I
The exhibition of late paintings by Mary Caroline Richards now opening at Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, New York, was first conceived in a conversation with Cornelius Pietzner, a friend of Richards and steward of some of her late work. He reached out to me upon hearing of a new program named in her honor.
Since, a quickened variety of time has visited the world. It is amazing that the exhibition is happening at all. A virus that, it appears, originated with one of our animal cousins, has started to make its way around the planet. The art center was closed for many months, and the start of the new program seemed precarious. In New York, everyone was encouraged to stay at home as much as possible, and many social and collective dimensions of life were abruptly called off. Festive exhibitions of art and in-person learning have become questionable activities. The sky was emptied of planes and the schools of children.
In this situation, a series of deaths, some of them filmed, many involving people of color and police officers, ignited protests not only throughout the country, but the world. Millions left their confinement to protest. Justice is important enough to risk life for. They continue all around the country. On the bottom of Warren Street, less than a mile from the art center, a giant mural reads BLACK LIVES MATTER.
And here we are, launching a program named after M.C. Richards, founded on aesthetic education, contemplative inquiry and action research. And we are showing paintings.
Well, isn’t that nice.
No, it is not nice.
Nice is to the good as a dictionary entry is to a poem by Richards. And the greatest challenge of these events will not be whether they are nice, but whether they can contribute to the good.
Words do not relate meaning. Everything is in between. This is so true it is also false.
II
Richards hovered in the periphery of my life until about ten years ago. At that time, I came across her book Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. A year later, I met a student who had attended Warren Wilson, not far from the site of Black Mountain College. As a student there, she had heard a legend of Richards. Richards was invited to deliver a speech. In my imagination, I felt the warm climes of North Carolina during May, accompanied by the itchy sensation of the appropriate attire, attire aggravated by the austere formalism typical of such occasions. The legend goes that Richards delivered a speech by repeatedly stating, “ART.” Over and over. Art, Art, Art was placed in terrible isolation before those gathered.
I have learned over the last decade that this is definitely true.
I don’t know if it actually happened.
“Until our worst fear befalls us, we are not born.”[1]
Richards gives thanks for her early formal education, which culminated with a PhD, as a wounding process that set her on a path toward wholeness for the rest of her life. In the legend of her speech, I sense her pointing an assembly of young people, who have followed their superstitious belief to the altar of American higher education as unwitting sacrificial lambs, toward the wholeness and the good as she had found it. Could they intuit what words could not convey by a delivery that left so much up to them?
Richards started college with the conventional superstition that the verbal, abstract, intellectual culture of the academy carried within it the door to a superior form of life. She dove into practices of logic, analysis, generalization and survey as a gifted student. As she reached the pinnacle of achievement, her doctorate, she was tortured by the lack of wisdom she actually possessed, and the anxiety that she would be found out for the fraud that she was. Coming to terms with the truth of this experience was one of her first exercises in sensing facts: “One of the first facts I was called upon by life and my ‘discipline’ to recognize was that I and my bright associates were idiots in some extraordinary way – moral idiots, at least unable to find our path into the good life which we had expected to be ours.”[2] Instead, she found herself in a circle of people who were “falling on each other with violence, resenting and betraying and fawning, filled with righteous despair.”[3] At first, she blamed her teachers. They had offered her no wisdom in working with human relationships, or how to work with crisis. They had not shown her that she was a part of a real outer and inner world. Nor had they shown her a path to inner resources for transformation. She was furiously angry with her education because she felt it had “betrayed her trust.”[4]
In her writing, this early process appears as a journey of death that set the stage for a life dedicated to rebirth and wholeness.
