Neville Wakefield

Appears in the ‘Schaulager-Hefte' series
Published by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, 2010
ISBN 978-3-9523403-4-9

The persecutions of the pre-Enlightenment body are well documented, but nowhere more so than in the opening passages of Michel Foucault’s, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault’s treatise on the contestations of the body politic, as it has been passed from the hands of torturers and executions into those of the modern institutions of rehabilitation, begins with a grisly and intricate account of the execution of Robert-François Damiens, condemned to perform l’amende honorable for his attempted assassination of Louis XV.

For the contemporary audience the description of physical pain and barbarism inflicted on the last man to be publicly drawn and quartered in France under the ancien régime is almost unreadable. We learn that the condemned man was placed on a specially erected scaffold so that the public spectacle of slow death and dismemberment could commence. The flesh of his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves was first torn away with red-hot pincers forged specifically for the task. Molten lead, boiling oil, resin, hot wax, and sulfur were then poured onto the open wounds before ropes attached to his hands and feet were harnessed to horses intended to draw the limbs from his still living trunk. According to an eyewitness account, the process was then suspended for some time as additional horses were recruited, following the protracted failure of the existing four to sunder the man’s limbs from their sockets. After many hours Damiens’s delinquent body was finally put to rest by burning his apparently still vital torso at the stake.

Torture, as Foucault observes, rests on a quantitative art of pain. It is intended, either by the scar it leaves on the body or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand its subject with infamy. In the given example, physical humiliation is retributive justice. It imposed ritualized restraints on the body of the condemned in such an extreme manner that the spectacle of the scaffold and the breaking of the corporeal form that it implied was a stern deterrent. The penal process, literally inscribed upon the sentenced body, was visible for all to see. Only with the Enlightenment was such inscription banished to the darkened corners of torture and the guillotine, prison, doctors, warders, psychologists, and educationalists took over, bringing with them the promise of punishment devoid of pain.

Under the new régime the lethal administrations of science and medicine came to replace the prolonged agonies of the gallows, crucifixion or wheel. And with this shift in the economy of restraint, the body was gradually excused from punishment and the theatrical representation of pain. The battleground of the Enlightenment thus belonged not to the control of the delinquent body but to something far more insidious, namely the forced rehabilitation of the errant soul.

Just as much Christian iconography is focused on the body of Christ as the vehicle of spiritual salvation, so has the manner in which Jesus died become a cornerstone of subsequent faith. That his death was brutal and tortuous is often overlooked. Instead we are asked to consider the more abstract piety of his suffering for which the lacerations, wounds, and restraints are but the metaphorical accoutrements of a higher spiritual condition. But for those for whom punishment of the sort described by Foucault was as much a part of public life as the ravages of war and plague, the tortured body was a familiar index of all relationships of authority both political and spiritual. But in the Christian narrative of the body, punitive humiliation and wounding constituted a narrative of escape. The Passion follows Jesus as he attempts to overcome the physical burden and restraints imposed on him by others. For his religious and political dissidence, and for our sins, he was sentenced not to a chemical straightjacket and term of rehabilitative incarceration, but to a torture so severe in its physical insult as to cause his death. A world beyond the limitations of the body could only be realized in his failure to endure a condition of corporeality in extremis. The ultimate self-liberator, Jesus took the insult and created of it a new being. His escape was not from his persecutors but from the shackles of physicality.

Nearly two millennia later, the secular showman Harry Houdini performed similar feats, escaping from the best confinements and restraints that the penal system had to offer against the vastly different backdrop of a society that favored rehabilitation over retribution. “He was,” writes psychologist Adam Phillips, “the secular and successful Prometheus, inside the law and beyond: he was the picture of the exorbitant entrepreneur, abolishing the category of the impossible; a man who was to help the police, by instruction and challenge, to improve their handcuffs: a man who would mercilessly expose the spiritualists who claimed they could release the dead from their silence.” In his representations of self-inflicted pain and public flirtations with death, Houdini realized that it is not suffering itself that we find degrading and morally objectionable but rather its imposition upon others. Where others had seen physical pain as a worthy adversary to spiritual practice, here it was posed as the boundary layer separating pure physical and mental achievement from spiritualist hokum. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the most celebrated image of Houdini is that of an Everyman, white shirt-sleeves rolled up ready for work as he hangs upside-down above a mob of spectators, bound and shackled with arms outstretched in the pose of an inverted crucifixion.

