Art: Elaborating on history or erasing it?

This essay (longer than my usual post length) first appeared in the catalogue for the Re-Sponse “retrospective” art exhibition that recently opened at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum (NMMAM) in Port Elizabeth, as a joint project between the Art Museum and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s School of Music, Art and Design. I have decided to post it here to draw attention to the work done on the part of these two institutions for the promotion of the arts, and also to give students easier access to it. For the exhibition, the director of the school, Mary Duker, approached a number of Eastern Cape artists with the request, to create an artwork in “re-sponse” to a selection of about 60 artworks from the NMMAM’s collection — a selection that spanned a wide variety of visual art genres and styles from different historical periods. In addition, she approached several academics, including myself, with the request that they respond critically to the selection of artworks concerned. All these critical responses were printed in the catalogue, together with colour reproductions of the contemporary artists’ artistic “re-sponses”. The essay that follows was my critical “re-sponse”.

In The book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera tells the story of how the communist regime in Czechoslovakia neatly erased the images of figures deemed unsuitable for, or incompatible with, the ideals of that regime from group photographs of “important” political individuals. This is an instance of what he thematises in the book under the concept of “forgetting” — there are ways of “forgetting” the past, of “rewriting” history, with a specific political agenda in mind, of course.

Needless to say, such politically (or ideologically) motivated “forgetting”, or more accurately perhaps, “erasing” of individuals and events from a nation’s history has happened many times in the history of the world. What such instances of erasure have in common, is to create the conditions under which people would “forget” the individuals or events in question, with a view to establishing or reinforcing a set of power relations that has supplanted that of which these “erased” people or events were representative.

Arguments pro- and contra- the benefits of a policy of “erasure” of individuals and events from the historical record are likely to abound in either direction, with justifications for the choice concerned. But whatever the arguments for either supporting the need to erase (and forget) or opposing such erasure of images may be, it cannot be denied that erasure and forgetting impoverishes history, and paves the way for a possible repetition of whatever the erased images — or, for that matter, destroyed or censored writings — represent(ed). This also applies to art.

Images are different from writings in an important respect, which bears on what is lost when images are “erased”, destroyed, censored or banned from a society with a view to promote their being forgotten. (I do not here want to focus on the important question of pornographic images; suffice it to say that, in my judgement, they should not be subject to censorship without further ado, but should be dealt with via the education of the public regarding the nature and implications of pornography. At any rate, this question merits exclusive attention.) While it is true that both images and written language comprise complexes of signification that are subject to interpretation according to the laws of semiotics — broadly, decoding or interpreting signifiers and their signifieds along the two axes of the paradigmatic (what is similar or different) and the syntagmatic (what succeeds or follows what in time), respectively, how this works in the case of different kinds of images, on the one hand, and in the case of spoken or written language, on the other, is significant.

In the case of a written text, signifiers in the form of words follow one another, and are read (“chronologically”) on a page or screen. The meaning (the signified) that these words have for a reader depends on the way that words which come later in the text modify or enhance what precedes them (the syntagmatic axis). For example, the words, “I hate you!” have a very different meaning from the amplified sentence, “I hate you not; on the contrary, I love you!” The words that come after the first three make all the difference. However, if the speaker repeats this kind of contrast too often in his or her speech, one would have reason to suspect that the similarity of sentence construction (the paradigmatic axis of meaning) reflects something that she or he wishes to hide, but implicitly reveals, instead. (Shakespeare’s “Methinks the lady protesteth too much!”) hence, the meaning on the paradigmatic axis of meaning would contradict the meaning on the syntagmatic axis.

