Anthony Gormley at the RA, or: Spaces, Places, and Traces

Antony Gormley’s solo exhibition is at the Royal Academy until 3rd December. Tickets here.

Our bodies and the spaces that sustain us – where we live, where our food comes from, where our waste goes – are becoming harder to ignore. As the climate changes, as borders continue to be redrawn, as people around the world agitate for progress, living in the 21st century means being forced to re-negotiate how we inhabit a space and how we treat our environment. How are we changed by our surroundings? What will it mean for us as individuals when our environment changes, irreversibly? How do we live with ourselves?

For Antony Gormley, all these questions can be answered by looking at our own bodies. Whether they go Gormley’s lead people transform spaces: whether it’s a beach in Liverpool or a hill overlooking Newcastle, a space is impossible to see the same way once Gormley’s left his mark. In Slabworks (2019), the first room of the RA’s ‘Antony Gormley’ exhibition, fourteen blocky steel sculptures are draped around the room. At first the Slabworks are vaguely Spartan things, machine-sawed blocks of metal; notice heads, feet, a crooked arm or a bent neck and the slabworks reveal their human forms. They are no longer things in a space but people in a room. It’s a kind of full-body pareidolia; recognise the person and the space starts to make sense. Understanding our bodies is the first step to understanding the world.

Antony Gormley, Slabworks (2019). 90mm weathering steel slabs. © David Parry / the RA. 

Anthony Gormley is so famous that apparently his exhibitions don’t need names. I suppose this is a retrospective – exhibiting works from across his career – this is a show that tries to take on some of Gormley’s biggest and most general themes. Bodies are the central topic, and there’s a distinct emphasis on bringing the viewer to interact with the art as directly as possible. There are sculptures to step over and walk under, to duck past and crawl through; one of them even smells. You can even take a selfie without getting a filthy look.

Gormley is interested in whether the different ways that we take up space change how we live and how we relate to our bodies. In the courtyard outside there is a tiny iron baby, a cast based on Gormley’s six-year old daughter that was made in 1999. It’s barely a quarter the size of the paving slab it rests on and it’s quite difficult to get a good look at, there’s so many people crowded around it. Two more installations – Clearing VII (2019) and Cave (2011) – are so massive that they require contortion and squeezing-past to be properly experienced. Gormley says he likes sculpture because the audience is part of the art – the space where the art is and where we the art-lovers are is one and the same. One of Gormley’s strengths is his ability to make his audience consider the different ways that we expect art to be presented and how we think we’re supposed to act when we’re around it.

Other pieces aim to capture fleeting moments, exploring the contrast between the experience of seeing something beautiful, which is normally over quite quickly, and sculptures as things which can last for centuries. One Apple, a series of 53 lead casings that stretches across the gallery, shows each stage of an apple’s life from blossom to rot. Each casing contains the remains of the apple inside the lead. In ordinary time, an apple rots after a few weeks; the artist’s intervention freezes the apple in time and edifies a single moment. The wall drawing Exercise Between Blood and Earth is a chalk outline of something like a tree’s rings, and each time it is exhibited Gormley re-draws the outline and preserves another moment of energy and motion. These are works that look at the traces our bodies leave behind and the marks that we make.

Antony Gormley, Exercise between Blood and Earth (1983). © Antony Gormley / the RA.

It’s significant that most of Gormley’s art responding to ideas of time and preservation dates from the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear obliteration was a daily fear. It would only take four minutes or so for an H-bomb to wipe out most of life in Britain and Ireland, about as long as it’d take to sketch the concentric circles of a tree. But that chaotic instant, like all other instants, would be recorded for centuries in the tree’s rings. The Cold War may well have inspired Gormley to make these works back in the 1980s but, with the knowledge that every plastic bottle I’ve ever used will remain on Earth longer than I will, Exercise in Blood and Earth still holds the power to disturb.

Gormley’s sketches on paper and notebook studies are on display, adding a useful context to Gormley’s process and thinking over the years. I’ve always found Gormley’s sculptures to be slightly unmoored, unrelated to any obvious themes or politics that I could suss out. Of course, not knowing where the metal people have come from or why they’re here is part of the mystique of Gormley’s sculptures. The difference between a space and a place is how you look at it. A space is generally empty (the sea, the wild, outer space) whereas a place is a specific space filled with things (a house, a country, a political rally). And yet while Gormley’s sculptures undoubtedly transform the spaces they enter, I often feel they don’t say very much.

Antony Gromley, Clearing VII (2019). © David Parry / the RA.

I do like Antony Gormley’s work, and there is of course no rule that says an artist should be tied to something loud and political. With Concrete Works (1990-93), what look like blank concrete blocks are revealed (by the programme) to be hollow, with the contorted shapes of human beings kneeling or praying trapped inside the stone. Notice the similarity with Slabworks? These blocks are the minimum space that a human being could occupy. You can’t help feeling that Concrete Works might mean something if, say, Gormley were responding to political violence, or religious persecution – instances where this kind of violence is very real.

On the other hand, it’s the fundamental unexplanability that gives Gormley’s work its bite. Because Gormley’s sculptures are just weird. They stand, staring out to sea, and we’ve got no clue what they’re thinking about. It’s the absence of meaning, familiarity, and simple explanations that gives them their magnetic pull. With lead men standing among the crowd, on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, it’s hard not to be awed by the eeriness of Gormley’s best work.

Anthony Gormley, Lost Horizons I (2008), 24 cast bodyforms. © David Parry / the RA.