Conceived as ”facilities designed to defeat the facility of drawing”, the early Drawing Restraint environments were in many ways similar to the locks that bound Houdini. Early works consisted of environments of ramps, inclines, elastic fetters, and tethers designed specifically to hinder the artist’s proficiency. Reaching against the resistance of gravity and restraint, each mark represented the physical effort of its making along with the cycles of exertion, exhaustion, and recovery that characterize our very existence as sensate beings. They invoke a world in which body and apparatus are unified through the decisive action and power of the will. Just as Houdini allegedly understood the locks that constrained him not as a mechanistic imposition but rather as an internal problematic, for Barney the bondage of organized resistance allows for a prosthetic extension of the self into the drawn form. All are, in some ways, encounters with difficulty. Early Drawing Restraint environments acted as test sites for the physical resistance of material. By pitting elastic against muscle or dead weight against lactic breakdown, the resulting marks told the story of resistance and, sometimes, refusal. In this sense the encounter was one with material but also with the laws, desires, and biological limits through which we discover, observe, and recognize a sense of self, and how we question who we are.

Houdini’s work consisted of devising ever more elaborate methods of escaping the confines of his adopted country. To this end, his powers of self-liberation were directed against not just the penal and psychiatric institutions of confinement but even the frozen food business for which ice chests offered the promise of permanent preservation. Barney’s vessels of confinement and restraint began with the institutions of his upbringing and education, the gymnasium and artist’s studio. Later they expanded to include the limousine that played host to a trinity of sparring satyrs; the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru that was stage to the bloody encounter between culture and creature; and the trawler Dimma, whose cramped quarters defined the transatlantic passage of Drawing Restraint 15 [Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 15, 2007]. Like Houdini, Barney offers the spectacle of the imperiled body struggling compulsively with its own vulnerability. Whether offered in the name of entertainment or art, each taught himself, in different ways, to assimilate the architectures of self-imposed constraint – straight-jackets, milk cans, elastic tethers, cars, ships – precisely in order to escape the physical limitations of the bound body. The rites of this communion could hardly be more different than those of the church, but what they may share is a vision of a body where the instruments of its repression, once internalized, become tools in the unlocking of each new form.

The exhibition design of Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail suggests not just the tiered ecclesiastical architecture of church and crypt, but also the secular and mythic separation between the forces of aspiration and their upward reach towards transcendence and the mortal inevitability of our physical demise. To descend below ground level at the Schaulager is to witness the exercise of gravity. Here, in three subterranean burial chambers, lie the sculptural bodies that speak to the inevitability of such a descent. The sculptural narrative – connected by the white hawser of a consciousness that extends from Torii [Matthew Barney, Torii, 2006], the collapsed scaffold of defeat, through Cetacea [Matthew Barney, Cetacea, 2005], the body, to the decomposed skeletal remains of Occidental Restraint [Matthew Barney, Occidental Restraint, 2005/2009] – tracks the final stations in the life-cycle of Drawing Restraint 9. The film that transports the bulk of the allegorical narrative is set against the cultural gravitas of post-war Japan. It describes the tensions straining and restraining the occupied cultural body as they are recounted through the mysterious relationship between the Guests (played by Barney and Björk) and the whaling industry’s blood harvest. In the dénouement, where the Guests strip themselves of submerged flesh in order to achieve communion with the hunted cetacean, Barney’s persistent interest in extreme corporeality comes closest to the narratives of penitence and transubstantiation that underpin the Christian Passion. Flesh, it seems to say, is vital witness to this mortality. Our nourishment is itself an autophagic act and our cultures create rituals of mortification in order to describe what may be variously understood as the font of resistive creativity, the blank void of existence, and the indestructible energy of the soul.

