Art As The Superior Path to Truth
A Review of Sierra Faust and Benjamin Havey's Neither Men nor Gods but Something Closer to the Former at the UMKC Gallery of Art.
I write about art. Unsurprisingly, Sierra Faust's and Benjamin Havey's Neither Men Nor Gods But Something Closer to the Former at the UMKC Gallery of Art (Feb 6-March 14, 2025) caught my attention specifically upon discovering Faust's visual art centered around the practice of writing. With high-art and high-concept elements rooted in polystylistic interplay, allegory, and allusion, what wasn’t there to be psyched about? The mainstay of the exhibit's singularity is the marriage of the artistic with the academic. Havey's romantic, life-affirming musical ruminations on the piano alongside Faust's fascinating inversion of a critic's role of "writing about art" transposed into "art about writing" makes for a meditative viewing experience for vast audiences.
Installation view. Photo provided by EG Schempf.
Both Faust and Havey produce works in response to Hesiod's Work and Days; a didactic poem centered around Hesiod's views on labor and morality. Hesiod, a poet, philosopher, and farmer, views the commitment to work as a path toward righteousness. The repetitive commitment to labor is demonstrated through the two artistic practices of drawing and piano playing.
"My practice is drawing a comparison or a parallel between written and visual language, so for me, these are twin processes, both very direct and very psychological," Faust says, describing her approach hearkening to aspects of the artist and the scribe in the days long before mechanical technology upset the natural balance of things. Neither Men Nor Gods involves piano selections and performances woven collaboratively with Faust's multifaceted ensemble, with each rendition occupying distinct modes and frames.
Installation view. Photo provided by EG Schempf.
Installation view. Photo provided by EG Schempf.
"I think what this exhibition is about is striving for something perfect and falling short. The title of this exhibition, Neither Men Nor Gods But Something Closer to the Former, is a line from Hesiod's Theogony. I thought it kind of spoke to this broader idea of trying to achieve this Platonic ideal that we might do in art or music, and I think that the human experience is just striving and falling short," says Faust. Havey continues, "Hesiod's work combines very concrete moral platitudes with how to live your life and combines more of these practical aspects of philosophy with these wild mythological depictions."
Another important philosophical figure, Glaucon, probably would have proclaimed, "Poetry is the superior path to truth" (or something like that). However, such distinctions between what art is and what art is not within the milieu of modernity have become (and perhaps always were) relatively meaningless. Is poetry the superior path to truth, or is it art in much broader terms? And where does that distinction exist, exactly, if it even does?
Counting Piece by Sierra Faust. Photo provided by EG Schempf.
Careful curation of intricate, labor-intensive illustrations and drawings carved into tablets of stone by Faust is rendered with mathematical codifications abstracted from the original empirical quantity of time and form. They become simultaneously ancient and contemporary artifacts, pieces of sacred material culture with an inventive set of qualities that utilize an array of techniques from artists, poets, composers, and philosophies past while generating something ever-evolving: an eternal clock of self-expression that endlessly ticks, never seeming to strike. The pair marry scholarly and artistic mediums independently and together. In conversation, the artists are a healthy synthesis of eclectic creative firebrands and lively theorists. "For me, art is like a philosophical arena that you're playing in, and your tools are objects and images in process. You can use others' tools if you want. You can use tools any way you want to. You can present these ideas to a viewer any way you want to see these ideas in play," Faust says.
By Sierre Faust. Photo provided by EG Schempf.
Faust's aesthetic is at times reminiscent of public art from thousands of years ago, punctuated with a modern and idiosyncratic twist—a kind of "calligraffiti"-glyph-informed imbued with intricate textural patterns correlated to poetic tradition and linguistic logic, further illuminating technical merit in form and the conceptual in content, as would a historical exhibit unbeholden to any one historical era. The duo utilizes spatial language to contextualize the semiology of the heady components involved in their mixed-media interactivity. Neither Men Nor Gods reverberate through the typology of the philosopher-poet and express a desire to absorb and express life's many flavors inside a finely finessed arc.
Indeed, Faust and Havey's execution elicits a mutually beneficial payoff of cooperative philosophizing- where the scribe encounters the lyre, Debussy meets Korean poetry meets emotive lyricality, provoking the listener to feel something not only visceral but also suscept themselves to the contemplative, where ancestral glyphs encounter arcane symbology. Where techniques are transferred, medium-bending invites mini-panoramas and metaphors to crash over each other like stunning crescendos of oratorical poetic flair, interspersed with musical narrative after musical narrative.
Havey, a music graduate student, provides impeccable musical selection and accompaniment. His tender construction of sound engenders communion with the romantic and deeply embeds the lyrical inside mythological evocations. Thus, the psychologically discrete limitations of implicit cognition are slowly dilated by mixing surface-level, disparate, acoustical elements that coalesce into lofting and wafting musical phrases that coexist, sparkle, and ponder.
Parts of Stone Calendar by Sierra Faust. Photo provided by EG Schempf.
Artists and audiences could benefit from imbibing such an interdisciplinary endeavor and funneling it through a decidedly philosophical filter. Such a practice expands the enterprise of the conventionally self-limiting parenthetic parameters that saturate current artistic norms and the “Art World” with whatever happens to be academically or culturally popular. Faust and Havey's approach liberates audiences from artificial boundaries and conventional, outmoded ways of thinking, often assuming the roles of modern philosophers themselves.
Such distinctions and "rules" are the same rules that Faust and Havey seem eager to tinker with or reimagine in their ongoing collaborations to create something unique and worthwhile. I can only speak as a critic, and I can speak as a critic of critics as I very much like to critique my fellow critics. Humans are not good critics, at least not without the benefit of hindsight. Paraphrasing the words of Havey, the lyrics, pieces, and worlds in this exhibit have their own universes within them. "We want others to feel something in what they imagine."
Such is the nature of truth.
Installation views of Neither Men nor Gods but Something Closer to the Former, all works by Sierra Faust. All images provided by EG Schempf. Thank you for contributing your words Alexej Savreux.
