Entry - 10.22.16

And who by fire, who by water,

Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime,

Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,

Who in your merry, merry month of May,

Who by very slow decay,

And who shall I say is calling?

-         Leonard Cohen, Who By Fire

A few weeks ago, I celebrated my 57^th birthday.  It recently occurred to me that my father was the same age when he lost his brother to a tragic car crash one snowy winter’s morning.  I didn’t know my uncle very well since my father’s family had fractured somewhat as the years had passed and the needs of offspring took precedence over those of siblings.  All the same, I was affected deeply.

The hazy years of my early childhood had been dotted with a few scattered deaths of superannuated relatives whose services I had been too young to attend, though I do recall an afternoon visit to a funeral home for the wake of one of my great uncles.  Most clear in my mind is the memory of hooking up with my equally young cousins and causing a bit of a disturbance in that solemn edifice by racing through the halls, hiding behind a wall of coats on a coat rack, exploring the viewing rooms and letting out squeals of terror and laughter when confronted with a lonely corpse laid out in his coffin awaiting visitors.

I was really too young to “process” these early deaths.  For me, they meant an unpleasant car ride or an evening with a babysitter.  At that time, the universe revolved solely about me, rendering me unable to empathize with the pain and sense of loss that others were experiencing.  Such is childhood.  After these early deaths, there followed what felt like an endless span of years during which there were no wakes or funerals, when my banal existence was focused on school or sports or friends without the shade of mortality intruding on my consciousness.  In fact, death seemed such an unreal concept that I was impatient with art, literature and lyrics (particularly in the folk music I listened to at that time) that sought to remind us how fragile a thing life really is.  To me, life seemed eternal and guaranteed, and art that contradicted that perception was contrived and the product solely of artifice and convention.

Albrecht Durer - Death and the Landsknecht- 1516

“My name is Death, cannot you see?

Lords, dukes and ladies bow down to me

And you are one of those branches three

And you, fair maid, and you, fair maid,

And you, fair maid, must come with me.”

“I’ll give you gold and jewels rare,

I’ll give you costly robes to wear,

I’ll give you all my wealth in store

If you’ll let me live, if you’ll let me live,

If you’ll let me live a few years more.”

“Fair lady, lay your robes aside.

No longer glory in your pride.

And now, sweet maid, make no delay.

Your time is come, your time is come,

Your time is come and you must away.”

                                        -Traditional Folk Song

Sebald Beham - O, Die Stund ist aus - 1548

So when my uncle died so suddenly in a senseless accident, the event had a profound impact on me – sort of like the result of dropping a stone in a placid pond.  Being in my last year of high school, I was now fully capable of appreciating the gravity of the event and could empathize with the suffering his family was experiencing.  Especially difficult for me to process was that my uncle’s children were of similar ages to those in my own family, his two youngest daughters being my juniors by a year or two.  In a flash, “death”, that unreal concept, had become a tangible reality for me.

After the wake, funeral and burial, my family stopped by my uncle’s house to share a meal with his family before returning to our home.  The place was filled to the rafters with aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, neighbors and business acquaintances, and I felt lucky to have found a free chair in their TV room upon which to sit while I balanced a plate of food precariously on my knees and ate an uncomfortable meal.  Among the folk that had sought refuge in this little annex was my father’s older brother who was nearly identical to my father in appearance but night and day as far as their personalities went, my uncle being somewhat of a gregarious joker while my father was serious and quiet.  While I watched two agitated Irish setters bounding in and out of the room, my uncle stopped eating a moment, looked up at his companions sharing the room and declared with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, “Well, that’s the first of us to go!”, referring to the seven original siblings in my father’s family and seeming to suggest that now that the floodgates were open the remaining siblings would fall like a line of dominoes.  His observation shocked me for being flippant and, while uncontestably factual, in spirit quite alarmist.  No one was going anywhere.  This death was an unforeseen blip on an otherwise clear radar screen.  Or, at least, so I thought.

I came into this world with a surfeit of aunts and uncles, there being seventeen in all, both by blood and by marriage.  At the time of my uncle’s declaration, I thought of my parents’ generation of relatives as rock solid, bound to be around for eons to come.  Within a decade, half of them were gone, taken by a host of ailments: heart disease, cancer, diabetes… the usual.  During that ten year span, I also lost my own father, an event that seemed ridiculously early and particularly avoidable.  So Death, that elusive and remote figure, became a regular companion of mine.  Health updates became common fare at family gatherings.  Someone was almost always going into or coming out of the hospital.  And there were those phone calls in the middle of the night informing our household of the latest passing.  I became indoctrinated in the culture of death, attending many a wake, funeral and burial.

And how did I change over the period?  Well. I can’t say that I became grim or morose, dwelling on the mortality of man throughout my average day.  I was young, and, at that stage of life, troubles have a fleeting impact.  Some deaths were harder to endure than others, but, for the most part, college then grad school, girlfriends and employment were my most pressing concerns during those years.  But, inevitably, my perception of the human condition had to shift.  My childhood belief in the reliability and constancy of the folk who populated my world gave way to the recognition that our little sitcom was performed by an ever changing cast of actors.  A dip in ratings or some mischief on the set could result in the exit of even central characters.  And, worse than that, it was entirely conceivable that the plug could be pulled on our show altogether.  That was my new reality.  In truth, I guess I should feel fairly privileged that I was able to maintain my childhood illusions for so long.

