One-point Perspective and other Renaissance ideas in Gentile da Fabriano’s 'The Presentation of Christ in the Temple' from 'The Strozzi Altarpiece', 1423

artfractures issue 04 summer 2010 Art Theory, Critique and

the Aesthetic IdeologyJeremy Spencer

One-point perspective and other Renaissance ideas...Ramesh Ramsahoye

Beyond Painting?John Finlay

Jill Townsley: Moments of RepetitionRobert Luzar

Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas’ Silent LightSam Ishii-Gonzales

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

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From the Editor

This is the final issue of ‘Artfractures Quarterly’ before we amalgamate and become ‘Art Fractures Journal’ in conjunction with Birkbeck College in London. Our new journal and publication will centre around issues and debates focusing upon contemporary curatorial practice. It will feature peer-reviewed articles and writing from scholars and curators around the world. We hope that our readers will continue to follow us through new and exciting times.

Artfractures welcomes two new additions to our editorial board: Kath Wood from the ‘Firstsite’ Gallery in Colchester (UK) and Francis Di Tommaso, curator of the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Artfractures wishes to thank all our loyal readership and those who support and work within the journal.

John FinlayEditor


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Artfractures

Chairman Elizabeth Cowling Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century European Art, Edinburgh University

Publisher Robert Priseman

EditorDr John Finlay

DesignerJohn Wallett

Editorial Advisory Panel

Fr. Martin Boland, Dean, Brentwood Cathedral, UK

Anthony Bond OAM, Head Curator International Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AUS

Dr Matthew Bowman, Art Historian, Curator and Editor of Rebus: A Journal of Art History and Theory, UK

Dr Ben Cranfield, Lecturer, Birkbeck College, London, UK

Dr Catherine Crawford, Lecturer, University of Essex, UK

Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School in New York City, USA

Andrea Hadley Johnson, Curator at Derby Museums and Art Gallery, UK

Dr Steve Swindells, Reader in Fine Art at Huddersfield University, UK

Francis Di Tommaso, Curator, School of Visual Arts, New York City, USA

Kath Wood, Director, Firstsite, Colchester, UK


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In this issue

Art Theory, Critique and the Aesthetic IdeologyJeremy Spencer p.5

One-point perspective and other Renaissance ideas in Gentile da Fabriano’s The Presentation of Christ in the Temple from The Strozzi Altarpiece, 1423 Ramesh Ramsahoye p.12

Book Review: Beauty by Roger ScrutonMartin Boland p.21

Beyond Painting?John Finlay p.25

Jill Townsley: Moments of RepetitionRobert Luzar p.30

Unspeaking Engagements, Lanchester Gallery ProjectsSteve Swindells p.36

Life: A Users Manual, Art Sheffield 2010Steve Swindells p.39

Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas Silent Light (2007)Sam Ishii-Gonzales p.40

Contributors p.44

Notes for submissions p.45

Cover photography by John Wallett


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Art Theory

Art Theory, Critique and the Aesthetic IdeologyJeremy Spencer

This essay originated in a lecture written and delivered with the intention to introduce ‘theory’ through a critique of the modernist theory of art to a more or less sceptical and resistant audience of art and design practitioners. Artists and art students are often suspicious of theory or doubt its relevance to their practice. “Theory gets in the way of spontaneity. Theory is a realm of bloodless abstractions which have nothing to do with the cut and thrust of practice”. [1] The new art history turned to theory as a resource for the analysis of art and culture. The name ‘the new art history’ signalled changes in the theories, methods, approaches and the objects of academic or traditional art history. It found resources for critical analysis in Marxist social critique and the method of historical materialism, feminist critique, psychoanalytical accounts of representation and the role of images in constructing social and sexual identity, semiological and structuralist theories and arguments that identified artworks as signs and systematic codes and asked what they might signify. These theories transformed the critical analysis of a series or history of ‘valued objects’ and how we write about, teach and value it. [2] As part of the ‘new art history’, the ‘social history of art’ wanted to restore a missing or ignored dimension of social and historical relations to the production of art. The social history of art coalesced in the early 1970s with the publication in 1973 of T. J. Clark’s two books on art and the French revolution of 1848, Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois. These writings are still rich in theoretical possibilities for the conjunction of Marxism and art history. [3]

In writings of the early 1980s, Clark emerged as a kind of defender of Greenbergian modernism recast and continued as ‘a practice of negation’. He espoused an avant-garde ‘harmful unsettling of categories’, an art of ‘fiercest innovations’, a modernism ‘compelled, and not just by exterior circumstance, to exceed its normal terms of reference and sketch out others’. [4] For Clark, these values are intrinsic to avant-garde practice in its search for an adequate representation of capitalist society and experience; they were not self-contained, independent and self-legitimating as they increasingly were in Clement Greenberg’s writings.

‘Modernism’ (or ‘realism’ or ‘postmodernism’) is made up of ideas, beliefs and theories about art. Theories of modern art, for example, see a clear separation between the theory and practice of art: first we have works of art, then we have critical theories that are dependent on works of art and which try to explain and interpret them. One comes after the other. According to this model, art is viewed as a kind of authentic ‘nature’ and theory is a kind of ‘culture’ that is dependent on it. [5] And although there is no practice without theory, in the ambience of art schools and circles the idea that theory has nothing to do with practice or at best comes after practice is still fairly common.


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A modernist critic, for example, will say that what matters most is what a picture makes him feel rather than what it will make him think. Greenberg considered aesthetic judgements immediate, free and involuntary: “you can no more choose whether or not to like a work of art than you can choose to have sugar taste sweet or lemons sour”. He recommends that we should “relish our helplessness in the matter”. [6] A modernist critic will understand the artist “as the feeling being whose works express both a personal sensibility and a universal condition”. [7] In this Romantic concept, “the source from which art springs is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and thus that art expresses the ethos, feelings and perceptions of a person ‘possessed of more than usual organic sensibility’ ”. [8] Following Charles Harrison, the modernist will know what feelings the artist is expressing or what the picture expresses by asking him or herself what he or she feels when he or she sees. But saying that, “This picture makes me feel sad or happy” is not the same as saying, “This picture expresses sadness or happiness”. It is difficult to dispute the first autobiographical statement, but the second is open to argument. What the picture expresses and what the spectator feels are not the same because a picture is an object with certain properties and characteristics that are its own and which are independent of the mind of the artist and the spectator. What a picture expresses need not be the feelings of the artist that began the picture or the feelings of the spectator looking at the picture. A picture can only express the properties and characteristics that belong to it and not what belongs to the artist or the spectator. [9]

The association a picture has with the world or what it expresses is dependent on language. Talking or writing does not make the picture but talking or writing does participate in making the picture and what it expresses. Although Greenberg in conversation with Clark in 1981, says that “only your eye could tell you” whether a picture succeeds or fails, there is always a linguistic element or factor in seeing. An artist is not a child or an idiot or a camera: what he or she sees is shaped by an existing knowledge of what he or she sees. We see an object or an image according to an interpretation. Seeing is a theory-laden undertaking. What we see is shaped by what we know. We do not ask, “What’s that?” of every passing car. [10] We always see a work of art as something, or as meaning or expressing something, and how we see it depends on where and how we encounter it. What an artist sees and what she makes out of what she sees only makes sense in and through the interpretations and descriptions of her seeing and doing. In the activity of any artist, knowing how to make or produce something and knowing what that something is or will become are closely interrelated. [11].

It follows then that art is intentional, which means that art is something that only human beings make and can make. If art is intentional then a concept or a theory enters into and plays a crucial role in the determination of what is made. [12] For example, for modernism and the modernist theory of art the concept which regulated the activity of the artist was that the work of art was above all else a ‘physical object’. [13] Modern works of art became increasingly to be understood more as ‘things in themselves’ and less as things that refer to other things in the world. The colours and forms of a painting and their arrangement on the surface of the canvas became the basis of the aesthetic experience rather than what those colours, forms and arrangement represented. [14]


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Concepts and theories of art determine or have an effect upon the practice of art. Critical theories don’t come after the work of art or merely interpret their objects, but actively constitute or use them, which means that individual agents, art theorists and critics, do the constituting or using. [15] But equally, theories are not independent of a work of art; there is only theory at all because of the object that has its proper limits; the critical theory of art is conditioned and caused by the practice of art. As such, there is no ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the relationship between theory and practice as modernists believed. [16]

We should remind ourselves of what theory is. At its most basic, theory can just mean the ideas about art that, following the literary theorist Paul de Man, come into being when the object of critical or theoretical discourse is no longer the meaning or the aesthetic value of an artwork but the modalities and character of the production and reception of meaning and value prior to their establishment. The implication is that the production and consumption in the work of art is complicated or problematic enough to require an autonomous activity of critical investigation, of theorising. [17] A theory is system of concepts that aims to explain an area of knowledge that we oppose to praxis. [18] Theory is the appropriation or representation of the world in thought for analysis. Theories are ways of framing and understanding a concrete world of social practices and historical processes. Theory cannot assume the concrete existence of this totality but actively produces it by taking into account the ‘many determinations and relations’ that constitute it. A theoretical appropriation of the world is not the same as an artistic or religious appropriation of the world. Theories are different to ideologies because they are self-conscious, self-critical and self-aware: unlike ideologies, they do not confuse mental speculation about or representation of the concrete world with the concrete world. [19]

The word ‘theory’ itself originally comes from the Greek verb theorein, which means to look at, to contemplate, to survey. The ancient Greeks designated certain individuals called the theoria, chosen for their integrity and honesty, to attest to the actual occurrence of an important political event, to witness it happening, and then verbally certify that it had taken place. Their function was to ‘see-and-tell’: other people could also see-and-tell, but only what the theoria saw and told had any social standing and therefore could be treated as fact. [20] Other people – women, slaves, and children were merely capable of Aesthesis, that is, an animalistic consciousness of things: perceptions without any social and or political authority. The theoria saw and in telling what it had seen affected an object of public knowledge and discourse. They provided an official and reliable form of knowledge and ‘a bedrock of certainty’. [21] This view of theory helps explain that theories do not simply find but actively constitute their objects. The material object is the basis of perception or cognition but the understanding of that object is constructed in and by language. Theory emerges as the relation between seeing material objects and the representation in speech or writing of what has been seen.[22] As I have argued, seeing is theory laden. We see, perceive or experience a material object like a work of art in and through the writing or speaking about it: in and through its theory.


