A short philosophical reflection on Yellow Horizon
Perhaps it would be good to start this essay with a disclaimer. I am not an artist, a dramaturge, or an art critic. I am a philosopher. This means that I approach this non-traditional work from a non-traditional framework. Specifically, from my specialisms, philosophical anthropology and metaphysics, I look at the conceptual richness that this work has to offer. Just as I read and evaluate a philosophical work by asking myself what ideas this work relates to and what philosophical question it tries to answer, I also approach Yellow Horizon, which Annemijn Rijk made in collaboration with Theun Mosk.
From order to receptivity
At the start, the visitors are welcomed by dancer Noemi Calzavara, mime artist Niels van Heijningen, and actress Sofie Porro. It is made clear that this is not a traditional theatre experience: the work has led to euphoria and fear, but we are reminded that we are always safe. Once inside, the performance begins. The players move slowly, almost unnoticed, through the space. Gradually, the players begin to breathe rhythmically and it is difficult to resist the temptation not to go along with this.
Modern dance is particularly difficult to interpret and Annemijn seems to play with this difficulty. The goal does not seem to be to understand or interpret. Rather, she seems to strive to make the audience receptive to the pure movements of the players. In this, she ties in with what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872) about the difference between today’s modern spectators and the spectator from classical antiquity.
What distinguishes the two, according to Nietzsche, is that the modern spectator – that is, us – is far too aggressive. According to Nietzsche, this is the result of the scientification of our culture, with the result that we take that scientific view with us when we enter a theatre. A poem by the one person who, in Nietzsche’s eyes, could never do anything wrong, Goethe, illustrates this scientific attitude well:
But research strives and searches, never tired,
For law and reason, for the why and how.
Nietzsche himself describes this scientific attitude as our ‘strictly causally oriented consciousness’ (p. 138). Once confronted with a work of art, we immediately try to interpret, understand and fathom it. Nietzsche contrasts this with the attitude of the ancient Greeks who, according to him, had a receptiveness to the ‘miracle depicted on stage’ (p. 138). Again, Goethe’s poem is helpful here. In the second part, Goethe writes:
How? When? Where? – The gods remain mute!
Keep to the word and don’t ask why?
In the opening scene of Yellow Horizon, the dancers remain “mute”. It is precisely the slow movement, the repetitive breathing that makes questions like ‘why’ and ‘how’ meaningless. Instead, we are forced to stick to the ‘wail’. To dwell in time on the movements that are made. Sharp, and with attention and receptivity to every movement.
Counter-illumination & counter-intentionality
When Sofie then breaks the silence with softly humming singing, everyone turns to her. It is noticeable to the audience that the slow dance and the rhythmic breathing have sharpened everyone’s attention. After the singing, the lights are dimmed, the music swells and the wall slowly moves back until after a while the audience is shrouded in complete darkness. In this total darkness, a light dot appears on the horizon.
Particularly strong in that play of light is the moment when the luminous dot you are staring at starts to blink and slowly starts to move. At those moments, you as a viewer no longer know whether you or the light is blinking, or whether you or the light is moving. It is through this interaction that you gradually begin to doubt your role as a spectator: from someone who observes what happens on stage, you change into someone who is observed by what happens on stage. It is this reversal of direction that brings to mind some passages from the ideas of phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
When Husserl studies consciousness in his work, he, under the influence of psychologist Franz Brentano, arrives at the proposition that consciousness is always directed at something. That sounds vague, but it is actually very simple. When you think, you are always thinking about something. (See, among others, Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936)). Whether it is the cup of coffee you are holding in your hands or your dream from last night, there is always ‘something’ that is being thought. Just try to consider your own thoughts. Even when you try to think of nothing, that nothing changes back into something because it has to be thought. The word that Husserl uses to indicate this orientation of consciousness is intentionality.
In his attempt to investigate whether we can relate to the world in another way, Merleau-Ponty turns to the artist in his Eye and Mind (1964). While the scientist constantly focuses his intentionality on the objects around him, the artist does something else. Merleau-Ponty quotes André Marchand who, following the painter Paul Klee, tells how he repeatedly ‘had the feeling in a forest that it was not I who was looking at the forest’ (p. 27), but that on some days it felt as if it were ‘the trees that were looking at me, talking to me’ (p. 27). Characteristic here is the somewhat romantic statement that it is not the task of the painter to fathom the universe, but that the universe must fathom the painter. But what exactly is written there?
We could speak here of a counter, or reversal of intentionality. Consciousness is no longer directed towards a world. Instead, one experiences that the directionality of consciousness is broken through and something is directed towards consciousness. Thinking is thereby subjected to that which is due to or approaches thought.
