CREATIVITY/NOVELTY - HERB GREENE

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CREATIVITY / NOVELTY In the twentieth century, in reaction against historical representations of the religious and spiritual in Western culture and to swim in the “sensationalist-objectivist” mainstream, many modern artists have avoided all but the most abstract symbols of spirit. Yet most of us ascribe spiritual values to the beauty and wonder we find in a nature which includes ourselves. Nature is a process that, to most of us, seems miraculous and awesome, a process with which we want to express empathy and in which we want to participate. But some among the elites that champion modern art are like mid-century Marxists. They have been, at best, indifferent to fostering expressions of this ever-present human urge, favoring instead an agenda stuck with a God-is-dead materialist ideology.
The events of the Anne Frank photo (pictured at bottom right) and the Redon print (pictured at middle right) in my collage (pictured at top right) provide a sense of life’s renewal, of spiritual values, and a venue for a whiteheadian interpretation of God I think many viewers can appreciate. Redon has turned his drawing on its side, as if he suddenly sensed a feeling projecting out from Ophelia’s upturned head through the cluster of flowers. This decision indicates novel conceptual feeling in Redon’s invention. On its side, the vase of flowers becomes dissociated from the expected, and evokes a sense of drifting and passage.
Redon’s Ophelia expresses both inward feeling and feeling projected outward, while allowing us to overtly behold the process. Ophelia’s eyes are closed, her face directed as if following or projecting both internal force and the flowers themselves. The body as a container, which this “force” can either emanate from or penetrate into, is a root metaphor of a conceptual feeling that Ophelia and the flowers are caught up in some ecstatic and spiritual flow of energy. One can feel certain affinities between Redon’s Ophelia and Anne Frank.
Anne looks out, aspiring expectant, with hints of the portentous. She appears young, sensitive and intelligent. Dark circles under her eyes contribute a certain gravity and morbidity to her expression, just as the dark spaces between Redon’s flowers suggest a gravity and mystery that underlies their warm, glowing colors. Whtieheadian “vectors” of feeling within us move from the warm, mysterious, dreamy face of Ophelia to the flowers, and from the flowers to her face. One searches for correspondences among the events of flowers, Ophelia, the preening, “caring” birds and Anne Frank. There is something spiritual and poignant in Anne Frank’s expression, with its prehension of youth, expectation, longing, searching and a gaze to a future world. I eliminate my prehension that the right side of Anne’s hair looks rather like the profile of a black spaniel in order to feel the possibility of redemption through the suffering that I identify with Anne. I also eliminate prehensions of the commercialization of Anne Frank by playwrights and others who have “modulated” her diary and story to soften and hide her witness to the darker realities of human barabarism and cruelty in a living present.
I feel an element of sadness associated with Anne’s death can be transformed into an element of triumph, because the loss of her life, which held so much promise, has so positively effected the lives of millions through her diary and her photograph. I also feel triumph in the Redon, a sense of imagination realizing a vision of the spirit. The photograph of preening gulls shows the interdependence of creatures-the necessity of caring that evolution has produced-and reminds us, in particular, that white sea birds, with their graceful, soaring wings, have become symbols of spirit and release in human culture. How to explain the resulting harmonized feelings that refer to such diversity of events? It is inexplicable without recourse to Whitehead’s principle of novel concrescence, the elimination of unwanted detail to produce aesthetic consistency. Finding consistencies between the Redon, gulls and Anne Frank does not constitute an exercise in indulging my romantic imagination. Such consistencies are public, available to everyone, to be reconstituted by the creativity of individual viewers.
Through the harmonies of prehensions, apperceptions, feelings, and ideas, the ideas of quest, hope, triumph and redemption conveyed by the Anne Frank photo can commingle with the spiritual movement, ecstasy and triumph in Redon’s Ophelia. Most people feel that there is some kind of directing agency in the world of ecological dependency, and that the world of abundant and incredible natural beauty is not wholly explicable by mechanistic models. Whitehead’s principle represents a rational explanation of this world without depending on supernatural causes. Neither capricious nor punishing, Whitehead’s God is capable of preserving all that is valued by the human mind, transforming disjoined multiplicity with its oppositions and diversities into concrescent unity. Here, Whitehead reveals his ties to Coleridge and the English Romantics. By the very nature of the drama of life and death on Earth, most of us will always seek deeply harmonized symbols of this kind of unity in the contexts of death, rebirth, triumph and redemption. This snapshot of Anne Frank, with her uplifted head, out-looking gaze and dark circles around her eyes, taken in an automatic photograph booth, has helped to immortalize Anne for millions. To me, the other photos taken in the same series made her look like a teenager, perhaps Jewish, perhaps impish, but without the distinctions that move me and, I presume, the editors of Life an many of their readers. Thus Whitehead’s universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites-of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the ‘opposites’ are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of ‘God’ is the way in which we understand this incredible fact- that what cannot be, yet is." For information or inquiries on purchasing Herb Greene paintings or drawings, please contact info@herbgreene.org copyright © Herb Greene