RACHEL HOWARD: GRAVITY & LIGHT Mario Codognato
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity, Grace is the only exception ... Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity. (Simone Weil) [I]
In his seminal essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle', Sigmund Freud wrote about Eros and Thanatos as representatives of the dual impulses of life and death inhabiting the psychological and physical dimension of every human being. Freud maintained that each of us is driven by these two opposing instincts. Thanatos, the impulse of death, manifests itself as aggression and self-destruction, while Eros, the Greek god of love, is the constructive impulse of life. Externally, these impulses take the form of the constructive and destructive behaviour that individuals perform. Mentally, we also exhibit this disposition toward both life and death: we love and we hate, just as we create and destroy, in our everyday lives.
Inevitably, art intrinsically contains and bears witness to this duality in all its potential forms, manifestations, interpretations and nuances. Indeed, art derives its power and reason for being from this very multiplicity of potential ways to interpret and represent.
Rachel Howard's painting remains suspended between the two sides of this duality--as if balancing on a rope that is pulled taut and suspended over a void. It deciphers these duelling impulses and distils their essence, tracing its silhouette. Her paintings are like skin that is blood-soaked due to love and its potential extreme consequences. They reproduce and make flesh both the skin of life and the skin of death. Howard's use of household gloss paint not only brings her canvases closer to everyday reality, as if they were an extension of the surfaces that we see and touch in our daily lives, but also helps the work stand out and dazzle us with the intensity of the red of the flesh and the black of the sinister, dark shadows that appear in all of her paintings. Her works are a kaleidoscope, alternating between details and close-up views of overlapping backgrounds, ghosts and illusions. In dealing with life and death and the mystery that they contain, along with their inevitability and intrinsic differences, her work captures and summarises intense moments in which the flow of consciousness- of both Eros and Thanatos--is at its most dramatic and extreme.
However labour-intensive, complex and time- consuming it may be to execute a painting, the final work reproduces the fraction of a second of an imperceptible moment and a vital and mortal spasm, seen as if under a microscope or through the gauzy curtain of memory. The clear gravitational demarcation of the brushstrokes lends a vibrant dynamic that makes the dividing line between life and death even more ambiguous. Is it blood that flows, throbbing with love, with endeavour, with pain? Is it blood that tinges a shroud, a sacrificial altar, a butcher's block?
Paintings are created by the living for the living, but they are also intended and conceived for survivors. A painting may become an epitaph, a tombstone, a memorial to an earlier era that has been lost to the past. The ambiguity created by this gravitational force purposefully makes it impossible to distinguish between the abstract and the figurative in Howard's work. With this kind of physical and organic flow of colour, everything becomes a trace, a mark, a stain left by life. Already in the two early works Brilliant White Three (1998) and End One (1998), the white that defines and frames the composition on the canvas works like an expanse of skin. It seems to be a patch of humanity, and the contrasting background is positioned on it and infiltrates the canvas like a tattoo, a lesion, an abrasion or a burst blood vessel.
If love and death are synonymous with preservation and destruction, self-preservation and self-destruction, then the seven cardinal sins, described by Aristotle as 'the clothes of evil', [ii] are much more ambiguous today as they are interpreted by Western society. Following in the tradition of artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Howard created a series of seven paintings, each one dedicated to one of the cardinal sins (2002-03). These evocative works garner their power to provide visceral impact and inspire ambivalence by subverting formal representation to instead generate a trail of light and bewitching reflections. In this way, Howard reinforces and recalls the dubious, complex and sinister appeal of the seven deadly sins, which perpetually lie in wait. A representation of evil must consider its meaning and the ways in which it will be analysed and judged. In our contemporary, post-industrial society, avarice and gluttony, lust and sloth are all part of the chain of finance and production that creates products and services. Indeed, these survive and flourish due to the very existence and definition of the seven deadly sins.
