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A CONVERSATION on ART and the IMMANENT
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With Raymond Barnett Ph.D.
December 2019 - February 2020
This conversation was engaged as I prepared for a March 2020 exhibit at the Sierra Arts Foundation in Reno Nevada.
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SRH:
Hi Ray,
It is a great honor to have this conversation with you.
We have known each other for years so allow me to provide some background. I first encountered you as one of my professors at California State University, Chico. I was a very naive art major that had enrolled in the Human Anatomy class you taught. I was greatly outnumbered by nursing students.
Years later, around 1993, I walked in off the street to find you in your biology department office. I had become greatly interested in North American birds and I wanted to paint a watercolor of a Prairie Falcon. You were the director of the Vertebrate Museum and I inquired if I could access the study skins in the collection. What we did not know at that moment was that the vertebrate museum would become my primary, Monday through Friday studio for nearly three years. We would chat as you would unlock the metal cases of drawers full of specimens and sometimes we had lunch together. That was one of the richest periods of my life as an artist and we have remained friends through the years.
Years later again, we went for a hike in Chico's Upper Bidwell Park. I remember sitting in a Maidu Indian cave and listening to you talk about your interest in Taoism. I did not realize then that your pondering would become the impetus of your wonderful book, Earth Wisdom.
I read Earth Wisdom with great curiosity. You make a compelling connection between the Taoism of ancient China and the seemingly serendipitous parallels with John Muir's unique wilderness worldview. You have great reverence for Muir and refer to him as an "Accidental Taoist." The book effectively establishes this metaphor to foster a socio-ecological metamorphosis to address the climate crisis.
Yet, as I read the book, a curious word kept showing up: Immanent. It is a word that seemed somehow familiar but was just out of my reach. In fact I nearly contacted you to sound you out on its meaning. I did form a germ of understanding for this concept. I believe you have discovered a fascinating window to a very nuanced thinking about our ecological and cultural future. Now I have had an opportunity to read the initial chapters of your upcoming book, The Gardeners of Gaia. I can see that you are digging deeper into this idea of the Immanent.
I know where I would like to begin our investigation. Where did this word Immanent come from? Could you give us an idea of your inspiration?
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Barnett:
Sure; the term immanent has been around for centuries in scholarly investigations into the nature of reality by Western philosophers, with many nuances and interpretations. But in general, it refers to the physical, day-to-day, sensory aspects of living life on earth. In the immanent tradition, the body we live in is positive, and breathing, eating, making love, enjoying the sunset, marveling at storms-all this is good and valued. Immanent is the antonym of transcendent, which refers to an imagined aspect of reality beyond or above the immanent, one which is timeless and pure. Implicitly and often explicitly, the transcendent is what makes humans better than all other creatures, makes them spiritual and confers upon them the possibility of eternal life (so long as you meet the requirements imposed by God, Jehovah, or Allah).
As a matter of fact, I hadn't been aware of the term immanent, myself, until the last decade or so. For the first six decades of my life, I lived the approach to reality that the word immanent describes: avidly enjoying summer thunderstorms rolling in through the wide-open prairie skies of my boyhood Oklahoma; tromping through the woods of my "country cousins" in Missouri; rambling in the mountains of California, China, and Europe; sleeping outdoors under oak trees in my back yard in California during full moon nights; making sure my kids knew the local birds and trees of northern California. But I didn't apply any particular term or thought to my inclination towards these sorts of things; I was just a bit-weird, you know.
That's what first intrigued me about meeting you, Scott. A guy who spends all week painting every little feather from a prairie falcon specimen in front of him? A guy who spends days in a canoe with a buddy exploring the marshlands of the Butte Sink? Weird, too!
But then in my mid-sixties of age, a college roommate, knowing of my experiences backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, asked me to write a chapter on John Muir for a book he was editing. Intrigued, I read the half dozen or so biographies of Muir; more intrigued, I read everything he wrote. His wilderness Journals, particularly, staggered me. I realized that Muir's way of experiencing the world was utterly foreign to the established view of our Western civilization, and completely at odds with it in every respect.
