The Broken Ladder

Philip Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order, Volume 1: My Life Among the Deathworks (forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in January) is structured around 39 paintings and other artworks. Mr. Rieff believes that these works all reflect, in one way or another, the agony of the decay of the old structures of religious authority (what he calls “the second world”) and the birth pangs of the new “anti-culture,” in which there is little regard for authority, and the self is oriented toward personal comfort. In this passage, Mr. Rieff discusses Joan Miró's 1926 painting “Dog Barking at the Moon":

The languages of highest knowledge, of second-world culture as it is a culture of commands and of faith — the amen of truth — are always organized as ladder languages, the traditional conception of a sacred order. Yet, consider the ladder in Joan Miró's “Dog Barking at the Moon.” It is clear this ladder is broken, the rungs do not quite fit, they are impossible to climb. It is an impossible vertical. There is a rather comic dog who cannot possibly climb it to the image of desire, the moon. That dog, baying at a moon that is at a considerable distance, is within the traditions we know in the West, a creature of fidelity. Dog imagery of faith is perfectly clear in the common, generic name given a dog: Fido, from fides, faith. Recall the old RCA Victor record label? The real animal of faith, in a unique way, is the human, who is a creature of faith/knowledge. The futility of Miró's dog, the faith-relation become a barking at the moon, has with it a comic aspect that is always there in the very denial of the ladder languages of faith as they are addressed highest above the vertical in authority.

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 52, Issue 12, Page A17