Impossible Dreams

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni (1475-1564) - Moses (detail), 1515



'I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.'

Michelangelo

Somewhere Between Certainty And Oblivion

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)


'The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: the Photograph's essence is to ratify what it presents. One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself [not the one shown above, by the way] which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstances I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distinction between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a detective "anguish" (the theme of Blow-Up was not far off); I went on to the photographer's show as to a police investigation, to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself.'

From Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Silently Stealing The World

Robert Capa, born Endre Ernö Friedmann (1913-1954) - Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936


'To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handsome visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality . . . '

From On Photography by Susan Sontag

Six Objects in Search Of An Exhibition II

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972): Thinking Inside The Box

Untitled (Soap Bubble Set), 1936

Untitled (Paul and Virginia), c. 1946-48

L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode, cours élémentaire d'histoire naturelle, 1940

Untitled (Solar Set), c. 1956-58

Untitled (Medici Boy), 1942-52

Setting for a Fairytale, 1942

The Week in Review

Films:

A Hard Day's Night, 1964 - d. Richard Lester
Help!, 1965 - d. Richard Lester
Magical Mystery Tour, 1967 - d. Bernard Knowles
Yellow Submarine, 1968 - d. George Dunning
Let it Be, 1970 - d. Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Rebel Without a Cause, 1955 - d. Nicholas Ray
Bitter Victory, 1957 - d. Nicholas Ray

Television:

Smallville: Season Five

Books:

Joseph Cornell - ed. Kynaston McShine
Joseph Cornell: Art and Metaphysics - Sandra Leonard Starr
Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams - Diane Waldman
Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay, Eterniday - Lynda Roscoe Hartigan et. al.
Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order - Lindsay Blair
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell - Deborah Solomon

Exhibitions:

Heroes and Villains: Australian Comics and their Creators - State Library of Victoria

Music:

Medulla, 2004 - Björk
Vespertine, 2001 - Björk
Homogenic, 1997 - Björk
Post, 1995 - Björk
Debut, 1993 - Björk

Bonus Quote

Magicians Of The Mundane

Joseph Cornell



'Every serious work of art contains two different lonelinesses. The first might be called "plastic loneliness", that is the beatitude of contemplation produced by the ingenious construction and combination of forms, whether they be still lifes come alive or figures become still - the double life of a still life, not as a pictorial subject but in its supersensory aspect, so that even a supposedly living figure might be included. The second loneliness is that of lines and signals; it is a metaphysical loneliness for which no logical training exists, visually or psychically.'

Giorgio de Chirico

Rotten Johnny

A Hard Day's Night - d. Richard Lester, 1964


'You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.'

John Lennon

Live To Be Old, But Die Young

James Dean - Rebel Without a Cause, 1955 (d. Nicholas Ray)


'Dream as if you'll live forever; live as if you'll die tomorrow.'

James Dean

Supremely Simple

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) - Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918




Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) - White Album cover, 1968


'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'

Leonardo da Vinci

Phyllosophy

Aristotle Ridden by Phyllis (Aquamanile), late 14th Century


'That women are thought to hold power over men . . . and that it is sexual power, is made explicit in [artworks] depicting the "Power of Woman" topos. In Phyllis Riding Aristotle, a key representation, the august and wise philosopher is shown down on all fours, like a beast, a situation to which he has been brought by having lusted after Phyllis. It was men, during the Renaissance and baroque periods, who were considered to have the capacity for the highest forms of reason. The humiliation of Aristotle, paradigmatic man of reason, clearly conveys the dangers of women.'

H. Diane Russell

Down At The End Of Lonely Street

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) - Evening on Karl Johan, 1892

Ghosts

Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.

Not all ghosts are women,
I have seen others;
fat, white-bellied men,
wearing their genitals like old rags.
Not devils, but ghosts.
This one thumps barefoot, lurching
above my bed.

