Neologism, Translation, Evocation and Equivalence
Searching for Authenticity Through the Modern

Eytan Fichman

Boston Architectural Center

Creative work can actualize an involving experience with an idea, beyond signifying or representing that idea. While creative work often begins in ideas (as well as in intuitions, accidents and inspirations), creative work can frame an encounter, if the author is mindful and the audience is receptive. The character and content of these encounters can be thought of as comprising and, in fact, actualizing the work. The sculptor Christopher Wilmarth, the photographer Minor White, the poet Paul Celan, and the architect Tadao Ando have all made modern work (and Ando continues to do so as the only living maker in the group) that I believe can be approached and understood in this way. I equate this quality in their work with authenticity, in its rooting of the work’s substance in a living, present encounter. In this they have engaged the persistent pursuit of the authentic within modernism, an impulse often associated with the origins of this movement.

The process of forming a response in the reading of a poem (or “physical poem” [i] as the case may be) can, of course, be a creative process involving a developing sense of meaning, an emotional impact, perhaps, the formation of a sense of understanding. The works of the creators that I discuss below don’t ‘read’ readily in anything like a narrative mode. These works work require an active process of engagement, sometimes involving struggle in the formation of meaning. The active process of engagement, in the case of these four, is crucial to their makers’ intentions.

Each of these makers worked in a way that results in a blurring, fusing, dislocating or undoing of easy meaning. By these means they each carefully mine and undermine legibility, creating an open ground for the viewer’s creative engagement. If the meaning is too clear the encounter is closed to exploration. If the meaning is too obscure the work becomes hermetic. Balancing this, they all walk what Minor White called the “spring-tight line” between “abstractions” and “the world of appearances.” [ii]

Christopher Wilmarth

Wilmarth began this passage by referring to a phenomenon, light, the originary phenomenon for much of his work. He then established the participation of the viewer as equivalent to the light’s physical interaction with matter, “what is lighted,” in defining light’s character. The “light gains character” not only from physical interaction with matter, the ostensibly defining phenomenon with quantifiable characteristics, but from the viewer and her personal qualities as they qualify and characterize the perception of what is physically present. Wilmarth then indicates he was writing about his work in its relationship to “the significant moments of” his “life.” In saying this, he narrowed the focus to “the significant moments.” These are in some sense celebratory pieces, inspired by unusual significance.

Wilmarth further stated that his “original experience” had “universal implications.” These implications and their universality are neither discussed nor defined, but his language implies to me a conviction that there is a potential for the many to connect with what is “located” for him “in” work of this kind, engendered by light. To say they are “located in” (and “signified by”) “kinds of light” is itself worth noting. What is “located in” the light is in some sense, in some part, the originary experience remade (not only referred to, though Wilmarth acknowledges as well that he believes signifying is part of the function of the work). This seems a compelling reading of Wilmarth’s intention, especially considering the sentence following. There he said that the sculptures “are places to generate this experience.” A second passage by Wilmarth may make more tangible aspects of the first:

Wilmarth believed the sculptures could generate this kind of experience, could be these places, for the right viewer – achieving a merging of self and place. The language Wilmarth used is ethereal and transcendental, speaking of a place of reverie where one could become lost in place in much the same way as one could become lost in thought.

Returning to the end of the first passage, “experience” is “compressed into light and shadow,” perhaps implying that the language of drawing is embodied (and given bodily dimension) in his sculpture, through which he can “return them to the world as a physical poem.” It is an almost synæsthetic equation of medium and effect in which steel and glass sculptures locate reverie through the means of drawn poems. To say that a work is meant to be a physical poem does not define it in a constraining way because we do not know what a physical poem is, at least not in the sense that there is a shared, familiar definition for it. But the phrase is evocative of an approach and an attitude. It may be instructive to consider this as well in terms of the sculptor’s relationship to the writings of the poet Stephen Mallarme. Wilmarth created a series of painted, drawn and sculpted works inspired, and perhaps instructed, by Mallarme’s poetry, following in the steps of Matisse, who had made illustrations for Mallarme that Matisse referred to as “equivalents.” [v] Dore Ashton, in an essay that speaks to parallels between these two visual translators of Mallarme, wrote:

For Wilmarth it was important not to represent things but, perhaps, to allude to them and, in the end, to evoke their presence. So while the work enfolds lines of thought in content, fabrication and in name and includes elements (like Roebling wire rope cable) with strong, and even named associations (he called one piece “Second Roebling,”) ultimately the meanings are not explained. They are material neologisms tinged and traced by meanings. To try to name them would preclude too many possibilities in another’s encounter with the work. The physical content within the pieces does matter, critically, but:

It is an “instrument of evocation,” not a guided path. Out of respect for the authentic experience of the work Wilmarth said:

Minor White

A horizontal black and white photograph, predominantly dark in its tonal range, depicts a landscape of striated rock and blackness. There is no apparent reference for the scale of the image. The curving, striped, twisted rock forms dominate the foreground and sides of the image, rendered in rich grey tones, shading off into the left-middle of the image, framing an inky black region dotted with sixteen small star-like white points. These points make a glittering constellation that seems to glow in the blackness, surrounded by the tumultuous yet velvety geology. [ix]

This image was published in Minor White’s book Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations. White conceived the presentation of images and captions as separate in this volume. [x] The image’s impact begins, for me, in dark reverie and sensuousness. The eye moves from right to left along curves of almost storm-roiled, ocean-like stone, which feel somehow monumental, and into the blackness punctuated by its stars.

