One-Point Perspective and Other Renaissance Ideas in Gentile Da Fabriano's 'The Presentation of Christ in The Temple' From 'The Strozzi Altarpiece', 1423

artfractures
issue 04 summer 2010
Art Theory, Critique and

the Aesthetic Ideology
Jeremy Spencer
One-point perspective and

other Renaissance ideas...
Ramesh Ramsahoye
Beyond Painting?
John Finlay
Jill Townsley:
Moments of Repetition
Robert Luzar
Belief in This World:
Carlos Reygadas Silent Light
Sam Ishii-Gonzales
Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

From the Editor
This is the nal issue of Artfractures Quarterly before we amalgamate and become Art
Fractures Journal in conjunction with Birkbeck College in London. Our new journal
and publication will centre around issues and debates focusing upon contemporary
curatorial practice. It will feature peer-reviewed articles and writing from scholars and
curators around the world. We hope that our readers will continue to follow us through
new and exciting times.
Artfractures welcomes two new additions to our editorial board: Kath Wood from the
Firstsite Gallery in Colchester (UK) and Francis Di Tommaso, curator of the School
of Visual Arts in New York.
Artfractures wishes to thank all our loyal readership and those who support and work
within the journal.
John Finlay
Editor

Artfractures
Chairman
Elizabeth Cowling
Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century European Art, Edinburgh University
Publisher
Robert Priseman
Editor
Dr John Finlay
Designer
John Wallett
Editorial Advisory Panel
Fr. Martin Boland, Dean, Brentwood Cathedral, UK
Anthony Bond OAM, Head Curator International Art, Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney, AUS
Dr Matthew Bowman, Art Historian, Curator and Editor of Rebus: A Journal of Art
History and Theory, UK
Dr Ben Craneld, Lecturer, Birkbeck College, London, UK
Dr Catherine Crawford, Lecturer, University of Essex, UK
Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media Studies
and Film, The New School in New York City, USA
Andrea Hadley Johnson, Curator at Derby Museums and Art Gallery, UK
Dr Steve Swindells, Reader in Fine Art at Hudderseld University, UK
Francis Di Tommaso, Curator, School of Visual Arts, New York City, USA
Kath Wood, Director, Firstsite, Colchester, UK
In this issue
Art Theory, Critique and the Aesthetic Ideology
Jeremy Spencer p.5
One-point perspective and other Renaissance ideas in Gentile da Fabrianos
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple from The Strozzi Altarpiece, 1423
Ramesh Ramsahoye p.12
Book Review: Beauty by Roger Scruton
Martin Boland p.21
Beyond Painting?
John Finlay p.25
Jill Townsley: Moments of Repetition
Robert Luzar p.30
Unspeaking Engagements, Lanchester Gallery Projects
Steve Swindells p.36
Life: A Users Manual, Art Shefeld 2010
Steve Swindells p.39
Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas Silent Light (2007)
Sam Ishii-Gonzales p.40
Contributors p.44
Notes for submissions p.45
Cover photography by John Wallett

Art Theory
Art Theory, Critique and the Aesthetic Ideology

Jeremy Spencer
This essay originated in a lecture written and delivered with the intention to introduce
theory through a critique of the modernist theory of art to a more or less sceptical
and resistant audience of art and design practitioners. Artists and art students are often
suspicious of theory or doubt its relevance to their practice. Theory gets in the way of
spontaneity. Theory is a realm of bloodless abstractions which have nothing to do with
the cut and thrust of practice. [1] The new art history turned to theory as a resource
for the analysis of art and culture. The name the new art history signalled changes
in the theories, methods, approaches and the objects of academic or traditional art
history. It found resources for critical analysis in Marxist social critique and the method
of historical materialism, feminist critique, psychoanalytical accounts of representation
and the role of images in constructing social and sexual identity, semiological and
structuralist theories and arguments that identied artworks as signs and systematic
codes and asked what they might signify. These theories transformed the critical
analysis of a series or history of valued objects and how we write about, teach and
value it. [2] As part of the new art history, the social history of art wanted to restore
a missing or ignored dimension of social and historical relations to the production of
art. The social history of art coalesced in the early 1970s with the publication in 1973
of T. J. Clarks two books on art and the French revolution of 1848, Image of the People
and The Absolute Bourgeois. These writings are still rich in theoretical possibilities for the
conjunction of Marxism and art history. [3]
In writings of the early 1980s, Clark emerged as a kind of defender of Greenbergian
modernism recast and continued as a practice of negation. He espoused an avantgarde harmful unsettling of categories, an art of ercest innovations, a modernism
compelled, and not just by exterior circumstance, to exceed its normal terms of
reference and sketch out others. [4] For Clark, these values are intrinsic to avant-garde
practice in its search for an adequate representation of capitalist society and experience;
they were not self-contained, independent and self-legitimating as they increasingly
were in Clement Greenbergs writings.
Modernism (or realism or postmodernism) is made up of ideas, beliefs and
theories about art. Theories of modern art, for example, see a clear separation between
the theory and practice of art: rst we have works of art, then we have critical theories
that are dependent on works of art and which try to explain and interpret them. One
comes after the other. According to this model, art is viewed as a kind of authentic
nature and theory is a kind of culture that is dependent on it. [5] And although there
is no practice without theory, in the ambience of art schools and circles the idea that
theory has nothing to do with practice or at best comes after practice is still fairly
common.