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The critical theories taught in universities and art schools are sometimes felt to be stifling and dogmatic and largely irrelevant to the business of making art. But the resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about art. It is therefore a resistance to language itself and to the possibility that works of art contain factors that cannot be reduced to perception, vision or feeling. They can. We need to recognise a non-perceptual, linguistic moment in paintings and sculptures and finally learn to read critically and theoretically rather than merely feel or see. A painting or sculpture is not the same as its sensory experience. But a natural object is the same as its appearance and our experience of that appearance. [23] If we do say that a painting or a sculpture is more or less equal to how it looks then we’re saying that there’s no difference between art and nature. It is to fail to address the non-perceptual intentional or conceptual factor – the purpose or the ultimately political intention and function that is a part of any painting or sculpture. [24] Modernism or the modernist theory of art emerges as an aesthetic ideology of art and artistic production that ignores the linguistic in the experience of the objects it values.

We know that representation will challenge the ontological status of the entity it imitates because it implies its absence in making it present. Aesthetic theories have considered the ambivalent nature of representation in the way that it either confirms or undermines the plenitude of the natural entity. In modernist art theory, the painted image is understood to bring before us something that only merely happens to be absent, restoring it to view and continuing its presence. Moreover, the image does not only duplicate sensory information or experience of nature but has the power to convert inward experience (feeling, emotions, passions) into a concrete object of perception. It seems that making the invisible visible is the function of works of art. And the concern with subject-matter as the core or heart of art practice suggests that many artists believe as much. Artists invest their time in a process that is supposed to confer the stability of perception upon what lies beyond or out of reach of the senses. The work of art emerges as a reassuring ‘proof of presence’: representation confers and confirms the presence and the stability of patterns of experience that lack both, namely, emotions and feelings. [25]

The critique of this aesthetic ideology at the heart of modernism, an ideology that mystifies the relationship of works of art to history, language and critical thought sustains the literary theorist Paul de Man’s writing of the later 1970s and early 1980s. The undoing of the analogical relation at the heart of the aesthetic ideology, the working assumption that artistic forms will consistently and adequately embody truth, preoccupies his work on the philosophical aesthetics of the Romantic period. [26] So, in his review of Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, Hegel defines the aesthetic as the “mutual formation of the rational and the sensuous” made ‘genuinely actual’ in a work of plastic art that reveals “the truth in the form of sensuous artistic shape”. [27] Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the discourse and category of the aesthetic has been committed to the kind of totality, uninterrupted articulation and reconciliation suggested here by Hegel. It is through the category of the aesthetic that philosophy guarantees its truth and coherence and its reach towards the concrete world.


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The immediate context for the important definition of the aesthetic ideology in de Man’s essay The Resistance to Theory is a discussion of the intransitivity and materiality of the signifier. This materiality is its autonomous power and its freedom from referential restraint, and it suggests the unreliability of art and literature as a source of information about the world. We should be wary of any conception of art that assumes too easily the transparency of the signifier or takes for granted its power to evoke the richness of sensory experience. It would be unfortunate to misrecognise the opacity and materiality of the sign and therefore confuse it “with the materiality of what it signifies”. [28] The confusion between literal and symbolic action is dependent on the suspect claim of the truth of representation, its power to confirm the plenitude of a natural entity. The interpretation of a scene of reading from Proust that appears in de Man’s Allegories of Reading of 1979 emerges as a narrative of the confusion of literal and symbolic action or the confusion of materiality of the sign with that of the referent, which de Man names as ‘the aesthetic ideology’. But he realises how easily the phenomenality of the sign can be aligned with the sensory experience of the signified. Phenomenalism is the tendency to treat art as if it were uncomplicatedly derived from or continuous with an experience of the phenomenal world. This term suggests visibility and the sensory, accessibility to the senses, intuition and cognition. It refers to entities that are accessible to the senses, bodies, persons, and icons. In that the meaning of phenomenality or the phenomenal reality of something is its accessibility to the senses it encapsulates a distinctly pleasurable aesthetic moment in art. It suggests imagination and feeling and the presumed power of the sign to evoke the richness of the sensory experience of natural or empirical reality.

Particular kinds of phenomenality that a sign can produce, that of light or sound for example, are unlikely to be confused with the phenomenal world: “no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day’ ”, however, “it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world”. [29] However, this kind of confusion is more or less unavoidable because the ‘phenomenalization of the sign’ is what signification really is. It’s probably what modern art thought it was. And ‘ideology’ is clearly bound up with the concept of phenomenality. In effect, ‘ideology’ is just another name for this process: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism”, de Man argues. [30] In other words, ideology is the delusion that art is or can become consubstantial with the natural world. Thus, ideology is the phenomenalization of the stubborn materiality of the sign; it is the transformation of this materiality into the phenomenal cognition that is characteristic of aesthetic judgments of modernist critics.

Although the critique of the aesthetic ideology is most worked out in his late work, his suspicion of the claims of the aesthetic is also apparent in Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight of 1973 that interrogates assumptions that language and nature can be ultimately reconciled. Thus, his essay Form and Intent in American New Criticism acknowledges that the “‘surface dimensions of language” belongs “to the domain of sensory experience”, but considers it debatable that we should imagine a continuity


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between them and the ‘subjective experience of the writer’. [31] Criticism and Crisis remarks upon the impossibility of ‘unmediated expression’ or “of making the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual sign coincide with what it signifies”. [32] We see, then, that de Man always responded suspiciously to the assumed “convergence of the meaning with the linguistic devices used to convey it”, of meaning with a ‘mode of expression’, the unity of ‘poetry and thought’, or the correspondence “between the semantic function and the formal structure of language”. [33] What we learn from de Man’s art theory is the immanent nature of critical discourse. Criticism must be like this (and here we might be sympathetic to the art student’s resistance to theory) because a work of art “is not a phenomenal event that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind. It leads to no transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge but merely solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent because it poses the problem of its intelligibility in its own terms”. [34]

Notes

[1] Victor Burgin, ‘Something about Photography Theory’, Screen, 35:1 (1984), p. 61.

[2] See Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 7. Fred Orton and Charles Harrison comment that a French tradition of structuralist and semiological thought appropriated by the social history of art derived from the linguistic theories of Saussure, the Marxist theories of society and ideology of Louis Althusser, the social and cultural critique of Roland Barthes and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. See Fred Orton and Charles Harrison, ‘Introduction: Modernism, Explanation and Knowledge’, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism, Criticism, Realism: Alternative Contexts for Art (London: Harper and Row, 1984), p. xx.

[3] John Tagg, ‘Art History and Difference’, in A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds.) The New Art History (London: Camden Press, 1986), p. 165.

[4] See T. J. Clark, ‘A Note in Reply to Peter Wollen’, Screen, 21:3 (1980), p. 100.

[5] See Charles Harrison, ‘Introduction: Modernism, Problems and Methods’, Modern Art and Modernism (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1984).

[6] Clement Greenberg, ‘Complaints of an Art Critic’, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 4, 5.

[7] Griselda Pollock, ‘Art, Art School, Culture: Individualism and the death of the artist’, reprinted in, The Block Reader in Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 53.

[8] Terry Atkinson, ‘Phantoms of the Studio’, The Oxford Art Journal 13:1, (1990), p. 49.

[9] See Harrison, ‘Introduction: Modernism, Problems and Methods’, p. 31.

[10] See N. R. Hanson, ‘Observation’, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 75, 77.

[11] See Jaakki Hintikka, ‘Knowing How, Knowing That, and Knowing What: Observations on their Relation in Plato and Other Greek Philosophers’, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984).

[12] See Richard Wollheim, ‘The Work of Art as Object’, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 10-11.

[13] Ibid., p. 11.

[14] See Harrison’s discussion of the distinguishing characteristics of modernism in his ‘Introduction: Modernism, Problems and Methods’, pp. 55-59.


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[15] Fred Orton, ‘The Object After Theory (Figuring Jasper Johns – Supplement 1: Flag)’, in de-, dis-, ex. Volume One Ex-cavating Modernism (BACKless Books in association with Black Dog Publishing, 1996), p. 25.

[16] See Burgin, ‘Something About Photography Theory’, p. 63 and Orton, ‘The Object After Theory’, p. 25.

[17] See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 7.

[18] Wlad Godzich, ‘Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat’, in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiii.

[19] See Griselda Pollock, ‘Art History and its Theories’, Art Bulletin (March 1996), p. 20. Pollock follows Marx’s critique of the mistake of confusing representation with the social and historical reality upon which it works. Marx writes in his 1857 ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse that: ‘The totality as it appears in the head as a totality of thoughts, is a product a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the heads conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical’. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), (London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1993), pp. 101-102.