ART
Receiving a teaching post at Black Mountain College was a turning point in Richards’ life. She began to work with ceramics and foster many of the insights described in Centering. John Andrew Rice, a founder of the college, had insisted that art be at the center of all learning. This was not to make artists, but “democrats,” people capable of choosing what it was they proposed to believe in, what was going to be their world. A student “sensitized to movement, form, sound and other media of the arts, gets a firmer control of himself and his environment than is possible through purely intellectual effort.”[5] Those educated through the arts are capable of being active participants in collective processes of choice, for they are “least subject to direction from without and yet have within them a severe discipline of their own.”[6] Decades later, Richards wrote that people do not “want to be educated to be servants of a system, however benevolent. We want to be inspired to create forms of living and working which will serve the needs of persons and their development. Of freedom and community. Of self-government. We need places to practice.”[7]
ART
Many forms of modern art encourage looking at the perceptible as if it were capable of contenting us by its mere appearance. Just through its physical presentation. “Art is the most physical of our sciences. It is the consequence of our passion to make our inner life visible and sense-perceptible, to embody it.”[8] This is a single object that need not be useful, or logically meaningful. It is a place of playful apprehension, yet imbued with reverence and interest. This gaze informs our encounters, when we look toward each other with this expectation of surprise and the encounter of creativity that exceeds our generalizations. We develop a sense of the individual spirit that gives its life its own meaning and cannot be determined by belonging to a group, be it by gender, race or faith. There is a part of us that is flame, not reflection. This leads to the experience that “We carry light within us. There is no need to merely reflect. Others carry light within them. These lights must wake to each other. My face is real. Yours is. Let us find our way to our initiative.”[9] An important part of tilling out racism and sexism will involve the cultivation of practices and pedagogy that can reveal the “real face.” This apprehension evades our typical sociological and genealogical gaze. It consists in a pictorial attitude of receptivity in the face of another that becomes a ground for revelation. What is a person?
ART
Artistic practice involves the immediate apprehension that nothing exists in isolation. There is no action in isolation. Everything is connected. “The potter wets his hands and moves the spinning clay upwards into a cone, pressing it together and lifting it up and downwards into a plane, stretching it and compressing it – moving it, up and down, in and out until the whole ball of clay moves into a center, that is, moves into equilibrium. Centering is the giving of a certain quality to the clay, so that the centeredness is distributed throughout it in an even grain… The center is everywhere.”[10] The an-aesthetic thinking of our time takes parts as wholes. I recently read a widely circulated opinion in a newspaper about the Swedes and their choices in trying to face the pandemic. The author wrote that they gained nothing, as they had neither economic gains nor less deaths than neighboring countries. I wish this kind of judgment was a-typical! The Swedes called on the intelligence and goodwill of the whole population, practicing the virtue of democracy. Even if they only fostered more democratic culture and respect for autonomy in collective governance, surely this is not nothing. There have been many other ways people have died to further democratic culture.
ART
Art offers us lessons even for the re-organization of our economy. The vocation of the artist has been understood as one where the meaning of the work is paramount, and the means to produce it is secondary. Authenticity and fidelity to inspiration are foremost. Richards did not advocate for liberty and anarchy in economic production. She saw that “The lonely soul labors toward fraternity. He labors to free himself from pride and ignorance and sloth so that he may live as a brother to other men. It is a lifelong task. Community life helps in this process. Mutual effort and understanding, practiced over a long period in the earnest spirit of a discipline, tend to help us toward our freedom. Certain jobs can be done only together, for a society of men provides a sinew no man has alone. People need each other in order that out of the multitude a whole image may be formed.”[11] While individual autonomy is characteristic of the artist, and collaboration characterizes the production of most economic goods,[12] the ideal of intrinsically motivated work should permeate all sectors of society. The performance of some task in the economy should be a dignified action in itself, helping to contribute to a future world one would like to inhabit. Art reminds us that the ideal economy would not be powered by wages, but by work being dignified and meaningful. While one may not work with the same level of individuation as an artist, each loaf of bread, house built, crop harvested can be felt as a creative contribution toward a good world. This is the foundation of Joseph Beuys’ whole conception of art.[13] Art points toward a future where wages will not be experienced as a distraction from the demand that our economy be GOOD. In a good economy, one is paid to meet one’s own needs so that one might creatively contribute to the meeting of certain needs in the community. The meeting of those needs itself should be able to inspire pride and dignity, and be pursued with a feeling of creative liberty. Today, many receive money to do work that they feel cripples them and contributes to a society they do not want in the future. This is the seed of so much despair and disillusionment, while our wages often pay our way into one of the infinite reveries of consumerism offered through our ingeniously manipulative advertising culture.
