Many would argue that any attempt to create art on the subject of the Holocaust by an artist who has not experienced the horrors of a death camp, or been raised by a family that has, would be destined to failure. Without authentic context, how could one possibly understand in a any meaningful way the events which took place? Indeed, the only genuine artistic response to the Holocaust would seem to come from those who have experienced it in some way and whose testimony has survived.
I was born in 1965 in the United Kingdom, was raised Christian and became an artist. Between 2008 and 2009, with no personal connection, I set out to create a series of paintings which would in some way explore an aspect of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany.
As an artist I believe in the civilising power of culture and have a deep love and admiration for the heritage of German society. Yet to see that a nation so great had in the past turned its means to an act so dark is a source of profound intellectual and emotional disturbance. How is it that a society as culturally and materially advanced as that of 20th Century Germany, a society that had previously nurtured Beethoven, Goethe and Kant, be capable of instigating a mass killing programme? The idea of creating a set of paintings in response to this question had been gestating within me for around 20 years. In many senses it feels that the greater the trauma, either individual or social, the greater the period needs to be before examining how one feels about it. So it was not until almost seventy years after the Wannsee Conference and the instigation of the Holocaust, that it felt even remotely appropriate for someone like myself to attempt to tackle the theme.
The main source of inspiration for this undertaking did not come from the imagery of starving figures or contorted piles of dead bodies which have become the all too familiar yet tragic representation of the Holocaust; in fact it emerged from many hours spent visiting the Seagram Paintings (1958 – 1959) by Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) at the Tate, London. As a set, the Seagram Paintings hang like a painted version of Stonehenge, acting as a metaphorical gateway to the eternal void. The German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840), who practiced a century earlier than Rothko, was also famous for producing images around the theme of a universal emptiness experienced within the human psyche, such as his Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), The Monk by the Sea (1808 -1810) and The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809 – 1810). With these and many other of Friedrich’s paintings we are confronted by a lonely figure who stands on the threshold of something much bigger than ourselves, something unknown. In studying Friedrich’s work we imagine ourselves to stand in the shoes of the subject. A hundred years later and Rothko removes any proxy figure within the picture plane that we might imagine ourselves to be, and in doing so places us the viewer directly at the metaphorical heart of the painting, making for a more immediate visual experience.
It was this idea of meditating over a void which most intrigued me. Not images of the Holocaust itself, because as horrific as they are, as time passes, the shock of what we are looking at subsides; in fact one thing which puzzles me is just how quickly we become de-sensitized to pictures of brutality, and how over time audiences become hardened by portrayals of atrocity. Instead, what I hoped to achieve with this series is a renewed look at the subject, a reflection which aimed to consider how there may be an underlying darkness residing in us all. More specifically, what intrigued me revolved around how we act within our social setting as individuals. And that this may on occasion, if we don’t pay attention to the seemingly insignificant details, pave the way towards our own culture descending into a void of inhumanity. This meditation seeks in some way to explore whether a social evil is the responsibility of only a small handful of people who manage to manipulate and distort a broader culture, or whether a whole society can be held in some way accountable for its actions.
As I began to contemplate this series, I was highly conscious of Theodor W. Adorno’s line ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ (1949) and wondered if, indeed, there can ever be any art after Auschwitz? After all, historians, survivors and nations are still trying to grasp exactly what happened decades after its occurrence, so how could any artist hope to approach a theme of such magnitude? Is this subject in fact off limits to all artists aside from those who have witnessed it first-hand? If this is the case, then it would seem at first appearance that an art of either reportage or catharsis, an art of account or therapy, rather than of symbolism and interpretation would be the only authentic response.
In order to explore this I first want to ask the question: What actually is art? For me, art is the creation of metaphor, the statement of one thing as being something it clearly is not. By engaging in this way the artist seeks to create a fresh way of looking at a subject, opening our eyes to additional angles and ideas which help bring new perceptions to bear. How then can this be applied to a trauma as great as the Holocaust?
For a person who was there, who recorded and depicted scenes they witnessed first-hand, by camera or with pen and paper, perhaps it is impossible to make metaphor from an event of such magnitude and instead perhaps we should regard the greatest achievement in this context as being to have witnessed and documented in some way, as a testament for others, events so horrific. This, I would argue, is both reportage of the highest order and a statement of the strength of the human spirit to be recognised and heard against extraordinary odds. Works of this nature are documentation brought back from the edge of humanity. It is this material, the written, spoken and recorded matter of survivors and eye witnesses which becomes the substance of authentication. And it is this substance which artists can attempt to use as the source material from which to create metaphor.
Art then appears to enter as a second stage to understanding; it arrives as a reflection of our emotional responses to events, rather than a description of them, enabling us to gain in some small way an alternative angle on our sensitivities to experiences.
In the 1970’s the Slovenian born painter Zoran Mušič (1909 – 2005) produced a series of haunting images in response to the Holocaust titled We are not the Last which depict twisted and emaciated human figures, often appearing as a kind of knotted undergrowth. Mušič was recognised during his lifetime as an artist of international importance, with his works hanging in many of the world’s most important art museums, and in 1956 his status as a major artist was confirmed when he won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. Mušič had moved to Venice in October of 1943, and in the November of the following year he was arrested and deported to Dachau concentration camp by Nazi forces. Whilst at Dachau he produced over one hundred sketches of life in the camp, of which around seventy survive.
Mušič’s work offers us an authentic response to the horrors of the Nazi concentration and death camps, perhaps the most genuine of all artistic voices on this subject. Yet we notice that his artistic response to the horrors of Dachau began as a direct recording of the sights he observed, only being synthesised some 25 years later into a more metaphorical format and a form we would view as art rather than record. This holding trauma apart for an extended period permits the emotional response time to breathe, enabling something more considered and meditative to emerge. It brings us to an understanding that great art may not be born of an immediate reaction to trauma, but instead grows slowly as a measured reply to the subject it explores.
In this way we might begin to observe that with Zoran Mušič, first came the recording of suffering, then much later a symbolic reply to it. And I believe what occurs within the individual is mirrored within society, and that what has been recorded in a time of pain, becomes the material with which artists much later build a metaphorical bridge between individual experience and a broader social understanding. This was the foundation of understanding for my own series of paintings Nazi Gas Chambers: From Memory to History (2008 – 2009). Having no personal connection to the Holocaust, I felt it was neither appropriate nor possible for me to produce a personal response to the sorrow and death caused by the events in question. Nor did it seem appropriate for someone in my position to undertake the creation of monument to those departed. Instead, what I hoped for was an alternative meditation on the origins of this tragedy and how it arose.
For the first part of this project I drew six delicately coloured pencil drawings designed to be reminiscent of hand tinted postcards. They represent external views of the hospitals in Germany and Austria where the T4 Euthanasia programme took place between 1939 and 1941, the programme which acted as the first whisper of the death camps which were to follow. I wanted them to have the appearance of holiday photos, the locations do after all look like retreats and hotels, places where state sanctioned murder would appear to be the last thing on the agenda. This somehow innocent and innocuous view is something I hoped might act as a visual stepping stone to the larger more direct paintings which make up the second part of the series.
The second part of the project consists of five large scale black and white oil paintings, each portraying the interior of a gas chamber. Each painting shares the same horizon line so that they work visually as a unit when hung together. Over the course of the five paintings the spaces depicted widen out, from the small and confined adapted shower room presented in Bernberg through to the large purpose built killing room at Auschwitz. As each painting visually expands we gain a sense of each room having the capacity to accommodate more people, and notice a gradual falling away of the pretence of cleansing the newly arrived to the straight forward practicalities of exterminating as many people as possible in the shortest given time.
The rooms themselves are painted devoid of figures, so that we might view them as places which hold no moral position about the events they were used for. They stand silent and empty, unconcerned by what we might think or feel. With this somewhat detached observance it is my aim that we view the Nazi gas chambers not so much as killing centers, which of course they were, but as a perverse cultural expression, constructed by a social group acting together towards a common goal, during a particular time and place. Each brick cemented in to position, every tile carefully laid down and all the pipes meticulously plumbed. In doing this it is my hope that we might begin to consider visually how no one person was individually responsible for the realization of these rooms or what took place in them. Not the architects who drew up the plans or the suppliers of materials to build them, not the factory workers who made the tins which held the Zyklon B or the truck drivers who delivered it. Instead they are the manifestation of a series of people acting in unconnected and banal roles towards a common goal.
Evil, if that is the term we use within this context, is allowed to occur because it takes root in the mundane. The gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek and the many other locations of Nazi mass killing did not just appear overnight, someone somewhere received an order to tile the gas chamber, someone was contracted to make and fit the pipes, supply the bricks make the metal doors and their hinges. All these people and many more will have received money for their work and not thought of themselves as directly responsible for the atrocity of the Holocaust, because they did not carry out the actual killing or come up with the original policy. They were in fact just getting on with their lives. And perhaps this is where one aspect of denial can take hold, that when no one person can be held wholly accountable, then no one person can be easily held to blame. Denial can of course be used as a coping mechanism. By ignoring or disbelieving powerful events which have the potential to emotionally overwhelm us, we enable our everyday lives to continue, we gain the capacity to ‘carry on as normal’.
As an artist coming to the subject of the Holocaust without any special connection and at a considerable time lag behind the events, it would be fair to ask; why should one do this? Personally, my motivations lie in a drive to explore the often difficult subjects that underpin contemporary society and appear as universal human themes. When we look at the history of the twentieth century in particular, we see violence enacted on a grand scale. We witness rampage shootings, total war and genocides which have occurred in places as diverse as Cambodia, Columbine, Armenia, Nanking and Rwanda, acts which have come to define the twentieth century as perhaps the most brutal of all time. In fact it would appear that violence is somehow hard wired into the human psyche. But as we know, it was the industrialisation of the killing process which for many marks out the Holocaust of Nazi Germany as a chapter to be treated separately from all other atrocities.
