Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back - Rumi
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pictorialists insisted that the camera was more than a device for documenting reality. No less than a paintbrush or a chisel, they argued, it was a means to produce great art. By that point, the technical improvements in cameras and their widespread adoption for both professional and personal use caused many critics to consider photography a trade or hobby, beneath the realm of the fine arts. Cameras, the nay-sayers maintained, were merely recording instruments, used to capture real-world visuals and spit them right back in photos. Photographs were not art because they were the work of machines, not man. They required only mechanical, as opposed to artistic aptitude: the installation of lenses, the click of a button, and then a standardized procedure involving chemicals and controlled light. A far cry from Michaelangelo struggling to subjugate a block of marble into David!
Well, the Pictorialists were having none of this. Photography greats like Arthur Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Gertrude Kasabier believed cameras could be used not simply to document reality but to create it. More importantly, they believed a photograph was not the bare machine product of the camera, but rather an intimate expression of the photographer’s artistic vision and imagination. By varying exposure times and manipulating prints as they processed, they created photos as mood-filled, impressionistic, and personal as any hand-painted picture (hence, the name “Pictorialists”). Every Pictorialist photo unmistakably asserted the human presence and intervention of the photographer-artist. Every Pictorialist photo challenged the viewer to ask: How can this be the work of a machine?
Robert Demachy, for example, added brushstrokes to the photographic print while it was still setting, resulting in a dramatic image that looks drawn with charcoal (Struggle, 1904):
And Edward Steichen mastered tone and diffusion, such that landmarks as familiar as the Brooklyn Bridge appear shrouded in mysterious meaning:
The Pictorialists made their case convincingly. Although photography moved on from Pictorialism to Straight Photography/Modernism, it was now regarded as an art form with a human stamp. Those scratched, tinted, and deliberately blurred images did their job. Today, over a century later, another set of images challenge us as viewers to ask: How can this be the work of a machine? But the joke (or nightmare, if you prefer) is that they are the work of a machine – specifically, AI art apps like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.
Certainly, the technology has a ways to go. Some AI art has the feel of a Google Images collage, an awkward pastiche of whatever search terms the user threw at the algorithm. Even the most visually arresting images, upon closer inspection, contain nonsensical forms, smeared features, conjoined or missing limbs. And yet, disturbingly, a lot of AI art looks pretty close to the kind of bland illustrations you see in banking brochures or magazine features: cartoonish lines, minimalist color palettes, simple motifs. Sometimes, in fact, I’m convinced I’m looking at the Photoshop artistry of a thirty-something graphic designer, not an app.
The deception makes sense; most of the “art” directed at us is generic commercial imagery, created by digital means for digital consumption. Well, don’t many commercial artists work by considering the terms of their client’s request, searching through libraries of licensed images, and cobbling together something that visually meets the boss’ parameters? In other words, don’t they act, on some level, as an algorithm? Perhaps the more relevant question raised by AI art, then, is not How can this be the work of a machine?, but Does it matter?
Yes, it matters. It’s important. So important, in fact, that we all need to start whittling goofy-looking ducks and painting portraits that don’t quite look right. We need to start crocheting misshapen blankets, and building wonky birdhouses and throwing crooked little clay pots. At worst, we’ll have an excess of handmade items to give to friends and family to re-gift, stash, or toss when we’re not looking. But at best, and hopefully, we’ll have re-connected with what makes us human, which is absolutely essential to remaining human.
Why Wendell Berry Doesn’t Use a Computer, and What It Has To Do With Kim Kardashian
Back in 1987, the essayist and poet Wendell Berry published a piece in Harper’s explaining his refusal to purchase a computer. The piece received a flurry of responses from readers, baffled as to why Berry would shun the obvious advantages of a word processer. I mean, my God, the man was a writer. How could any writer, as Berry did, still work longhand, “with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper”? Even worse, Berry stated that he gave his handwritten sheets to his wife, who typed them up on their “old Royal standard.” Predictably, this prompted angry accusations (by men, by the way) that Berry was a chauvinist exploiter.
Berry responded with the essay Feminism, the Body, and the Machine. I hold this essay in high regard, not just because it’s beautifully written, but because it’s one of the few arguments I’ve read that actually changed the way I think. (Do an inventory of the writers who truly altered your worldview in a meaningful way. You probably won’t list many). Berry begins by refuting the notion he was sexist, pointing out that (1) his wife volunteered to type his pages, and (2) whether husband or wife, there are greater rewards and freedom working for the family economy as opposed to a corporate employer. More to my point, Berry goes on to assert that computers, like all technology, pose the gravest of dangers: they threaten to sever mind from body.