The title, initially withheld, then given, is “Bullet Holes, Capitol Reef, Utah.” The shock of the marriage of stars and bullet holes proceeds from what is really a narrative theatrical device. A surreal, unscalable image snaps into focus and shifts sharply in character. An image and a title, the most commonplace of format elements, have been rearranged to force re-reading, to displace reverie with shock.

How is one to regard the beauty apprehended only a moment ago? Now there is a struggle to come to terms with something both terrible and beautiful. Or is it? What is the origin behind these bullet holes? All this is experienced in the moments of the viewing as it might be in a play with two acts. The image has functioned as an equivalent, but perhaps not in quite the way that Matisse meant in applying this term to his accompaniments for Mallarme’s poems. An equivalent of what?

Minor White explicitly explored Equivalence in his work. Alfred Stieglitz named the concept in photography in the 1920’s and called a number of his photographs by that name. [xi] It became a mode of work and of conceptualizing work for a number of photographers after him, including White. Stieglitz’s own explanations of Equivalence seem to me to be open-ended and vague: “I have a vision of life and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.” [xii] Some of the photographers that followed him, including Minor White, reflected further on the nature of equivalence. White wrote:

White once said, when looking at an image of the ocean, “that he was ‘appalled by the image of [his] inner landscape.’ ” [xiv] Equivalence could yield an appalling apparition. Equivalence, for White, depends on the way we as viewers interact with what the photographer has made. Equivalence is individual based on the unique combination of viewer and viewed. It is unique to each of us, or unique in the combinatory relationship of the work with what each one of us brings to the work at the time we view the work. In this he seems to be a cousin to Wilmarth and, as well, an inheritor of Walt Whitman’s world-view:

This begins to ground the case for Equivalence in photography as a medium for rooting work authentically in contemporary life through rooting it in the moment, perceptually, emotionally and cognitively. The logic respects a limit definition of the contemporary – the very moment of the present. It implies as well respect for the authenticity of the spontaneous response. Although Equivalence could also be an experience engendered by living with an image for a while. Spontaneity might not emerge immediately. Studying with Minor White meant spending a lot of time:

Because the idea was, “to photograph not for what the subject is, but for what else it is.” [xvii]

White’s explorations of Equivalence require, at times, a testing of the relationship photography has to representation; a testing through subverting but not completely undoing the ability to recognize (as in the bullets / stars image), leading towards a critical experience of Equivalence. [xviii] It has to do with being unknowing and knowing, at once and by turn. “The spring-tight line between reality and photograph has been stretched relentlessly, but it has not been broken.” [xix] In this way the neologistical properties of his images (this is the invention of a visual ‘bulletstar’) help us in a “process of release” akin to Wilmarth’s and triggers engagement with, in White’s terms, “what else” that the photograph might be. At the same time the coining of ‘bulletstar’ parallels something in the word work of the next artist.

Paul Celan

Knowing something of the history of Paul Celan’s life is crucial to understanding his poetry. One is the ground for the other. He was born Paul Ancel in 1920 and grew up in a small town in Romania called Cernovitz that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus Ancel’s first language was German. He grew up with a love for and a scholarly appreciation of poetry, reading Rilke and other poets with his high school friends. World War II changed his world radically and tragically. Because he was a Jew he was forced to work in a Romanian labor camp during part of the war. He suffered violent personal loss through the war as well: that of his parents and some of his friends. He saw the society and culture of his youth destroyed. He witnessed the Holocaust. My parents, Pearl and Yehudi Fichman, were high school friends of Paul Ancel and introduced me to his life and his work as the poet Paul Celan while I was growing up.

Writing after the war and for the rest of his life engaged Celan in a struggle to come to terms with “that which happened.” [xx] At the end of the war he felt that all that was left to him was his mother tongue, the language of German, the language of the instigators and perpetrators of the murder of his world. His struggle to come to terms needed to be enacted through the language of “deathbringing speech.” [xxi]

In “Todesfugue” (Death Fugue), written around 1945, not long after Ancel learned of his parents’ deaths, he wrote for the first time as Celan, writing darkly, metaphorically and factually, speaking through poetry of the death camps of World War II. [xxiii] His work changed in approach and character over the years of his writing career. It moved from the mode of “Todesfugue” to a more abstract sort of quarrying and fusing of chunks of meaningform in his last works. Here the need for neologism was sponsored by a struggle to learn how to speak. The resultant poems are joined and shaped in ways perhaps closer to the form of struggle in human thought. The language that “gave no words for that which happened” needed to be forced, blasted and annealed into neologisms if an authentic coming to terms was to be achieved.