Now, after seventy years, as the last survivors die out, memory of the Holocaust has the potential to fade, despite written, spoken and visual legacy. Perhaps after seventy years we have a duty not only to archive and shore up the testimony of survivors but to examine our past for lessons as to how we might live more fully in the future, one in which we treat each other with respect and dignity.
So what lessons might we begin to learn by studying the gas chambers of Nazi Germany? For me, it is that social atrocities, when they arrive, come with little warning, yet they are enabled by the commonplace activities of many people who cannot be held individually fully accountable for what occurs. And it is perhaps these small sins of omission which we must all be on our guard for if we are to maintain and build communities of peace and prosperity in the future, societies where each person is valued for their uniqueness within the group regardless of their opinions. By embracing our differences we are able to nurture and develop strong communities, creating civilizations which are enriched and rendered beautiful through diversity.
Robert Priseman
This essay was first published in the journal ‘The Holocaust in History and Memory’ Vol 6. The full series of original paintings and drawings‘Nazi Gas Chambers: From Memory to History’ is held in the permanent collection of the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria. See the work at http://www.robert-priseman.com/projects/gas-chambers/
Sunday 20 April 2014
Art and Death: From Crucifixion to Lethal Injection
In early 2005 I was visiting the National Gallery in London and found myself looking at The Mond Crucifixion by Raphael. I was transfixed by the beautiful handling of paint, the delicate portrayal of skin and fabric, and the sensitive expressions on the faces of the subjects. And I found myself thinking over how universal images are of people being put to death in western culture and how many of these have their root in the execution of Christ.
Raphael’s 1503 Mond Crucifixion conveys a sense of deep calm. At the feet of the central figure of Jesus kneel Saint Jerome to our left to whom the painting is dedicated and opposite him Saint Mary Magdalen. Behind Saint Jerome stands Saint the Virgin Mary and behind Mary Magdalen, Saint John the Baptist. In attendance two angels catch Christ’s blood in chalices as it issues from his wounds and in the sky above, the Sun and the Moon appear as silent witness to one of the most famous events in history.
This painting is modelled in the classical tradition. The composition of the figures is arranged into a formal rhombus design which helps establish a sense of balance and order. Elsewhere the use of atmospheric perspective in the background landscape and a rich use of colour all contribute to present a scene which radiates a feeling of immense beauty. Artists of the Renaissance, like Raphael, employed geometrical principles to help compose their paintings so that the mathematical order observed in the movement of stars would be reflected upon the earth. In this way, the adoption of the golden section rule, Fibonacci sequence and Euclidian geometry were engaged to mirror the divine order of heaven upon the world, which in turn placed the human actions depicted at the center of a celestial symmetry.
Whilst Raphael’s painting is rooted in a specific historical event, we see his portrayal of it is deliberately set at a far remove from reality. The horror of a public execution has been transformed into a scene of serenity, where Christ, who we witness from the discharge of his blood in the picture, remains alive yet apparently free from physical agony. As viewers, Raphael leads our emotions to experience his work in quiet reverence. We accept the tableau we witness as one of God’s grace enacted on human drama, where heavenly order triumphs over the chaos of emotion, where our own pain is removed and death is finally defeated. We are offered peace.
In presenting capital punishment as salvation, Raphael uses painting as a metaphor of deliverance from sin and transforms despair into hope. Yet the same event depicted by the hands of another artist who employs an alternative approach, can convey an entirely different message. An interesting example of this is found in the Russian artist Nicolai Ge’s 1893 painting The Crucifixion. Here Ge presents us with a brutal counterpoint to Raphael’s vision of order and beauty, which is perhaps one of the most accurate depictions of a Roman crucifixion ever to have been painted. Gone for Ge are the richly dyed robes worn by Christ and his attendants and in their place are no more than a few tattered rags. And where the crucifix in The Mond painting stands, judging by the height of the figures, at around 11 feet tall, the same structure in Ge’s image has a much shorter and more practical height of around seven feet, which, unlike Raphael’s skilfully constructed cross, is comprised of no more than a roughly hewn post set in the ground with a beam secured across the top. We also notice that the feet in Ge’s painting are not nailed together one over the other, resting on a small platform, which was an artistic invention, but are nailed instead through the ankles on either side of the post.
All colour in this painting has drained away to leave us with a starkly monochromatic vision. This lack of vibrancy creates a joyless impression of an unfeeling society which is carrying out its legal sanctions on the criminally guilty. Gone are the angels, the sun and the moon and the soothing mandate of heaven with its calming use of geometrical proportion. The portrayal of the contorted figures at an angle to the flat of the picture plane only heightens the sense of dramatic tension, leaving us in no doubt about how we should feel when we look at his painting - repelled. This approach to portraying the death of Christ has rarely been adopted by other painters, who by and large favour the course taken by Raphael.
Ge’s realism offers us a vision of excruciating pain and desolation. His is not a divine Christ, but a human Jesus. And when we compare the two alternative approaches Raphael and Ge take to explore the same event, we realise that by adopting different compositional techniques, colour palettes and model expressions, painters are able to influence the way we as an audience feel about what we are looking at. The artist becomes the author of our emotions.
Aside from Ge, many artists have depicted realistic images of people being put to death in the name of the state, though usually with a secular theme. When they do it is common to find the subject adopting a cruciform pose, as it is a pose which has come to represent both universal human suffering and salvation. Such examples are found in Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier and in Nick Ut’s 1972 Vietnam war photograph Trang Bang after a South Vietnamese Air Force Napalm Attack. What we notice when looking at these pictures is that we tend to identify personally with the distress of the subject. Their pain metaphorically becomes our pain. This is in part because of the way the images are composed, with the main character being the focus of the core narrative around which all the other components revolve. This emotional identification with the suffering of individuals at the hand of the state is a signifier of liberal thinking and a desire to limit the extent of the power of government over the individuality of the citizen.
After viewing the Mond Crucifixion and these 19th and 20th Century examples of cruciform suffering, I became interested in exploring just how an artist might engage with the theme of execution in the 21st Century. As an artist, I had recently completed a set of paintings of empty hospital interiors and was struck by how similar they are in appearance to American lethal injection facilities, and so I decided to use these as my starting point. In undertaking the ‘Hospital’ series I had been drawn initially to the way medical environments are designed to perform their function with a matter of factness which overrides our emotional concerns by soothing them. Sealed from the outside world, like an airport or underground station, they disconnect us from everyday life. Gone is any sense of natural light, season or time of day. Gone too is the chaos of nature and any regional reference which might establish an awareness of place. This has the effect of creating an environment with a surreal quality which is detached from the every day.
In the painting Operating Theatre, which I produced in 2004, I sought to deepen the sense of the surreal already apparent in the surgical setting by removing the human figure. The specific operating theatre in question was located on the outskirts of London, in Kent, and in painting it I further softened the shadows cast by the rooms’ lights, removed labels, simplified the equipment, and enhanced the muted colours of the floor and walls. These actions were designed to heighten an already amplified sense of calm.
Around the operating gurney we can see plenty of space for a medical team to perform their duties without being constrained, and we also notice how most of the equipment is mounted on castors to help keep things fluid and easily at hand. This is a space in which all life to be cared for is valued equally and, no matter who you are, medical care for those at the receiving end provides an experience without hierarchy. It simultaneously presents a view of the best and worst place we could ever expect to find ourselves in, because we are presented with an environment dedicated to preserving our physical being, yet one which we would hope never to need. This is a theatre where the performance of real life is played out with ordered professionalism. A place where the patient relinquishes control of their body to the authority of the surgeon, so that the chaotic sensations of fear, pain and human frailty may be washed away by the cool order of scientific reason.
When we look at Operating Theatre’s counterpart, the painting Lethal Injection Gurney we find many similarities. I undertook this painting in 2007, and it depicts the interior of the execution facility at The Walls in Huntsville, Texas. Like the operating theatre it presents us with an enclosed interior removed from daylight, nature or any reference to its geographical location. Beautiful turquoise wall colouring, soft fawn curtains, subdued lighting and a crisp white sheet stretched over a soft thin mattress for the comfort of the condemned, show us that here the iconography of the hospital has been deliberately adopted. And just as with the operating theatre, we can see that all life which is subject to ‘treatment’ is handled without hierarchy. On the right-hand side we glimpse a windowed room where witnesses sit, and to the left a two-way mirror behind which the guards who administer the lethal injection sit, so that they might see without being seen.
The overriding impression here is one of a calm disconnection from reality which helps steer our feelings as far as possible from any sense of physical and emotional trauma connected to the executions which are carried out. This is not for the benefit of the person being put to death, but for our benefit. It is we the viewers who do not wish to be distressed by what we witness, a sense further enhanced by the knowledge that events are going on in private, behind closed doors.
By stark contrast, Nicolai Ge’s depiction of Roman crucifixion presents a spectacle designed to be as public and as painful as possible, with the condemned being positioned along a busy road outside the city gates where they might form a powerful public display. This demonstrates the Roman consensus for the death penalty, when enacted by crucifixion, to be seen by men, women and children, and to be preceded by the torture of the body.
What conclusions then can we draw from these observations?
It would appear that our emotions are subject to external influences, and in understanding this, an artist like Raphael can choose to paint a picture of suffering and death and present it to us in such a way that we feel a sense of tranquillity when we view it. And that just as an individual like Raphael can guide our emotions, so too can the state.
The Mond Crucifixion is one of Raphael’s earliest works and it was commissioned as the altarpiece for the side chapel of the Church of St. Dominic in the small Italian city of Città di Castell. Those who assigned Raphael to undertake this painting would have wished him to transform the visual horror of the death of Christ into a vision of visual majesty. A story about Saint Jerome, to whom the painting is dedicated, is often referenced in art of how he soothed an aggravated lion when he pulled a thorn from its paw and tamed it in the process. Which serves to remind us how Raphael has presented a comforting image of crucifixion by utilising a sense of divine symmetry to remove all of its pain and so restage it as an act of grace.