The danger most immediately to be feared in “technological progress” is the degradation and obsolescence of the body . . . Since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind – the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines – and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.
What happens when this mind/body severance occurs, when the body is degraded as a lesser object? We begin to harbor contempt for our bodies and our own nature. We begin thinking about and treating our bodies as things, machine parts to be manipulated to optimize productivity, intelligence, health – even sexual pleasure. Disturbingly, the body become less the counterpart to the soul, existing in a living relationship with it, and more like a component in an industrial economy, to be altered and tweaked at will. As Berry notes:
Our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of ‘sexual partners,’ orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal more abundant as soon as it can be done by robots.
Berry made this assessment in 1989. That was well past 1960, the year the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive for women. Just one year later, in 1961, silicone breasts implants were invented, thereby enabling women who were self-medicating against fertility to mimic the fulsome, ripe contours of the very fertile.
Now, I’m sure Berry had seen or at least was aware of fake boobs by 1989. But as trenchant as his insight is, I don’t think even Berry could have envisioned the Flesh Hellscape that video games, internet celebrity, and online porn – all aided and abetted by plastic surgeons – have wrought. Technology has rent body/nature from mind/soul so completely, many of our female “influencers” now inject and stitch themselves into proportions that don’t humanly exist. Their inflated lips, breasts, and butts, don’t simply – per Berry - express an idea of pleasure, but a parody of it. Their outrageous hip-to-waist ratios are a joke, a mockery not just of “What Men Want”, but of our traditional understanding of “Woman.” And because “influencers”, well, influence, scores of women have followed suit and transformed themselves into their Mini-Mes (often going into considerable debt to do so). The result is an increasing uniformity to the women we encounter in digital media: same plump lips, same mermaid hair, same Disney-Princess eyes. Identical blow-up sex dolls, churned out to factory specifications. That’s how we like our widgets: interchangeable.
Lest you think the phenomenon of industrial sexuality is limited to certain socio-economic classes, let me introduce you to The Sugar Babies of Stanford University. The two undergrads profiled, students at one the world’s most selective universities, sent sexts, sexual voice recordings, and sexually suggestive photos to working class men for pay via TikTok. Both students came from wealthy families and had their tuition and college costs covered. The reason for their scheme? They wanted to generate “passive income stream.” What’s striking about the account is that the undergrads seemed to differentiate themselves from their avatars, as if each existed entirely independent from the other. Their bodies, their voices, were physical objects to manipulate for a fee online, while their “true” selves went to class, sought out post-grad employment, and prepared to join the ranks of the country’s elite. In other words, they not just allowed, but enthusiastically embraced technology to sever mind from body.
So what does all this have to do with Berry choosing to work longhand? Silicone butt implants and sexting is a far cry from writing poems for Harper’s, after all. Well, as Berry puts it:
This hatred of the body and of the body’s life in the natural world, always inherent in the technological revolution . . . is of concern to an artist because art, like sexual love, is of the body . . . To reduce or shortcut the intimacy of the body’s involvement in the making of a work of art (that is, of any artifice, anything made by art) inevitably risks reducing the work of art and the art itself.
What Berry argues, essentially, is that the substitution of technology for the body makes art less human by divorcing it from its human history. He concedes writing by hand is not as “insistently tangible” an act as “building a house or playing the violin” – or, for that matter, painting a picture. But in taking pen to paper, he creates a record linking him to the words that came before; due to erasures, cross-outs and add-ins, every page is a roadmap of his prior thoughts:
A handwritten or typewritten page is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history – erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations – suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization. The well-crafted table or cabinet embodies the memory of (because it embodies respect for) the tree it was made of the forest in which the tree stood. The work of certain potters embodies the memory that the clay was dug from the earth . . .
. . . All good human work remembers its history. The best writing, even when printed, is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of the quality of the hand-written page; it is a palimpsest.
In contrast, the goods mass-produced by technology are relentlessly of the present moment, their slick uniformity suggesting a mechanical process as opposed to a human history.
