When I
was going round the studios on Friday I was asked this question, “Can a
contemporary painting deal with spiritual ideas?” I suggested that it could but
found it hard to explain in the short time I had available. Some time ago I was asked to give a talk
on drawing, and it coincided with what was then the first Gulf War. Part of the
lecture was focused on a series of drawings by Michelangelo and I used these
drawings to try and explain how an artist could make images that held us in
that moment between the physical nature of our what at the time seemed very ‘raw’
and ‘harsh’ material focused world and that ‘big other’ that spiritual
something that we aspire to but so rarely glimpse, because we are usually so
mired in the mud of reality. These were the drawings I was looking at:
Michelangelo Crucifixion
Only in drawing or painting
could his ideas be materialised, in particular because of the nature of
three-dimensional illusions in two-dimensional space. Michelangelo builds these
images out of small soft marks, the body is chiseled into existence, he can
feel his way towards a form as if he is finding it in a block of stone. Yet at
the same time he is composing this as a flat image, the dynamics of the surface
operating as they always do, triangles and rectangles of connection and
direction, forcing the eyes to shift and move across the surface, whilst at the
same time decoding the artist’s marks of illusion.
By looking at these four
drawings as a sequence we can see Michelangelo thinking. We can follow his
materialisation of an idea, an idea that reveals itself in the making of a
visual image. In the first earlier drawing Michelangelo is still relying on a
well understood series of conventions of the time. In this case, Christ is
positioned with arms nailed in an outstretched position, the agony of the
moment being expressed through the sinuous writhing of his body, the moment of
his impending transformation expressed through the upturned gaze. However the
image isn’t totally convincing. It appears too easily constructed, there is no
corresponding agony in either its execution or in the final appearance of the
figure of Christ, who could just as easily be writhing in sexual enjoyment. The
next drawing is later, a similar image, but this time the head looks down and
the arms are taking the weight so that the shoulders lie beneath the level of
the hands. Christ is no longer ecstatic and the curved form of the body starts
to feel slightly ‘wrong’ as it doesn’t quite take the weight needed. The third
drawing shows us that moment when Michelangelo discovers a new visual language.
His marks are more searching, they scrape the image out of the paper surface
and at the same time the essential dynamic of the composition changes. The arms
now form a much sharper triangle of downwards thrusting force, the body and
legs no longer writhe they fall heavily as a central drop. And yet, because of
the faint marks indicating the repositioning of the arms there is also a
suggestion of flight. This figure is capable of metaphorically flapping its
wings as it escapes the dead weight of existence. By positioning the arms in a
midway point between the horizontal and the vertical they are capable of
lifting the body. A type of lifting only achievable by two eyes tracing their
way across a two dimensional image, a type of lifting that can only work when
the eyes pass over a series of marks that suggest the physicality of a body,
but yet under closer inspection dissolve into a series of energetic marks. It
is here in this complexity of mark becoming image and image expressing meaning
that a compacted new series of meanings opens out. The forth drawing knows what the third drawing found. This is a very old idea, one
that has been with us for thousands of years.
In the Mind in the Cave Lewis-Williams
points to an awareness of the cave wall as a type of membrane that sits between
the world of now, today, life or what we might call reality and the world of
the past, death or the spirit. A living individual could stand on one side of
this wall/membrane and touch its flat surface, and in this way could perhaps
also touch that world on the other-side, that world of ancestors, the place
where the spirit that leaves the live body on death goes to. The idea of
religion would have to start somewhere, and it was most likely to have been a
concept that was developed to cope with our confrontation with death. At one
moment a dear friend or loved one would be alive and vital and then suddenly,
perhaps after a fall or other accident, that friend was unmoving, inert and
lifeless. So what happened, where did that life-force go to? This it could be
argued is the origin of our idea of the spirit or soul. Cave painters created
images that mediated between the two worlds of reality and the spirit, the very
nature of the images lay in a between state, not physically real, but still
recognizable as animals. If of course they were to be seen by flickering
candlelight all the more chance that they would appear ‘real’, that they would seem
to be suffused with life. Michelangelo works in that same thin gap between this
world and the next, reinventing the Paleolithic rules for the 16th
century.
Why is this so fascinating? I
believe it is because it’s physical but not physical at the same time. Paper is
material and invisible membrane at the same time. Just as for the cave painter
the wall operates as a space between reality and the other, a sheet of paper,
or a canvas can operate the same way. I don’t mean that it is a window into
another world, (sometimes of course it is seen like this, see Paraskos) it is instead an
arena where the materiality of inks, chalks, paints or whatever marks are made
from can be read as two things at once. They operate both in their material
reality of mud like earthiness and as metaphors for how we believe life could
be. The soot made blacks of cave paintings are also running horses, that will
run and run forever, their animal spirit captured in that most basic soot
pigment. The black chalk used by Michelangelo is also a man forever dying and
being reborn on that cross.
