Brian Dillon Essay

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
Langston Hughes, Suicide Note

The surface of Rachel Howard's paintings, the seductive texture that connects her abstract and figurative work, is a calm river of household gloss, expertly set in motion and frozen in livid colour. It is the Arst thing that strikes you  about her pictures, this seamless downpour of paint: a vertical torrent that seems to advance from one painting to another, sometimes fading out before it reaches the bottom of the canvas, only to fall unbidden from the upper edge of another. The paint seems unstoppable: an image of the onrush of time itself. In fact, as a glance at the thin, mottled edge of the painting reveals, the vertical blur is achieved with painstaking slowness and care: built up, palimpsetically, through repeated pourings, till the required effect appears. Only then does the artist consider how the stream might be interrupted, how a figure might arrange itself against the reflective plane: perhaps visibly suspended from the top of the painting, maybe contorted at its centre or splayed awkwardly, at odds with the implacably earthbound force of the background. 

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Whatever its bodily arrangement in space - and sometimes it seems to raise itself, to strain against the downward slide of the surface - the figure is falling too. It is at times merely an elongated blur, a cataract of black paint whose outline merges with the surrounding pigment, so that the body, if that is what it is, seems draped in a tattered or sodden garment. (It would be too easy to say that it resembles a shroud.) Thin rivulets of black that could be lank hair or (here one begins to imagine the scene) ropes, or even blood, connect the figure to the upper and lower edges of the canvas. In places, recognizable body parts seem to rise from the surface: the outline of a breast or thigh, an upraised profile, an arm or leg caught at an angle that would look painful if we did not already know that these are ‘suicide paintings', that the fall or slump of the figure in question has already occurred, that for all the gravitational pull of the painting, for all its energy, something has already come to an end. 

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In the most precise, though archaic, sense of the word, Howard's suicide paintings are pathetic. That is to say, they picture a certain kind of pathos a relationship between subject and viewer, or more precisely between the body of the subject and the body of the viewer, that is undeniably affective, without being reducible to voyeurism on the one hand, or pure sympathy on the other. Their painterly antecedents, as we shall see, are venerable, and no less vexed in their complex address to the spectator than Howard's own ambiguous images, or her source material. The latter is vividly contemporary. The artist's studio is filled with the photographic originals of her figures: pictures of suicides, found on the internet and abstracted from their contexts in the shape of rapidly executed line drawings which then form the basis of the paintings. What she looks for is not a scene as such - the ordinarily 'pathetic' remnants of a life, strewn about the corpse; the domestic indicators of what brought an individual to this sorry condition - but the attitude of a body. The series began, in her mind, with the suicide of an acquaintance who was discovered, she says, not in the imagined drama of the last moments ('dangling from the rafters') but kneeling in a pose almost of prayer: a position from which he might have saved himself at any moment. 

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What the paintings refuse from the outset, in other words, is the scenography of violent self-killing: ancient or modern, public or private. There is nothing here of the hapless lepers commonly photographed for the popular press of the early part of the last century, or of Andy Warhol's screenprints from such images. There is no public, such as appears in Frans Masereel's woodcut of 1925, The City: a dead body before which recoils, fascinated, a respectable crowd of onlookers and behind them an oblivious cityscape. There is scarcely any scenario, such as the Illustrated Police News gleefully depicted in the late nineteenth century: gruesome instances of decapitation by train, self-guillotining, even auto crucifixion. There is no narrative like the one painted by Frida Kahlo around The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938), in which the artist's friend is seen three times: stepping from a window, plunging, then prone. At the same time, one might object that there is no death so public as a death available for download, a death replicated on a thousand screens. What Howard shows us, or rather remakes so that we see it for the first time, is intimate but by no means private. It is, in a sense, the human as such: these are paintings (and this is what pathos entails) of life. 