In another series by Howard, Repetition Is Truth – Via Dolorasa (2005-08), the artist offers a fresh vision of one of the major iconographic and iconic images in the history of art: the Stations of the Cross. Since Medieval times, through the eighteenth century when Giandomenico Tiepolo created his frescos in the Church of San Polo in Venice, to Mel Gibson's contemporary cinematic interpretation of The Passion, the arduous path that Christ follows, bearing the cross towards the walls of Golgotha for his own crucifixion, has been synonymous with and a metaphor for the capacity of human beings to inflict cruelty upon others. This episode of utmost evil is about gauging one's own power by causing others pain.
In 2004, the photographs of the unspeakable violence and abuse that American soldiers inflicted on Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison camp were circulated around the world by the media. The contemporary Western world was reminded of the ghosts of the abyss of genocide, the banality of evil, and the hatred that impedes progress toward an ethical and civil utopia- a heavy weight bearing down on culture and history. The contrast between the suffering and humiliation of the victims and the jovial and entertained attitude of their tormentors presented paradoxical and oxymoronic emotions. The viewer's conscience was short circuited with immeasurable and logic-defying repulsion, anguish and dejection. The images resembled a Medieval fresco of hell, with the shocking nudity of the damned and the sardonic grins of devils dressed in camouflage. Indeed, they took the same form that the human imagination has conjured up as a vision of hell over thousands of years- punitive afterlife for the wicked - under all religious beliefs and in all corners of the globe.
Of all the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, one in particular has been so widely distributed and reproduced by the media that it has become a visual synonym for the tragic events, perhaps in part, paradoxically, because it was the least explicitly cruel image released. The image is a portrait of a hooded Iraqi prisoner strung up to electrical wires. His arms are outstretched, forming mere coincidence? the shape of a cross. His obvious suffering, his anticipation of the fate that awaits him and his pose immediately and inevitably recalls the figure of Christ on the cross at Golgotha. His image speaks of sacrifice, but also transmits the universal symbolic message of man's suffering (reaching beyond Christian confession), the frailty of the body and the precarious nature of human existence. This image, free of rhetoric, devoid of theatricality or construction, more than any other image of our time, is bound to the iconic tradition of the crucifixion in Western art history.
This is a documentary photograph depicting something that actually happened, differentiating the image from a staged version of the Stations of the Cross, whether a religious or artistic reconstruction. Thus, current affairs, history and myth co-exist in this image. Howard uses this powerful photograph as a starting point, a study and the conceptual and visual basis for her version of the fourteen Stations of the Cross that Jesus had to walk before his crucifixion. [iii] This series was exhibited in a deconsecrated Gothic church (the Donna Regina Vecchia Church in Naples). It was hung above the altar between two frescos of Jesus on the cross from the Renaissance period. There, it became an epiphany of pain; timeless yet simultaneously anchored in everyday reality, omnipresent and absurd, yet another symbol of destruction and, ultimately, of self-destruction.
Each of the other fourteen large canvases in the series represents a different station of the cross, offering a visual reincarnation. Much like the seven deadly sins, the stations derive their power from the tragedy of being reduced to their smallest common denominator. This synthesis starts with the image of the hooded prisoner, distilling into blood which then flows into light and pain-filled shadows that lose themselves in the faint glimmer of oblivion. Once again gravity- emphasised by downward brushstrokes- plays a key role in the visual and conceptual construction of the composition. Gravity weighs it down, just as the cross burdens Christ's body, not just physically, but metaphorically and morally as well. Then, thanks to the potential transience of art and of life, that weight becomes a shadow of the figure's physical existence and tangibility.
In another series of Howard works painted from 2006 to 2008, Suicide Paintings, the gravity-determined dripping of blood and the signs of palpitation become ghostlike and obscure. Shapes of figures, animals and events appear highlighted and dazzle against a night sky. Subjects roam across the canvas; suspended on the viscous surface, encrusted in layers of the paint, taking contorted positions, dangling nervously and uncertainly. Bound with ropes, laces and nooses, they recall Pisanello's fifteenth century fresco of two hanged men in the Church of Sant'Anastasia in Verona. They hang upside down, encouraging gravity to relapse. This provides further contrast and another visual oxymoron that strips the images bare and reveals them in all their crude brutality.
