Within many Mesoamerican cultures, visual art preserves experiences of awe cultivated in what some call shamanism. Through the use of medicinal plants, dance, dreams, and ceremony, a shaman enables experiences of mystical awe for community members in which boundaries between self and others vanish, a sense of interdependence and proximity to a universal life force is felt, and a shared consciousness with other species and supernatural beings is sensed.
These experiences are archived in chants and songs, ceremonies, systems of knowledge about the powers of plants and other species, and visual art and design. Carvings, paintings, masks, woven baskets, and figurines decorate public and private spaces, their patterns stirring us to see the world through awe-inspiring undulating movement, spirals, iridescent color, and unusual illumination. Human and nonhuman hybrid figures—the merging of categories—are a common visual motif, challenging default expectations.
Viewing art activates the dopamine network in the brain. When paintings decorate the walls in public buildings and offices, people’s minds open to wonder: they demonstrate greater creativity, inspiration, problem-solving abilities, and openness to others’ perspectives. Art empowers our saintly tendencies. One impressive study, which involved more than thirty thousand people in the United Kingdom, found that people who practiced more art, like painting and dance, and viewed more art, for example by going to museums or musical performances, volunteered more in their community and gave more money away two years after the study’s completion.
Visual design that encourages more everyday awe also promotes collective health and well-being. One recent study from Denmark found that hanging paintings on hospital walls led patients to feel more secure, to get out of their beds and socialize more, and to come to understand their illnesses within a broader narrative about the cycle of life. In cities judged from photos to be more evocative of visual awe, people report more robust health, even after controlling for income and local levels of pollution. In cities with pathways for walking, orienting landmarks, squares, and public buildings like libraries—elements of urban design that locate us within geometries of urban social living—people feel more open and report greater health and well-being. Simply being near cathedrals and in chapels inclines people to greater cooperation. Awe-based visual design enables us to see the world through awe, locating our individual selves within larger life patterns of interdependence.
Shock and Awe
During her childhood in Ohio, Susan Crile’s family liked to go deep-sea diving. In the otherworldly, liquid ether of underwater, she found the sublime floating in vast quiet. Time dilated. She saw blurry outlines of life forms. She sensed mystery and felt peace.
This memory brings to mind another story of awe she tells me, about when her family dined with a Bedouin community camped out in tents in the Syrian desert. The stars, the pulsating music, the rocking, swaying bodies, the aromatic flavors—all left a lasting impression that brings tears to her today as she recounts this to me in her apartment in New York City.
When President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Susan felt riled up. The images of the “smart bombs” upset her. “Those are kids and moms being killed,” she tells me. Historic buildings obliterated. The default language of the news—“collateral damage,” “precision strike”—left Susan pacing her studio.
When Saddam Hussein set Kuwaiti oil fields on fire, it stirred Susan to action. She reached out to Boots & Coots, the company that extinguished those fires, and made her way to Kuwait. There, she traveled roads that had recently been combat sites, seeing children’s toys strewn about, burned-out tanks, charred outposts, spent shells. The heat of the sizzling lakes of oil nearly knocked her down. The skies were enveloped by black smoke. The jetlike roar of the fires sounded like death. Later, working from the photos she took, she painted apocalyptic scenes of brilliant flames, vast black smoke, disorienting reflections in pools of oil. Awe mixing with horror.
Walking through Central Park to teach art at Hunter College on September 11, 2001, she passed people covered in ash, walking slowly in astonished horror, a pilgrimage of ghosts. This time she worked from videos. Her paintings capture the time dilation; the slow-motion building collapse; the profusion of ash; the repetition of Manhattan buildings with people climbing out of windows, which many recall today as a moment of awe.
When the photographs of prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib were released, she reproduced them in a series of drawings that mix horror, brutality, awe, and compassion, an emotional blend that was what first led me to visit her. In her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, art books cover surfaces. Stacks of drawings lie under large tables. Pencils and pastels and chalks are arrayed on trays like crudités. The dust and scents of art are in the air, reminding me of moments from my childhood in my dad’s studio.
As one enters the apartment, in the center of one’s field of vision is a black box three feet tall by two feet wide—the size of a large Christmas present. It is the size of the box we put prisoners in solitary confinement in at Guantánamo Bay for weeks on end. Susan’s black box makes you feel a life pattern: being subjugated and trapped by vast powers. It causes me to shudder. My mind opens to wonder about human horrors. How long would it take for me to die in that space? And if I didn’t die, what would my thoughts be like?
Susan’s series Abu Ghraib: Abuse of Power includes portrayals of dogs lunging at genitals, unconscious swollen faces, prisoners gasping for air in a tank of water, piles of nude bodies. The bodies are simple outlines, diaphanous and covered in sheens of light. One is tied up within the black box but looks resigned, even serene. I want to move people to know in their bodies this suffering, Susan explains to me. To feel compassion. She flips through an archive of awe and horror that inspired her: Goya’s Disasters of War series, eighty-two prints depicting torture, killings, rapes, and the famine and inquisition during the war between Napoleon’s Empire and Spain. As she flips through these prints, she points out moments of compassion amid horror.
Art creates an aesthetic distance, a safe space, from which we can consider the horrors humans perpetrate. In relevant studies, when people encounter images of genital mutilation or sexual harassment and are told they are pieces of art, the stress-related regions of their brains and bodies are less reactive. Within this safe space of the imagination, we are free to wonder, to think in broader, more open ways about how the act fits within moral frameworks that define our communities. How can we place a human being in a box the size of a Christmas present? We are back to Robert Hass’s tour of how poetry, drama, and literature archive awe and horror. We are within the logic of the Natyashastra. Art allows us to contemplate horrors together and imagine social change fueled by awe and wonder.
This is what Leda Ramos teaches her working-class Latinx and immigrant students: art allows you to archive the patterns of life and wonder about social change. Leda’s parents immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1957 and landed in Echo Park, where she grew up with Brazilians, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, an elderly woman who had ridden in a Conestoga wagon from Oklahoma, and a hippie family whose mom didn’t wear bras. As a child, Leda was awestruck by the magic of the carrom board, a game from India, so she made her own and put it in a grassy, overgrown space in her backyard. It would become a community center of laughter, flirting, roughhousing, and playful competition—a sacred social geometry of the play of neighborhood kids.
After stints at highbrow museums, Leda chose the path of the underpaid adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. As I tour her studio in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, she points to a piece of graphic art outlining her immigrant story—it includes an image of her dad—“El Hijo”—in El Salvador, a web of cacti, and a plane in the upper right corner. Next to this piece is a digital painting Leda made with her students of the CARECEN mural Migration of the Golden People, by the artist Judy Baca, which includes scenes of activist Rigoberta Menchú, farmworkers marching with faces wizened from working in the fields, police beating nonviolent protesters on the dirt road of a small village, the lush Central American landscape.