Robert Priseman
This essay was originally delivered as a talk at Amherst College on the 28th March 2014. The full series of original paintings and drawings ‘No Human Way to kill’ is held in the permanent collection of the Mead Art Museum, Massachusetts.
View the series at http://www.robert-priseman.com/projects/no-human-way-to-kill/
Raphael’s 1503 Mond Crucifixion conveys a sense of deep calm. At the feet of the central figure of Jesus kneel Saint Jerome to our left to whom the painting is dedicated and opposite him Saint Mary Magdalen. Behind Saint Jerome stands Saint the Virgin Mary and behind Mary Magdalen, Saint John the Baptist. In attendance two angels catch Christ’s blood in chalices as it issues from his wounds and in the sky above, the Sun and the Moon appear as silent witness to one of the most famous events in history.
This painting is modelled in the classical tradition. The composition of the figures is arranged into a formal rhombus design which helps establish a sense of balance and order. Elsewhere the use of atmospheric perspective in the background landscape and a rich use of colour all contribute to present a scene which radiates a feeling of immense beauty. Artists of the Renaissance, like Raphael, employed geometrical principles to help compose their paintings so that the mathematical order observed in the movement of stars would be reflected upon the earth. In this way, the adoption of the golden section rule, Fibonacci sequence and Euclidian geometry were engaged to mirror the divine order of heaven upon the world, which in turn placed the human actions depicted at the center of a celestial symmetry.
Whilst Raphael’s painting is rooted in a specific historical event, we see his portrayal of it is deliberately set at a far remove from reality. The horror of a public execution has been transformed into a scene of serenity, where Christ, who we witness from the discharge of his blood in the picture, remains alive yet apparently free from physical agony. As viewers, Raphael leads our emotions to experience his work in quiet reverence. We accept the tableau we witness as one of God’s grace enacted on human drama, where heavenly order triumphs over the chaos of emotion, where our own pain is removed and death is finally defeated. We are offered peace.
In presenting capital punishment as salvation, Raphael uses painting as a metaphor of deliverance from sin and transforms despair into hope. Yet the same event depicted by the hands of another artist who employs an alternative approach, can convey an entirely different message. An interesting example of this is found in the Russian artist Nicolai Ge’s 1893 painting The Crucifixion. Here Ge presents us with a brutal counterpoint to Raphael’s vision of order and beauty, which is perhaps one of the most accurate depictions of a Roman crucifixion ever to have been painted. Gone for Ge are the richly dyed robes worn by Christ and his attendants and in their place are no more than a few tattered rags. And where the crucifix in The Mond painting stands, judging by the height of the figures, at around 11 feet tall, the same structure in Ge’s image has a much shorter and more practical height of around seven feet, which, unlike Raphael’s skilfully constructed cross, is comprised of no more than a roughly hewn post set in the ground with a beam secured across the top. We also notice that the feet in Ge’s painting are not nailed together one over the other, resting on a small platform, which was an artistic invention, but are nailed instead through the ankles on either side of the post.
All colour in this painting has drained away to leave us with a starkly monochromatic vision. This lack of vibrancy creates a joyless impression of an unfeeling society which is carrying out its legal sanctions on the criminally guilty. Gone are the angels, the sun and the moon and the soothing mandate of heaven with its calming use of geometrical proportion. The portrayal of the contorted figures at an angle to the flat of the picture plane only heightens the sense of dramatic tension, leaving us in no doubt about how we should feel when we look at his painting - repelled. This approach to portraying the death of Christ has rarely been adopted by other painters, who by and large favour the course taken by Raphael.
Ge’s realism offers us a vision of excruciating pain and desolation. His is not a divine Christ, but a human Jesus. And when we compare the two alternative approaches Raphael and Ge take to explore the same event, we realise that by adopting different compositional techniques, colour palettes and model expressions, painters are able to influence the way we as an audience feel about what we are looking at. The artist becomes the author of our emotions.
Aside from Ge, many artists have depicted realistic images of people being put to death in the name of the state, though usually with a secular theme. When they do it is common to find the subject adopting a cruciform pose, as it is a pose which has come to represent both universal human suffering and salvation. Such examples are found in Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier and in Nick Ut’s 1972 Vietnam war photograph Trang Bang after a South Vietnamese Air Force Napalm Attack. What we notice when looking at these pictures is that we tend to identify personally with the distress of the subject. Their pain metaphorically becomes our pain. This is in part because of the way the images are composed, with the main character being the focus of the core narrative around which all the other components revolve. This emotional identification with the suffering of individuals at the hand of the state is a signifier of liberal thinking and a desire to limit the extent of the power of government over the individuality of the citizen.
After viewing the Mond Crucifixion and these 19th and 20th Century examples of cruciform suffering, I became interested in exploring just how an artist might engage with the theme of execution in the 21st Century. As an artist, I had recently completed a set of paintings of empty hospital interiors and was struck by how similar they are in appearance to American lethal injection facilities, and so I decided to use these as my starting point. In undertaking the ‘Hospital’ series I had been drawn initially to the way medical environments are designed to perform their function with a matter of factness which overrides our emotional concerns by soothing them. Sealed from the outside world, like an airport or underground station, they disconnect us from everyday life. Gone is any sense of natural light, season or time of day. Gone too is the chaos of nature and any regional reference which might establish an awareness of place. This has the effect of creating an environment with a surreal quality which is detached from the every day.
In the painting Operating Theatre, which I produced in 2004, I sought to deepen the sense of the surreal already apparent in the surgical setting by removing the human figure. The specific operating theatre in question was located on the outskirts of London, in Kent, and in painting it I further softened the shadows cast by the rooms’ lights, removed labels, simplified the equipment, and enhanced the muted colours of the floor and walls. These actions were designed to heighten an already amplified sense of calm.
Around the operating gurney we can see plenty of space for a medical team to perform their duties without being constrained, and we also notice how most of the equipment is mounted on castors to help keep things fluid and easily at hand. This is a space in which all life to be cared for is valued equally and, no matter who you are, medical care for those at the receiving end provides an experience without hierarchy. It simultaneously presents a view of the best and worst place we could ever expect to find ourselves in, because we are presented with an environment dedicated to preserving our physical being, yet one which we would hope never to need. This is a theatre where the performance of real life is played out with ordered professionalism. A place where the patient relinquishes control of their body to the authority of the surgeon, so that the chaotic sensations of fear, pain and human frailty may be washed away by the cool order of scientific reason.
When we look at Operating Theatre’s counterpart, the painting Lethal Injection Gurney we find many similarities. I undertook this painting in 2007, and it depicts the interior of the execution facility at The Walls in Huntsville, Texas. Like the operating theatre it presents us with an enclosed interior removed from daylight, nature or any reference to its geographical location. Beautiful turquoise wall colouring, soft fawn curtains, subdued lighting and a crisp white sheet stretched over a soft thin mattress for the comfort of the condemned, show us that here the iconography of the hospital has been deliberately adopted. And just as with the operating theatre, we can see that all life which is subject to ‘treatment’ is handled without hierarchy. On the right-hand side we glimpse a windowed room where witnesses sit, and to the left a two-way mirror behind which the guards who administer the lethal injection sit, so that they might see without being seen.
The overriding impression here is one of a calm disconnection from reality which helps steer our feelings as far as possible from any sense of physical and emotional trauma connected to the executions which are carried out. This is not for the benefit of the person being put to death, but for our benefit. It is we the viewers who do not wish to be distressed by what we witness, a sense further enhanced by the knowledge that events are going on in private, behind closed doors.
By stark contrast, Nicolai Ge’s depiction of Roman crucifixion presents a spectacle designed to be as public and as painful as possible, with the condemned being positioned along a busy road outside the city gates where they might form a powerful public display. This demonstrates the Roman consensus for the death penalty, when enacted by crucifixion, to be seen by men, women and children, and to be preceded by the torture of the body.
What conclusions then can we draw from these observations?
It would appear that our emotions are subject to external influences, and in understanding this, an artist like Raphael can choose to paint a picture of suffering and death and present it to us in such a way that we feel a sense of tranquillity when we view it. And that just as an individual like Raphael can guide our emotions, so too can the state.
The Mond Crucifixion is one of Raphael’s earliest works and it was commissioned as the altarpiece for the side chapel of the Church of St. Dominic in the small Italian city of Città di Castell. Those who assigned Raphael to undertake this painting would have wished him to transform the visual horror of the death of Christ into a vision of visual majesty. A story about Saint Jerome, to whom the painting is dedicated, is often referenced in art of how he soothed an aggravated lion when he pulled a thorn from its paw and tamed it in the process. Which serves to remind us how Raphael has presented a comforting image of crucifixion by utilising a sense of divine symmetry to remove all of its pain and so restage it as an act of grace.
Robert Priseman
This essay was originally delivered as a talk at Amherst College on the 28th March 2014. The full series of original paintings and drawings ‘No Human Way to kill’ is held in the permanent collection of the Mead Art Museum, Massachusetts.
View the series at http://www.robert-priseman.com/projects/no-human-way-to-kill/
Susan Gunn: The Beauty of Imperfection
Broken glass. It’s just like glitter, isn’t it?
Pete Doherty
Between 1915 and 1923 Marcel Duchamp created The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even which is also often referred to as The Large Glass. It is a work of art comprised of two large glass panes, one positioned above the other. In notes Duchamp produced on his work, he described it as the depiction of an erotic encounter between a “Bride” in the upper panel and her nine “Bachelors” gathered below in the lower panel. Neither painting nor sculpture, The Large Glass was composed using materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust, combining elements of chance, carefully considered perspective and a delicate craftsmanship in its construction.