The paintings from the exhibition How To Disappear Completely (2008) focus on the theme of suicide. This extreme act is almost inexplicable from the viewpoint of those who the victim leaves behind. It is an act in which Thanatos expresses his impulse for self-destruction, displaying his full potential for emotion and pain. Images of dangerous objects abound, probably taken from printed publications and the internet: a sinister pair of scissors - a potential instrument of self-harm - and a ladder, leading up to the gallows, take on the character of a still life. The sketchy, hurried brushstrokes impart an almost unfinished quality - unfinished like the life of the self-destructive, which is interrupted.
The series sets a deeply melancholic and anguished mood, suspended in time to excruciating effect, similar to the suspense inspired by watching certain films. In some works, faceless figures, deliberately anonymous, dangle from nooses, subject to vertical gravitational pull. The forensic aspect contorts and offers itself for a lyrical yet brutal interpretation. Like the sonnets that Walter Benjamin dedicated to his childhood friend Christoph Heinle, who committed suicide just after turning twenty, the figures dissolve while attempting in vain to find meaning for and in the deaths of those who choose to die.
Like poets and painters before her, such as Brice Marden with his metaphorical Suicide Notes, Howard leaves existential notations. Though anchored in realism, these are not spelled out, but they do seem like notations - like something left behind as an account, an explanation of the inexplicable. In other works, such as Hooked (Party with Tina) (2006), the divide between Eros and Thanatos is rendered more ephemeral and ambiguous; we are meant not to understand, but to determine subjectively whether we are witnessing erotic play or a corpse. The painting inspires introspection and maieutic analysis; it fades into the gap between passion and violence, between control and madness, between victim and torturer.
It is in the context of this later duality, and in the context of a case study of a couple's double suicide, that Howard dedicates her most recent series of works to a clinical syndrome that may not be widely known to laypeople, but is recognisable to them all the same. Folie à deux (or shared psychosis) is characterised by psychotic behaviour, principally by delusions shared by two or more people who have a close and intimate relationship. It was described for the first time in France by Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret in 1873, and studied further by Alexander Gralnick in the 1040s. In the majority of reported cases in medical literature, patients suffering from folie à deux are members of the same family, or a couple (husband and wife). The disease is usually associated with a dominant/submissive relationship, and therefore a torturer/victim relationship. Gralnick maintained that the key was to identify the submissive party, who might not even be conscious of being submissive, as such behaviour is often an attempt to sustain an intimate relationship with the dominant partner. The dominant partner, in turn, is forced to keep contact with reality, while the submissive partner adjusts to the need to become dependent.
External factors are also very important to the development of folie à deux. In fact, the couple involved usually lives in a climate of intimate contact and is often isolated from the rest of the world and its influences. In short, with folie à deux, co dependence, the acceptance and sharing of delusional ideas and social isolation often render a couple unable to interact with and analyse reality. This permits delusions to grow or reverberate within the relationship. The delusion may grow until an exterior source manages to intervene or the psychosis is interrupted.
In one of her paintings, Howard illustrates the syndrome through the graphic depiction of a pregnant woman. Her legs are splayed and her head is thrown back, introducing once again the ambiguity and dichotomy typical of the artist’s work, open to many potential interpretations just as We may employ many interpretations in viewing and reading our own lives and the lives of others. Does folie à deux exist between a mother and her unborn child, between mother and father, between the self and the other. between the self and society, between the self and life itself? It remains an open question. Art is an open question and is itself nourished by the complexity of open questions, and Rachel Howard's paintings are no exception.
Mario Codognato is an art historian and the chief curator at the Museo MADRE, Naples.
[i] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New
York: Routledge Classics, 2002), P. 2.
[5] Hieronymus Bosch (C.1450-1516), Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, Oil on panel
[6] Giovanni Domenic Tiepolo (1727-1804) Carrying the Cross: Christ falls beneath the Cross for the third time, 1749, Oil on canvas, From the series: The Stations of the Cross, 9th station
[ii] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Translated by J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin Books, 2004).
[iii] Images of this work, study, 2005, can be found on pp. 115-6
[7] Antonio Pisanello (1395-1455), St. George and the Princess of Trebizond, detail of two hanging men from the left hand side, c.1433-38, Fresco