Act of Embrace
All I wanted to do was deform a surface
I wanted to experience the mortality of thought.
I saw no space prior to bodies or their intervals.
The secular niches flickered luminously.
Space was a very fine condition of corpuscular light.
I witnessed immaterial tissues.I embellished antiquity with my laughterWhat is painting but the act of embrace?
— Lisa Robertson
I start with the worn and eroded surfaces of Greek and Roman sculpture fragments of the female form. Through painting and drawing, in the process of recording these surfaces and these forms, I create a second parallel surface, with its own history. I aim to interrogate the role of both the artist and the viewer through this process of transformation. Looking at statues and statue fragments of female figures from Greece and Rome and repainting them so that they sit on the line between flesh and stone, I am at once confronting their status as significant figures in the history of Western art and as individual artistic objects with a personal history, worn down and transformed through time.
In this liminal space between death and life, frozen and in motion, stone and flesh, I also confront the myth of Pygmalion and his statue-bride. Pygmalion is not interested in any living women, but instead desires for his sculpture to come to life. The most familiar version of Galatea’s myth comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Pygmalion falls in love with a statue that he carves and wishes to marry her. Aphrodite grants Pygmalion’s wish and Pygmalion goes on to marry his creation, now made flesh and blood. Through the centuries this myth has been reimagined by countless artists and writers. Some continue to give Pygmalion his prize, but more begin to ask -- what about his sculpture? What about Galatea? And what about Pygmalion himself? What happens to him once his sculpture has broken beyond the bounds of his creation?
In this series of works I want to examine what lies behind our persistent desire for our art to come to life. This is not an accusation, but an exploration. It is almost impossible to view things without enlivening them, bringing them to life, in our imagination. But what does it mean to desire to see art, particularly Greek and Roman sculpture, reanimated? Can an act of appreciation also be an act of violence? What is the role of the classical conception of beauty in contemporary art?
I work from sculptures and sculpture fragments of Greek and Roman sculptures housed in major art museums around the world. I paint these forms to learn more about them. I do not wish to deny my own aesthetic appreciation of these forms. I do not want to deny their beauty; but through this process of recreation, I want to examine both their role in defining beauty and informing my own aesthetic standard. Using oil paint and pastel, I recreate the forms, paying attention to the cracks and worn surfaces and missing pieces. While preserving these fragmented forms I push their surfaces towards life, away from the obvious stillness and deadness of marble. I build up my surfaces through thin layers of color. I complicate the dullness and opaqueness of the originals through slow shifts in tone, through moments of brightness, and unexpected and meaning-ladden hues. I introduce allusions to the bodily, the transient, and the easily wounded. I want these pieces to be both beautiful and uncomfortable. These pieces preserve the grace and elegance of the Roman marble; they preserve the sensuality of the form. They evoke the larger art historical tradition that these sculptural figures have inaugurated, but at the same time these paintings do not let one be an unquestioned and uncompromised observer. The reds start to speak to the possibilities of blood. The missing limbs start to look alarming. And the possibility that a human consciousness lurks underneath these half-alive forms becomes an unexpectedly unsettling thought.
These paintings are fragments of Galatea. She is in the midst of her transformation, prompted by some sort of desire, sensual or aesthetic. She is a figure trapped somewhere in the midst of her transition between stone and flesh. The Pygmalion myth, and its many retellings—the many possible readings of Galatea’s fate—of Pygmalion’s motivations are evoked in these images. The myth and its own long history, is imprinted on the very surface of these figures. But Galatea is no longer a coherent whole. As the sculptures are fragmented so is the coherent narrative of the myth. Each artist, each culture, each time period finds their own meaning in the vision of art coming to life and the unresolved possibilities of this transformation linger on the surface of these fragments.
George Bernard Shaw reimagines Galatea in the person Eliza Doolittle, who “never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable” (xviii). In the play Professor Higgins makes a bet that he can turn Eliza, a flower girl, into a lady, by teaching her proper manners of upper class speech. For Higgins Eliza is simply an experiment; but Eliza is her own person with her own vision of herself and Higgins’ sculpting does not come to define her. Shaw’s Galatea fully embraces the new life she has been given. She interrupts the expected script, leaving Professor Henry Higgins and making use of the mythological narrative, into which he aggressively pushes her, for her own ends; she starts a flower and vegetable shop. But then, she is once again Galatea-as-bride in the musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. Still under the sway of her creator, Eliza returns to Higgins in the final scene, which suggests reconciliation and perhaps even a future marriage.
There is catharsis in both these endings. One ending completes the narrative arc of Pygmalion, the other of Galatea. Both cannot be satisfied at once. There is tension in the original myth. One of course desires for Galatea to be free, but there is also some kind of sympathy for Pygmalion that is hard to shrug off. Shaw taps into the feminist potentials of the original story. He sees Pygmalion as arrogant and a bit of a brute. Galatea can do better. But the public imagination demands romance nonetheless and pities Higgins, even in his blindness.