Prior generations were not so lucky.  Before the advent of modern medical and sanitation practices and the development of vaccines and antibiotics, there was a vast array of serious maladies thriving that could rapidly take the life of even a healthy, robust individual.  Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever and influenza epidemics routinely broke out in isolated pockets or swept across entire continents. From the 14^th to the 17^th century, plague outbreaks were regular occurrences in most European nations.  Tuberculosis, a potentially deadly, infectious, bacterial disease of the lungs, was particularly prevalent in the nineteenth century.

Hans Holbein (1497-1543) created a series of woodcuts on the theme of The Dance of Death which presented a selection of scenarios in which “Death” stole away healthy and active individuals from their loving families or in the midst of performing a critical role in the extant social structure.  In the series, the victims display no outward manifestation of illness and appear surprised and distressed to be escorted away by the skeletal figure of Death.  The purpose of the series seems to be religious.  Rather than explore the realities of dying, Holbein chooses to remind his audience that death could come at any moment, regardless of age or social status, and the time to repent is nigh.  In one print, a duke turns away in distaste from a beggar woman and her child unaware that Death is already laying his boney hands upon him, and, in another, a judge accepts a bribe from a litigant while Death removes the staff of office from his grasp.  Clearly, Holbein lived in an age when death struck indiscriminately and often.  Under the circumstances, the artist felt compelled to remind his audience of their moral obligations, the fulfillment of which would determine their circumstances in a promised afterlife.

Hans Holbein - Death Taking a Child - c1538

Hans Holbein - The Duke - c1538

Hans Holbein - The Judge - c1538

While Holbein explores death within allegory to instruct his audience, for Edvard Munch (1863-1944) death was personal.  His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five years old, one of his sisters succumbing to the same disease nine years later at the age of fifteen.  His only brother died of pneumonia at the age of thirty.  This series of deaths experienced throughout his youth had a profound impact on Munch and colored his understanding of life.  Early in his career, he sought to capture the suffering and despair experienced not by the dying but by those who remain to live with the loss.  In these works, Munch pares down detail to absolute essentials: a glass of water at a bedside, the thinned and matted hair stretched across the brow of a sick girl, exaggerated floorboards spanning a barren room, a sickbed, a coffin.  Eventually, the dead or dying individual becomes a secondary character positioned inconspicuously within the image or hidden altogether.  We are invited to empathize with the survivors who are represented not as individuals but as emblems of the various responses to death.  As a whole, these images do not delve into the artist’s particular experience but seek to transcend them to arrive at the universal.  All the same, these images are extremely moving, informing us of an artistic outlook defined by a prolonged exposure to illness and death.

Edvard Munch - The Sick Child - 1896

Edvard Munch - Death in the Sickroom - 1895

Edvard Munch - By the Deathbed - 1895

Like Munch, Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) chooses to explore the experience of death through the eyes of mourners.  She too suffered the loss of siblings during her early youth.  Surely the most devastating loss she was to withstand was the death of her son, Peter, at the age of eighteen in the opening battles of World War I in 1914, an event that sent her into deep depression and transformed her into a committed pacifist.  Her work often documents the impact that an untimely death effects on family members and comrades.

Kathe Kollwitz - Woman with Dead Child - 1903

Kathe Kollwitz - Memorial for Karl Liebknecht - 1921

Surely the most commonly portrayed death in European art is that of Jesus of Nazareth, the philosopher/activist who was put to death, as have many before and since, for preaching love and peace.  Often artists in depicting the dying have sought to reassure their audience that dying can be a gentle passing into the afterlife.

Carl Bloch - The Crucifixion - 1869

This is usually not the case with the crucifixion of Jesus.  Central to Christian thinking is the concept that Jesus suffered humiliation, torture and a horrific death to expiate the sins of the faithful, thereby opening the doors of heaven to them.  By exposing powerfully the full extent of his sufferings, artists were reminding the people of the burden of debt which they owed to Jesus and exhorted them to ignore their own penances as they committed themselves fully to leading Christian lives.  Particularly, in Northern Europe at the time of the Renaissance, artists took a strange delight in documenting the agonizing death that Jesus suffered.

Jan van Eyck - The Crucifixion - c1440

Matthias Grunewald - The Crucixion - 1515

The Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) provides a unique consideration of the subject of the death of Jesus.  The viewer is presented with the image of Jesus’s corpse laid out upon a slab.  The stigmata inflicted during his crucifixion are clearly documented, and, besides the bier, two women draped in shawls kneel in prayer.  But in many ways, this image is very impersonal.  In fact, if not identified by its title, this painting could be of anyone.  Furthermore, this image is primarily an unemotional exploration of what were then radical theories of perspective.  Unencumbered by pathos or a desire to proselytize, Mantegna selects the theme of the dead Christ as a convenient foil by which to explore technical developments in how three dimensional space is represented on a flat surface.  Looking at this work, I feel little empathy with the individual portrayed; instead I become absorbed with the visual distortions imposed by the artist’s choice of an unusual vantage point, noting inevitably what he got right and what he didn’t quite pull off.

