Islands                               

in the Cosmos                                    

Visions of Man

Adrift                                                              

                              and Apart

Page III

In Head, an enormous male head is jettisoned from its body and shoots through the dark space which surrounds it like a comet bursting across the sky. A trail of hair and blood and matter and sinew flows from out the head as it continues in its trajectory; there is such ferocious velocity to it, it seems as if the head will emerge out of the canvas and into the exhibition room. One half expects to leave the gallery with the head in one’s hands. The body of the head lay below, floating as if in water, its legs gently kicking in the air while several other bodies are caught in the wake of the jettisoned head. The countenance of the man is ripe with fear, his mouth gaping open, his pupils nearly washed out, his eyes devoid of definition and white like egg shells.

What is this? The moment of death?

Obviously, this is a death experience, but the head still clearly possesses life, enough so that one suspects that wherever it ends up, it will continue to speak or scream or gaze in horror, awake, terrifyingly awake. Is it man dreaming and awakening? Man gazing into the black abyss as he perishes? It is unclear, but the terror in the work is self-evident and as in the other paintings, light seems to have no source but to erupt out of the faces and the bodies themselves. Man seems to be the source of illumination; that that may be the case is possibly verifiable by the fact that the stream which erupts from his body is a long blue and white shaft of light, like a star shot from the man’s innards. This is fragmented man in the midst of self-destruction and the other bodies are his other selves, the conflicting multitude of selves of man at war with one another and the world.

To witness and perceive the subtleties in the paintings is slightly difficult at times, while one has to strain to see the paintings in their entirety, thus one doesn’t experience the paintings as one truly could, and needs to, and as every artist and every painting surely demands. In general, the exhibition is finely lit, but it could be exceptional and the paintings demand perfection, thus it would be wise to take into consideration. While our doors of perception are far from cleansed and we rarely see things as infinite, we should at very least be able to see, not to have glaring lights obstruct our attempts at seeing. There is enough obfuscation in perception itself; this only compounds our difficulties and truncates our ecstasies. How paintings are illuminated is one of the primary concerns of the writers of Hyperion, and it should be one for every gallery and museum (not that it isn’t, but the art of lighting demands perfection and such perfection is rare), as this problem is not particular to Forum Gallery, but to many galleries and museums. The most exemplary and striking use of light which I witnessed was in a Caravaggio exhibition in Rome in 2000; the curator clearly knew that the sculpting of light was as important as the paintings and without the proper dramatization, the real power of the paintings would be lost. But at many exhibitions in New York and around the world, one is often forced to bend, stoop, and stand at the oddest of angles as well as at far distances in order to eliminate glares that are the result of poorly staged lighting, and this is precisely a question of staging. The glare from such over-bright, misdirected, or poorly dramatized light washes out areas of whatever painting or sculpture one is viewing, thus impeding one’s ability to experience art and reducing the intensity of the experience. And if our experience of the art is reduced, then the art is reduced, too, and it isn’t seen as it could be seen; certainly not as the artist wishes us to see it. Bad lighting disrupts our dreaming. While many galleries and museum directors surely have lighting designers, most of them seem to be merely adequate and art commands something far higher. To inadequately light is to commit a great disservice not only to the spectators viewing art, but to the artists and their work and, ultimately, to the experience of art itself. It would have been truly mesmerizing for a museum to have invited Sven Nykvist to light one of its shows, but his going under no longer makes that possible. There are other masters though, like Vittorio Storaro. It would be wise to invite him to curate and light a show, for all of us would gain from it.

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In String, a group of five figures, perhaps a family, are afloat in space. Three of the figures are close together, intimately united or delicately crowded against one another—a brother and sister? Or two lovers? Whoever they are, they seem attached to one another, physically attached or bonded together and a string emanates from their hands and stretches out across space, connecting them to the body of a man floating upside down, who holds the string in his hands gently, his fingers closed gingerly around it. Again, the bodies provide the brightest illumination and the space around them is relatively dark, save for the stars and patches of what might be gas from nebulas. Another figure floats below the main group, his arms protecting or hiding his face. He floats below them, though in this as in other paintings, the sense of direction is not necessarily clear and there may not be one. If there is any up or down it is questionable; the stars are not above or below us, they surround us. Again, the features of the bodies are nearly white washed and it is unclear if they are dead or alive. The general tone of the painting is one of coldness, fear, and isolation. The figures in it are connected but unable to communicate. Distance and isolation rule, and Nerdrum reflects all of these things in his very rendering of the paint, but one must struggle to perceive it.