Besides, Gormley is basically a personal artist. Artworks like Matrix III (2019) are all about how we as individuals exist in space. This is a house, Matrix III says; this is where you’ll want to spend most of your life, if you can afford one of these. I overheard someone beside me in the gallery say that she was ‘mesmerised’ by the lines. Revealing the surreal elements of everyday things can’t fail to impress.

Antony Gormley, Matrix III (2019). 6 tonnes of reinforcing steel. © David Parry / the RA.

The logical conclusion of all this thought about how we live and how we make our mark on places is the final installation, Host (2019). Gormley has filled an entire gallery space with mud and seawater, making the white-walled, 18th century room look like Shoeburyness at tide-turning. It smells, faintly. Unlike Matrix III, or the solid casings of apples and people, this is a formless, undefined artwork. The formerly safe and specific place “the RA” is now a smelly, hazardous space “the sea” – a nasty inversion that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever had their house flood. The outside is inside, and there it is again – that sense of how strange the world can easily become. Only Anthony Gormley can give you this. The RA wouldn’t let anyone else.

 

Picture Credits:

• All images except Exercise between Blood and Earth were taken from the RA’s Exhibition page, here.
• Exercise between Blood and Earth is © Antony Gormley, and I sourced the image from this Tumblr blog. I assume the image copyright lies with Antony Gormley or the RA, but if not it’s the property of berndwuersching.

Please contact me for any copyright concerns.

Putting a pin through pretension: ‘Playing to the Gallery’, Grayson Perry

The world of contemporary art can be a baffling, hard-to-navigate place. Whether you’re an aspiring artist, or just conflicted about whether a visit to the Tate is really worth the exorbitant train fares, it’s difficult to judge the value of art if you think you don’t know anything about it. Playing to the Gallery, Grayson Perry’s short 2014 guide to the art establishment, is here to remind us that to enjoy art you don’t need anything except curiosity.

Grayson Perry.  Image: Swan Films / Channel 4.

I sometimes find myself in a double-bind when I talk about contemporary art, caught wanting to defend art from ill-intentioned attacks whilst also feeling frustrated by the elitism, pretentiousness, and the lack of opportunities that can proliferate in the industry. Grayson Perry has done some fantastic work, therefore, in writing Playing to Gallery to elucidate some of the harder-to-understand aspects of the art world.  There are some brilliant art and artists out there at the moment and it’d be a shame if, for one reason or another, people weren’t interested in going to see them. Perry puts it best in the introduction:

It’s easy to feel insecure around art and its appreciation, as though we cannot enjoy certain artworks if we don’t have a lot of academic and historical knowledge. But if there’s one message I want you to take away it’s that anybody can enjoy art and anybody can have a life in the arts – even me! For even I, an Essex transvestite potter, have been let in by the art-world mafia.

There are plenty of guides out there that offer readers an introduction to thinking about art, but few that I’ve read do so with the same humour and energy as Playing to the Gallery. Most people have a vague idea of what is ‘good’ art and what is ‘bad’. Harder to define is why we think this thing is good and that thing is ugly, an abomination, a total waste of time/money/sense. Not an easy task. Across four short chapters, Perry offers an insider’s perspective on why the art in museums and galleries has come to be called “good”, how the nature and purpose of art has changed in the last hundred-and-fifty years, and where we should start in forming our own ideas of what “good taste” is.

Playing to the Gallery (2014) Grayson Perry.

Perry is a funny, unpretentious writer, and Playing to the Gallery touches on some of the knottiest problems in contemporary art without simplification or condescension. Speaking broadly, one of the most important themes in art from the Moderns to now is self-consciousness. Artists like to make artworks that interrogate themselves, that force us to think about what we’re doing when we go to a gallery and put our hands on our chins, or post pictures of paintings on Instagram. A hundred years ago the Impressionists were asking: what does it mean to paint a portrait when a photograph is an infinitely more realistic way to capture someone’s image? Painting something non-realistically – capturing its essence, not just what it looks like – was the solution, and since then artists have been trying to push the boundaries in every direction. This is why so much contemporary arty is so different to what we’ve been taught is “good” art; that’s also why some if it is naff.  Although Playing to the Gallery dives deep into some complex debates but Perry has the advantage (over, say, a purely academic writer) of speaking from experience, which lends the book a chatty, conversational tone. Much better to discuss art with an intelligent friend than to sit through a tedious lecture. And there are drawings – funny ones.

I think I once got this as a birthday card. Copyright: Grayson Perry (2014).

It is important that people should enjoy art and be challenged by it, because as well as bringing us a lot of joy art can also get us to think more carefully about ourselves and the world.  As Perry explains, this need to give audiences a shake-down was why so many artists in the 1990s tried to shock or outrage their audiences, and why so many of those artists missed the point. Playing to the Gallery is peppered with examples from artists that you’ll be half-familiar with, which is an extremely helpful way of nudging the curious toward learning about more contemporary artists on our own initiative. It matters a lot that books like Playing to the Gallery should be accessible like this, because I recently saw an argument on social media that accused art theorists of deliberately obscuring contemporary art behind a wall of unnecessary jargon. Perry touches on this issue in chapter one, talking about the coded language of “International Art English”, and criticising the art establishment for almost “being scared of everyday clarity”. While I can accept that, like all professions, art requires a technical lexicon, the way that art is talked about can be so intimidating. Art-people must do better to engage people, especially when you realise that the Tate Modern is now the UK’s number-one visitor attraction, beating the British Museum by a few million for the first time in decades. Contemporary art has gone mainstream.