The Large Glass was shattered in transit following its only public exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Duchamp repaired his work, gluing the shards of glass back together again and it now forms part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The accidental element incurred in its breakage has become part of the fabric of the work as we now see and appreciate it, in much the same way we might feel comfortable with the surface cracks in old oil paintings which are known as craquelure.
Like all things formed in nature, cracks never travel in straight lines; they cannot be controlled by human hand or forced into a particular direction or pattern. Just like our fingerprints, they are unique and beyond duplication. Even when we apply the same conditions and forces to bear upon identical objects, cracks never repeat, revealing their structure to be outside ourselves, existing in a condition of fragility. We can never return cracks to their perfect unbroken state, only hold them in place and secure them, as Duchamp did when he sandwiched his repaired Large Glass between two further glass panels.
The special nature of cracks and the pathways they take is central to Susan Gunn’s work as a painter. Her often large scale, monochromatic canvases, such as Divided ground: Red, Dark Matter I and Sacro Terra Grande, present the viewer with a delicately fractured surface of uniformly coloured gesso contained within a series of straight edges which are carefully defined by human hand. She describes the end result of her work as being “like a mirror of life” where “things happen which are beyond our control”, yet which, in the presence of Gunn’s work, we realise we seek to contain. In this way, her canvases present the viewer with a metaphorical meditation on the fragility of life, beautiful in all its flawed and imperfect manifestations. Somehow they appear to represent an innate desire to protect.
Gunn’s working process begins with the building up of layers of gesso mixed with pure pigment over the surface of a canvas. Gesso is a traditional medium employed as a ground by Italian renaissance artists and is usually comprised of chalk mixed with glue formed from the skins of rabbits or calves. Typically it is employed as a primer to coat solid surfaces such as wooden painting panels, carved furniture and picture frames over which oil paint and gilding can be applied. Painting panels were initially prepared by Italian craftsmen with a base layer of gesso grosso (rough gesso) which was comprised of a coarse plaster, over which a series of thin layers of gesso sottile (finishing gesso) were then applied. These were prepared with a fine plaster slaked in water to produce an opaque, white, reflective surface. The absorbent quality of gesso makes it suitable for painting on in all media, as well as providing an ideal surface for the application of gold leaf.
Gesso, which is typically applied in 10 or more fine layers, has a brittle consistency susceptible to cracking, and it is this property Gunn manipulates in an attempt to alter and control the way cracks appear within the fabric of her paintings. Speeding up or slowing down the drying time of gesso contributes to the way the fractures form, while heating up the surface creates more cracks and cooling it down produces less. Correspondingly, when more layers of gesso are applied to the surface the fissures appear more pronounced. The cracks created by Gunn in the composition of the gesso form clean breaks in the medium, just like shattered shards of glass, which extend through to the canvas, unlike the craquelure we see in old paintings which rests wholly on the surface.
Once the gesso on Gunn’s paintings has dried the surface is initially rough. Gunn smooths this by polishing it with wax and oil, while also applying water to the gesso which treats it as a kind of watercolour paint, allowing the pigment to seep through to the canvas surface and stain it. This renders the white of the canvas imperceptible to the viewer.
In the mid 1950’s the Italian artist Lucio Fontana initiated a series of monochromatic ‘slash paintings’ which consisted of a sequence of gashes he made through his canvases. Fontana lined the reverse of these paintings with black gauze in order to create the appearance of a profound darkness which appeared behind the open cuts, creating a mysterious sense of illusion and depth. In 1952 Fontana also began a ‘Stones’ series which fused the sculptural with painting by encrusting the surfaces of his canvases with a heavy impasto paint and coloured glass.
Yet where Fontana employed a wide range of contemporary colours to create paintings which he labeled as “an art for the Space Age”, Gunn limits herself to a small handful of around four or five pure pigments which have their origins in the depths of human history. These are comprised primarily of lamp black, white, carmine, orange and ivory with some canvases making use of gold leaf which is applied to the finished surface. This choice of colour is an important consideration for Gunn who favours ancient working materials and techniques. For example, Lamp Black, which is one of the oldest colours in use today, was commonly used as a pigment in Egyptian tomb painting and was made using the carbon residual from the oil burnt in lamps, which is where its name originates. Carmine, on the other hand, which is also known as crimson, was made by extracting the dye from the kermes insect. An alternative source was discovered by the Spanish in Mexico where the Aztec and Mayan people were found to be using carminic acid from the cochineal beetle to dye fabrics a rich red. A tiny insect, it took the Aztecs around 70,000 cochineal beetles to create a pound of crimson pigment.
Interestingly, whilst Gunn’s paintings may bring to mind mediaeval stained glass windows without pictures or sacred doorways leading to the realm of the unknown, she does not describe herself as an abstract painter, stating that “my works are not abstracted versions of things we find in the World”.[i] This belief is one sympathetic to a conviction Mark Rothko held, who insisted he was not an abstractionist, feeling such a description was inaccurate to his core interest “in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”[ii]
Rothko’s paintings became increasingly sombre as he grew older and appear to be representative of a deepening despair he felt in his personal life. We perhaps sense this most clearly in his ‘Seagram’ series which were produced using a method of applying thin layers of binder mixed with maroon and black pigment directly onto untreated canvases, painting thin layers to create a subtle fusion of overlapping colors and shapes. In many senses the adapted traditional working techniques employed by artists such as Rothko and Gunn underpin a traditional understanding of the role painting plays within society at large, which is not, as they see it, to create a wholly intellectual response to the evolving conversations artists have between themselves within the confines of art galleries, but to speak more broadly of the human emotions and traumas which define the way we all experience the World and which we can only attempt to rationalize after the event.
On 25th February, 1970, a consignment of Rothko’s ‘Seagram’ paintings arrived in London for permanent display at the Tate Gallery. On that same day, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist lying dead in his kitchen. He had sliced his arms with a razor which was found lying at his side. For many, this act transformed the meaning of his work, saturating his paintings with a profound gravity.
Whereas tragedy came at the end of Rothko’s life, for Gunn it struck in her mid-twenties and may be central to our understanding of how she approaches painting. Gunn worked initially as a wedding dress designer on leaving school until the birth of her first daughter Francesca, who was diagnosed with Leukaemia just after her first birthday. Francesca lived for a further18 months, during which time she underwent intensive chemotherapy. While in hospital with her daughter, Gunn drew portraits of her child “because it didn't seem right somehow to take photographs of her in there”[iii]. Following her daughter’s death and the birth of two subsequent children, Gunn enrolled at art school at the relatively late age of 35. She said that “As I developed my practice I had a strong feeling that I didn't want to share the images in my head with anyone else.” [iv] Feeling instead that “I wanted to go beyond what could be immediately defined, though for me the cracked and marbled surface of the gesso was and is very much like a memorial slab.”[v] The painted surface in this sense appears to represent Gunn’s weekly ritual of cleaning her daughter’s gravestone, where in the polishing she declared an attempt to try to impart dignity to the memory of her lost daughter.
Tragedy is the birthplace of the sacred, underpinning many of our prayers and rituals. The loss of those we love reminds us of how precious life is. In representing this in art, Gunn offers a series of universal images which depict the fragile and lost in all of us, highlighting our consistent inability to pay close attention to that which is most important. In doing so, she creates a metaphor for our broken nature, which clearly defines the beauty of our imperfect humanity
Robert Priseman
View Susan Gunn's website at http://www.susangunn.co.uk/
[i] From a conversation between Susan Gunn and Robert Priseman on the 6th November 2012
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko
[iii] http://www.edp24.co.uk/what-s-on/susan_gunn_exhibition_at_norwich_castle_1_711836
[iv] From a conversation between Susan Gunn and Robert Priseman on the 23rd August 2013
Pete Doherty
Between 1915 and 1923 Marcel Duchamp created The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even which is also often referred to as The Large Glass. It is a work of art comprised of two large glass panes, one positioned above the other. In notes Duchamp produced on his work, he described it as the depiction of an erotic encounter between a “Bride” in the upper panel and her nine “Bachelors” gathered below in the lower panel. Neither painting nor sculpture, The Large Glass was composed using materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust, combining elements of chance, carefully considered perspective and a delicate craftsmanship in its construction.
The Large Glass was shattered in transit following its only public exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Duchamp repaired his work, gluing the shards of glass back together again and it now forms part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The accidental element incurred in its breakage has become part of the fabric of the work as we now see and appreciate it, in much the same way we might feel comfortable with the surface cracks in old oil paintings which are known as craquelure.
Like all things formed in nature, cracks never travel in straight lines; they cannot be controlled by human hand or forced into a particular direction or pattern. Just like our fingerprints, they are unique and beyond duplication. Even when we apply the same conditions and forces to bear upon identical objects, cracks never repeat, revealing their structure to be outside ourselves, existing in a condition of fragility. We can never return cracks to their perfect unbroken state, only hold them in place and secure them, as Duchamp did when he sandwiched his repaired Large Glass between two further glass panels.
The special nature of cracks and the pathways they take is central to Susan Gunn’s work as a painter. Her often large scale, monochromatic canvases, such as Divided ground: Red, Dark Matter I and Sacro Terra Grande, present the viewer with a delicately fractured surface of uniformly coloured gesso contained within a series of straight edges which are carefully defined by human hand. She describes the end result of her work as being “like a mirror of life” where “things happen which are beyond our control”, yet which, in the presence of Gunn’s work, we realise we seek to contain. In this way, her canvases present the viewer with a metaphorical meditation on the fragility of life, beautiful in all its flawed and imperfect manifestations. Somehow they appear to represent an innate desire to protect.