Celan became a writer stammering through the unspeakable via the unutterable; “calling himself ‘whitegravel stutterer’; someone speaking through his ‘true- / stammered mouth’ about ‘eternity / blood-black embabled’.”  Whether as poet, speaker or translator (he engaged translation of others’ poetry throughout his career) he was often “opting for neologism.” [xxv]

Though his work seemed to become more closed, when he was challenged about this Celan said that his poetry was “absolutely not hermetic.” [xxvi] “ ‘In a poem, what’s real happens,’ he (Celan) told a German high-school class.” [xxvii] In this obscure yet open language he speaks to the problem of authentically making actual through his poems. In his later works Celan described less and evoked more but the work became commensurately more difficult to access narratively. In later work he strived more to make actual an encounter through language with “that which happened.” Yet, like the other makers in this study, he sought, quoting Martin Buber, “ ‘an addressable thou’: the poet himself, his mother, wife or sons, a loved one or friend, the Jewish dead, their God.’ “ [xxviii]

Like the others in this study, “Celan’s work demands an ‘encounter’ like that in his writing of poems, where ‘I went with my very being toward language.’“ [xxix] And like the next maker, “Celan’s writing may baffle the reader unready to give it that ‘attentiveness’ he considered ‘the natural prayer of the soul.’“ [xxx]

Tadao Ando:

Ando is a boxer that became an architect. He is an architect who went to high school, worked as a carpenter and then traveled to educate himself. He never went to architecture school. He never worked for anybody else. [xxxi] He builds stark, concrete buildings in traditional Japanese neighborhoods (and in many other places). His stance is aggressive, perhaps befitting a pugilist:

At the same time Ando is a traditionalist who became an architect. He champions the values behind the Sukiya tradition of teahouse architecture, a delicate, even fragile wood and paper architecture that sought oneness with nature, simplicity, and rusticity through the use of humble materials employed in a refined way. The purpose, if it can be summarized, was to create a place to shelter the spirit and foster its growth. To this end, Ando believes that it is necessary “To resuscitate the aesthetic of the sukiya style today, it is necessary to employ its spirit, not necessarily its forms.” [xxxiii]

Ando was asked in a recent interview about how to respond to the events of 9/11 and how one might mark the World Trade Center site. He said, “To console and quiet the souls of the thousands of people lost, and above all, to raise the hopes of the coming generation, isn’t a ‘blank’ open space what is needed now?” [xxxiv]

At some peril we might look at Ando as a contemporary warrior poet in the samurai tradition. Clichés carry risks but I hope they may be more useful than damaging here. For the samurai, warfare and tea ceremony were related Zen Buddhist paths, or Ways, to enlightenment (the Way of the warrior and the Way of tea). Like the samurai, Ando integrates a martial arts ethos and the practice of a subtle art.

Ando has worked in a way comparable to the tea ceremony masters of a previous era. They developed a new type and form based on a desire to cultivate spiritual growth. They made a place apart from the everyday world, reached by a circuitous path, the roji. They crawled through a constricted entry, the nijiriguchi, to reach a space apart, with their experience focused on a contemplative interior and the ritual acts within it. The teahouse, or sukiya, was constructed of humble materials used in a refined and attentive way. All this was done to foster spiritual growth through an encounter, the tea ceremony, tempered by a Zen influenced sensibility cultivating attentiveness to people and things. [xxxvi]

Ando’s contribution has been to create equivalents to buildings of the sukiya tradition by redeploying their underlying principles, within the circumstances that he finds himself. These buildings do not refer to or signify their originary sources. They enact the principles again, neologistically, which is the only way these principles could hope to be actualized in contemporary settings. These are Ando’s means towards achieving an authentic contemporary encounter with an antique ethos.

Conclusion

These are four makers of modern works. Wilmarth was a maker of “physical poem[s]” of reverie; Celan was a poet of struggle, asking an “addressable thou” to enact that struggle in neologistic language with him. Minor White was a poet in neologistic images. Ando is a poet-warrior in the samurai / sukiya tradition who seeks Equivalence through hewing to antique principles while employing contemporary terms. Wilmarth worked to preserve the creative relationship between viewer, work and author, seeking a viewer who would be a catalyst for realizing a physical poem. White too made space for the perceiving viewer, basing the work on creating a relationship between viewer and work that reached an emotional stage. For Celan the art happened in the poem, through an encounter with the poem, never hermetically, speaking with/to an “addressable thou.” Ando’s works are effectively performance pieces where the audience is led onto a stage to perform rites and rituals of spiritual growth in a sanctified realm and thereby foster the occupants’ spiritual growth.

These four makers have made the substance of their thought, and their work in form, available, relying on it being transformed and abstracted, in order to permit an authentic encounter. Whether in language or form language, that encounter requires active engagement. The substantial content of their work can only realize its authenticity in the crucible of the encounter.