The Aesthetics of Confronting Loss
In Nest, supple, light-toned cloth punctuated by navy blue thread form this fittingly entitled sculpture. Cradled within its center is a photo of the face of a young man. Without learning anything of the artist, Susan Carlson, it remains for the viewer a tender, naive image of love. The photo, though, is of the artist's late 19 yr-old son. The childlike image of love remains as such, but gains poignancy and meaning. Precisely its childlike quality renders it devastating in this context. Touching narratives arise for the beholder; for example, the nest could symbolically represent the mother's rebirth of her child — once in flesh, now in spirit — back to the Universe. For a bird makes a nest to lay an egg and sit upon it. That natural process of preparation and nurture is here replaced with this small sculpture, within which there is only a photo preserving his visage, a contemporary form of the traditional death mask. It represents a dual loss: the loss of her child and the loss of her role as a mother — the proverbial 'empty nest.' This is the emblematic work of the Carlson's exhibition 'I Can't Imagine: Artwork from the Terrain of Grief' on display at the YWCA Women's Art Gallery in downtown Cincinnati.
Art as a vehicle for mourning and its cathartic transformation has existed from our beginnings (assuming we expand the definition of what we term 'art,' since the current usage of the term is recent). For instance, with the Greeks, from Homer to funerary sculptures, Aeschylus' tragedies and Aristotle's acute writings on fear and pity, the ancients seemed to find the two nigh-inseparable. It was the unquestioned admixture of art and religious pratices: art making was a pious act, the objects sometimes votive offerings. 
In philosophy, from Plato's dialogues to Kant's third Critique the aesthetic experience of beauty implied an act of remembrance of transcendent forms, referring, subtly, to an actual state of Fall. The production of art and poetry in this vein will always exist so long as creators boldly face mortality, from a Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night) or the character of Magdalena Abakanowicz entire sculptural opus. Significantly, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, commissioned to acknowledge and transform a nation's grief, is the one artwork likely known in every American household ¹.
Sorrow is universal; we differ only in our degrees of experience. Beauty is more complex. Our beholding of true beauty transports us into a sphere within yet not of the finite realm. Finitude — the realm of suffering — is transcended yet deepened. Artwork made in the light of sorrow becomes revelatory.
Consequently, philosophers have wrestled (unsuccessfully) with the problem of truth and art: the tragic rendered beautiful at once faces us with the truth of existence and its immediate transcendence. Though on the grounds of truth, Plato would eject poets from his Republic, and later philosophers would remove the aesthetic from the moral sphere, it is undeniable that in sorrow we touch upon a (or the) truth of existence. Oscar Wilde wrote the following passage in a state of suffering, in the final years of his life in gaol; let us here use his text as both a summary and exemplar of the preceding reflections:
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the senses, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain. (De Profundis, 1905)
The role of making in grief has this deep rooted tradition. Not just through pity, but also in this vein we could view the work of Susan Carlson; she, like Wilde, creates as a mode of liberation from an imprisonment. Some works bear the rawness of her loss, the transformation only in its first appearances. In Stages we see the immediate, direct working of her difficulties; in the aforementioned Nest there is some semblance of reconciliation and peace. In Hands, though their form (I assume they are castings of the artist's hands) is one of clinging to the shirt, their presence may also be interpreted as an offering. This sense, though, is the overriding theme of her exhibition: alongside the catharsis of transformation and making, the exhibition itself is an offering, a giving. Intimate, moving, courageous.
'I Can't Imagine: Artwork from the Terrain of Grief,' Works by Susan Carlson. YWCA Women's Art Gallery, 898 Walnut St. Cincinnati, OH 45202 513-241-7090. Exhibit continues through Sept. 24.
Special thanks to Daniel Brown for his suggestions for this article, in particular his deepening of the narrative insights.
¹how different the sentiment behind the aforementioned works to that of Koons' superficial salvos of kitsch, appropriately made en masse in warehouses by his assistants. Koon's work is priced in the millions; Carlson's is priceless.
