Islands
in the Cosmos
Visions of Man
Adrift
and Apart
Page II
Since the announcement of the death of God, man has had to wrestle with the question of meaning, to struggle with the predicament of nihilism, and it is a crippling force we are every day in combat with. In this existential epoch, few artists are concerned with the spiritual, or even comprehend the necessity of the concern, especially if not more for atheists than anyone else, and there are a multitude of superficial atheists who have not experienced the trauma of their non-belief. But it is one, and it yields a concern, an exigent concern, for without some form of the sacred, the atheists are doomed, destined only to stumble like blind men through forests, to be whipped by gravity like scarecrows on the moon. Until they create some form of sacredness, they will remain hollow men, empty shells whimpering in the dark, weightless objects cast about like willows on the wind, buffeted by the relentless sea, burned by the stars, obliterated by the planets and the nebulae.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
. . .
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
-T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
For the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, who clearly sees himself as a kind of ‘sorcerer’ and views art as that which may heal humanity of its wounds, our spiritual condition is of deep import. “Today,” Nerdrum declared, “the world resides in a spiritual darkness. . . The entire world gropes for spiritual renewal.” In the epoch following the death of God, what precisely is meant by spirit and the spiritual demands definition; such words and phrases cannot be bandied about without clarification. Today then, spirituality is a way of being in and relating to the world, of how we live with ourselves in time and what animates and guides us. In having eviscerated the monotheistic deities, we discovered how threatening and dangerous they were to us, if not to the world we once thought they created. Yet while they have been sacrificed, and we will continue to sacrifice them, we are still broken from nature; we still have not completely purified nature of the deities. Thus, we are not living with ourselves in the world as contraries; though we have killed the gods, we still possess bodies which are bifurcated; instead of the religious conception of the body as distinct from the soul, the schism remains, but as mind and body, and this schism gives rise to myriad psychological and physical problems. As Blake had the Devil tell us over two hundred years ago, energy is not evil; in fact, “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.” It is rare that we retain and live with such truths. The schism still exists and reason for us is not what it was for Blake, but a ghost limb. The spiritual renewal that the world then gropes for is the renewal of the truth of contraries and the lost unity of opposites. It is the overcoming of the schism of body and soul or body and mind and of the need to revere the animal in us, but that is not a base primitivism. “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
Nerdrum, who has generally been roundly condemned by his contemporaries as reactionary and kitschy, is truly an untimely artist, both a critic of his era and in his refusal to capitulate to its whims, an exemplary model for it. He is engaged in an agon with the herd of popular artists who lack his formidable skills and vision and who castigate him for being a kind of reverse heretic. They are hardly admirable opponents though and even admit the fact; in a brief review in Art in America on an Nerdrum exhibition at Forum Gallery over ten years ago, Robert Kushner confessed that his generation lacked the ability to execute traditional techniques—what he referred to as their “collective distrust and rejection” of such techniques is surely rooted in such inadequacy, at least in part and that part is large. It is also rooted to the pernicious notion of singularity which has corrupted most of humanity, which cannot stand to be other than completely originary. For to embrace tradition is to realize and acknowledge as T. S. Eliot noted in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” To be among the dead is anathema to most of humanity though, and especially for most artists, even the most mediocre, who long to spring from voids and vacuums. In two hundred years, the painters of today who imagine they are so radical and anti-traditional will become the models of another tradition, and one which will be rejected by future artists. While they donned costumes and performed the role of the artist, Nerdrum was one; while they fashioned themselves radical, he truly was radical and gave birth to work out of a real vision wholly alien to the caprices of his time. In our era, one of the most dubious caprices is that of contextualization; it is an intellectually deficient idea promulgated by the herd in order to legitimize works wholly devoid of skill, effectiveness, and vision. It is a crutch to support unrepentant mediocrity, an art of ressentiment, which lacks sensitivity, imagination, and true force. It is not the work of a talent developed and refined through discipline, devotion, and sacrifice; it is not the realization of any genuine achievement. It is an art of ready-mades, of true effortlessness, of inadequacy and laziness and it has rendered the galleries a veritable if not at times literal cesspit. Nerdrum was not seduced by the caprice and rejected it wholesale; to him, it was a sign of corruption, of the complete impoverishment of art. In the future, when the myth of contextualization perishes because of its exiguity, the detritus in the galleries that survived only out of the poverty and decadence of the era will be forgotten and Nerdrum’s paintings will remain, shocking testaments of a true iconoclast.