[20] Orton, ‘The Object After Theory’, p. 25.

[21] See Godzich, ‘Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat’.

[22] Orton, ‘The Object After Theory’, p. 25.

[23] Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Second Edition, Revised (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 23.

[24] De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 10.

[25] De Man, Blindness and Insight, pp. 123-125.

[26] See T. J. Clark, ‘ Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézenne’, reprinted in Jonathan Harris, (ed.), Value, Art, Politics (Liverpool University Press, 2007.)

[27] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 62.

[28] De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 11.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid. As Andrzej Warminski glosses this sentence: ‘the confusion consists in thinking of the text, a linguistic artefact, in terms consistent with a phenomenology of the self and its experience of the “natural”, phenomenal world’. See Andrzej Warminski, ‘Ending Up/Taking Back’, in Cathy Caruth, Deborah Esch (eds.) Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 26.

[31] De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 22.

[32] Ibid., p. 9, 11

[33] Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 24-25, 54.

[34] Ibid., p. 107.


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Art Historical Essay

One-point perspective and other Renaissance ideas in Gentile da Fabriano’s The Presentation of Christ in the Temple from The Strozzi Altarpiece, 1423Ramesh Ramsahoye

Gentile da Fabriano, The Strozzi Altarpece, tempera on panel, 1423

In many textbooks, Gentile da Fabriano is represented as an artist whose work typified the decorative and courtly International Gothic style. However, the predella panels of the altarpiece that he painted for the wealthy Florentine banker Palla Strozzi tell a different story. They show that Gentile was an incredibly innovative and inventive artist, aware to some extent of the new humanist interest in the art and values of ancient Greece and Rome, intellectual pursuits associated with the emerging Renaissance style - with which he is usually seen to have little association. One of the most significant innovations in this new style of painting was one-point perspective. This system needs a little explanation. It is essentially when the artist mimics the effect observed when looking down a railway track. The rails seem to merge on the horizon at a point known as the vanishing point. The space between the sleepers also seems to get narrower as we look into the distance.


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It is generally agreed that mathematical perspective was invented by Brunelleschi in a painted study that he made of the Florence Baptistery as early as 1414. He stood opposite the structure, positioning himself just inside the portal of the cathedral. At the vanishing point of his painting, Brunelleschi drilled a small peephole. He then held the panel up to his eye, with the painted image facing the Baptistery. Looking through his peephole he held up a mirror to reflect his painting back to his eye, thus producing a perfect illusion of the scene before him.

For Brunelleschi this was more of a mathematical and optical experiment and it was not until 1417 that the system he devised for representing the three-dimensional world illusionistically and with mathematical precision was utilised by an artist in a commissioned work. It was the sculptor Donatello who first seized upon the implications of Brunelleschi’s discovery in his predella relief of St George and the Dragon (1415-17) beneath his life size marble figure of St George (1415-17) for the church of Orsanmichele.

Donatello, St George and the Dragon, marble, 1415-17 Orthogonal lines traced from the loggia of the building to the right of the composition converge onto a vanishing point located on the torso of St. George.

Donatello had clearly grasped the mathematics behind Brunelleschi’s method and even includes a section of the perspective grid on the floor of the classical loggia to the

(L) Railway tracks showing the basic principles of one-point linear perspective. The lines created by the rails which lead into the distance are known as ‘orthogonals’. The horizontals formed by the sleepers are usually referred to as ‘transversals’. (R) The Florence Baptistery, c. 1060, seen from the steps of the Duomo


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right of his composition. The drama of St George slaying the dragon is enacted in a comprehensible and rationally constructed space. It took some time for painters to adapt this technique and it was first used by Masaccio in the late 1420s in works such as his Pisa Polyptych, 1426 and Trinity, 1427.

However, as early as 1423 we can see that Gentile was moving towards an understanding of one-point perspective in his predella scene of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple for the Strozzi Altarpiece. The pavement slabs of the city create orthogonal and transversal lines which create a convincing spatial field to house the temple in Jerusalem.

However, the overall spatial construction is somewhat awkward and unresolved and the orthogonals do not, crucially, culminate on a single vanishing point. This has confirmed for art historians that Gentile was unaware of Brunelleschi’s far more precise mathematical system. It has always seemed as though Gentile had somehow grasped the concept but not the exact scientific method. Had he seen Brunelleschi’s panel but not received a complete explanation? A close inspection of Gentile’s composition suggests that he had not only seen Brunelleschi’s panel, but that he had at least partially understood the mathematical principles that lay behind it.

Before proceeding to examine this issue it is important to note something that does not add up in this story. Why did Brunelleschi, who had made such an important discovery, simply abandon it in order to focus upon architecture, bequeathing it as a gift to his friends Donatello and Masaccio? He was a competent sculptor and with this new technique could certainly have guaranteed himself the success that had eluded him in 1401 when he had lost the competition to produce relief sculptures for the East Doors of the Florence Baptistery. One explanation is that architecture had by this stage already become his priority and that, initially, he had not gone to the Baptistery to conduct a perspective experiment at all. As Peter Gärtner astutely points out: “In drawing, the geometrical patterns of the building almost demand the discovery of perspective.” [1]

A groundplan of the baptistery, when marked with square modules and then seen in elevation actually produces the mathematical system of one-point perspective.

(Above) Gentile da Fabriano, The Presentation in the Temple, 1423 (Right) Masaccio, The Trinity, fresco, 1427 Santa Maria Novella, Florence


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Brunelleschi’s original intention was surely to study just the measurements and proportions of the Baptistery in themselves as the Florentines believed that the structure was a remodelled Roman temple. He wanted to learn about classical architecture and, whilst he had visited Rome in 1404, the Baptistery was closer to hand. The building actually dates from c.1060 and is an example of Romanesque design but its groundplan must have intrigued the young architect as it preserved the dimensions of the original Roman building. Brunelleschi wanted to understand the central planning, sacred geometry and proportional systems that Vitruvius (architect to the emperor Augustus) had described as being essential to temple design in ancient Rome.

In Vitruvian theory, the modules of a building’s plan should relate to a man of ideal proportions and it must immediately have been clear to Brunelleschi that if he could find the secret of these measurements right on his doorstep in the Baptistery then he would be able to create structures with which the spectator would feel a sense of harmonious balance. Subsequently, he must have also realised when looking at his drawn study that if the square modules marking the floor of the Baptistery were continued beyond its confines to incorporate its surroundings, this would create a remarkable impression of depth in a painted image.

It is very likely, then, that Brunelleschi’s first made a study of the plan and elevation of the Baptistery seen in isolation. His biographer, Manetti, records that the perspective panel he produced was a fully coloured image. This would have concealed the modules on the floor of the Baptistery that had originally inspired the invention of the system. However, Brunelleschi almost certainly made the perspective grid visible in his portrayal of the surrounding piazza so that his new technique could be seen. It was left for Alberti to write down clear instructions for painters to follow in his Della Pittura of 1436. He had received a humanist education at the university of Padua, and explained how these measurements could be part of a whole philosophical system in which man is connected with the world around him, united once more with God’s creation.

We can now evaluate how the spatial construction in Gentile’s predella panel might fit into this revised story of how perspective was discovered. The fact that the orthogonals do not converge upon a single point has been seen by art historians to signify that Gentile was not in touch with Brunelleschi’s discoveries at all and the investigation has ended there. However, if we analyse the composition more carefully, something fascinating emerges. We could almost be looking at Brunelleschi’s test panel. Gentile’s centrally positioned temple, set in a piazza and surrounded by civic buildings echoes the composition of Brunelleschi’s first perspective experiment according to the description by Manetti:

…there is not a miniaturist who could have done it better; picturing before one’s face that part of the piazza which the eye takes in, and so towards the side over against the Misericordia as far as the arch and corner of the Pecori, and so of the side of the column of the miracle of San Zenobi as far as the Canto alla Paglia. [2]

Furthermore, on closer inspection, an astounding series of orthogonal convergences and geometric correspondences can be detected in Gentile’s predella, demonstrating his understanding of some of the principles of one-point perspective. Even a glance at


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one of the rooftops is enough to confirm that Gentile knew full-well that orthogonal lines converging upon a single point could create the impression of a spatial field.

In his later explanation of perspective, Alberti placed such emphasis on the central vanishing point that it is often overlooked that in Brunelleschi’s experiment the geometric structure of the Baptistery would have produced three, with orthogonals converging either side of the building as well as one at its centre.

As has been explained, the third, central vanishing point, created by the floor modules of the baptistery, was hidden in the final panel. However, Gentile actually includes all of the three vanishing points which were the basis of Brunelleschi’s perspective construction. However, two are located just beyond the frame and so have been overlooked by art historians. Gentile had understood the geometry of perspective after all. He had just not integrated the observer and the proportions of the human figure into his schema or linked his temple mathematically with the surrounding space. He may well have seen the final panel but not Brunelleschi’s original plan and elevation, with the all important floor modules within the Baptistery. This would have given him the key to integrating the interior of the temple with the space between with the temple and the observer. He even opts to leave this area out of his composition as a means of disguising his inability to fully connect the various spaces of his charming little cityscape.