Gunn’s working process begins with the building up of layers of gesso mixed with pure pigment over the surface of a canvas. Gesso is a traditional medium employed as a ground by Italian renaissance artists and is usually comprised of chalk mixed with glue formed from the skins of rabbits or calves. Typically it is employed as a primer to coat solid surfaces such as wooden painting panels, carved furniture and picture frames over which oil paint and gilding can be applied. Painting panels were initially prepared by Italian craftsmen with a base layer of gesso grosso (rough gesso) which was comprised of a coarse plaster, over which a series of thin layers of gesso sottile (finishing gesso) were then applied. These were prepared with a fine plaster slaked in water to produce an opaque, white, reflective surface. The absorbent quality of gesso makes it suitable for painting on in all media, as well as providing an ideal surface for the application of gold leaf.
Gesso, which is typically applied in 10 or more fine layers, has a brittle consistency susceptible to cracking, and it is this property Gunn manipulates in an attempt to alter and control the way cracks appear within the fabric of her paintings. Speeding up or slowing down the drying time of gesso contributes to the way the fractures form, while heating up the surface creates more cracks and cooling it down produces less. Correspondingly, when more layers of gesso are applied to the surface the fissures appear more pronounced. The cracks created by Gunn in the composition of the gesso form clean breaks in the medium, just like shattered shards of glass, which extend through to the canvas, unlike the craquelure we see in old paintings which rests wholly on the surface.
Once the gesso on Gunn’s paintings has dried the surface is initially rough. Gunn smooths this by polishing it with wax and oil, while also applying water to the gesso which treats it as a kind of watercolour paint, allowing the pigment to seep through to the canvas surface and stain it. This renders the white of the canvas imperceptible to the viewer.
In the mid 1950’s the Italian artist Lucio Fontana initiated a series of monochromatic ‘slash paintings’ which consisted of a sequence of gashes he made through his canvases. Fontana lined the reverse of these paintings with black gauze in order to create the appearance of a profound darkness which appeared behind the open cuts, creating a mysterious sense of illusion and depth. In 1952 Fontana also began a ‘Stones’ series which fused the sculptural with painting by encrusting the surfaces of his canvases with a heavy impasto paint and coloured glass.
Yet where Fontana employed a wide range of contemporary colours to create paintings which he labeled as “an art for the Space Age”, Gunn limits herself to a small handful of around four or five pure pigments which have their origins in the depths of human history. These are comprised primarily of lamp black, white, carmine, orange and ivory with some canvases making use of gold leaf which is applied to the finished surface. This choice of colour is an important consideration for Gunn who favours ancient working materials and techniques. For example, Lamp Black, which is one of the oldest colours in use today, was commonly used as a pigment in Egyptian tomb painting and was made using the carbon residual from the oil burnt in lamps, which is where its name originates. Carmine, on the other hand, which is also known as crimson, was made by extracting the dye from the kermes insect. An alternative source was discovered by the Spanish in Mexico where the Aztec and Mayan people were found to be using carminic acid from the cochineal beetle to dye fabrics a rich red. A tiny insect, it took the Aztecs around 70,000 cochineal beetles to create a pound of crimson pigment.
Interestingly, whilst Gunn’s paintings may bring to mind mediaeval stained glass windows without pictures or sacred doorways leading to the realm of the unknown, she does not describe herself as an abstract painter, stating that “my works are not abstracted versions of things we find in the World”.[i] This belief is one sympathetic to a conviction Mark Rothko held, who insisted he was not an abstractionist, feeling such a description was inaccurate to his core interest “in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”[ii]
Rothko’s paintings became increasingly sombre as he grew older and appear to be representative of a deepening despair he felt in his personal life. We perhaps sense this most clearly in his ‘Seagram’ series which were produced using a method of applying thin layers of binder mixed with maroon and black pigment directly onto untreated canvases, painting thin layers to create a subtle fusion of overlapping colors and shapes. In many senses the adapted traditional working techniques employed by artists such as Rothko and Gunn underpin a traditional understanding of the role painting plays within society at large, which is not, as they see it, to create a wholly intellectual response to the evolving conversations artists have between themselves within the confines of art galleries, but to speak more broadly of the human emotions and traumas which define the way we all experience the World and which we can only attempt to rationalize after the event.
On 25th February, 1970, a consignment of Rothko’s ‘Seagram’ paintings arrived in London for permanent display at the Tate Gallery. On that same day, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist lying dead in his kitchen. He had sliced his arms with a razor which was found lying at his side. For many, this act transformed the meaning of his work, saturating his paintings with a profound gravity.
Whereas tragedy came at the end of Rothko’s life, for Gunn it struck in her mid-twenties and may be central to our understanding of how she approaches painting. Gunn worked initially as a wedding dress designer on leaving school until the birth of her first daughter Francesca, who was diagnosed with Leukaemia just after her first birthday. Francesca lived for a further18 months, during which time she underwent intensive chemotherapy. While in hospital with her daughter, Gunn drew portraits of her child “because it didn't seem right somehow to take photographs of her in there”[iii]. Following her daughter’s death and the birth of two subsequent children, Gunn enrolled at art school at the relatively late age of 35. She said that “As I developed my practice I had a strong feeling that I didn't want to share the images in my head with anyone else.” [iv] Feeling instead that “I wanted to go beyond what could be immediately defined, though for me the cracked and marbled surface of the gesso was and is very much like a memorial slab.”[v] The painted surface in this sense appears to represent Gunn’s weekly ritual of cleaning her daughter’s gravestone, where in the polishing she declared an attempt to try to impart dignity to the memory of her lost daughter.
Tragedy is the birthplace of the sacred, underpinning many of our prayers and rituals. The loss of those we love reminds us of how precious life is. In representing this in art, Gunn offers a series of universal images which depict the fragile and lost in all of us, highlighting our consistent inability to pay close attention to that which is most important. In doing so, she creates a metaphor for our broken nature, which clearly defines the beauty of our imperfect humanity
Robert Priseman
View Susan Gunn's website at http://www.susangunn.co.uk/
[i] From a conversation between Susan Gunn and Robert Priseman on the 6th November 2012
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko
[iii] http://www.edp24.co.uk/what-s-on/susan_gunn_exhibition_at_norwich_castle_1_711836
[iv] From a conversation between Susan Gunn and Robert Priseman on the 23rd August 2013
[v] http://www.edp24.co.uk/what-s-on/susan_gunn_exhibition_at_norwich_castle_1_711836
Sustained Reality: From Francis Bacon to Paula Rego
The Human Clay
Our desire to express and record the reality of our being through the creation of objects stretches back with photography to the invention of the daguerreotype in 1837 and in written literature to the Mesopotamian ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ some 2,500 years earlier. Painting has an even longer history, whose evidence we find preserved in the ‘Cave of Swimmers’ of the Gilf Kebir plateau in the Libyan Desert, which dates back 10,000 years, to the Wandjina figure paintings of Kimberley in Western Australia which are 17,000 years old and to the Lascaux cave paintings which were painted some 20,000 years ago.
The American painter R. B. Kitaj, who lived and worked in London between 1959 and 1997, believed the human figure created the foundation on which all great art is formed, and argued that art’s core mission lay in unearthing the reality of significant and sacred human experience. Based upon this principle, Kitaj was approached by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1977 to put together a selection of works by British artists for an exhibition which he titled ‘The Human Clay’. Kitaj stated his criteria for selection quite simply: “I was looking mostly for pictures of the single human form as if they could be breathed on, whereupon they would glow like beacons of where art has been and like agents of a newer life to come.”[i] In total Kitaj selected one-hundred and five artworks by forty-eight painters for his survey; including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Adrian Berg, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Leon Kossoff, William Turnbull and Euan Uglow.
‘The Human Clay’ opened at a time when abstract painting was the fashionable and dominant trend in the art world. Abstraction was predominantly seen as an American art movement which had been championed by the New York art critic Clement Greenberg. With the emergence of painters like Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, Greenberg made a case that, after the war, the new avant-garde in art was emerging away from Europe and flourishing in the USA. Yet among many of his contemporaries, Kitaj came to see in the United Kingdom “…artistic personalities in this small island more unique and strong and I think more numerous than anywhere in the world outside America’s jolting artistic vigour. There are ten or more people in this town, or not far away, of world class, including my friends of the abstract persuasion. In fact, I think there is a substantial School of London.”[ii] It was this small group, and most specifically the figurative artists within it, namely, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, which the art critic Michael Peppiatt came to focus on when he further distilled the essence of ‘The Human Clay’ exhibition by curating the 1987 show ‘A School of London: Six Figurative Painters’.
Of the six ‘School of London’ artists, four - Auerbach, Freud, Kitaj and Kossoff - were Jewish, with only Kossoff having been actually born in London. Freud and Auerbach had moved to England from Berlin, while Bacon came from Dublin, Kitaj from Cleveland, Ohio and Andrews from Norfolk. Whilst at first appearance these six artists seem to have little in common other than a residence in London, they were all united in friendship, the exchange of ideas and a preoccupation with painting. Peppiatt describes them as holding a “disdain for art-world vogues…”[iii] whilst observing in their work a common philosophical underpinning, writing how “…the atmosphere of guilt and human vulnerability that rises from their pictures constantly recalls the existentialist mood.”[iv] This philosophy is one which emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of individual experience in a godless world. It places an emphasis on the freedom of individual choice and a responsibility for the consequences of one’s own action. This ‘existentialist mood’ appears to stem from a sense of individual alienation felt in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.
It is perhaps not surprising that the work of the post-war London figurative painters was seen at the time as unfashionable, because what comes into fashion must by definition go out of fashion. The defining agenda of this group was a wish to unearth and express in paint something of the fundamental emotional undercurrent which helps define our common human experience. In this way painting acts as a means to meditate on our feelings about a subject rather than merely describe it. It is a slow and absorbing process which enables paint to function as a metaphor for our subconscious, allowing it the capacity to make visible a world we sense inside ourselves yet cannot easily see. The result when we look at the output of the ‘School of London’ is a body of work which has stood the test of time, an art which endures.