Above all Perry wants to remind us that art is experiential:

People want an outrageous and exciting experience from art and then they want to slightly puzzle over what it’s about.

There is no proscribed way of enjoying art and, despite what any self-appointed tastemaker or tabloid nay-sayer might opine, there is no such thing as objectively good art. Perry quotes Alan Bennett in saying that there should be a sign at the National Gallery: “You don’t have to like all of it”. I would have liked a more unified theory of art from Playing to the Gallery – I found myself thinking towards the end of a chapter, okay, now what? – but I think if Perry were giving us the answers then that would defeat the point. Don’t let people tell you how to enjoy. Here are some clues, but the point is that when viewing or making art you need to be your own judge, because authenticity is what makes the effort worthwhile. You should, however, always listen if someone wants to show you a way of appreciating something they think is beautiful.

Playing to the Gallery also brilliantly investigates whether the avant-garde really exists anymore. The avant-garde is supposed to be the “advance guard”, the cutting-edge: but are artists working in a publicly-funded institution, with their paintings on mugs and postcards in the gift shop, really at the forefront of culture? I don’t see why not, necessarily. Yet one of the biggest problems that we face today is that radical politics have been commodified – Amazon will sell you a T-shirt that says FEMINIST whilst treating their employees (of any gender) like shit. ‘Outrage has been domesticated’, Perry laments. When we live in a world dominated by global capitalism and where truly anything can be called art, are there any more meaningful boundaries to push? Perhaps we should return to authenticity, then: art that was made with integrity and honesty. Perry talks about how, as a child, art functioned as a means of survival for him – it was a place for him to escape to in difficult times, and that later creativity allowed him to express himself as who he was. If an artist has found themselves through their art then that, surely, makes it authentic and truthful and beautiful. Doesn’t it?

Copyright: Grayson Perry (2014).

Art should be fun, which is why children are good at it. Picasso is famous for having said that, at age four, he knew how to be an artist, and that the skill came from knowing how to preserve that creativity as you grew up. One of the loveliest lines in Playing to the Gallery describes the sound of LEGO being poured from a box as the “noise of a child’s mind working”. I really like that.

Get the book here. 

Quotes:

Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery (London: Penguin, 2014)

Image Copyright

• All images of artwork contained in Playing to the Gallery are copyright property of Grayson Perry. The drawings were scanned by me from my book; thumbs edited out.
• Image of the artist copyright Swan Films / Channel 4, from this article.

Please contact me for any copyright concerns and I’ll be glad to comply.

Exhibition Review: Violent Amnesia | Oscar Murillo

‘Violent Amnesia’ by Oscar Murillo is at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until the 23rd of June.

Since reopening in February 2018, Kettle’s Yard has boasted some of the largest gallery space in Cambridge for temporary exhibitions. These spaces offer open, accessible room for shows that’d be impossible to accommodate in the main house, which has enabled Kettle’s Yard to keep abreast of its impressive history as a unique centre for the Arts in Britain. Oscar Murillo hasn’t been afraid to push this space to its maximum potential, with his latest show, ‘Violent Amnesia’, spread across four galleries and spilling into the tiny nave of St Peter’s Church up the road.

There’s something derelict about the way Murillo combines painting and installation in ripped, torn canvases with sagging folds, hanging from rails on grommets like black curtains. In the largest of the four galleries, black textile sheets are piled in heaps on the floor which visitors are invited to walk on and take pictures with (handy if you’re in the market for a new profile pic). In another gallery one of these sheets is faced by a row of three pews salvaged from a closed North London church. The effect is vaguely unsettling: the pews’ splintered wood and empty seats give the feeling that you’ve stumbled into some kind of ritual that’s just been vacated. Yep, something pretty derelict about ‘Violent Amnesia’.

Oscar Murillo, The Institute of Reconciliation (2014–). Courtesy of Kettle’s Yard.

Oscar Murillo (b. 1986) moved to the UK with his family in the 1990s from Colombia. His work has always sought to explore the ties between community, migration and identity. His installations draw upon family and personal history and the connections he’s made across the world. At the heart of ‘Violent Amnesia’ is the ongoing installation The Institute of Reconciliation, made up of these hanging canvases daubed in black paint and sprawled across the galleries. Murillo has been working on (or adding to) The Institute of Reconciliation since 2014 using paint, textile and burnt corn. One of Murillo’s innovations in painting – seen in the catalyst series at ‘Violent Amnesia’ – is to paint onto a “master canvas” and then lay another canvas on top of the first one and paint something else onto that. Working with a stylus, the paint is pressed through the canvasses to transfer images and leave deep impressions on the original canvas.

Oscar Murillo, surge (2017-8), Oil and oil stick on canvas and linen. Courtesy of Kettle’s Yard.

You can see this technique at work in surge, above, one of my favourite pieces featured at ‘Violent Amnesia’. It’s busy, but not overwhelming. It’s a form of bricolage – French, meaning roughly “D.I.Y. but arty” – layering up signs, symbols and motifs from a variety of sources to create something like the mish-mash of information that we see everyday, in the street or online. I wonder what those Devanagari words say. I wonder where the other layers came from. I won’t find out about either, but surge is trying to get me to think about what we lose and what we find when things are mixed together: across borders, times and mediums.

Murillo says that the idea for ‘Violent Amnesia’ came to him in 2017 while he was in Japan. While in Nagoya he came across the Japanese concept of ‘Mono no aware’ [物の哀れ], which translates as ‘the pathos of things’. Mono no aware is the feeling that you get when you realise that everything is doomed to change, nothing lasts and there’s nothing you can do about it. As Murillo explains:

It is not meant to be a general sadness but rather a deeply felt emotion that washes over us as individuals as we realise that everything is transient and in its own time and space, and place.

