I am going to start with a scientist Jean Emile Charon who
believes that science can prove that the soul is immortal. Now he is straying
into Metaphysics, which is a total heresy in the prevailing world of scientific
positivism. Jean-Emile Charon is still alive, though for the past five years in
a coma, and he was a physicist and an engineer and a specialist in nuclear
research.
Charon has said;
Our body's electrons enclose a
space and time unlike the one we have always been aware of. In this electronic space-time,
there is an orderly memory of past events that goes on endlessly empowering and
enriching us -- not only in that part of ourselves we call mind, but in every
single part of our being, in the very electrons that combine to make us who and
what we are. These particles, moreover, possess an eternal life through time,
which means that each individual human spirit (what the Greek philosophers
called soul) has been, is, and will be -- for as long as the world exists.
Of course we are up against the scepticism of scientific
positivism. Most scientists have the belief that the universe and life are the
product of a multitude of encounters between chance and laws of nature, Charon
says that this theory of the random impersonal nature of chance is falling
apart before our eyes.
I believe we are at the end of this scientific paradigm,
which denies the supernormal and entering a new paradigm of belief in the
immortality of the soul. Art must
speak about this. We are visual
artists, and so speak in visual language.
Here in this school we are specialising in the traditional European
visual language of painting and sculpture. Our art is centred on the human body. I have called this paper. The recovery of Beauty, but it might
also be subtitled, The Nude in Art.
This European visual language could also be called the
language of Raphael paradigm of beauty, because Raphael in la Stanza della
Segnatura established the visual language of the Renaissance Christian
world-view. Here is an outline
diagram of it. It explained a
cosmos with the earth at it centre.
On each of the four walls are: Moral truth, Divine Truth Rational truth
and Artistic truth. Artist truth
was beauty. Here is one of the panels, Parnassus.
Beauty leads us to, the vision of paradise and the soul to its
eschatological purpose. That purpose was the resurrected body that artists of
the Renaissance saw as the beautiful body. The body in fact that derived from the Classical Greek
concept of the body beautiful. In
its purest state this body was naked or what we call in English nude. In paradise soul beauty and body beauty
would become one.
Now this visual language spoke in continuity from then until
the end of the 19th Century.
Bouguereau in the La Naissance de Venus
is still working the same language of mythology as Raphael in The Triumph of Galatea.
Renaissance Christianity was Neo Platonic and founded on a synthesis of
the Greeks and Hebrew myths, and these are written pictorially from the
Renaissance until the end of the 19th century.
We can call it, The Classical Visual Language, or the
language of the Raphael paradigm of Beauty, both are synonymous and it is
essentially the revival of this that we are engaged in here. The revolutionary art of the 20th
century overthrew the art of the Raphael paradigm. I call this the great iconoclastic movement of the 20th
century. It destroyed the highly accomplished craft that underpinned the
Raphael paradigm. We are relearning this craft of painting and sculpting again
after four generations of discontinuity.
However we must ask ourselves the question. What are we saying with it?
The Raphael paradigm is visual philosophy. La Jeunesse de
Bacchus by Bouguereau marks the end of beauty as religious truth in the
Raphael sense. Looking at it gives me a feeling of innocence in paradise. I am reminded of that other vision in
the bible of the holy mountain of the Lord were where the wolf shall lie down
with the lamb and a little child shall lead the loin and the calf. Bacchus or Dionysus is clearly the Christ child, the child that tames the dangerous
beast of the sexual instincts.
But we fear that the bacchanal is not innocent, and indeed
has its dark side: Picasso Silenus Dancing 1933 and
Bacchanal with Minotaur 1933. Even though he uses the Classical
Visual language, Picasso corrupts it with clumsy caricature. Picasso is deeply
destructive. The legacy of Picasso
has been the abandonment of the teaching of the academic system of art
training. This skill that Picasso
was himself trained in is no longer available to to-days artists. In the post Picasso world mainstream
art is limited to primitivism, or a very elementary level of traditional skill.
However to return to Silenus the drunken old man of
practical wisdom, he also had the gift of prophesy, he keeps appearing in
visual mythology. Here he in
Bouguereau¹s and again in the sculptor Dalou, Triumph
of Silenus. Note the allusion to
Christ¹s triumphal return to Jerusalem on palm Sunday and the contrast, Jesus a
young man, the man-god, in his prime, choosing the sacrifice of his body for
his ideals and Silenus the pragmatic old man, still prisoner to life.
