How Our Awe for Visual Design Helps Us Understand the Wonders and Horrors of Life
A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy Art,
and by “art” from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.
IRIS MURDOCH
Jurassic Park is a visual paean to the wonders of life. Its high-spirited narrative careers through encounters with overpowering nature—the waves of a tropical storm—big ideas—gene editing, chaos theory— dinosaurs, and, like so many of Steven Spielberg’s films, the moral beauty of children. In the movie these wonders are imperiled by capitalists seeking
to commodify awe.
When eleven-year-old Michael Frederickson first saw the brontosaurus in that film, he was awestruck. For those in the world of CGI (computer-generated imagery), that slow-moving, tree-trimming dinosaur is an act of Iris Murdoch’s “good art,” allowing “pure delight in . . . what is excellent.” It is, for CGI artists, like the Lascaux cave paintings, Giotto’s frescoes, the Dutch masters’ portrayal of domesticity and light, Hokusai’s paintings, and Cézanne’s cubism-inspiring apples: a new way of seeing the world. With the magic special effects, Spielberg and his team created tyrannosaurs,
triceratops, stegosauruses, and brontosauruses that we, as viewers, feel are real.
To explain to his parents how Jurassic Park moved him so, Michael bought the film’s soundtrack and played it one night during dinner. As they sat listening, Michael burst into tears. His parents thought he was depressed. A year later, in sixth grade, Michael was given this essay prompt: What is the best day you could ever have? Michael’s answer: “After lunch, do computer animation for Pixar.” After studying computer science, where he often found digital awe in the patterns and systems of code, he would in fact make his way to Pixar and begin a career in visual awe.
Today, Michael is a “set artist” at Pixar. He uses the latest advances in computer graphics, big data, and machine learning to create the visual worlds of Pixar films—the streets of Paris in Ratatouille, the reef life in Finding Dory, and the interiors of Riley’s mind in Inside Out.
For Michael, Inside Out allows its viewers to reflect upon loss and the search for identity. Working on it led him to insights about his own life, but once it was released in theaters, he felt adrift. As he tells me this, he quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “in landlessness alone resides highest truth.” Awe does leave us in a “landless” place, unmoored and unconstrained by the default self and society’s status quo. He began giving a talk around Pixar, which he shares with me over a cup of coffee. After some pleasantries Michael opens his laptop to his first slide, “The Sixth Emotion.” That emotion is awe.
For Michael and so many others, a point of visual art is to evoke awe. Art allows us to transcend, in Murdoch’s words, the “selfish dream life of the consciousness.” Or within the framework we have been developing here, art can quiet the oppressive excesses of the default self and lead us to “love in the highest part of the soul,” feelings of joining with others in an appreciation of what is meaningful and life-giving. The slides in his talk offer one kind of proof of the centrality of awe to visual art. He shows a slide with dozens of awe expressions from films. Steven Spielberg cast Drew Barrymore in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, he notes, because of her
awe face. He then produces a convincing Keanu Reeves imitation from The Matrix—“Holy shit, this shit is amazing”—and then exults that The Matrix “is all IT.” Luke Skywalker is “the galactic purveyor of awe,” and here Michael covers Joseph Campbell’s treatment of awe-guided heroic journeys in myth, an inspiration of Star Wars. It is a dizzying tour of how film documents awe.
The archaeological record suggests that we started creating visual art about 100,000 years ago, when we began beautifying our bodies with ocher paint, decorating shells for necklaces, burying people with sacred objects, and eventually—60,000 years ago—painting and engraving on rocks and rock walls, often in caves. Today, the passions we feel from visual art are many, and range from feelings of beauty, to astonishment, to comic absurdity, to the sense of being mocked. And let’s not forget boredom as you slog through a museum wondering what the point of art is. The question we take on here is: How is it that a painting, or the design of a building, or a textile, or a film, can move us to feel awe?
Life Patterns in Room 837
In 1977, my family made a pilgrimage to the Louvre before crossing the channel to Nottingham, England, for a sabbatical year. Rolf and I, then fourteen and fifteen, sprinted through the museum, snapping photos—with Kodak Instamatics—of Mona Lisa. Security guards told us to calm down— Tranquille! Not a lot of awe, I must say.
