ABSTRACT
There is a scene in Todd Haynes's homage to Douglas Sirk, Far from Heaven (2002), in which Raymond, the character of the African American gardener in Hartford, Connecticut, and Cathy, the character of a white housewife trapped in a conventional marriage, stand in front of Miro's Nightingale's Song (1940).1 'It moves me', is all that Cathy can say to describe the effect of the image. She admits to the vagueness of her impression, but Raymond hurries to agree that that is exactly what abstract art does-it moves. For that reason, he explains, abstract art picked up where sacred art had left off. The scene captures the cultural situation of the 1950s: two people subjected to norms that decide how they can live and whom they can love, and for whom the future is no vista of cultural possibilities. For a while, in front of Miro's nightingale something snaps, as if a motion were heard that does not change the norms and the arrangement of Cathy and Raymond's separate worlds of prohibited attachments but ends up weakening a bit the stomp of conventions and norms, temporarily undermining their authority. In the brief moment of the vague 'it moves me', social norms lose their hold a little, a slight shift occurs, a jolting is registered; nothing external; everything happens inside the spectator. There occurs 'a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning' (Butler, 1990, p. 139), that makes the authenticity, the very reality of the conventions to which the two characters are subjected through and through seem preposterous, long enough for a shift of point of views to take place. What had been steely certainties are now consigned to the transitoriness of cultural constructions. Eventually, it becomes obvious that the history that has enforced those constricting certainties is the same history that will demolish them. What is at stake in Mird's image is a refusal of forced immobility. Such refusal strikes us even more if compared to the fateful inaction of Kafka's man stranded before the law. Miro's aesthetic abstraction seems to respond to Kafka's portrait of a cruel moral abstractionism. If the latter surges from the void of an absent law lodged inside the subject as a self-imposed injunction to prostrate before the gatekeeper, to
New York. A print of the painting may be found in Mink, 1994, p.69 and also on the web at abcgallery.eom/m/miro/miro-4.html.