In the same way, the play of light in Yellow Horizon also brings about a reversal in its spectators. Already with the dancing prelude, the thinking of the visitors is made receptive to sensory stimuli from outside without immediately being directed towards understanding. Now the directed thinking is gently broken through by a light that is greater than thought itself; shaken by something that thought cannot comprehend and with that this approaching light breaks through the spectator’s directionality. At that moment, the spectators have nothing left but pure surrender. What is exceptional about this is that while Merleau-Ponty attributes such an experience only to the painter who feels that the trees are watching him in the forest, we, thanks to Yellow Horizon, all gain access to this fundamental experience of counter-intentionality for the artist.
Revelation and confrontation
It is therefore a given that we experience something special as spectators. Moreover, this experience is different from the way in which we move through life in the everyday sense. But why is this change in our perception valuable?
It is not without reason that thinkers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Levinas, following Nietzsche, investigate whether there are other ways of thinking possible that do not degenerate into this scientific, directed, objectifying and calculating thinking. As heirs of the Enlightenment, they are familiar with both the fruits of the scientific revolution, the progressive humanist ideals and the optimistic belief in human reason, as well as with their excesses: an industrialized society with a culture of planning, control, efficiency, predictability, measurability, organization and alienation.
We can also go a step further. Enlightenment thinking has of course contributed to enormous technological progress. But this unbridled technological growth has also led to the overexploitation of nature. And of course the ideal of the rational human being has freed us from the authority of the church and thus dismantled dogmatic convictions. But hasn’t precisely this categorization of the human being – as a rational being – made possible by reason led to an exclusion of all kinds of so-called non-rational beings and therefore so-called non-humans? (E.g. the child, the woman, the “exotic” other, the “ecological” other).
Our current culture, according to the above-mentioned thinkers, demands an investigation and openness to other ways of thinking and being in order to approach ecological-humanitarian issues from a way of thinking that is different from the way of thinking that we can (partly) hold responsible for the existence of such issues. Yellow Horizon makes a valuable contribution to this, in its attempt to break through our current way of thinking.
The question is of course what remains when that is broken through, and that is precisely the exciting thing that Yellow Horizon confronts you with as a viewer. After all, you lose your grip on the world because the work resists every attempt at understanding by grasping thought. After having spoken to various visitors, it is also clear that the experiences vary considerably: from meditative and soothing, euphoric and ecstatic, absolutely penetrating into the essence to absolute non-being. Perhaps the most striking description is that of a participant who could not find the words for what had happened to her.
In religious terminology, we can perhaps best call this a revelation. Colleague Prof. Dr. Ruud Welten describes the revelation in If the grain of corn does not die, (2016) as a proclamation of a message that we have not shaped ourselves, for which we have not been able to prepare ourselves, but which has the potential to have ‘profound consequences for the rest of our lives’ (p. 15). Revelation is, to use a grand word, traumatizing, because it resists every attempt to be integrated into an existing linguistic order because it breaks through that current order.
Earth
In my experience, there is a symbolic expression of my own experience in the scene when the dancers reappear on stage. Although I am of course, following on from what was mentioned above, doing it an injustice when I try to talk about it, I still think that this symbolic story can provide insight into what the work can bring about.
The luminous circle is approached towards the end by the three players, who are only visible in silhouette. This image reminded me strongly of an experience described by several astronauts known as ‘the overview effect’. This was first introduced in the book of the same name written by Frank White. White interviewed numerous astronauts and concluded that a shared experience of altered consciousness was widespread among those who had seen the Earth from space. Take for example the description given by astronaut Rusty Schweikart in his interview with White. He says:
You identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans […] and that whole process of what you identify with starts to shift as you go around the Earth […] you look down and see the surface of this globe that you have been living on all this time, and you know all these people down there and they are like you, they are you – and somehow you represent them. […] you recognise that you are a piece of this total life. (Quoted in White, 1987, p. 12, own translation)
Almost all astronauts report a similar experience: an unexpected and overwhelming emotion that manifests itself in an appreciation of the beauty of the earth, an increased sense of connection with and responsibility for the earth, and, most importantly, a sense that transcends the earth and the importance of the self.
The earth, in this sense, is like the light we are confronted with as spectators in Yellow Horizon, a transcendent entity that alone can still enforce a moral imperative after the death of God, an agent whose autonomy we have lost sight of or an eye that pierces my selfish individual gaze.
About the author
Dr. Max van der Heijden is a philosopher and currently works at Tilburg University. He obtained his doctorate on the thinking of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his plea for the “naturalization” of man. He currently teaches courses such as history of modern philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of science, enlightenment & counter-enlightenment, and close-reading. In his current research he tries to answer the question of what art can do in times of ecological crisis from a post-humanist perspective. Contact: m.m.c.vdrheijden@tilburguniversity.edu.