But that isn't all.
Some ghosts are children.
Not angels, but ghosts;
curling like pink tea cups
on any pillow, or kicking,
showing their innocent bottoms, wailing
for Lucifer.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Best We Regret

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) - Head of Christ, 1918

Anthem For Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Six Objects In Search Of An Exhibition I

Eva Hesse (1936-1970): Sister From Another Planet

Accession II, 1967




Magnet Boards, 1967




Sans II, 1968




Repetition Nineteen III, 1968




Expanded Expansion, 1969




Contingent, 1969

The Week In Review


Films:

Eyes Without a Face, 1960 - d. Georges Franju
The Innocents, 1961 - d. Jack Clayton


Television:

Smallville: Season Four


Books:

Concerning the Spiritual in Art - Wassily Kandinsky


Exhibitions:

Mike Nelson: Lonely Planet - ACCA

Populous: Of a Body of People - The Ian Potter Museum Of Art
Attention Please! Posters from the Gerard Herbst Collection - The Ian Potter Museum Of Art
A Spoonful Weighs a Ton - The Ian Potter Museum Of Art
Illuminations: Middle Eastern Manuscripts - The Ian Potter Museum Of Art

After Image: Social Documentary Photography in the 20th Century - NGV International
Proof: Contemporary Australian Printmaking - NGV International
Sneakers: Classics to Customs - NGV International


Music:

The Rite of Spring, 1913 - Igor Stravinsky
The Soldier's Tale, 1918 - Igor Stravinsky
The Firebird, 1919 (rev.) - Igor Stravinsky
Pulcinella, 1920 - Igor Stravinsky
Oedipus Rex, 1927 - Igor Stravinsky
Petrushka, 1947 (rev.) - Igor Stravinsky
Apollo, 1947 - Igor Stravinsky
The Rake's Progress, 1951 - Igor Stravinsky

Is This It, 2001 - The Strokes
Room On Fire, 2003 - The Strokes
Maximum Strokes, 2004 - The Strokes
First Impressions Of Earth, 2006 - The Strokes

Bonus Tracks

This Ernie's No Muppet

Ernie Cline - Spoken Word

The Simian Soliloquy (Dance Monkeys Dance) "bastardised" by Paulo Ang

Lurid London

André Derain (1880-1954) - The Pool of London, 1906

"Art must not be intelligent; art is a jouissance, an enjoyment."

"The substance of painting is light."

"We were always intoxicated with colour, with words that speak of colour, and with the sun that makes colours live."

"I do not innovate. I transmit."

"Everything comes from nature and everything returns there."

André Derain

Twentieth Century Pagan

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) - Eye-Balloon, 1876


'I never have experienced intellectual pleasure except on the analogical plane. For me the only evidence in the world is commanded by the spontaneous, extralucid, insolent rapport which establishes itself, under certain conditions, between one thing and another, and which common sense hesitates to confront. True as it is that the most execrable word I know is the word therefore, with all it bears in terms of vanity and morose delectation, I madly love everything that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought and suddenly ignites a flare illuminating a life of relations fecund in another way. Everything indicates that men of an earlier time possessed the secret of these relations. And the flare, though it quickly dies, hardly needs to be measured on the dismal scale of exchange values prevailing today. No answers except to immediate utilitarian questions. Indifferent to anything that does not approach from very near, more and more insensible to anything that can deliver him (provided he has some amplitude) an interrogation of nature, the man we shun gives himself hardly any other task than to float. The millenarian conviction which maintains that nothing exists gratuitously and that, on the contrary, there can be neither beings nor natural phenomena deprived of a ciphered communication with us - the conviction animating the majority of cosmogonies - has lost its position to the most obtuse of detachments; we have thrown away the axehead with its handle. We stop and ask ourselves: 'Where do we come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?' But is it not an aberration, and impudent, to wish to transform a world which one no longer cares to interpret in any permanent sense? Primordial links are broken. I say only analogical tools reach fleetingly towards their re-establishment. Whence the importance assumed, at long intervals, by these brief flashes from a mirror.

On the bed of the whites of the eyes, the
iris is the base for the mattress of the
pupil, where a phantom of ourselves lies
down in a dream.