What ‘Violent Amnesia’ aims to capture, then, is the aftershock that remains after something has changed. If Murillo’s pieces look like wreckage this is less because we should be trying to establish what they once were and what they might’ve meant than an attempt to think about wreckage and leftovers themselves. I’ve come across ‘Mono no aware’ in a few Japanese novels, and it brings to mind William Basinski’s composition The Disintegration Loops, but short of a Beckett stage I’ve never before seen an installation that’s tried (as Murillo says) to ‘capture this idea of forgetting’.

There’s a definite ecological aspect too, it seems. The burnt corn – a staple food in Colombia – references environmental as well as economic destruction in Colombia and elsewhere. Bringing to the fore all of these cast-away objects, like burnt corn and salvaged pews and the saturated remnants of other canvasses, Murillo links up Mono no aware’s recognition of impermanence with throwaway culture. In St Peter’s Church Murillo has filled the (still in use!) pews with five grotesque papier-mache effigies, whose insides are filled with burnt corn and clay. They’re nasty little people and the symbolism isn’t subtle. Consumption comes at a price.

Oscar Murillo, The Institute of Reconciliation (2014–), papier-machie and fabric. Courtesy of Kettle’s Yard.

Upstairs at Kettle’s Yard are a few other projects: Murillo’s sound work My name is Belisario, a recording of his father telling the story of his flight from Colombia and arrival in the UK, and Hannah Kemp-Welch’s project ‘Hyperlocal Radio’. Kemp-Welch has worked with children from North Cambridge to design, build and record their own sound artworks using old Pye radios. The project encourages young people to tell stories for themselves and highlights the importance of local communities, whilst also questioning where Cambridge’s expanding tech industry might be tasking us. Ambitious-sounding, but delightful. Don’t miss it.

I’m intrigued by The Institute of Reconciliation as an ongoing installation, especially as it combines so many different medias – painting, palimpsest, burnt corn and stuffed effigy. I haven’t thought of an artwork as an “institution” – what does that mean, exactly? If a institution is a body that is organised for some purpose, then without being facetious I want to know what the purpose of Murillo’s institution is. For me, capturing the idea of forgetting must be about figuring out how to remember what we didn’t know we’d forgotten. Perhaps bringing together different medias, sources and styles is that very reconciliation that Murillo is trying to find.

Find the exhibition catalogue for ‘Violent Amnesia’ here.

Oscar Murillo will be performing and giving a talk at Kettle’s Yard on the 30th of April and on the 17th of May. Find out more here. 

Image Credits – All images courtesy of the artist, © Oscar Murillo and photograph by Matthew Hollow. Please contact me for any copyright concerns. 

Exhibition Review: Kip Gresham | The Art of Collaboration

‘The Art of Collaboration’, Kip Gresham et al., is at The Heong Gallery in Cambridge from the 1st of March to the 19th May 2019.

It’s always cool to see an exhibition that covers art made over a long stretch of time. Usually this is because it’s a retrospective of someone’s career but, as the title suggests, ‘The Art of Collaboration’ is doubly impressive because it showcases such a variety of different artists across a long period. Since founding the Manchester Print Workshop in 1975, Kip Gresham has helped countless artists transfer their work into the world of prints, to realise their visions anew in a fresh medium. Printmaking is fundamentally all about collaboration, and ‘The Art of Collaboration’ accordingly showcases forty years’ worth of artistic friendships. It’s a credit to Gresham’s prowess as Master Printer that such a broad church of artistic vision can sit so comfortably in one room.

The Master Printmaker, Kip Gresham.

‘The Art of Collaboration’ is on display at the Heong Gallery, which is attached to Downing College, Cambridge. The Heong itself is an elegantly basic space, like an oversized cabin (I think it was once an Edwardian stables) with high walls and a row of concealed skylights that give the galley a bright, open feel. Having opened in 2016, the Heong is a young gallery, but they’ve maintained a strong programme of exhibitions for at least as long as I’ve been visiting. Their previous exhibition – Stuart Pearson Wright’s brilliantly surreal ‘Halfboy’ – and last year’s ‘Stephen Chambers | The Court of Redonda’ last year have stayed on my mind a lot longer than many shows do. So it’s unsurprising that Kip Gresham’s show should also capitalise on the Heong’s extensive links to the art world (of Cambridge and beyond), especially as Gresham is now based locally at The Print Studio.

Just over forty artists are represented here, including 21 RA members, and as you’d imagine difference is the key. Some works explode with colour and vibrancy, using bold inks for bright, clean designs. Other works bespeak an agonising process of design and redesign to achieve complex, almost ornate prints crammed with detail. Very few of the works at the Heong are static – take for example John Hoyland’s Roots (1992). There’s a definite technical kudos in making a print that can capture the movement and energy of painting.

John Hoyland, Roots (1992).

Any artistic labour is of course difficult – but it’s the peculiar fate of the printmaker to be just that, a labourer, working with tools and machinery and close to the practical side of the art business. Or, closer than most people imagine an artist to be. Transferring an artist’s work to the medium of print presents all kinds of technical challenges; the genius of the printmaker is to meet these challenges and overcome them in a way that adds to the artist’s vision, not takes away, creating new works that could only have been made through collaboration.

