On Artistic and Philosophical Rabbit Holes

il-Kamra ta' Fuq

 

'I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit-hole ...

and yet - it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life!'

 

 

I. 

 

Artists, like philosophers and certain young girls, can never resist heading down a rabbit hole; often without considering how in the world they might get out again.  

 

So it is that, later this month, Maria Baldacchino, Karl Fröman, Maria Fröman, SJ Fuerst, and Luca Indraccolo, will individually explore and conceptually map out as best they can a series of surreal landscapes in an exhibition curated by Melanie Erixon entitled The Rabbit Hole Collective #1 [1].    

 

Visitors can look forward to encountering Lego-animals, gravity-defying pieces of fruit, painted inflatable pool toys, Pulcinella among the ruins, and other enigmatic figures looking for a coherent narrative within an environment in which it is reasonable to expect the impossible.   

 

 

II. 

 

The phrase, down the rabbit hole, is, of course, taken from Lewis Carroll's nonsensical novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and generally refers to the fact that it is often easier to get lost in one's own reality - or to find oneself in a strange and perplexing situation - than might be imagined once a collective frame of reference (i.e. common sense) is abandoned (or you take too many psychedelic drugs).  

 

Arguably, the best and most brilliant discussion of Carroll's work is by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who, in his 1969 work Logique du sens [2], challenges the conventional view that falling down a rabbit hole invariably ends in mad obsession or delusion (and is thus something that one should probably avoid doing).  

 

For Deleuze, the rabbit hole is primarily a zone of indeterminacy between two distinct states; i.e., a unique liminal space which he relates to his philosophy of difference and becoming. 

 

Thus, for Deleuze, the rabbit hole doesn't only allow for a shift in perspective or the exploration of new ideas and experiences, but provides an opportunity for molecular change via an opening up to alien forces (this is not simply an imaginative game or fantasy, but an event that has demonic reality and involves a natural play of haecceities) [3].     

 

 

III.

 

I'm not sure if the five artists involved in the upcoming exhibition at il-Kamra ta' Fuq have read Deleuze; nor if they care very much about his reading of Lewis Carroll in The Logic of Sense. 

 

However, one artist who has certainly read Deleuze and who does seem to care a good deal about his (and Guattari's) thinking on holey space [4], is John Beckmann [5], who, in 2019, was responsible for a conceptual installation in New York entitled Rabbit Hole (for Gilles Deleuze).

 

In this work, full of clever and often subtle artistic references, Beckmann filled an empty gallery with live rabbits, ladders, and all manner of artificial holes, tunnels, and escape hatches for visitors to explore. The aim was to create a rhizomatic space of complexity, ambiguity, hybridity, contradiction, and otherness, in which nothing was quite what it seemed. 

Amusingly, Rabbit Hole also raised a question that many critics have posed about the contemporary art scene: 

 

"Is it really a powerful underworld of counter-cutural subversion whose liminal spaces allow people to move beyond society's status quo? Or is it a warren of anxiety, self-reference and solipsism?" 

 

Answers on a postcard please ...

 

 

John Beckmann / Axis Mundi: 

Rabbit Hole (for Gilles Deleuze) (2019) 

archello.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The exhibition will run from 25 April until 11 May, 2025 at il-Kamra ta' Fuq, New Life Bar (1st floor), Church Square, Mqabba, Malta. For more details please click here, or visit artsweven.com

 

[2] The English translation of Deleuze's text by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, was published as The Logic of Sense by Columbia University Press, in 1990. 

      Assembled from a series of thirty-four paradoxes and an appendix of five essays, the book is essentially an exploration of meaning and meaninglessness. For Deleuze, there is the kind of superficial nonsense which Lewis Carroll delights in and then there is the more profound (and violent) kind offered by Artaud. But nonsense of either kind can only be viewed as that which positively has no sense (as opposed to any absense or lack of sense).      

[3] See Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 252-253.

[4] See Deleuze and Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus ... pp. 413-416. 

      The argument is that there are some people who are of necessity cave dwellers; individuals who love to bore holes and "turn the earth into Swiss cheese" [413]. Theirs is a space that is permeable and full of subterrannean passages that branch off in multiple directions and connect in unexpected ways; a space often associated with clandestine or illegal activities.

 

[5] John Beckmann laid the foundation for his New York based contemporary interior design studio Axis Mundi in 2004, drawing upon his scholastic roots in philosophy and visual culture. Those who wish to know more about him can click here.

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).

On Lewis Carroll and His Love for Alice Liddell and Other Little Girls

Six-year old Alice Liddell dressed as a beggar-child 

in a photograph by Lewis Carroll (1858)

As everyone knows, Lewis Carroll was extremely fond of children (except boys) and very much liked to keep their company. And to photograph them. He seems to have found their beauty unearthly, though not inhuman in the manner of the nymphet as described by Nabokov.

Adopting the Roman symbol of good fortune, Carroll would call a white stone day one on which he met by chance a memorable girl-child; on a train journey, for example, or at an exhibition, or perhaps at the seaside. He always carried with him a little bag full of puzzles, tricks and small gifts with which to entertain any little girls he might encounter on such a day. And he carried too a supply of safety pins for pinning up their skirts, should they wish to paddle in the surf.

Many lovely little creatures skipped and danced their way into Carroll's life and his affections. But none quite left their mark on him as did Alice Liddell, who, again as everyone knows, provided the inspiration (or at the very least the name) for Carroll's most famous literary creation.

There has been much speculation - not all of it pleasant or supported with evidence - about the precise nature of Carroll's relationship with Alice (as, indeed, with her older sister, Lorina). I doubt very much, however, that he wanted to sexually abuse her and would refrain from (retrospectively) describing him as a predatory paedophile; it's important to remember that Carroll lived in a time very different from our own.   

Having said that, he was clearly infatuated with the girl, whom he adored in that peculiar Victorian manner - sublimating illicit desire into ideal moral sentiment - and although there's no record of actual impropriety, there were enough elements of perviness to concern her mother who, eventually, took steps to discourage Carroll's relationship with her daughters and burned all of his early letters to Alice (letters that often closed with 10,000,000 kisses).

Ultimately, if obliged to take a position on this affair, I tend to agree with the American writer and critic, Katie Roiphe, whose 2001 work, Still She Haunts Me, is a fictional reimagining of the relationship between Carroll and Alice which suggests they were essentially friends with benefits - but not the kind of benefits that we've come to expect.

I agree also with Roiphe, writing in an essay, that, whilst Carroll was no drooling child molester, neither was he the shy, stuttering, essentially sexless bachelor that some of his defenders would have us believe. It is, she writes, simply absurd to claim that Carroll was drawn to little girls on a purely spiritual plane; his erotico-aesthetic appreciation of their physical charms was too conspicuous.

To his credit, however, he exercised great discipline and, rather than indulge his carnal urges, produced amazing works of imaginative nonsense instead. There is, says Roiphe, something noble in a practice of self-restraint "so forceful that it spews out stuttering tortoises and talking chess pieces ..."

She concludes:

"There is something touching about a man who fights the hardest fight in the world: his own desire. You can feel the loneliness on the page. You can the feel the longing in the photographs. You can witness the self-contempt in his diaries. ... He had impure thoughts, yes. But what matters, in the end, is what he did with them."

See: Katie Roiphe, 'Just Good Friends', article in The Guardian (29 Oct 2001): click here to read.