Malcolm de Chazal

Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori any bridge which might be thrown. Poetic analogy differs profoundly from mystical analogy in that it never presupposes, beyond the bounds of the visible world, an invisible universe tending to make itself manifest. It is entirely empirical in its movement forward, except that the empiricism assures it the total liberty of motion necessary for the leap it must provide. Considered in its effects, it is true that poetic analogy seems, like mystical analogy, to militate in favour of the conception of the world ramified as far as the eye can see and entirely filled with the same sap, but it maintains itself without any constraints in the sensible or even the sensual structure and without displaying any propensity to orient itself towards the supernatural. It tends to hint at and bring to account truly 'absent' life. And, just as it cannot lose its substance in metaphysical reverie, so it cannot for an instant dream of turning its conquests to the greater glory of some 'beyond'.

The dream is a heavy
Ham
Which hangs from the ceiling

Pierre Reverdy

I arrive a sparrow hawk and depart a phoenix.

Voice of the Third Soul, Egypt

Given the present state of poetic research, little should be made of the purely formal distinction which might be established between metaphor and comparison. It suffices that both constitute interchangeable vehicles of analogical thought and that if the first offers flashing resources, the second, which one must judge by Lautréamont's 'beautiful as', presents considerable advantages of suspension. It is understood that beside these the other 'figures' which rhetoric persists in enumerating are absolutely devoid of interest. Only the analogical switch arouses our passion; only by it can we start the world's motor. The word like is the most exalting at our command when it is pronounced familiarly. Through it human imagination fulfils itself and the highest destiny of the mind comes into play. Likewise, we reject disdainfully the grievously ignorant abuses of the image in today's poetry and we appeal to it, in this regard, for an always-great luxuriance.

Your throat which advances and which pushes the silk
Your triumphant throat is a beautiful armoire.

Charles Baudelaire

The analogical method, though held in honour in antiquity and the Middle Ages, was thereafter grossly supplanted by the 'logical' method which has led us to our well-known impasse.The first duty of poets and artists is to re-establish analogy in all its prerogatives, taking care to uproot all the rear-guard spiritualist thought, always carried along parasitically, which vitiates or paralyses its functioning.

Your teeth are like a flock of sheep leaving the washpen.

Song of Songs

It should be remembered that thirty years ago Pierre Reverdy, first approaching the source of the image, was led to formulate the capital law: 'The greater and truer the distance between two juxtaposed realities, the stronger will be the image and the greater its emotive power and poetic reality.' This absolutely necessary condition can never be taken as sufficient. Another exigency which, in the final analysis, could well be of an ethical order, takes place beside it. Let notice be taken: The analogical image, to the degree that it illuminates in the brightest way partial similarities, will not be traduced in terms of equation. It moves between the two realities present in a determined way which is never reversible. From the first of these realities to the second, it marks a vital tension turned possibly towards health, pleasure, quietude, given thanks, consented usages. It has as its mortal enemies the deprecative and the depressing. If noble words no longer exist, false poets cannot avoid identifying themselves by ignoble rapprochements. The classic example is the 'Guitar - a bidet that sings', by an author [Cocteau] who abounds in such 'discoveries'.

I see the spirits assembled; they have their hats on.

Swedenborg

Your tongue
The red fish in the aquarium
Of your mouth

Apollonaire

We passed along an avenue planted with blue breasts where day no longer differentiated itself from night except by a comma, and the sardine from the grasshopper by a scratching hair.

Benjamin Peret

The best light on the general, obligatory sense that the image worthy of the name must have is furnished by a Zen writer: 'Out of Buddhist kindness, Basho one day ingeniously changed a cruel haiku composed by his humorous disciple, Kikaku. The latter having written, "A red dragonfly - tear off its wings - a pimento", Basho substituted "A pimento - add wings - a red dragonfly".'