Although perhaps not fully initiated into the secrets of perspective, Gentile was clearly not entirely out of step, nor unaware of the new classical discoveries that would soon change the course of art and transform western civilization. For example, the loggia of the building to the right of the temple resembles Brunelleschi’s classicial design for the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, 1419-23. The Corinthian columns and distinctive round arches of Gentile’s painted architecture purposefully recall ancient Roman buildings. However, he does not seem to have had a full understanding of Roman systems of proportion. Not only do the supports have a slender, attenuated appearance, the arches look small in relation to the height of the columns, giving the structure a Romanesque character. It was Brunelleschi who would be the first to

Reconstruction of how vanishing points would have been traced from the Baptistery on Brunelleschi’s Test Panel


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understand the complex systems of proportion that lay behind the harmony, balance and symmetry of Roman buildings and these qualities are apparent in the more measured and orderly façade of the new orphanage he built for his city.

Gentile also seems to have had some understanding of the classical ideas being revived by Early Renaissance humanists. These scholars looked to the ancient philosophers for practical solutions to the social, economic, scientific and political problems of the day in face of a church that was struggling to provide satisfactory answers in these spheres. In particular, ancient notions of civic virtue and of the individual’s duty to the rest of society find expression within Gentile’s painting. His compositional thinking, in which he took the composition for the main scene from a work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and planted it contemporary Florence, reveals a desire to relate the religious subject to a particular civic context.

Filippo Brunelleschi, Ospedale Degli Innocenti, 1419 (directed by Brunelleschi until 1427)

Squatting in the street before Gentile’s loggia is a bedraggled beggar - his skin, browned by the sun, informing us that he has been homeless for some time. The viewer is prompted to pity him and respond sympathetically to his plight. Loggia’s were frequently used on the facades of insitutions of public charity at this time, such as the building by Brunelleschi already cited, and the Ospedale di San Matteo - a structure of essentially Gothic design. By mimicking Brunelleschi’s classical architecture for the Ospedale Gentile connects Christian charity with specifically Roman values of dutiful citizenship, of which the most eloquent exponent was the statesman Cicero…

Because each person thus has for his own a portion of those things which were common by nature, let each hold undisturbed what has fallen to his possession. In anyone endeavours to obtain more for himself, he will violate the law of human society. But since, as it has been well said by Plato, we are not born for ourselves alone; since our country claims a part in us, our parents a part, our friends a


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part; and since, according to the Stoics, whatever the earth bears is created for the use of men, while men were brought into being for the sake of men, that they might to good to one another - in this matter we ought to follow nature as a guide, to contribute our part to the common good. [3]

It was Masaccio who would ultimately answer this call for a classically inspired art with a contemporary social relevance. The pictorial elements of the Healing of the Cripple from the Brancacci Chapel (1427), attributed to Masolino but most likely conceived in collaboration with Masaccio, are very similar. Like Gentile, Masaccio locates the religious subject in his native Florence in order to drive home the message that St Peter’s concern for the dispossessed and the sick should be adopted by the viewer.

\

Masolino and Masaccio, The Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha, fresco, 1427, Brancacci Chapel

St Peter’s toga-like robes and the round arches of the building’s façade evoke ancient Rome in a similar way to Gentile‘s image. The message of Masaccio’s painting is clear - it is Roman values of civic virtue and public service as well as Christian virtue that must come to the aid of Florentine society and each citizen is urged to adopt them, including the well dressed dandies who trot past, absorbed in their own conversation and blind to the plight of their fellow man.

In addition to being concerned with the same classical virtues, Gentile’s predella deliberately links contemporary social deprivation to the theme of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple - but why? To answer this question we must turn to two popular devotional texts of the time, Jacopo de Voragine’s Golden Legend and the Meditations on the Life of Christ by the Pseudo-Bonaventure. In both texts the circumcision of Christ in the temple is presented as a prefiguration of the Passion as it is the first shedding of Christ’s blood. It therefore relates to the ultimate salvation Christ promised to the destitute. However, in the Golden Legend the circumcision is also specifically linked to charitable duties.For a contemporary viewer familiar with this devotional text, the scene with the beggar therefore formed a prompt to meditation that would have been readily understood. A worshipper would have easily grasped the message that their own spiritual circumcision could only be achieved by good works - they must help the poor and the needy in the city of Florence.


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For we have nothing proper, but Jesu Christ hath lent to us all that we have. Then it is well reason that we do give for him to the poor such goods as be his, for we be but servants, and we ought to give to the hungry meat, to the thirsty drink, to the naked clothing, visit the sick, and tofore all things to love God, and after, our neighbour as ourself; and despoil ourself from sin, and clothe us with good works and virtues, and follow the commandment of Jesu Christ. And in this manner we shall fulfill the will of our father Jesu Christ, if we be so purged and thus circumcised. [4]

Gentile’s panel also conveys religious meaning on a more subtle level. On closer inspection it can be seen that the beggar holds his stick in a peculiar manner. Its end is positioned over his groin and he clasps it between his thumb and second finger, in a very suggestive manner. He holds a bowl for collecting alms, which we may assume to be empty. The beggar’s head is turned up towards the old, lame woman who seems similarly desperate. He seems to be explaining the event in the temple through mime and passing on the life-changing news that their saviour has arrived and that he will shed his blood to save mankind. This little genre scene is therefore not just a snapshot of contemporary life but a way of explaining the religious mystery of the circumcision in a manner comprehensible to ordinary folk.

This examination of Gentile’s small panel of the Presentation in the Temple clearly shows that he was more familiar with the new Renaissance idea of one-point perspective than many would give him credit. He also seems to share the new humanist interest in classical architecture as well as the Roman social and philosophical values which so enthralled his contemporaries. He bridges two worlds like no other painter of the time, allowing new ways of thinking to enter a religious painting whilst retaining the spirituality and devotional intensity of the Gothic age.

NOTES

[1] Peter Gärtner, Brunelleschi (1998), p. 24.

[2] Quoted in John White The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1972 ed.), p. 114.

[3] From Cicero, On Moral Duties (De Officiis), 44 BC, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Andrew P. Peabody, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1887. (Book 1 Section 7)

[4] From the 1900 translation of The Golden Legend.


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Book review

Beauty by Roger Scruton Oxford University Press 2009

Martin Boland

Beauty has become a dirty word in parts of the contemporary art world. If used at all, the word is surrounded by ironic inverted commas. At present, to judge something beautiful is to reduce it to the decorative and ornamental, to suggest that the aboriginal creative impulse has been subordinated in favour of the bourgeois pursuit of painterly form. This is the disdained art of the Salon. Art historians remind us that it was here that the art of repetitive, futile gestures turned art into an exercise in good taste. Therefore, only an iconoclasm that was willing to vandalise the idea of beauty could emancipate the artist from such visual stagecraft. Manet, the art history books tell us, threw the first stone.

In the nineteenth century, John Keats’s poetic aphorism, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” seemed to distil the aesthetic ideals of an age. But in the 1950’s Andy Warhol appeared to subvert this Romantic notion of beauty with his painting of a shoe entitled, “Beauty is shoe”. Beauty was no longer to be associated with the most noble of ideals, but was anything the artist declared it to be. With evangelical zeal, contemporary artists have preached that beauty is a false illusion, an opiate that dulls an acute sense of the existential futility at the core of our beings. Beauty has no redemptive power, they argue, beauty is dead. “Chaos reigns...” as the fox says in Lars von Trier’s film, Antichrist.

In an age where meaning is porous and a goulash of opinions relativise the belief that there is a truth to be known by reason, the relationship between the visual arts and beauty disintegrates. According to Arthur Danto this “...effectively liberated artists from the imperative to create only what is beautiful, and at the same time freed the philosophy of art from having to concern itself with the analysis of beauty... It follows that creating beauty is but one option for artists, who also have the choice of injuring or merely disregarding beauty.” Writing in 1948, Barnett Newman provided a mission statement for contemporary art: “The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.” Thus many accept that Art’s purpose is to desecrate, transgress and create altars to “the beauty of ugliness” because this is where reality supposedly exists. So, Luc Tuymans can say, “I am not so much interested in the spiritual aspects of culture – ‘beauty’ or poetic descriptions of beauty don’t seem real enough for me. Reality is actually far more important than any form of spirituality. Realism. It’s much more interesting to crawl from underneath to the so-called top.”


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In Beauty, the English philosopher, Roger Scruton, attempts to retrieve the concept from what Jake Chapman memorably called the “degenerate sublime”. Immediately, the question arises ‘what is beauty?’ and how does one judge what is beautiful. Scruton circles the problem by using a series of philosophical platitudes against which he measures and tests his arguments.

His first two platitudes are:

(i) Beauty pleases us.

(ii) One thing can be more beautiful than another.

According to Scruton, the beautiful is not just pleasing to the eye but carries the freight of multiple meanings and values. A well made bed may provide visual pleasure, but its importance extends beyond this to an innate desire to order our domestic lives and make them a place worth living in. Tracy Emin’s My Bed may find gallery space in Tate Britain, but there are few people who would prefer to sleep between soiled sheets rather than those that are laundered and clean.

But how does the beauty of a well made bed compare, for example, to Bernini’s St Teresa in Ecstasy? Scruton describes the former as possessing “a minimal beauty”. The latter an intoxicating quality that demands a kind of reverence on the part of the viewer. The bed may be admired, but the beauty of the Bernini catches us unawares and draws us into a new attentiveness. Through the contemplation of beauty, new possibilities of understanding the material world are glimpsed. But before our notion of beauty escapes into some rhetorical stratosphere, Scruton makes the provocative point that “...minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them.”