In room 837, things changed. My dad suggested we stand for a minute in front of the Dutch masters, in particular Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Jan Steen. Visitors crowded around Vermeer, and softly oohed and aahed in tones of reverence. His work, as luminous as it is, struck me as too staged and controlled; too much “perfection of form” for my teenage eye hungering to redeem the wild. I was moved by Vermeer’s predecessor,
de Hooch, a painter of “quietly revolutionary” paintings, in the words of art historian Peter Sutton.
De Hooch’s paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch citizens of Delft, usually women, cooking, doing laundry, petting dogs, sweeping, holding infants, picking lice out of children’s hair, breastfeeding, or admiring a glass of ale, changed how I see the world. Susanne Langer, our guide to aesthetic awe, offered a hypothesis for how:
It may be through manipulation of his created elements that he discovers new possibilities of feeling, strange moods, perhaps greater concentrations of passion than his own temperament could ever produce, or than his fortunes have yet called forth.
Seeing de Hooch allowed me to discover “new possibilities of feeling.” I sensed a mathematics of moral beauty in a mother’s glance at a child. I could feel from his painting the vast forces that unite us when moving in unison while doing laundry or being touched by morning light. Though I felt alienated most of the time at age fifteen, I too would experience sublime community over a beer with friends someday. De Hooch opened my eyes to the idea of everyday awe.
In 2019, I returned to Paris. I visited the Louvre and made my way past the endless line of selfie-taking Mona Lisa viewers and found myself in room 837. Once again, awe overtook me, this time in front of de Hooch’s La Buveuse from 1658. In this painting, a man standing near a table pours a young woman a drink. She receives it with relaxed asymmetry, extending her legs in repose. Her face is awash in a coy smile, her eyes looking out toward what is possible. A man across the table looks off into the distance while smoking a pipe. An elderly woman standing nearby touches her chest. How might I describe how this painting made me feel awe? And why?
The concepts and language I might use fail to fully capture the intuitive, holistic processes visual art engages to move us to awe. Our language-based theories of how our minds work don’t often succeed in explaining how our
minds actually work, for so many layers of the mind’s operations occur prior to the stories and explanations we offer with language. Neuroscience is helpful in capturing more subconscious processes. Within the study of the brain, neuroaesthetics—which attempts to explain how our brain responds to art—highlights four ways that visual art moves us to feel awe.
Think about the last time you encountered a piece of visual art that made you feel awe, perhaps a painting, or a photograph, or a temple’s patterned carvings or cathedral’s vaulted apses and stained-glass windows, or a climactic scene in a movie. As you look at the source of visual awe, neurochemical signals move from your retinas to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, which begins to construct the rudiments of images out of the angles of lines, patterns of light and dark, early signs of shape, texture, and color. In this first stage of perception, art reveals visual patterns we may not be aware of in the moment, and this can initiate feelings of awe— the human geometry of the eyes and mouth of the face of a homeless drifter, patterns of light and shadow on the facade of a building in a city, or, in de Hooch’s paintings, villagers moving in unison, going humbly about their daily affairs.
These neurochemical signals will next activate regions of the brain that store your ideas about objects. Through visual techniques, the artist can prompt us to ponder notions and concepts; for example, our relation to the wonders of life. The embracing light that touches the four figures in La Buveuse might trigger thoughts about the power of the warmth of the sun or how time endlessly passes as the light shifts across the day.
This neurochemical representation of visual art next activates networks of neurons, for example in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, which stir your body (e.g., heart, lungs, muscle groups, and immune system). In this moment, visual art can evoke the direct embodied experience of awe, all from standing in front of a two-dimensional painting or photo, often hundreds of years old.
Finally, the neurochemical signals arrive in the prefrontal cortex, where we ascribe meaning to the piece of art, with our words, concepts, learned interpretations, stories, and cultural theories about social living. Visual art
can provoke us to reimagine reality. It can open us up to new ideas about who we can be and what our collective lives might be, in terms of our s*xual identities, for example, and forms of social organization. My experience of awe in viewing de Hooch’s painting when I was fifteen years old gave rise to an idea in my mind, a radical one for me at that time in my life: the possibility of experiencing everyday awe.
In good art, there are so many opportunities to reach the highest part of the soul.