Andrea Mantegna - The Dead Christ - c1480

While we are addressing religious themes, I think taking a look at Michelangelo’s (1475-1564) Dying Slave might be in order.  In many ways, this work is as unusual as that of Mantegna.  But while Mantegna chooses to take a scientific approach to a subject matter that clearly presupposes a strong religious construction, Michelangelo’s faith determines his execution of Dying Slave, a theme not readily associated with a religious context.  A first look at this sculpture suggests to the viewer anything but a dying slave.  A few silken bands encircling the figure’s chest are the sole attribute that would identify this individual as a slave, and nothing in his facial expression or overall pose would suggest that he is in the throes of death – usually an exhausting and agonizing ordeal.  In truth, the Dying Slave appears to be experiencing a kind of orgasmic ecstasy, which seems totally at odds with the theme of the work.  Only after consideration does the viewer realize that the slave is slipping the bonds of servitude and suffering to enter another dimension free from earthly concerns.  And, as such, the sculpture serves as a metaphor for the faithful, documenting the moment when an individual is released from the pains and cares of daily existence and enters the realm of heaven.

Michelangelo - Dying Slave - 1513 to 16

Other artists were able to find heroism in death.  Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) depicts Socrates about to drink a cup of hemlock, a sentence he chose over the disgrace of exile.  Socrates, undaunted by his fate, continues to philosophize to his followers who are not nearly as unemotional about his imminent death.  Perhaps David, recognizing the Revolution’s propensity to execute its most ardent supporters, was exhorting its leaders to continue to work tirelessly and stay focused on the goal of creating a just and egalitarian society, in spite of the high personal risk assumed by them.

Jacques-Louis David - The Death of Socrates - 1787

Throughout history, War has provided most consistently the opportunity for an individual to die a heroic death.  Well, maybe I should say that War provided artists the opportunity to depict a heroic death.  No one can be sure exactly what really transpired in the chaos and mayhem of any battlefield, but a heroic death, especially one suffered by a commander, presented a great vehicle for inspiring patriotic zeal and served as a great recruitment tool.

Horace Vernet - La Bataille du Pont d'Arcole - 1826

John Singleton Copley - The Death of Major Pierson - 1784

John Trumbull - The Death of General Montgomery at the Attack on Quebec - 1786

John Trumbull - The Death of General Warren at Bunker's Hill - 1815 to 31

With the development of modern warfare, the battlefield experience changed.  The slaughter of ever larger numbers of combatants became possible.  Death became indiscriminate and impersonal.  The demands of rapid deployments meant that the dead and wounded were often left on the battlefield for days before being attended to.  Mathew Brady (1822-96) was one of the first photographers to document the aftermath of modern conflict, and his raw and unflinching photographs of the American Civil War dead changed the way that civilians on the homefront viewed the war.  At the war’s start, Brady’s New York photography studio was doing very well as soldiers sought to secure ambrotype or albumen portrait prints of themselves before leaving their homes and families for the front.  But Brady decided that he wanted to document the war itself and hired 23 assistants to work in the field, each of them equipped with a traveling darkroom.  The slow speed of exposure required for these early photographs made recording active battles nearly impossible, but the aftermath of these battles became ideal subjects.  So a large number of the over 10,000 plates used to record the war were devoted to documenting the war dead in the field.  These deaths were not presented in a heroic or idealized manner.  The dead were recorded where they had fallen, their corpses often contorted in agony, their flesh bloated from decomposition.  Endless rows of bodies were stacked side-by-side in open fields awaiting processing and burial.  Probably for the first time ever, the public was introduced to the unfiltered realities of death in the field, and these realities were exceedingly gruesome.  Brady even held an exhibition in his New York gallery of The Dead of Antietam, devoted solely to photographs of the casualties of that Civil War battle.

Mathew Brady - Fredericksburg - 1863

Mathew Brady - Gettysburg - 1863

Brady anticipated eventually selling his plates to the US government, but, once the war was over, interest in his stark images waned as the nation preferred to leave the painful memory of the war behind.  Brady lost his studio, went into bankruptcy and ultimately died in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.

During Germany’s Weimar Republic, a period of liberal reform following the collapse of the government after World War I, artists enjoyed greater freedom than ever before.  A new movement called Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity flourished in the post war years, with artists documenting the atrocities they had often experienced firsthand in the field and condemning the social institutions that had supported and profited by the conflict.  George Grosz (1893-1959) and Otto Dix (1891-1969) depicted the war dead in a manner never permitted before.  The stagnant fronts of trench warfare resulted in the establishment of a no man’s land between enemy lines, a few hundred yards of barren ground too dangerous to intrude upon without great risk to life.  The bodies of soldiers killed in past assaults on enemy lines were necessarily abandoned where they had fallen and would decompose with time.  Using exaggeration and caustic wit, Grosz and Dix exposed to the public the horrible wounds, ignoble deaths and eventual deterioration of World War I’s combatants in a manner that would be difficult to tolerate in most of today’s liberal, democratic societies.  Such truths are too ugly to stomach and deny the public the comfortable illusion of noble sacrifice in war.

George Grosz - Freedom - 1936

Otto Dix - Dead Man - 1924

Otto Dix - Dead Man in the Mud - 1924

Otto Dix - Dead Sentry - 1924

Otto Dix - Skull - 1924

Recording the features of the dead is not a new interest.  Even in Ancient Rome, a wax death mask was made of the face of the recently dead and was worn by a participant during death rites.  During their Coptic period, Egyptians attached naturalistic portraits painted on wooden panels to the mummies of the dead.  Throughout the centuries plaster masks were made of famous and powerful individuals at their deaths.  They were also used to document the facial features of unidentified corpses before decomposition made recognition impossible.  Making these masks was an involved process, requiring some preparation of the deceased and multiple applications of plaster.  Often the corpse was positioned with head upright during the procedure.  Even after the development of photography, this tradition continued.  Why?  Clearly the death mask doesn’t capture a “true” likeness of an individual.  Often features are distorted by wasting, settlement and other physical changes occurring with death, and, unanimated by the spark of life, even those features accurately recorded seem artificial and vaguely unhuman.  On the other hand, I guess the death mask provided a precise, dispassionate perspective of the deceased, documenting in real proportion his or her features: the length of the nose, the width of the forehead, the pockmarks left from a childhood ailment, a scar testifying to a careless fall years ago, the lines of age incised sharply about the eyes and mouth.  At the most elemental level, death masks attest to the futile desire of the living to hold onto the intangible, the ephemeral and the fleeting and to deny the finiteness of human existence.

