Archeologists have found an area in Turkey which might
have inspired the Garden of Eden story.
Gobekli Tepe is a region which once had overabundant vegetation and
animal life, attracting numerous hunter-gathering bands which lived lives of
extraordinary leisure and ease there. This was super-lush, fertile land that naturally
provided an excess of food for everyone with minimal labor.
Yet, it is also part of the archeological
record that, ultimately, this easy life ended and was replaced by the much
harsher lifestyle of farming; it appears that farming, itself, began in this
very region. Instead of nature readily
providing the needs for small groups, now men and women had to engage in back-breaking
labor in hierarchical arrangements to eat.
Folk memory and tall tales being
what they are, it is believed this transition from ease to toil became the
basis of the story of “The Fall.”
Yet, the Garden of Eden story also contains numerous
symbolic aspects which are open to various interpretations. Jennifer Scanlan compiled the work of 19
artists at the Museum of Biblical Art to explore the various aspects of this allegory.
This museum, by the way, is absolutely free and this show is not-to-be-missed.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that
this is a museum for Bible-thumpers – no way: this museum has amazing and
thought-provoking shows. Please use the
free audio guide, when you go, in that you’ll hear actual interviews with the
artists. You can easily spend a couple hours at this show and come away having
been intellectually, aesthetically and morally engaged.
One of the numerous symbolic aspects of Eden that is open
to interpretation is, of course, the snake. In many stories of world mythology
the snake represents a type of spiritual thief.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian), for example, a snake steals the
flower of immortality from the hero. In
the “Garden” myth the snake is, however, like a traditional trickster figure
who literally thinks he is doing something good but just plain gives
destructive advice.
There are no
sinister, malicious, ulterior motives: the snake wants to be helpful, but his
shortcut to salvation is wrong, wrong, wrong.
He seems to represent that capacity we have to take spiritual short-cuts which don't work. The tragedy of the ‘fall’ is that the first humans
lacked the capacity to discern bad from good spiritual advice, until it was too
late.
Human spiritual history (for a big
chunk of the world population) becomes the attempt to reclaim Eden after this
horrible but unavoidable debacle. I mean, OK, John Milton, what the hell were
they supposed to do? It looked like a damn good deal to me too when I first
read about it.
Yet, to Adam Fuss, the story of the snake in the garden “doesn’t
make sense”. To Fuss the snake represents life and fertility and any number of
positive qualities. Fuss uses an old
daguerreotype method to present two intertwined snakes on a mattress. The
mattress can connote a place of rest and reproduction.
He challenges us, perhaps, to see the snake
not as a traditional allegorical character but as a pro-sexual,
pro-reproductive symbol. Interestingly,
there was a group of ‘heretics’ in France in the 1200s called the Cathars who
believed that the universe was so flawed and so evil that the creator god must
have been some type of perverse monster.
They deliberately read the Bible as a type of tragedy where the snake
was a hero attempting to liberate humanity from the workings of the creator god
and Satan became the hero of the entire book. Fuss seems to go in a more
‘pagan’ than Cathar direction though.
Mat Collishaw uses the snake in a somewhat more
traditional manner as he presents what appears to be a mirror with the
undulating image of a snake writhing and moving about as we look at our own
reflections. According to the audio
guide the snake represents something once desirable but now repulsive.
To me, seeing the snake embedded in the
mirror with my reflection, wantonly dancing around, leads me to consider the
nightmare scenario of possibly discovering that some inner characteristic I’d
like to rid myself of might not, in actuality, be possible to eliminate. Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed!
In a humorous vein, Mark Dion presents a creature which
at first sight looks like a dinosaur, but then you learn that according to the
Bible not just Adam and Eve were punished.
God removed the legs of the snake after the fall and made it crawl on
its belly. Dion shows us literally what
a four-legged snake before the fall might have looked like.
In his interview presented through the audio
guide he indicates that one of his purposes in creating the piece was to show
the high intelligence of the pre-fall snake.
So we see a four-legged creature brimming with knowledge and confidence
(he looked a little like Anthony Weiner to me). This is snake as supernerd, Wikisnake, ready
to give you tons of false information with the deepest sincerity.
Lynn Aldrich also presents her version of a snake as a
coiled garden hose. She explains that
she wishes to equate the snake to the ‘underlying discomfort’ with urban and
suburban life that is often felt by those living in and around LA.
It’s not a sense of horror or dread, but a subtle sense that something
is wrong which often dominates the lives of the more thoughtful inhabitants of
the City of Angels.
Among my favorite pieces was Barnaby Furnas’ painting of
Adam and Eve in which he tried to convey a sense of Newtonian gravity in the
painting through dripping paint. He
feels that ‘the fall’ is best represented by our subjugation to gravity. Gravity limits our movements, binds us to the
ground and is responsible for the aging
process. Fred Tomaselli takes Masaccio’s
Adam and Eve and presents their internal circulatory and visceral systems (in
lieu of the amazingly expressive facial expressions in Masaccio’s painting) in
his portrayal of the expulsion from Eden.