A modernist critic, for example, will say that what matters most is what a picture
makes him feel rather than what it will make him think. Greenberg considered aesthetic
judgements immediate, free and involuntary: you can no more choose whether or
not to like a work of art than you can choose to have sugar taste sweet or lemons
sour. He recommends that we should relish our helplessness in the matter. [6] A
modernist critic will understand the artist as the feeling being whose works express
both a personal sensibility and a universal condition. [7] In this Romantic concept, the
source from which art springs is the spontaneous overow of powerful feelings, and
thus that art expresses the ethos, feelings and perceptions of a person possessed of
more than usual organic sensibility . [8] Following Charles Harrison, the modernist
will know what feelings the artist is expressing or what the picture expresses by asking
him or herself what he or she feels when he or she sees. But saying that, This picture
makes me feel sad or happy is not the same as saying, This picture expresses sadness
or happiness. It is difcult to dispute the rst autobiographical statement, but the
second is open to argument. What the picture expresses and what the spectator feels are
not the same because a picture is an object with certain properties and characteristics
that are its own and which are independent of the mind of the artist and the spectator.
What a picture expresses need not be the feelings of the artist that began the picture
or the feelings of the spectator looking at the picture. A picture can only express the
properties and characteristics that belong to it and not what belongs to the artist or
the spectator. [9]
The association a picture has with the world or what it expresses is dependent
on language. Talking or writing does not make the picture but talking or writing
does participate in making the picture and what it expresses. Although Greenberg in
conversation with Clark in 1981, says that only your eye could tell you whether a picture
succeeds or fails, there is always a linguistic element or factor in seeing. An artist is not a
child or an idiot or a camera: what he or she sees is shaped by an existing knowledge of
what he or she sees. We see an object or an image according to an interpretation. Seeing
is a theory-laden undertaking. What we see is shaped by what we know. We do not ask,
Whats that? of every passing car. [10] We always see a work of art as something, or as
meaning or expressing something, and how we see it depends on where and how we
encounter it. What an artist sees and what she makes out of what she sees only makes
sense in and through the interpretations and descriptions of her seeing and doing. In
the activity of any artist, knowing how to make or produce something and knowing what
that something is or will become are closely interrelated. [11].
It follows then that art is intentional, which means that art is something that only
human beings make and can make. If art is intentional then a concept or a theory enters
into and plays a crucial role in the determination of what is made. [12] For example, for
modernism and the modernist theory of art the concept which regulated the activity
of the artist was that the work of art was above all else a physical object. [13] Modern
works of art became increasingly to be understood more as things in themselves and
less as things that refer to other things in the world. The colours and forms of a painting
and their arrangement on the surface of the canvas became the basis of the aesthetic
experience rather than what those colours, forms and arrangement represented. [14]

