The Tiger’s Eye: Prototype and Symptom

The Tiger’s Eye was a magazine that existed for nine issues in the late 1940s. Attempting to break the conventional model of the common arts/culture little magazine which the founders of Tiger’s Eye believed stultified the arts by publishing some poems, some stories, some critique, and sometimes some art, without replicating the experience of artistic production, they designed a magazine that worked by linkages, associations and groupings, which would occur in the reader’s mind, in order to mimic, if not, actually reproduce, the creative process. In creating such hyperlinks that would transfer information from the poet, to the reader, via the artist–or from the artist, to the reader, via the poet–the mental mainframe generated by this magazine is additionally comparable to the network of networks which we are all very familiar with. The internet could not have been a model for the founders of The Tiger’s Eye, but in retrospect we can see that their attempt was a kind of symptom of deficiency in communication; their nine-issue effort a daring prototype for the online, hyper-connected, multimedia arts/culture magazine to come.

From October 1947 to October 1949, painter John Stephan and poet Ruth Stephan published nine issues of an arts/culture magazine in which creative energy generated by groupings and assemblage were central to an editorial ethos. In an attempt to publish and respond to poetry and art without creating a confrontational relationship between the editorial voice and subjects of its commentary, their magazine gave meaning to works by placing various media alongside each other, without author or artist names, allowing the media shifts to speak for the raw, transferable substance of the works. In one issue, a painting by Max Ernst appears next to the transcription of a Kwakwaka’wakwuitl shaman song (essentially a prayer to the Killer Whale), followed by a dramatic dialogue taking place at the bottom of the sea, in which “the characters are unaware of each other.” In the magazine’s editorial statements, it was made clear that such associative parataxis was intended to make the reader look at the content and ask, “Is it alive? … How does it enter the imagination?” The media shifts were meant to demonstrate the life and activity of work(s). The editors suggest that if a work had something to impart to another work, the works shared a kind of fundamental thing, and this fundamental thing was only localizable in the mainframe of the connections, the reader’s mind.

Although the magazine strung together linkages, such as the Ernst/kwakuitl/underwater complex, it didn’t mention the connecting theme in its pages. The experience for the reader is somewhat like suddenly being submerged. The meaning of the complexes, if there is anything like a meaning to be had from them, occurred in the experience of navigating the magazine’s pages. But, seafaring metaphors aside, the magazine couldn’t merely place two things next to each other and expect a kind of artistically transcendent experience. To intensify the multi-perspectival experience, the magazine left the authors and the artists of the works unnamed. There was “a Tale of Contents” in the center of the book, in which all the artists and authors were listed, but the experience of coming to a naked poem, or a poem unattached to a name, would be more intimate. This intimacy would allow the reader to feel all possibilities–all aspects of a poem, a piece of art. The editors wrote:

A work of art belongs, moreover, to whoever receives it within his life. This Hepplewhite chair is now my chair in my room. That Rilke poem is now the reader’s poem in the reader’s imagination. Why must he drag along the name and personal association of the poet?  The artist who is not a self-adorist creates for the sake of creation, for the impulse to share the impact of reality or the sweep of fancy. Why should he try to build up an importance for himself? That is for the world to decide and to do.

Locating the activity of art in the mind of the receiver (reader/viewer), the editors designed the magazine in such a way that its content would immediately enter the reader’s mental space. Once the work of art had entered that imaginative space, the connections to the other works in the magazine would be easily made. A poem by Shakespeare would be pure poetry before it was a poem by Shakespeare. This would, in the editors’ view, allow for the kind of transcendent power of observation–one could see the poem, as never before–which would realize, or bring to life, artistic works. And this energy, generated by the purified view of a poem by Shakespeare, would be transferable to a painting by Rufino Tamayo and, more importantly, to the reader’s life, precisely because the immanent life of the artistic works would be revealed. If these works could share something it was because they had something to share–and that shareable something was the lifeforce!

Making it clear that the criticism of art had to enliven art, the editors cited Henry James’ 1893 essay, “Criticism,” in their first issue. Following James’ dictum that criticism had to enliven the subject of its critique, criticism in The Tiger’s Eye frequently took on a multi-perspectival approach: five (unnamed) thinkers would each give a different reading of Sartre’s novel The Age of Reason, one reading it “as Metaphysics,” another “as a View of Human Freedom,” another “as a Novel,” another “as a Guide to Young Writers, and another “as Existentialism.” Hyperlinking observations would create a hyperobservation, or rich complex of thought with many available directions. The reader could follow one line of thought or another or two at once, or three, reading one against the other or in light of another. Critique was structured around a network which today mirrors the blogospheric community with its intersecting arguments, comments and rants. This multi-headed beast was, however, controlled in The Tiger’s Eye by the material of the publication. The magazine aspired to something like hyperlinkage but was limited by its print medium.

Some of the most striking observations on the nature of the project were made by the artists with work published in the magazine. Rufino Tamayo, for example, wrote that the “structure is animated with poetry… It is then we breathe again with a whole lung and our faith springs to life because it is evident that painting, in spite of everything, continues existing.” Painting is animated by poetry but only in so far as it could breathe life into the faith of the viewer-reader. The connectivity among various media instantiates a kind of belief. But a belief in what? In the value of arts? If this is the case, then it is only a value because it reminds us of our central role in the life of arts (whose life is only meaningful as it reminds us of the life of our lives!). The art and its makers and its observers are involved in a mutual pact of responsive attentiveness. And technology which was unavailable to The Tiger’s Eye but which we see today fulfilling the enlivening directive with similar kinds of associations, linkages and assemblages, has made the question of how these associations, linkages and assemblages make us aware of the lifeforce all the more relevant.

In a previous article, I offered a provisional answer. But, as the editors of The Tiger’s Eye put it, “we must realize that a sentence is not the only packmule for an idea.”