In the case of images things work somewhat differently. In the case of cinematic images on a screen, one would be confronted, as in reading a text, with signifiers unfolding in both the syntagmatic (what follows what) and the paradigmatic (what belongs with what) registers, because of the temporal succession of images and dialogue. In the case of paintings, however, the temporal syntagmatic axis is ostensibly absent, and it appears that viewers have to address the question of the interpretation of paintings largely at the paradigmatic level of decoding visual signifiers. However, because all artworks have their provenance in an historical context, the syntagmatic axis of meaning can and should be invoked in their interpretation (via similarities with and differences from other artworks, and in so far as it is implied by changing artistic techniques. So, for example, Max Emadi’s painting of the crucified Christ, Before Serrano (2004), cannot be understood adequately unless it is compared with Andres Serrano’s photograph, Piss Christ (1987). In the case of conceptual art, on the other hand — sometimes presented in the format of “paintings”, sometimes as “installations”, images and textual elements combine and interact within the “same” aesthetic (or pseudo-aesthetic) space, and one has to employ both paradigmatic and syntagmatic strategies of interpretation.

But let us confine ourselves to paintings or artworks comprising images or image configurations for the sake of clarity. What is distinctive in the interpretation of images? Unlike a written text, a painting (or photograph) does not give viewers explicit guidance, through the formulation of words in sentences, about their signification. To be sure, not all texts are attempts at clear indications of how they should be interpreted either; some, especially literary texts, employ many literary or figural devices to impart different layers of meaning to a text. But in the case of images viewers are in a position where, unless they know how to understand a mere distortion (or foregrounding, or highlighting, or fading) of an image, or the juxtaposition of two or more images, the meaning they attach to the images in question may indeed be arbitrary. This is not to say that they would find the images meaningless; it may well have some meaning for them, although it may be more a matter of imposing their own, personal frame of reference on the images in question (much like the interpretive responses to Rorschach plates in a psychologist’s consulting room, which tell one more about the patient than about the figures on the plates), than following the images where they point to in their configuration. I can just hear the huffs of outrage on the part of readers here: “What? Who has the right to tell me what to see in a painting?!”

The point is: some interpretations of paintings/artworks/images are arbitrary, and some, while never deserving the description of “absolutely correct”, given the ambiguity of images, may be described as “responsible” or “valid” within a range of semiotic alternatives. Here some examples may illuminate what I mean. The cybachrome photograph (referred to earlier) by Andres Serrano, called Piss Christ (1987), for instance, has given rise to an enormous controversy precisely because of the overwhelming tendency on the part of viewers, to respond to images as if they are Rorschach plates meant to gauge patients’ psychological preoccupations. By reacting to this image — a crucified Christ figurine suspended in reddish orange colour, which strikes one initially as being quite beautiful — with sometimes violent rejection and outrage, when viewers learn that it is a photograph of a crucifix floating in the artist’s own urine, is what I mean by an interpretation which is arbitrary, and therefore not responsible.

Why? Because viewers who respond to it in this way, have not taken the trouble to follow the visual signifiers where they lead along the paradigmatic (and the implied syntagmatic) axis. Instead, they have simply responded to the association — mainly in the title of the photograph, and not primarily in its visual appearance (if no one had been informed, obliquely via the title, how it was made, I doubt whether the controversy would have ensued) — of Christ, the central figure in Christian religion, with something excremental, namely urine, jumping to the premature conclusion that the artwork (and therefore the artist) is promoting the idea that Christ equals urine, in other words, that Christ’s hallowed religious status, and concomitantly Christ “himself”, should be rejected. This tells one more about such viewers than about the meaning of the artwork (namely, that they need the security of Christ as religious icon so badly that any hint of their “faith” being misplaced will meet with violent opposition).

What would a “responsible” or “valid” (given the multivalency of especially visual signifiers, not “correct”) interpretation of Piss Christ be, then? Paradigmatically (in terms of “what belongs with what”), the figurine as signifier does represent the crucified Christ, and at first sight it comes across as a beautiful image, suspended in glowing colour. As such it represents or signifies what Christians believe to be the Son of God, who died for their sins, so that believers may gain forgiveness and salvation. But then the implications of the title kick in, and one is obliged to ask why the artist produced the image in this scatological way — why the urine, why the fact that the crucifix strikes one as the cheap plastic kind that may be purchased at any tourist stall near or in a church or cathedral? And, moreover — remembering that every artwork is produced or created at a specific time in the history of human society — why would the artist (Serrano) exhibit this image, which is and was predictably disturbing, to the public in the late 20th century?