Egon Schiele

Ludwig van Beethoven

Napoleon Bonaparte

William Blake

Damien Hirst (b1965), a British artist who throughout his career has garnered great attention presenting work overtly ghastly and macabre, created a unique work of art in 2007, For the Love of God, which addresses the theme of human mortality.  From a London taxidermist he purchased a human skull, which was later determined to have come from a man who died at about 35 years of age in the 18^th century.  Hirst made a cast of the skull in platinum which he encrusted with jewels including 8601 flawless diamonds.  The teeth from the original skull were inserted in the jaw of the platinum cast.  The resulting artwork is a strange anomaly.  Hirst has violated societal norms in his handling of these human remains, creating an object that the squeamish might as a rule avoid.  As a reminder of human mortality, it might, like Holbein’s woodcuts, serve to warn us that we should make good use of the time we’re allotted to strive for elevated goals, to seek achievements of real significance, to assist and ease the suffering of our fellow man, except that this skull is comprised of jewels and precious metals, which render it a ridiculous bauble, a decorative piece meant to be admired and coveted.  For Hirst, Death has become a commodity which can be packaged and marketed to the public; in fact, this work supposedly sold for £50 million almost immediately upon completion.

Damien Hirst - For the Love of God - 2007

There are some artists who have attempted to explore death with a cool inquisitiveness devoid of a social or religious agenda.  Theodore Gericault (1791-1824), the same artist who painted unemotionally a series of portraits of the insane, chose in 1818 to document the severed heads of executed prisoners.  Once guillotined, the heads were unceremoniously piled together waiting to be collected and discarded.  Gericault captures the clean incision left by the rapidly descending blade, the gray-green pallor of each face, the final expression frozen on the features of these individuals at the moment of death.  Gericault offers his viewers a detached glimpse at the moment of death, the split second when the thread of life is severed.

Theodore Gericault - Heads of the Executed - 1818

 Gericault himself was to die in 1824, just a few years after painting Heads of the Executed.  He was only 32 years old and endured a long and painful death after suffering injuries from a riding accident further complicated from the effects of untreated tuberculosis.  Ironically enough, his death was memorialized by his friend and fellow artist, Ary Scheffer (1795-1858), who portrayed the event with unreserved Romantic excess.

Ary Scheffer - The Death of Gericault - 1824

The Impressionists applied scientific principles concerning color theory and optics within their work.  In many ways, they chose to observe their subjects dispassionately, making their works studies in light and atmosphere.  Among the Impressionists, Claude Monet (1840-1926) is certainly the artist who maintained most consistently throughout his career the tenets of the movement, striving diligently to record nature as it truly is perceived rather than intellectually or technically conceived.  When his wife lay dying in 1879, Monet naturally determined to record her image on her deathbed.  The resulting painting does not painstakingly record the symptoms of wasting and deterioration in his wife; instead, his interest is drawn to the play of light on her body, the obfuscation effected by the lace veil draped over her form and how the mass of flowers laid upon her chest becomes visually enmeshed with the lace of her gown and veil.  If the painting’s title didn’t inform us otherwise, Madame Monet could easily be taking an afternoon nap under mosquito netting.  This painting reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of the Impressionist approach: the interest in light, broken brushwork, color and atmosphere is applied regardless of subject matter, but there follows an inevitable loss of context and a prettiness inappropriate to the gravitas of the situation.

Claude Monet - Camille Monet on her Deathbed - 1879

In a particularly moving photograph, Sally Mann (b1951) records an image of her father being treated for brain cancer in a hospital bed, her two children perched on the edge of the bed staring sullenly into the camera.  While the children are in focus and properly lit, her father is bathed in harsh light, his hand grasping the bedrail, his face turned to the viewer.  His features are distorted and eradicated in the strong light, suggesting that he is already slipping into another dimension, his hand on the rail a last desperate hold on life.  The impossibility of finding an exposure that will permit the camera to accurately record both the children and her father declares that the void between the living and the dying is too wide to breach, that all the empathy and concern that survivors can muster will never allow them to comprehend the awful moment when consciousness ebbs from another being.

Sally Mann - He is very sick - 1986

Perhaps some of the most poignant works on the theme of death that I know of are the series of studies executed by Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) of his mistress, Valentine Godé-Darel, as she lay dying of cancer.  Hodler produced over 70 sketches, gouaches and oil paintings documenting Godé-Darel’s decline between February 1914 and January 1915.  It’s impossible to know exactly what Hodler’s motives were in recording these intimate moments.  Hodler, who in his later years primarily painted landscape on location, must have made the decision to spend as much time as possible in the sickroom tending to the needs of his companion and found the need to keep busy during the tedium of his vigil.  But surely a pact had to be made between the living and the dying permitting this intrusion, this unique dissection of the process of dying.  Early on, communication is still possible with Godé-Darel eyeing the artist imploringly from her bed.  Eventually, her wasted form no longer shares the same dimension as the artist; her eyes no longer take in her surroundings, her lips no longer speak but fall agape drawing in laboriously another breath.  But even as the artist documents Godé-Darel’s decline with almost scientific detachment, somehow Hodler’s commitment to this woman and his terrible grief at losing her predominate these images.