Concepts and theories of art determine or have an effect upon the practice of art.
Critical theories dont come after the work of art or merely interpret their objects, but
actively constitute or use them, which means that individual agents, art theorists and
critics, do the constituting or using. [15] But equally, theories are not independent of
a work of art; there is only theory at all because of the object that has its proper
limits; the critical theory of art is conditioned and caused by the practice of art. As
such, there is no before and after in the relationship between theory and practice as
modernists believed. [16]
We should remind ourselves of what theory is. At its most basic, theory can just
mean the ideas about art that, following the literary theorist Paul de Man, come into
being when the object of critical or theoretical discourse is no longer the meaning or
the aesthetic value of an artwork but the modalities and character of the production
and reception of meaning and value prior to their establishment. The implication is
that the production and consumption in the work of art is complicated or problematic
enough to require an autonomous activity of critical investigation, of theorising. [17] A
theory is system of concepts that aims to explain an area of knowledge that we oppose
to praxis. [18] Theory is the appropriation or representation of the world in thought for
analysis. Theories are ways of framing and understanding a concrete world of social
practices and historical processes. Theory cannot assume the concrete existence of
this totality but actively produces it by taking into account the many determinations and
relations that constitute it. A theoretical appropriation of the world is not the same as
an artistic or religious appropriation of the world. Theories are different to ideologies
because they are self-conscious, self-critical and self-aware: unlike ideologies, they do
not confuse mental speculation about or representation of the concrete world with the
concrete world. [19]
The word theory itself originally comes from the Greek verb theorein, which
means to look at, to contemplate, to survey. The ancient Greeks designated certain
individuals called the theoria, chosen for their integrity and honesty, to attest to the actual
occurrence of an important political event, to witness it happening, and then verbally
certify that it had taken place. Their function was to see-and-tell: other people could
also see-and-tell, but only what the theoria saw and told had any social standing and
therefore could be treated as fact. [20] Other people women, slaves, and children were
merely capable of Aesthesis, that is, an animalistic consciousness of things: perceptions
without any social and or political authority. The theoria saw and in telling what it had
seen affected an object of public knowledge and discourse. They provided an ofcial
and reliable form of knowledge and a bedrock of certainty. [21] This view of theory
helps explain that theories do not simply nd but actively constitute their objects. The
material object is the basis of perception or cognition but the understanding of that
object is constructed in and by language. Theory emerges as the relation between seeing
material objects and the representation in speech or writing of what has been seen.[22]
As I have argued, seeing is theory laden. We see, perceive or experience a material
object like a work of art in and through the writing or speaking about it: in and through
its theory.

The critical theories taught in universities and art schools are sometimes felt to be
stiing and dogmatic and largely irrelevant to the business of making art. But the
resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about art. It is therefore a
resistance to language itself and to the possibility that works of art contain factors that
cannot be reduced to perception, vision or feeling. They can. We need to recognise a
non-perceptual, linguistic moment in paintings and sculptures and nally learn to read
critically and theoretically rather than merely feel or see. A painting or sculpture is not
the same as its sensory experience. But a natural object is the same as its appearance
and our experience of that appearance. [23] If we do say that a painting or a sculpture is
more or less equal to how it looks then were saying that theres no difference between
art and nature. It is to fail to address the non-perceptual intentional or conceptual
factor the purpose or the ultimately political intention and function that is a part of
any painting or sculpture. [24] Modernism or the modernist theory of art emerges as
an aesthetic ideology of art and artistic production that ignores the linguistic in the
experience of the objects it values.
We know that representation will challenge the ontological status of the entity it
imitates because it implies its absence in making it present. Aesthetic theories have
considered the ambivalent nature of representation in the way that it either conrms
or undermines the plenitude of the natural entity. In modernist art theory, the painted
image is understood to bring before us something that only merely happens to be
absent, restoring it to view and continuing its presence. Moreover, the image does
not only duplicate sensory information or experience of nature but has the power
to convert inward experience (feeling, emotions, passions) into a concrete object of
perception. It seems that making the invisible visible is the function of works of art.
And the concern with subject-matter as the core or heart of art practice suggests that
many artists believe as much. Artists invest their time in a process that is supposed to
confer the stability of perception upon what lies beyond or out of reach of the senses.
The work of art emerges as a reassuring proof of presence: representation confers
and conrms the presence and the stability of patterns of experience that lack both,
namely, emotions and feelings. [25]
The critique of this aesthetic ideology at the heart of modernism, an ideology
that mysties the relationship of works of art to history, language and critical thought
sustains the literary theorist Paul de Mans writing of the later 1970s and early 1980s.
The undoing of the analogical relation at the heart of the aesthetic ideology, the
working assumption that artistic forms will consistently and adequately embody truth,
preoccupies his work on the philosophical aesthetics of the Romantic period. [26] So,
in his review of Friedrich Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, Hegel
denes the aesthetic as the mutual formation of the rational and the sensuous made
genuinely actual in a work of plastic art that reveals the truth in the form of sensuous
artistic shape. [27] Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the discourse and
category of the aesthetic has been committed to the kind of totality, uninterrupted
articulation and reconciliation suggested here by Hegel. It is through the category of
the aesthetic that philosophy guarantees its truth and coherence and its reach towards
the concrete world.

