HARRIETTE JOFFE

A Necessary Journey

Early man took stones, stood them on end and left them for all generations to see. That gesture expressed “I exist, I am here,” which every piece of art expresses and which each of us as an individual and as a collective needs to recognize and understand.

Through a series of departures and returns artists have had to explore new perspectives that have lead them to discovery, revelation and transformations never before imagined possible.

My work is an ongoing search for that place where the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. It speaks of an extended human condition extracting an essence and universality out of human events and recasting everyday life to create a new myth.

The idea of all things being connected may be a problem for some but it is what I feel intrinsically and is hopefully revealed in my work in grace. Like Carl Jung, I know there is a collective unconscious where past history is imprinted on our genes to be passed on. All that I am, all that I have experienced becomes my art. Each time I enter the studio, I ask to be opened, to allow those thoughts and images to touch me from a higher source, a distant place.

“We have reached the limits of our language” Leroy Little Bear a Navajo leader has said. It is through the ritual power of speech and song that the Navajo are enabled most powerfully to affect and alter events in the enveloping cosmos. According to Gary Witherspoon in his landmark study of Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, the Navajo consider the act of speech to be an externalization of thought an “imposition of form upon the external world”, in which “the surrounding air is transformed.” [1]

The Latin American poet Jorge Luis Borges describes his personal universe.

“In the lower part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere, of almost intolerable brilliance, At first I thought it rotary; then I understood that this movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous sights it enclosed. The Aleph’s diameter must have been about two or three centimeters but the Cosmic space was in it, without diminution of size. Each object (of the glass, for instance) was infinite objects, for I clearly saw it from all points of the universe. I saw the heavy-laden sea; I saw the dawn and the dusk; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver plated cobweb at the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London); I saw interminable eyes nearby looking at me as if in a mirror; I saw the same paving tile I had seen thirty years before in the entranceway to a house in the town of Fray Bentos… I saw the circle of my obscure death; I saw the Aleph from all points; I saw the earth in the Aleph and in the Aleph once more I saw my face and my viscera; I saw your face and felt vertigo and cried because my eyes had seen that conjectural and secret object whose name men usurp but which no man has gazed on; the inconceivable universe.” [2]

Borges continues; “I would like to add two further observations; One on the nature of the Aleph; the other on its name. As is well known the latter is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the cycle of my story does not appear mere chance. For the cabala, this letter signifies the En-Sof, the limitless and pure divinity; it has also been said that it has the form of a man who points to heaven and earth, to indicate that the inferior world is a mirror and map of the superior; for the Mengenlehre it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, in which the whole is no greater than any of its parts”. [2]

This is the Borges that I have carried with me, since first I read it during the sixties. I have recognized in it, the past, present, and future space in which I live. My art reflects this connection. I too see a universe in every grain of sand, in every star.

Leroy Little Bear, a Navajo elder, has said, “We have reached the limits of our language”. Therefore I believe that to exclude anything i.e. physics, mathematics, biology or ecology as separate from visual arts, music or dance is an inconceivable notion.

For many of us, being comfortable has become the inevitable goal, the status quo. Since the events of September 11,2001 this safe acceptance of life no longer works. Now is a time when creative freedom can truly make a difference. Whether we directly or indirectly contribute a message, a story, a discovery does not matter. What is important, what is vital to our world, is that we do not stop creating. Like the “universe which continuously opens out upon its-self.” [3]

                    I allow my art to become.

Harriette N. Joffe

 

Notes:

1. David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous, 1997

2. Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, 1967

3. Louise Young, The Unfinished Universe, 1986

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