| page up |
In turning away from modernity and towards the ‘spiritual’ style of titans like Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Velazquez but transfiguring it and making it new, Nerdrum, as Donald Kuspit observed, explicitly condemned modernity as inadequate. Picasso once said that “there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.” To Nerdrum, most contemporary painting is as dead and destitute and decadent as humanity, and both come under fierce scrutiny in his work. It is not that he is returning to a dead past as some of his detractors claim, but that he is reviving a living practice, employing a technique that is in line with his philosophical and artistic principles. The technique coincides with the vision. To condemn modernity is to condemn modern styles and techniques. To paint as Nerdrum does, to reject the caprices of his time, is to proclaim a revolution in art, and his work is an enactment of that revolution. The transfiguration of the high style of venerable painters like Titian and Rembrandt is the very application of it in his era yet, there is more to it than that as the simple adoption of an earlier style would clearly be sentimental, a nostalgic or naïve and hopeless gesture, like driving a wind-up Ford down a superhighway. It is through his perception and his analysis and his critique that what is oft referred to as ‘Old Master’ technique is transfigured; it is through his vision, for what and how he perceives is different. If Rembrandt and Caravaggio were alive, they would not paint like Nerdrum and next to their paintings his would be quite strange, foreign, peculiar, work not of their time at all, but from beyond—it is the work of a new era and of a wholly different consciousness. In critiquing his era, he could not do so with its instruments or techniques. Yet he is not a luddite, for he is not rejecting technology outright—a paintbrush is a technological instrument—but he is a symptomatologist diagnosing a disease. His eye is the eye of a painter who is future minded; it is the eye of a physician and a poet and a philosopher, and through his work he is struggling to heal, to sing, and to see. He has stated that he views the present “from a diagnostic angle” and that he tries “to depict the world in which we live and the one yet to come.” For Nerdrum, a “painting ought to be a window onto a world—into a world—where the truest and simplest ideas reside.” Undoubtedly, as is evident from his new paintings, the world in which we live and the world yet to come is a world wherein humans seem even more alienated than ever. It is the world of a rootless species. Nerdrum: “Our time is the age of fragmentation. The spirit of unification is gone.”
In the new body of eleven paintings currently on view at Forum Gallery from January 25 to March 17, 2007, “Odd Nerdrum: Paintings,” the diagnostic vision the painter has of the world is palpably clear. In the press release, Forum Gallery explains that the paintings in the exhibition “present a new level of inquiry into the artist’s exploration of the state of humankind’s being.” The state of humanity has been a long standing concern of Nerdrum’s and his inquiry into it has been intense and serious; what it yields is always provocative, often enigmatic, and typically unsettling, but the truths of humanity are unsettling. When the tragic reality of the world is clear to one, such truths must be tended to. And it is only through being un-settled that we will gain insight into ourselves; it is only through disrupting the false ground on which we stand that we will at last be able to struggle to find our roots again, to truly be settled, as settled though only as are roots, which always turn and shift in the ground as they drink up its riches. Nerdrum unquestioningly believes it is of dire necessity to confront these truths and many of his paintings are confrontations. His current inquiry has yielded a group of unforgettably evocative paintings that are the product of truly insightful diagnostic work. It is work born of harrowing knowledge and it reveals something of the state of humanity, and the vision is grim.
As claimed in the press release, Nerdrum’s new paintings are supposedly a “marked departure” from his previous work but, in terms of their vision of man, such a striking departure isn’t at all evident. Nerdrum’s inquiry has not revealed new truths about man, but that is only because man remains the same. The tragic reality has not changed. The impending doom, the struggle, the fear, the helplessness, they are all the same and Nerdrum’s depiction of them isn’t altogether different from his previous depiction of such conditions. In his other work, one finds not only the portrayal of similar conditions but a similar viewpoint of those conditions; the drama of humanity does not occur in space but it does occur in equally alien and indeterminate landscapes which may not at all be earth. “Earthly human needs” may not be addressed in these paintings as the press release declares, though gravity, which it lists as one of the earthly human needs (are they different in space?), is hardly a human need, it is a law, a force which exists regardless of whether there are even humans on the planet, but then, perhaps it is only that they are not explicitly addressed. In space, though space in Nerdrum is always more than space alone, it is not possible to fulfill them, and what Nerdrum is conceivably illustrating is the enormous difficulty or the impossibility of struggling to fulfill our needs. What is markedly different though is the visual landscape in which Nerdrum executes his vision; through displacing man in space, he heightens and intensifies his expression of our conditions. The revelation of the inquiry is that, even if we are thrust into space, and we already have been, at least as a species, we will still be lost, we will be even more lost in fact, tattered, beaten, and insensate. While already in the cosmos, in fact, we always are, it is rare that we feel it, just as it is rare that we feel that we are in nature, that we are a part of it, and it is that dissociation which is one of Nerdrum’s main concerns. But we can’t feel space because the space we are locked in is the space of the mind and the de-deification of nature, and that includes man, is part of Nerdrum’s work as an artist. Once that is accomplished, if it ever is, we may at last be able to feel the presence of the cosmos, to feel ourselves in it.
