The Surrender of Man – Naomi Falk

[Inside the Castle; 2025]

Surrender to what?

I don’t know where I am, and for a moment that makes me think I’m in fiction.

But it’s not that. This “I” is human.

I thought I was in memoir. Or criticism. The author behind the “I,” I will learn from her website, dislikes that term. I am sorry.

It appears this is none of the above.

How do you articulate with the limited construct of language something as rich and malleable as an emotional response to art? And: is it some sort of curse to find your own artistic tools in the use of that very limited invention?

But also: is page one a bit early to ask why bother continue living in such an ugly world? Maybe it’s not early, and I am just afraid.

How long does it take to accept disorientation? To fully accept it without the secret, caveated belief that this acceptance will miraculously return things to familiarity. It won’t, mostly because that isn’t acceptance.

Many pages later, I tell my Instagram followers: “Every time I write a book review it reminds me that the more something initially confuses me the more obsessed with it I will eventually become.”

Naomi Falk writes in the opening pages of The Surrender of Man about “the words,” the need to write as an affliction that has consumed her, something that makes her miserable as often as it feels like the only way to make sense of her life: “I’m just reciting, like a part of the machine, laboring on in the penal colony. Fulfilling a pointless task to appease my own sanity. By the light of daybreak the words grow garish. To which of the senses do they belong?” She writes in dramatic, visceral images: “The words move with convicted velocity toward a frenzied surrogate dimension where decision is a trap door to an even more sorrowful level of the mind’s labyrinthine catacombs.” Much as I hoped, at first, for a narrative to emerge, the book refused this expectation. Instead, it is a series of interactions with artwork that Brooklyn-based Falk has encountered in her work and arts writing. She is interested in art produced volcanically from fault lines, art about pain and rage and sadness and fear, the ugly feelings that a capitalist, patriarchal society pulls from so many of us. The question at the heart of the book is why we do, or should, proceed with our lives in spite of such pain. She is drawn to “the darker spectrum of emotion produced by art and its practice,” as well as art created from the fear that everything is meaningless as a desperate, but perhaps effective, bid to prove that untrue. She doesn’t look for beauty in this art because it isn’t made primarily to be beautiful; she searches instead for meaning. Falk tells us that it’s up to us to decide whether the book has a narrative arc: “In the broader public arena of the written word, so many narratives we feed each other have a trajectory with a beginning, a climax, a conclusion (This book? That’s for you to decide.).”

Falk doesn’t say that until well into the book, though, and for the first several chapters, I stubbornly, stupidly kept trying to force a more conventional storyline to appear. The Surrender of Man is not a book that you can get your head above, and it becomes great only when you let yourself sink into it. At the start of each chapter, Falk includes an image of an artwork she will write about. These works include artists from around the world and range from paintings to installations to films. Their common ground is an aim to unsettle the audience, evoke disturbance or pain. The first chapter responds to Austrian artist Alfred Kubin’s ink drawing Epidemie, which shows a bleak, faded scene (for me it evoked a snow storm), in which a giant skeleton pours some undefined but certainly poisonous substance over a village. Some of the artists are relative unknowns I couldn’t find in my numerous Google searches but whom Falk met in the Brooklyn art or music scenes. Italian artist Elia Bianchini’s untitled oil painting from 2019 was one of my favorites; the work was part of a series Falk and writer Mina Hamedia commissioned for the inaugural issue of NAUSIKÂE after Falk met Bianchini at a friend’s basement experimental music performance. The painting is all black and blue, a person’s head in the center, eyes looking ill without pupils, tilted back so a black hand in the top right corner can pour something from a bottle into their open mouth. Other works are from more prominent artists displayed in museums, like Puerto Rican artist Juan Antonio Olivares’s ten-minute film Moléculas, which Falk saw at the Whitney in Manhattan — a “devastatingly expressive” teddy bear recounts his pain-washed memories in voiceover. Each time I arrived at a new work, I examined it, at first unsure how this communication was supposed to work. It isn’t a communication I’m used to, and I had to practice.

Falk showed me how. A work that looked completely abstract to me was a whole scene for her. Each piece took her back to memories and feelings, as well as the artist’s motivations and philosophies she knew. Bianchini’s painting reminds Falk of the time, while walking home from elementary school, she found a dying bird, which she tried in vain to keep alive. She realized that “my caretaking was just an alternate means of death that extended what might have been a quick blade plucked from the meadow,” which then leads her back to writing:

I used to lament over any type of ending; every facet of myself was open and turning in perpetuity. But a good writer knows when to stop tinkering; a good painter puts the brush down when it feels right. I wish I’d known that the most unexpected part of getting older was confronting last times, finalities, the end of things.

One way to reckon with endings, with a work’s finitude, is to make this turn back to writing, as Falk does—to test the ways we can broaden a work’s cultural presence, expand its meaning by merging it with our own reactions.

Falk responds to Moléculas first by recounting a failed romance (a relationship that necessitates her coinage “elsewheremaxxing”). The story finds her meeting Olivares’s teddy bear on one of her escapes to an art museum. Her “connection to the work,” she says now, “is unbreakable,” reflecting the transformation we feel in the face of great pain. In each chapter, Falk urges the reader to make meaning from art, tells us that we have the ability to read it in this deeper way as well.