Sacred Geometries
When I give talks on awe, I begin with the definition that began this book: we feel awe in encountering vast mysteries that transcend our understanding of the world. Over the years, often a hand has risen, and this astute question soon followed: What about the awe we feel from the minuscule? When looking at a cell under a microscope? Or the sixty-eight Thorne miniature rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago, which portray domestic interiors from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries in astonishing detail, down to the light filling the rooms from outside, each within a two-by-two-foot space? Or the near microscopic brushstrokes of Jan van Eyck? These champions of small awe might then cite William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” or Walt Whitman’s spiritual homage to a blade of grass and cross their arms and raise their chins in defiance. They are onto something
—microscopic awe.
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher archives microscopic awe. She has devoted many years to photographing the structure of bees’ eyes, their honeycomb constructions, blood cells, and the tissue of bone. It was her photos of her tears that moved me to reach out.
As a child in Minnesota, Rose-Lynn found awe in patterns of snowflakes, in the profusion of soft hairs on pussy willows, on school visits to a museum of science and industry, and in classes on quilts and mosaics.
She sensed patterns. Relations. Deep, unifying structures. “Sacred geometries,” Rose-Lynn would repeatedly say, invoking the idea that there is transcendent, even spiritual, feeling found in seeing the deep geometric structures of the world. There are geometries of life patterns that we hear in the symbolic sounds of music and see in visual art.
When I visit Rose-Lynn in her home and studio in Sherman Oaks, California, her reverence for sacred geometries is on full display. On a table is a scattering of rocks of varied shapes and sizes; she grabs several and points out timeless patterns, visual stories of awe about the Earth’s geological evolution. On a dresser in the hallway sits a construction from her art school days, interconnected parallelograms creating a pyramid. From simple geometric forms emerges awe-inspiring complexity.
Rose-Lynn’s paintings from her thirties on her bedroom walls center upon “deconstructing the vanishing point” so notable in Renaissance painting, when the converging lines of a checkered floor in a cathedral or palace, for example, disappear. For Rose-Lynn, the vanishing point in her painting speaks to that which has no end, no content, even no existence. In hearing her say this, I appreciate how a visual technique in art can enable us to understand a big idea of awe: that beyond the dissolving self is expansion and infinity.
One day while setting up to work, Rose-Lynn found a dead bee on a windowsill. She placed it under a microscope and took photographs with a lens that captures the microscopic. This first series of photos is in her book Bee. She shows me a photo from this series, that of a bee’s eye. She then points to a photo of the luminous profusion of hexagons that comprise the honeycomb structure.
AWE!
She tells me: “There are patterns in nature beyond their physical form, and their deeper resonances make me sense a Golden Mean within us.” Rose-Lynn then riffs on the sacred geometry of the hexagon—it is in the
Star of David, the shape of a cloud on Saturn, the Hagal rune from Nordic traditions, and our DNA. Art allows us to find awe in seeing the unifying geometries of life.
One day, Rose-Lynn received a call from the son of a man she had come to know when she was a student wandering Europe in the late 1970s. While in Paris, she had an acute flare-up of Gaucher disease, an inherited genetic disorder that caused deterioration in her hip bones, among other issues. (In Gaucher, an enzyme deficiency prevents the complete breakdown of certain cells, and instead causes them to accumulate in the spleen, liver, and bone, with serious consequences.) She caught a night train to Florence; by the time she arrived she could hardly walk. She dialed a phone number a friend had given her, and met Patrick, who fed her soup, hoisted her across a piazza so she could at least see Giotto’s frescoes and Michelangelo’s tomb, and got her into a hospital, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. When Patrick’s son called to say that he had died, she couldn’t stop the flow of tears.
So she placed her tears on slides and began photographing them. From more than one thousand photos, one hundred experiences are represented in her book The Topography of Tears. The first two are Tears of timeless reunion (in an expanding field) and Grief and gratitude. They look like aerial maps (for her, of her emotional terrain), abstract forms made up of systems of the body—veins, capillaries, nuclei. Other photos have captions like The irrefutable, In the end it didn’t matter, The brevity of time (out of order) losing you, and Tears of elation at a liminal moment.
