band of clouds on the horizon were a portent of landfall and a new world. mystical traditions clouds express the unknowable nature of the divine (for example, The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval work of Christian mysticism). has a religious drift to it. When the clouds part, we glimpse the light. Veiling God, too terrible for human eye, the cloud already symbolizes the presence of God. gods; and in Egypt of the creation deity. Later, as Jacqueline Taylor Basker outlines in her fascinating essay "The Cloud as Symbol: Destruction or Dialogue": image of the cloud for Yahweh. As an aniconic people, who could not use a tangible material image to rep- resent their god, the cloud provided a convenient insubstantial object to use as a visible symbol. During the wanderings of the Jews in the des- ert, the cloud hovers over or in the `tent of witness' and plays a sym- bolic role as a recurrent theophany (an appearance of the Divine) in Old Testament scripture to witness the presence of God. underlying the divine nature of Christ, as we see in the Transfiguration described in the Gospel of Matthew (17:5): cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, `This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!' can recall religious ideas about the eye of God or clouds of glory, while also evoking secular notions of castles in the sky--or, in opposite mood, mushroom clouds and nuclear destruction. religious myth, water precedes creation. We sense this in Sweeney's spectacular series of horizon photos taken from Raumati where he sometimes lives on the lower West Coast of New Zealand's North Island. In these images, where water meets sky in changing light, it is as if the void takes shape--a creation myth enacted for his lens. For Sweeney, who grew up Roman Catholic, the first verses of Genesis would surely have inspired his vision: heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, `Let there be light': and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God di- vided the light from the darkness. emerges out of water and ultimately dissolves back into it, purified and washed clean. As Eliade says, water is the "reservoir of all the possibilities of existence." Likewise, the horizon line opens us up to unlimited possibility, releasing us from life as it has taken shape around us and into the infinite beyond. "The health of the eye," wrote Emerson, "seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough." in particular how this view from Raumati used to excite his wonder about what might lie ahead for him--a virtuality that became actual when he left these islands surrounded by water to reimagine himself on the island of Manhattan. land that called him forth. New York in particular is the symbolic and storied center of the world, especially compared to New Zealand geographically and by association culturally on the edge of the world. But necessarily coterminous for religious man, the center and the edge fold over each other for Sweeney. Hence, in his photography, he brings together nature--symbolized by the New Zealand landscape--and culture-- symbolized by New York. centrality or sacrality. Culture, on the other hand, is man-made, temporal, and by comparison regarded as peripheral. So, already in Sweeney's work there is a certain displacement if not inversion between the idea of New Zealand and New York. According to this reading New Zealand would be a natural paradise and central while New York, teeming and distracted, would be far flung and on the edge. polar world views artfully turned upside- down--his framing of nature is determined by both the history of religion and of art (and in this way are mediated or unnatural; while his urban views, equally mediated by art history, are presented as natural pieces of infinity. incomparable natural splendor. As Sweeney says in conversation, "If mountains were show business this would be Broadway." At the same time, we can't help but be aware of its "chocolate box" vista--a view a million other travelers have snapped in |