The plastic Clorox jug has a shape and a loop for the forefinger that recalls the stoneware jug that went before it. But something vital is missing. It embodies no memory of its source or sources in the earth or of any human hand involved in its shaping . . . the materials of the world have entered a kind of orphanhood.
This “orphanhood” – this divorcing of mind, body and human history that Berry describes – is what led me to a ceramics studio to face down my first block of clay.
How I Found God and Humanity in Making Bad Pottery
If you’re a female over fifty, taking a pottery class – or really, pretty much any class – makes you a cliché. Yet I found myself willing to accept life as a textbook Old Lady, if it meant once again engaging meaningfully with the material world. I work in the legal field. While I encounter many interesting analytical challenges, I’m consigned to sitting at a desk and staring at a computer. This describes most “knowledge work” and there’s a creepy unreality to it. Back in the day, lawyers printed out their briefs and the like; it killed a lot of trees but at least gave all that thinking some kind of physical manifestation. Today, everything is filed and sent electronically, depriving you of the satisfaction of patting a fat stack of pages and declaring, my masterpiece. All my thoughts, communications, and – thanks to Covid – face-to-face interactions with clients and others are mediated digitally through screens.
I found myself unmoored from the concrete, the real. I wanted the experience of building something I could touch and handle in three dimensions. I wanted to re-capture the joy of childhood, when I’d construct tree forts or squish mud between my fingers just for the tactile ooze of it.
So I signed up for a course on hand-built pottery (no wheel-throwing for me, thanks, I’m too much of a control freak). I had to knead clay, roll it, cut it into slabs and shape it into vessels. The clay was soft and unmistakably earthy; by trial and error, I began to learn how to adjudge its hardness by touch. You’d think the bare sensory experience of patting a ball of clay between my palms or pinching coils of clay together would be satisfaction enough. But because I am a perfectionist who came of age in the industrial economy, I wanted a flawless execution, too. I wanted the products of my hands to look polished, smooth, and utterly symmetrical – in other words, as if they had been made by a machine. Instead, the walls of my cups sat a little crooked. The rims of my vessels rippled and refused to conform to a pure circle. The clay always betrayed where I had pressed too hard or too weakly. My stuff looked wonky.
Now, here’s where a good teacher really helps, not only with technique but with how you approach the act of creation (which, as we’ll see, is a sacred act). When I bewailed the wobbly rim of one of my cups, my teacher exclaimed: “But I love an undulating rim! It tells the story of you and the clay.”
In other words, it is a history, a palimpsest. It is a material echo of my relationship with the clay. The undulating rim of the cup manifests not only my status as a novice potter, but the reality of my fingers. The way the cup tilts slightly to the side records how soft the clay was when I let it set. The wonky handle embodies my nervous excitement at challenging myself with something new. When that cup came out the kiln, I remember feeling disappointed. But now it’s the first thing I grab when I pour another serving of coffee; its off-kilteredness has endeared itself to me, because I can’t divorce my self and that specific day at the studio from the cup. The clay and I had a “thing” going, which is fired into the fact of the cup, making it an artifact.
And here’s where it gets even better, because it gets mystical. No matter how amateurish my pottery, I began to appreciate it for its audacity. I fashioned something that never existed before! From old earth, I created something new! Could a child have done the same? Of course, but that makes it not a smidgeon less profound. The act of creation is necessarily joyous because it recalls our own creation by God, and so we experience echoes of His joy in His handiwork. The act of creation is sacred because it affirms the worth of creation as a whole. It proclaims the everlasting, Eternal Yes that George Emerson shouted from the treetops in A Room With A View.
But even for non-believers, the act of creation is undeniably moving. Years back, the Telegraph conducted an interview with the illusionists Penn and Teller, asking them what, after so many years, motivated their work. Teller (the silent one of the team) explained:
“There is that great line in Sunday in the Park with George,” he says, referring to Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 musical about Georges Seurat, “ 'Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat’.” He falls silent again and, as unexpectedly as those coins turn to fish, big fat tears start rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t say that line without choking up, because it states, in profoundly poetic terms, what I have always wanted to do with my life. It’s so simple and so funny, but boy it hits me deep.”
The man knows magic, so we should take him at his word.
Healing the Wound
Rates of depression and anxiety in Western countries continue to climb at a steady pace, particularly among adolescents. Technology, in the form of smartphones and social media, has played an outsized role in the rise of mental disorders by increasing loneliness and isolation. And every new technological advance seems designed to exacerbate the problem by exponential degrees.
