trouble filling the ostensible gaps between art and religion, and between meaningless and meaningful statements. In his reconstructed Zuider Zee surf, Feigl discovered an artistic universe that had hitherto not been reconnoitred.[9]
Paul Groot
Notes
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Frankfurt am Main 2003
- Cornelis Verhoeven, Bijna Niets, Utrecht 1970
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, London 2006
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, London 1978
- The two revolving boats, hung vertically, proved to be two eighteenth-century wooden sloops from the depot of the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen.
- The design reminds one of Joseph Semah, who regularly publishes attractive case studies. He parodied Beuys in performances and created ironic artistic models à la Barnett Newmann, in order to ultimately connect Beuys and Newman. See also: www.forum.nl/ ZienIsGeloven /interviews3.html
- According to Nobel Prize winner Gerard ’t Hooft, string theory is a ‘disturbance theory’. See his book, De bouwstenen van de schepping, Een zoektocht naar het allerkleinste, Amsterdam 1999, p. 212
- Georgi’s ideas were only made known a few weeks later, when they were published in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper. See Margriet van der Heijden, ‘De ondeeltjes-hype, fractaal spookdeeltje moet kosmisch raadsel oplossen’, NRC Handelsblad, 28 June, 2008
- There are several films of De Branding/ The Breakers available on the Internet. The best is by Feigl himself. See YouTube
Opening
