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  • Beauty as Anomaly:Why Does the Bush Not Burn Up?
  • Linus Meldrum

Meanwhile Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. Leading the flock beyond the wilderness, he came to the mountain of God, Horeb. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him as fire flaming out of a bush. When he looked, although the bush was on fire, it was not being consumed. So Moses decided, “I must turn aside to look at this remarkable sight. Why does the bush not burn up?” When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to look, God called out to him from the bush: Moses! Moses! He answered, “Here I am.”

—Exod. 3:1–4

We are in a tenuous position. We desire a renewal of Beauty, but we struggle to get the party started. We are in disarray. We appear to have a willing cohort, but there is no concise theory that guides us. Many of us have concise theories that contradict each other; are we Art Sedevacantists, believing that all of contemporary media is illicit, or are we Postmodern Pilgrims, walking a perilous path upon which Truth is obscured by layers of despair and disbelief? Most of us have grown up in a time when personal preference trumps formal rules. In our culture, our aesthetic sensibilities cannot help but be affected by a concept that began long ago as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and eventually morphed into a narcissistic motto for the art-makers of today: “That’s the way I roll.”

Vision, the sense by which we absorb much of the material world, is the necessary material pathway. However, the visible is not the same as the visual. While the visible is taken in as data, the conveyance of meaning, particularly aesthetic meaning, means that the “stuff” has been transformed by the mysterious action of the imagination. This transformation awakens the mind to visual narrative, an image-story that requires not words or names but relationships that precede the literal. A quote from Otto Pacht, twentieth century Austrian art historian, helps to clarify: “[where] art history is concerned, [End Page 62] in the beginning was the eye, not the word.”1 Postmodernism has been a movement pre-occupied with deconstructing words, rejecting meta-narratives, revising and reinventing history at will, ignoring traditions built from scholarship and building “new traditions” of disparate bits of contemporary distractive fascinations. The result, sadly, is that most of postmodern visual art relies on many, many words to complete the “picture” for the viewer. This condition demotes the visual to simply the visible; the literal now rules the realm of meaning.

Can we renew the sense of a “visual contract” between artist and viewer, to really know the mind of a truly visual artist? Can we regain what has been lost, missed, or ignored in recent decades? If so, we must look—and look hard. We must point ourselves to a seeing, not just a telling; we must return to the primal act of knowing visual meaning by visual means. This visual knowing is not a naming and cataloging of objects. This knowing desires identities for which there are no names. This kind of identity exists where nameable things gather and interact, but anomaly, a sparkling instrument of the composer, lives between and among nameable objects and qualifies the experience in a paradoxical way. Anomaly is something that cannot be, but is—the bush that burns but is not consumed. Anomaly shakes the viewer awake. Once the viewer is awakened, the artist has the opportunity to form the visual narrative as an experience of, not an illustration of, the subject—an incarnation as something you know with your eyes.

Let us consider visual examples that reorient our seeing. If the surprise and mystery of anomaly is to be fruitful, let us return to tradition to see where Visual Art encountered the bridge to the Modern world. Visual modernism fully ripens at the end of the nineteenth century—a last gasp of energy that stamps all of art history with a seal of sorts. Apart from Monet at Giverny, what came after 1900...

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