Most unexpected was my dawning realization that Muir's understanding of the world and the place of humans in it looked a lot like the approach of the Taoist tradition of China, which I had been exposed to at Yale as a callow undergraduate, but didn't appreciate at the time. Muir, an eccentric immigrant from Scotland, saw the world the same way that Taoists had for 2,000 years in China-the same way I saw it and my artist friend Scott Hudson saw it! And it was starkly different than the way our Western "civilization" described.
In the view of Muir and Taoists, this physical, day-to-day life on earth is paramount-not some future existence in Heaven or Nirvana. Our bodies are wonderful and positive, a gift from the universe-not a suspicious vessel embodying temptations that would rob us of eternal life. The earth is a precious gift from the universe also, full of wonders and beauty and filling us with awe and love-not a neutral, inanimate chunk of dirt that exists only for us humans to rip apart and destroy for profit to buy bigger homes and fancier cars.
As this jarring realization sank in, I cast about for a way to organize it, for a term to denote this extraordinary and very different way of living life. Many decades earlier, studying religion in New York City's Union Theological Seminary the year after college (before the U.S. Army caught up with me and sent me to Southeast Asia), I had read that religious scholars divided religions into transcendent ones (concerned with that eternal afterlife somewhere above or beyond the earth positing an other-worldly place where "good" people went after death: Christianity and Islam, preeminently) and immanent ones (concerned with the earth: animism, shamanism, Shinto, and Taoism). The immanent religions were the early, "primitive" ones; the transcendent religions were the later, "advanced" ones.
So I decided to liberate transcendent and immanent from their usual religious and philosophical context, and apply them to these two very different ways of living life, of humans experiencing reality. Thus the immanent worldview.
In other words: I didn't consciously realize I was "living" something called an immanent worldview until I recently began to think about how I would describe it (prompted by Muir's journals and Taoism's tradition). I'd be interested in your experience, Scott. Do you just paint and sculpt and create art with a clear understanding of your "stance" toward the world and Western civilization-or do you just "do" it because that's what you do? (Probably a naive question, but...)
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SRH:
Well, that is complicated. I'll try to answer it honestly in a way that makes sense to me. I have never been a decorative artist and was always restless to say something relative to what it meant to be alive in this time. At times that meant staring into the shadows. I was never the most cerebral among my peers but I feel patterns and currents deeply.
There is no separation between my life as an artist and my sense of place, which is immersive and expansive. Consistent with your idea of the immanent, I have always felt kinship with birds, lizards and trees. I talk to them. In the macrocosm, I see humanity as just one cell or organism in a bio-regional ecosystem on a planet that is a tiny cell or organism in a much bigger living organism we call the Universe. I feel it breathing and contracting and boundless. I will never forget a time camping in remote central Nevada. A friend pointed at a faint smudge in the night sky near Cassiopeia and said, "That smudge is Andromeda, the only distant galaxy we can see with our bare eyes." That was one of those moments when the wide-open dimension of life crystalized.
This is likely why I am distrustful of what people call Information Theory. I have heard people reduce the universe to a series of 1's and 0's and it makes me feel fenced in. It feels like a leash.
My wife Kathy is currently reading Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Kathy directed me to a passage where Aurelius mentions the Seminal Intelligence of the Universe. I would be a poorer artist if I did not sense that consciousness. The universe has a soul.
Now that I have gotten myself out into waters where I might not be able to swim back, I want to return to the ideas in your writing. You and I have parallels in our sense of life. Among them is our inclination towards Taoism. In addition to your education, you had some rich and exotic adventures in Asia to expose you to eastern thought. I was just a few years too young to be drafted into service in Viet Nam and I have never been to the Far East. Yet, sometime in the early 1980's I was given a copy of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. I was very hermitic and spent a great deal of time wandering in the woods so Lao Tzu got under my skin.
Though I was constrained by an English translation of Lao Tzu, there was one maxim in particular that I have taken to heart all these years and I believe is poignantly germane to our conversation, "The way that leads forward seems to lead backwards." The key emphasis is that it seems to lead backwards. It implies that the past is a repository of wisdom as we conceptualize a forward future. Lao Tzu's maxim has been foundational to my sense as an artist and a citizen.