Ferdinand Hodler - Madame Valentine Gode-Darel Ill - 1914

Ferdinand Hodler - Portrait of Valentine Gode-Darel Sick - 1914

Ferdinand Hodler - Valentine Gode-Darel in Hospital Bed - 1914

Ferdinand Hodler - Portrait of Valentine Gode-Darel - 1915

Ferdinand Hodler - Portrait of Valentine Gode-Darel Dying - 1915

Ferdinand Hodler - Die Tote Valentine Gode-Darel am 26 Januar 1915 - 1915

It is only to be expected that artists present varying perspectives on death.  After all, it’s really all speculation.  I mean if one is making artwork about death, then it goes without saying that one has yet to experience it.  For many of the artists surveyed here, the theme of death is used as a tool to propound a sense of morality and civic duty, to proselytize a faith, to further a political agenda or instill nationalism in their audience.  Conversely, other artists have asked us to consider objectively the price to be paid for unrestrainedly embracing the rhetoric of political extremism and militarism.  My favorite works out of this selection are those that document the experience of death on a personal level, that permit a discomfiting glimpse into the intimate and disagreeable realities of dying, that allow us to witness through the eyes of the mourner the aftermath of loss.

Dover Stone Church

A week ago my youngest son and I went hiking at the Dover Stone Church, the site not of a church at all but a cave formed during the glacial retreat at the end of the ice age.  The cave, though shallow in depth, is lofty in height and is graced with a waterfall whose pattering notes fill its dark interior.  Maybe it was because this is the spot where the Pequot grand sachem, Sassacus, fled to after his defeat by the British, only to be executed by the Mohawks.  Maybe it was because my lower back was killing me that morning, making every step a penance and reminding me that the passing years were taking their toll on me. Or maybe it was just the autumn season when minds naturally turn to endings.  Whatever the reason, we fell into a discussion about death.  We both agreed that death is simply the end of consciousness and, as such, offers an end to pain, suffering, desire, responsibility, regret, boredom, shame… honestly, I could go on forever.  We also agreed that death should not be feared at all, a concept easier to embrace at the age of 15 than 57.  As we hiked, we came across a sign warning of the presence of bears and timber rattlesnakes in the park, and my son became a little anxious, seeing a bear behind every tree and checking out the dark crevices between rocks along the way for snakes.  He practically jumped out of his socks when he nearly trod upon a slithering garter snake sunning himself on a rock in our path.  Apparently, he wasn’t ready to move on to the sweet hereafter just yet.  And there lies the perplexing contradiction inherent in most people’s attitude concerning death: intellectually, we can abide with death while, emotionally, we cling tenaciously to life.

As always, I encourage all to comment here, but if you prefer to do so privately, you can write to me at: gerardwickham@gmail.com.

    

Entry - 8.2.14

A number of years ago, I brought an artist friend who was visiting the USA up to my studio to view my recent work, and he looked a long while at the oil painting set upon my easel, his brow knotted in dissatisfaction, and said, “Gerry, your work is too subtle.  If you want people to notice it, you’ve got to make it more extreme, more sensational… more controversial.”  The work he was viewing was An Exclusive Repast, a painting that I had been working on for months and was finally nearing completion.

Gerard Wickham - An Exclusive Repast - 1996

I could read my friend’s mind.  With all of today’s technological advances, it is incredibly easy to reproduce and disseminate imagery.  We are simply bombarded with spontaneous digital snapshots, advertising, political imagery, news photos and reproductions of artwork.  When looking at artwork on the internet, I cover so much material so rapidly, scrolling through pages of thumbnails in just a few moments, only stopping to open up an image if it grabs my attention.  My friend, who enjoys a successful career in the arts, recognized that I needed a “hook” that would make people stop and examine my work, that could possibly get a gallery director interested in representing me, that could even get some media coverage, good or bad.  Having been peripherally involved in the “art world” for many years, I certainly didn’t have to be told this.  In fact, I had already formed in my mind an informal list of the most effective ways to draw attention to one’s artwork which I will share below.

Avant-garde – Anyone who was conscious in the twentieth century is familiar with the term avant-garde.  It comes from the French meaning advance guard, the body of the army that leads the way into hostile territory to make discoveries, to determine the lay of the land and to make contact with the enemy – often suffering heavy losses in doing so.  When applied to the art world, the term refers to those artists who reject the established modes of visual representation and adopt a language more applicable to the era in which they live.  In doing so, they would usually experience years of dismal sales, public derision and poverty.  I think that the term “Avant-garde” was first applied to the impressionists, but the concept is not new and could refer to a multitude of movements that arose since the renaissance.  For instance, the mannerists, in opposition to the ideals established during the renaissance, painted flesh in garish, unnatural colors, distorted the proportions of their figures and preferred unbalanced and dynamic compositions, often adopting an unusual vantage point to further energize their imagery, all innovations which violated renaissance ideals.  I am sure that the public was initially dissatisfied with the changes which the mannerists initiated, but, with time, got used to the new approach to imagery, the mannerist mode becoming what one expected from “good art”.