Silenus is son of the satyr Pan and a nymph. Classical mythology is full of these
demimonde beings, half man and half animal and they have deep psychological
meaning and are deeply rooted in our cultural heritage. Bouguereau Nymphs and Satyr. Here the Satyr is holding back, as if
rendered impotent by the teasing nymphs, yet there is a tension that maybe they
are playing with fire and the beast might become the minotaur.
In the La Jeunesse de Bacchus
detail we have the centaurs riding off into the background. They are savage creatures principally
know in mythology for their war with the Lapids. Fighting broke out at the wedding of the Lapids¹ king
Pirithous to Hippodemia. The centaurs, unused to wine, seized the women of the
Lapids and one of their number Eurytion tried to carry off the bride. Here they are quite happy and innocuous
riding off with one of them playing the twin flutes. The flutes allude to the music competition between
Dionysus and Marsyas, another important mythical theme that is worth study.
So in La Jeunesse de Bacchus
we have the theme of the age of gold were the dangerous passions are tamed and the
Christ Child as Dionysus brings everything into harmony.
I do not know how much you know about Greek Mythology. It seems we have a missing link here. I
must emphasise the vast store of psychological knowledge we inherit from the
classical Greeks. Much of modern
psychology and therapy is based on Freud and Jung¹s discoveries in the
unconscious, and they constantly referred back to classical mythology. Freud even called his theoretical
model, The Oedipus Complex. These
ideas are continued in scientific psychological language, so we must ask
ourselves why have they been ditched in visual language. There is a great rupture in out culture
here.
Joseph Campbell, a mythologist, whose writings have greatly
influenced me tells us that we are at present in the plethora of the break up a
world phase of warrior patriarchy which began some 4000 years ago. The European
feudal system, our European sub-system, finally collapsed in the early 19th
century with the fall of the Hapsburgs and the Romanov¹s. With it the warrior code of allegiance
and honour came to be questioned as well as the project of Christian God as a
warrior God; a god with whom you had to get right. Renaissance Classical visual
art was the visual language of that warrior elite and expressed its values and
its code of morality. All the values of this Christian Feudal system came under
the hammer of revolution and everything about them was hated.
However revolution is not the answer. A culture cut off from its roots is
shallow. We must pick what is
valuable from our visual heritage and reintegrate it. We have also killed the
Classical Visual language because our great thinkers, scientists and
philosophers, no longer believe in the soul and its immortality.
Here are two examples of 19th
century attempts to use photography for
mythological themes. I think it
shows the failure of photography to capture the immortality of the gods, these
bodies are only too mortal. Now
that the craft of traditional realism is only a fringe movement in mainstream
art we are in danger of becoming totally dependent on photography and the
computer generated realism, and that would be a huge cultural loss. The machine
speaks of morality while our craft that of immortality.
To return to the language of art; in sculpture it is
expressed in body language. We see
here the pathos of Rodin¹s Paolo and Francesca,
and their doomed erotic love. The
story is taken from Dante, la Comedia Divina. Then the more lyrical Springtime
and the Eternal Idol. I am just letting the
images speak. Just look at the
face of Bernin¹s Daphne, she is fleeing from
Apollo¹s love and is turning into a laurel tree. Next we have Flora by
Carpeaux, This is a most beautiful
sculpture. It is in the
Louvre. The theme is the bacchanal
of the little children under the spread arms of Flora. Next we have the children¹s bacchanal
by Rubens in the Feast of Venus detail. I recently saw this painting in
Vienna. More serious adult sexuality is going on in the background. Here
is a complete view of the painting.
I have noticed that this painting brings up a certain modern
unease with the present focus on paedophiles. I would say that artist¹s today would be courageous to
tackle this allegorical subject matter and to use children as models for a
study of it. Yet there is nothing dark
in Rubens¹ picture. The children
are enjoying their naked romp as young children do. They are involved with each other. So are the satyrs and
adult women. The adults and
children are separately self-involved and have no interest in each other. The satyrs
only want to chase the adult woman.
At the feast of Venus the world of adult sexuality and innocence child
play exist side my side without embarrassment or guilt.
Now Rubens paints the other side, the bodies of those
enslaved in their lust falling into the fires of hell. Ruben¹s paints the tensions and
conflicts of human sexuality of his age, but one feels here is a man of faith
and in his Christian vision nothing is driven underground and repressed.
