Who would want, the story suggests, a world in which everything nice were partitioned off from everything horrible, thereby draining the world of its wild, nearly unnavigable paradoxes? And who would want a feminism—or any form of social justice—that lessened our apprehension of such difficult coexistences, or diminished our access to this electrical current? The genius of “The Agonized Face” is that while its narrator eventually decides—in print, at any rate—that such contradictions are unsustainable, the story at large sustains them.
RINGS OF ACTION
ARTISTS SUCH as Plath and Bacon aimed to access “the brutality of fact” without providing any narrative to house it, and yet also without courting abstraction. This is an intriguing aim, albeit one bound to produce not only formal but also political difficulties.
For many would argue that art which aims to extinguish the story behind the suffering and focus on the suffering itself partakes in a different, more insidious cruelty—that of depoliticization, of stripping cruelties from their contexts so that they seem pitiable, sensational, or inevitable, rather than contingent, avoidable, or explicable. (This was Brecht’s argument about most theater; it is also Sontag’s, in her critique of Arbus, and John Berger’s, in his of Bacon.) “The most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change,” says filmmaker Wim Wenders. For the most part, I agree. And if one suggests that the thing that cannot change is the very thing that is causing suffering, the indoctrination can be all the more toxic. Such forms of expression can seemingly act as an accomplice, even if unwittingly, to this cynicism, which turns its back on the hard work of ferreting out the reasons why a particular cruelty has occurred, who is responsible for it, who gains from it, and who suffers.
Perhaps this is why I felt a wave of disappointment after viewing the Metropolitan Museum’s 2009 retrospective of Bacon. My disappointment did not stem from the paintings themselves, but rather from the room devoted to the many visual sources from which Bacon derived images to paint. These clippings went beyond the expected homoerotic wrestling strips by Eadweard Muybridge and the film stills of the screaming lady from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. They also included innumerable clippings of dead, disfigured, or mutilated people from any number of twentieth-century conflicts, from World War II to the Algerian War.
The disappointment I felt while beholding these clippings alongside Bacon’s postcards of Michelangelo, Velázquez, and Rodin prints perplexed me. I already knew that Bacon was an omnivorous collagist who made no distinctions between so-called reality and representation as he went about isolating the screams, injuries, and physical deformations and configurations he wished to paint. I already knew that Bacon was especially keen on arenas in which human suffering and conflict are somehow both performative and real, such as in boxing matches.
And yet something about the documentary photos of bodily carnage—particularly those of rebel Algerian body parts, which came from a book of 1950s French propaganda called The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution—gave me pause. After looking at them for some time, I found I wasn’t in the mood to look at Bacon’s paintings any longer. I felt a longing for Otto Dix, whose perversity and invention coexist raucously with named historical event. I also felt a weird longing for Andy Warhol—one of the few contemporaries Bacon admired, to the surprise of those who would pit Warhol’s catatonic sheen against Bacon’s muscularity and gore. At least Warhol’s mining of newspapers for his Death and Disaster series (1967), which includes car crashes, plane crashes, suicides, electric chairs, celebrity deaths, and so on, was clean and clear—without pretension, without existential apparatus.
In retrospect, it occurs to me that part of the intensity of Bacon’s paintings may in fact stem from their own status as cutouts, as isolated rings snipped from the social fabric and sea of images from whence they came. This likely would have been Theodor Adorno’s take: in his essay “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Adorno argues that the lyric I—that is, the sound of an individuated self, in all its privacy, individuality, and autonomy—is always but an excision; it is always formed by a rupture, or break, from “the collective and the realm of objectivity.” “The more heavily social conditions weigh, the more unrelentingly the poem resists, refusing to give up any heteronomy, and constituting itself purely according to its own laws,” Adorno writes, unwittingly providing a good description of the solitary, pressurized environments created by Bacon’s rings of action, or Plath’s fiercely personal mindscapes.
THE ARTIST who has become most well known in recent years for cutting figures—almost literally—from the psychosocial fabric of history is Kara Walker. Walker works primarily with silhouettes—black figures cut out of paper and arranged on white walls in phantasmagoric tableaux set in the antebellum South. These tableaux depict a panoply of brutalities and perversions played out in the context of the singularly cruel institution of American slavery. The pornographic violence of her imagined scenes contrasts sharply with the aesthetic neatness of her chosen form. But despite Walker’s elaborate, almost baroque gestures toward the historical—which have included a meticulous engagement with the typeface, rhetoric, literary production, and handicraft of the period at stake—her work still engenders charges of narcissism, of being “more of an excursion into her personal hang-ups than an exorcism of the country’s racial psychosis,” as Howard Halle put it in a review of Walker’s widely traveled 2007 show, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.
Halle’s criticism doesn’t come out of the blue—as the above title suggests, Walker is as insistently self-referential as she is referential of history, often casting herself in her work as “The Negress” (as in the “Negress of Noteworthy Talent,” or the “Negress of Some Notoriety”). Truth be told, I find myself more politically interested in the phenomenon of Walker than aesthetically compelled by the work, as its formal properties often leave me cold. That said, the conflict Halle here poses between “an excursion into her personal hang-ups” and “an exorcism of the country’s racial psychosis” interests me a great deal. I’m not saying one can’t tell the difference between the two, but how?