Gresham does this without sacrificing the style of the artist’s original work. Take Alan Davie’s Grangemouth Image (2010), which is entirely typical of the busyness that defined Davie’s work in oils, filled with “primordial” shapes, pictograms and symbols. The patterns on Grangemouth Image are almost Aztec; a bit brighter than some of Davie’s work in oils, but you want a print that stands out. However, just a few feet down Kiki Smith’s deceptively simple Chicks (1997) shows us some minimalist kiwi birds, pecking away without a care for the tangled mess of lines and colour over the way. These works couldn’t be less alike – and yet both come to life thanks to Gresham’s skill as printmaker.

Alan Davie, Grangemouth Image, 2010. © Estate of Alan Davie. All rights reserved, DACS 2019.

In the accompanying catalogue, Stephen Chambers and others call Gresham’s skill as printmaker “alchemy”, a kind of magic that’s all to do with taking one thing and transforming it into another. The printing process is itself a nice metaphor for collaboration – both are palimpsestuous, about adding layers and give and take, piling up ideas and sticking things together to see what fits. This was most noticeable in Peter Blake’s Demonstrations in a Department Store No.2 (1998) which fills a photo-realistic background with grainy cut-outs from pop culture, a bit like a Carry On poster or the album art of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I was most impressed with John Bellamy’s Odyssey (1998), a carnival parade of waxy figures inside a pencilled frame that was seemingly doodled by Bellamy himself. In actual fact, the frame around Odyssey was a lithograph made to look like hand-done pencil. I can only imagine how many hours it took Gresham and Bellamy to get that right.

Some of the works weren’t to my taste, but then again I’m sure there are other visitors who’ve got no time for Bellamy or Blake who loved the things that I found a little dull. Which I guess is entirely the point (!) of an exhibition like this. With a number of works (like Bellamy’s Odyssey) Gresham tests the limits of what can be done with the printmaking form. Richard Long’s RIVER AVON MUD AND DUST LINES ALONG THE RIO GRANDE (1996) plays with running ink and mud stains to capture a moment of otherwise impermanence – kicking up mud – and preserve it almost like chromatography.

Richard Long, RIVER AVON MUD AND DUST LINES ALONG THE RIO GRANDE, 1996. © Richard Long 2019.

Richard Long has often made art that’s a kind of capture, taking the seemingly ordinary or the ephemeral and transforming it into something worthy of being gawked at and written about on graduate student blogs. Yet that seems to be exactly what some of the most inventive art does – it can take the most mundane thing for its subject, and remind the viewer of the beauty that can be found all around us. And Gresham himself has said that the it’s magical to work with such creative people. Hmm. Maybe there really is a kind of alchemy to printmaking after all.

Every work at ‘The Art of Collaboration’ is unique, and each tells a story of partnership that’s as different from the next as the prints themselves. Gresham must’ve had a lot of fun making these, meeting so many other fantastic artists – Stephen Chambers, Prunella Clough, Anthony Gormley (to name three big-hitters). A case of notebooks on display demonstrates the intricate planning and foresight that went into each of the prints. While some works might seem like a random tangle of shapes and colours, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s long, difficult work, but clearly it pays. According to Gresham, collaborative printmaking is a constant process of cumulative learning, of adapting and growing the way one works to accommodate a changing bevy of partnerships. This exhibition shows the fruits of our labour if we’re open to new ideas and new ways of working.

 

Sources

• Alan Davie, Grangemouth Image, 2010. © Estate of Alan Davie. All rights reserved, DARS 2019.
• John Hoyland, Roots 1992.
• Richard Long, RIVER AVON MUD AND DUST LINES ALONG THE RIO GRANDE 1996. © Richard Long 2019.

 

For any copyright concerns please contact me and I’d be glad to comply. 

Ekphrasis and the Ephemeral in Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’

Donna Tartt, the wisdom goes, leaves literary critics in an awkward position. That she writes bestselling thrillers seems excuse enough to have kept her away from high-falutin fancy book talk; but because her books are so good, and read by so many, maybe there’s a dereliction of duty if we don’t take them seriously. Perhaps I’m just late to the game. Searching Tartt’s name on the Cambridge University Library, however, turns up slim results, which seems to prove my point. The middlebrow is where it’s at, dear reader, and Donna Tartt’s third novel The Goldfinch does plenty of interesting things with ekphrasis, a fascinating and obscure type of writing.

The Goldfinch – presumably a superb, heart-rending masterpiece.

Ekphrasis – from Greek, meaning something like ‘to call out and proclaim an object’ – is a Classical rhetorical technique present in all ages of art and literature, from the Greeks to The Goldfinch. Simply put, ekphrasis is a detailed description of visual art, most commonly a poem about a painting. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn is probably the most famous example; Keats describes a Greek urn as a way of thinking about history, art, how people from the past tried to communicate with the future through the things they made. Another iconic ekphrasis from the Romantic period is Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, where Shelley uses a description of a ruined statue in the British Museum as a way of saying that, no matter how mighty, all tyrants fall in the end.

Ekphrasis is a brilliant method of reflection because it responds to something that already exists, in this case an artwork: look at the painting while you read the poem, and you’ll see it in different way and gain a greater insight into what it’s trying to say to you. Ekphrasis is often a bit more flashy than normal prose; according to the critic Ruth Webb,

what distinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia, its impact on the mind’s eye of the listener who must […] be almost made to see the subject.