The School of London painters mediated their differing views of reality either through the use of photographic source material which acted as a starting point for accessing the emotional or by direct observation from life. Where Andrews and Bacon made extensive use of photographs, the paintings of Auerbach, Freud and Kossoff are born from direct observation. The thick use of impasto by Auerbach for example, appears to be the polar opposite to the delicate and near photo-realistic handling of paint by Andrews, an artist who he greatly admires. Peppiatt wrote of Andrews that he “…maintains a hair’s breadth between the reality and its translation into acrylic or watercolour. Within that narrow, enigmatic area, he captures appearances so accurately while subjecting them to a kind of astonished scrutiny, which conveys the mystery inherent in the very act of seeing.”[v] This ‘astonished scrutiny’ is a phrase which could easily be applied to the work of Freud, whose intense visual gaze seems to pierce the surface of observed human flesh in what Peppiatt refers to as “…the dislocation of appearance”.[vi]
Auerbach and Kossoff created a visual architecture rooted in the real world upon which they lay the stuff of paint. Andrews, Freud and Kitaj on the other-hand convey “a sense of mystery which lies inherent in the very act of seeing.” What unites these different approaches is a desire to prize open the shell of the human figure and peer below its surface, in an attempt to understand the nature of our fundamental human existence. This coherent act led Michael Peppiatt to write of them that “…over the past thirty-five years a body of work has evolved in London which possesses a power and a relevance to the future of painting that would be hard to make anywhere else in the world”.[vii]
Yet British painting almost appears to have come to an end in 1987. In the years following ‘A School of London: Six Figurative Painters’, it is not only figurative painting which appears to be operating against the vogues of artistic fashion, but painting itself. In an interview with David Sylvester in October 1962, Francis Bacon had said “…what is fascinating now is that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.”[viii] This deepening of the game of art is a challenge only a handful of figurative painters appear to have developed a wish to fully engage with, painters like Tony Bevan, Christopher Le Brun, and Paula Rego, who emerged as significant artists working in the United Kingdom during the 1980’s.
A Sustained Reality
When we look at these artists we find common threads of interest with the ‘School of London’ painters. Bevan’s works for example are often concerned with the structure of the human head alone. The art critic Marco Livingstone described how “The human head, and specifically his own, has been Tony Bevan’s most obsessive subject during the 90’s, endlessly rephrased and reinvented on a colossal scale that allows the viewer no escape from the confrontation. Of all the images at the disposal of a figurative artist it is the one with the greatest potential of speaking of the human spirit and the full range of emotions.”[ix] This inquiry beautifully explores and develops the world of the painters who have gone before him.
Christopher Le Brun’s paintings are more romantic than Bevan’s, and appear influenced by Delacroix and early Guston. They recall the fairy tales told to us in our childhood and reconnect us with a sense of internal poetry. Bryan Robertson describes how “Le Brun is not offering us pastiche, or a contrived neo-romanticism, but a re-definition of the past in terms of the present: the objects, events and presences of an ancient and legendary world caught up and transformed by the imaginative urgency of a painter working in the late twentieth century.”[x] He goes on to say that, “Le Brun's painting is often nocturnal, elegiac or valedictory; sunset or late afternoon rather than morning or sunrise; farewell and passion spent rather than physical engagement or direct encounter.”[xi] The paintings of Paula Rego also contain a sense of folk tale narrative, viewed through a surrealist eye and dislocated from reality. Her figures are wrapped up in their own thoughts, contained within their own universe.
These three artists don’t appear as part of an art movement or school, but represent a desire to continue an engagement with the human form through painting which Kitaj laid out in ‘The Human Clay’, as a means to unearth the reality of significant and sacred human experience
By engaging in the process of painting, painters move beyond description and use paint as a means to explore and express the emotional undercurrent of human existence, this is almost always their own and makes the act of painting a deeply autobiographical process. To engage in this process requires a degree of personal removal by the artist and is where photography sometimes aids the production of contemporary work, because it offers an emotional distance from a subject. This means photographs can provide the artist with a safe starting point for returning to the source, which in turn allows the emotional response to be explored .
Kitaj wrote of this when he said “The consequences of a detached art are very seductive … a very high act indeed is said to transpire there, an ultimate act or moment or feeling, so independent of anything else but its paint or shape, for instance, as to give that art its very value, an incredible purity. The idea took root in Mondrian’s concept of art as a ‘life substitute’, something apart, detached from a life out of balance.”[xii] This highlights a seeming contradiction at the heart of painting; it is attempting to be both emotionally engaged and intellectually relevant. For painters, this delicate balancing act is achieved when emotional sensitivity leads the way to the subject, and then an intellectual detachment from feelings and absorption in the process occurs when the work of painting begins.
A New Reality
Part of Kitaj’s original criteria for ‘The Human Clay’ was to find artists who would act as “agents of a newer life to come”. At the beginning of the 21st Century, practitioners who represent this newer life in the story of painting in Britain are emerging. They are engaged with the issues that painters have always concerned themselves with: the plasticity of paint, the balance between the rational and the intuitive and the mystery of human existence. Like the School of London painters they are highly individualistic in their approach to work, yet where the School of London artists were primarily concerned with representations of the human form, these new painters have moved their focus away from direct depictions of the figure, while the mystery of human experience remains central to their concerns. They are interested in the uncanny, the slippage of the real, what Michael Peppiatt refers to as the “dislocation of appearance”. Through painting the non-portrait, as we may recall in Van Gogh’s paintings of his empty bedroom, the human presence can be felt through its absence. The artists who seem to be working in this new direction are artist like Gillian Carnegie, Simon Carter, Monica Metsers, Nicholas Middleton, Carol Rhodes and George Shaw.
Shaw’s paintings are, like those of Carter, Metsers and Rhodes, empty of the living, and autobiographical. Shaw records the mundane and overlooked and finds poetry in the everyday landscapes of his own suburban surroundings. Some of his most famous images depict the two square miles of Coventry which constitute the Tile Hill housing estate where he grew up. This loving obsession for a limited geographical area recalls Constable’s paintings of the Dedham Vale, Kossoff’s representations of London and Monet’s paintings of his gardens at Giverny. Like Shaw, Simon Carter limits most of his paintings to a seven mile stretch of coast in his native Essex which lies between Holland on Sea and Walton on the Naze. This physical constraint is itself part of the narrative which forms his meditations on our material presence within the physical world and highlights the idea that what is most personal is also that which is most universal.
The youngest artist featured in this exhibition is Monica Metsers who was born in 1981. Metsers geography is even more restricted than Shaw’s and Carter’s, as she never has to leave her studio. Metsers enigmatic paintings begin when she remodels children’s toys. Broken and then re-fashioned into peculiar landscapes, she photographs the results and paints from the photographs. This return to childhood through an act of destructive manipulation has an unsettling and compelling effect which recalls in some way the paintings of Max Ernst. In her work, Metsers draws out the idea explored by psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner that play is the birth place for creative acts, a place where a mirror world to the real one is made and controlled, a safe world which represents the real but is not of it.
After so many years of artistic human production, and in an age which, Post-Duchamp, is comfortable viewing readymades, installations, photography and time-based media, what could be left to say by the artist who wishes to paint a picture? The answer appears to be a desire to return to the origins of creative practice, a desire to find again that which is original. Where photography has the ability to freeze a fleeting moment with dispassion, and film create the illusion of capturing the essence of time itself to hold it prisoner like a bird in a cage, painting distils time into object. For the painter, time is substance, felt both fast and slow, an element we experience through our emotions. In this way, paint has the capacity to make visible a world we sense inside ourselves yet cannot see, to act as a metaphor for our subconscious.
Robert Priseman
View the exhibition http://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/francis-bacon-paula-rego
[i] Catalogue preface to The Human Clay, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
[ii] Catalogue preface to The Human Clay, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
[iii] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p10
[iv] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p8 [v] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p11-12
[vi] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p 12
[vii] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p7 [viii] David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, First published 1975, 2002 edition, p. 29
[ix] Marco Livingstone, In the Spirit Beneath the Skin, http://tonybevan.com/Tony_Bevan_Marco_Livingstone_essay.html, 1998
[x] Bryan Robertson, Catalogue Introduction, Marlborough Fine Art, http://www.christopherlebrun.co.uk/newsite/texts/bryan_robertson/, 1994
[xi] Bryan Robertson, Catalogue Introduction, Marlborough Fine Art, http://www.christopherlebrun.co.uk/newsite/texts/bryan_robertson/, 1994
[xii] Catalogue preface to The Human Clay, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
Our desire to express and record the reality of our being through the creation of objects stretches back with photography to the invention of the daguerreotype in 1837 and in written literature to the Mesopotamian ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ some 2,500 years earlier. Painting has an even longer history, whose evidence we find preserved in the ‘Cave of Swimmers’ of the Gilf Kebir plateau in the Libyan Desert, which dates back 10,000 years, to the Wandjina figure paintings of Kimberley in Western Australia which are 17,000 years old and to the Lascaux cave paintings which were painted some 20,000 years ago.
The American painter R. B. Kitaj, who lived and worked in London between 1959 and 1997, believed the human figure created the foundation on which all great art is formed, and argued that art’s core mission lay in unearthing the reality of significant and sacred human experience. Based upon this principle, Kitaj was approached by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1977 to put together a selection of works by British artists for an exhibition which he titled ‘The Human Clay’. Kitaj stated his criteria for selection quite simply: “I was looking mostly for pictures of the single human form as if they could be breathed on, whereupon they would glow like beacons of where art has been and like agents of a newer life to come.”[i] In total Kitaj selected one-hundred and five artworks by forty-eight painters for his survey; including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Adrian Berg, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Leon Kossoff, William Turnbull and Euan Uglow.
