Awe полностью

During her childhood in Ohio, Susan Crile’s family liked to go deep-sea diving. In the otherworldly, liquid ether of underwater, she found the sublime floating in vast quiet. Time dilated. She saw blurry outlines of life forms. She sensed mystery and felt peace.

This memory brings to mind another story of awe she tells me, about when her family dined with a Bedouin community camped out in tents in the Syrian desert. The stars, the pulsating music, the rocking, swaying bodies, the aromatic flavors—all left a lasting impression that brings tears to her today as she recounts this to me in her apartment in New York City.

When President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Susan felt riled up. The images of the “smart bombs” upset her. “Those are kids and moms being killed,” she tells me. Historic buildings obliterated. The default language of the news—“collateral damage,” “precision strike”—left Susan pacing her studio.

When Saddam Hussein set Kuwaiti oil fields on fire, it stirred Susan to action. She reached out to Boots & Coots, the company that extinguished those fires, and made her way to Kuwait. There, she traveled roads that had recently been combat sites, seeing children’s toys strewn about, burned-out tanks, charred outposts, spent shells. The heat of the sizzling lakes of oil nearly knocked her down. The skies were enveloped by black smoke. The jetlike roar of the fires sounded like death. Later, working from the photos she took, she painted apocalyptic scenes of brilliant flames, vast black smoke, disorienting reflections in pools of oil. Awe mixing with horror.

Walking through Central Park to teach art at Hunter College on September 11, 2001, she passed people covered in ash, walking slowly in astonished horror, a pilgrimage of ghosts. This time she worked from videos. Her paintings capture the time dilation; the slow-motion building collapse; the profusion of ash; the repetition of Manhattan buildings with people climbing out of windows, which many recall today as a moment of awe.

When the photographs of prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib were released, she reproduced them in a series of drawings that mix horror, brutality, awe, and compassion, an emotional blend that was what first led me to visit her. In her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, art books cover surfaces. Stacks of drawings lie under large tables. Pencils and pastels and chalks are arrayed on trays like crudités. The dust and scents of art are in the air, reminding me of moments from my childhood in my dad’s studio.

As one enters the apartment, in the center of one’s field of vision is a black box three feet tall by two feet wide—the size of a large Christmas present. It is the size of the box we put prisoners in solitary confinement in at Guantánamo Bay for weeks on end. Susan’s black box makes you feel a life pattern: being subjugated and trapped by vast powers. It causes me to shudder. My mind opens to wonder about human horrors. How long would it take for me to die in that space? And if I didn’t die, what would my thoughts be like?

Susan’s series Abu Ghraib: Abuse of Power includes portrayals of dogs lunging at genitals, unconscious swollen faces, prisoners gasping for air in a tank of water, piles of nude bodies. The bodies are simple outlines, diaphanous and covered in sheens of light. One is tied up within the black box but looks resigned, even serene. I want to move people to know in their bodies this suffering, Susan explains to me. To feel compassion. She flips through an archive of awe and horror that inspired her: Goya’s Disasters of War series, eighty-two prints depicting torture, killings, rapes, and the famine and inquisition during the war between Napoleon’s Empire and Spain. As she flips through these prints, she points out moments of compassion amid horror.

Art creates an aesthetic distance, a safe space, from which we can consider the horrors humans perpetrate. In relevant studies, when people encounter images of genital mutilation or sexual harassment and are told they are pieces of art, the stress-related regions of their brains and bodies are less reactive. Within this safe space of the imagination, we are free to wonder, to think in broader, more open ways about how the act fits within moral frameworks that define our communities. How can we place a human being in a box the size of a Christmas present? We are back to Robert Hass’s tour of how poetry, drama, and literature archive awe and horror. We are within the logic of the Natyashastra. Art allows us to contemplate horrors together and imagine social change fueled by awe and wonder.