The immediate context for the important denition of the aesthetic ideology in de
Mans essay The Resistance to Theory is a discussion of the intransitivity and materiality of
the signier. This materiality is its autonomous power and its freedom from referential
restraint, and it suggests the unreliability of art and literature as a source of information
about the world. We should be wary of any conception of art that assumes too easily
the transparency of the signier or takes for granted its power to evoke the richness of
sensory experience. It would be unfortunate to misrecognise the opacity and materiality
of the sign and therefore confuse it with the materiality of what it signies. [28] The
confusion between literal and symbolic action is dependent on the suspect claim of
the truth of representation, its power to conrm the plenitude of a natural entity. The
interpretation of a scene of reading from Proust that appears in de Mans Allegories of
Reading of 1979 emerges as a narrative of the confusion of literal and symbolic action
or the confusion of materiality of the sign with that of the referent, which de Man
names as the aesthetic ideology. But he realises how easily the phenomenality of the
sign can be aligned with the sensory experience of the signied. Phenomenalism is the
tendency to treat art as if it were uncomplicatedly derived from or continuous with
an experience of the phenomenal world. This term suggests visibility and the sensory,
accessibility to the senses, intuition and cognition. It refers to entities that are accessible
to the senses, bodies, persons, and icons. In that the meaning of phenomenality or the
phenomenal reality of something is its accessibility to the senses it encapsulates a
distinctly pleasurable aesthetic moment in art. It suggests imagination and feeling and
the presumed power of the sign to evoke the richness of the sensory experience of
natural or empirical reality.
Particular kinds of phenomenality that a sign can produce, that of light or sound
for example, are unlikely to be confused with the phenomenal world: no one in his
right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word day , however, it
is very difcult not to conceive the pattern of ones past and future existence as in
accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to ctional narratives and
not to the world. [29] However, this kind of confusion is more or less unavoidable
because the phenomenalization of the sign is what signication really is. Its probably
what modern art thought it was. And ideology is clearly bound up with the concept
of phenomenality. In effect, ideology is just another name for this process: What we
call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference
with phenomenalism, de Man argues. [30] In other words, ideology is the delusion
that art is or can become consubstantial with the natural world. Thus, ideology is the
phenomenalization of the stubborn materiality of the sign; it is the transformation
of this materiality into the phenomenal cognition that is characteristic of aesthetic
judgments of modernist critics.
Although the critique of the aesthetic ideology is most worked out in his late
work, his suspicion of the claims of the aesthetic is also apparent in Paul de Mans
Blindness and Insight of 1973 that interrogates assumptions that language and nature
can be ultimately reconciled. Thus, his essay Form and Intent in American New Criticism
acknowledges that the surface dimensions of language belongs to the domain of
sensory experience, but considers it debatable that we should imagine a continuity

between them and the subjective experience of the writer. [31] Criticism and Crisis
remarks upon the impossibility of unmediated expression or of making the actual
expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual sign coincide
with what it signies. [32] We see, then, that de Man always responded suspiciously to
the assumed convergence of the meaning with the linguistic devices used to convey
it, of meaning with a mode of expression, the unity of poetry and thought, or
the correspondence between the semantic function and the formal structure of
language. [33] What we learn from de Mans art theory is the immanent nature of
critical discourse. Criticism must be like this (and here we might be sympathetic to the
art students resistance to theory) because a work of art is not a phenomenal event
that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as
an act of the mind. It leads to no transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge
but merely solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent because it poses the
problem of its intelligibility in its own terms. [34]
Notes
[1] Victor Burgin, Something about Photography Theory, Screen, 35:1 (1984), p. 61.
[2] See Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 7.
Fred Orton and Charles Harrison comment that a French tradition of structuralist and semiological
thought appropriated by the social history of art derived from the linguistic theories of Saussure, the
Marxist theories of society and ideology of Louis Althusser, the social and cultural critique of Roland
Barthes and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. See Fred Orton and Charles Harrison, Introduction:
Modernism, Explanation and Knowledge, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism,
Criticism, Realism: Alternative Contexts for Art (London: Harper and Row, 1984), p. xx.
[3] John Tagg, Art History and Difference, in A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds.) The New Art
History (London: Camden Press, 1986), p. 165.
[4] See T. J. Clark, A Note in Reply to Peter Wollen, Screen, 21:3 (1980), p. 100.
[5] See Charles Harrison, Introduction: Modernism, Problems and Methods, Modern Art and Modernism
(Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1984).
[6] Clement Greenberg, Complaints of an Art Critic, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.)
Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 4, 5.
[7] Griselda Pollock, Art, Art School, Culture: Individualism and the death of the artist, reprinted in,
The Block Reader in Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 53.
[8] Terry Atkinson, Phantoms of the Studio, The Oxford Art Journal 13:1, (1990), p. 49.
[9] See Harrison, Introduction: Modernism, Problems and Methods, p. 31.
[10] See N. R. Hanson, Observation, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism, Criticism,
Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 75, 77.
[11] See Jaakki Hintikka, Knowing How, Knowing That, and Knowing What: Observations on their
Relation in Plato and Other Greek Philosophers, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.) Modernism,
Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984).
[12] See Richard Wollheim, The Work of Art as Object, in Fred Orton and Charles Harrison (eds.)
Modernism, Criticism, Realism (London: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 10-11.
[13] Ibid., p. 11.
[14] See Harrisons discussion of the distinguishing characteristics of modernism in his Introduction:
Modernism, Problems and Methods, pp. 55-59.
10