Rose-Lynn explains: The lines, shapes, patterns, and movement of tears reveal the sacred geometry of her feeling. The images visualize what pain looks like. And gratitude. And grief. And awe. With more than thirty measures of our body’s physiology, scientists can vaguely point out profiles of twenty or so emotions. With her photography, Rose-Lynn enables us to see that hundreds of complex feelings have distinct neurochemical profiles revealed in the shape of tears. William James would have said Whoa.
In looking at Rose-Lynn’s photographs of tears of human emotion, I am transfixed by The pull between attachment and release, which is reproduced
below. The lighter shape seems to be floating away, to my eye, from the first. Grief comes in fleeting waves of attachment and release.
Visual art also documents the geometries of our social lives: the symmetries of love between parent and child in depictions of Madonna and child by Raphael or da Vinci, or waves of collective effervescence in the drunken dinner scenes of the Dutch master Jan Steen, also found in room 837 of the Louvre. Sebastião Salgado’s photos of masses of wet, muscular bodies working in unison in Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine, which at its peak employed fifty thousand men, capture the sublime, hellish horrors of extraction-based capitalism, and how it reduces individual minds and bodies to means of production.
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The pull between attachment and release. Rose-Lynn Fisher
Visual art also allows us to see the deep structures, or sacred geometries, of the natural world. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel described scientifically more than four thousand kinds of single-cell protozoa. Haeckel also believed that he could reveal scientific truths by drawing the species he studied, producing one hundred illustrations he would publish in a series of ten installments in Art Forms in Nature in 1904. This book has more than one hundred arresting renderings of jellyfish, sea anemones, clams, sand dollars, fish, and the occasional insect. Viewing his drawings is a strange and beautiful epiphany: the drawings
reveal the signature qualities of each species in exaggerated artistic detail, allowing us to imagine how it adapted and survived in highly specific ways. In marveling at the symmetry and geometries shared by the species he drew, Haeckel enables the viewer to see the relatedness of different species, that the diverse forms that life takes are unified by a life force, or “artistic drive,” in Haeckel’s phrasing. His drawings allow us to see Darwin’s idea about the evolution of species from earlier, primordial forms.
Rose-Lynn shows me photographs from a more recent series, of ghostlike cells originally from a fragment of her own bone. They look like the sign for infinity—drifting and, to my eye, unaware of how they, the product of a simple genetic variation in one group of cells, can introduce complex pains, horrors, insights, and wonders into a human’s life. The geometries of all our lives, the traumas we have encountered, or the beauty, the curse you may feel running through your family’s history, and its blessings, are found in the shape of cells we cannot see and in random mutations of our DNA.
Toward the end of our conversation, I sit in the living room near the small table with rocks strewn across its surface. Rose-Lynn calls out as she is making a cup of tea in her kitchen: “Awesome and awful. It’s so striking that they go together.”
We discuss the ninth-century etymology of “awe,” and how the meaning of the word has changed.
She continues.
“Awesome and awful . . . they are mine to reconcile.”
For Rose-Lynn, “art is a language, which through flashes of insight reveals the answer that exists within a question.” In art we see life patterns, for both living and dying. In that moment of reconciliation, we might consider what to make of this cycle of life and death.
Hints of Vast Mysteries
Our default minds, so focused on independence and competitive advantage, are not well suited to making sense of the vast. So guided are we by prior knowledge and our need for certainty that we avoid or explain away the mysteries of life. Visual art, though, offers us hints at understanding the vast and mysterious.
There is no better guide to this idea than philosopher Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1729. His thin book from 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, should be mandatory reading in art, architecture, film, and design schools.
Burke’s thin volume opened eighteenth-century eyes to everyday awe. In those pages, he details how we can experience awe in all manner of perceptual experiences—thunder, shadows, patterns of light on a road, and even the sight of bulls (but not the more beautiful, affectionate cow!). The book has oddities, no doubt: Burke prioritizes the visual and auditory; according to him, scent cannot make us feel awe. (This notion offended, rightfully so, a Frenchwoman I met hiking who worked in the perfume industry.) Most critically, Burke offers ideas about how our experiences of the beautiful and the sublime differ.