Beauty provokes these desires in a more intense, purified fashion. Matisse spoke of his art of “serenity, balance and repose” as providing the comfort of a “good armchair”. It would be difficult to find contemporary artists speaking today in such terms or using such benign language. They are more likely to be concerned about, as Liam Gillick puts it, “...where we all stand in relation to shitting, dying, feeling paranoid and not really caring.”

Scruton challenges this bilious attitude. “This movement of ideas can be seen as in part a recognition of the ambiguous nature of the term ‘beauty’. But it also involves a rejection of beauty in its narrow sense, as an affirmation that the old invocations of home, peace, love and contentment are lies, and that art must henceforth devote itself to the real and unpleasant truth of our condition.” The flight from beauty is, in fact, a flight from the reality of who we are. The truth of our human condition is that beauty affords us pleasure, sometimes an intense pleasure. This is complete within itself and one that makes the human enterprise meaningful.


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The true modernist, according to Scruton, does not break with tradition but develops an hermeneutic of continuity with the past. The tradition is not jettisoned or destroyed but, rather, restored and purified of distorting accretions. It offers a cultural store through which contemporary concerns, in all their complexity, might be approached. In this way, human beings can “...consecrate human life and endow it with more than worldly significance”. We recognise that Beauty is not a social construct, but that it is a need anchored in our natures . It reassures us that our world is not an alien jurisdiction but our home. At the same time, as Immanuel Kant recognised, beauty also provides us with transcendental horizons, those longings to reach beyond that which is imperfect, chaotic and destructive and strain towards a less worldy realm. “Modernism was not conceived as a transgression but as a recuperation,” writes Scruton, “an arduous path back to a hard-won inheritance of meaning, in which beauty would again be honoured.”

This slim volume punches above its weight. It is a thoughtful assault on the “facetious ephemera” that wins too many prizes and litters art fairs. Above all, Beauty is a prophetic cry against that priestly caste of curators and art theorists who dictate what is art but on the flimsiest philosophical grounds. Scruton believes that beauty is a universal value that articulates in a unique way the truth of who we are. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Scruton’s cri de coeur is one worth listening to.


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Review

Beyond Painting?John Finlay

(Dachau, Oil on Canvas 1.52 x 2.28 metres )A recurring philosophical and moral dilemma arising out of the post-World War II atrocities has been question of the very existence of art after the Holocaust. Theodor Adorno’s famous aphorism, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, has been repeated so endlessly that it is almost a cliché: an authoritarian remark (later retracted) that inhibits our right to examine the real nature of such a statement or to discuss it within the context of a wider debate regarding the arts. The determining remark that all art should have the audacity to tackle this subject matter without criticism, reproach or moral impeachment, raises the question of whether it is only ever possible to document the Holocaust, but to commemorate or portray the events by, for example, means of painting or sculpture, is perhaps to go beyond the boundaries of representing such atrocities?

So putting on an exhibition dealing with the inexpressible acts that took place in the Nazi death camps seriously forces one to consider whether this is really an ‘appropriate’ subject for an exhibition showcasing works of ‘art’. It seems, to reiterate Adorno’s phrase, almost ‘barbaric’ to think of justifying a display of paintings evoking the unthinkable suffering in Auschwitz-Berkenau, Bernburg, Majdanek, Mauthausen and Dachau: places synonymous with heinous crimes against humanity. Let me give you an example. Established as a mental home in 1875, one block of Bernburg hospital, near Magdeburg, Germany, was handed over to ‘Operation T4’ of the Nazi euthanasia


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programme in the summer of 1940. A gas chamber was installed in the basement, where it masqueraded as a shower room, while the rest of the building continued to operate as a mental institution. Between November 1940 and August 1941, approximately 9,000 mentally and physically handicapped individuals were murdered, usually in groups of 60 to 75, in the gas chamber. When Operation T4 ended, its euthanasia centre resumed executing another 5,000 concentration camp prisoners, mostly Jewish, under the code name Sonderbehandlung—‘special treatment’. Faced with such horrors and the moral opposition of portraying the Nazis’ murderous ideology, does one decide to neglect the subject entirely—perhaps risk denying the Holocaust altogether—or face it head on and confront the enormity of the crimes committed in the camps?

Another inherent problem connected with the creation of the gas chamber is that it is almost always fettered with the extermination of the Jewish population, but is in fact a historical misconception: for it was first designed and introduced in the 1920s as a method of capital punishment in the United States. The first US prisoner to be executed by gas was Chinese-born Gee Jon in the Nevada State Prison on 8 February 1924, the last, a German citizen Walter LaGrand, executed in the Arizona State Prison on 3 March 1999. This is chilling reminder that death by execution is still on the statute books in the United States. More disturbingly, perhaps, there is a very real, direct and insidious correlation between the industrial-mechanized scale killings carried out in Nazi camps and modern methods of judicial execution. The sheer inventiveness employed to kill prisoners all around the world—execution by firing squad, hanging, electrocution, stoning, beheading, strangling with a truck crane, lethal injection, garrotting and gassing are a perplexing and deeply disturbing aspect of a meticulous and, often, highly unpleasant, killing system. The liturgical process of capital punishment has another frightening connection with the concepts of technological ‘experimentation’ and ‘Sonderbehandlung’ (special treatment) of the condemned as well as a ministration that involves a set of highly ritualistic and mechanical procedures in order to kill in large and smaller numbers.

Historically, the image of the electric chair is congruent worldwide with execution in the United States of America. The American artist Andy Warhol’s depiction of the chair at Sing, Sing Penitentiary in Ossining, New York, where 614 prisoners were executed, was typical of his (and, by association, our) often deadpan response to the political controversy surrounding capital punishment and other issues relating to torture and human rights. For the artist it was an expression of the intertwined relationship between death and repetition within the capital punishment system. Warhol’s brutally expressionless image is given a further poetic touch with the word ‘silence’ inscribed above the door entrance to the electric chamber, and where death is represented as a state of continuous waiting and as replication. The electric chair’s power is reliant on both its ability to produce deterrence—inhibit the criminal act—and its history and image as New York State’s most terrifying death-bringing contraption. Whether a statement of opposition or purely an objective response, Warhol’s electric chair hums with a charge so lethal that it is too powerful and horrific to be dismissed as simply cold, sensationalist imagery. Warhol returned repeatedly to the subject at a time in the early 1960s when Americans were debating the death penalty and political resistance to capital punishment was particularly resilient in New York State (the chair’s use finally ceased in August 1963). In the end, Warhol’s electric chairs are testimonials to our own indifference to cruelty and death when it does not affect us directly.


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Of course art history is littered with past images of killings and holocausts: infanticide (Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents), executions (Manet, The Execution of Maximillian), genocide (Goya, The 3rd of May 1808), rape (Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women), bombing (Picasso, Guernica), not to mention the countless images of torture depicting saints and sinners alike throughout the history of biblical slaughter: martyrdom, flagellation, beheading, crucifixion (Grünewald, Isenheim Alterpiece). The masterworks that fill the galleries of the world today also depict countless aggressors, wars and massacres as well as other innumerable horrors, cruelties and degradations—real and imaginary—and all created by the human mind. Many of these works are considered ‘beautifully’ painted, engaging, are studied endlessly and regarded as priceless historical masterpieces illustrating religious values or traditional moral codes. Yet art works depicting the Holocaust confront us with contradictions that somehow seem much more difficult to engage with, particularly when history is so close to us. In many cases survivors of the death camps still live with these truly gruesome past experiences, so works of art portraying these terrible events appear to defy the very concept of art as an aesthetic, moral enterprise.

However, after meditating on the latter predicaments and viewing Robert Priseman’s ‘Gas Chambers’ exhibition in its completeness and intellectual whole, as opposed to seeing these depictions as a series of separate images, could I then begin to make sense of the profound contradictions at the heart of such a subject, as well as consider the disturbing relationships between art, beauty and horror in the context of art history. On ascending the stairs of the main gallery at COCA (Centre for Contemporary Art in Christchurch, New Zealand) one is immediately confronted by a discord between beauty—in this case a set of six picture postcard images of the exteriors of the German Aktion T4 ‘euthanasia centres’—and the darkness of the gallery walls onto which five huge images of gas chambers have been projected, and represent the empty, haunted spaces, memories

(Majdanek, Oil on Canvas 1.52 x 2.28 metres )


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and knowledge of the Nazis’ atrocities. Here, as in all of Priseman’s paintings, the devil is truly in the detail, the thick impasto in some of these pictures become remnants of the gassings: for there are no figures or extraneous details in most of Priseman’s paintings beyond the marks of fingernails, hands, scrawls and scratches that bring to mind the last moments of the desperate, suffocating individuals gasping for air as they succumbed to the effects of Zyklon B gas. The projections, replaced by the original paintings on linen, somehow seem to defend our sensibilities, our eyes, ears and minds, from the interior walls that bear and scream out a truth too ghastly to contemplate.