[15] Fred Orton, The Object After Theory (Figuring Jasper Johns Supplement 1: Flag), in de-, dis-, ex.
Volume One Ex-cavating Modernism (BACKless Books in association with Black Dog Publishing, 1996),
p. 25.
[16] See Burgin, Something About Photography Theory, p. 63 and Orton, The Object After Theory, p. 25.
[17] See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 7.
[18] Wlad Godzich, Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat, in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiii.
[19] See Griselda Pollock, Art History and its Theories, Art Bulletin (March 1996), p. 20. Pollock follows
Marxs critique of the mistake of confusing representation with the social and historical reality upon
which it works. Marx writes in his 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse that: The totality as it appears
in the head as a totality of thoughts, is a product a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the
only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this
world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long
as the heads conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of
the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), (London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review,
1993), pp. 101-102.
[20] Orton, The Object After Theory, p. 25.
[21] See Godzich, Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat.
[22] Orton, The Object After Theory, p. 25.
[23] Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Second Edition, Revised
(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 23.
[24] De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 10.
[25] De Man, Blindness and Insight, pp. 123-125.
[26] See T. J. Clark, Phenomenality and Materiality in Czenne, reprinted in Jonathan Harris, (ed.),
Value, Art, Politics (Liverpool University Press, 2007.)
[27] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
p. 62.
[28] De Man, The Resistance to Theory, p. 11.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid. As Andrzej Warminski glosses this sentence: the confusion consists in thinking of the text,
a linguistic artefact, in terms consistent with a phenomenology of the self and its experience of the
natural, phenomenal world. See Andrzej Warminski, Ending Up/Taking Back, in Cathy Caruth,
Deborah Esch (eds.) Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 26.
[31] De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 22.
[32] Ibid., p. 9, 11
[33] Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 24-25, 54.
[34] Ibid., p. 107.
11

Art Historical Essay
One-point perspective and other Renaissance

ideas in Gentile da Fabrianos The Presentation
of Christ in the Temple from The Strozzi
Altarpiece, 1423
Ramesh Ramsahoye
Gentile da Fabriano, The Strozzi Altarpece, tempera on panel, 1423
In many textbooks, Gentile da Fabriano is represented as an artist whose work typied

the decorative and courtly International Gothic style. However, the predella panels
of the altarpiece that he painted for the wealthy Florentine banker Palla Strozzi tell a
different story. They show that Gentile was an incredibly innovative and inventive artist,
aware to some extent of the new humanist interest in the art and values of ancient
Greece and Rome, intellectual pursuits associated with the emerging Renaissance style
- with which he is usually seen to have little association. One of the most signicant
innovations in this new style of painting was one-point perspective. This system needs
a little explanation. It is essentially when the artist mimics the effect observed when
looking down a railway track. The rails seem to merge on the horizon at a point known
as the vanishing point. The space between the sleepers also seems to get narrower as
we look into the distance.
12
(L) Railway tracks showing the basic principles of one-point linear perspective. The lines created by the rails which
lead into the distance are known as orthogonals. The horizontals formed by the sleepers are usually referred to as
transversals. (R) The Florence Baptistery, c. 1060, seen from the steps of the Duomo
It is generally agreed that mathematical perspective was invented by Brunelleschi in

a painted study that he made of the Florence Baptistery as early as 1414. He stood
opposite the structure, positioning himself just inside the portal of the cathedral. At
the vanishing point of his painting, Brunelleschi drilled a small peephole. He then held
the panel up to his eye, with the painted image facing the Baptistery. Looking through
his peephole he held up a mirror to reect his painting back to his eye, thus producing
a perfect illusion of the scene before him.
For Brunelleschi this was more of a mathematical and optical experiment and it was
not until 1417 that the system he devised for representing the three-dimensional world
illusionistically and with mathematical precision was utilised by an artist in a commissioned
work. It was the sculptor Donatello who rst seized upon the implications of Brunelleschis
discovery in his predella relief of St George and the Dragon (1415-17) beneath his life size
marble gure of St George (1415-17) for the church of Orsanmichele.
Donatello, St George and the Dragon, marble, 1415-17 Orthogonal lines traced from the loggia of the building to the
right of the composition converge onto a vanishing point located on the torso of St. George.
Donatello had clearly grasped the mathematics behind Brunelleschis method and even
includes a section of the perspective grid on the oor of the classical loggia to the
13

