The Art of Returning

Written By: Christina Schmid Constellation 06 2.1.10

At the heart of each return lies an absence undone.

On a bright day in December, I stand inside the white cube of the Leopold Museum in Vienna’s museum quarter and furtively dab at my eyes.

Caution: Art can cause public displays of emotion and embarrassment.

A man and a woman stretch across the canvas in a relaxed embrace. Resting behind the woman, the man seems to be holding her. Her head lies on one of his arms. The other is slung across her neck, dwarfing her face in a gesture of intimate possessiveness. Or is he holding on for dear life? Her head tilts upward, where his lips nestle in her hair. Hands and feet entwined, they are at peace. No erotic frenzy here but an aftermath, a contentment.

The year, I read, is 1918. Egon and Edith Schiele, the couple in the painting, have managed to survive the First World War, only to succumb, within days of each other, to the Spanish flu.

The painting, impossible to find online and costly to obtain in reproduction from the Leopold Museum, is said to be among Schiele’s last. While Family, Squatting Women and Squatting Men all reveal the new direction of his final work, the painting of Egon and Edith is the only one left unfinished. Their feet are pale blotches of color, not yet integrated into the muted palette of their embrace.

Returning to Austria this past December for the first time since my grandmother died—a return to an absence impossible to undo—I find myself in front of this painting, inexplicably sad, moved to tears by unfinished feet, and unable to move on.

In 1996, Michael Brenson, former art critic for The New York Times, visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see the collection of Henri Cartier Bresson’s photographs. Looking at the photographs he knows so well, Brenson experiences a curious breakdown: he starts to cry, controls himself, and breaks down again. Confused and humbled by the experience, Brenson returns to tell and analyze this story repeatedly in the essays compiled in Acts of Engagement, each time trying to understand better the peculiarities of this aesthetic experience. Involuntary and immediate, Brenson’s reaction to Cartier Bresson’s photographs leads him to write:

“I believe the aesthetic response is miraculous. Such an astonishing amount of psychological, social, and historical information can be interwoven into a single connective charge that a lifetime of thinking cannot disentangle the threads” (66).

What do we connect with in art and why? Does the language of reason ever suffice to disentangle, to explain?

The language of the miraculous seems sadly out of date and yet, there was a time the mysteries of the “single connective charge” could be discussed in polite company without fear of embarrassment, when art was allowed to be more than intellectual exercise and finely woven political yarn.

But even more than a lifetime of disentangling, “the aesthetic response proposes the control of the everyday self as a construction, if not a fiction. Even at its most ecstatic, or perhaps particularly at its most ecstatic, this response is an expression of discontent and irresolution, as well as an offer of release and growth” (68).

Coming undone is a consequence of giving in to art. What stirs us and why?

Returning to Egon and Edith, there is no denying the tragic appeal of the young couple’s untimely death. At the Leopold Museum, which houses the largest collection of Schiele’s work, the topic of his premature death is broached with something resembling tact but, simultaneously, with a keen understanding of the way death sells: die young, and ideally while still beautiful, and remain the impassioned 28-year old genius forever. (A certain degree of narcissism, manifested in countless self-portraits, helps posterity maintain your image).

Posterity, (that is, the Leopolds), had this museum built with money from the Republic of Austria and the National Bank in 1994. But the Leopold Museum does more than house and pay homage to Schiele’s work. It claims him, at the heart of Vienna, as one of Austria’s favorite sons. Seeing Schiele thus transformed is an ambivalent pleasure. During his lifetime, bourgeois bureaucracy pressed law suits because of the perceived youth and nudity of his models, and the unbridled eroticism of his drawings. But the formerly stigmatized “pornographer of Vienna” now draws crowds, not in spite but because of his taboo-defying work. The prodigal son has risen to propriety.

This winter, the permanent display of Schiele’s work, housed on the spacious ground floor, was complimented by a show entitled “Munch and the Uncanny” on the lower level. After descending to the “uncanny” galleries, painted in appropriately dark shades of gray and replete with allusions to Sigmund Freud and Edgar Allen Poe, I see innocent kissers turn into blood-sucking vampires. A sick child’s profile conveys the fragility of all human existence, while the angst-ridden modern subject silently screams under heavy reddish skies. Next to Munch’s visions, reason sleeps while monsters are born—Francisco Goya, 1799. Alfred Kubin’s ominously empty staircases reveal hidden domestic terrors, while nightmares assault dreamers in their most vulnerable state—Fuseli, 1781. Perhaps most impressive: Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Imaginazione, created between 1745 and 1750, show geometrically impossible spaces, laced with staircases leading into nowhere, vast interiors devoid of any reference points or orientation. Translated into “Imaginary Prisons,” the wall plaque erases the title’s more sinister suggestion: the imagination itself becomes a prisoner here.