In an interview, Nerdrum explained that his task “is to clarify life in a way that adds to what has been created before. Nature is no longer man’s adversary—it is man’s salvation.” Nature and man have been slandered and Nerdrum knows this well; he knows that man must return to nature, he knows that we must erase the hieroglyphs and rediscover and reawaken our deepest instincts. This seems a simple truth, if not a platitude, and many surely have a rich, intimate, and fructifying relationship with nature, but, predominantly, such relationships are rare, and Nerdrum is at war with the principal forces which are blind to or disdain this truth, whether out of fear, ignorance, or for gain and glory. For Nerdrum, the painter, like most of humanity, has “lost touch with the functional within himself and in nature,” and part of his work is geared towards the reunification of man and nature. To speak of reawakening our deepest instincts and grounding ourselves in nature is not to invoke Rousseau and the enactment of a primitive regress. Nerdrum specifically rejects such naiveté and stated that he is “no worshipper of nature in the sense of our National Romantics. What I seek is to bring out is the higher being in nature.” What is it that Nerdrum means when speaking of the higher being in nature? Is it man in nature, yet not only man but the integrated man in nature who is at one with his instincts? Is it the man who knows that “Energy is Eternal Delight” and that only those whose desire is weak are able to restrain it? Is it the man who would “sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”? Is it the man who knows, “Where man is not, nature is barren” but, equally so, where nature is not, man is barren? It would seem to be all these things and that the higher being in nature has perished, like Dionysus once perished, and that it awaits resurrection, which is why it must be brought out. If God died from his pity for mankind, what has propelled us to where we are?
It is the sickness of consciousness, of, in particular, the madness of rationality and its desire to tame nature and to know all that has led to the cataclysmic state we are in. While the Delphic Oracle commands “Know thyself!” the other, equally vital imperative inscribed over the Temple of Apollo is rarely invoked: “Not too much!” Knowledge is not limitless, it has bounds, but out of audacity man refuses to heed such limits, and that is part of the madness of reason—we pursue the first imperative of the Delphic Oracle like predators but often neglect the second. Moderation seems as alien to us as our instincts. While nature as Nerdrum realizes is clearly our saving sorceress, man doesn’t seem to want to be saved; man resists nature for he fears it as he fears the truth of himself, and that fear is evident in nearly all of Nerdrum’s new paintings, wherein man is cast from out of the habitat of the earth and into a cosmos which, intrinsically, he is part, but not even or hardly ever part. Nerdrum is aware that man cannot possess nature, “but is an anxious part of it” and that anxiousness is but one thing he seeks to evoke in his images, which he deliberately strives to make universal, not local. And this may be not perhaps a marked departure, but, certainly, it is something new, something different, a fresh achievement: in these eleven new images, from Dissolving to Love Divided, 2005, Drifting, Void, and Burning (the paintings without dates were deliberately left undated by the artist), Nerdrum’s desire to make his images universal has been fulfilled in an exceptionally dramatic manner. In not dating many of the paintings in the exhibition, Nerdrum not only increases their potential universality but their timelessness as well, making them not only reflective of our era, but of any and every era. Stripped of all accoutrements, stripped even of seemingly indiscriminate landscapes, which may have been suggestive of certain terrain, man naked in space is man as universal as can possibly be. This is not the state of being of the people of Iceland or Norway, this is the state of being of the world:
In In Limbo, a number of bodies are jettisoned through or suspended in space; some seem to float, others to fight against or are caught in currents that they cannot extract themselves from. Whether they are dead or alive is unclear. But here, as in all of the paintings in the exhibition, man is even farther from nature than he is on earth, and farther still from his own nature. Though directly in space, man is still remote from that space, of which he is nothing more, and of which man is far more. It is man caught, cast in a world in which he belongs but cannot situate himself, where he has lost the ability to exist—he no longer knows how to. Perhaps then the ambiguity of the status of the bodies, that is, whether they contain life or no, is appropriate. It is man as man is. Individual, isolated bodies which rarely, like islands, have knowledge of what is around them though, as with the woman gazing downward, there are rare instances when we are conscious of the continent from which we have separated ourselves and of others who we long to communicate with. It doesn’t seem at all possible though for anyone in the painting to communicate, let alone to come together like members of a community—each is in their own gravitational furrow and each will remain there.
| page up |
Continue| Reading | Page III