From Rising Sun by André Breton

The Virtues of Vicissitude

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) - Prometheus Bound, 1611-12


'Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudemonism - all of these ideas that measure the value of things according to pleasure or suffering, that is to say, according to secondary states and side-effects, are foreground ideas, and naive. Anyone conscious of having creative energies and an artist's conscience will look down on them not without mockery, but also not without pity. Pity for all of you! Although it is not pity in your sense, to be sure. It is not pity for social 'misery', for 'society' and its sick and injured, for the perennially depraved and downtrodden who lie around us everywhere; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious ranks of slaves who are looking to be masters (which they call 'being free'). Our pity is a more elevated, more far-sighted pity - we see how human beings are being reduced, how all of you are reducing them! And there are moments when we look at your pity especially with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity - when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. If possible (and no 'if possible' can be more crazy) you want to abolish suffering! And we? - it seems that we want it to be, if anything, worse and greater than before! Well-being in your sense of the word - that certainly is no goal, it seems to us to be an end! A condition that would immediately make people ludicrous and contemptible - make us wish their downfall! The discipline of suffering, great suffering - don't you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted - has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In the human being, creature and creator are united: the human being is matter, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense, chaos; but the human being is also creator, sculptor, hammer-hardness, observer-divinity, and the Seventh Day - do you not understand this opposition? Do you understand that you pity is for the 'creature in the human being', that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, purified - that which necessarily has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity - do you not understand whom our reversed pity is intended for, when it resists your pity as the worst of all possible self-indulgences and weaknesses?

Pity versus pity, then!'

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Sonorous Image

Bill Henson (b. 1955) - Untitled (from the Paris Opera Project) 1990-91


1. 'The work might begin with a fleeting impression from first-hand experience or a piece of music I am always drawn back to, or perhaps in a paragraph of writing I cannot forget - and then it takes its own course. I become like a participant in some larger process I happen to be fascinated by.'

2. 'In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you're looking at a painting, or a photograph.'

3. 'I'm interested in that tender proximity, that ineffable, fragile, breathing closeness or presence which photography can animate while, at the same time, allowing no possibility for any familiar connection with the individuals in the picture.'

Bill Henson

The Possible And The Real

Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) - Old Horizon, 1928


'I believe in the end we shall consider it evident that the artist in executing his work is creating the possible as well as the real. Whence comes it then that one might hesitate to say the same thing for nature? Is not the world a work of art incomparably richer than that of the greatest artist? And is there not as much absurdity, if not more, in supposing, in the work of nature, that the future is outlined in advance, that possibility existed before reality? Once more let me say I am perfectly willing to admit that the future states of a closed system of material points are calculable and hence visible in its present state. But, I repeat, this system is extracted, or abstracted, from a whole which, in addition to inert and unorganised matter, comprises organisation. Take the concrete and complete world, with the life and consciousness it encloses; consider nature in its entirety, nature the generator of new species as novel and original in form as the design of any artist; in these species concentrate upon individuals, plants or animals, each of which has its own character - I was going to say its personality (for one blade of grass does not resemble another any more that a Raphael resembles a Rembrandt); lift your attention above and beyond individual man to societies which disclose actions and situations comparable to those of any drama: how can one still speak of possibles which would precede their own realisation? How can we fail to see that the event can always be explained afterwards by an arbitrary choice of antecedent events, a completely different event could have been equally well explained in the same circumstances by another choice of antecedents - nay, by the same antecedents otherwise cut out, otherwise distributed, otherwise perceived - in short, by our retrospective attention? Backwards over the course of time a constant remodelling of the past by the present, of the cause by the effect, is being carried out.

We do not see it, always for the same reason, always a prey to the same illusion, always because we treat as more what is the less, as the less what is the more. If we put the possible back in its proper place, evolution becomes something quite different from the realisation of a program: the gates of the future open wide; freedom is offered an unlimited field. The fault of those doctrines - rare indeed in the history of philosophy - which have succeeded in leaving room for indetermination and freedom in the world, is to have failed to see what their affirmation implied. When they spoke of indetermination, of freedom, they meant by indetermination a competition between possibles, by freedom a choice between possibles - as if possibility was not created by freedom itself! As if any other hypothesis, by affirming an ideal pre-existence of the possible to the real, did not reduce the new to a mere arrangement of former elements! As if it were not thus to be led sooner or later to regard that arrangement as calculable and foreseeable! By accepting the premise of the contrary theory one was letting the enemy in. We must resign ourselves to the inevitable: it is the real which makes itself possible, not the possible which becomes real.'

