awe and reverence for primeval nature and to remind us of our own transi-
toriness as a species in the face of it, somewhat in the manner of symbolic art
(the pyramids of Egypt, say), as Hegel discusses it. The minimalist cyclic
musical compositions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, for example, often
seem to aim at producing a felt sense of“primeval time”as opposed to the
time of agency, politics, history, and human projects of the cultivation of self
and culture. This music has affinities with more cyclic and modal, less
aggressively cadenced works in the Indian musical tradition. It can seem to
some ears on the one hand empty and merely decorative, but to other ears or
the same ears at other times to be an apt reminder of human finitude and the
mystery of life.
The environmental art of Robert Smithson and Richard Long seems to aim
at a similar effect–massive arrangements of earth, as though carried out by
prehuman gods or by time itself, prior to the dawn of historical time.
Christo’s wrappings of buildings and massive adornments of features of the
landscape (“wrapped”islands, the 25-mile nylon cloth“Running Fence”) have
a similar effect, mixed with a kind of sensuous attraction as the cloth moves
with the wind and changes appearance in sun and shadow. All this work
seems designed deliberately to resist the thought that works of art are
always, only, or centrally made by specific individuals to human scale and
for private ownership. They present themselves as both monumental and
transitory, beyond human time. On a smaller scale, Tibetan sand mandalas
that have attracted some interest are likewise transitory works meant to be
contemplated for their spiritual significance for a time, but owned by no one,
and soon erased and scattered.^72 The director Werner Herzog produces in
some of his films, especially inAguirre, the Wrath of God(1972), a sense of the
transitoriness of the human by shooting natural phenomena–running
water, plays of light and shadow on a landscape–in wide-angle deep focus
and incorporating these shots into a plot of the disappearance of the human.
The camera can focus sharply as the eye cannot: for it the image on the
screen is always blurred somewhere, though in sharp focus everywhere–on
an entire wide-angle shot of change, as though a transaction were taking
(^72) See the discussion of sand mandalas in Freeland,But is it Art?, pp. 115–16. I was able to
see a sand mandala built, displayed, and then removed after a few weeks from McCabe
Library at Swarthmore College.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 275