For years I thought I was working in the tradition of the American Transcendentalists. Now, after reading your work, I might have misunderstood the term. I do not think much about an after-life. I don't think about it at all. I think about how short a time I have left to get any meaningful work done. Yet, though I am not religious in any traditional sense, I think a lot about faith and how it shades human nature. I am probably an outlier in the arts (and sciences) because evolution and what many Christians call intelligent design are not un-reconcilable to me.
I'm curious about your contrast of the transcendental and the immanent. I know there must be a spectrum between the two, a thousand shades of a gray area. It puts me in mind of another polarity, something I read in Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams. In that book, Solnit cites an essay by W.H. Auden that contrasts the Utopian and the Arcadian. Auden identified Utopians as designing a future of active management with "all the authority and technology within their grasp." The Arcadian view might be well expressed by the American cellular biologist and politician, Barry Commoner who advocated the "unbending laws of ecology" and "nature knows best." Commoner's view allows for the inherent intelligence of the ecosystem and seems resonant with the immanent. Are there any current public figures that you believe embody the concept?
In addition, you sent me more chapters of your manuscript on the immanent and I was surprised to see you take a deep dive into art history. In the time that I was painting in the Vertebrate Museum, I do not recall a conversation about art history in any depth. Can you describe how you started contemplating this as a metaphor for deep ecology?
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Barnett:
Why "take a deep dive into art history"? Well, what I'm investigating in my next book is whether the immanent worldview that Muir and certain aspects of Taoism share might have existed in the cultures of prehistoric humans-the late Paleolithic and the entire Neolithic. How do you reconstruct the worldview of humans before the invention of writing? One indication might be the art produced by these humans.
So I'm taking a rigorous look at Neolithic art. What am I looking for? Well, as you have concisely phrased it in an early email to me, the hallmarks of the immanent worldview of Muir and Taoism are three pillars: earth, kinship, and yin/yang. That is: a worldview that puts our lives here on the earth at the center of everything (rather than an afterlife in heaven); the recognition that we humans are closely related (kin) to the other creatures on the earth (rather than superior to them, and set apart by a supernatural God); and the realization that reality is generated by the complimentary interaction of dualities (the yin and yang of cold and hot, receptivity and assertiveness, moon and sun, female and male, and so on) (rather than imposed by a supernatural God who is (only) Good, Just, Male, and usually Angry).
So I'm looking for indications in Neolithic and late Paleolithic art that are consistent with earth, kinship, and yin/yang-or not. And so far, I'm finding plenty of evidence in their figurines, murals, cemeteries, and graves that lend support to these early humans having an immanent worldview.
Why is this interesting and important? If my early findings in prehistoric art survive further investigation, it means that the immanent worldview is not just a way of looking at the world stumbled upon by John Muir in the late 19th century, and also formulated by aspects of the Taoist experience the past 2,500 years or so. But it means that this worldview, so different than the dominant transcendent worldview of human societies since states first appeared in 2,500 BCE, will have had a much longer and wider history. In fact, my findings strongly suggest that for the 10,000 years of the late Paleolithic (when humans began settling in villages) and the entire Neolithic, the immanent worldview was, in fact, the dominant way that humans experienced and interpreted what being human in this world entailed (at least in what is today Europe and China).
The corollary to this is that the transcendent worldview that has ruled human societies since the end of the Neolithic and the rise of states in 2,500 BCE is not the innate, unalterable, identifiably "human" stance toward the world, but is in fact a secondary way of "being human" in the world, one which has only been dominant in human cultures for the past 4,500 years. And moreover that the original way of being human in the world-the immanent worldview-lasted twice as long, an astounding 10,000 years from the first Natufian culture settling into Near-eastern villages (Levant) around 12,500 BCE until the end of the Neolithic and the rise of states about 2,500 BCE. In other words, the transcendent worldview that has characterized humans for 4,500 years up to today is only a later, aberrant, deadly detour of humanity, a tragic "wrong turn" away from a lengthier, original worldview of earth, kinship, and yin/yang.
This, of course, would put a fundamentally different perspective upon "being human" in this world. It would open up the very real possibility of humanity being able to turn away from the transcendent worldview's destruction of the earth and glorification of humans as superior to the earth-the worldview that has for the past 4,500 years wracked the earth with pollution, destruction, plummeting biodiversity, patriarchy/misogyny, and now climate change that threatens the very existence of the human species and many others. A return to the immanent gives us a way out of the present existential crisis of humanity and the earth we inhabit.