Historically, paintings of suicides have been paintings of the living. This applies, paradoxically, even when what is pictured is a corpse; the painter paints the intention, or the story, or the affecting aftermath planned by the suicide: a future of which he or she remains, by virtue of that narrative, an active part. In classical art, the paradox is hardly visible, because what is depicted is the heroism of the suicide's intent, or the determination of the act itself. Ajax, in a seal made in Corinth around 700 BC, prepares for his death by burying the handle of his sword in the ground and falling on it: what we see is the body at the moment of contact with the blade - a body still active, muscular, heroic even, or especially, at this extreme. Later, in Renaissance imaginings of the classical ideal of eager renunciation of the world, Socrates will willingly accept the hemlock; Lucretia, having told her husband of her rape, will stab herself in the heart; the Stoic Cato will end his life rather than surrender to Caesar. Tragedy, not pathos, animates these scenes. 

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Against the heroic suicide is set the abject suicide, who is usually female or, if male, feminized to a state of extreme passivity. Such suicides are in no sense heroic, but wretched or despairing. They include the love-lorn hero of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), whose death apparently inspired many young men and women in Europe to end their lives in the ensuing decades. In 1778, Christiane von Lassberg, thinking herself abandoned by her lover, drowned herself with a copy of Werther in her pocket, and an apprentice shoemaker threw himself from a window with a volume tucked in his waistcoat: countless other examples were reported, and Goethe was accused of having morally depraved and mentally enfeebled his readers. Suicide, in other words, was a form of Romanticized sentiment or aestheticized weakness. 

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The suicides in Howard's paintings are not heroic: after centuries of medicalization of self-killing, we no longer credit the idea of a classically dignified embrace of death. But nor are they exactly abject. Instead, they present a particular sort of passivity: an aesthetic category which the art historian Stephen F. Eisenman has called a pathos formula'. It consists, precisely, in the arrangement of a body: a suffering body that appears throughout the history of western art and proposes, each time, a complicity between victim and viewer. It is not merely a latter of what we so easily refer to as voyeurism, but of a figure that suffers and appears to take pleasure in that suffering. It is the body, for example of the Christian saint, who gives himself up without complaint to his martyrdom, as in the numerous depictions of the multiple piercing of Saint Sebastian. It is manifest in Michelangelo's Dying Slave (c. 1513), who throws back his head in a kind of ecstasy and reveals his perfect body. 

What would it mean to reanimate such an aestheticized form of physical suffering now - and more pressingly, perhaps even scandalously, what would it mean to apply it to a suicide? The question is misleading, because the category has never really gone away: it is there, for example, in our communal imagining of the passive (even when self-willed) deaths of certain rock stars: Morrison, Vicious, Curtis, Cobain. It is present in more ominous form in the numerous photographs that emerged in 2004 from the prison at Abu Ghraib. For the US soldiers who took those photographs, says Eisenman, the apparent complicity of the Iraqi prisoners - their enforced 'enjoyment of their torture, sexual humilation and bodily defilement with their own excrement - was exactly the point of the images. 'Pathos' in this context does not mean that the figures were meant to elicit sympathy, but that they appeared to give themselves to a perverse mutual pleasure in their degradation. They were meant to aestheticize themselves at the moment of their greatest suffering, or even of their deaths. 

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Howard's suicide paintings are an attempt to face up to this intimacy between torture and aesthetics, and to rescue from that recognition a sense of something that we would have to call (with certain caveats in place about such grand terms) human dignity. In practice, what this means is that she invites us to look very closely at the bodies in question. How to do that, given her own ravishing aesthetic, the veils of paint and the layers of the process by which these paintings are produced? In fact, it is the very surface that allows us to see what we might call the generic humanity of her subjects. 

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I say 'generic' because, first of all, we have no idea who these people are. Howard has given some of them names, she says, in order to confer on them, in death, a dignity that their public exposure has stripped away. But the names are as much markers of our distance from them as indicators of their individuality - what matters is rather the specificity of a pose (if we may use such a word here) than identity as such. Take Eva (2005) for example: a dangling woman whose ankle length dress is made of whorls of paint, so that the contours of her body have almost vanished and she is almost a rectangle of black at the centre of the canvas. Her face, like the faces of all of Howard's subjects, has been blackened. And yet: her kneeling posture, her head thrown back like Theresa of Avila in ecstasy, cannot fail to give her a saintly aspect that connects her too to countless remembered images of the tortured or lynched. The affinity could look crass - one thinks of photographs of Holocaust victims in 1945, thoughtlessly captioned 'the martyrs of Belsen' - but it is the beauty of the pose that sets the painting in uneasy complicity with the whole history of the 'pathos formula’. The artist has not added beauty to the original, but discerned in the lineaments of the pose an extreme ambiguity at the heart of the idea of bodily beauty. In Ecstasis (2006), the same kneeling pose has become little more than a stream of descending paint, with the suicide's body merely suggested by the possible curve of an arm and the hint of her protruding feet. 