The crypt is conceived both as a repository of this flesh and an echo-chamber inviting reflection across time and culture. In the first of three chambers, Lucas Cranach’s Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns [Lucas Cranach the Elder, Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, c. 1520/25] watches over the broken and deformed scaffold of Barney’s sculpture Torii [Matthew Barney, Torii, 2006]. An image of imperturbable resignation and beauty, it presides over the demise of the physical self at the hands of others in much the same way that Torii, equal parts gantry and Shinto shrine, presides over the exploitation of the body of the whale. Painted in deference to the single thorn thought to be relic of Christ’s original crown held by Frederick the Wise, Cranach conjures an image of simultaneous ascent and descent, as if the blood that seeps downward from the ignominious crown does so only against the rising composure of the soul. Next to the suggestive religiosity of this scene, in the second chamber Hans Baldung Grien’s celebrated painting Death and a Woman [Hans Baldung Grien, Death and a Woman, 16th c.] projects an image of secular duality across the split body of the sculpture Cetacea [Matthew Barney, Cetacea, 2005]. In the painting mortality is depicted as the confrontation between carnality and sensuality, eroticism and decay. The woman, beautiful and voluptuous, literally spills into death. Here, as with Cetacea – a petroleum-jelly field emblem from which the retaining cruciform bar has been removed, allowing the walls to collapse – the overflow of the body is also signal to its end. Dramatized in the final of the three chambers it is an end that is both deposition and burial. Facing the decomposed corpse of Occidental Restraint [Matthew Barney, Occidental Restraint, 2005/2009] is Baldung Grien’s painting of the Deposition. His depiction solicits us to join the small gathering of grief-stricken onlookers and add witness to the moment at which the limp form of Jesus, bleached of life, is transformed into the body of Christ, a Eucharist that becomes one with the architecture of faith and the congregation of which we are a part. It is a moment echoed in the final scene of Drawing Restraint 9 [Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005] whereby the two protagonists become fully identified with object of their fascination by flensing and eating the flesh of the other. But while their act of cannibalistic self-mutilation may signal the possibility of transfiguration and rebirth, it also heralds the end of the body as vital force. And to the extent that Occidental Restraint represents the carcass of an encounter with the narrative trajectory of the sacramental body, it is in this final room that the painted invocations and sculptural remnants of this trajectory are laid to rest.

The concept of burden, both physical and psychological, introduces the upper level or ‘church’ of the exhibition and the Drawing Restraint archive. The bloody, industrialized harvest of the whale was the result of General McArthur’s decision to transform the decommissioned Japanese Navy into a whaling fleet, and thus we follow his footsteps into the nave-like space, positioned directly above the crypt containing Cetacea [Matthew Barney, Cetacea, Jahr], the whale’s remains . To the extent that Barney’s installation Instrument of Surrender [Matthew Barney, The Instrument of Surrender, 2009] is an anti-monument to the emasculation of the Japanese by MacArthur, so does Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s painting The Bearing of the Cross [Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder, The Bearing of the Cross, c. 1530] speak to a similar, albeit Christian, theme of humiliation at the hands of an occupying force. In this work, physical burden and psychological torment are instruments in surrender of another kind, that of the worldly body to the immortal spirit. Punishment is exacted on the physical form, drawn in blood across a broken and ridiculed body. Just to the left of this painting, the footsteps that track from the abstracted landing craft of McArthur’s beach-head lead us to an altogether different and contemporary theatre of shame, where the writing is no longer on the body politic but on the artifacts of culture. Significantly, the scaffold of this punishment is not a cross but a simple desk, an elevated platform of learning aimed at the contestation and reformation of the errant psyche. Its judgment is written not in ink but in blood, in a document purposefully secreted from public view.