We might all happily nod at the well-worn adage “the personal is political,” but what has happened when we feel as though someone has abused or appropriated history in a “too personal” way? What, or who, demarcates the boundaries of such a meshing? Or is it not the boundaries themselves that are at issue, but rather the sensibility with which they are transgressed? When does the imbrication of intimate subjectivity and historical record come off as revelatory, and when does it bring us to Halle’s conclusion: “[Walker’s] cotillion of horrors—the pickaninnies trailing feces, the Negroes choking on massa’s cock—grabs you by the throat, but to what end? As an object lesson in history, or as a form of elitist titillation? I’ll leave it to others to enjoy Walker’s visual equivalent of erotic asphyxiation, but as Samuel Goldwyn once remarked, include me out”?
Perhaps the confusion lies in the “personal is political” formulation itself, which offers but a simple copula where there actually exists a multitude of possible relations. As Jacqueline Rose has put it in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, it isn’t just that “the personal is political—for a long time feminism has insisted that what goes on in private is a political matter that concerns us all,” but rather that “psychic life in itself will not be relegated to the private, it will not stay in its proper place. It shows up on the side of the historical reality to which it is often opposed.” It’s this inappropriate “showing up” that interests me—a kind of crashing of the party that cannot be stopped, only contended with, when it occurs.
I agree, for example, that reading about the inspiration Walker derived from an “on-again, off-again complicated relationship with a white man” whom she suggests, in a 2007 New Yorker profile, was “a sadist, a racist, a misogynist . . . and perhaps less credibly, Satan himself,” alon
gside work such as Why I Like White Boys, an Illustrated Novel by Kara E. Walker Negress (2000), begins to feel like an overshare, if such a thing could be said to exist in art. (“I am easy. / and that is why White boys like me, and black / boys, suspect me of liking white boys. / funny loop,” she writes, in a series of notes collected in 2003’s Narratives of a Negress.) But after decades of hearing the bad news from Spike Lee, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, and countless others about the nearly psychotic dynamics they perceive operating between black men and white women (see Lee’s Jungle Fever, Cleaver’s testimonial to raping white women as “an insurrectionary act,” Baraka’s monstrous white-woman-villain creation in Dutchman)—not to mention centuries of literature and art by white men that gives free expression to a catastrophic erotic preoccupation with “the Negress”—why, or how, does an African-American woman artist’s exploration of her feelings about white men come off as an overshare, speaking more of her personal tastes than of historical legacies?
The assertion that “the personal is political” is surely one of feminism’s major achievements. Even so, predictably enough, women still struggle to lay their claim to it. The weird combination of narcissism, self-critique, and historical hyperbole that laces Walker’s work seems to me symptomatic—not in wholly uninteresting ways—of this problem.
Perhaps Walker’s more egregious stance has been her association of the workings of the art world (or, more particularly, her place within it) with the institution of slavery—an association many have found patently offensive, especially considering Walker’s privileged status as the youngest recipient ever of a MacArthur “genius grant,” and the recipient of solo shows at both the Whitney and the Met before she turned forty. Walker has addressed this conflict repeatedly in her work, with no small amount of self-loathing, as in this snippet from Texts (2001): “Dear you insufferable cunt . . . Why do you insist on tormenting yourself, as well as your loved ones, with Ingratitude? . . . You are given ‘chances,’ ‘opportunities,’ ‘inches,’ as well as Miles. And you take them all. And spit, spit in those faces, bite those hands defecate on heads from your bare branch perch.” While witty in its way, this doesn’t necessarily get her off the hook with those who think, as Halle puts it, that “she draws a rather outrageous parallel—that life as a famous artist is just like being a slave—in order to star in her own institutional critique.”
Halle is here referring to the parallel Walker draws in her 2005 video 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, A Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, in which a slave—referred to as “Bess, A Comely Negress,” and played by a woman other than Walker (but who stands in as a sort of double for her)—cuts out a black paper silhouette portrait of her master. Such parallels recur throughout Walker’s writings, often by way of particularly loaded word choice (as when she talks about being driven to “auction” herself off—“teeth and hair, tits and ass”—“auction” having a strong association with both the history of slavery and the art world).
Similar indictments have hounded Plath, whose invocations of Jewish identity and the Holocaust amid her psychosexual dramas have seemed, to many, the height of irresponsible trivialization and self-aggrandizement. Unsurprisingly, the reactions to such provocations have been fierce. Speaking of Plath’s notorious poem “Daddy,” in which Plath’s speaker says, “I think I may well be a Jew,” and compares her father to a Nazi, critic Leon Wieseltier (whose parents were Holocaust survivors) scolds, “Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews. The metaphor is inappropriate.” Feminist critic Jane Marcus weighs in similarly: “For some of the suffering young, the murder of six million Jews is exactly equal to the rage felt twenty years later at a father’s death. . . . Plath’s capacity as a poet to enshrine private pain and suffering in terms appropriate to the suffering of millions appeals to that special audience which needs to feel that its private suffering is unique and colossal.”