From The Creative Mind by Henri Bergson

The Bodies Of Christ

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1522 (above) and Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506), Cristo in scruto, c. 1480 (below)

'In 1522 (the underlying coat bears the date 1521) Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) painted a disturbing picture, the Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, which may be seen at the Basel Museum. The painting apparently made a tremendous impression on Dostoevsky. At the very outset of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin attempted to speak of it, but to no avail; only through a new polyphonic twist of the plot did he see a reproduction of it in Rogozhin's house and, "struck by a sudden thought", he exclaimed: "That picture . . . that picture! Why, some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!" A little later, Ippolit, a peripheral character who nevertheless seems, in many respects, to be the narrator's and Myshkin's double, gave a striking account of it: "The picture depicted Christ, who has just been taken from the Cross. I believe that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, whether in the Cross or taken down from the Cross, as still retaining a shade of extraordinary beauty on His face; that beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of greatest agony. In Rogozhin's picture there was no trace of beauty. It was a faithful representation of the dead body of a man who had undergone unbearable torments before Crucifixion, been wounded, tortured, beaten by the guards, beaten by the people, when He carried the Cross and fell under its weight, and, at last, had suffered the agony of Crucifixion, lasting for six hours (according to my calculation, at least). It is true, it is the face of a man who had only just been taken from the Cross - that is, still retaining a great deal of warmth and life; rigor mortis had not yet set in, so that there is still a look of suffering on the face of the dead man, as though He were still feeling it (that has been well caught by the artist); on the other hand, His face has not been spared in the least; it is nature itself, and, indeed, any man's corpse would look like that after much suffering. I know that the Christian church laid it down in the first few centuries of its existence that Christ really did suffer and that the Passion was not symbolic. His body on the Cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. But, strange to say, as one looks at the dead body of this tortured man, one cannot help asking oneself the peculiar, and interesting question: if such a corpse (and it must have been just like that) was seen by all His disciples, by His future chief apostles, by the women who followed Him and stood by the Cross, by all who believed in Him and worshipped Him, then how could they possibly believe, as they looked at the corpse, that that martyr would rise again? Here one cannot help being struck with the idea that if death is so horrible and if the laws of nature are so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who overcame nature during His lifetime and whom nature obeyed, who said Talitha cumi! and the damsel arose, who cried, Lazarus come forth! and the dead man came forth? Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable and dumb beast, or to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, some huge engine of the latest design, which has endlessly seized, cut to pieces and swallowed up - impassively and unfeelingly - a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being! The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously. The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one fell blow. They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away, within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him. And if, on the eve of the Crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the Cross, would He have mounted the Cross and died as He did? This question, too, you can't help asking yourself as you look at the picture.""

Holbein's painting represents a corpse stretched out by itself on a slab covered with a cloth that is hardly draped. Life-size, the painted corpse is seen from the side, its head slightly turned toward the viewer, the hair spread out on the sheet. The right arm is in full view, resting alongside the emaciated, tortured body, and the hand protrudes slightly from the slab. The rounded chest suggests a triangle within the very low, elongated rectangle of the recess that constitutes the painting's frame. the chest bears the bloody mark of a spear, and the hand shows the stigmata of the Crucifixion, which stiffen the outstretched middle finger. Imprints of nails mark Christ's feet. The martyr's face bears the expression of hopeless grief; the empty stare, the sharp-lined profile, the dull blue-green complexion are those of a man who is truly dead, of Christ taken by the Father ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") and without the promise of Resurrection.

The unadorned representation of human death, the well-nigh anatomical stripping of the corpse conveys to viewers an unbearable anguish before the death of God, which here is mingled with our own death because there isn't the slightest suggestion of transcendency. What is more, Hans Holbein has given up all architectural or compositional fancy. The tombstone weighs down on the upper portion of the painting, which is merely twelve inches high, and intensifies the feeling of permanent death: this corpse will never rise again. The pall itself, reduced to a minimum of folds, emphasises, through that economy of motion, the feeling of stiffness and stony cold.

