Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2010
Robert Bergman
by Peter GabelWhen we say we seek tikkun olam-to heal the world-we implicitly refer to a reservoir of human goodness, a wholeness from which we are alienated and which we call upon each other to restore or even to make manifest in a more complete way for the first time. We don't mean that the world must be fixed, like a fence, but that there is a truth within us as social beings that has become distorted and masked from our own awareness, and yet that can be felt, intuited, and known, and therefore healed from its present fallen state. But to make the case for a tikkun olam-to really convince ourselves and one another that this convulsive social healing is possible and is therefore the necessary moral project of our lives-we need decisive reminders that we absolutely do know what we're talking about, that we are referring to something real within and between us that calls upon us to resolve the social illness that separates us and makes us unwell.
The photographic portraits of Robert Bergman-currently on display at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., at the Museum of Modern Art's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, and at the Yossi Milo Gallery on West 25th Street in Manhattan-provide a decisive reminder of this kind. These breathtaking works of art, of which we offer one example on this page, bring us face to face with other human beings. But unlike most face-to-face encounters in which the outsides of two faces are visible to each other from within each viewer's subjective isolation booth, the encounters made possible by Bergman's photos provide sudden moments of the discovery of mutual Presence, in which we are pulled out of our customary withdrawn state, the key symptom of our illness, and into a sacred contact with the humanity of the other behind and through the image of the face itself. I call these works breathtaking because they unfailingly cause an interruption or disturbance of my breathing as I experience the shock, and the relief, of being brought into an experience of mutual recognition with one after another of the human beings Bergman portrays-and I believe they will do the same for anyone who contemplates them at full size in the gallery. In each case the trappings of a social identity are there that convey a definite impression of a particular life's circumstances-of one or another legacy of suffering and solitude and also of resilience, determination, and effort-but the accumulation of past influences is in every case transcended by an uncanny illumination, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that conveys a sense of universal vulnerability and at the same time invincible spiritual strength.
The aesthetic of postmodernism is at odds with the spiritual activism of the Tikkun community because it celebrates irony, the glancing blow, a "quotation mark" approach to the social world that seeks to evade being trapped in false representations of the self, and in so doing participates in the Fear of the Other that is the source of our problem in the first place. Bergman's art rows mightily in the other direction. Like postmodernism, Bergman takes on the false world masquerading as real, but he does so by making present our inner authenticity and our longing for social redemption through the act of recognition of who we really are. Instead of stranding us in our own isolation through clever facade-puncturing deconstruction, Bergman pulls us straight through the world of appearances and, by making who we really are manifest, shows us in our hearts that healing to become this who-we-really-are is our moral destiny, is what we're supposed to be doing with our lives.
The portraits are up only until January 10 at the National Gallery, January 9 at the Yossi Milo Gallery, and January 4 at P.S.1. So start the New Year right and get out and see them if you're able. We will ourselves exhibit Bergman's portraits on our online art gallery from January 6. For the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery, go to www.tikkun.org/daily and click on "Art Gallery."
Peter Gabel is a law professor and author, and is associate editor of Tikkun.
Source Citation
Gabel, Peter. 2010. Robert Bergman. Tikkun 25(1): 24.
