At left is Uncovering, no. 1, from an in-progress series by the Canadian artist Frank Rodick. Called Revisitations, the new series roams freely across time and cultures for images from the charnel house of our collective history. The source for this particular image comes from an old labor movement pamphlet on World War I and depicts the carcass of a horse that, in dying on the battlefield, has become ensnared in barbed wire. The triptych itself is small and mounted inside a box. Lift the lid and the scene unveils itself for you.
Some time back, Rodick sent me a jpeg and asked for my response. So, one afternoon, I sat down with the image and a strong internet connection. For a number of reasons – my admiration for Rodick’s work, my fascination with animals, my own magpie way of thinking – I wanted to give this piece a concentrated reading. And, then, I wanted to see what you could do with just a single image.
The answer seems to have been: quite a bit – especially when dealing with this particular artist. The internet, it turns out, played a major role in shaping my thinking. That mess of an archive enabled me to dig into ideas that might otherwise have remained half-buried. Those ideas are best understood as associations – impulses even. That is to say, in relating Uncovering to the works I have in what follows, I don’t mean to suggest linear influences. I have no way of knowing whether the connections I see are intentional on Rodick’s part. Nor, to be quite frank, do I care. Rather, what interests me is the way images flow through our collective experience and the way good ones – really powerful ones – never really disappear.
What follows is an expanded version of what I wrote that afternoon.
The Peep Show
The stereoscope was invented in 1838 and popularized in this country during the 1880s by Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing,” he wrote, “taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.”
The stereoscope creates the illusion of depth, immersing you in the scene, and it remained popular until another immersive art form – the moving picture – arrived in town. By the 1950s, the stereoscope reemerged, but now as the ViewMaster, a children’s toy.
But that desire to immerse ourselves in the work of art remains strong – as strong, perhaps, as the desire among artists to submerge us.
The most notorious example in 20th century art is Duchamp’s enigmatic masterpiece Etant donnés 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage [Given: 1. The waterfall, 2: The illuminating gas]. Jasper Johns called it the strangest work of art in any museum. For its time, it was a rule-changer, and even today, when anything goes – at least in theory – Etant donnés has an uncanny power to shock. For one thing, Duchamp doesn’t let you get away with anything: you are complicit in this work of art as in very few others that come to mind. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which houses the piece, has hidden it away in its own private gallery. Turn the corner into that room and you face a Spanish wooden door with ironwork fittings. It might be something from one of Poe’s gothic castles. On examination, you discover two peepholes. Peer through them and you encounter a naked woman in the grass. Behind her rises a hilly landscape where a waterfall, animated by a flickering light source, seems to pour into a nearby lake.
The setting could be read as a little Eden – the grassy meadow, the distant waterfall, the brilliant sunlit sky. Plus, we know that the model for Etant donnés was Duchamp’s lover, Maria Martins.
But if this is Eden, it’s Eden after the fall. Martins seems more used here than alluring. Her body might be mutilated: from our viewing angle, she is effectively faceless; her pubic hair has been shaved. Were it not for the fact that she holds a gas lamp in her outstretched hand, you might take her for a corpse. What you’re looking at seems more like a nightmare – a crime scene – than a love nest.
Duchamp was born in 1887 at the dawn of the moving picture era. In France, the Lumiere Brothers introduced their Cinematographe in 1895; in the U.S., Thomas Edison unveiled his Vitascope in 1896. But the invention of cinema was less a dawning than a culmination of a centuries-long fascination with optics. The camera obscura (first built c. 1000 but Aristotle had laid out the theory around 330 BC), the magic lantern (c. 1420), the peep show (1437), the cyclorama (1787), the kaleidoscope (1816), the zoetrope (1860) – all way stops in the history of looking.
To say that visual artists are interested in the seen world is beyond obvious. But art-making has always included another, fabulist strain. Think Bosch. Check out Bomarzo. And the emergence of all these mechanisms for seeing did more than disrupt the aura of the work of art. These various devices enabled people – artists and showmen alike – to go after something more, to follow what is perhaps a deeper need: the urge to create a second reality, to immerse viewers in another world.
The story that early audiences panicked at footage of a locomotive heading toward them, while apocryphal, nonetheless points to the immersive quality of film. You sit in a darkened theater and enter someone else’s dream world. The peep show and the stereograph create a similarly intimate experience: it’s just you and the image.
