Impacto ambiental

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Leon Golub’s work combines a bald and sloganeering claim with very violent narrative imagery and powerful affect. These combine into what could be described as ‘affect as critique’. Some

of the images he has selected are particularly nasty and transgressive and this is compounded by the large size of his works. Interestingly, as well as size, he employs a device that Tuymans also uses in that he avoids providing any background or context to concentrate the narrative. This decision is made (by both) to remove any distraction from the pictured incident or situation so that it gets undivided attention139. If we go back to the discussion of how we come to new understandings through dialogue, we can see that this over-directed focus indicates a lack of confidence in the audiences’ ability to pick up the message. The tactic removes from the viewer the work of making prioritising choices about what they are seeing and what is important to them. Such dialogue ceases to be a free exchange between interlocutors because the text does not depend for its meaning-making on both parties equally. An important conclusion of my theoretical research is that artwork functions most effectively if it disrupts ‘the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as the vehicle’140.

Fig. 56. Leon Golub, Interrogation III,305 x 421.5 cm, 1981

There is very little ambiguity in Interrogation III (Fig. 56). There is no rupture between the sayable and the thinkable. The stilted and awkward almost choreographed disposition of the bodies – as though staged to mime action – gives Golub’s work a strange sense of suspension in time which disrupts a normal mimetic reading. The pictured brutalisation of the woman, in itself, provides very little opportunity for anything other than the limited response of outrage and rejection. The lack of contextual information increases that emotional concentration through

focusing on the single line of information the viewer must process. The isolation of the stream of narrative, out of its context, is a deliberate strategy designed to limit the range of responses available to the audience. While this painting is didactic, like Goya’s, it does carry the authenticity and conviction of its author in its cry of outrage and protest. This recognisably human response, of itself, invites the viewer’s engagement through identification with the author. Context provides important ingredients for understanding, in part, through the way it obscures and complicates agreement. It is the ambiguity of contextual information that sets the stage and enables dialogic relation and debate. To the extent that this is not available, through whatever sources, the artist is manipulating the viewer and thereby undermining the interpretive capacity of his audience.

In provoking an immediate revulsion, the viewer is simply being asked to assent to the image by responding with the same emotion as that presented. The message is clear; two men are abusing a naked woman who is defenceless, sexually exposed and vulnerable. It is hard to find a reason for making the image, since anyone would already agree that this sort of situation was deplorable. No persuasion is needed. Some mitigation of this banality, as often occurs with critique, comes in the title. The word ‘interrogation’ introduces the idea that the two aggressors are representing the State. Golub is making a general claim, not about men, but about men as the representatives of (fascist) institutional power, and institutional power as having no bond to the laws of common humanity. This is still problematic however, since his critique of fascism is asserted but not substantiated. This painting is simply polemic because the simple association of inhuman behaviour with the authoritarian state is accomplished emotionally but without any argument. If the painting is to be regarded simply in terms of its emotional impact, it succeeds. It is the one of the most affective of all the paintings I cite in this research. To criticise its value as critique is not necessarily to criticise its impact as a painting. The work focuses on reminding the audience of the bonds of common humanity that are being violated.

Two Black Women and a White Man (Fig.57) offers a contrast with Interrogation III, it provides the potential for the reader to enact more interpretive nuance. This is, in part, the result of the way the bodies are disported – the moment itself is poignant rather than violent – but it is also a result of the increased context provided and the scratchy rendering of both the figures and their background. In later work Golub used this confusion between figure and ground more fully141.

Fig.57. Leon Golub, Two Black Women and a White Man, 305 x 414 cm, 1986.

Some painters – notably Pierre Bonnard – have used this confusion between figure and context to force the viewer into a process of untangling and interpretation. Being required to create some perceptive order out of a complicated interwoven arrangement of information and distraction, is much more analogous to everyday living, than simplistic presentations that occur with too much focus.