What does it mean to look through words? When we look at a painting, what are we supposed to see – the thing represented, or how the artist sees the world? Something like Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss is not powerful because it shows two people in an embrace, but because it gives us a new way to visualise how we feel about someone we love. Art is a way of seeing rather than a thing to see; ekphrasis in writing, then, is about examining how we relate to art and how it affects us.

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, oil and gold leaf on canvas (1907-8), Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Which brings us back to Donna Tartt and The Goldfinch. The novel is about a real-life painting – also called The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654 – and one man’s obsessive relationship with it, an obsession which comes dominate every aspect of his life. Theo Decker is only thirteen when his art-loving mother takes him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to see Fabritius’ Goldfinch. Theo idolises his mother, and through her he loves the art – especially after a terrorist bomb destroys the Met gallery and kills Theo’s mother.

In a state of shock, Theo ends up walking out of the gallery holding The Goldfinch, which he takes home and hides, ready to give to her when she walks through the door. In the days to come he is too traumatised by his mother’s death and the blast to tell anyone about his mistake. When he realises the seriousness of what he’s done, it’s too late to claim innocence. By not coming forward Theo becomes a criminal, a guilt made all more acute by his desire not to lose the last connection to his dead mother.

If The Goldfinch is a novel about a character with an obsession, Donna Tartt clearly has her own fixations as a writer. Right from the beginning of The Secret History – Donna Tartt’s phenomenal first novel, which I wrote about here – the murderous narrator Richard confesses a ‘morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs’. You could say that Theo in The Goldfinch suffers from the same affliction, except here the picturesque is literally a picture.

The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius, oil on panel (1654). Mauristhuis, The Hague.

There’s a clever parallel in the way that the novel’s plot revolves around a calamitous explosion at an art gallery: in real-life, The Goldfinch was one of the only artworks to survive the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, a gunpowder warehouse explosion which killed over a hundred people including Carel Fabritius, who was inside his studio with all his other (now destroyed) paintings at the time. Seeing The Goldfinch in the Met gallery, knowing that it’s survived three hundred years’ decay and destruction, Theo’s mother remarks:

…it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things […] I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Which is exactly how Theo views his pilfered painting: it’s a kind of bulwark against history, a guarantee that, even if people die and let you down, then at least some things endure. As he grows older, leaving New York to live with his deadbeat dad in Las Vegas, Theo’s view of the world becomes increasingly pessimistic. He falls in with a capricious Russian boy called (predictably) Boris, and together they get drunk, smoke weed, steal things from supermarkets – a far cry from the clingy mummy’s boy Theo’s implied to have been in his “old life” before the explosion.

I actually found this part of The Goldfinch the most enjoyable – Boris is a great character, and their misadventures in the Mojave are great fun to be part of. As I say, Tartt does a great job of contrasting their picaresque youth with Theo’s close dependency on his mother as a younger boy – a change that leaves you with the feeling that, with the vodka hangovers and enough cigarettes for a French bordello, Theo might be going down the wrong path. But he’s too pessimistic to care – an attitude that certainly doesn’t help him lay to rest his trauma. Without his mother he’s lost; there’s no meaning in life, so why take it seriously? Which is where I want to draw this distinction between the ephemeral and the ekphrastic. If Tartt typifies Theo’s real life by change and impermanence, then the still-life of the painting anchors him, gives him something solid and reliable to hold onto.

And yes, art can do that for people. But The Goldfinch brings no comfort to Theo. He can’t share his terrible secret with anyone for fear of retribution, and so his guilt and shame grow. For years, in fact, he’s too terrified to even look at the painting or take it out from the layers of paper that it’s wrapped in. He is much like the feathery prisoner in The Goldfinch, chained to a wall for the remainder of his life: that anchor to the past is more like an albatross around Theo’s neck, or a millstone.

Perhaps there’s something about Tartt’s epigraph to the novel – a quote from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus – more meaningful than just a punchy opening. Camus boldly declares:

The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

This of course applies to Theo’s painting, which brings danger with its sort-of-psychological safety. In Sisyphus, Camus maintains that it’s not enough to realise that life might be meaningless, you have to make meaning for yourself, even if you know that we’re all going to die and nothing really matters in the end. You get the sense that, if someone were to come along and steal the painting, Theo would be a lot happier. He’d see that living in the past is unhealthy, that the life he ends up with as an antiques dealer living with a kindly old craftsman (Hobie, an unusually decent character for Tartt) is not such a bad one, and that holding onto our traumas only makes them more damaging and more traumatic.

I don’t think that Donna Tartt wants us to think that Theo’s obsession is anything but toxic, but the novel’s use of ekphrasis – Theo’s relation to The Goldfinch – is all the more compelling because it’s so skewed. Everything we need to need to know about Theo is wrapped up in Tartt’s use of ekphrasis. It’s quite ironic that the bare fact of The Goldfinch‘s survival is a testament to human fragility – that our greatest treasures are only what we can save from the passage of time – and yet Theo can’t take that as a cue to live while he can.

A lot of the novel’s key ideas are brought into play in its final chapter, which functions as more of an essay than a conclusion. Granted, some of The Goldfinch’s best passages of ekphrasis come from here, but to be perfectly honest I found the ending to The Goldfinch a bit weak. My rule is to never give spoilers in an article so I’ll leave plot concerns aside (basically, I thought the ending was a wet firework) and focus on Tartt’s choice to shine a light directly on the novel’s Big Ideas in the last twenty pages.