The viewer's gaze penetrates this closed-in coffin from below and, following the painting from left to right, stops at the stone set against the corpse's feet, sloping at a wide angle toward the spectators.

What was the purpose of a painting with such peculiar dimensions? Does the Dead Christ belong to the altar that Holbein did for Hans Oberried in 1520-21, in which the two outside wings depicted the Passion and the centre was saved for the Nativity and the Adoration? There is nothing to support such a hypothesis, which, however, is not implausible when one takes into account a few features it shares with the outside wings of the altar that was partially destroyed during iconoclastic outbursts in Basel.

Among the various interpretations given by critics, one stands out and seems today the most plausible. The painting was done for a predella that remained independent and was to be positioned above the visitors as they filed in, from the side and the left (for instance from the church's central nave toward the souther aisle). In the Upper Rhine region, there are churches that contain funerary recesses where sculpted Christly bodies are displayed. Might Holbein's work be a painterly transposition of such recumbent statues? According to one hypothesis, this Dead Christ was the covering for a sacred tomb open only on Good Friday and closed for the rest of the year. Finally, relying on X rays of the painting, Fridtjof Zschokke has shown that the Dead Christ was initially located in a semicircular recess, like the section of a tube. That location corresponds to the date inscribed next to the right foot and the signature: H. H. DXXI. One year later, Holbein substituted the arched recess with the rectangular one and signed above the feet: MDXXII H. H.

Italian iconography embellishes, or at least ennobles, Christ's face during the Passion; but above all, it surrounds Christ with figures that are plunged not only in grief but also in the certainty of the Resurrection, as if to suggest the attitude we too should adopt when facing the Passion. Holbein, on the contrary, leaves the corpse strangely alone. It is perhaps this isolation - an act of composition - that endows the painting with its major melancholy burden, more so than its delineation or colouring. To be sure, Christ's suffering is expressed through three components inherent in line and colour: the head bent backward, the contortion of the right hand bearing the stigmata, the position of the feet - the whole being bonded by means of a dark palette of greys, greens and browns. Nevertheless, such realism, harrowing on account of its very parsimony, is emphasised to the utmost through the painting's composition and location: a body stretched out alone, situated above the viewers and separated from them.

Cut off from us by its base but without any possibility for the gaze to extend to Heaven because the ceiling in the recess comes down low, Holbein's Dead Christ is inaccessible, distant and without a beyond. It is a way of looking at mankind from afar, even in death. Just as Erasmus saw folly from a distance. It is a vision that opens out not onto glory but to endurance. Another, a new, morality resides in this painting.

Christ's dereliction is here at its worst: forsaken by the Father, He is apart from all of us. Unless Holbein, whose mind, pungent as it was, does appear to have led him across the threshold of atheism, wanted to include us personally, humans, aliens, spectators that we are, in this crucial moment of Christ's life. With no intermediary, suggestion or indoctrination, whether pictorial or theological, other than our ability to imagine death, we are led to collapse in the horror of the caesura that is death or to dream of an invisible beyond. Does Holbein forsake us, as Christ, for an instant, had imagine Himself forsaken? Or does he, on the contrary, invite us to change the Christly tomb into a living tomb, to participate in the painted death and thus and thus include it in our own life? In order to live with it and make it live, for if the living body in opposition to the rigid corpse is a dancing body, doesn't our life, through identification with death, become a "dance macabre", in keeping with Holbein's other well-known vision?

This enclosed recess, this well-isolated coffin simultaneously rejects us and invites us. Indeed, the corpse fills the entire field of the painting, without any laboured reference to the Passion. Our gaze follows the slightest physical detail: it is, as it were, nailed, crucified and riveted to the hand placed at the centre of the composition. Should we attempt to avert our gaze, it is quickly stopped, locked in on the distressed face or the feet propped against the black stone. And yet this walling-in allows for two prospects.

