IN THE GALLERY
‘Painting with Light’
Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the modern age
Tate Britain: Exhibition
11 May – 25 September 2016
I.
Looking at paintings, sculpture, drawings, in short absorbing ‘art’ exhausts me. After about thirty minutes I need to sit down. And so I now sit on a bench in the Tate Britain and close my eyes. An image, a woman’s face, is planted there, a delicate pre-Raphaelite face, pursed lips, and intense unforgiving eyes. I knew those eyes well, they were Z’s eyes cold as ice in the face of some real, or imagined, -much more frequently imagined, -infidelity on my part.
In the gallery, strangers mingle and talk in lowered voices as if at a garden party thrown by the Queen. But in this filtered atmosphere ghosts flit silently amongst the crowd or stare down from canvases as they engage endless critics and admirers. I do not really fear these ghosts; indeed, it is these very ephemeral phantoms with whom I have come to talk; but I always feel a slight trepidation at what precisely they will reveal to me each time I open myself up to them.
We think that it is only our past that haunts us, this is not so, indeed, the spectres of things to come are far more to be feared, but are fortunately slightly rarer. They appear to be absent from the gallery today. Certainly they could have nothing to say about poor dead Chatterton, draped across his garret bed his face as white as a chalk sea cliff, a perfect Romantic metaphor. The boy genius, cruelly treated in life by the Augustans, only to have the Romantics claim him as one of their own.
Photography is much more deceptive than any painting could ever be in that it purports to present us with the true image, with the ‘real.’ Yet at no time was this particular fallacy so much disassembled as in the immediate period following its birth. Photography was embraced by some artists, not for its ability to depict ‘true’ images, but for its ability to deceive and falsify that paradoxically can serve to make sense and illuminate reality.
A woman stands in the shade, freckles of light scatter across the wall behind her as she stands fixed in a pose with a bowl of fruit, her neck adorned with beads. It is the eyes however that fix our attention asking questions of us the answers to which she will never know, for it is we who know what the future holds.
Though the past recedes ever more quickly out of our grasp,
‘…like a torrent round a rock.’ [1]
until it becomes increasingly difficult to track the rapidly disappearing years. Time sucking away people, places, things. Only here in the gallery does time stand still.
II.
Where does this tiredness come from, is it the pulling of the ghosts or the weight of ‘art?’
‘One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.’[2]
It is, of course, both. Every picture demands our attention, our concentration, desires our commitment and since we/I cannot possibly commit to each and every one of these images and have constantly to explain this to each, in turn. This is what exhausts me.
There are images though that stay, embed themselves, the sad eyes of the young woman in Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,’ or the eerie faces in "Evening on Karl Johan Street" by Munch. " They come to stay, images of civilisation or of its decay.
As I stare at the meandering light that whispers through the trees, my view is temporarily blocked by a young woman who seems to want to climb into the picture. I have some sympathy, though for me it is books that I want to enter.
Galleries should, like cathedrals, be practically empty to allow for conversation to flow unfettered between you and the objects that fascinate and inspire. As it is in The Tate Britain this conversation is constantly being interrupted.
‘In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo’
Behind the woman holding fruit the wall suggests a cool tranquillity. I think now of that coolness, the coolness of fresh spring water, the coolness of church pillars, a place of refuge on a hot summers day. Churches too can provide refuge from the savage ticking of the clocks. If you stand still in an empty church for long enough you can experience time stand still. In that moment, you become the hunted who has found temporary refuge, a respite from the chase.
In the next room, there is a picture that unsettles me. I saw it on my first tour of the exhibition and it said something to me that I couldn’t quite make out. I now return to find her, her eyes closed, desperately trying to break free of the pose that has been forced upon her. A woman trapped in time. I, however, can be of no assistance, besides she does not know how lucky, how safe, she is protected by a seal of glass against the ravages of the passing years, unlike the rest of speeding like a skydiver whose parachute has failed toward our inevitable deaths.
As I say, I can be of no assistance to her but this cuts both ways. Art cannot save me from myself, not even music can accomplish this, though both sweeten and greatly enrich existence. Books on the other hand perhaps....
‘if I could find a real good book I wouldn’t have to come out and look at what they have done to my song.” [Melanie Safka]
About a year ago in the Tate Modern I entered a room at the centre of which was an installation by Mira Schendel, this consisted of a cube from floor to ceiling made up of thousands of strands of thread, its foggy translucence stopped me in my tracks.* For a second, no more, I understood something of the nature of time, and then my awareness dissolved becoming a mere appreciation of something remarkable.
It is often that way, back out on the street again time feels unspeakably vulgar, like a belch that makes me forget the relative solitude of the gallery.
*It was a rare moment when the room was empty of any other visitors.
II.
In the next room, there is a picture that unsettles me. I saw it on my first tour of the exhibition and it said something to me that I couldn’t quite make out. I now return to find her, her eyes closed, desperately trying to break free of the pose that has been forced upon her. A woman trapped in time. I, however, can be of no assistance, besides she does not know how lucky, how safe, she is protected by a seal of glass against the ravages of the passing years, unlike the rest of speeding like a skydiver whose parachute has failed toward our inevitable deaths.
‘if I could find a real good book I wouldn’t have to come out and look at what they have done to my song.” [Melanie Safka]
About a year ago in the Tate Modern I entered a room at the centre of which was an installation by Mira Schendel, this consisted of a cube from floor to ceiling made up of thousands of strands of thread, its foggy translucence stopped me in my tracks.* For a second, no more, I understood something of the nature of time, and then my awareness dissolved becoming a mere appreciation of something remarkable.
It is often that way, back out on the street again time feels unspeakably vulgar, like a belch that makes me forget the relative solitude of the gallery.