Donna Tartt.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – plenty of novels leave the knockout punch for the finale – but I don’t know. When you’ve kept the reader’s attention for pushing 800 pages I’d be tempted to focus on the characters, not the ideas. If Donna Tartt were a lesser novelist you’d think that she were afraid we’d miss the point; but I was so impressed with The Secret History‘s subtle riffing on Classical themes that I think Tartt knows exactly what she’s doing, which makes me question why she’s done it. Novels aren’t essays – they’re more like thought experiments, running through ideas, or at least that’s what Camus used them for. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being a little unfair. Even if for me The Goldfinch ends on the wrong key I’m still enamoured with Tartt’s ekphrasis.

By far the most powerful message of The Goldfinch is to not take for granted the friendships that you make. Boris and Theo make a good team of misfits and as I say, the middle portion of the book set in Las Vegas is where Tartt’s eye for the complexities of relationships really shines. The characters often reference Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: a book I haven’t read but I’m sure there are all sorts of undertones that I’m missing there. Aside from the bond between Boris and Theo The Goldfinch is a rather gloomy novel, but then ekphrasis often is quite nihilistic – see for example Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts, with the cheerful opening:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters […]

A poem that Theo thinks of more than once in The Goldfinch. Because ekphrasis is all about how we look at art it’s an excellent method of self-reflection. It’s a really useful way of underscoring how narrators, writers and readers alike relate to others because it uses art as a catalyst for these relationships. Ekphrasis in The Goldfinch shows the irony – and finally the tragedy – of how Theo’s got it wrong, about art and life. Change is a natural part of life; if the Richard in The Secret History is doomed because he desires perfection, maybe Theo is doomed because he can’t – won’t – let go of a perfection that he’s made for himself. There’s no such thing as the perfect painting, even less so than a perfect life.

 

 

Sources

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus [1942] (London: Penguin, 2005)
• Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, oil on board, 33.5 cm × 22.8 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1654.
• Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm × 180 cm, Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1907-8.
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (New York: Little and Brown, 2013)
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
• Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word and Image, 15 (1999), pp. 7-18; p. 13.

 

Image Credits

• Amazon.com
• Wikipedia
• Little and Brown.

 

Please contact me regarding any copyright infringement and I will gladly comply.

Profiles no. 3 – Talking to Hyenas with Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was without question one of the greatest Surrealist painters. She had an amazing, varied life – an affluent childhood in Edwardian England, a romance with Max Ernst in 1930s Paris, flight from the Nazis and a brief, traumatic spell in a Spanish asylum – before her death at the age of 94 in 2011. She was at the core of the Surrealist movement but, as is too often the case for great women working alongside great men, she was overlooked until the latter years of her life. Richly detailed and filled with creepy symbolism, Carrington’s paintings are genuinely dreamlike, capturing everything that the Surrealists sought to depict and uncover through their art. They’re fantastically weird.

Leonora Carrington.

Carrington was born in 1917, the daughter of a wealthy Lancashire mill owner. She detested the stuffy upper-class world that she grew up in, being expelled from two different schools for rebellious behaviour before she was sent to an art academy in Florence. Her mother presented her at Court in 1936, exhibited before the King and Queen and shown off to all the eligible bachelors of the English aristocracy. Being presented at Court was a huge deal back then, and if you were a young woman then your first appearance in Society was hyped up as the most important day of your life so far. You can probably guess how Leonora felt about that.

Carrington was a writer as well as a painter, and her story ‘The Debutante’ tells of a young girl’s hatred for all the pomp and circumstance of her upbringing, and the rigid lifestyle forced upon her. The girl in the story has befriended a hyena she met at the zoo, and confides in the animal her anxiety at the upcoming party her mother’s throwing for her. The hyena has a cunning plan – if the girl sneaks her out of the zoo, then she can attend the party in the girl’s place. Everything goes off without a hitch, until:

The greatest difficulty was to find a way of disguising the hyena’s face. We spent hours and hours looking for a way, but she [the hyena] always rejected my suggestions. At last she said, ‘I think I’ve found the answer. Have you got a maid?’

‘Yes,’ I said, puzzled.

‘There you are then. Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we’ll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I’ll wear her face tonight instead of mine.’

I love the shift in the narrative – how we go from a relatively silly and playful mood into something far darker. Though she goes along with the plan the debutante, in her naivety, has been duped by the malevolent hyena. ‘The Debutante’ is brilliantly strange, but with purpose – you’ll find a lot of her stories are about young women find themselves manipulated by sinister (usually, but not always) male forces. I know less about art than I do about books, but I from what I can tell the same is true of her paintings.

In 1936 Carrington attended the first (and last) London International Surrealist Exhibition. If I were a time traveller I seriously think this’d be my first stop. Surrealism, of course, was a primarily European movement, flourishing in Paris, Berlin and Zurich – and for whatever reason it never caught on as fully here as it did on the Continent. So the Exhibition represents probably the high-point of British Surrealism, attended by all of the big names of the movement. Famously, Salvador Dali delivered a lecture whilst wearing a deep-sea diving suit (he nearly suffocated, but rescued by David Gascoyne and a spanner) and a young Dylan Thomas went around with teacups of boiled string, asking visitors whether they liked their tea weak or strong. For the young Leonora Carrington it must have been an overwhelming and liberating experience, as it must feel for anyone who finally discovers something that they can devote their lives to.

The International Surrealist Exhibition in London. From top left: Diana-Brinton Lee, Salvador Dali (in suit), Rupert Lee, Paul Eluard, Musch Eluard, ELT Mesens (1936).