right of his composition. The drama of St George slaying the dragon is enacted in
a comprehensible and rationally constructed space. It took some time for painters to
adapt this technique and it was rst used by Masaccio in the late 1420s in works such
as his Pisa Polyptych, 1426 and Trinity, 1427.
However, as early as 1423 we can see that Gentile was moving towards an
understanding of one-point perspective in his predella scene of The Presentation of
Christ in the Temple for the Strozzi Altarpiece. The pavement slabs of the city create
orthogonal and transversal lines which create a convincing spatial eld to house the
temple in Jerusalem.
However, the overall spatial construction is somewhat awkward and unresolved
and the orthogonals do not, crucially, culminate on a single vanishing point. This has
conrmed for art historians that Gentile was unaware of Brunelleschis far more precise
mathematical system. It has always seemed as though Gentile had somehow grasped
the concept but not the exact scientic method. Had he seen Brunelleschis panel but
not received a complete explanation? A close inspection of Gentiles composition
suggests that he had not only seen Brunelleschis panel, but that he had at least partially
understood the mathematical principles that lay behind it.
Before proceeding to examine this issue it is important to note something that
does not add up in this story. Why did Brunelleschi, who had made such an important
discovery, simply abandon it in order to focus upon architecture, bequeathing it as a
gift to his friends Donatello and Masaccio? He was a competent sculptor and with this
new technique could certainly have guaranteed himself the success that had eluded
him in 1401 when he had lost the competition to produce relief sculptures for the
East Doors of the Florence Baptistery. One explanation is that architecture had by this
stage already become his priority and that, initially, he had not gone to the Baptistery
to conduct a perspective experiment at all. As Peter Grtner astutely points out: In
drawing, the geometrical patterns of the building almost demand the discovery of
perspective. [1]
A groundplan of the baptistery, when marked with square modules and then seen
in elevation actually produces the mathematical system of one-point perspective.
(Above) Gentile da Fabriano, The Presentation in the Temple, 1423

(Right) Masaccio, The Trinity, fresco, 1427 Santa Maria Novella, Florence
14
15

Brunelleschis original intention was surely to study just the measurements and
proportions of the Baptistery in themselves as the Florentines believed that the structure
was a remodelled Roman temple. He wanted to learn about classical architecture and,
whilst he had visited Rome in 1404, the Baptistery was closer to hand. The building
actually dates from c.1060 and is an example of Romanesque design but its groundplan
must have intrigued the young architect as it preserved the dimensions of the original
Roman building. Brunelleschi wanted to understand the central planning, sacred
geometry and proportional systems that Vitruvius (architect to the emperor Augustus)
had described as being essential to temple design in ancient Rome.
In Vitruvian theory, the modules of a buildings plan should relate to a man of
ideal proportions and it must immediately have been clear to Brunelleschi that if he
could nd the secret of these measurements right on his doorstep in the Baptistery
then he would be able to create structures with which the spectator would feel a sense
of harmonious balance. Subsequently, he must have also realised when looking at
his drawn study that if the square modules marking the oor of the Baptistery were
continued beyond its connes to incorporate its surroundings, this would create a
remarkable impression of depth in a painted image.
It is very likely, then, that Brunelleschis rst made a study of the plan and
elevation of the Baptistery seen in isolation. His biographer, Manetti, records that the
perspective panel he produced was a fully coloured image. This would have concealed
the modules on the oor of the Baptistery that had originally inspired the invention of
the system. However, Brunelleschi almost certainly made the perspective grid visible
in his portrayal of the surrounding piazza so that his new technique could be seen. It
was left for Alberti to write down clear instructions for painters to follow in his Della
Pittura of 1436. He had received a humanist education at the university of Padua, and
explained how these measurements could be part of a whole philosophical system in
which man is connected with the world around him, united once more with Gods
creation.
We can now evaluate how the spatial construction in Gentiles predella panel
might t into this revised story of how perspective was discovered. The fact that
the orthogonals do not converge upon a single point has been seen by art historians
to signify that Gentile was not in touch with Brunelleschis discoveries at all and the
investigation has ended there. However, if we analyse the composition more carefully,
something fascinating emerges. We could almost be looking at Brunelleschis test panel.
Gentiles centrally positioned temple, set in a piazza and surrounded by civic buildings
echoes the composition of Brunelleschis rst perspective experiment according to the
description by Manetti:
there is not a miniaturist who could have done it better; picturing before ones face that part of
the piazza which the eye takes in, and so towards the side over against the Misericordia as far as the
arch and corner of the Pecori, and so of the side of the column of the miracle of San Zenobi as far
as the Canto alla Paglia. [2]
Furthermore, on closer inspection, an astounding series of orthogonal convergences
and geometric correspondences can be detected in Gentiles predella, demonstrating
his understanding of some of the principles of one-point perspective. Even a glance at
16