Lets us now look at the bacchanal
of Carracci painted for the Farnese Popes. Again Silenus on his donkey. Ariadne and Bacchus or as I
prefer to call him Dionysus are riding in their respective chariots, note the
tigers, sometimes lions and leopards
that pull Dionysus¹ and the goats that pull Ariadne¹s. These animals had symbolic
meaning. The story of Ariadne
abandoned on Naxos by Theseus and her mystic marriage to Dionysus is a central
theme in mythology, why has it been abandoned, and why did it meant so much to
artists and musicians and philosophers up until the end of the 19th
century. Here we have Makart the
forgotten Viennese painter, again the Triumph of
Ariadne. I saw this
painting in Vienna. One can
recognise Sisi the last Hapsburg Empress as Ariadne. However the painting seem unsure, decadent a sense of threat
form the wild animal energies beneath the surface. In this strange detail the lion begins to
devour. It is prophetic because
the repressed sexual and aggressive energies are going to erupt. Europe is about to be plunged into its
darkest century.
The story of the hunter Actaeon particularly interests
artists because he was turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own
hounds. His crime was to see
Diana, or her Greek name Artemis, bathing naked with her nymphs. Gainsborough
Actaeon. The virgin goddess¹s anger in the face of the sexually
predatory male eye is another theme from classical mythology, and it still
resonates today.
I come to art from a background of Freudian psychotherapy
and I considered training for a career as a psychotherapist, so I have
extensive knowledge in that area.
I was also introduced to Jung by the writings of the mythologist Joseph
Campbell. So I am bringing a great
deal of this to my talk. Jonathan
Hanaghan, a psychoanalyst whom I knew, held that the exhibitionist and peeping
instincts were very powerful, indeed great forces of nature as the myth of
Actaeon shows us. Jonathan
Hanaghan used the word peeping instead of voyeurism because it more correctly
related back to the terrified little boy¹s fear that he will be castrated and
his compulsive peeping as an adult is a symptom of that fear.
Greek vase painting. Here the clothed goddess Artemis fires
arrows at Actaeon, while his hounds devour him. Note the tiny penis uncovered and the symbolism of the
sheathed sword. We are told from
Greek mythology that Artemis never reaches the age of puberty. Actaeon also represents the pre-puberty
male who strays inadvertently into the realm of goddess beauty and is destroyed
by it. Adult sexuality requires
Rite of Passage, it is much too powerful a force not to be religiously bound.
Also we are dealing with an inherited cultural tradition of
sexual wounding in infancy as a mechanism of patriarchal control. Again I will
let the pictures speak. Cannon Fodder, Bare bottom Spanking and Lady
with a Chastity Belt and the Devil. It is quite clearly this control is psychologically
imprinted by Christianity. I got
these pictures from Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit.
Bride stripped bare by her
Bachelors, 1915 -23 the large glass by Marcel Duchamp. Note that the French word for bachelor
is a celibate. The meaning of the large glass is coded and can only be
deciphered from the study of the writing and life of Duchamp. Duchamp has had a huge influence on
visual language developed by Modern Art in our times. He is the father of conceptualism, and famous for his bottle rack, and the cubist Nude
descending a staircase. Here is his nude with
cubist influence. He subsequently rejected cubism finding it empty. He was born in 1877 and started life as
a fairly conventional artist often giving his titles a double meaning, Flirtation. This drawing called Sunday of a man pushing the pram and his pregnant
wife is distinctly sour. Although
Duchamp was attracted to women, his inclination was for the spirituality of
non-procreative sexuality. As a young man he toyed with the idea of becoming a
catholic priest. He was a deep
thinker and philosopher, as many great artists are. He held that art had lost its historic purpose, which was to
speak of things, political, philosophical and religious. He was influence by the Descartes
separation of the matter and spirit and deeply affected by 19th
century atheism, and I seem to sense a cry of existential despair in his art
and in modern art in general
I took the following series of slides from a book on
Duchamp. His last work
Étant donnés, is in The Philadelphia
Museum of Art. He worked on in secret for 20 years in preparation for it to
being installed after his death. It is a peepshow that you see through a hole
in this door. Étant donnés. In his
lifetime the installation was already assembled in his private studio and he
left exact details of how it was to be moved 3 photos and drawings.
Etant donnés, I personally
do not like it and I find it disturbing.