So that's why I'm taking my deep dive into the art (and graves) of the late Paleolithic and entire Neolithic. It's very exciting, very promising so far, and if the universe gives me another year or two to finish up (hey, I turn 75 years of age on the Ides of March this year, so it's not a given) perhaps it will appear before the general public and generate a stir.
Your other question above is about the contrast between the immanent and the transcendent being perhaps a spectrum with "a thousand shades of gray", and wondering what current public figures embody the immanent. It seems to me that the two worldviews are starkly different, and like oil and water (of course, oil would represent the transcendent, and water the immanent!) simply don't mix. Of course, we all know people who combine in their lives certain aspects of the transcendent, and certain of the immanent. I see this not as a spectrum of varying shades of gray, but rather as a combination of bits of each worldview, the chunks intercalated into the whole without a mixing or diminution of each chunk by the other.
For example, I have a good friend from high school, over 50 years ago, with whom I recently reconnected. He is a professional craftsman who works with wood from all over the world to create beautiful tables, chairs, jewelry boxes and so forth. He loves and is deeply knowledgeable about trees and wood and the grain and luster and characteristics of them. All aspects of an immanent outlook. But he also is deeply knowledgeable about wines (particularly the German Rieslings) and their infinite subtleties, and also early modern poetry, and firmly sees humans as particularly and uniquely suited to produce (and appreciate) such things as beautifully crafted furniture, wines, and poetry. These are rather transcendent views, to my mind. So he's an intriguing combination of certain traits that reflect the immanent and other traits that reflect the transcendent. He's a wonderful person and a fine friend, despite (because of?) this combination of the immanent and the transcendent. I accept him unreservedly for what he is.
But it still seems to me, nonetheless, that if humans are going to continue to exist on a viable earth, our human culture needs to make a sharp, fast, and decisive turn away from the transcendent outlook and towards the immanent outlook that apparently characterized us for 10,000 years before our disastrous 4,500-year detour into the transcendent worldview-in my modest opinion (supported by the evidence, both ancient and contemporary). To do this, we must look to radical (nothing less will do the trick) environmentalists such as Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, writers such as Wendell Berry, George Monbiot, and Naomi Klein, and the outlook of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Claude Monet.
I think it's entirely accurate to say that these folks I cite above share with you, Scott, the aim "to say something relative to what it meant to be alive in this time," as you put it above. Your comment that "I feel patterns and currents deeply" is indicative of how closely you're aligned to Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Patterns and currents are the signs of the flow ("path") of the Tao in the world. It strikes me that the compelling thing about the patterns and currents of the Tao's flow is that they ring true; that is, they are genuine, the ultimately real sign of "the way things are" on the earth (raz nihyeh in Hebrew, expressed in the 4q Instruction scroll amongst the Qumran sect's Dead Sea Scrolls of the 1st century BCE). You and the others above are thus all truth-sayers in your art. I hope you understand what I'm getting at; it's sometimes hard to express. Easier to just see it in your paintings and sculptures.
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SRH:
O'Keeffe and Monet? You picked two artists with pure spirits.
This aspect of our conversation is a reminder that art is a critical human lens to view larger universal truths.
In the book Leap, the writer Terry Tempest Williams tells a wonderful story about the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch. When Williams was a child, she would sleep at her grandmother's where there was a reproduction of Bosch's El jardin de las delicias (Garden of Earthly Delights). But her grandmother saw fit to include only two panels, Eden and Hell, and removed the third, middle and fairly carnal earthly delights panel (for the musician readers, apparently there is a Hurdy Gurdy in Hell).
When Terry Tempest Williams visited the Prado Museum in Madrid, she was "stunned" to discover the existence of the middle panel with all of its adult content. But she was also surprised to discover that Bosch was an acute observer of the birds of his corner of Europe. In fact, Williams was able to taxonomically identify a list of 35 species in the painting including Stonechat, Hoopoe, and Tengmalm's Owl. Bosch was a birder.