(Hademar, Pencil & Crayon on Paper 152 x 228 mm )

In contrast, Priseman’s coloured drawings deliberately enhance the picturesque, fairytale architecture of the euthanasia centres and the pretty surrounding countryside—only a trail of black soot pouring out from a smoke stack of one of these deceptively quaint buildings alludes to the unthinkable horror within. Of the gas chambers themselves, perhaps the most unsettling is the last in a series of projections that gradually darken and no longer pretend to be places for the fumigation of clothing, bedding, blankets or disguised, by the use of slick and shiny tiles, as shower rooms for the de-infestation of people. Established in 1940, Stammlager was the original camp for Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German) concentration complex and its administrative centre near Kraków, Poland. Gassings began on 3 September 1941 when the SS first tested the use of Zyklon B, and where the Nazi’s killed some 250 severely ill concentration camp prisoners and 600 Soviet prisoners-of-war in this experimental gas chamber in the basement of ‘Block 11’. A bunker was later constructed outside the prisoner compound and was converted into a permanent gas chamber, with the ability to hold around 700 to 800 people. Up until December 1942, the chamber was in regular use, but the precise number of people murdered here is not known, although estimates vary from several thousand to a maximum of 10,000 people.


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Can, then, the artist—painter, sculptor, photographer, poet or musician—ever really do justice to the representation of the genocide of entire races and the resulting horror propagated by such evil aspirations? Perhaps not, but I now believe it is a practice worthy of the effort. We study, remember and endeavour to portray the Holocaust for the same a reason that we are determined to make sense of the contradiction of how precisely a highly intelligent, developed and cultured nation assigned itself—its might, skills and imagination—to undertaking the death of millions for what now seems to us the preposterous reason of not being considered human. It is worth remembering that the deaths of countless individuals, men women and children were not always mechanized. Massacres, mainly mass shootings, were committed not only by Nazi death squads, who we mistakenly imagine all to be psychopaths, but by various helpers, collaborators, other prisoners, local villagers (coerced by fear or the promise of ‘loot’) and watched by ordinary folk, neighbours, friends, children and loved ones. Progressive and ‘enlightened’ as we consider ourselves to be, the world we live in, the here-and-now, still “radiates disaster triumphant.” (Theodor W. Adorno Dialect of Enlightenment, 1947). As Robert Priseman has himself pointed out:

Think of Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people between 1975 and 1979, or the ‘Disappearances’ in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983 which saw some 200,000 people ‘vanish’, or the loss of 3 million Bangladeshis during secession from Pakistan in 1971. Think also of Rwanda, Bosnia, Vietnam, Eritrea, Sierra Leone and many, many others.

If we stop remembering, if we become disinterested or start to feel comfortable in the presence of such horrors—Priseman’s images will undoubtedly be comfortless, even harrowing to many—then it is a black mark against our humanity for, as it has often been said, “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”

(Bernburg, Pencil & Crayon on Paper 152 x 228 mm )


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Review

Jill Townsley: Moments of Repetition. Robert Luzar

Work as an element in a work-of-art can entail more in its investigation than celebrating the latter, as the pure, fine art object. Jill Townsley’s approach to making art emphasizes the crux of making something, reminiscent of industrial manufacture and craft, and manifests a principle of re-production that goes largely unnoticed in precious fine art artifacts. Her installations, videos, and sculptures express a fact of process, at times marked but always evident of the more discrete performative activity of creation and play. By exposing repetition in process, down to the simplest elementary building block, Townsley arguably enables viewers to gain more understanding into what creates an artwork than through art alone. Where her approach deserves considerable merit is with how she ventures to identify with craft and production, and the disparate inchoate phases that act as supplements to the artwork. To open my short meditation on Townsley’s work and labour I will coin Glenn Adamson’s description of craft as supplement:

To say that craft is supplemental, then, is to say that it is always essential to the end in view, but in the process of achieving that end, it disappears. [1]

If Townsley’s material strategies incorporate a play with the supplement she does so in order to indicate the point in the evolution of a work of art, before it becomes anything, where it is still vulnerable to aimless production. When the predicament of process arises it is a moment in which the materials and actions reveal a constitutive property of having no end or beginning. I will try and elaborate how Townsley approaches these moments, when the act of labour approaches a level of failure, and the work resides with a disintegration of the capacity of the material, along with levels of cognitive concentration.

In March, 2010, the Nunnery Gallery (London, UK) presented ‘Moments of Repetition’, an exhibition solely housing a series of Townsley’s artworks. A variety of approaches, ranging from sculpture, installation, video, drawing, and photography, represented a culmination of five years of her intensive investigation into repetition and process. This period coincided with the time with her involvement in and completion of a practice-lead PhD, whilst registered at Liverpool University, with a Gladstone Fellowship from The University of Chester. Through in-depth experimentations in the studio, a series of exhibitions - notably ‘Second Lives’ – Remixing the Ordinary’, the inaugural show in the new galleries at the Museum of Art and Design, New York (2008-2009) - and whilst with the university she rigorously explored the fundamentals of labour inherent in simple actions of repeating. I will examine some of these pieces and projects, which fall under her series ‘Labourworks’, and see how they identify ways of brining an experiential account of process in its logic.


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Her materials resonate with conventions of labour-production, synthetic in kind, such as foam, wire, and plastic. When Townsley takes a wire, for instance, and makes it visible as a coil, nestled in a multiplicity of other coils she provides the material with a design, a spiral. Each coil appears static, as if freezing the centrifugal movement that builds a nest of spirals. This, in turn, allows us to perceive the intricacy of a disorienting operation. With its human scale, the coils assemble into a large cube, making its size approachable, its presence hardly overwhelming. These factors enable us to then to experience aspects of weaving and repeating.

The unit of repetition can be inspected further in the eight-foot pyramid, ‘Labourwork 5 - Spoons’. We can clearly see how three plastic spoons, bound by a rubber band, act as one of 3,091 parts used to assemble the overall mammoth structure. It is by rendering this unit materially present that Townsley’s work initiates the expressive logic of repetition, and both with a highly physical and conceptual potency.

When seeing the video recording of ‘Labourwork 5’, where the pyramid slowly disintegrates, this more abstract repetition slowly and progressively becomes apparent. Kate Armstrong addresses this abstract kind of repetition in relation to the process of

‘Brass Cube’ 2003, Wire 2 x 2 x 2 metres


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art production, where she describes it as “...something in every system that cannot be fully understood or fully cognized: the unrepresentable.” [2]

We may wonder if seeing a physical reaction of materials, as in the de-composition of a form, is a way of providing a closer proximity to repetition as ontologically unpresentable. Yet when ‘Labourwork 5’ does collapse, as the video displays it progressively and slowly crumbling, Townsley is offering the viewer the chance to hypothesize where exactly abstract repetition occurs. It lies somewhere within the tension and dissipation of physical energy, which is released as each rubber band breaks. Seeing the demise of a pyramid is like viewing the fall of an architectural goliath and allowing an effective approach to understanding repetition through the familiar materials of plastic and rubber. Not by repeating through manufacture of the object-unit, or the larger sculpture, but by seeing these material constructs naturally dissolve, do we begin to get a glimpse at the process as a series of abstract forces.

Abstraction is reiterated by the purely geometric shapes and forms present in these works, either as squares, cubes, or triangles. Considering these compositional motifs as architectural constructions, recalls Wilhelm Worringer’s dictum that works of art which he exemplified through gothic ornamentation (spires, repetitive coiling lines) and a plethora of of non-representational designs each directly expresses the forces that govern an impulse for creating the work. Worringer comments how this activity and impulse stems from an obsession with a kind of embodied matter, and is characteristic of the graphic motif of a line:

The unsatisfied impulse existing in this confusion of lines, clutching greedily at every new intensification, to lose itself finally in the infinite, is its impulse, its life. [3]

It is the motif of the line that particularly making this impulse, as a process of vitality, immanent and graphic in matter. In Labourwork 7 - Scribble to the Count of Five, Townsley employs the line in an obsessive activity of marking it out onto paper. In part she tries to provide a limit to scribbling black lines endlessly, filling out the white paper into a black square. Her decision is to use 500 repetitions of scribbling, while counting to five (repeated five times) in order to arrest, what is otherwise an impulse to repeat without end. In its final appearance the count satisfies the drawing of a larger, homogeneous black square. In contradistinction from the spoons, or coils, here one can barely find a part, or elementary unit within it; the black line disappears into a black, graphic mass.

(L) Detail of ‘Spoons’, 2008 (R) ‘Spoons’, 2008, 9,273 Plastic Spoons, 3,091 Rubber Bands, 2.59 x 3.48 x3.48 metres


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‘1 Meter Scribble Square’ 2007 (Gel pen and paper 1 x 1 metres )

Both the square and the scribble can be distinguished, as Townsley also presents a video derived from documenting the process of her executing the square from beginning to end, from white to black; but as an opaque mark both motifs coincide. Townsley marks, records, and presents what can appear as a monument of process: an opaque surface, or limit to perception and spatial access. In its black surface it appears as an enlarged detail of the microcosmic line. With this gesture she in turn brings a critical perspective to the moment of repetition, that phase of labouring and scribbling for an obscene length of time. The opacity of this surface reflects nothing more, no recollection of the experience, except a repression of the act of a compulsion to repeat. What makes Townsley repeatedly scribble, even to five-hundred cycles?

The video that accompanies the scribble drawing could be perceived as a method of rendering a motive that is either unconscious, or which only Townsley was conscious of during the extensive endurance activity of scribbling. What we see are five monitors, playing a video recording of the development of the drawing. We see a beginning, a white page, and an end, a black square, and then the sequence plays again. It is perhaps the loop as much as the black mark that the instant of repetition and its cessation for accomplishing its representation can be perceived as simultaneously surface and interval. As a point the square demonstrates a mark as a limit to an absolute encounter of repetition. To use Gilles Deleuze’s articulation, repetition is a notion without a concept. It is, as he states, “...not a specific form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the pure and empty form of time.”[4] Counting to five, and scribbling 500 cycles is a purely functional strategy to bring some presence to an empty form of repetition, just enough to touch upon it without completely erasing the count altogether.