I will quote a letter I found on the internet,. It is a letter to the editor of Art in
America on an article Étant Donnés
by Naumann.. It expresses well the
emotions that Duchamp arouses
Naumann's analysis of Étant donnés brought me back to the late '60s and
my initial encounter with Duchamp's mysterious mise-en-scene, wickedly aimed at
an unsuspecting public. In this regard, I recall the artist's interview for
television, given toward the end of his life, in which he asserted that
contemporary art, compared to Dada and other forms of early modernism, no
longer had the ability to shock. Yet his parting shot gives the lie to such an
assertion. He acts like a naughty child who relishes toying with adulthood's
Victorian sense of propriety, simultaneously referencing his own confusion over
and fascination with the illicit mysteries of the opposite sex. Indeed, while
viewing the work, I found myself perplexed and disoriented in addition to
feeling "set up," as Duchamp, pandering to my basest desires,
transformed me into a Peeping Tom, a voyeur peering through holes in a wood
door. Desiring to satisfy my curiosity, I somehow, in the process, was made to
feel guilty. No doubt, those who preceded me--the evidence of their experience
stained into the door at head level--had a similar reaction.
With Étant donnés Duchamp
closes the gap between art and life as skillfully as any artist of his or any
other generation. The work's ability to disturb is part and parcel of this
strategy. And in his desire to have his secrets uncovered bit by bit over time
(as Naumann observes), Duchamp succeeds in provoking the public from the grave.
The artist's penchant for manipulating what is instinctual is profound. He
plays on humankind's most fundamental passions, those of curiosity and guilt,
and gets away with it, after which he deserts the viewer, leaving him
vulnerable and alone to contemplate what has been set in motion.
The male spectator is
mystified. Causing a jolt to the senses, the scenario with its nude mannequin
wreaks havoc with the female mystique, which has transfixed many a
pre-adolecent. Duchamp's explicit rendering of the female nude is designed to
discredit Victorian illusions about the fair sex. She appears waxen and dead,
akin to Lenin's body in its Red Square tomb. This effect is compounded by the
figure's hairless vulva, which mimics a wound or gash, the remnant of a violent
act. To be sure, the media have provided the public with its share of dead
bodies abandoned in the woods. But, intentionally evoked or not, the violence
embedded in Étant donnés is the terminal example of an aggression against women
which, arguably, much of Duchamp's oeuvre exhibited over the course of his
career.
Gerrit
L. Lansing
Greenwich, Conn.
I think this writer¹s point is overstated, but represents a
real opinion out there. The aggression against women is a projection of the
little boy¹s fear of mother-power.
We are really getting into the nitty gritty of the power of the visual
image.
In the book on Duchamp from which I scanned this page, something of his conflict is confirmed.
The photo above in Courbet, Origine du Monde, while below is of a sex doll.
Gustave Courbet.
The Origine du Monde 1866, In Duchamp¹s
lifetime this picture was still censored and induced voyeuristic guilt. In the 1980¹s it was hung in the Musée
D¹Orsee. It was courageous of
Courbet to paint it in 1866 and it
too over a hundred years for it to be exhibited in public.
I am going to use my psychoanalytically training and a lot
more information of Duchamp to propose the following. Duchamp suffered trauma as a child and it damaged his growth
to sexual maturity. This little boy had child terror of the female genitals,
and the difference between the male and female. This is a need for compulsive
looking that masked the castration terror. This installation is a peep show, but as well there is a
denial of adult sexuality in the absence of pubic hair, but there is a
carefully arranged lock of hair next to the face which you cannot see. Why was
Duchamp so terrified of this peeping or voyeuristic compulsion that he had to
postpone exhibiting this artwork until after death?
I speak from personal experience of having suffered
childhood sexual trauma, and my art has been a journey of self-discovery and
healing. I take the view that the
artist in the exploring the microcosm of his inner world speaks the macrocosm
of the external world. It took
considerable courage for me to exhibit this sculpture of mine here at the RHA
in Dublin last year, and I received considerable flax about it. I call it contemplation
in an altered state of consciousness and I was making the point that
erotic trance is an altered state of consciousness; moreover it is spiritual
and akin to a mystical experience, indeed a connection with the divine.
As I say, this theme of wounded sexuality continues right up
to the present time. Traditionally
in Christianity your body¹s sexuality did not belong to you, it belonged to God
and licensed only in the sacrament of marriage. The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife
by Daniel Maclise. These marriages
were often political and loveless.