Staring at an Instagram post on your Samsung featuring an influencer enjoying a field of flowers is alienating enough: you’re not in that field with her. You’re not partaking in her reality. But the alienation is compounded by the many overlapping layers of phoniness inherent in the reality depicted. A filter was used on the posted image to make the sky appear sunnier and the field greener. A photo-editing app shed ten pounds off the influencer and erased her crow’s feet. The influencer, as far as you know, is an ecologically-conscious fashionista who shares helpful vegan lifestyle tips. But she could also be zipping around the world on her private jet while wearing Harp Seal boots and tucking into a juicy steak. “She” could be the influencer’s publicist, or a middle-aged man, or a bored middle-school girl. All you know is her avatar, a digital stand-in that has been carefully manipulated and, to use a hated term, “curated.”
All of us understand, even on a subliminal level, that what we encounter and interact with through technology is artificial. Yet despite our understanding, despite being in on the joke, we’re still going crazy. I believe that’s because the connection between mind and body, between our inner world and the material one, is a vital, life-sustaining connection, like an artery. And now that we’ve severed it, we risk bleeding out.
So here’s a few ideas on how to stem the flow (besides the obvious one Steve Jobs employed with his own kids, i.e. restrict the use of tech):
For the young, bring back cursive penmanship. Yeah, I know today’s generation isn’t going to use cursive much. My own kids, now adults, barely learned cursive in school and by their signatures you’d think they were 80-year-old stroke victims. “We don’t need it, Mom!” they shout whenever I roast them about this. “We’ve been typing ever since middle school!”
I don’t care. There is something to be said for the tracing of cursive letters, for experiencing the sensation of graphite against paper, for having a record of the history of your progress and realizing your hands have opposable thumbs for purposes beyond texting.
Also for the young, keep art classes in school. I know they’re expensive and many school budgets are stretched. I know very few students will become professional artists, and that many lack talent or interest. My own kids stank at art, as I learned when my daughter came home from first grade and handed me a portrait in which she’d rendered me as a cyclops.
Keep the classes because it’s not really about teaching kids art. It’s about reminding them they’re human, that they can engage with and create physical realities, not just digital ones. It’s teaching them a technique to stay sane. Besides, you’d be surprised at how much importance kids place in their own creations, even the hideous ones. My daughter, the decidedly non-artistic one, still treasures the misshapen paper mache “dog” (it really is a stretch to call it a dog) she made as a little girl. It’s an artifact of her youth that she refuses to toss.
And for everyone, of all ages: just create without being wed to an outcome. Too many foreclose themselves from the joy and meaning of creation because they dread the possibility, to put it crudely, of “sucking.” But fear not being cringe. I repeat: FEAR NOT BEING CRINGE. I myself have been cringe, many times, and I can attest it’s not so bad. In fact, it’s empowering. If your work is cringe-worthy, by definition people cringe before it, the way they might cringe before Godzilla or the Hammer of Thor. In that sense, abject failure, especially the public variety, makes you something of a badass. Besides, the alternative is a life spent always consuming, never producing — reliable as a machine, and about as interesting as one.
So knit that blanket, and if your stitches are evenly-spaced and of consistent tightness? Then yay, you, excellent handiwork! But if they’re not evenly-spaced, if you in fact forget to count stitches and wind up with a blanket that flares out at the bottom like a Christmas tree? Then wrap yourself up and revel in the trapezoidal coziness that is your Christmas-tree-shaped blanket, the imperfect product of your hands.
Build the wonky birdhouse – the birds will still nest there and besides, you can always say you were going for a “naïve, folk art” look. Make the crooked little pots. Adopt the materials of the world and rescue them from their orphanhood. Enjoy the relationship that flourishes between your mind, your body and the physical. And remember and cherish not only the fact of but the reason for your humanity.
Thanks for linking to that Berry essay—if I'm lucky, I'm on my way now to becoming a better Luddite.
My wife recently took up wheel-based pottery, and it's stimulation and creation that thrills her a lot (she's in her twenties, if that encourages you about our generation). I thrill a lot in the mugs and plates and bowls she brings home, because they're functional and alive to the touch in a way that I envy as a writer whispering into the Internet. I'd never thought of the physicality of pottery, where the earth's clay and the human and their conversation are recorded as an artifact and a created entity. It's a blessed connection to think about, thanks for that.