The process of “revitalizing” imagery is actually a very natural one and had occurred for centuries in a totally organic fashion.  After extended exposure to visual norms, the brain becomes calloused and gravitates to something different.  (I’ve been commuting by train along the very scenic Hudson River for so many years now that I have to remind myself, now and then, to look out the window to take in the view.)  As natural as the process of revitalizing imagery had been, a change occurred in the mid-nineteenth century which made the evolution of stylistic modes a little more violent.  Starting with the impressionists, the initiation of a new stylistic mode became a traumatic, sensational, revolutionary donnybrook, and, since the age of the impressionists, it has become increasingly critical to offend ordinary tastes in order to get attention and to establish oneself as an “authentic” and “credible” artist.  Eventually the pattern became almost predictably banal.  A renegade artist would burst onto the scene with work that was so audacious, so outrageous, so unmarketable, so beyond the scope of what one previously considered “art” that the public would gasp in collective horror, the press would lambast the poor soul and gallery directors and museum curators would bar the doors of their honored institutions to his work.  But, contemporaneously, a growing number of supporters would form: an art-wise elite enlightened in the latest modes of representation, a handful of progressive critics and a few gallery owners willing to gamble on the work of a maverick newcomer.  Within a decade, our renegade artist would be showing in the most exclusive galleries, would be represented in the collections of most major museums, would enjoy unanimous critical support, would be teaching at one of our esteemed institutions of learning, would be fetching astronomical prices for his work and would consequently sport a huge target on his back for the next generation of renegade artists to take a shot at.

The trick was to make a splash, and the bigger the splash, the better.

Henri Matisse - Blue Nude - 1907

Marcel Duchamp - Fountain - 1917

Carl Andre - Equivalent VIII - 1966

Richard Serra - Tilted Arc - 1981

Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - 1991

Nudity/Sexuality – During my 6+ years of study, I usually worked a couple of days each week from a nude model.  At first doing so seemed a strange and titillating experience, but, over time, it became quite natural – at times, fatiguingly mundane.  Quickly, I became aware that painting or drawing the nude figure was exceedingly challenging.  Besides addressing proportion and anatomy, the artist must be aware of subtle tonal variations in the appearance of flesh resulting from sun exposure, abrasions and frictions and the flow of blood beneath the skin’s surface.  I eventually came to think of the nude as a landscape of rounded mounds, shaded valleys, stretches of ridges and dark crevices all bathed in a golden light.  After years of fairly rigorous study, I had made some progress in tackling this demanding subject matter, but, once out of grad school, it became nearly impossible to find accommodating volunteers to pose and my budget wouldn’t permit me to hire professionals.  So, even though I was interested in continuing with figure study, the nude virtually dropped out of my oeuvre.  I state this here so that it will be clear that I more than understand the appeal of the nude as an artistic subject matter.

America is very conflicted about sexuality.  I think it’s essential that we keep in mind that many of the Europeans who initially settled this country came here because their religious beliefs were too extreme to be tolerated in their home countries.  Among the Puritans, for example, offenses punishable by death included the worship of any non-Christian god, blasphemy, witchcraft, bestiality, homosexuality and adultery.  And there was a wide array of punishments and tortures to be carried out in cases of less serious crimes.  The Puritans were so zealous that they couldn’t tolerate the Quakers, often branding them on the forehead and forcing them into exile for propounding their beliefs.  It wouldn’t be too great a stretch to find many significant similarities between the practices of the historic Puritans with those of today’s Taliban.

I guess the rule of thumb during America’s early colonial period was: if it’s pleasurable, then the devil must be in it.  Attitudes towards sex and sexuality were naturally impacted.  Dress was plain, monochrome (black being the preferred color) and above all chaste.  Sex was restricted to intercourse within marriage.  All non-marital and non-reproductive sexual activity was forbidden, including pre- and extra-marital sex, homosexual sex, masturbation, and oral or anal sex.  Violators of these restrictions received any number of punishments, even, in some cases, the death penalty.  These uncompromising beliefs about chastity and sexuality didn’t just evaporate during the centuries following the American Revolution; they are still deeply engrained in the American consciousness and affect our decision making, often steering public debate on significant issues, even today.  For instance, prostitution is illegal in all but one of the 50 states.  The Supreme Court recently determined in support of religious groups that Obamacare cannot mandate that insurance policies must cover contraception.  Bill Clinton was politically neutralized during his presidency not as a result of his performance or policies but because of his extra-marital activities.  The Puritan ethic is alive and well in America.

While many of the first Europeans settlers came to America to experience religious freedom, there were many others who came to pursue entrepreneurial opportunity.  These were extremely motivated individuals willing to leave home and family to risk death (in the trans-Atlantic crossing, at the hands of native Americans, from disease, exposure and starvation) all in hopes that an unexplored continent of limitless land and unexploited resources would offer the newcomer inconceivable financial rewards.  This entrepreneurial hunger accelerated the expansion of the colonies, fueled the American Revolution, made the scourges of slavery and indentured servitude irresistible to our forefathers, encouraged innovation, invention and initiative throughout our history and led to the blind pursuit of Manifest Destiny untempered  by consideration of the rights of native Americans or potential environmental consequences.

Our entrepreneurial spirit also ensured that sex, the greatest sales hook of all time, would become ubiquitous in our society.  Today sex sells software, cars, laundry soap, soft drinks, footwear and vacation packages.  Images of half-nude models adorn our bus stops, the tops of taxi cabs, pay phone kiosks, magazine covers and the display windows of stores.  Sex is infused in our movies and music, the books we read, our theater and shows, our choreography and poetry.