Considering all these factors, one may arrive at a “responsible” or valid interpretation like the following: cheap plastic crucifixes denote the commercialisation of religion — making money out of people’s religious needs. Urine is a fluid excreted by the body, and the Gospels’ story of Christ’s crucifixion involves body fluids, such as when a soldier is supposed to have pierced Christ’s side with his spear (when blood would have flowed), and when Christ was given something to drink by means of a soaked sponge. In other words, recalling the historical context (along the syntagmatic axis of meaning) of Christ’s martyrdom, as reconstructed in the Gospels, reveals that it is not all that unusual to associate bodily fluids with the crucifixion. Urine is paradigmatically linked with those other fluids.

But the crucifix, floating in urine, which is a fluid usually expelled from the body? Again, follow the signifiers where they lead to. At first sight the photograph is beautiful, but this beauty hides something, revealed in the title. In other words, in so far as the crucifix metonymically represents the Church (as the body of Christ in the world), it suggests that the Church, which may first strike one as being beautiful too — by analogy with the photograph of the crucifix surrounded by resplendent colour — may, on closer inspection, hide something just as the photograph does. In other words, if one puts these meanings or “signifieds” together, what the photograph means is something highly critical of the role of the Church in society, namely, that, instead of living up to its historical role as the representative of Christ the Saviour on earth, it hides the fact that it really treats Christ — what Christ really represents — as no more than something excremental, like urine. This is not to deny that urine plays an important part in the life of the body — one has to expel it to remain healthy — but precisely what is expelled, makes all the difference. And Serrano’s photograph suggests that the late 20th century Church has expelled the wrong thing, in fact, the very thing that gives its historical mission meaning, namely the figure of Christ itself, which has been made cheap by commercialisation and the pursuit of earthly riches such as those housed in the Vatican. Indirectly, therefore, his Piss Christ could be read as an implicit critique of the refashioning of the Church in the image of capitalism — a process that vitiates the spiritual mission of the Church.

This is an interpretation or decoding of the photograph, Piss Christ, which takes seriously what the signifiers comprising it mean in a demonstrable manner, as I have tried to show. It is what I would describe as “elaborating” (extending and labouring) on meanings and on the history implied by them, instead of erasing these. It should be obvious how this differs from the kind of gut-level response which merely indicates how images impact on one’s own, usually ideological, sensibilities, without taking into account what they mean when interpreted in a patient, painstaking way at the paradigmatic and syntagmatic levels of meaning. It should also be apparent that, when images are removed from historical records — whether it is from a photograph, as Kundera has indicated, or whether artworks in their entirety are removed from art collections — this is parallel to the misguided, violent reactions on the part of viewers confronting an artwork like Piss Christ. Why? Because, as in the case of the latter, when attempts are made to erase (that is, change) history, it issues from the ideological commitments of those who have the power to do so. And in the process they distort history, and remove the opportunity for their descendants to learn from what the elided images represent(ed). When this happens — when, instead of elaborating on history, as Andres Serrano did with his Piss Christ, in this way rendering a critique of the role of the Church in society — a process of forgetting is set in motion, one that could easily lead to the repetition of ideological historical blunders and abominations, such as fascism or apartheid.

It is not only in the case of potentially controversial artworks that one is obliged to follow what Lacan calls the “chain of signifiers” where it leads; with every artwork or image configuration this is the case, no matter how difficult the process of interpretation may be. In the case of some artworks, for example the so-called “White Square” by suprematist artist Malevich, the artist has given one a blank canvas to interpret — which led Karsten Harries (in The Meaning of Modern Art) to remark that it represents the limit of interpretive freedom, where the artist invites one to see in the emptiness of the canvas anything one wishes, or … everything that starts to take shape there under one’s projecting gaze if one looks at it for long enough.