On the one hand, there is the insertion of the signature, MDXXII H. H., at Christ's feet. Placing the painter's name, to which was often added that of the donor, in that position was common at the time. It is nevertheless possible that in abiding by that code Holbein inserted himself into the drama of the dead body. A sign of humility: the artist throwing himself at God's feet? Or a sign of equality? The painter's name is not lower than Christ's body - they are both at the same level, jammed into the recess, united in man's death, in death as the essential sign of mankind, of which the only surviving evidence is the ephemeral creation of a picture drawn here in 1521 and 1522!

We have, on the other hand, this hair and this hand that extend beyond the base as if they might slide over toward us, as if the frame could not hold back the corpse. The frame dates precisely from the end of the sixteenth century and includes a narrow edging, bearing the inscription Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum, which encroaches on the painting. The edging, which seems nonetheless always to have been part of Holbein's painting, includes, between the words of the inscription, five angels bearing the instruments of the martyrdom: the shaft, the crown of thorns, the scourge, the flogging column, the cross. Integrated afterward in that symbolic framework, Holbein's painting recovers the evangelical meaning that it did not insistently contain in itself, and which probably legitimised it in the eyes of its purchasers.

Even if Holbein's painting had originally been conceived as a predella for an altarpiece, it remained alone; no other panel was added to it. Such isolation, as splendid as it is gloomy, avoided Christian symbolism as much as the surfeit of German Gothic style, which combined painting and sculpture but also added wings to altarpieces, aiming for syncretism and the imparting of motion to figures. In the face of that tradition, which directly preceded him, Holbein isolated, pruned, condensed and reduced.

Holbein's originality, then, lies in this vision of Christly death that is devoid of pathos and is intimate on account of its very banality. Humanisation thus reached its highest point: the point at which glory is obliterated though the image. When the dismal brushes against the nondescript, the most disturbing sign is the most ordinary one. In contrast to Gothic enthusiasm, humanism and parsimony were the inverted products of melancholia.

. . .

Finally, Mantegna's famous Cristo in scruto (c. 1480, at the Brera Museum in Milan) may be considered the precursor of the quasi-anatomical vision of the dead Christ. With the soles of the feet turned toward the viewers and the foreshortened perspective, Mantegna's corpse imposes itself with a brutality that verges on the obscene. Nevertheless, the two women who appear in the upper left hand corner of this painting introduce the grief and the compassion that Holbein puts aside precisely by banishing them from sight or else creating them with no mediator other than the invisible appeal to our all-too-human identification with the dead Son . . . And yet, always heedful of the Gothic spirit, Holbein maintains grief while humanising it, without following the Italian path of negating pain and glorifying the arrogance of the flesh or the beauty of the beyond. Holbein is in another dimension: he makes commonplace the Passion of the Crucified Christ in order to make it more accessible to us. Such a humanising gesture, which is not without a modicum of irony toward transcendence, suggests a tremendous amount of mercy with respect to our death.'

From Holbein's Dead Christ by Julia Kristeva

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition III

Splitting Hares

Broomstick Bunny, released February 25th 1956 (Warner Brothers) - d. Chuck Jones, w. Tedd Pierce, a. Richard Thompson, Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Abe Letivow, v. Mel Blanc, June Foray (uncredited), m. Milt Franlyn, p. Eddie Selzer

The Week in Review

Films:

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, 2005 - d. Lian Lunson
Perfume, 2006 - d. Tom Tykwer
Pan's Labyrinth, 2006 - d. Guillermo del Toro
A Scanner Darkly, 2006 - d. Richard Linklater
Little Miss Sunshine, 2006 - d. Johnathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Marie Antoinette, 2006 - d. Sofia Coppola

Books:

Journals of Jean Cocteau - Jean Cocteau
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey
Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal - Paul Gauguin
The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out Of The Earth - Edvard Munch
Inferno: From the Occult Diaries - August Strindberg
Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh - Vincent van Gogh

Music:

Symphonies, 1-10 - Gustav Mahler
Daphnis et Cloé - Maurice Ravel
Four Last Songs - Richard Strauss

Exhibitions:

Before the Body: Matter - Monash University Museum of Art
Sigmar Polke: Music from an Unknown Source - RMIT Gallery

Bunny Bonus

Lady Bugs






















From Hare Conditioned, 1945 - d. Chuck Jones