Posture and viscera speak to us of the inner pain involved in a divorce
from the divine. Tomaselli’s is the most
stylish fiery sword I’ve seen in art and the implication is that Adam and Eve simply
lacked the cellular wherewithal to resist the advice of the serpent. As Peter Weiss once wrote: “These cells of
the inner self are worse than the deepest stone dungeons…”
Jim Dine shows his fascination with tools in a piece
which implies the change in relationship between humanity and nature after the
“fall”. Dine obviously loves tools: his dad apparently owned a hardware
store. As the son of a mechanic I can
understand his almost fetish-like appreciation for these things. The irony, of
course, is that this love of tools belies the stated horror of the consequences
of the fall. The implication could be:
maybe the ‘fall’ wasn’t so bad after all. Look at all these cool tools and the
cities they built. What’s so bad about
this?
The answer might be in Alexis Rockman’s piece about the Gowanus canal. In
his interview Rockman literally asks, in regard to the environment, “How can
you not despair?” He presents a
conglomerate image of this heavily polluted canal inspired by the story of the
dolphin that accidentally swam into it and died soon after of toxic shock.
Dominating the extreme pollution of this
canal is the image of a cat. Rockman
states that it looks into the polluted canal almost Narcissus-like, and like
us, the cat is an innocent looking creature which, in reality, is mischievous,
self-absorbed and destructive.
Marina Zurkow shows a similar pessimism in her video
Mesocosm (Times Square). You have three screens corresponding to Bosch’s
triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The left screen shows pre-industrial Times Square, the central screen
shows the current area and the screen to the right shows ‘hell,’ a Times Square
dominated in the future by the vermin which evolved in response to our
existence: rats, cockroaches, pigeons.
The tree is also a central aspect of the story of
Eden. A tree is a bridge between the earth
and the sky or between the earth and God or even between the ‘lower’ and the
‘higher’. The story of Eden is,
basically, the story of choosing between two different bridges. Maria Magdalena
Campos-Pons uses human hair in an image combining the image of a woman with
that of a tree.
The piece is dominated
by the color red which can denote both positive and destructive
characteristics. In Rona Pondick’s piece
she also presents the combined image of a tree and humans. The tree is a bridge
because the roots dig deep into the soil but the branches reach up into the
sky. In Pondick’s piece we see that
human heads extend from the very tips of the branches.
Lina Puerta points out that the nature we usually see in
cities is highly controlled nature which often denotes affluence and she is
more interested in weeds and other forms of vegetation which spread
uncontrollably and which are considered eyesores. You see these recalcitrant forms of plant
life spreading unopposed throughout a blank white wall. This would seem to be
the ‘garden’ fighting back and trying to reclaim us despite our efforts to
remain fallen. Naomi Reis uses modernist
architecture combined with Babylonian hanging garden style vegetation to
represent our quest to get back to the garden.
Modernism and the belief that architecture could be humanistic and
inspire positive social change is inherent in the belief in ‘utopia’ that has followed
the fall. Mary Temple paints shadows of trees on the wall of the museum which
are so realistic you initially think they are actual shadows coming from
outside. In reality, they do not correspond to anything from outside the nearby
window. The shadow is divorced from real nature, the nature has been lost and
in an eerie, supernatural situation we see the empty remnant of the interaction
between nature and the sun.
Pipilotti Rist presents a little video piece involving
home gardening which questions the social relations involved in servants
engaged in the upkeep of the gardens of the wealthy. The garden in our world is no longer a
natural thing but something that must be sustained with exploited labor and the
products of industrial production.
With the abandonment of a God-provided life,
we established hierarchical systems in which nobody truly prospers. The wealthy
become corrupted in comfort while the poor become corrupted through physical
and emotional pain. Dana Sherwood presents various cooking utensils as apparent
evidence of the fall as well as a humorous video in which she presents culinary
delicacies from her kitchen to the wildlife around her home. She discovers that raccoons prefer cookies to
the traditional staples of their diets. The fall of humankind has even
corrupted the natural tastes of wildlife, which also prefer junk food to the
real stuff.
Finally, we might ask, “How could something come from
nothing? How could something always be?” Indeed, Emil du Bois-Reymond
considered the origin of the universe to be one of the 7 unanswerable questions
to which we can only respond by saying: “Ignoramus et ignorabimus.” “We don’t
know and we will never know.”
To some
extent Sean Capone’s piece “1,000 Paths to the Divine” made me recall that
quote. The origin of the type of
spiritual state promised by many of the world’s religions – true altruism,
unconditional forgiveness, tolerance, universal love, overcoming our anger and
aggression – would be as incomprehensible as the origin of the entire universe.
Where would this state of being come from? The
implication in this wonderful video seems to be that our path to the divine is
sensory induced, based on the experience of the fall and a quest to understand
ourselves and the world as a way to overcome the fall. Our inner experience of
this process will be part metaphorical and part unrecognizable - a seamless
combination of the inner and outer worlds showing that the mind and nature will
be one again when the garden is regained.
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For more about a progressive interpretation of Bible stories:
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