ART
One of the greatest global threats today is the environmental crisis. While we can anticipate that the trajectory we are on will make the recent pandemic out to be mild, we continue on. We are so distant from the natural elements and life of our planet, and generally alienated from its cycles, rhythms, beings and reality. Our way of coming into contact with the natural world is largely informed by the impressive and powerful practices of modern science. But what of the good? If science is so supreme, Richards inquires, how has it led us so far astray in our planetary health?[14] For modern science offers us an-aesthetic and distanced knowledge of our planet. It has largely forsaken the aesthetic. A crucial weakness in our current culture of learning is the lack of aesthetic natural-scientific practices. These are not artistic practices! They are an empiricism so true that it overcomes abstraction and connects to life. The biologist Craig Holdrege has developed them in his methodological portrayals of plants and animals, and the physicist Georg Maier has developed them in the aesthetic thinking of his practical optics. If aesthetic education in the arts prepares us to apprehend the individual life of other free humans and live in a democracy, aesthetic natural science allows us to apprehend the life of non-human presences and processes on the planet. The one contributes to modern democracy and human rights, the other to ecological democracy and regenerative society.[15]
ART
Art, while the most physical, is also spirit. It is one foundation stone for what is today called contemplative pedagogy.[16] Richards writes “that life is an art, that life can only be understood if it is approached as an artistic process, we mean that as in theater or alchemy, something is deeply interfused through its physical forms. And to understand the physical forms accurately, it is necessary to see them with a double eye.”[17] This double gaze opens up on inner phenomena and an understanding of the contours of learning culture in our time, when “[u]niversity truth… is changing. And university members are handicapped by attachment to intellect, money, status, materialistic knowledge and role playing. Heart and soul and spirit are blowing their trumpets around the walls. The inner life is asking to be taken seriously as a fact, connected with the physical body of man and earth and stars, and connected with our capacity for knowledge.”[18] Richards often presents her work in the context of anthroposophical contemplative practices of inquiry. “Anthropos Sophia brings to our current research a perspective which would look at people and things and institutions from the inside, seeing substance as spiritual, forms as inwardly sourced (as from the invisible ‘content’ of a seed), all forms together working in learning and teaching in mutuality, spirit in man a part of spirit in the universe, an ecology of human spirit and cosmic spirit, earth and the stars.”[19] When Darwin suggested that species might evolve from one another, and there might be a common ancestor of all life on earth, he challenged the theological dogma that all species were static, created at some distant point in the past and merely reproducing and repeating themselves. Each species was on a linear path that did not intersect with another. Darwin, among others, suggested that two areas held to be utterly independent should be considered as connected, even versions of one another. The most profound sentiment in contemplative morphology challenges contemporary teachings by asking if there can be a morphological relationship between forms of intangible, mental experience and tangible experiences of matter. For instance, could the wonderful, differentiated physical cosmos be a transformation of a distant state of being that was purely mental? What of the connections we notice everyday, that, for instance, light is connected to consciousness, that when we open our eyes with dawn coming through our window our consciousness responds? We associate being gripped by insight with being illumined. Must we consider Emerson’s suggestion that matter is deadened thought “mere” poetry? The pioneer of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, pursued research that can be understood as a contribution to this possibility. To imagine a physical cosmos that did not contain spirit until a nervous system existed on the planet is convention. This is not a plain truth. While many may find Richards’ talk of “an ecology of human spirit and cosmic spirit” as new age navel gazing that cannot come to terms with the actual ecological challenges we are facing, they might do well to refer to a recent history of the ecological movement in the USA and its connection with this orientation.[20] Here again we find art, as a practice that looks with the double eye of outer and inner.
Closing Hymn by M.C. Richards
Sweetness stores in the root,
sap rises and descends.
The rhythms of our nature
round us round.
Human Beings, risen,
take eternal life in hand.
Our creative light
shares in world creation.
The Life-Line of our Schooling
is its golden vein.[21]
[1] M. C. Richards, The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings by M. C. Richards (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 243.
[2] M. C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), p. 14.
[3] Richards, The Crossing Point, p. 210.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Martin B Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 39.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Richards, The Crossing Point, p. 140.
[8] Ibid., p. 179.
[9] Richards, Centering, p. 18.
[10] Richards, The Crossing Point, p. 177.
[11] Richards, Centering, p. 113.
[12] https://www.freecolumbia.org/blog/2020/3/31/liberty-equality-fraternity
[13] https://www.freecolumbia.org/blog/can-everything-be-art
[14] Richards, The Crossing Point, p. 182.
[15] Nathaniel Williams, “Aesthetic Education in the Anthropocene” (PhD dissertation, University at Albany, 2020).
[16] Arthur Zajonc, “Contemplative Pedagogy: A Quiet Revolution in Higher Education,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 2013, no. 134 (2013): pp. 83–94.
[17] Richards, The Crossing Point, p. 181.
[18] Ibid., p. 216.
[19] Ibid., p. 215.
[20] Dan McKanan, Eco-Alchemy: Anthroposophy and the History and Future of Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2017).
[21] M. C. Richards, Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Selected Poems of M. C. Richards (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1990), p. 130.