For Burke, feelings of beauty arise out of a sense of familiarity and affection; awe, by contrast, arises in our recognition of what is powerful, obscure, and dreadful. Current studies in the science of aesthetics align with this distinction. Our default expectations about size, space, time, objects, other people, and causality streamline our efforts to make sense of the world. When what we encounter readily aligns with our mind’s default expectations, we feel comfort and pleasure. This has been found in studies of faces, scents, images of furniture, and everyday scenes.
In visual art, we like and prefer scenes that reflect familiar, statistical regularities of the world—the visual expectations of our default self. We like placements that seem familiar, such as putting objects in the center of a scene. We find it pleasing when things that belong in the sky, such as birds, are high up as opposed to close to the ground. We prefer horizon lines that are typical of how we look at the world, and we find horizon lines that are unusually high or low unpleasant. Visual art that captures how we typically
perceive the world brings us comfort, and its companion in the realm of aesthetic emotion, the feeling of beauty.
For visual art to stir awe, Burke continues, it must suggest vast mystery. One pathway is to hint at expansive causal forces. Perceived profusion— carvings on the facade of a church, a long line of trees in a garden, gravestones in a military cemetery—hints at the deep forces that organize our social and natural lives. As one example, Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre buzzes with a profusion of pedestrians, streetlights, and cafés, hinting at the transformative cultural energy of Paris in the late nineteenth century.
Simple repetition, Burke observes, is suggestive of vast causal forces that manifest in repeating forms. Images of waves, or mountains, for example, hint at large, unifying forces—the tides of the ocean or the geological evolution of the Earth. Swedish filmmaker Mikel Cee Karlsson relies on extended repetitions of everyday acts—brushing teeth, stroking a partner’s hair, leg jiggles, nervous tics—to emphasize the conventions that organize the patterns of our social lives.
For Burke, patterns of light and movement can focus our minds. When scenes in art are unified by light (as in Rembrandt’s paintings), sensed motion (Monet’s flags in Rue Montorgueil with Flags), or a pervasive hue (Picasso’s Blue Period), we infer that there is something vast that joins together the objects in the image.
And visual art can stir awe through subverting our default expectations about time, as in the use of slow motion in film (think Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull). And space: Vincent van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms has no horizon or perspective; the thin branches seem to extend beyond the edge of the painting, producing a vertiginous, disorienting effect. He painted it for his nephew, newly arrived to the world. The painting seemed “to enthrall” the younger Vincent, as reported by his mother, Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Joanna.
As Iris Murdoch suggested, visual art helps us transcend the status quo expectations and ordinary way of perceiving our lives through the lens of the default self. Instead, through hints at vastness and mystery, art enables
us to see the deeper structures to life around us, and grounds us within these interconnected patterns.
Direct Perception
It has long been thought that visual art enables new “possibilities of feeling,” allowing us to perceive the world directly through the lenses of emotions. Seeing twentieth-century German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s portrayals of grief—she lost two of her children at young ages—opens our eyes to what the world looks like during experiences of loss. Jim Goldberg’s photographs in Rich and Poor make us see the life-is-on-the-line, raw tenderness of living in poverty. Rothko’s paintings can evoke the thought patterns of deep depression that led him to suicide at age sixty-six.
For Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, a point of visual art is to evoke mystical feeling and “preserve the soul” through such “Stimmung,” or mood:
[In great art] the spectator does feel a corresponding thrill in himself. . . . Indeed the Stimmung of a picture can deepen and purify that of the spectator. Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they “key it up,” so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument.
Visual art fine-tunes our experience of awe. Rest your eyes on a Huichol string painting from Mexico and you may sense you are hallucinating. South African artist Ernest Mancoba’s paintings of spiritual experience are suffused with the bright, otherworldly light of mystical awe and interconnectedness of forms. Berlin’s omnipresent street art—portrayals of ecstatic dancers or odd, dreamlike beings—may lead you to see the city through the lens of awe. Psychedelic artists like Alex Grey have sought to
capture what it is like to see the world in a mystical moment on psychedelics. Art is a door of perception and can function as a lens of awe.
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Street art seen on an awe walk I took in Berlin
How visual art leads to the direct perception of awe inspired Rebecca Stone to forty years of study of Mesoamerican art. She has published papers on Andean textiles, Mexican tomb sculptures, carvings on Incan agricultural devices, Ecuadorian petroglyphs, and the architecture of the Wari Empire (from 600 to 1100 AD in central Peru). She synthesizes these discoveries in her book The Jaguar Within (in Mesoamerican traditions, the jaguar is a sacred animal).