Whereas one can use the spoons to cast his imagination, and try to sense the effect of repetition, the black square is a visible testament to the inert quality of the black line that scribbles it into place. Repetition may be without any entity. One cannot see it as a black obstruction to visibility and intelligibility. The video, however, with its frantic sounds of marks scouring a surface, draws our attention to be, even partially, in the moment of something seemingly senseless as pure repetition. With both the video and the marks we experience the gesture of drawing upon repetition, in its moment of and as an operation. There is perhaps no tangible conceptual framework to be identified in this moment, which is why one can at least listen, see, and almost feel repetition as a hazy presence.


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As much as Townsley is perhaps demystifying the complexity of repetition, revealing the literal episodes and phases of a works evolution, we should not overlook the effect the level of endurance, the investment of making the work, has on our capacity to pay attention to what is being done. Enduring entails working in the midst of a time that eventually, at some point during the prolonged period of labour, slips into a time erased of sense and purpose. To use Nietzsche’s phrase:

Duration ‘in vain’ without end or aim is the most paralyzing idea...[5]

The viewer can easily imagine the boredom that would emerge and seize the mind during the crafting of large quantities of wire, binding spoons, or scribbling. Countless hours, and days gone evoke a sense of empathy with the material and the hand that wields it. Conversely, we may wonder if Townsley is able to recall and return to the points when her endurance shifted into periods of mindlessness and pensive paralysis.

Considering these activities as mindless should not be understood as an insult; labouring within a practice of craft, before, or outside of art, in that space that behaves as a supplement to pure art, means that one chooses to work devoid of being supported by an idea of the beautiful, or marvelous - feelings that give passion and meaning to the work. It is the way Townsley uses numeration that confers a critical distance, and allows us to experience a fragment of this unfathomable repetition. To repeat to 500, or 3091 emphasizes the number as a focal point to Townsley’s acts. If repetition is in itself void of any concept, something of an empty duration that one can only engage through endurance, number functions to prevent the act from being completely forfeited. Historical examples, such as Eric Satie’s lengthy musical performance, ‘Vexations’, demonstrate how one arrives at a number that marks a limit to the act.

(detail) ‘840 Satie’, 2006 (Video and Chalkboard, 1250 x 820 mm)

Satie’s act inevitably failed at the fifteenth hour of the performance; at 840 repetitions of the same melody, the number accomplishes the instant when the mind ceases to endure a repetition that is a priori aimless. Townsley references Eric Satie, with Labourwork 8 - Satie 840. Again, she incorporates the loop of a video to show her hand inscribing numbers in chalk on a blackboard. Replacing Satie’s sonic interval with that of an ephemeral rendering of a number, Townsley’s gesture is seen as an erasure of each instant of Satie repeating the melody. This action provides a summary of how repetition, as a fundamental operation of process, can be expressed in her work.


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No material, or frequency of labouring with process as repetition can accomplish a representation of its limitless, and incorporeal state. It can at best be approximated. Townsley’s approach to making, in the sense of an approximation to repetition is to reveal the process of some key fine art situations: tying, weaving, or scribbling.

Revealing a mechanical process, either through elastics, spoons, or wire, reflects a gesture of acts of failure. Her work oversteps the conceptual quip that one can understand the work by seeing its mere image, or reading its text; for one has to spend some time, a few moments watching a loop, or feeling the physicality of a large cube or pyramid to begin to approach something as unrepresentable as the empty notion, which compels a simple act to repeat.

Notes

[1] Adamson, G., Thinking Through Craft, Oxford: Berg, 2007, p. 13.

[2] Armstrong, K., Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002, p. 6.

[3] Wilhelm Worringer, Form In Gothic, transl. & edited by Herbert Read. London: Shocken Books, 1964, p. 79.

[4] Gilles Deleuze, Repetition And Difference, transl. Paul Patton. New York: The Athlone Press, 1994, p. 276.

[5] Nietzsche, F. W. (1901) The Will to Power, transl. by Walter Kaufmann, & R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1967, p. 55.


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Review

Unspeaking EngagementsLanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry University, 12 February – 19 March 2010.

Steve Swindells

The artists in Unspeaking Engagements explore processes of physical and/or durational engagement as a means of constituting the artwork. Each address their own or the viewers’ awareness of their body in relation to time and space. At issue are questions of how such awareness can be cultivated, felt, represented and ultimately proliferated through the work of art. Unspeaking Engagements showcases artworks as sites of shifting experiences, in differentiation from artworks that require detached observation and propose fixed or final interpretations.

The exhibition proposes a detailed understanding of major questions within international contemporary art practices - who does what, how, when, and to whom – and consequently links theoretical debates about the intersection of performance and performativity to more recent critical issues of relational or participatory art. Moreover, the international basis of Unspeaking Engagements highlights different terms for understanding common methods and aims. Theories and sensibilities developed in one part of the world can be radically tested in another, provoking unexpected intensities and new formations.

Andrew Spackman, a Senior Lecturer at Coventry School of Art and Design has written a compelling fictional and actual review of the exhibition. In one aspect of his review Andrew poses a number of reactions, questions and problems that emanate from the altered-states the work suggests.

i. The artist’s start with the notion of the body, but present dislocated versions of themselves. Fictional characters playing out challenging, riddle-some, but seemingly futile and purposeless tasks.

ii. The artists seem to attempt communication but the language is obscured. It is beyond international, but is not merely personal either. Perhaps the work and the viewer are being placed in a state of oscillation. The work oscillates between states of something and nothing. Could something be knowledge and nothing is experience?

iii. If oscillation is occurring, what is the transmitted wave? And why does the artist seek to set this oscillation in motion? Why do they feel the need to ‘mess us about’? Repetition is good. Repetition seems to be the pivot point that all other things balance/rotate. Repetition is the works forcefulness, whilst its message is a quiet deadly whisper.

iv. Has the fixed, knowable, known become a problem for artist? A ‘stuck’ space. Is oscillation a narrow band of avoidance?


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v. Is the search for avoidance also a search for a ‘slow’ space, a frozen moment before we entered the ‘now’? Are these artists looking for freedom? A ‘potential’ form of freedom in place of our narrow experience of freedom that is our contemporary experience. Could this be called ‘Liminal Liberty’?

vi. Is modernism still alluring to artists because it is considered dead and so no one can own it. New endings of the project could be written and re written without need to test their viability.

Unspeaking Engagements is an international exhibition of visual art at Lanchester Gallery, Coventry University in collaboration with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The exhibition is curated by Brian Curtin and Professor Steve Dutton. The exhibition includes artists from Thailand, Ireland, Singapore, Taiwan and Britain – though many have transnational affiliations. Unspeaking Engagements was shown at the Art Centre of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok during 2009.


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Review

Life: A Users ManualArt Sheffield 2010

Steve Swindells

This is the fifth citywide event organized by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum (SCAF), co-curated by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher. The title for Art Sheffield 2010, ‘Life: A User’s Manual’, is taken from Georges Perec’s 1978 novel of the same name, where the inhabitants of a fictitious Parisian apartment block leave objects and traces of their lives behind in their flats. The writing, similar to elements of the exhibition is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer of complexity and the resulting stories construct a trail of everyday life consumed by spaces, places and things in the world.

In contrast to many other types of city wide contemporary art events, ‘Life: A Users Manual’ is understated which reflects something of the organisers sensibilities to present the unspectacular acts of everyday ‘affect’ as a way of negotiating the world today.

At the Millennium Gallery, Susan Hiller’s work, ‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1972-76’ is a conceptual looking grid of 305 postcards that show British coastlines battered by high seas. At the time of the work Hiller argued conceptual work always seemed to be flat, arguing in classic conceptualism there is no notion of affect that seems to acknowledge the potential for contradiction. Hiller’s work plays with contradiction and emotion to create a space for differentiation. ‘Shoum’ (2009) by Katarina Zdjelar depicts a man from Belgrade translating the lyrics of Shout by Tears for Fears. The resulting performance provides a phonetic interpretation of the original sound track in which continuous mishearing provides a humorous mistranslation. Zdjelar is interested in how the persistence of doing something unfamiliar produces difference, and alternative ways of being.

At S1 Artspace, Haegue Yang has created a sensorial installation of various media that focuses on the notion of abstraction. Architecture, cloths stands, lights, dry-ice and candles all reflect a mysterious space that is both subjective and romantic while touching upon specific cultural narratives. Haegue Yang represented Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

Art Sheffield 2010 ‘Life: a Users Manual’ is spread across the city’s gallery spaces: Bloc, Millennium Gallery, S1 Artspace, Site Gallery, Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery and other public sites.


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Film Theory

Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (2007)Sam Ishii-Gonzales

It is with his third feature film Silent Light (Stellet Licht, 2007) that the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas has come into his own. It is here that his thematic and formal concerns – his interest in spirituality, materiality and singularity (and roughly in that order) – attain a new purpose and clarity. Oddly enough this has occurred not through a rejection of his earlier cinematic influences, so as to forge his own original path, but rather through a full-scale immersion into the work of a key precursor; an immersion that has allowed Reygadas to, paradoxically, find his own voice, to render concrete his own perspective on the world. There are a number of important “art cinema” reference points for Reygadas, including Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. The key influence on Silent Light though is Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word, 1955), about religious faith, set amongst Christian farmers in the Jutland region of Denmark in the 1920s. The characters in Dreyer’s film argue over a number of religious (and secular) belief systems only to be confronted at the end with the unexpected and miraculous – the resurrection of the dead – brought about by the unlikeliest of sources: a mentally unstable young man and the innocent belief of a small child. Reygadas transposes Dreyer’s work to a farmland area of Northern Mexico inhabited by Mennonites, a religious community consisting of the descendents of German immigrants who left their homeland to escape persecution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Reygadas cast his actors from among the members of the Mennonites community of this region with the exception of his two female leads, whom he found in Mennonite communities elsewhere in the world: the non-professional actress who plays Esther is Canadian, and the non-professional actress who plays Marianne is German. The setting of the film and the casting of the actors are an inspired transposition of Dreyer’s work. They are the first of many.