As I file past the paintings, etchings, and drawings, caught up in a steady stream of visitors who speak many languages, there is literally no room to stop. This art must be attractive. Audio-tours whisper alongside docents who explain the work to the crowds in definitive tones. On this Sunday before Christmas, when all the stores are closed and the seasonal shopping frenzy comes to a momentary halt, the sensation of being caught up in the throng of dutiful culture consumers is eerily reminiscent of trying to maneuver Mariahilferstrasse, one of Vienna’s prime shopping streets, in the week before Christmas. An uncanny resemblance: different, of course, yet similar enough to cause a double take.

There is something maddening in looking at art this way. Meanings, rather than proliferate idiosyncratically, are nailed down by authoritative voices. The adventures of the imagination that art ideally allows for are made to disappear. I flee up the stairs, where Schiele’s paintings greet me with that curious air of reciprocity that philosopher Elaine Scarry ascribes to the beautiful: it hails us, as if, for a moment, there was a glimpse of recognition, a kind of return.

Yet the images on this floor proffer another kind of recognition.

So familiar are they from postcards, calendars, and coffee mugs that seeing them for what they are has been getting increasingly difficult. They seem to have become absorbed by “the endless stream of trinkets and divertissements” that, in Scott Rothkopf’s mind, makes up popular visual culture. For Rothkopf, that stream is diametrically opposed to the cause of art, but, perhaps needless to say, there are those who think it is a good idea that art finally come down from its ivory tower and fully belong to the world. The age of enchantment is over. Long live the gift shop.[i]

Commodification and availability go hand in hand. With the vast spaces of the virtual at our fingertips, we can find the image anywhere in “the present democracy of the virtual:” “internalized, privatized, ‘personalized,’—miniaturized, domesticated, speeded up, put at every infant’s disposal—with the image doses more and more self-administered by interactive subjects, each convinced that the screen was the realm of freedom,” writes T.J. Clark (176). Enthralled by countless options, we easily mistake a postmodern carcer d’imaginazioni for the ultimate liberation.

Having learned how to navigate the stream of images, how to let it wash over us without commitment, its very ubiquity resulting in a counterintuitive kind of invisibility, I stand still, arrested by a painting in a museum whose status as tourist magnet and patriotic fortress discomfits me. But regardless of my reservations, isn’t this judiciously white-walled place an asset to art, installing it at the heart of the city, crowding it with hungry eyes? It could be. My unease, I realize, stems from the way this space directs attention and manipulates value. What is encouraged is not active engagement with the work in the context of the Leopold Museum, but submitting to the authority of the space. Forget about making meaning of and on your own. We are here to tell you. Forget about playfulness. Art is serious business. And it is. The Leopold Museum is part of a cultural marketplace that in turn is very much part of the spectacle of visual culture.

Impossible to remove from this culture of sensation and spectacle, art can nonetheless resist the breathless pace of consumption. Art invites a slowing down, a kind of attentiveness and imaginative scrutiny not exhausted on first viewing. Echoing Paul Valery, Clark writes, “art-ness is the capacity to invite repeated response” (115). The connective charge we feel upon returning to art may be all in our heads, but that, says Valery, allows art to evoke new reactions and different phenomena each time we pause to look. The point is to engage. The point is to let art move us, to let art take us—regardless of where that might be. The journey is always worth the risk.

References

Michael Brenson, Acts of Engagement. NY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004.

T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Scott Rothkopf, “Takashi Murakami: Company Man.” © Murakami. NY, Tokyo: Kaikai Kiki Litd., The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007. 128—159.

Paul Valery, Zur Theorie der Dichtkunst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962.

Images

1) The Leopold Museum in Vienna

2) Egon Schiele, Squatting Women (1918)

3) Egon Schiele, Family (1918)

4) Edvard Munch, Vampire (1895)

5) Edvard Munch The Sick Child (1885/1886)

6) Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)

7) Johann Heinrich Fuseli, Der Nachtmar (1781)

8)–11) Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d’Imaginazioni (1745—1750)

[i] Rothkopf writes that “Western avant-garde art has long been premised, at least to some degree, on its fundamental antagonism to mass culture and on its ongoing critical reappraisal of its own conventions—twin aims tat Murakami’s corporate project cannot easily be claimed to fulfill. For even more antithetical to the true cause of art than mass culture’s endless stream of trinkets and divertissements are the multinational corporations that produce them” (133).