At the heart and center of the constructed basilica are the wrestling satyrs of Drawing Restraint 7. Beneath it is JP Steudner’s seventeenth century Prayer Sheet with the Wounds and the Nail [Johann Philipp Steudner, Prayer Sheet with the Wounds of Christ, 1686/1700], an abstracted representation of Christ’s wounds – the shoulder wound from bearing the cross and the spear wound made in his side – along with a nail from the Crucifixion. Here, the relationship between body and belief is made explicit by materializing the soul through the open wounds. The written prayer, which entreats Christ to present his ”honeysweet wound,” underscores the already highly eroticized imagery common to medieval devotional art. The phallic fetishization of the nail recalls an obsession with the instruments of torture paralleling that of the wound itself. Interestingly, one manifestation of ‘sympathetic magic’ was the widespread use in the seventeenth century of weapon salve for healing. Salve was applied not to the wound, but to the weapon that caused the wound. Centuries later Joseph Beuys would bring his own brand of shamanistic object animism to this idea of salve by proclaiming, ”Heal the knife that cuts the wound”. Beuys’s belief in trauma as the prerequisite for moral and social health posited the wound as a natural state and art as a tool for healing. In this sense weapon salve carries with it a larger idea of salvation, suggesting perhaps that it is only by giving attention to the instruments of torture and restraint that we can come to understand, and thus heal, our self-inflicted wounds.

Above the devotional wounds rages the mythological conflict of Drawing Restraint 7 [Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 7, 1993]. As satyrs wrestle to overcome the resistance of circumstance, biology, and history to realize a drawn form, the tragicomedy of their efforts unfolds through the three channels of video. Although the pedigree of this encounter belongs not to the Christians but the Ancient Greeks, it, too, is marked by the struggle for ascension. As the limousine that is both their transport and confinement hurtles across the arcing bridges and tunnels of Manhattan, the satyrs enact the myth of Marsyas, the ancient satyr who was punished by the gods for his hubris by being flayed alive and his skin nailed
to the trunk of a tree. Inside the pimped-out bathysphere, the satyrs, horns locked in conflict, attempt to trace the mark of their libidinal energy on the moon-roof that separates their internal world from that of the heavens above. For the first time in the Drawing Restraint series, the conditions of restraint are relayed as a narrative reflected in twelve positions, or stations, of photographic work that attends the video. Where early work may have drawn on the internal bodily thresholds of resistance and rejuvenation, the narrative arc of Drawing Restraint 7 moves outside the body to include the greater moral and architectural structures of resistance in its surroundings. Barney’s interest in hypertrophic development – the development of form, specifically tissue through resistance, breakdown, and cellular resurrection – expands to include entire belief systems with their inherent capacities for failure and doubt. In the language of religion, the failure of belief is the failure to remake one’s own interior self in the image of God; in the secular language of restraint it might be characterized as the refusal or inability to turn oneself inside-out, to devote one’s physical interior to something outside itself. ”Myths,” as Phillips points out, ”are often about the inescapable, about the painful discovery of powerful constraints; they tend not to be about people who get away with things but rather stories about people who try to. People whose transgressions turn out to be lessons for us all.” The satyrs’ desire to be more god than goat marks the breakdown of divine constraining order. For giving expression to this desire, they are punished. In an effort to restore the balance of cosmological energy, l’amende honorable is made whereby fur is ripped from flesh, and the separation between the realms of gods and mortals is restored once more.

Sharing aspects of the mythological structure of the ancient Greeks, the Passion of Christ is also a physical, moral and spiritual tale of a failing body struggling against resistance and striving for redemption. Each scene of the Passion, as represented here in the cycles by Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer, acts as graphic invocation, or extraction, of a larger drama as it unfolds both historically and in the minds of the devout. In part, this fragmentation of the narrative was the product of printing innovations that took place in the mid-fifteenth century, but it also allowed for the formation of a divine heraldry in which the instruments of the Passion, once abstracted from the narrative context, could be understood through contemplation as instruments not of dishonor and ignominy, but of salvation. Isolated in this way, each station allowed for a figurative identification with a moral or spiritual condition. Dürer’s own identification with the Passion is famously represented in his Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows. But while the ravages of war and plague undoubtedly sharpened a religious fervor focused on the debilitations of the physical being, the widespread obsession with Passion narratives also allowed artists to address the expressive, individualized subject in a language common to all. The Passion is the story of a singular tormented body and its passage through suffering, but the narrative itself has become a body or vessel to be inhabited by others. Barney’s own use of narrative has followed similar lines. What began as a private dialogue with the body for which his art gave public form has evolved into a discourse on the public forms of myth, archetype, and religion that nourish our common soul. Defining the four corners of the chancel-like space central to the exhibition, the Christian narrative speaks to a proposal of being, no less than the satyrs do of form. Both are narratives of transformation, journeys told through the obstacles and impediments that we must face precisely in order to escape or overcome their impact on our lives.