one of the rooftops is enough to conrm that Gentile knew full-well that orthogonal
lines converging upon a single point could create the impression of a spatial eld.
Reconstruction of how vanishing points would have been traced from the Baptistery on Brunelleschis Test Panel
In his later explanation of perspective, Alberti placed such emphasis on the central
vanishing point that it is often overlooked that in Brunelleschis experiment the
geometric structure of the Baptistery would have produced three, with orthogonals
converging either side of the building as well as one at its centre.
As has been explained, the third, central vanishing point, created by the oor
modules of the baptistery, was hidden in the nal panel. However, Gentile actually
includes all of the three vanishing points which were the basis of Brunelleschis
perspective construction. However, two are located just beyond the frame and so have
been overlooked by art historians. Gentile had understood the geometry of perspective
after all. He had just not integrated the observer and the proportions of the human
gure into his schema or linked his temple mathematically with the surrounding space.
He may well have seen the nal panel but not Brunelleschis original plan and elevation,
with the all important oor modules within the Baptistery. This would have given him
the key to integrating the interior of the temple with the space between with the
temple and the observer. He even opts to leave this area out of his composition as a
means of disguising his inability to fully connect the various spaces of his charming
little cityscape.
Although perhaps not fully initiated into the secrets of perspective, Gentile was
clearly not entirely out of step, nor unaware of the new classical discoveries that would
soon change the course of art and transform western civilization. For example, the
loggia of the building to the right of the temple resembles Brunelleschis classicial
design for the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, 1419-23. The Corinthian columns and
distinctive round arches of Gentiles painted architecture purposefully recall ancient
Roman buildings. However, he does not seem to have had a full understanding of
Roman systems of proportion. Not only do the supports have a slender, attenuated
appearance, the arches look small in relation to the height of the columns, giving
the structure a Romanesque character. It was Brunelleschi who would be the rst to
17

understand the complex systems of proportion that lay behind the harmony, balance
and symmetry of Roman buildings and these qualities are apparent in the more
measured and orderly faade of the new orphanage he built for his city.
Gentile also seems to have had some understanding of the classical ideas being
revived by Early Renaissance humanists. These scholars looked to the ancient
philosophers for practical solutions to the social, economic, scientic and political
problems of the day in face of a church that was struggling to provide satisfactory
answers in these spheres. In particular, ancient notions of civic virtue and of the
individuals duty to the rest of society nd expression within Gentiles painting. His
compositional thinking, in which he took the composition for the main scene from a
work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and planted it contemporary Florence, reveals a desire
to relate the religious subject to a particular civic context.
Filippo Brunelleschi, Ospedale Degli Innocenti, 1419 (directed by Brunelleschi until 1427)
Squatting in the street before Gentiles loggia is a bedraggled beggar - his skin,
browned by the sun, informing us that he has been homeless for some time. The
viewer is prompted to pity him and respond sympathetically to his plight. Loggias
were frequently used on the facades of insitutions of public charity at this time, such
as the building by Brunelleschi already cited, and the Ospedale di San Matteo - a structure
of essentially Gothic design. By mimicking Brunelleschis classical architecture for the
Ospedale Gentile connects Christian charity with specically Roman values of dutiful
citizenship, of which the most eloquent exponent was the statesman Cicero
Because each person thus has for his own a portion of those things which were common by nature,
let each hold undisturbed what has fallen to his possession. In anyone endeavours to obtain more for
himself, he will violate the law of human society. But since, as it has been well said by Plato, we are
not born for ourselves alone; since our country claims a part in us, our parents a part, our friends a
18