Mark Zaharov takes the ridiculousness of Pygmalion further. His Pygmalion is a pathetic figure. In the Formula of Love, Zaharov’s Soviet-era fantasy film, he satirizes the imposition of desire upon and the idealization of a sculpted form. Aliosha has fallen in love with a statue and he wishes that the travelling magician bring the marble to life so he can marry her. He sings at the statue:
…And your unmovingness, and paleness, and silence
Say so much about so much to my soul.
And it seems to me: I know, I remember your name,
We met from a distance in my native land.
For me you are - not marble, not an angel, not a goddess,
You are - One who I love, oh how much I love you!
Pygmalion is not really in love with anything at all, except for his own imagination. What Aloisha learns in the end, in typical Soviet fashion, is that if he stops fantasizing about marble he will find that love has been waiting for him all along, in the form of a (flesh and blood) Russian peasant woman. Zaharov sees the myth as a reflection on misguided emotions and the hubris of artists, who love themselves, and their creations—as extensions of themselves—above all else.
H.D’s poem on the subject reinterprets the Pygmalion myth as an Ars Poetica. She reverses the power dynamic between art and artist. She imagines Pygmalion as an artist who at the moment of attaining the greatest, most godlike control over his creations, is abandoned by his sculptures, as they attain a life beyond his reach. Pygmalion cries:
They have melted into the light
and I am desolate;
they have melted;
each from his plinth,
each one departs;
they have gone,
what agony can express my grief?
each from his marble base
has stepped into the light
and my work is for naught.
There is no fulfillment, after all, in the moment when the sculpture comes to life. Pygmalion has overreached his domain in wishing for his sculptures to be more than marble. The sculptures lead their own lives now. He remains a man, who has only played at being god. But his creations are truly godlike in their eternity and their autonomy. Art lives a life beyond the artist.
I present only a limited list of retellings. They are the ones that are the most personal to me and illustrate my literary background on which I often draw for inspiration, but the narrative itself is ubiquitous. As J. Hillis Miller writes, “the coming alive of a statue that one has made and then fallen in love with expresses in a fable the act of personification essential to all storytelling and storyreading” (vii). And this holds true in the visual world as well. The most basic premise of Pygmalion underlies most historically-oriented artistic viewing and creating practices. And although the gendered implications of the myth are incredibly resonant within feminist discourse, and are a significant part of this project, I want to highlight that this is not the only narrative thread of the Pygmalion myth. The premise of a man sculpting and fulfilling his own desires, of the woman once brought to life obediently accepting her role, is a deeply troubling one. How this situation continues to be played out in our current society, how our artistic traditions encode and validate this narrative, are questions which need to be examined. The Pygmalion myth, as well as the larger tradition of aesthetic ideals that Greek and Roman sculptures of women has inaugurated and sustained, is inextricable from the stories of those that have been marginalized and hurt by the classical narrative of art history, those that have been cut out from it, shaped by it, and silenced by it. But the myth, more abstractly, does speak to finding joy and meaning in beauty, whether it be misguided and futile or not, and to the potentially heartbreaking, potentially funny—in its self-aggrandisement—process of artistic creation.
This is what I am trying to draw out in my series of Exquisite Corpse paintings (pg.1,13,21). There are many possible narratives that these figures participate in. These fragmented narratives come together to illustrate larger themes, but they also stand at odds with each other and can prove difficult to unify into a coherent whole. These paintings draw from a variety of sources that encompass a range of ancient sculpture. Together they build up to a full figure, but each individual panel asks different questions as the figures represented are pushed towards life. The first piece comes from a Roman tomb and evokes the possibility that art has the power to keep people alive beyond the grave. The second is a fragment of an old market woman, whose body is battered both by the wear and tear of her own life, and by her second life, as a mass of stone. The third is a fragment exposed, now forced to hold meaning in areas which the sculptor never intended to be seen. The fourth captures the permanent duality of the transition between stone and flesh, as one foot steps off the platform while the other remains rooted in the marble slab.
In creating this series of drawings and paintings my position is a complicit one. I am the one that imagines these figures into life. I myself must face all the implication that come with taking on this subject matter. Inherently, in the process of recording these figures, in learning the detail of their surfaces, I learn to appreciate their beauty and their form. In Crouching Venus Fragmented (pg. 6) and in Venus (pg.14) I emphasize the missing parts of the sculpture, how they evoke violence and interrupt the form, but I am also appreciative of the elegance of the forms, how they've persisted through time, and the power that they continue to exert even in their fragmented state. I am painting about Galatea, but in some ways I am Pygmalion myself. In not claiming a resolved narrative, in emphasizing the fragmentation of the form, and a fragmentation of intent—what Linda Nochlin calls the “shifty and ever-shifting role” of the trope of fragmentation—I put my own confused relationship to beauty and art history at the forefront of my work (59). How do I keep enjoying the beautiful when enjoying the beautiful comes with such a weight? But at the same time how can I deny my own enjoyment of the beautiful when it’s such an inherent part of my knowledge and understanding and experience of the world?