Slightly to one side of reality

For a moment I forgot what I was doing and where I was going: so it seems to be anytime I experience happiness, it always has to be slightly to one side of reality.

There is a quality about Optic Nerve, by Maria Gainza, that I find compelling and elusive, much like art itself. There's something about it I need to work out.

Looked at from one side, this book is a series of essays of art criticism, each focusing on a particular painting of an artist's oeuvre and sprinkled with anecdotes of the artist's life. This novel is perhaps an attempt to rectify the narrator's observation that "Carelessly administered, the history of art can be lethal as strychnine." Here, the lesson is by turns sedative and invigorating, therapeutic for the narrator. For me, this jumble of fact and opinion poses a puzzle to be sorted out.

From another angle, it relates episodes from the narrator's life, in some ways only very tangentially related to her encounters with specific artworks. I can't say whether the art essays complement her biography or if it's the other way round. They feel to me very separate, and the points of intersection confuse me. "You write one thing in order to talk about something else." So which is the thing, and which is the something else?

I wasn't swept away by this book, and there are bits I thought boring, and I don't understand how the thing as a whole hangs together, yet I want to return to it someday. I feel there might be hidden here some key — to art, to seeing, to the stillness and joy and understanding I think art should bring, and even (as seems to be the narrator's quest) to happiness.

It's a slim novel, densely packed. Cándido López thought that in order to touch the heart of reality, it had first to be deformed. When the world is precarious, Hubert Robert's paintings seem to say to her, the idea of finishing anything stops making sense. She struggles with the coexistence of dogmatism and sensuality in El Greco. She dismisses Monet as a one-trick pony. She plumbs Toulouse-Lautrec's depth in the floating Paris he saw from his unique perspective. Rothko leaves her "fuck me" dumb.

People say you have to approach a Rothko in the same way you approach a sunrise. The work has a clear beauty, but that beauty can be either sublime or decorative.

The story of Rothko is, for me, the centrepiece of this book, and his life's battle of "stopping the black from swallowing the red." Clearly the narrator relates and is deeply affected by Rothko's work.

It gives me a feeling of my singularity: a clear sense of the brutal solitude of this slab of sweating flesh that is me. I'm alive, I remember, and I can't help but immediately feel saddened, like anytime happiness is promised and you embrace it, but you know it isn't going to last.

She is unhappy with her husband, with her pregnancy, with her mother, with her clients. She's seeing a doctor about the twitch in her eye. She seems impregnable in conquering physical illness, but is lost in the face of emotional difficulties.

Light red over dark red, 1955-57, Mark Rothko
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

Yeats spoke of the Celtic twilight, and warded off his melancholy by pouring himself into Greek translations. Dead languages have never been your forte, but you have other things, a manicure being the cheapest option you've come up with to keep your darkness at bay. And in general it's worked, helping you to stay present, restricting your focus to that tiny portion of your self. Nowadays, if you let yourself become distracted, if there is some pause in the application of the nail varnish, why lie? You're the very first to let ruins enchant you. Some days you are liable to be devastated by a broken nail, or a cuticle that's ever so slightly too big, or the nail varnish chipping; and cracks suddenly appear in the dam that keeps all of your sadness in check.

She starts out in the fog of ash from nearby meadow fires, but she feels something like "poetic joy" in the end, in the snow.

"Isn't all artwork — or all decent art — a mirror?" So this is a book about how we see the world, and how we see ourselves. Maybe this is why I'm struggling with it — I'm having a hard time seeing myself these days.

I'm feeling very arty lately — doing sculpture workshops and some crafty things. But I absolutely aspire to the sublime, not merely decorative. In fact, I don't even want a thing at the end of it; it's the process that's sublime, something sublimated into something else. I just don't know what the thing is.

Gainza as an art critic may be onto something in terms of how we talk about art. I went to a gallery yesterday and the curatorial statement was just so much bullshit. Because art is so subjective, we couch it in all this academic jargon to objectivize it. But by creating this distance, we're diminishing the thing, the meaning, the significance, the "fuck me," that makes it art. The only way to talk about art in any significant way is deeply personal.

From The Nation:

Optic Nerve’s episodic iridescence—the way each chapter shimmers with the delicacy of a soap bubble—belies its gravity. Gainza has written an intricate, obsessive, recherché novel about the chasm that opens up between what we see and what we understand. Late in the book, María is asked to write an essay for the retrospective catalog of an artist she’s only just met. Unenthusiastic about the work, she nevertheless agrees, fascinated by his tales of religious fervor and gay ’80s nightlife. “Deep down I think I am a destroyer of images,” she says, an incredible admission for someone in such obvious thrall to art. But María destroys images only insofar as she refuses their interpretation, at least initially. Like any good critic, she is less interested in the static image than in that image’s nexus of potential connections. We lack a satisfying name for that first confrontation with meaningful art—the gleaming, white moments of wordless perception. This is María’s state of grace. Optic Nerve, a radiant debut, enlarges that moment and invests it with ecstasy.

Excerpt: The Red and the Black (translated by Jane Brodie)

(Also, how much do you love this book cover?)