0.2 Introduction: living with the living: entering and exiting  (Page 6/6)

Thus in Wolfson’s theoretical formulation, the veil both embodies and performs a radical inversion that inverts the very notion of inversion. He concludes the Introduction, thereby closing his opening, by again allowing the veil to fold back on itself. As he observes, “The unicity consigned to the end is a visual attunement to the void of all being, the void of all things fully void, the breach of unity by which the unity of the breach (dis)appears in and through the cleft of consciousness. In this temporal crevice and spatial hiatus, the symbolic is imagined as real, and the real as symbolic. I trust that the excursions of this book will help others to lift many veils, but I am ever mindful that with every veil lifted, another will be unfurled.” Elliot R. Wolfson, in correspondence with the author, June 24, 2008.

"through her veil"

through

her veil

his voice

i heard

vacated

in time

behind

their nakedness

etched in

stone

the name

we cannot

re/member

to forget

what it was

we remembered

to forget

Just as Wolfson’s various reflections on the veil appear in the contexts of a scholarly study of Habad and a collected volume of poetry, The poem “through her veil” can be found in Elliot R. Wolfson, Footdreams and Treetales: Ninety-Two Poems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 68. this ambivalent mystical imagery also sheds valuable light on the paintings. When asked about these thematic conjunctions, Wolfson affirmed to me that the passages from the Habad book are indeed “sufficient to confirm your sense of the importance of the trope of the veil and how it joins together this [scholarly] work (much of my work really) and the paintings.” Elliot R. Wolfson, in correspondence with the author, June 24, 2008. Thus, much as words create complementary aesthetic and hermeneutical structures in Wolfson’s writings, so too does color serve as a veil in his paintings, as pigment appears as a material presence that grounds the ungroundable. Such modalities of formal enclosure are necessary to convey an intrinsic sense of their own largesse, or the insight that there is always more to find in the hiding of the hidden. When these concepts are translated into art historical terms, Wolfson’s abstract paintings can be seen as simultaneously encompassing and eliding the categorical frameworks that distinguish the very boundaries between abstraction and representation. With their intricate configurations of emerging and dissolving presences, the paintings can be viewed as conjunctive membranes or translucent screens that simultaneously demarcate and disseminate the material and the ethereal domains, bringing to earth mystical imagery that invokes the shifting veils of a living heaven (vilon).

These observations on creative envisioning lead to a final reflection on time, timeliness, and contemporaneity. Wolfson characterizes his own writing as being not the product of a medievalist, a modernist, or a postmodernist, but rather as contributing to “the thinking that is happening now.” Wolfson notes that this expression is a modification of the phrase used by his colleague, David Leahy, who describes his own interpretive methodology as part of the “thinking that is occurring now.” Elliot R. Wolfson, in correspondence with the author, July 18, 2008. Thus it is perhaps especially appropriate that this study should be brought forth by Rice University Press, a publisher that is also consciously engaged in shaping the thinking that is happening now by actively pursuing the dual publishing platforms of digital and print media. The concurrent appearance of books in such multiple electronic and paper formats promises to contribute in new ways to an expanded sense of what it means to work with living texts. Indeed, a digital press seems to present an ideal forum for potentially transgressive ideas, edgy new expressions of the art and “thought that is happening now.” Not only can these subjects include the “risky” work of contemporary living artists, but innovative conceptual experiments with hybrid, transdisciplinary genres that necessitate a series of boundary crossings, and thus a reforming of established categorical grounding.

Like a pearl that grows out of multiple shells simultaneously, this study is situated within the multiple fields of these overlapping paradoxes. It is my hope that such composite positioning engenders new configurations of living ideas to form in the conjunctive membranes (velum) that lie within, behind, and beyond the adjacent surfaces of the printed page, the painted canvas, and the digital veil.