This artistic awareness of the ecosystem goes back to the first chapter of art history. In 2012, Kathy and I traveled to Les Eyzies, France to see the Magdalenian cave paintings at Font du Gaume. These black and red oxide paintings depicted bison, reindeer and horse and were created by Late Upper Paleolithic peoples from 17,000 - 12,000 BC. During our tour, no photographs were allowed but they let me take a small pad and pencil to sketch from the paintings. Later, I followed a tip from a staff person and walked a couple of miles up the road to see the much lesser known cave at Combarelles. That was where I saw the unmistakable engravings of a lion and a rhinoceros. It is still stunning to think these creatures once roamed the Dordogne region of France.
I want to explore another corner of the Immanent. When we first discussed the possibility of this conversation, I did a simple Google search and encountered a curveball: Immanent Justice. There was an article under Advances in Experimental Social Psychology titled Immanent Justice Reasoning: Theory, Research and Current Direction (M. Callan, R. Sutton, A. Harvey, and R. Dawtry). I wondered if there was a thread connecting this theory with my understanding of the immanent in your text.
The theory of Immanent Justice infers a reasoning that "Attributes a deserved outcome to someone's prior moral deeds or character".......something deserved. The theory was also underpinned by 'Metaphysical assumptions that are not put away when children become adults." Another article cited the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his theories of child psychology and moral development. Piaget mused on the contrast between moral relativism based on intentions and moral realism based on consequences. That pesky word moral kept popping up. Your book Earth Wisdom concluded with a distinctly moral imperative regarding how we can envision the future of our climate and culture.
This theory of Immanent Justice might be an indirect metaphor for our conversation. But it does not seem necessarily out of place. It references a childhood sense of wonder, often associated with the natural world. It also can make a strong inference that a healthy sense of environmental justice is something we deserve as a human right.
There is something else I want to explore. It has been a privilege to read draft chapters of your manuscript for The Gardeners of Gaia. Your text introduced me to the biochemist, historian and Sinologist Joseph Needham. Needham appears to have been an exceptionally brilliant and eccentric figure. Reading about him, I learned two new words, Morphogenesis (evolutionary developmental biology) and Gymnosophist (practice of nudity, asceticism, and meditation). He was the first head of the Natural Sciences Section of UNESCO and a highly respected authority on the history of Chinese science and technology. It is this last that seems most relevant to our conversation.
One of the things he was most known for was The Needham Question: "Why had China and India been overtaken by the west in science and technology despite their earlier successes?" The Needham question carries a heavy implication of technology, which will be impossible to disregard as we contemplate our current challenges. I wonder if the Needham Question and any conclusions he drew were a metaphor for your thesis on the immanent?
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Barnett:
Needham first, Scott, then Terry Tempest Williams and Bosch's three panels of Delights.
Needham was a British polymath who, through a life-long love affair with a Chinese biochemist, was introduced to the staggering achievements of Chinese culture. In the process of writing (and overseeing others' writing) several dozen volumes of Science and Civilization of China, he posed the "Question" you refer to above. Though some of today's (transcendent-worldview) historians disparage aspects of his (immanent-worldview) scientific approach, I think he is persuasive.
Briefly put, Needham thinks that imperial China exhibited the same social separation as early Western civilization: a lower class interested in the land and working it with their hands and hand-crafted machinery, versus a literate elite who prized the intellect and its abstractions, convinced that only humans and human culture mattered, who exalted a coming eternal life in heaven with God (and their own ancestors, in Chinese culture), and scorned those who worked with their hands and with the earth. The former exhibited the immanent worldview, the latter the transcendent. The social structure of imperial China was so successful and strong that these two viewpoints remained socially separate, and the distinction between them was never bridged for as long as the Empire lasted (i.e., until 1911). The people who used their hands and knew the earth weren't encouraged to think; those who could think considered the earth unworthy of their consideration.
In the West, on the other hand, the two groups and two approaches to living were kept separate only until the Black Death swept Europe in the 14th century and thereafter, creating social chaos there. (Though the plague also visited imperial China, their more robust social order survived.) Then mercantilism appeared in the West, and people who knew how to work with their minds and their hands became important in devising new technologies to plunder the earth and create wealth by the new chemical, mechanical, and industrial processes. In effect, the lower class was given permission to learn and to think (as they never had in China). The new thinking men (almost entirely men until Madam Curie) who could work with their hands on the earth, flourished, creating an emergent western technology, which conquered the world. Conquered China did away with the old, formerly successful imperial system that had existed for 2,500 years-though the transcendent worldview underpinning that China persisted, of course.