So, as I stated earlier, America is very conflicted about sexuality.  It seems that as a nation we’re fine with sex if it’s gratuitous, titillating and sanitized, but once it crosses a line to become something real and elemental we are appalled and disgusted.  Rolling Stone, a magazine covering the edgy world of the rock music scene, commonly sells itself by featuring on its cover celebrities in various states of undress but is very careful never to expose what Monty Python referred to as “the naughty bits”. When Amy Winehouse was coming apart at the seams shortly before her death, the magazine contained a brief article about an occasion when she was found wandering the streets outside her home, naked and dazed.  The article included a photo of her with black bars covering the appropriate zones.  I wonder how this magazine, once the touchstone of a generation of rebellious youth, would cover Woodstock today.  My suspicion is the digital censor would be working a little overtime before that edition hit the magazine racks.  When Janet Jackson flashed her breast for a millisecond during the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show, the nation erupted in a frenzy of shock and outrage.  There were even Congressional hearings to investigate the matter and determine what punishments should be meted out to the responsible parties to ensure that such an affront to public decency should never occur again.  When corrupt bankers tank our economy or a drone missile takes out a wedding convoy in Yemen or cops beat a man to death during a routine traffic stop, no one is shocked or outraged.  But a momentary glimpse of a breast…

So it’s no secret that an artist hoping to get a bored, imagery-sated public to notice his work would serve his purpose well to showcase imagery with strong sexual content, preferably featuring some full frontal nudity.

Balthus - Therese revant - 1938

Eric Fischl - Bad Boy - 1981

Lucian Freud - Naked Man with Rat - 1977/78

Robert Mapplethorpe - Thomas - 1986

Jenny Saville - Plan - 1993

John Currin - Nice 'N Easy - 1999

Controversy – One of the most effective ways to draw attention to one’s work is to offend the viewer by challenging his belief system, desecrating something he holds sacred or violating the currently accepted moral code of the majority

Religion, without a doubt, is an easy target.  True believers are like rabid fans at a soccer match, just waiting for that bad call or blatant foul to clear the stands, rip out the goals and pounce on a few of the opposition’s players.  I’m often mystified that in a nation that takes such pride in its tolerance of all belief systems we feel it acceptable to go absolutely bonkers when an artwork provides evidence that the artist doesn’t share our beliefs, doesn’t hold sacred those objects and images that we revere, doesn’t follow the same taboos that steer the course of our lives.  If we truly believe in our faiths, can’t we, upon observing the shenanigans of the infidel, sit back smugly and tell ourselves that eternal damnation awaits those who violate our covenants.  Most religions set rules and penalties for violating them, abstract or otherwise, applicable to their followers, but the followers independently deputize themselves to police the entire community, root out violators of the faith and inflict punishment on them.  Hell, it’s a lot more fun to incite the faithful into action, print up some placards and hit the streets, make a few irate phonecalls to local politicians and ultimately shut down an art show than to wait quietly for the hand of god to exact justice.  Conversely, while the artist is expressing surprise that his innocuous work elicited such a heated response and holds firm against this contemptible call for censorship, he is also basking in the media attention that the controversy has garnered.

Andres Serrano - Piss Christ - 1987

Chris Ofili - Elephant Dung Madonna - 1996

Another way to draw a strong response from the public is to offend its sense of patriotism.  People tend to compartmentalize their concept of “homeland” separate from the abuses and shortcomings inherent in their national history and the inanity and corruption that pollutes contemporary politics, leaving them free to wax sentimental, chests aswell and hearts palpitating wildly, whenever a band strikes up the national anthem or the flag ascends a flagpole.  When an artwork threatens to violate the sanctity of our concept of “homeland” and infect it with facets of reality, we respond angrily, demanding that the artwork be withdrawn and the artist be punished.  In particular, desecration of the flag seems to incite a violent response from patriots.  During times of war, the public is especially sensitive to work that depicts servicemen in other than a positive light.  Again, the public outcry, a “spontaneous” demonstration, media coverage and finally governmental intervention and censorship can establish an artist’s reputation and initiate a brilliant career.

Paul Cadmus - The Fleet's In! - 1934

And don’t for a minute conclude that censorship is solely the expedient of conservatives; liberals are just as ready to disregard the Constitution’s First Amendment when they feel that an individual has violated the murky and unforgiving code of Political Correctness.  In our crusade to establish the perfect citizen within our society, we cannot tolerate works of art, statements or even flip comments that express opinions that contradict the strict yet quite mutable code of moral acceptability.  But while violating the strictures of Political Correctness will gain an artist attention within the media and community, there is a danger inherent in doing so.  Since the overwhelming bent of the artistic community is liberal, establishing a name for oneself by blaspheming against the commandments of that community may lead to condemnation by those with power and influence within that community and banishment from the network of outlets available to promote one’s work.

David Nelson - Mirth and Girth (Portrait of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington) - 1988

Silly Art – Of late, I’ve been noticing a proliferation of what I would call “Silly Art”, work that is just plain ridiculous because of its theme, its size or the medium in which it is executed.  Often the subject matter is cute, borrowed from the cornucopia of cartoon and commercial imagery available in comic books, television shows and merchandizing targeted for children.  The intent, as far as I can tell, is usually to be humorous.  Because these works tend to be large and situated in public areas, I commonly come across new woks while wandering the streets of NYC and have witnessed firsthand how they excite interest and draw crowds of passing pedestrians.

