MAN AND BOY ON WEST SCOTT STREET continued...






It is one of the offices of art to give visual embodiment to the invisibilia of things as lived, to absenses and presences deposited in rooms, gardens, staircases, doors, and windows that are vivid to us whenever we revisit them, in act, memory, or dream, but as transparent as ghosts to anyone else, who sees merely their architectural identity. I have visited, as a pilgrim, La Maison de Tante Leonie, and responded to it through Proust's language, which has become as much a part of me as it was of him. What my experience would have been had I not read Proust is easy to image a bourgeois house in a Norman village with a tiny garden, not greatly different from any house anywhere at all. The handsome house that Tom Rose presents in photographs here tells us a great deal about the pride, the values, the aesthetics of the person for whom it was built, but little of what it meant to him as a boy, in whose psyche the house inscribed itself as an ensemble of dangers and adventures. The critical question is whether this meaning, these meanings could have been transmitted by visual means alone, without, that is, the text that accompanies them like a narrator's voice-over in a film.

One of the immense advantages to artists in today's art world is that the injunctions of a previous phase of modernism - to respect the inherent limitations of ones chosen medium - have entirely lost their authority. As a philosopher, I recall parallel interdictions that were intended to govern meaningful discourse when meaning was restricted to what was verifiable by means of observation. That ruled out as meaningless what could not be rendered in the exiguous vocabulary of 'observation sentences' which effectively ruled out all the deep issues of philosophy. Philosophers of my generation lived through the death-agonies of the dreaded Verifiability Criterion of Meaningfulness, that intimidated the discourse we ached for by stigmatizing it as nonsense. Philosophy came slowly back to life when verificationism lost its toxicity. The artistic outcome of fidelity to boundaries of the medium was an enhanced aesthetic of materials, but at the cost of meanings larger than that. Today's artists are more interested in meanings than in matter, and seek ways to give voice to the meanings resident in things. As a sculptor, I suppose, Rose could have built a model of the house at 1018 W. Scott, or even a replica which we could enter. He could even have placed within it replicae of certain charged objects : a boy's blood soaked underpants, for example, leaving us to puzzle out its meaning for ourselves. Or a floor that burst into flame around its visitors. But where would that leave his viewers? The work would be more and far less than what he has given us in words and pictures in a book-like object we can hold in our hands. It could never achieve the urgency, the agonies, the fears, the promptings of a boyish curiosity recalled and relived and revealed. It would, rather, be fitted into the Lebenswelt as a piece of Grand Guignol, a Halloween sideshow, a 'haunted house', a residence for the Addams Family of existential freaks.

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