Indeed, even in the transformed West this transcendent worldview, mandated to exploit and plunder an animate earth persisted to subjugate nature (and become rich doing it). The early scientists in the west all carried with them the transcendent worldview ("Man is the measure of all things," as the old Greeks had put it). Many of them were clergy, devoutly believing in God and white males. But a funny thing happened. As they investigated God's Creation, they discovered that the natural world didn't need a God for it to make sense. They discovered, indeed, that the explanations that described the functioning of the natural world cast doubt on a God controlling everything and thus, exalting humans.
As Western science matured, it abandoned its transcendent origins and became immanent in its outlook. It became immanent precisely by the same method that the ancient Taoists in China, immanent practitioners extraordinaire, used to arrive at their worldview, and described in their Tao Teh Ching (Dao Dejing) 2,500 years ago: "By looking!" (chapters 56, ).
The same method that you, Scott, used in my Vertebrate Museum in Chico two decades ago, sitting there with your watercolors and a Prairie Falcon in front of you. By looking! The same method that Monet used with the Bodmer Oak and O'Keeffe with the horse skulls she stumbled upon in the New Mexico arroyos.
Next: what a wonderful story you tell above, about Terry Tempest Williams and Bosch's three panels of Delights. And it fits right into our look at the immanent (real, present, earthly) versus the transcendent (imaginary, removed in time or space) in art. The Eden and the Hell panels are of course transcendent, representing not anything real but fantasy images existing only in the human brain of past (Eden) and future (Hell) situations, inhabited by imaginary people. But the middle panel, hidden by her grandmother-now there's reality, the immanent, experienced in the present and by the senses. It has an inherent power and seduction, which is why her grandmother wanted to shield the young Williams from it. Better to deal with fairy tales of bloodless "places" safely tucked away in the past and future or above or below the real world.
It does take courage to exist (and paint!) in the reality of the immanent, to step up to the present here-and-now of our bodies and the brutal, pitiless, but beautiful world we inhabit. That's why I invoked Monet and Georgia O'Keeffe above. The mid-19th century classicists of Paris' Academie des Beaux-Arts were painting and exhibiting yet another transcendent iteration of the endless obsession with angels and devils, crucified gods and virgin mothers, and battles between Greeks and Persians dead long ago-but not Claude Monet. He and his comrades found their fascination with seascapes and ballet dancers and their own day's picnics in parks and bathing in lakes. The immanent world of now. One of my favorite Monet paintings is The Bodmer Oak, depicting the strength, beauty, and here-ness of a majestic oak in a forest setting. Another is Adolphe Monet Reading in a Garden, showing his father simply reading a newspaper in the shadows of a charming garden. Here-ness. Now-ness. Real life being lived in the present by real trees and real people-vastly different than yet another version of The Rape of the Sabine Women.
Or exemplified by O'Keeffe and her large-scale flowers of her early Lake George years, "making people look at those flowers," observing the incredibly vivid colors and curves of Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers. Her later work likewise focused on the shapes and curves of weathered horse and goat bones in the New Mexico drylands of Ghost Ranch, often enough viewing the startling blue of the sky through a pelvis' obturator foramen, or juxtaposing a Calico rose with a cow skull, or a blue morning glory with a ram skull. All elements of the real world, not an imagined one, and all the more ravishingly beautiful for it. The immanent world.
Monet and O'Keeffe and their colleagues brought us back to the real, the present-to ourselves, our real selves. They brought us back to where art by humans had begun, in those southern France caves that you describe visiting above, Scott. Good for you, to seek these places out; revealing, too, about you as an artist. No paintings there of angels or faeries (as revealed recently upon walls of Pompeii) or mythical beasts. No, here we have the majestic beasts of late-Paleolithic Europe: bisons, horses, aurochs, deer, rhinoceros, lions.