Later that year she met the artist Max Ernst at party in London. Despite the fact that Ernst was more than twenty years older than her (and married) by 1937 the pair had run away to Paris and Leonora was exiled from her family. They mingled with all the Surrealists, Dadaists and Modernists you could name – everyone from James Joyce to Tristan Tzara – and the couple supported one another’s artistic development. It was around this time that Carrington produced one of her most famous early works, titled The Inn of the Dawn. It comments on the artist’s sexuality, and her newly discovered freedom as an artist; it was dedicated to Ernst. The seated figure is both male and female, and most likely represents Carrington and Ernst as one. I wonder if the rocking-horse is a cheeky reference to the Dadaist movement? (‘Dada’ means ‘Rocking-Horse’ in French, and the name was chosen at random by flicking through a dictionary).

The Inn of the Dawn, Leonora Carrington, 1937-1938

After Ernst’s divorce from his wife in 1938 he and Carrington moved to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, a small town in southern France. They each sculpted a guardian animal to protect their home and their relationship: Ernst made some birds and Carrington constructed a plaster horse head. Their partnership was not fated to last, however, and  in 1940 Ernst was arrested by the French police because he was German. Devastated, Carrington fled to Spain. Her growing anxiety, coupled with paranoia, isolation and a series of hallucinations led to her confinement in an asylum, which her family quietly paid for without leaving England to help themselves. She endured horrific treatment – electroshock therapy, treatment with drugs now banned the world over, as well as sexual abuse from her doctors – which she detailed in the novel Down Below (1988).

Labyrinth, Leonora Carrington

By 1941 she had escaped to Lisbon, and from there she fled to Mexico City – where she remained for the rest of her life. Despite the trauma of her early years I think she did have a happy life there, marrying a Hungarian photographer called Emerico Weisz. For the rest of her life Carrington continued to refine and develop her art in isolation from the Europeans that she had been so closely associated in the 1930s, allowing her work to take on a peculiarity and refinement that is entirely her own.When she was told that one of her paintings had been sold at Christie’s in New York for $1.5 million, she replied that they must be joking. Yet she is very well respected in Mexico, and her reputation is steadily growing.

For me, Carrington’s artwork exemplifies everything that the Surrealists stood for. The best definition I can find for what Surrealism is supposed to mean – what all the melting clocks and impossible stairs and strange hammerhead shark people are about – comes from David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935):

It is the avowed aim of the Surrealist movement to reduce and finally to dispose altogether of the flagrant contradictions that exist between dream and waking life, the ‘unreal’ and the ‘real’, the unconsciousness and the consciousness.

Gascoyne argued that if we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, then what we experience whilst dreaming is just as valid as the experiences of our everyday lives, which all other artists confine themselves to. In a sense Surrealism is hyper-realist, because a Surrealist is painting a landscape made of dreams – no matter how bizarre that might be. If you leave everyday logic to one side and realise that these paintings are supposed to be as mad as our dreams then you’ll start to get a lot more out of them.

Detail from ‘Samian’, Leonora Carrington

Take a look at this painting. Isn’t it fascinating? What strikes me about it is what the figure on the right is wearing – what are her clothes made of? Notice how I think it’s female; I might be wrong. Are they feathers? Silk? Or is she wearing something far more surreal: is it so hard to imagine that she is wearing pure starlight, a shower of meteors, or the moss that grows on sea rocks? You could spend hours taking these pictures apart and trying to imagine what kind of a world the subjects inhabit, how its internal logic seems to fit together. I have never come across another artist who can show so authentically what it’s like to be dreaming. It’s amazing.

It was commonly said among her contemporaries how astonishingly beautiful Carrington was. This is obviously nothing new – the idea that, like objects of art themselves, female artists have to be attractive in a fey and willowy (arty) way, at the same time as being artists. Shape and structure, and conventions of how things should look are definitely something that Carrington explores; in many ways the deformed, abject animals and people that populate her paintings seem to challenge our assumptions of what is normal or not, what can be considered beautiful and how exactly we do the considering.

There is a complicated beauty in her paintings, expressed with a fine attention to detail and a clear mastery of artistic discipline. She was influenced by Mexican and Celtic mythology and for a time she and a handful of others studied alchemy and the dark arts. But I guess that’s nothing out of the ordinary, when your friends boil string and put on diving suits for kicks.

The Militant Muse is published by Thames and Hudson. 

A long-standing tendency has been to view the women of Surrealism as muses, mirrors that reflected the brilliance of male counterparts like Ernst. This is damaging because it pushes artists like Carrington to the sidelines and negates the originality of their work. The art scholar Whitney Chadwick has been working on restoring this balance for a long time, and her new book The Militant Muse (Thames and Hudson, 2018) explores female Surrealism in a more balanced light, touching extensively on Carrington and others, like Frieda Kahlo. Leonora’s collected stories are published by Penguin as The Hearing Trumpet and a small selection have just been released as part of their new Moderns series (that’s how many I’ve read).

I’m definitely going to try and give The Militant Muse a read, and I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in knowing more about this amazing woman buying that little Penguin sample of her short stories. They can turn from the light-hearted to the macabre in seconds, without ever losing their fairy tale atmosphere. They are always dreamlike, even if sometimes they feel too much like nightmares.

Quotes are taken from ‘The Skeleton’s Holiday’ by Leonora Carrington (London: Penguin, 2018) and ‘A Short Survey of Surrealism’ by David Gascoyne (London: Enitharmon Press, 2000). 

Picture Credits are varied, and I’m very happy to take anything down that infringes on copyright: Tate Archives, saatchigallery.com, vorpalcloud.org, and theartstack.com,  amazon.co.uk and Wikipedia.