At times, as discussions of art or the writing process tumble into elaborately worded descriptions of pain or intricate metaphors, the book feels overdramatic. When I read “the mind’s labyrinthine catacombs” the first time, it was hard to digest. But even that becomes defensible, perhaps even revolutionary. Maybe the problem, again, was my own expectations, what I have become used to in writing. My own discomfort with sincere expressions of emotion. Falk writes that “self-expression is a risk,” but that “when people turn away from feelings, they stifle what might be a profound delve into the porous limits of the human experience.” It’s a risk many artists and storytellers are unwilling to take. As uncomfortable as a writer’s angry vulnerability can be, it’s an alternative to the “dissociative feminism” narratives that keep cropping up: stories whose young, white, female protagonists are marked mostly by their disaffectedness, their dissociation. They might be manic, icy, sexually confused, hiding from some childhood trauma, or simply trying to feel as little as possible in an often horrifying world. While there is value in many of these depictions of modern womanhood, that relatability can be unproductive: what are you relating to, exactly, if you can’t tell how these characters feel since they themselves don’t seem to know? And when did not caring become chic? What made us believe that was a useful, powerful attitude? Falk opposes this idea so strongly it is at times uncomfortable, but necessarily so. Art and language, Falk says, “are the strongest tools of the mind I know.” And making meaning from that art requires we care about it, that we let it pull apart our fissures and break us open:

So many of us have something to say but imagine we do not have the outlet or time or knowledge: engaging with art, going to the museum for an hour, could be, in itself, a gesture toward artmaking. What you bring to the encounter is a lifetime. A work of art is what you understand it to be as your mind opens toward a person, allegory, culture, angle, hue, texture, sentence. You have a feeling about it and mustn’t worry about whether someone will agree.

While Falk at first saw her own need to write as something put upon her, something she feared was purposeless, she has since found reason for it: “the antidote to meaninglessness was art. I could be the agent of my own meaning; the answers would come from my perception and understanding of the world and those around me.”

Each chapter, too, is a reminder of how easy it is to slip into passivity the way we so often do in the face of fine arts in particular. But, if you let them, these chapters can pull you out of that and toward overthinking, or extensive thinking, for the benefit of your own senses. “Perhaps,” Falk writes, “we create art in hopes that others will be moved by what they see to do the same.” She thinks of art history as a “series of responses; each artist is just paying homage to all that has come before,” like an ongoing story passed down through generations. This book is Falk’s own contribution to that lineage, each chapter her “song” for an artist through whom she has understood herself.

Why participate in this emotionally taxing conversation with artists and their work? Self-expression might be risky, but misunderstanding art might be worse, as we seem just as confused today about the importance of the “self” in art as we are uncomfortable with emotional “expression.” Falk’s own writing reflects a tension between the online, nothing-is-serious, sarcasm-pilled world and sincere artistic appreciation. She drops slang in the middle of eloquent paragraphs—she likes artist Kiyomi Taylor’s “impulse for strong and deranged confrontation of her own psyche” because the alternative, she writes, is that:

the hot girls of my generation have caricatured their need for a year of rest and relaxation (no shade) so much that it has come full circle and I see them swallowing their pain in exchange for what? Following pin-brained internet dudes into the White Supremacy pipeline. Becoming hateful and bland. Wanting so desperately to be cool and romanticizing how much they lose touch with themselves. The 2020s whisper that they want more…

The “no shade” feels jarring, but that disjunction is part of the point. Disjunction is where we live now, and we must somehow understand art from within it. Losing touch with ourselves, swallowing pain rather than expressing it, can have us forgetting that art is, in part, definedby the emotion behind it. I think Falk, seeing art as a language (and language as art), would agree that if something has no creator behind it with something to say, nothing to make us feel, it is not art at all.

The art many of us see most of these days is through a screen, reproduced, flattened, removed from three-dimensional reality, perhaps viewed in a tiny square behind a microcelebrity’s blown out hair on Instagram. We interact with art by watching someone else theoretically interact with it, although our own interaction is a millisecond blur as we scroll to the next post, and we know their interaction goes little beyond aesthetic or monetary compulsions. We start to imagine art only as an immediate visual, forgetting the text(ure) that accompanies it. And with this attitude, when we see something not even created by a human being with any pain or anger or history to expel into it, we are inclined to believe it is art, regardless of how uncomfortable that makes us. We forget we have a choice, that defining art differently can resolve the problem of its co-option by non-human entities, at least to an extent.

It is rare to see someone engage as deeply and personally with art as Falk does in The Surrender of Man. And that deep engagement is not something we should lose. I interpret Falk’s idea of “surrender” as permission: permission to engage, rather than distance ourselves, to embrace our subjective responses to art and lean against that art to understand ourselves, to feel things instead of fear them. The word “surrender” also speaks of endings, of death. Maybe in part, Falk is suggesting we accept that as well, and that we create and converse with art that faces its inevitably. When I returned to the book’s prologue after finishing it, the writing didn’t feel so mystifying. The first sentence reads, “In moments of darkness, I gravitate toward art.” And there might be no historical moment of darkness—a time when the purpose of art has never been more in question—for which this book is more necessary. Art born from the uglier parts of psyches, the type Falk is interested in, might too be the best counterpoint to the poreless images we see online. If art is to appeal to us while serving its communicative purpose of expressing some present distress, maybe it can be the dialectical synthesis of the ugly and the beautiful.

The responsibility now falls to the reader. Falk has done her part, producing meaning for herself from the art she engages with and reacting by, at times compulsively, it seems, creating something in response. Now “caring about anything here,” she writes, “all depends on you.”

Erin Evans is a writer from Michigan, now living in New York. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as an arts writer and editor for The Michigan Daily. Her essays and criticism have appeared there and in Vestoj.