In ways more or less elaborate or brilliant, we are all only ever preparing for death. Barney’s interest in this preparation is prefigured in the currents of Masonic ideology that ebb and flow through the Cremaster series. “All that he fears,” writes W.L. Wilmshurst in The Meaning of Masonry, “is that is that when the time comes, he may not be free from those ‘stains of his own nature, which may delay his after-progress. No! The death to which Masonry alludes, using the reference to it, is that death-in-life to a man’s own lower self which St. Paul referred to when he protested ’I Die Daily’. It is over the grave, not of one’s dead body but of one’s lower self that the aspirant must walk before attaining to the heights.

What is meant is that complete self-sacrifice and self-crucifixion, as all religions teach, are essential before the soul can be raised in glory, ’from a figurative death to a reunion with the companions of its former toils’ both here and in the unseen world. The perfect cube must pass through the metamorphosis of the Cross.” To the extent that the ascensions and elevations of the upper level of the exhibition speak to the manner in which both art and religion propose escape routes from inevitable patterns of morbid conformity while the descent of the lower level suggests their embrace, Drawing Restraint 17 [Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 17, 2010] provides the figurative and literal connection between the two realms. Inspired by Baldung Grien’s Death and a Woman [Hans Baldung Grien the Elder, Death and a Woman, 16th c.], the narrative of Barney’s new work reaches across Basel, from the Goetheanum (center of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical movement), via the Kunstmuseum (where a drawing by Barney hangs in place of the loan by Baldung Grien that has been displaced to the Schaulager, next to its companion piece Death and a Maiden) and into the Schaulager itself. The painting draws on the tradition of Totentanz, in which the skeletal form of Death, equalizer of peasants and popes, stalks the living as a malefic, amorous aggressor whose very presence implies the presence of an empty grave waiting to be filled. Particular to Baldung Grien’s iteration is a barely disguised eroticism, which suggests not only la petite morte of expended sexual desire, but the rape of life itself. Rape is also the subject of Lucas Cranach’s Lucretia [Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lucretia, 16th c.], who killed herself to atone for the violation and sins of the Empire. She is depicted here moments before plunging her tormentors’ sharpened phallus into her grieving heart.

In Barney’s interpretation, this encounter with death takes place as the ‘maiden’, a young technical climber, enters the Schaulager and attempts to scale the sheer and inhospitable heights of the atrium wall. Beneath her, entombed and subterranean, lie the sculptural bodies of Torii, Cetacea, and Occidental Restraint [Matthew Barney, Torii, 2006; Cetacea, 2005; Occidental Restraint, 2005/200)]. Just outside these chambers is a large scaffold-like structure over which has been stretched a thin membrane or veil. Not far from this a pile of dirt is portent to some burial yet to happen. As the climber overcomes the obstacle of the overhanging soffit, she scales past the second level of the exhibition, with its dual claims to limit and aspiration, and proceeds towards the apex of the modern cathedra. Just as she appears to achieve these insurmountable heights her last handhold gives way and we witness the ballet of gravity as she plunges back downward through the membrane of the possible toward the fate of the unknown. It is at this point, perhaps, that our identification with the figure ceases and we become, as with the Golden Gate bridge suicides in Eric Steel’s 2006 documentary The Bridge, mere spectators in the final choreography. Perhaps we see in it the efforts of our own ascension and our ultimate fall from grace. Or perhaps, our interest is that of the pornographer who, like the escape artist, trades in people’s fascination with death so as to avert the far greater haunting that is the death of desire. Either way, the path that such an expanded drawing might describe is no less numinous or revealing than any other mark making that seeks to depict the split-screen moment that is the divergence of body and soul.

Notes:
Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the art of Escape, Vintage: 2002, p. x Joseph Beuys, xxx
Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the art of Escape, Vintage: 2002, p. x W.L. Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, xxx