The present collection of paintings that artists have been invited to respond to in the shape of their own artworks, is no exception to the demands of what I have called here (following Nietzsche) “responsible” interpretation. Sure, there is the option, which I hope to have debunked above, of simply “reacting” to these artworks on the basis of the way it affects one’s own fears and desires, or the more responsible, and more difficult one, of reflecting on the way they (or rather, their constituent signifying elements) resonate with one’s own personal frame of reference, and responding in a considered, interpretive manner. And there is much to respond to — landscapes and portraits from different eras, representational art and abstract art, intricately patterned craft, “historical” paintings, “mythological” paintings, “political” art, surrealist art (of which Fred Page’s “life-in-death” painting, The Casket, addresses me most powerfully) — in short, there is bound to be something that would stir an artist and a commentator alike.

Five artworks in this collection that interact semiotically with tremendous force (given my own conceptual-historical interpretive grid), are the characteristically stylised oil painting by Pierneef — a lowveld landscape with a hut and two figures; Charles Ginner’s Leeds Roofs, Sthembiso Sibisi’s Afternoon Song, Frederick l’Ons’s War meeting, M’Kosa Tribe, and William Kentridge’s Fete Galante. The first of these presents viewers with a geometricised aesthetic of the South African landscape, but not one that passively imitates the conventions of perspective painting, despite elaborating on this European tradition. Instead, Pierneef’s vision crystalises in a composite image which pays homage to the undulation of an inimitably African panorama, one that captures the life-rhythms of this continent at the point where human culture and natural forces converge.

Pierneef’s painting collides unapologetically with Ginner’s evocation of the austere beauty emanating from the unmistakable industrial shapes of Leeds, a world in another hemisphere, which not only denotes a qualitatively different economic and social existence, compared to that in the largely pre-modern African lowveld, but also a historically and structurally different cultural milieu, namely that of industrial technology oriented modernity. The historical and cultural gap intimated by this juxtaposition is exacerbated further by l’Ons’s 19th century painting evoking a historical phase in the colonisation of Africa, and one with military overtones, as well as by Sibisi’s post-apartheid town(ship)scape, with its fusion of township family life and images of stunted economic aspirations, presided over by a rather sterile Christian cross.

All of these significations or meanings, embodied paradigmatically and syntagmatically (historically), are framed by the significance of Kentridge’s highly ironic mixed-media piece, which parodies the historical artistic meaning of fête galante (“gallant party”), an invention of Antoine Watteau in the 18th century. But where, in Watteau’s paintings, people were portrayed in Arcadian natural surroundings — implying a simple, harmonious relationship with nature — Kentridge butchers this meaning with a disturbing image configuration that combines surrealistic exuberance and apparently thanatic libidinal intimacy with the chaos of industrial production in a space that lacks any prospect of deliverance, where even the rear-view mirror, instead of providing a glimpse of where we have come from, reflects only dispassionate (if not sardonic) eyes (a truncated self-portrait?). Fête galante has become fête macabre. As an artistic metonymy of the condition of postmodernity, Kentridge’s composite image, when seen in juxtaposition with the other artworks discussed above, is an elaboration on our contemporary historical situation that invites further elaboration from artists and critics alike.

Any responsible hermeneutic interpretive engagement with the selected artworks from the NMMAM collection would avoid arbitrary reaction, which would be tantamount to erasure or “forgetting” of the kind described earlier. Instead, artist and commentator alike owe it to these artworks (and the artists who are responsible for them) to enter into a carefully interpretive, responsible relation with them. Anything less than that would be a denial of the validity of history and memory, even if it is in the negative sense of eschewing former pitfalls.