The bodies in the paintings in the exhibition are the same palpably fleshy bodies of Nerdrum’s other work, but they reveal something other paintings of his have not or they do so in different ways: the bifurcation of the body, the split between man and man and the bifurcation between man and the cosmos. Some parts of the bodies are evaporating or burning up; some are literally aflame or being torn apart, like man has been torn from his original body, like man torn from other men. Nerdrum reveals our hidden roots adrift in space, dangling in the ethers, torn out of us by others, or like umbilical chords which have never been cut, never been played—it is only noise, not music which we hear and Nerdrum reveals the wounds which result from this, the anguish in our bodies and the brutalities which we commit against them. And our bodies are ourselves, for there is no soul but only the body and those brutalities are thus signs of our self-destructiveness. Some of the bodies seem radiantly warm, some are in the midst of decay, others seem to fight the current. Some of the figures seem calm, others fearful, helpless, lost. The uppermost figure in In Limbo glances down as if she wants to unite or communicate with one of the other figures, but communication is impossible; everyone in this painting is isolated from everyone else, they are islands in the cosmos, visions of man adrift and apart. The distance of man from man is exemplified in space, but it is consciousness which creates the greatest space between us. Reason, instead of uniting us, isolates and separates us, and thinking, if all we do is think without continuing to live with our instincts, is a reduction of our wider circumferences, the enormity of our actual existence, whose scope is immeasurable. Man, as Nietzsche declared, was “reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating, cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their “consciousness,” their weakest and most fallible organ! I believe there has never been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort.” Through forcing our instincts inward, through turning from what is most free in us, powerful, natural, cruel, we turn ourselves against ourselves and in that turning we gave birth to our most debilitating malady. Hopelessly divided, at war with his nature, man is now trapped in consciousness, a pure realm he created to escape from a body he could never escape. Now it seems impossible to escape from consciousness; we may have left ourselves too far behind. It is our consciousness which propels us farther and farther from the real truth of ourselves. Man in space, the astronaut in space, is yet again the madly reasoning non-animal, non-mythic figure who is divorced from everything. In Nerdrum’s paintings, space is space, but it is also man’s mind; it is metaphoric of consciousness, and in the space of our minds, we are dead, our bodies perish and consciousness is the tomb which engulfs us and separates us from the world.

What Nerdrum knows is that “man will always be subject to his sex and his body, having to cope with this—being dependent on an earthbound body. To this I have always remained faithful.” This kind of Dionysian faith is in many cultures uncommon, but, as far as Nerdrum is concerned, beyond matter, beyond this world and this earth, there is no spiritual dimension. Whatever there is that is sacred must sprout from matter itself, from the realm in which we live and nothing else. This is it. And to think with the body is vital for Nerdrum; it is through the “earthbound body” that we remain faithful to the earth. When Zarathustra dares us to believe even in our entrails, he is declaring that one must think with the body, too; that the voices of our bodies are as crucial as the voices of our minds, but only the truly courageous are capable of believing even in their entrails. Yet, all of us must struggle to do so; if we do not, we will continue along the apocalyptic road that we have measured out for ourselves and in measuring out this road we are measuring against ourselves. For Nerdrum, “in the long run, nature always wins,” and that is the reality which he depicts—in all of these paintings, man is at the mercy of nature, which is the enormity of space, and man himself. Nature is the adversary man cannot conquer, despite the enormity of his audacity. When we destroy the illusion of absolute originariness and dance together before the fire, we return to our most fruitful roots and are rejuvenated. As Shakespeare wrote in Troilus and Cressida, “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin”—that is a Dionysian truth and Nerdrum wrestles to depict that truth in images, giving us back the reality we have lost, or revealing in our bodies how we have lost that reality. To go with the Lotus Eaters is to go with our humanity, with the humanity that is instinctual, with our infallible drives, to risk our consciousness in favor of our indisputable truths. It is our only hope.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, March 2007)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “Islands in the Cosmos: Visions of Man Adrift and Apart”

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