Silent Light is not simply a remake of Ordet. There are fundamental differences in story and plot. At the same time it should be evident to anyone who has seen both films how they are related to one another since there are any number of thematic, visual, and auditory allusions made to Dreyer’s work, most obviously in the scene of the wake and resurrection near the end of the film. Where Reygadas really shows himself an heir to Dreyer though is in his attention to the expressive potential of cinematic form, particularly the rhythmic possibilities of the long take. For Dreyer, the control of cinematic rhythm is the distinguishing trait of a great filmmaker. Dreyer’s understanding of rhythm evolves over his forty-five year career. Most crucially in the shift that occurs from silent to sound film. Dreyer’s silent films (especially Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) demonstrate his mastery of rhythm via montage, rhythm as a consequence of alternating shots that replace one another in rapid succession,


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sometimes for purposes of harmonic compliment, sometimes for purposes of atonal disruption. Dreyer, however, came increasingly to believe that sound film required another approach to cinematic rhythm, one that used sound – spoken word, ambient noise, music – as a rhythmic component within the shot, rather than across shots, alongside the movements of the camera and the gestures of the actor. These elements in combination allow for a “specific sound-film rhythm.” [1] This belief led Dreyer to the long take aesthetic that characterizes his last two films, Ordet and Gertrud (1964).

Still: Silent Light

In Ordet the rhythm is so masterfully, and so minutely, controlled that initially it seems almost to have been snuffed out. First time viewers will, no doubt, be puzzled by the slowness with which events unfold, with which the actors move and say their lines. And yet, as the film proceeds, the glacial pacing becomes increasingly more compelling, even logical, and what initially feels labored takes on a new quality, a sense of inevitability – an inexorable movement that brings us to the threshold of a revelation. The climax has extraordinary force and power, but only if you experience the film as an organic whole, only if you experience the denouement as the harmonic resolution to all that has come before it. (At the level of structure, the climax provides closure through the cessation of movement. At the level of the narrative, however, the end is an opening. This tension between levels is part of what makes the finale so emotionally complex and rewarding.)

As the film scholar David Bordwell observes, “The primary function of [Dreyer’s] long takes… is to foreground the shot itself as a component of cinematic perception.”[2] The shot is no longer simply a narrative unit in a larger signifying chain, but imbued with its own significance. Each shot, as Bordwell says, “...creates its own rhythmic ensemble.”[3] We are not asked simply to scan the image and (impatiently) await the arrival of the next one but to become absorbed, fascinated, by what is placed in front of us and to take it in at a certain deliberate, measured pace. This is what we find as well in Reygadas: a request that we remain within this shot, that we immerse ourselves in this thing, that we become absorbed in the beauty of this world. From the opening nearly five-minute long take of a blanket of stars and the sun slowly emerging over the horizon (and which will be rhymed with the final shot), Reygades demonstrates a similar attention to and mastery of duration. I don’t wish to suggest to the reader that


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Silent Light has the same tempo as Ordet. It doesn’t. But it certainly does have a very different pace from a typical mainstream narrative film. In total, the film, which runs a 126 minutes, has 226 shots with an average shot length (ASL) of roughly 34 seconds per shot. By comparison, a contemporary feature film of the same length would typically have close to 2,000 shots and an ASL between 3 and 6 seconds; hence, moving at nearly eight or nine times the speed of this one. (On the other hand, Dreyer’s film, roughly the same length as Reygadas’, has only 114 shots or roughly half the number of shots as Silent Light.)

Some viewers may balk at this kind of pace, but I would suggest that one of the greatest strengths of cinema is precisely the way it allows us to take in an image at a different rate or speed than we have become accustomed to in our modern consumer society, which teaches us to look through images rather than look at them. As the art critic Paul Galvez recently notes, in the context of painting and poetry, “In a world where images and words slip easily off the surface of things […] moments that make us slow down to take in the substance of experience in all its complexity are needed more than ever.”[4] The long take is one of the means whereby cinema resists the reification of images (the transformation of images into consumer goods to be exchanged at will). Silent Light, with its precise framing and camera movements, asks us to attend to its images with heightened awareness and absorption. It encourages a movement into the image rather than a movement across or through them. In the process, the seemingly mundane is transformed into something else – something unexpected, miraculous, sublime – and because Reygadas’ focus is on the ordinary, without recourse to professional actors or sets or digital effects, he allows us to rediscover what is extraordinary about our everyday reality.[5]

It is the two filmmaker’s different approaches to cinematic realism that finally distinguishes one from the other. Without dismissing realism out of hand, Dreyer always insisted that it be combined with another word that modified or qualified its meaning; his two favorite being “spiritual” realism and “psychological” realism, which he seems to use interchangeably. What interests Dreyer are the fears and desires of his human characters. Ordet is a film about human belief. It affirms a world of belief, a world we can believe in, a world that makes sense for us. Reygadas, by contrast, affirms the world itself, with and without man. Reygadas’ faith is not in man but in the world. Silent Light is about belief in this world. Pure and simple. His is a spiritual realism of another sort. A spiritual realism without psychology, which is to say without man; a non-anthropomorphic realism of the type found in object-oriented philosophy. This shift of emphasis results in a qualitatively distinct resurrection scene. Admittedly, the resurrection in Silent Light doesn’t have half the impact of the equivalent scene in Dreyer, but neither is it meant to. Everything that occurs in Ordet is a preparation for this moment. It is the thematic and formal culmination of all that came before it. This is not the case in Silent Light where the wife’s resurrection is embedded in a natural world that is itself miraculous. So whereas Ordet ends with a medium close-up on Inger and her husband Mikkel, the final six minutes of Silent Light returns us to nature – returns us, in fact, to the location where the film began. We watch as the light slowly fades, certain that the cycle of life and death will begin again the following day and the day after that.


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For those disinclined to be generous in regards Reygadas’ transcription of Dryer’s work, let’s not forget that Dreyer’s film was itself an adaptation of a play by Kaj Munk, a Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Germans in 1944 for his vocal criticism of the Nazis as well as his role in the Danish resistance. In regards to Munk and his play, Dreyer would say it was necessary to become possessed by Munk himself “and then to forget him.” One must “preserve him and free oneself from him” at the same time. [6] A similar thing happens with Silent Light. Reygadas both preserves Dreyer and frees himself from him. Silent Light evokes Ordet only to finally become its own unique entity. It is thus not only the perfect homage to a canonical work of cinema but to the auteur that created it, because this is the true lesson that one learns from someone like Dreyer: the only true auteur is the one who finally goes his or her own way; who discovers the power of cinema for themselves.

Notes

[1] Carl Dreyer, Dreyer in Double Reflection, ed. Donald Skoller (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 129.

[2] David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 151. For those who might wish to consider the formal properties of the film in more detail, Bordwell’s chapter-length analysis of Ordet is exemplary.

[3] Bordwell 160.

[4] Paul Galvez, “Inner States: Gustave Courbet,” Artforum (May 2008), p. 346.

[5]] Reygadas’ use of actors both compliments and perfects Dreyer’s contention that cinema requires a new use of actors. Dreyer believed that filmmakers need to discover a form of acting specific to the medium, one that understands the difference between, as he puts it, “pretending and being” (Dreyer 53). It is precisely this – being rather than pretending – that we find in Silent Light.

[6] Dreyer 165; emphasis added.


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Contributors Fr. Martin Boland is the Dean of Brentwood Catherdral and writes ‘The Invisible Province’ blog at http://theinvisibleprovince.blogspot.com

John Finlay studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (1989-92) and received his doctorate from the Courtauld in 1998. He is an independent art historian of French history and culture, specializing in twentieth century modern art, and is a regular contributor to Apollo, Sculpture and H-France. He is a regular contributor to to a number of international art journals and magazines including Sculpture, Apollo and Bonhams magazine. He is also a cultural commentator and currently writes a weekly art column for New Zealand’s national newspaper, The Press.

Sam Ishii-Gonzales is a Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School in New York City

Robert Luzar has an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design (UAL), London and is currently enrolled on the PhD progremme at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (UAL), London.

Robert Priseman studied Aesthetics and Art theory at the University of Essex before taking up Painting full-time in 1992.

Ramesh Ramsahoye studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (1989-92) and received an MA from the Courtauld in 1993. He is an independent art historian specializing in seventeenth century Dutch art. He is also a scholar of Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture. He lives and teaches in County Wexford in the Republic of Ireland.

Jeremy Spencer completed his PhD in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex and lectures in Contextual Studies at the Colchester School of Art and Design.

Dr Steve Swindells is Reader in Fine Art at Huddersfield University.


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Documents

One-point Perspective and other Renaissance ideas in Gentile da Fabriano’s 'The Presentation of Christ in the Temple' from 'The Strozzi Altarpiece', 1423