‘The Human Clay’ opened at a time when abstract painting was the fashionable and dominant trend in the art world. Abstraction was predominantly seen as an American art movement which had been championed by the New York art critic Clement Greenberg. With the emergence of painters like Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, Greenberg made a case that, after the war, the new avant-garde in art was emerging away from Europe and flourishing in the USA. Yet among many of his contemporaries, Kitaj came to see in the United Kingdom “…artistic personalities in this small island more unique and strong and I think more numerous than anywhere in the world outside America’s jolting artistic vigour. There are ten or more people in this town, or not far away, of world class, including my friends of the abstract persuasion. In fact, I think there is a substantial School of London.”[ii] It was this small group, and most specifically the figurative artists within it, namely, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, which the art critic Michael Peppiatt came to focus on when he further distilled the essence of ‘The Human Clay’ exhibition by curating the 1987 show ‘A School of London: Six Figurative Painters’.
Of the six ‘School of London’ artists, four - Auerbach, Freud, Kitaj and Kossoff - were Jewish, with only Kossoff having been actually born in London. Freud and Auerbach had moved to England from Berlin, while Bacon came from Dublin, Kitaj from Cleveland, Ohio and Andrews from Norfolk. Whilst at first appearance these six artists seem to have little in common other than a residence in London, they were all united in friendship, the exchange of ideas and a preoccupation with painting. Peppiatt describes them as holding a “disdain for art-world vogues…”[iii] whilst observing in their work a common philosophical underpinning, writing how “…the atmosphere of guilt and human vulnerability that rises from their pictures constantly recalls the existentialist mood.”[iv] This philosophy is one which emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of individual experience in a godless world. It places an emphasis on the freedom of individual choice and a responsibility for the consequences of one’s own action. This ‘existentialist mood’ appears to stem from a sense of individual alienation felt in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.
It is perhaps not surprising that the work of the post-war London figurative painters was seen at the time as unfashionable, because what comes into fashion must by definition go out of fashion. The defining agenda of this group was a wish to unearth and express in paint something of the fundamental emotional undercurrent which helps define our common human experience. In this way painting acts as a means to meditate on our feelings about a subject rather than merely describe it. It is a slow and absorbing process which enables paint to function as a metaphor for our subconscious, allowing it the capacity to make visible a world we sense inside ourselves yet cannot easily see. The result when we look at the output of the ‘School of London’ is a body of work which has stood the test of time, an art which endures.
The School of London painters mediated their differing views of reality either through the use of photographic source material which acted as a starting point for accessing the emotional or by direct observation from life. Where Andrews and Bacon made extensive use of photographs, the paintings of Auerbach, Freud and Kossoff are born from direct observation. The thick use of impasto by Auerbach for example, appears to be the polar opposite to the delicate and near photo-realistic handling of paint by Andrews, an artist who he greatly admires. Peppiatt wrote of Andrews that he “…maintains a hair’s breadth between the reality and its translation into acrylic or watercolour. Within that narrow, enigmatic area, he captures appearances so accurately while subjecting them to a kind of astonished scrutiny, which conveys the mystery inherent in the very act of seeing.”[v] This ‘astonished scrutiny’ is a phrase which could easily be applied to the work of Freud, whose intense visual gaze seems to pierce the surface of observed human flesh in what Peppiatt refers to as “…the dislocation of appearance”.[vi]
Auerbach and Kossoff created a visual architecture rooted in the real world upon which they lay the stuff of paint. Andrews, Freud and Kitaj on the other-hand convey “a sense of mystery which lies inherent in the very act of seeing.” What unites these different approaches is a desire to prize open the shell of the human figure and peer below its surface, in an attempt to understand the nature of our fundamental human existence. This coherent act led Michael Peppiatt to write of them that “…over the past thirty-five years a body of work has evolved in London which possesses a power and a relevance to the future of painting that would be hard to make anywhere else in the world”.[vii]
Yet British painting almost appears to have come to an end in 1987. In the years following ‘A School of London: Six Figurative Painters’, it is not only figurative painting which appears to be operating against the vogues of artistic fashion, but painting itself. In an interview with David Sylvester in October 1962, Francis Bacon had said “…what is fascinating now is that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.”[viii] This deepening of the game of art is a challenge only a handful of figurative painters appear to have developed a wish to fully engage with, painters like Tony Bevan, Christopher Le Brun, and Paula Rego, who emerged as significant artists working in the United Kingdom during the 1980’s.
A Sustained Reality
When we look at these artists we find common threads of interest with the ‘School of London’ painters. Bevan’s works for example are often concerned with the structure of the human head alone. The art critic Marco Livingstone described how “The human head, and specifically his own, has been Tony Bevan’s most obsessive subject during the 90’s, endlessly rephrased and reinvented on a colossal scale that allows the viewer no escape from the confrontation. Of all the images at the disposal of a figurative artist it is the one with the greatest potential of speaking of the human spirit and the full range of emotions.”[ix] This inquiry beautifully explores and develops the world of the painters who have gone before him.
Christopher Le Brun’s paintings are more romantic than Bevan’s, and appear influenced by Delacroix and early Guston. They recall the fairy tales told to us in our childhood and reconnect us with a sense of internal poetry. Bryan Robertson describes how “Le Brun is not offering us pastiche, or a contrived neo-romanticism, but a re-definition of the past in terms of the present: the objects, events and presences of an ancient and legendary world caught up and transformed by the imaginative urgency of a painter working in the late twentieth century.”[x] He goes on to say that, “Le Brun's painting is often nocturnal, elegiac or valedictory; sunset or late afternoon rather than morning or sunrise; farewell and passion spent rather than physical engagement or direct encounter.”[xi] The paintings of Paula Rego also contain a sense of folk tale narrative, viewed through a surrealist eye and dislocated from reality. Her figures are wrapped up in their own thoughts, contained within their own universe.
These three artists don’t appear as part of an art movement or school, but represent a desire to continue an engagement with the human form through painting which Kitaj laid out in ‘The Human Clay’, as a means to unearth the reality of significant and sacred human experience
By engaging in the process of painting, painters move beyond description and use paint as a means to explore and express the emotional undercurrent of human existence, this is almost always their own and makes the act of painting a deeply autobiographical process. To engage in this process requires a degree of personal removal by the artist and is where photography sometimes aids the production of contemporary work, because it offers an emotional distance from a subject. This means photographs can provide the artist with a safe starting point for returning to the source, which in turn allows the emotional response to be explored .
Kitaj wrote of this when he said “The consequences of a detached art are very seductive … a very high act indeed is said to transpire there, an ultimate act or moment or feeling, so independent of anything else but its paint or shape, for instance, as to give that art its very value, an incredible purity. The idea took root in Mondrian’s concept of art as a ‘life substitute’, something apart, detached from a life out of balance.”[xii] This highlights a seeming contradiction at the heart of painting; it is attempting to be both emotionally engaged and intellectually relevant. For painters, this delicate balancing act is achieved when emotional sensitivity leads the way to the subject, and then an intellectual detachment from feelings and absorption in the process occurs when the work of painting begins.
A New Reality
Part of Kitaj’s original criteria for ‘The Human Clay’ was to find artists who would act as “agents of a newer life to come”. At the beginning of the 21st Century, practitioners who represent this newer life in the story of painting in Britain are emerging. They are engaged with the issues that painters have always concerned themselves with: the plasticity of paint, the balance between the rational and the intuitive and the mystery of human existence. Like the School of London painters they are highly individualistic in their approach to work, yet where the School of London artists were primarily concerned with representations of the human form, these new painters have moved their focus away from direct depictions of the figure, while the mystery of human experience remains central to their concerns. They are interested in the uncanny, the slippage of the real, what Michael Peppiatt refers to as the “dislocation of appearance”. Through painting the non-portrait, as we may recall in Van Gogh’s paintings of his empty bedroom, the human presence can be felt through its absence. The artists who seem to be working in this new direction are artist like Gillian Carnegie, Simon Carter, Monica Metsers, Nicholas Middleton, Carol Rhodes and George Shaw.
Shaw’s paintings are, like those of Carter, Metsers and Rhodes, empty of the living, and autobiographical. Shaw records the mundane and overlooked and finds poetry in the everyday landscapes of his own suburban surroundings. Some of his most famous images depict the two square miles of Coventry which constitute the Tile Hill housing estate where he grew up. This loving obsession for a limited geographical area recalls Constable’s paintings of the Dedham Vale, Kossoff’s representations of London and Monet’s paintings of his gardens at Giverny. Like Shaw, Simon Carter limits most of his paintings to a seven mile stretch of coast in his native Essex which lies between Holland on Sea and Walton on the Naze. This physical constraint is itself part of the narrative which forms his meditations on our material presence within the physical world and highlights the idea that what is most personal is also that which is most universal.
The youngest artist featured in this exhibition is Monica Metsers who was born in 1981. Metsers geography is even more restricted than Shaw’s and Carter’s, as she never has to leave her studio. Metsers enigmatic paintings begin when she remodels children’s toys. Broken and then re-fashioned into peculiar landscapes, she photographs the results and paints from the photographs. This return to childhood through an act of destructive manipulation has an unsettling and compelling effect which recalls in some way the paintings of Max Ernst. In her work, Metsers draws out the idea explored by psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner that play is the birth place for creative acts, a place where a mirror world to the real one is made and controlled, a safe world which represents the real but is not of it.
After so many years of artistic human production, and in an age which, Post-Duchamp, is comfortable viewing readymades, installations, photography and time-based media, what could be left to say by the artist who wishes to paint a picture? The answer appears to be a desire to return to the origins of creative practice, a desire to find again that which is original. Where photography has the ability to freeze a fleeting moment with dispassion, and film create the illusion of capturing the essence of time itself to hold it prisoner like a bird in a cage, painting distils time into object. For the painter, time is substance, felt both fast and slow, an element we experience through our emotions. In this way, paint has the capacity to make visible a world we sense inside ourselves yet cannot see, to act as a metaphor for our subconscious.