So it is with Uncovering. Like Duchamp’s use of the peep show, the format Rodick has chosen forces you into an intimate relationship with what is revealed because you discover it on your own. No respectful distance separates you from the image before you, no fellow gallery-goers distract you with their chatter, no competing artworks call to you from the opposite wall.
The Charnel House
Like the Duchamp, too, Uncovering speaks of unspeakable things. Both have the whiff of death about them, and each, in its own particular way, brings to mind a deposition or an entombment.
The status of Maria Martins is ambiguous, of course: is she dead or merely post-coital? Whatever your interpretation, she is nothing but a body – flesh incarnate? At the first, literal level, Christianity, like Etant donnés, is about nothing but sex and death: the Bible spins the tale of a man (born of a virgin) who dies a gruesome death. Only for Duchamp – and for Rodick – the narrative doesn’t end in the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, but rather in something far more troubling and far more sinister.
Representing yet another carcass, Uncovering draws on this same tradition in Western art. On a purely formal level, it borrows the triptych format that was so typical of representations of the death of the Christ. (Is it coincidental that the triptych format is much favored by Francis Bacon – one of Rodick’s favorite modern painters?)
Even more to the point, it shares some of the same sad elegance of those images. The horse has fallen back into the barbed wire, and the arc described by its neck is as graceful as van der Weyden’s or Caravaggio’s rendering of Christ’s lifeless body. Both are nothing more than a sack of bones and flesh, but how tenderly they have been portrayed.
These swooning figures draw us in – is death ever so beautiful? – only to break our hearts. That something so compelling, so vital is nothing but a carcass – dead meat – is almost unbearable.
All the fancy art-historical references aside, Uncovering is, all on its own, a tragic report back from the war zone – and a particularly horrific one at that.
We have a taste, certainly, for images of war: Robert Capa, David Douglas Duncan, Doug McCullin, Larry Burrows, – all brought back searing pictures that gave us a sense of battle. And if we weren’t reading the picture press, we could always turn on the evening news for the film footage.
During the Civil War and World War I, the folks back home saw less of the action – the technologies weren’t yet in place – but they could purchase stereographs of life on the frontlines. The technical limitations restricted the subject matter to fairly static scenes of the trenches and the gruesome aftermath. But even a century on, those images of the corpse-strewn battlefield have lost none of their tragic power.Consider then, the people who bought these mementoes. When you think about the physical experience of looking at a stereograph, at the intimacy of the viewing – you can’t shift your gaze away – you’re stunned that there was ever a market for these things.
Seen on their own, without the aid of the stereo viewer, they remind me of altar paintings – not triptychs this time but the small-scaled double paneled paintings of the Northern Renaissance that served as objects of private devotion. And perhaps that is precisely the function these grisly images served.
Miserere mei, Deus
Industrial models of killing made their first appearance in the American Civil War and reached a fever pitch in World War I. Both saw once unimaginable casualty counts (700,000 and 16 million, respectively). In light of all this human carnage, I have to ask myself why I am so moved by an image of a horse.
The obvious, and not altogether wrong, answer is sheer sentimentality. Having urbanized and mechanized most of the animal kingdom out of our lives, we’ve lost touch not only with them but with something essential in ourselves. So we fetishize the poor creatures, projecting on them our dream of what we’ve lost. They are, we believe, innocent and, as innocents, somehow more deserving of our compassion.
But innocence has nothing to do with the matter. At Gettysburg, at the Somme, Anzio, Normandy, Khe Sanh, Falluja, the righteous no less than the wicked were slaughtered – like Rodick’s horse – on the battlefield.
To me, Uncovering acts as a devotional object – like a Northern Renaissance diptych or one of those Civil War stereographs. Like those latter images, like Etant donnés, this piece implicates you, giving you no choice but to look, to see the carnage, to enter into the charnel house. The three vignettes create a sense of movement across the picture plane, and the peep-show format draws you into a deep physical space. You become both participant and voyeur – scanning the ruins of the battlefield and yet peering into another world, another reality.
Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.
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You can see Uncovering, no. 1, at Labyrinth of Desire, a mid-career retrospective of Frank Rodick's work curated by Katherine Ware. The exhibition opens March 13 and runs through April 24 at Colton & Farb Gallery in Houston.