The alternative was sainthood, The Temptation
of Saint Antony. Perhaps a
middle way was the bacchanal were some of the moral rules were reversed for the
period of festival or holyday. Here The Age of Reason is
a humorous look at the bacchanal by Stephen McKenna, an Irish artist of
international fame. It is in a modern office setting, perhaps the underground
fantasy behind the famous Office Christmas party. It is the preparation drawing for a painting, which I do not
have a photo of. It is called
ironically The Age of Reason.
Stephen McKenna is more in a half-way-house that I am, in that he draws
the nude in the clumsy Picasso style
that I called a debasement of classical beauty.
Now to take Louise Fenne¹s painting Woman
in a Church. At the first
level it is a very pleasing painting with good composition and colour and
catches the eye. Let us look a
little deeper and find levels of meaning that all art must have if it is to
effectively speak in metaphor.
Although the clothes are modern, they are like male clothing
from the Renaissance. There is a hint of androgyny though the title clearly
tells to she is a woman. The
church furnishings go back to then, or at least to a world where the arts and
crafts were offered in the service of worship. She is lighting a candle, and this resonates back to
Pre-Christian times, to the goddess who tended the sacred fires.
Cu face. She is pensive and
concentrated and seems to be asking the question. ³What is it to be a woman in
our modern age² and ³what is the meaning of religious ritual.² Traditionally a
woman must keep her head covered in church while a man must have it uncovered,
but this could be a young Florentine man of the 15th century wearing
a hat.
There is a phallic element in the candles. One held with her left hand
horizontally is sharing the flame, which is pretty much in the centre of the
picture. Read mythically in
Campbell¹s language this is the left hand path of the feelings. See the diagram from an alchemy text
Her right hand picks up a candle that is next to be lit in
the sacred fire ritual. It points
in the direction of her left hand, the hand of
feeling saving in the visual language of alchemy, intelligence leading to
feeling. Another candle, beside
her right wrist, a rejected one, is in the
wrong place and drooping from the heat of the candle stand. The candle stand itself is placed were
her genitals are, the central lighted candle originates from there as well as
the most burned down candle. The
lighted candles made a diagonal that forms a cross,
the symbol of Christianity. It is
in this diagonal position that Christ carries his cross.
Woman in a Church. I am sure these things I have read in
Louise¹s painting are not necessarily conscious on her part, but that does not
matter, the painter paints intuitively becoming a channel for a work that is
mythically and symbolically deep.
She does this by absorbing the lessons the Master painters of the
Renaissance paradigm. She is using
a visual language, the Classical Visual language, already full of metaphor and
making new metaphor out of it.
We can see whole iconoclastic movement of the 20th
century, which we know of as Modern Art as a consequence of the Darwin based
scientific denial of immortality and the existence of the soul. Science has but
is us a box and the language of mainstream art is a cry of despair.
We as artists, philosopher artists, must try and understand
the current movements of our time. I feel that the narrowness of the prevailing
philosophy centred on reductionist science has created a new Puritanism in
which beauty has to be censured.
The Raphael Paradigm with its belief in immortality and
beauty was much broader.
"Myth is the secret opening through which the
inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation..." I
quote from Joseph Campbell. Campbell¹s tells us that art must be mythologically
deep and this is a big point in my lecture. I have shown the psychological
richness of our classical visual heritage, and the folly of cutting out a huge
section of it.
Also I have touched on its possible use in the visual
language of our time.
As Campbell puts it art must be open being, open to the
mythology from which our world culture derives. The artist is continually reworking this creating a language
relevant to his time, but always addressing what James Joyce called the grave
and constant in life.
Bibliography
Campbell Joseph
Masks of God: Vol. I Primitive Mythology, Vol. 2
Oriental Mythology, Vol. 3 Occidental Mythology, Vol. 4 Creative Mythology
Joseph Campbell Foundation
Charon Jean
The Unknown Spirit
http://www.webstationone.com/fecha/charon.htm
Duchamp Marcel
Marcel Duchamp by Ades, Cox, Hopkins Thames and Hudson
LETTERS - Letter to the
Editor
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_9_89/ai_78334683
Theweleit.
University of Minnesota
Press
Male Fantasies by Klaus
Theweleit.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/T/theweleit_male.html