The difference between these works (Interrogation III and Two Black Women and a White Man) arises from both Golub’s subject matter and treatment. The scene he is presenting in the latter work is making a wry and gentle observation about cultural change. It is more subtle and as such creates the potential for a much more intimate engagement by the reader. The sloganeering of Interrogation III defines the solidarity between painter and viewer as a political and emotional bond. A more subtle observation, which anticipates reciprocity from the audience would indicate a different basis of solidarity. A format that presupposes the separate and discriminating integrity of the other forges a deeper affirmation of commonality. As Ricoeur has said, the remarkable quality of the text is its ability to reveal a ‘possible way of looking at things’ when the ‘world horizon of the reader is fused with the world horizon of the writer’. The understandings that make this fusion possible are accessed by the viewer through the presentation of an artwork containing consideration and qualification that conveys a recognizably human mixture of certainty and uncertainty. This is the sort of indecision we might

expect from ourselves. It is difficult to recognize as a fellow, the person who doesn’t present his critique as an enigma for him/herself also.

Two qualities in Interrogation III date the painting as of Golub’s era but not our own. As I have claimed previously, good critique in painting, or any other medium, is characterised by its ability to enlighten a range of discourses at the same time. Both the emotionalism of the claim of conviction contained within the focus of the work, and its proselytizing, are not useful critical modes currently. This is partly to do with the contemporary over-use of such appeals to the self evidence of moral righteousness, but also to the over-use of modes which deliberately instigate emotional response as entertainment. What locates it historically most clearly, is its failure to place any reliance on the interpretive power of the viewer. By contrast this criticism does not apply to Two Black Women and a White Man because an active, interpretive engagement is possible on the basis of the expectation of the artist that the viewer has an equivalent interest in, and awareness of, the situation that Golub has so wryly observed.

A final observation about Golub is to do with his reference to the real. His paintings do not quote photography in the way Jusidman’s, Hume’s or Tuymans’ do. Neither do they quote the tradition of painting from life that Currin’s do. The paintings do make a reference to reality, but it is a literary reality of fiction as subliminally remembered folklore and legend. Golub’s figures have some of the stilted awkwardness of the Frankenstein trope which augments the violence to the point where it becomes the ‘fiction’ of archetype. It may be this that allows his figuration such powerful affect. It is perhaps a confirmation of Buchloh’s claim about the use of photography in the painting of the time that Golub hasn’t employed a photographic truth claim to substantiate this image. Interrogation III could have entrained another compelling discourse had it included a reference to a time and place. The lack of such a reference is both an indication of the painting’s era, and of the novelty of the truth claim in painting. Thankfully, as I have discussed previously, it is now available to substantiate and augment affect.

While the overt subject of Interrogation III could be said to overlap with my own overt subject matter in Pictures of the Body the differences between them could be expressed in terms of polarities. Golub emphasises and places his expectation of solidarity in emotion whereas mine is oriented more intellectually. Golub is assertive whereas Pictures of the Body is subdued.

Fig. 58. Showing the scale of Golub’s painting Prometheus II (on the left) at 302.5 x 246.5 cm.

This expressionist commitment to grandeur was standard in Golub’s era and is now a feature of Tuymans work. As a sign, when used regularly, size dominates the viewer/subject. The initial phenomenological encounter with this domination precludes the possibility of dialogue. The awe, inspired by overwhelming size, is more in keeping with religious observance than horizon fusion.

My paintings are small and his are large etc. This not only reflects the differences between authors and their personal history, it also reflects the politics of the era and the differing cultural contexts. One of the requirements and characteristics of critical art work is its response to contemporary local conversation even when discussing historical subjects.

All of the artists discussed here, and many others not discussed, here have contributed to this research through cooption or elimination. Even so, the vocabulary and grammar of critique is not a simply ‘available formulation’; the vocabulary of each of these artists depends entirely on their own reflexive capacity, history and circumstance. I suggested at the beginning that their work has been most useful as examples of what not to do rather than the opposite. The reason for this is that critique is always required to find and express authentic difference. It was the difference between these artists and my own history that was their most positive contribution. Their cumulative affirmation of their own difference has assisted me in formulating the environment from which I aim to continue that same tradition of dialogue.