[Apparently elephants naturally occasionally pick up objects and make abstract marks on the ground. Elephant experts showed some pencil drawings thus produced, first to an art professor. He described them as 'beautiful', 'tense', 'incredible', and said, 'I can't get most of my studentsto fill a page like this.' When informed of the 'artist', he cited human insularity, the 'ego' that prevents us from accepting aestheticism in other species. Then the experts sent the drawings to de Kooning. His wife, also an artist, responded: '[W]e looked at the drawings and were very impressed by them. We felt they had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality. Needless to say we were dumbfounded when we read that they were made by an elephant.']

            A friend directed me to this 'damned talented elephant' post on the internet. Naturally, I was amused. But, after the initial risibility, a certain seriousness began to dawn – and not just the raw negativity. I think the professor indirectly hit the nail on the head. While he was explicitly saying that our human ego prevents us from seeing the aesthetic powers of non-human creatures, the issue is precisely the ego. The elephant has no ego. The fact that elephants pick up a stylus or proto-stylus on a fairly regular basis and make similar marks probably points to something indigenous in all consciousness – a desire to express apart from the simple force of life, the moment of living.
            But the paradox is that this is precisely the desire for ego.
            In other words, the elephant makes something forceful and complete because it essentially lacks ego. But the act itself is the protean moment of ego.
            This is in essence what I have been arguing about Abstract Expressionism.

             I just got a massive book on the Italian Renaissance – putatively the authoritative text – and the peculiar reaction I have is that the Renaissance is in fact not a period but a moment of transition. I have argued elsewhere – if not here – that the Classic / Romantic cycle is a mythic modern invention. I think if I were now to posit a cycle, it would be Gothic / Puritan. Classicism is an invention that begins in the Renaissance. We now know that the ‘pure’ Greek temples with their exquisite proportions and white marble were originally painted in nearly primary colors. The essential simplicity of line in some of the more self-consciously ‘humanistic’ artists and architects of the Renaissance is in fact an entirely limited interpretation of the ancients, and undoubtedly depends more on the context in which humanism arose than on the actualities of the ‘classical’ past.
            There is no direct link between ‘classical civilization’ of the ancients and European culture as it emerged from the Medieval. Fragmentary remains, no doubt. But Europe emerged from itself. The Gothic had finally even entered profoundly into the Italian peninsula. What this massive text shows is the essential continuity between the Gothic and the Baroque. It insists on placing the art in the context of its architectural base. And as soon as we do that, we see that the very disposition of the art itself is inherently complex and ornate. The simplification, at this point, is simply a beginning movement within a frame.
            Humanism and Protestantism are a continuity within the developing frame of that simplification, that purification, of the Gothic complexity of the summa, the mental equivalents of the extraordinarily integrated culture created around and in the name of the Church and legitimately evinced through the High Middle Ages, the culture we still tend to shade out if not shun. But humanism was the small mouse gnawing at the central pillar, the foundational support, not of stone, but of wood, of a living substance rather than the inhuman calcification that resisted the evolutionary process of the ‘realism’ that the Middle Ages themselves had in fact discovered. Reaching back to the ‘ancients’ was a matter of course, but irrelevant.
            What was happening may have justified itself in the name of a mythical past. But it was, in fact, entirely a present revolution, and the beginning of revolution.
            I am awed by the visual transitions from the Medieval to the Renaissance that sometimes takes place on a single wall in some monumental Italian hall. The mirroring of abstraction and motif is absolute. The formally shadowed face of a Christ – signifying, incredibly, authority, suffering and compassion simultaneously – becomes a rhythmic movement of figures in a crucifixion or descent from the cross signifying the same array of emotion in terms of ‘realistic’ rendering.

             But what is happening is a purification. ‘Romanticism’ is a consequence, not a cause. If we ‘purify’ the human moment from the soaring Gothic architecture and then from the trans-human monumentality of authoritarian secular culture, we are left with the individual. Art descends from the ornate and storied wall and becomes the equivalent of the altar piece alone. But the sacrificial core is no longer a deified moment of the past, but a direct expression of the human as the living presence of the moment of experience.

             But a purification is an idea as well as an impulse. And impulse and idea are not the same. When we have culture, impulse is the self. But if we ‘purify’ the culture out of existence, ‘transcend’ the tradition that is culture, the self is also lost. Self becomes an idea alone. And while the idea is an embodiment of the self, the idea as self is as calcified as a displaced fragment of an unknown culture: a meaningless ‘abstraction’.
            This is what hung in the balance with Abstract Expressionism. But we can only become that elephant for a brief instant of time, and then the impulse falls to pieces and the last allegory of the self explodes in meaningless fragments. At best, the only cultural referents become the objects of daily life. But to present them as ‘art’ is the final jest, not at the expense of art, but at the expense of the human self.
            If we deny the core, how will we seek for the core? The artifice of ‘spirit’, at this point, is as empty as idea.

             Integrity is the only alternative, the thing the elephant seeks. The pieces lie all around us. But as long as we deny integrity as essentially human, that is, as a coherent whole that can manifest a coherent whole, we are only a zero. And to present a zero as something is an essential untruth.
            If I point to Pound and say, with him, ‘I gather the limbs of Osiris’, I honor a failure as profound as his, as well as his success. But perhaps, in the process, I gain a soul.