Within many Mesoamerican cultures, visual art preserves experiences of awe cultivated in what some call shamanism. Through the use of medicinal plants, dance, dreams, and ceremony, a shaman enables experiences of mystical awe for community members in which boundaries between self and others vanish, a sense of interdependence and proximity to a universal life force is felt, and a shared consciousness with other species and supernatural beings is sensed.
These experiences are archived in chants and songs, ceremonies, systems of knowledge about the powers of plants and other species, and visual art and design. Carvings, paintings, masks, woven baskets, and figurines decorate public and private spaces, their patterns stirring us to see the world through awe-inspiring undulating movement, spirals, iridescent color, and unusual illumination. Human and nonhuman hybrid figures—the merging of categories—are a common visual motif, challenging default expectations.
Viewing art activates the dopamine network in the brain. When paintings decorate the walls in public buildings and offices, people’s minds open to wonder: they demonstrate greater creativity, inspiration, problem-solving abilities, and openness to others’ perspectives. Art empowers our saintly tendencies. One impressive study, which involved more than thirty thousand people in the United Kingdom, found that people who practiced more art, like painting and dance, and viewed more art, for example by going to museums or musical performances, volunteered more in their community and gave more money away two years after the study’s completion.
Visual design that encourages more everyday awe also promotes collective health and well-being. One recent study from Denmark found that hanging paintings on hospital walls led patients to feel more secure, to get out of their beds and socialize more, and to come to understand their illnesses within a broader narrative about the cycle of life. In cities judged from photos to be more evocative of visual awe, people report more robust health, even after controlling for income and local levels of pollution. In cities with pathways for walking, orienting landmarks, squares, and public buildings like libraries—elements of urban design that locate us within geometries of urban social living—people feel more open and report greater health and well-being. Simply being near cathedrals and in chapels inclines people to greater cooperation. Awe-based visual design enables us to see the world through awe, locating our individual selves within larger life patterns of interdependence.
Shock and Awe
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 s*xual 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.
This is what Leda Ramos teaches her working-class Latinx and immigrant students: art allows you to archive the patterns of life and wonder about social change. Leda’s parents immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1957 and landed in Echo Park, where she grew up with Brazilians, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, an elderly woman who had ridden in a Conestoga wagon from Oklahoma, and a hippie family whose mom didn’t wear bras. As a child, Leda was awestruck by the magic of the carrom board, a game from India, so she made her own and put it in a grassy, overgrown space in her backyard. It would become a community center of laughter, flirting, roughhousing, and playful competition—a sacred social geometry of the play of neighborhood kids.
After stints at highbrow museums, Leda chose the path of the underpaid adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. As I tour her studio in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, she points to a piece of graphic art outlining her immigrant story—it includes an image of her dad—“El Hijo”—in El Salvador, a web of cacti, and a plane in the upper right corner. Next to this piece is a digital painting Leda made with her students of the CARECEN mural Migration of the Golden People, by the artist Judy Baca, which includes scenes of activist Rigoberta Menchú, farmworkers marching with faces wizened from working in the fields, police beating nonviolent protesters on the dirt road of a small village, the lush Central American landscape.
Leda is working in the tradition of Central American and Mexican American political art, in which public art—murals, paintings, posters, and today T-shirts and stickers one puts on a laptop cover or a street sign— documents and awakens us to moral harm. Most famous in this tradition is Diego Rivera, but Leda was moved to awe by David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was brought to Los Angeles from Mexico to teach muralism and paint Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism, which depicted the brutality of capitalism toward immigrants. It was whitewashed, literally, by the Los Angeles City Council before eventually being recovered and restored by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
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“Transmigración del moderno Maya-Pipil” (1997) mix media on blueprint paper. Artist Leda Ramos. Leda Ramos Collection, Central American Memoria Histórica Archive, Special Collections and Archives, Cal State LA University Library.