Robert Priseman
View the exhibition http://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/francis-bacon-paula-rego
[i] Catalogue preface to The Human Clay, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
[ii] Catalogue preface to The Human Clay, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
[iii] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p10
[iv] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p8 [v] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p11-12
[vi] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p 12
[vii] Catalogue essay to A School of London: Six Figurative Painters, The British Council, 1987, p7 [viii] David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, First published 1975, 2002 edition, p. 29
[ix] Marco Livingstone, In the Spirit Beneath the Skin, http://tonybevan.com/Tony_Bevan_Marco_Livingstone_essay.html, 1998
[x] Bryan Robertson, Catalogue Introduction, Marlborough Fine Art, http://www.christopherlebrun.co.uk/newsite/texts/bryan_robertson/, 1994
[xi] Bryan Robertson, Catalogue Introduction, Marlborough Fine Art, http://www.christopherlebrun.co.uk/newsite/texts/bryan_robertson/, 1994
[xii] Catalogue preface to The Human Clay, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
Reflection: The Art of Jevan Watkins Jones
A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.
Roberto Burle Marx
When Marcel Duchamp created his first Readymade from a snow shovel in 1915, which he titled In Advance of the Broken Arm, his aim was to create an art which moved beyond what he felt to be purely visual and instead sought to intervene in the “real” world. In doing this, he liberated the very idea of what constituted art. A few decades later the German artist Joseph Beuys asserted the concept that “everyone is an artist”, in order to establish the notion that creativity exists in all people and should be brought into all areas of human experience.
Upon these two central ideas of the twentieth century, that everyone is an artist and all substance and action has the potential to be art, a clearly defined understanding of who is an artist and what constitutes a work of art appears to have evaporated. Yet a sense of art being something special within society remains. This elusive feeling is captured in what unites all artists; the desire to generate a shift in our shared perceptions of the world, which in turn creates a pause in the noise of life so that we might find the magical in the mundane and awaken within ourselves a feeling of what the nature of existence really means to us.
This enables us to view art as a process of philosophical meditation which results in the yielding of an object or action, be it a painting, sculpture, film, installation or performance. The very best of these result from the removal of the artist’s own ego at the point of production and involve only the most minimal intervention with the subject matter itself. This detachment enables the work to act as an exploration of, and comment on, the culture it emerges from.We see this exemplified in works such as Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, which involved his turning a urinal upside down and Bicycle Wheel, where he simply fixed the wheel of a bike upon a stool. This same lightness of touch is found in the paintings and screen-prints of Andy Warhol, where pieces such as Electric Chair, Marilyn and Campbell’s Soup Cans are presented as two dimensional versions of Duchamp’s Readymades.
These same issues, which focus around found objects being displayed as finished works of art are central to the artistic practice of Jevan Watkins Jones. With works such as Tracking Down the Man Inside and Chair Leg, we find ourselves presented with objects the artist has humbly selected, apparently at random, and decided to offer as completed works. But this minimal approach belies a much more subtle and complex process which is founded on the practice of drawing. Just as a painter might begin a thought process with a series of sketches before applying the first brush of paint to a new canvas, Watkins Jones spends time drawing the visual world he finds around himself. This is a process he usually engages with sitting on the ground, looking up. It enables a period of meditation on the material of existence, which once absorbed, leads Watkins Jones to quietly notice beauty in the otherwise unobserved and overlooked.
Watkins Jones does not draw what he presents as found object, but uses drawing as a stepping stone to a deeper understanding and engagement with the physical world. The objects he selects are usually in the final stages of decay, when they are taken to his garden studio and carefully placed on a bench. Here they will rest for many months before either being assimilated into his oeuvre or discarded completely. This long reflection removes any sense of his individual taste as it allows the objects to assert their own authority; it is an engagement which places the artist as a mediator between the corporeal world and our observance of it, and is one which requires a refined aesthetic sensibility. Like all great art, this requires the artist to participate in a directly emotional response to the subject matter, for he must first find a resonance within it, something which the artist attempts to rationalize only after the event. It is this profound emotional interaction which we as viewers respond to in a direct and instinctive way, developing an intellectual understanding only in the wake of what we feel.
Throughout the 1950’s, Joseph Beuys produced thousands of drawings which helped him to developed his own artistic agenda. He explored the metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems, and reached the conclusion that humanity, with its desire for rationality, was eliminating “emotions” and in doing so, was managing to erase a fundamental source of energy and creativity, something he believed we each hold inside ourselves. For Beuys, who later declared himself a shaman, art occupied a magical realm, a place where we are able to find a connection with our raw emotional selves. This reveals artistic practice to be a mediation of the spiritual for both the artist and the viewer, helping us to unlock things we sense yet cannot easily articulate in words.
When we look at the work of Jevan Watkins Jones, we are presented with this same sense of magic. Objects which have previously functioned within the world have now been discarded and begun the process of decay. Yet here they are, arrested for a while, offered up so that we might wonder over the cycle of life. They occupy a world in opposition to the noise of mass media advertising, video games and movies, whose purpose appears to be a perpetual distraction to that which is really important to life, that which we find is available for free, like friendship, tenderness and love. They are cast as the shadow to birth and remind us of our mortality, a reflection which recalls how precious life really is.
Robert Priseman
View the work of Jevan Watkins Jones at http://www.jevanwatkinsjones.com/
Roberto Burle Marx
When Marcel Duchamp created his first Readymade from a snow shovel in 1915, which he titled In Advance of the Broken Arm, his aim was to create an art which moved beyond what he felt to be purely visual and instead sought to intervene in the “real” world. In doing this, he liberated the very idea of what constituted art. A few decades later the German artist Joseph Beuys asserted the concept that “everyone is an artist”, in order to establish the notion that creativity exists in all people and should be brought into all areas of human experience.
Upon these two central ideas of the twentieth century, that everyone is an artist and all substance and action has the potential to be art, a clearly defined understanding of who is an artist and what constitutes a work of art appears to have evaporated. Yet a sense of art being something special within society remains. This elusive feeling is captured in what unites all artists; the desire to generate a shift in our shared perceptions of the world, which in turn creates a pause in the noise of life so that we might find the magical in the mundane and awaken within ourselves a feeling of what the nature of existence really means to us.
This enables us to view art as a process of philosophical meditation which results in the yielding of an object or action, be it a painting, sculpture, film, installation or performance. The very best of these result from the removal of the artist’s own ego at the point of production and involve only the most minimal intervention with the subject matter itself. This detachment enables the work to act as an exploration of, and comment on, the culture it emerges from.We see this exemplified in works such as Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, which involved his turning a urinal upside down and Bicycle Wheel, where he simply fixed the wheel of a bike upon a stool. This same lightness of touch is found in the paintings and screen-prints of Andy Warhol, where pieces such as Electric Chair, Marilyn and Campbell’s Soup Cans are presented as two dimensional versions of Duchamp’s Readymades.
These same issues, which focus around found objects being displayed as finished works of art are central to the artistic practice of Jevan Watkins Jones. With works such as Tracking Down the Man Inside and Chair Leg, we find ourselves presented with objects the artist has humbly selected, apparently at random, and decided to offer as completed works. But this minimal approach belies a much more subtle and complex process which is founded on the practice of drawing. Just as a painter might begin a thought process with a series of sketches before applying the first brush of paint to a new canvas, Watkins Jones spends time drawing the visual world he finds around himself. This is a process he usually engages with sitting on the ground, looking up. It enables a period of meditation on the material of existence, which once absorbed, leads Watkins Jones to quietly notice beauty in the otherwise unobserved and overlooked.
Watkins Jones does not draw what he presents as found object, but uses drawing as a stepping stone to a deeper understanding and engagement with the physical world. The objects he selects are usually in the final stages of decay, when they are taken to his garden studio and carefully placed on a bench. Here they will rest for many months before either being assimilated into his oeuvre or discarded completely. This long reflection removes any sense of his individual taste as it allows the objects to assert their own authority; it is an engagement which places the artist as a mediator between the corporeal world and our observance of it, and is one which requires a refined aesthetic sensibility. Like all great art, this requires the artist to participate in a directly emotional response to the subject matter, for he must first find a resonance within it, something which the artist attempts to rationalize only after the event. It is this profound emotional interaction which we as viewers respond to in a direct and instinctive way, developing an intellectual understanding only in the wake of what we feel.
Throughout the 1950’s, Joseph Beuys produced thousands of drawings which helped him to developed his own artistic agenda. He explored the metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems, and reached the conclusion that humanity, with its desire for rationality, was eliminating “emotions” and in doing so, was managing to erase a fundamental source of energy and creativity, something he believed we each hold inside ourselves. For Beuys, who later declared himself a shaman, art occupied a magical realm, a place where we are able to find a connection with our raw emotional selves. This reveals artistic practice to be a mediation of the spiritual for both the artist and the viewer, helping us to unlock things we sense yet cannot easily articulate in words.
When we look at the work of Jevan Watkins Jones, we are presented with this same sense of magic. Objects which have previously functioned within the world have now been discarded and begun the process of decay. Yet here they are, arrested for a while, offered up so that we might wonder over the cycle of life. They occupy a world in opposition to the noise of mass media advertising, video games and movies, whose purpose appears to be a perpetual distraction to that which is really important to life, that which we find is available for free, like friendship, tenderness and love. They are cast as the shadow to birth and remind us of our mortality, a reflection which recalls how precious life really is.
Robert Priseman
View the work of Jevan Watkins Jones at http://www.jevanwatkinsjones.com/
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