Permit me to characterize a common reaction here.  Along a public street walks a couple, attending to their regular business and having no interest in seeing any art.  They glance into a nearby courtyard or square to observe some garish, oversized replica of a beloved cartoon character, and they stop in their tracks, broad grins stretched across their faces.  Nearly mesmerized, they forget their prior obligations and, like automatons, approach the work, eyes locked on it and smiles permanently etched on their faces.  They stare for a while, take a stroll around the circumference of the work and finally they grant the ultimate endorsement that any artist can hope for – they pull out a cellphone and take a selfie in front of the work.  This accomplished, they are quickly on their way once more.

This variety of work definitely pleases the public and is guaranteed to attract lots of media attention.  It functions similarly to a Disneyworld attraction or a wacky mascot at a sports event.  We can’t help but become interested and are momentarily awed or amused but also can’t help but question whether there is much substance inherent in most of this work.

Tom Sachs - Hello Kitty - 2008

Jeff Koons - Balloon Dog - 1994/2000

Wow! That balloon dog is actually made of stainless steel.

Takashi Murakami - Miss ko2 - 1997

Florentijn Hofman - Rubber Duck - 2007

In closing, I want to make it clear that I am not implying that the artists featured in this entry are less than committed to their subject matter and have resorted to presenting a specific variety of imagery solely for commercial or narcissistic motives (though there are probably a number of exceptions).  I greatly admire many of the artists included in this piece, their work having had a profound influence on my own development.  Art asserts its own rules and logic regardless of the expectations of the public or the prevalent moral codes in place at the time.  I once found myself pursuing a form of imagery that could have been construed as sensationalist.  While I was in grad school, I had a kind of creative crisis which led me to question my approach to imagery.  I felt my work had become too didactic, judgmental and critical and no longer reflected my own personality and outlook.  I tend to see phenomena as multifaceted and embodying within themselves contradictions that preclude any full understanding of them, but somehow my stance in relation to my work had evolved into the perspective of an infallible and omniscient authority.  For nearly a year, I went through a period of experimentation, both technically and philosophically, and floundered quite a bit before arriving at an approach that made more sense for me.  My new work suggested recognizable imagery but was so “abstracted” that the viewer would be hard-pressed to determine precisely what the imagery represented.  I became interested in imagery that expressed a duality, a self-nullifying contradiction, and chose to explore this theme primarily through pictorial representation of the creation/destruction paradigm.  This all sounds very heavy (and believe me I could go on about my thinking ad nauseam), but the resulting imagery was actually playful and intuitive.  Most commonly I would opt to present an image that suggested both sexual activity and, simultaneously, an act of violence.  My figures, repeatedly edited, distorted and expanded, were painted in lurid, peachy hues, inundating the picture plane with activity.  The paint handling was vigorous and intuitive, varying from thin washes to thick impasto, splatters and drips commonly charging the canvas surface.  Though through concealment and camouflage I deliberately withheld from the viewer any precise reading of the imagery, there existed within the work a potent nuance of the erotic.  I arrived at this approach organically and intellectually with no commercial motives, but I must also confess that it was gratifying to discover that, whenever my work was displayed, it excited attention and prompted discussion.  This felt pretty good and certainly provided an incentive to explore these themes and techniques until the proverbial well went dry.  (Which it did a few years later, but that’s another whole story altogether.)

Gerard Wickham - Yin and Yang - 1984

Gerard Wickham - The Letting No. 2 - 1984

The point is I once produced the kind of work that my friend was advising me to embrace.  As my painting slowly evolved, eventually becoming representational, I even sought to retain, thematically at least, the mood of lurid suggestiveness that my earlier work embodied.  And, gradually, as the years passed, my interest in shocking or captivating my audience waned.  Perhaps this was just part of the aging process or perhaps it came about from having young children running about the house.  My best guess is that this change in approach resulted from my not having an audience at all to consider.  Painting, for me, had become a dialogue with myself.

Shortly before my friend’s visit to America, I consciously recognized the transformation that I had unconsciously undergone.  I understood that I wanted my work to be more subtle, less confrontational… ultimately deceptively benign.  My desire was that one could live satisfactorily in the presence of one of my paintings for years, experiencing repeated episodes of contemplative consideration, never quite reaching a decisive conclusion about the work, yet sparked through the exploration of it into engaging in a fruitful, internal discourse.  Having given this topic of viewer engagement much thought, I had to smile inwardly when my friend offered me his manifestly practical advice.  I was heading in the absolutely wrong direction, one that I follow even more rigorously today than I did at that time.

Gerard Wickham - Three Tangerines - 2010

One Final Note: Since the topic of censorship has been addressed in some depth in this entry, I think it appropriate to make mention of the fact that my last entry on Liu Xiaodong, a posting that, I believe, was balanced, fairly positive and would not be construed as critical of China, appears to have gotten my blog blocked in China.  Previously, my blog had a small but consistent audience in China, but, since my June posting, I have not received a single hit there.  My guess is that simply including Liu’s name in my blog, regardless of content, was sufficient to get it quarantined.  I think it is really regrettable that the government cannot tolerate Liu’s message; his work reflects a consciousness of the environmental and social impact of rapid development on a population, an empathy for the suffering of his fellow citizens and a concern for his nation’s future.

As always, I encourage readers to comment here, but, for those who would prefer to comment privately, I can be emailed at: gerardwickham@gmail.com.