These original artists of our kind had a very immanent view of the world. As recently pointed out by prolific scientist and commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, in this art there was no obsession with humans, but rather a keen interest and depiction of the natural world and its (nonhuman) creatures, with occasional ochre-outlined hands the only signature of its artists. "In our self-obsessed age, the anonymous, mysterious cave art of our ancient ancestors is exhilarating...connecting us with the long-lost natural world...They knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high." She cites paleoarcheologist Jean Clottes: "The essential role played by animals evidently explains the small number of representations of human beings. In the Paleolithic world, humans were not at the centre of the stage."
Modern artists' keen eyes caught all this, and absorbed it, Ehrenreich observes. "Jackson Pollock honored them by leaving handprints along the top edge of at least two of his paintings. Pablo Picasso reportedly visited the famous Altamira cave before fleeing Spain in 1934, and emerged saying, 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'"
So the Paleolithic cave artists (who included females, according to measurements and proportions of those human hands depicted in the caves) and Monet and O'Keeffe have something important to tell us-the immanent understanding that oak trees and morning glories and horse skulls and bison and rhinoceros are our kin. That we and they are all in this together. That the earth and its creatures are not here to be subdued and exploited by superior humans, but are rather here to be celebrated and protected as our kin. And you and your colleagues today, Scott, are similarly reminding us of that great truth, obscured by the transcendent patriarchy of the elite these past 4,500 years. You and those artists who came before you who paint real life are reminding us of who we are and how we fit into things. Which may, just perhaps, save us from the looming catastrophes the transcendent worldview has created for humans and the planet.
What work could be more important than that? While there is of course nothing "wrong" with well-crafted art of religious, classical, and mythological topics, or "decorative" aspects, art reflecting the true, immanent relationship of humans and the natural world satisfies in a unique and deeply moving manner, by acknowledging our deepest roots as creatures of the earth. Doubtless the artists producing such art experience that "rootedness" of the immanent outlook as they produce this art. And that realization is perhaps an appropriate place to bring this invigorating discussion to a close from my end, and to thank you, Scott, for arranging this dialogue.
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SRH:
Thank you, Ray. Though we will close for now, it seems appropriate that I am left with more questions than easy answers, more possibilities than solutions. Let me follow up with a couple of final reflections before I sign off.
First, I want to comment on the very fluid developments surrounding recent advances in artificial intelligence and surveillance culture by China. In addition, just two days ago it was reported in news media that the United Kingdom inked a 5G deal with the Chinese firm Huawei against strong opposition from the US. The west is characterized as falling behind in these 21st century technologies. It seems like Needham's question remains dynamic and open.
Second, I want to echo your premise about the relevance of cave painting. Though I began as a painter, you know my practice evolved into wood sculpture and large room-sized conceptual installation. Yet, over the last decade, after visiting the Louvre and Orsay in Paris, museums in London, and elsewhere, I fell back in love with painting. And after exploring the cave paintings in the Dordogne, I had a powerful realization. As my peers and I put brush to surface, striving to penetrate some meaning, we are still "Painting the Cave." That most basic impulse buried in some deep recess of our ancestral memory has not evolved much in these thousands of years (handprints on a Pollock). Even one of our futuristic giants, the late architect Zaha Hadid was in her fundamental development, a painter. Painting remains among the most direct, intimate and primal expressions of that immanent impulse.
Now it is time to close. There was no way of knowing where this might meander and that is how it should be. Now, you have a book to finish. I have such great respect for the philosophical endeavor you have embarked upon. Thank you so much for setting time aside from that work for this conversation.
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Raymond Barnett is the author of Earth Wisdom: John Muir, Accidental Taoist, Charts Humanity's only Future on a Changing Planet. Barnett graduated from Yale in Chinese history and earned his Ph.D. from Duke in evolutionary ecology (serving a year in Viet Nam with the U.S. Army in between). A professor of biology at Chico State University for three decades, Barnett resides in Northern California, where he enjoys backpacking in the Sierra Nevada and kayaking California's rivers and coast. See www.raymondbarnett.com.
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Scott Robert Hudson is an artist working in Socio-Ecological themes. He splits his time between Reno, Nevada and Cedar Falls, Iowa. www.scottroberthudson.com.
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