THE SURRENDER OF MAN (EXCERPT) by NAOMI FALK
March 18 2025An excerpt from Naomi Falk's upcoming book The Surrender of Man, published by Inside the Castle, out April 22nd. This section is taken from a chapter about Helen Frankenthaler's painting entitled Trojan Gate.
You should know that we bring our baggage to any interpretation of a work of art; any interpretation that matters, anyway. You recall your exaltations and sufferings, once-shapeless memories are kicked from the silt and their details strike like lightning before your eyes. Perhaps you cringe before an abstraction of rosy reds and soft whites because as a child, you once ate a bag of peppermint saltwater taffy and vomited at a Californian Wax Museum. Perhaps transient rainbows have peppered your dreams and reconjured in the silvery spectrum of a video artist's light pool. There is a place for attempts at objectivity, but not here. Not in the rebuilding of the self. I didn't begin to study art from an academic angle. I don't like it there; I deny them what they want. I want the facts to be right but the feelings to be mine.
Naomi Falk is a writer, editor, and book designer.
Inside the Castle:
Inside the Castle is a small press operated from Lawrence, Kansas. They began operations in the spring of 2014. Their books are unique from one another but share a vision, that literature is not representational but incantatory, that books are objects that exist much like other objects in your life and home, only they have additional dimensions, not dimensions separate or distant from the ones you occupy, but involuted dimensions that only become apparent when you reach out to them.
www.insidethecastle.org