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The art-historical resonances of such images become, if anything, even clearer in Howard's preliminary line drawings. The drawing, as we have seen, subtracts a good deal of context from the photographed figure. But it also adds something. Where the finished paintings at times resemble the ravished figures of Klimt or the tormented bodies of Francis Bacon, the drawn body recalls the isolated bodies of Egon Schiele: ravaged and erotic, alone and imploring. In the drawings, pathos is a matter of the line, or more exactly of the outline: the solid border that separates them from the surrounding space. Bodies hunch over, standing, as if still alive, or splay themselves naked across the paper as solid silhouettes. As in the paintings, some of them are hanging, occasionally sending a slim black line dripping downward from an upraised arm. Their faces are all obscured. 

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Pathos, for Howard, is not only a question of our feeling for the boundaries of a suffering human body - her drawings of dogs locate it instead in a sort of generic physicality. Her canines are thin, addled creatures: shivering, contorted, both comically alive and hardly there at all: mere scraps of animal being. The 'black dog', of course, denotes depression or melancholia, but these creatures are more vivid, less numinous than that: their haunches quiver with fear, hunger and lust; they squat or curl themselves into stranded black smudges of isolation. It would be misleading to say that they resemble the human figures, because no such difference can really be adduced: what we see in the suicides is an animal being that is no less human for that.

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 In his book Homo Sacer (1995), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that the horror of the Nazi death camps consists not in the reduction of individuals to something inhuman, but more exactly in the stripping away of everything but life itself. It is the logic too of those non-places, such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners are reduced to a condition of mere bodily existence. Bereft of all other attributes, left only with their bare life', the victims may be killed, tortured, or simply neglected, with impunity. This is what the suicide shares (and this runs counter to all moral judgements of his or her 'irresponsibility") with the victim of torture. All that remains is life itself, expressed - because this is literally all that remains - in the attitude of the suffering body: slumped, kneeling, prostrate or suspended. 

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This is one of the paradoxes at the heart of Howard's suicide paintings: the subjects in many cases look as though they are still alive, as if they embody that state of living death that is the object of what we call tragedy. The tragic hero is alive but acts as though already dead: his body, on stage, is an emblem of his coming demise. In classical art, that means that he continues to act in the face of his own death, but modern tragedy entails a level of passivity (Hamlet is the obvious example) that reduces the hero to his own bare life, which is perilously close to death. It is what those who have never come close to killing themselves cannot quite grasp: that for the would-be suicide, stripped already of all the signs of life, there is hardly any difference between life and death. Living, as such, is far behind him, and all that is left is this fragile thing: bare life. 

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Suicide, as Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), is 'prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art'. It makes no sense, in the context of Rachel Howard's paintings and drawings, to speak as we so often do of the ‘aestheticization of suffering', still less of a specific 'glorification' of suicide: both imply a distance between object and treatment that is not really there. The haggard black figures at the centre of her suicide paintings ought in a way to stain the surface of the river of colour, to break its gorgeous tension. But there is in reality no distinction to be made between the beauty of the surface and the pathos of the subject. Although the process is protracted - she must wait for successive layers to dry and stay vigilant for snags or flaws in the fluid skin of the painting - the figure and ground are part of the same aesthetic moment. What Howard discovers in her photographic originals, then transmutes in her line drawings, is already aestheticized. That is perhaps why she can refer to five of her abstract works as suicide paintings: because the pall of colour that descends over them is already an image of a process at once infinitely deliberate (in Camus's terms) and absolutely final. The river asks her for a kiss, and she dives in.