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Kyla MacFarlane
VII
In contrast to the
interiority of Red, in the work of Pierre et
Gilles, everything is surface. Their 1990 work,
Saint Viviane-Mauriel Moreno
(one of three works from their 1987–1991
Saints series exhibited in Votive) features
wounded flesh. But the effect is purely cosmetic:
fake blood stands for welts appearing on the
surface of the subject's curved back. Here,
the body is a taut, shiny fetish - a meeting
point between traditional religious imagery
of devotional saints and the contemporary culture
of the celebrity pin-up. There is a hint of
death here, the realm of the martyred saint,
but the devotion alluded to in these images
is one of admiration of beauty, celebrity and
bodily perfection. The kind of tension this
creates between the traditionally religious
iconography quoted and employment of staged,
hand-painted photography gives these images
their representational force. The result (and
the process itself) lies somewhere between the
celebrity photography of Annie Leibovitz, mass-produced
painted imagery of Catholic icons and the paintings
of Caravaggio or Raphael.
Saint André
– Jean-Paul Izquiero(1988) has a hint of
the homoeroticism that features in much of Pierre
et Gilles' practice. Whilst retaining a certain
reverence for both its art historical and religious
sources, the image also resonates in the realm
of current gay iconography in popular culture.
Further to this, by eroticising the body of
the saint, Pierre et Gilles also capture something
of the embodied religiosity that Mieke Bal was
quoted as asserting earlier in this essay. This
vacillation creates something of a collapse
between history and the present that is similar
to what Bal identifies in Jeannette Christensen's
reworking of Caravaggio. She writes that:
Through the intervention
of the contemporary remake and commentary, this
painting with its religious subject becomes
not just secular, but
emphatically erotic … There is no longer
any telling apart of the historically near subject
of interpretation, for the subject in turn has
become an object of interpellation, and henceforward
these positions of object and subject have become
caught in the movement that inscribed the act
of viewing in time, while at the same time being
fundamentally unstoppable. [12]
Pierre et Gilles
play similar games with certainty and uncertainty
in this series of saints, conflating history
and the present;body and spirit behind a highly
polished façade.
click on image
to enlarge
VIII
It is perhaps appropriate
to end this text with a discussion of Megan
Jenkinson's In Parenthesis (2001), which represents
a series of asides, or footnotes to moments
in history. In this way, the work alludes to
and critiques the grandness and solidity of
the historical moment, producing a whispering
against the absolute silence of the white gallery
wall. Of course, such silences have their own
resonance-behind the wall of the art institution
lies a history of visual production and between
the lines of the received texts of history rests
a series of unspoken or remote stories.
A similar effect
is gained by the excerpt of text that hangs
beneath the images. Quoted from Book II, Chapter
13 of The Venerable Bede's The History of the
Church of England, it compares the "present
life of man on Earth with that time of which
we have no knowledge&". In the narrative, one
of the king's chief men describes the flight
of a sparrow through a warm banqueting hall
in the depths of winter. Whilst in the hall,
says the man, the small bird is safe, but in
his flight path before and after his brief visit,
he is vulnerable to the storms of winter. Similarly,
we know nothing of what happens before or after
a man's life. Therefore it is right to follow
a new teaching that brings more knowledge. The
speaker's analogy of the tiny sparrow's flight
path as a brief period free from frailty and
vulnerability can be read against and within
the partiality of the images above. It is a
statement about the limits of knowledge and
an impetus for the adoption of faith.
In Parenthesis also
presents a series of oppositions: the personal
rituals of death, birth and baptism are represented
amongst uniforms of power, whilst secular imagery
sits opposite religious contemplation. These
are suggestive of a conversation or dialogue
between contrary points of view and their slivered
forms highlight a partiality, as if we are overhearing
only snippets of a larger discussion. Grammatically
and visually, the lining up of parentheses inside
one another leads to a central emptiness, as
if this series of asides seems to cancel each
other out until there is simply silence.
In many ways, the visual "pause&" that is central
to this work articulates the insufficiency of
the internal/external model and signals the
potential for disruption that is raised by the
other works in Votive. The complex corresponding
imagery and parallel text of In Parenthesis
allude to the incisions made by social codification
and the rituals of religious faith, siting them
as gaps or ruptures or, in a more directly corporeal
sense, they can be read metaphorically as a
wound. This metaphor is particularly potent
in a Christian context as it alludes to the
wounds of Christ on the event of his crucifixion.
And, as Bal suggests with reference to Caravaggio's
representation of the penetration of this symbolically
loaded incision in The Incredulity of St Thomas,
limited visual and physical access to such openings
activates the charged connections between desire
and vision -giving erotic force to a religious
subject. [13]
Metaphorically, the
presence of the wound has the potential to disrupt
the surface quality of the Mobius, which, despite
its clever confusion of inner and outer, does
not allow for the effects of incisions or excesses.
However, it provides us with a starting point
from which the works of Votive emerge. If, as
these works suggest, the psychical, the corporeal
and the rituals of the religious institution
are intertwined, we can move towards an understanding
of what a rupturing of this relationship might
mean. Jenkinson's work suggests that it is in
the vulnerable space of the silence, the pause,or
the open wound that this might be gained.
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Megan Jenkinson
In Parenthesis (detail),
2001
Courtesy of the artist and Jonathan Smart
Gallery, Christchurch
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click on image to enlarge
Notes
[1] Breakwell, Ian. "The
Sermon&", Nineteen Eighty-Four: An Exhibition,
London: Camden Arts Centre, 1984, p 34.
[2] Serrano had received
funding from the National Endowment for the
Arts and, following a complaint from the American
Family Association, senator Jesse Helms proposed
that indecent or offensive works should not
continue to receive funding. New York senator
Alphonse D'Amato also condemned the work
in Congress. His outrage and that of Helms
were publicly echoed by many constituents.
For a brief account of these events and comments
from the artist see Weintraub, Linda. Art
on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's
Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s –
1990s, Litchfield, CT: Art Insights Inc. 1996,
pp 160-164.
[3] Bal, Mieke. Quoting Caravaggio:
Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp
37 -38.
[4] Bal, p 38.
[5] This laser copy reproduction
is framed and hung above a frame filled with
red Jell-O. Bal notes that the work was part
of an installation in which Christensen exhibited
other reproductions of old masters and gelatine.
Against the detail from Caravaggio's
painting, the red Jell-O is suggestive of
a bodily interior.
[6] Andres Serrano quoted
in Weintraub, p161.
[7] Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile
Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 1994.
[8] Grosz. p117.
[9] Grosz. p117.
[10] In Deep Throat (1972),
Linda Lovelace plays a woman who gains satisfaction
performing oral sex as her clitoris is situated
in her throat.
[11] Jezebel used false
witnesses and forgery in order to obtain a
vineyard for her husband, King Ahab, condemning
the owner of the property to death in order
to achieve her goal. For her story, see Kings
I and 2 in the Old Testament. Aaron appears
in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Mary Magdalene
anoints Christ's feet in Luke 7:37-38
and the resurrected Christ appears to her
in John 20.
[12] Bal, p36.
[13] See Bal, p37, for a
detailed account of this relationship.
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