Leda dwells on an artwork she created for the exhibition, Central American Families: Networks and Cultural Resistance, at the Cal State LA University Library as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies at Cal State LA. Her piece has images of a Latina in cap and gown, people in ghostlike sheets protesting the dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, her family’s immigration to the United States, and a Radio Sumpul radio tower, which broadcasted music and stories warning Salvadorians of U.S.-trained military death squads nearby. Dolores Huerta, who founded the United Farm Workers of America in 1962
with Cesar Chavez, gave the keynote speech that day. Leda’s artwork was on walls nearby. Huerta closed her talk as follows:
When we talk about our history, we are talking about the history of the United States of America. . . . It’s our turn and this is our moment. So let’s celebrate Chicano studies by making more history.
Of her work for that day, Leda tells me: “When I honor Dolores Huerta, I am honoring my Salvadoran mother and my Indigenous ancestors.”
When visual art moves us to awe, it can change history. Studies report that we find art that progresses from one tradition, say realism, to another, and art that deviates from artistic conventions of the time and shocks us with the new, to be more powerful. More surprising and awe-inspiring cultural forms—whether they be visual art, New York Times stories, music, or urban legends—are more likely to be shared digitally and to transform how we perceive the world. Susan Crile’s art archives the horrors of torture. In Leda Ramos’s art and teaching, she and her students archive the place of the immigrant within a political narrative of a history of colonialism and violence, protest, and change. We feel shock and awe at this life pattern of subjugation, and wonder what we might do to end such oppression.
A Life of Visual Awe
In our evolution as a most cultural primate, humans have been finding awe in visual art for tens of thousands of years. Our aesthetic capacities for creation and appreciation have allowed us to see the geometries of the natural and social worlds and navigate those worlds with greater intelligence. Across history, awe-inspiring visual art has allowed us to find hints of what we make together of the ever-changing mysteries of life. Visual art allows us to directly experience awe and enjoy its individual and collective benefits. In the service of promoting cultural evolution through
changing minds and history, visual art has shocked and awed people into new ways of seeing the world. These themes ran through a series of stories Steven Spielberg shared from his life of visual awe.
Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, hosted a small gathering in Los Angeles on technology and social progress, which I was lucky enough to attend. When it was my turn to present, I spoke of how to measure awe in the chills, in tears, in the vagus nerve, in the voice and face, and in the DMN, and how awe moves us to wonder and saintly tendencies. As I was talking about the chills, Steven raised his hand. I paused my presentation and, in a slightly absurd act, called on him. He told the story of being awestruck at seeing his new grandchild being born, Kate leaning into his leg while sitting on the floor.
Later that night I happened to sit next to Steven and Kate when out for dinner. They spoke of their careers in film and painting. Of West Side Story, the 2021 remake that Steven had just wrapped up. Of the funeral for Kirk Douglas, who used to frequent Steven’s mom’s restaurant in LA to flirt with her. Stories about how the crying was so intense on the set of Schindler’s List that one actress needed three days of therapeutic intervention to recover from re-creating this awesome archive of the horrors of the Holocaust.
I had to ask:
Steven, what was awe like for you as a child?
Without missing a beat, he recalled seeing his first film when he was five. His dad, an engineer involved in the invention of the computer, took him from their home in Camden, New Jersey, to a theater in Philadelphia. As they inched forward in a long line near the brick walls of the theater, young Steven, holding tightly to his dad’s large hand above, thought they were going to the circus. Instead, it was to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth from 1952. After a wave of disappointment, Steven started to attend to the film’s grainy images. Two trains career down the tracks. A character in a car drives alongside, trying to warn them. To no avail. The trains collide and cars fly everywhere, bodies hurtling into space. Young Steven felt suspended in time, wonderstruck. Awed.
At home, Steven began crashing the cars of his model train set. His dad had to repair the trains repeatedly, so he let Steven borrow the family video camera instead, which he used to stage and film more than one hundred toy train wrecks. No damage was done in this realm of the imagination, just the sacred geometry of make-believe destruction.
One night his dad gathered him up and hustled him into the car. They went to a field and lay on their backs on blankets. A meteor shower washed over the sky. Steven recalls the light, the profusion of stars, how vast the night sky was, and his experiments with seeing—directly, or out of the corner of the eye—fleeting patterns of stellar awe.
It was this wonder of life he hoped to give to others in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As Steven asked for the check, he summed up why he still goes to movies and makes movies for others:
We are all equal in awe.