By
taking concepts developed by two writers, Michael Paraskos and James Elkins, perhaps I can elucidate all this in a
more academic manner.
Paraskos
suggests that artists have a material engagement with reality. This engagement
then becomes an artwork and when it does a transformation takes place. The
artwork is no longer read as material object, because a new world has been
created. Paraskos argues that pictures are like windows onto other realities
fabricated by artists, the reality of paintings being as real as our reality,
but operating within a different set of parameters. Paraskos traces his belief
to ideas developed by the Greek Orthodox Church in relation to the reading of
icon paintings. Within the Orthodox tradition an image of Christ is not seen as
a picture but as a window directly into heaven. Paraskos argues that all art
works in this way, and uses an Orthodox religious term to describe the
transformation of the physical into the metaphysical, calling it Metastoicheiosis. Perhaps because I am more
aware of the traditions of Catholicism the term transubstantiation is easier
for me to grasp in this context. At the moment when the wafer and wine are
taken during Mass, these are ‘transformed’ into the body and blood of Christ.
The physical become spiritual. Paraskos argues that it is only when this type
of transformation takes place that a true work of art comes into being.
Personally I think Paraskos takes this too far but I do sympathize with him and
believe his writings come from a sincere desire to give artists that agency
that allows them to believe they can do something spiritual and magical beyond
the everyday. However my argument would be that they do do this and have always
done it. By believing in the significance of confronting mundane materials and
reshaping them in the name of art, artists are always transending the material and
making it into ideas and thought forms, these being perhaps what were once
called spirits.
Elkins in his
book ‘What Painting is’ states that “paint is a cast made of the painter's
movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts”. He goes on to say
that “Paint is water and stone, and it is also liquid thought.” If we go back
to Michelangelo’s drawings for a moment, you can see his hand thinking, the
black chalk gets darker if you wet it, this thinking coming out of his mouth as
much as his hand, spit dripping on his chalk tip as it blackens, dry side grain
dusted off as he lightens his touch and twists his hand and arm to make fainter
marks. The hand and mind meld together as one and here I believe Elkins is
closer to the truth than Paraskos. My belief is that as artists we discover
through the making what it is that we are saying, images arrive through our
sensitivity to the materials, the images of course reflecting our experience of
reality.
So yes I do believe we can make images
that deal with spirituality, but I also believe that these images are
discovered in their making and cant be determined beforehand if not they will
become poor illustrations of ideas and not new realities.
My own attempts to do this have occurred at times of deep emotional trauma. One of the hardest was when my mother died. The print below, which was made from a series of drawings made whilst my mother was dying of cancer was perhaps the nearest I have ever managed to get in terms of visualising that slippage between the physical world and the spiritual one.
Texts referred to:
Lewis-Williams,
D (2004) The Mind in the Cave London:
Thames and Hudson
Paraskos, M (2011) Clive Head London: Lund Humphries
Elkins, J
(1998) What Painting Is New York: Routledge
Coda
As I was writing this post an image by Pontormo that I saw in Florence
a few years ago kept rattling around my head. He painted the Visitation in
1528, slightly later than Michelangelo. The story he was trying to get across
was that Mary had had an ‘immaculate conception’, i.e. had in someway been
impregnated by God. It was another of those moments where the divine and the
physical conjoin, the act of human physical reproduction, changed into a moment
charged with divine energy. The figures appear to be both solid and floating at
the same time, Pontormo designing their bodily movements to express an idea of
spiritual energy that runs throughout the composition. However the most
exciting thing about the painting when you actually see it is the colour. It
has recently been restored and the large expanses of green that make
up the dresses enclose a sharp triangle of pink that glows with the optical
effect of simultaneous contrast. This when looked at actually flickers, the
pink glow of its edge drifting slightly back and forward as your eyes move over
the image. When I saw this I realised that what Pontormo had been able to do
was to invent a new pictorial concept and use it to refresh what was by then
becoming a quite tired visual illustration. Artists had been using a simple
device to show the fact that Mary was divinely pregnant, usually consisting of a
series of golden lines dropping from the top of the picture frame and ending up
in her stomach as if she had been speared. Pontormo doesn’t need to do this, he
creates the glow of conception as an actual optical phenomena, something that
was perhaps not fully realised until the experience of colour field painting in
the twentieth century. Yes painters can paint the spiritual.
Pontormo Visitation
Detail
I love your posts, thank you
ReplyDelete