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Author's introduction to Marcia Brennan's Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson
Elliot R. Wolfson, Night Traces , 2008. © Elliot R. Wolfson.

Flowering Light -- buy from Rice University Press. image --> As a modernist art historian, I spend most of my time with the dead. Typically, this entails engaging with the artistic works of key historical figures, their accompanying exhibition histories, and their relations to significant developments in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. Working with these established subjects not only means reconstructing an extensive base of primary visual and archival source materials, but negotiating a well-developed historiography and, with it, a corresponding set of accepted methodological strategies. Thus in various ways, working with the dead means engaging with the collective voice of the discourse on the discourse.

This study represents something different; as such, the text marks a departure that is also an arrival. From a different historical perspective, I also examine the relations between mysticism and modernist aesthetics in my book Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (forthcoming from the MIT Press, 2010). Because of the unique nature of the subject matter—the concordance of mystical and aesthetic expression in the scholarly, painted, and poetic works of a living author and artist, Elliot R. Wolfson—familiar templates of thought are not always readily available, or even aptly applicable. Instead, Wolfson’s artworks invite viewers to reconsider what it means to work with the living. Not only are his books and paintings the products of a living artist, but at the core of the corpus lies a set of ideas that sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.

In turn, this book is designed to reflect some of the complexities of its subject matter, in part through the convergence of art historical and religious studies methodologies with the domains of contemporary art criticism, poetry, and creative writing. In the crossing of these interpretive streams, what is said is also deeply informed by what remains unsaid. One particularly suggestive expression of such unsaying concerns the transgression of the edges that demarcate the familiar boundaries of established academic discourses. In so doing, this text is presented partly as a work of conceptual art that resonates with the capacity of mystical envisioning to create imaginative worlds. This is one of the reasons I wanted to write this book (and, hopefully, why you will want to read it). In short, in this study I am not just writing about mystical art and literature; on a certain level, the text represents an attempt to produce mystical art and literature, through words and images that can potentially induce these states aesthetically and hermeneutically in their readers.

At the outset, I should note that it was my own longstanding engagement with abstract art that initially drew me to the mystical discourses of kabbalah. That is, when encountering abstracted modernist painting and sculpture, viewers often find themselves in the paradoxical position of contemplating substantial surfaces that have been envisioned and instantiated as insubstantial forms, even as these forms are manifested materially as concrete, sensuous presences. To cite Wolfson’s incisive formulation in his award-winning study, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination , “In consonance with the teachings of mystic visionaries in various traditions, kabbalists assent to the view that the primary task of the imaginative faculty is to depict imaginally what is without image, to embody that which is not a body, to give form to the formless.” Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. xii. Applying these concepts to the visual arts, abstracted painting and sculpture can be seen as suggestively imposing a form on that which has no form, thereby allowing the invisible to become visible. Regarding these themes, see also Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), for a discussion of Morris Louis’s engagement with Jewish mystical conceptions of sacred fire in his Charred Journal series and in the prismatic light of his abstractions.

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Source:  OpenStax, Flowering light: kabbalistic mysticism and the art of elliot r. wolfson. OpenStax CNX. Dec 09, 2008 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10611/1.1
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