Bedfellows: the time
and matter of two fake deaths
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The subject of this text arose from an afternoon in the
Metropolitan Museum in New York in the summer of 2015 and the opportunity to
look at and write about art with which I was unfamiliar. With it came the
chance to write in a different way to normative
historical writing, to write mainly about art’s formal components – its
capacity to mean something just through the selection of the raw stuff at the
artists’ disposal - without too much recourse to textual sources, and to think
about the interstices between art and writing.
The first of the two works in question is anonymous, a
small, finely crafted, sixteenth century terracotta made in France in the
sixteenth century showing the death – or more specifically, the dormition - of
the Virgin Mary. The other, more recent, much larger picture also shows another
immanent death. Here, blood pours from the head of an anonymous prone male
figure as he seemingly breathes his last. The picture measures around two by three
metres and was made in 1970 by the twentieth century American painter, Philip
Guston.
On reflection, the two works were part of a curious
calculus: they had something in common and where they had nothing in common,
they really had nothing in common at all, each respectively repelling and
attracting the other with the force of their own similarity and difference. In
this sense, they were, both literally and figuratively, bedfellows, two
characters caught napping in once different and now similar circumstances, both
brought together by the redemptive cloak of art. (In this sense we might see
the museum as misericordia, doing the job of the Virgin’s gown, offering
sanctuary to the myriad pictures that gather within.)
Let’s start with a striking similarity. Neither of the two
subjects is really dead. According to Catholic doctrine, the Virgin Mary
doesn’t die; she simply enters a period of suspended existence, a sleep or
dormition. We know this because she is conceived without concupiscence and at
her passing from this world sleeps uncorrupted before ascending a few weeks
later to her Son’s side, whereupon she assumes the role of Queen of Heaven,
Christ’s bride. Her course from one condition to the other is cat’s cradle like
in its theology and is discussed at length by the early Christian Fathers. It
gets taken up again by theologians in sixteenth century France and Germany, and
it is upon this reference that our dormition draws.
At the exact moment shown in the Metropolitan’s terracotta,
Mary is largely of this world rather than the next, an old woman, her face
drawn and wrinkled. But the next world clearly beckons. Time, space and matter are
already buckling under the weight of the prescience of this event, a buckling
that shapes and twists the terracotta. Mary is given notice of her passage into
heaven by the same angel who announces her pregnancy and in this her final
moment all but one of the Apostles – Thomas – take time out of their Pentecostal mission to
rally to her bedside. They come from far and wide and arrive with miraculous speed.
Each somehow finds his space around Mary’s bed, twisting in an out of the
pliable clay interior, pushing bedposts, arches and pilasters to find sufficient
room. Over time, even the clay struggles to keep pace as it too cracks and the
components of the picture warp. We have, then, within the dormition a doubled time:
the twisting time of the event itself (the mustering of Apostles and angels) and
the material time of the clay as it dries and twists over its six hundred year
history. Not least we have the doubled time of the spectator: the time of the Catholic
Church and now the time of art.
Like the Virgin, Guston’s subject is also in some form
suspended state but we know this only from clues in the picture rather than
religious dogma. The picture is ambiguously titled Stationery Figure. It is not moving. Despite its thanatosic pose,
the figure is clearly living. It draws on a cigarette, the intake of oxygen
making the tip glow red while a small, cartoon like cloud of smoke hovers
above. (By way of a theological footnote, the late Apostle Thomas was said to
have arrived late at the Virgin’s bedside on a cloud such as this.) Our second figure,
then, is not dead but acting badly, playing possum, a stage corpse taking time
out between scene changes. A hint of the time of the event is given by the
clock in the picture’s background: it seems to take place in the early hours of
the morning – sometime before 1.30 a.m. - although the calibrations on the
clock face are difficult to read. At least fourteen divisions can be seen and
some are partially eclipsed by the prone figure. It is also possible to see the
night sky through a small window in the picture’s background. In this sense,
then, the Virgin and the Stationery
Figure are both poised on a chronological margin: poised waiting in a backstage
time of a suspended performance.
What of the two works’ facture? The dormition is made with evident
skill. The clay is pressed into describing the event in painstaking detail from
the texture of Mary’s skin to the decorative detail on the pitcher by her
bedside, from the carefully delineated pages of a Gospel to the ionic pilaster
visible behind the bedpost to the right. The artist of the dormition also knows
his art history: the images of the Apostles take their lead from various forms
of Roman portraiture, some classical and idealising, others more realistic. The
Apostle on the far left looks like a pugnacious
Vespasian from the first century when Romans gave up idealism. In stark
contrast to the level of detail, skill and labour invested in the Dormition, Guston seems to know nothing.
His work is crude, clumsily drawn, badly painted and poorly composed. There is
nothing in the selection of colours – pinks, whites, greys and reds - that
could possibly suggest any hint of harmony, informed selection or taste. However,
this may also be a choice conditioned by the time of another dormition. These are the colours of the
slaughterhouse, the colours of greying fat, blood and flesh, not of
decomposition but not of life either. This is the matter of death as it is caught
between a moment, the absence of life and the point of putrefaction. If this is
the case, we can quickly find our way back to the dormition because these are
the colours so abjured by Mary’s immaculate condition. We have, then, flesh in
two kinds of suspended animation, one immaculate, the other the death of the freezer
cabinet. Again, the two figures are both inscribed with a new kind of time, a
time of suspension.
There are also curious connections in the two works’
composition. In step with Guston’s wilfully clumsy drawing, is an equally
clumsy composition. Components of the picture make way for one another
flattening the picture into a relief. The
bulb, the light switch, the smoke, hand and window find space for one another
in a way with which the sculptor of the dormition might again sympathise. On closer
inspection the body doesn’t eclipse the clock face, the clock presses onto the
body: time weighs on Guston’s figure.
Although the two works have something in common – they share
comparable subjects, they address the subject of time, and not least, they are
both art - the contexts from which they draw their references are very
different. The Dormition takes as its
point of reference from the spiritual preoccupations of the northern European late
medieval world, one in which intense spiritually is articulated through close
observation. By contrast, Guston’s world is one largely of his own making and
his point of reference is not art by way of theology – but art for art, prepositionally turned in on
itself like most of the art in the Met and most art in museums. There are clues
to what is going on but we need to look back at Guston’s troubled course through
American art to find them. In the 1930s and 40s, he made the transition from a
socially and politically engaged figurative art to Abstract Expressionism. The
final part of his career marked a return to figurative art for which his was
vilified by many art critics and it is in his early work that we can start to
find some points of iconographical reference: an interest in surreal forms
particularly in the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico. But Guston’s
points of references are still largely personal; in fact, they are personal
twice over: once as modernism (with its concern with art’s autonomy, its locus
of meaning solely in the person of its maker) and again as a wilful personal rejection of what became American
modernism’s house style - Abstract Expressionism. Guston, like his friend the
author Philip Roth, were both rejected by the art establishment for injecting vulgarity
into the academy. Again the offence is doubled: the picture is vulgar because
of its facture - this is a horrible scene, horribly painted - and vulgar purely
by way of it containing figuration at all, at least from the vantage point of a
modernist aesthetic of 1970.
By way of a conclusion another kind of time conditions our
two works. Guston eventually runs out of paint. His signature rests not on the
bottom of the painting – presumably the limits of the picture’s mise-en-scène
- but on the lateral band of pale pink that doesn’t quite make it to the canvas’s
lower edge. The dormition doesn’t quite make it either. This may be a sketch
for a work in alabaster, a pliable, expressive but unforgiving medium that fixes
its subject not in the transitional stuff of clay but in the dead matter of
stone.
Steven Adams