What’s striking to me here is the repeated critical claim that each artist is drawing a one-to-one ratio that “exactly equates” her private situation with the public suffering of millions of others (others whose privacy and individuality have, by now, in the minds of many, been safely blurred into the great march of history). But does Walker really say that life as a famous artist is “just like” being a slave? Does Plath really say that the murder of six million Jews is “exactly equal” to her pain or rage? (And in what way could historical event be comparable to private sensation anyway, given that they are, in some real sense, apples and oranges?) The work of Walker and Plath makes ugly parallels, outrageous associations, and occasionally appalling speculative identifications. But why collapse these various operations into “exact equivalences,” even if just for critical panache? And why ring the “appropriateness” alarm, when the injunction to behave appropriately—as both Plath and Walker know well—is but a death knell for art-making, especially for women?
There’s no denying the fact that both Plath and Walker have an appetite for self-mythologizing, which can be, at times, seriously annoying. Both remain seemingly more transfixed by the psychology—and erotics—of oppression than of liberation (see, for example, Plath’s incendiary lines from “Daddy”: “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you”—lines that reverb with Walker’s infamous contention that “all black people in America want to be slaves a little bit”). We don’t have to agree, and we don’t have to like it. But why let it extinguish our capacity to differentiate between the many possible kinds of association that art sets into motion, such as metonymy, metaphor, simile, synecdoche, analogy, and allegory?
Blurring out such distinctions delivers us into a world made up of simplified resemblances and amplified divergences—in short, a world deprived of its wide array of relationality. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” Henry James once wrote. “The exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear do so.” That’s the artist’s exquisite problem. Ours, in turn, is to grapple as alertly as possible with the proposed nature of these relations, along with the contours of the circle that momentarily circumscribes them.
As far as Walker’s work goes, the two interpretive lenses that Halle offers for it—that it is “an object lesson in history” or “a form of elitist titillation”—leave out a third term, which strikes me as the more accurate: that of psychological fantasia. In his 1925 poem “Heritage,” Countee Cullen famously asked, “What is Africa to me?” Walker’s work gives imaginative rein to the same question, along with its implicit twin: What is America to me? For both Cullen and Walker, the “to me” part of the question remains crucial, the point of generation.
The tongue-in-cheek opening sequence of 8 Possible Beginnings (a rendition of Middle Passage in which some black bodies are marked “authentic” and others, “wannabe”) already announces its historical apparatus as a sort of sham, or playpen—a loaded backdrop for present-day terms and preoccupations. The video’s most disturbing layering of this sort occurs in a later scene, in which a cutout of a young African-American girl is being followed, or prodded, into the woods by a cutout of a menacing, haggish white man. The voice-over here is performed by Walker and her young daughter, who repeat, in staggered rhythm, lines such as “I wish I were white,” “I think he’s going to hurt me,” “I wonder what it will feel like,” “I guess this is what happened to Abby,” “I wish I could get this thing off me,” and, perhaps most chillingly, “Go with the flow.”
Walker’s use of her own daughter’s voice to read such lines—lines that clearly prefigure the child’s violation—is stunning. Perhaps it is stunningly cruel—though, once again, to whom, exactly, I cannot say; one can easily imagine that the daughter made it through the recitation unscathed. The impulse here seems to be to take one’s worst fears—either for oneself now, for the child on
e was once, or for the child one is now charged with protecting—and to smear oneself and one’s child into them, even if by a reenactment laden with distances. (“They’re only paper dolls,” and so on.) The scenario evokes the plot of Beloved, in which Toni Morrison showcases how the charge of maternal protection was wickedly obstructed by slavery and profoundly complicated by subsequent racism. But Walker’s engagement of her own daughter, in 2005, has a nastier edge. It seems gratuitous, almost evil. For instead of (or in addition to) reenacting a fear, it seems to construct a trap, insofar as it hoists a nefarious legacy into the mouth of a young girl before it’s clear that she herself will be haunted by similar fears, legacies, or fantasies. The drive to undertake such a smearing becomes the fascination, as much or more than the historical incidence of such violations.
MANY COMMENTATORS on Bacon’s “rings of action” have read in them a psychological ambivalence, a simultaneous need to love and murder his subjects, including himself. “Love is the instinct which creates that figure and nurtures it to fulfillment; murder, the instinct which pins it down and finishes it off,” Russell writes. There is probably some truth here, especially insofar as it relates to the Levinas spectrum of murderous action on the one end, and instinctive protection on the other (not to mention to Bacon’s own S/M proclivities). It is not, however, an interpretation that held much interest for Bacon. When asked by David Sylvester whether he considered his distortions “both a caress and an assault,” he replied, “I think that is too logical. I don’t think that’s the way things work. I think it goes to a deeper thing: how do I feel I can make this image more immediately real to myself? That’s all.”
The Art of Cruelty Page 23