part; and since, according to the Stoics, whatever the earth bears is created for the use of men, while
men were brought into being for the sake of men, that they might to good to one another - in this
matter we ought to follow nature as a guide, to contribute our part to the common good. [3]
It was Masaccio who would ultimately answer this call for a classically inspired art with
a contemporary social relevance. The pictorial elements of the Healing of the Cripple
from the Brancacci Chapel (1427), attributed to Masolino but most likely conceived
in collaboration with Masaccio, are very similar. Like Gentile, Masaccio locates the
religious subject in his native Florence in order to drive home the message that St
Peters concern for the dispossessed and the sick should be adopted by the viewer.
\
Masolino and Masaccio, The Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha, fresco, 1427, Brancacci Chapel
St Peters toga-like robes and the round arches of the buildings faade evoke ancient
Rome in a similar way to Gentiles image. The message of Masaccios painting is clear
- it is Roman values of civic virtue and public service as well as Christian virtue that
must come to the aid of Florentine society and each citizen is urged to adopt them,
including the well dressed dandies who trot past, absorbed in their own conversation
and blind to the plight of their fellow man.
In addition to being concerned with the same classical virtues, Gentiles predella
deliberately links contemporary social deprivation to the theme of the Presentation of
Christ in the Temple - but why? To answer this question we must turn to two popular
devotional texts of the time, Jacopo de Voragines Golden Legend and the Meditations on
the Life of Christ by the Pseudo-Bonaventure. In both texts the circumcision of Christ
in the temple is presented as a preguration of the Passion as it is the rst shedding
of Christs blood. It therefore relates to the ultimate salvation Christ promised to the
destitute. However, in the Golden Legend the circumcision is also specically linked to
charitable duties.
For a contemporary viewer familiar with this devotional text, the scene with the beggar
therefore formed a prompt to meditation that would have been readily understood. A
worshipper would have easily grasped the message that their own spiritual circumcision
could only be achieved by good works - they must help the poor and the needy in the
city of Florence.
19

For we have nothing proper, but Jesu Christ hath lent to us all that we have. Then it is well reason
that we do give for him to the poor such goods as be his, for we be but servants, and we ought to give
to the hungry meat, to the thirsty drink, to the naked clothing, visit the sick, and tofore all things to
love God, and after, our neighbour as ourself; and despoil ourself from sin, and clothe us with good
works and virtues, and follow the commandment of Jesu Christ. And in this manner we shall fulll
the will of our father Jesu Christ, if we be so purged and thus circumcised. [4]
Gentiles panel also conveys religious meaning on a more subtle level. On closer
inspection it can be seen that the beggar holds his stick in a peculiar manner. Its end
is positioned over his groin and he clasps it between his thumb and second nger, in
a very suggestive manner. He holds a bowl for collecting alms, which we may assume
to be empty. The beggars head is turned up towards the old, lame woman who seems
similarly desperate. He seems to be explaining the event in the temple through mime
and passing on the life-changing news that their saviour has arrived and that he will
shed his blood to save mankind. This little genre scene is therefore not just a snapshot
of contemporary life but a way of explaining the religious mystery of the circumcision
in a manner comprehensible to ordinary folk.
This examination of Gentiles small panel of the Presentation in the Temple clearly
shows that he was more familiar with the new Renaissance idea of one-point perspective
than many would give him credit. He also seems to share the new humanist interest
in classical architecture as well as the Roman social and philosophical values which
so enthralled his contemporaries. He bridges two worlds like no other painter of the
time, allowing new ways of thinking to enter a religious painting whilst retaining the
spirituality and devotional intensity of the Gothic age.
NOTES
[1] Peter Grtner, Brunelleschi (1998), p. 24.
[2] Quoted in John White The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1972 ed.), p. 114.
[3] From Cicero, On Moral Duties (De Ofciis), 44 BC, translated with an Introduction and Notes by
Andrew P. Peabody, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1887. (Book 1 Section 7)
[4] From the 1900 translation of The Golden Legend.
20

Book review
Beauty
by Roger Scruton
Oxford University Press 2009
Martin Boland
Beauty has become a dirty word in parts of the contemporary art world. If used at
all, the word is surrounded by ironic inverted commas. At present, to judge something
beautiful is to reduce it to the decorative and ornamental, to suggest that the aboriginal
creative impulse has been subordinated in favour of the bourgeois pursuit of painterly
form. This is the disdained art of the Salon. Art historians remind us that it was
here that the art of repetitive, futile gestures turned art into an exercise in good taste.
Therefore, only an iconoclasm that was willing to vandalise the idea of beauty could
emancipate the artist from such visual stagecraft. Manet, the art history books tell us,
threw the rst stone.
In the nineteenth century, John Keatss poetic aphorism, Beauty is truth, truth
beauty seemed to distil the aesthetic ideals of an age. But in the 1950s Andy Warhol
appeared to subvert this Romantic notion of beauty with his painting of a shoe entitled,
Beauty is shoe. Beauty was no longer to be associated with the most noble of ideals,
but was anything the artist declared it to be. With evangelical zeal, contemporary artists
have preached that beauty is a false illusion, an opiate that dulls an acute sense of
the existential futility at the core of our beings. Beauty has no redemptive power,
they argue, beauty is dead. Chaos reigns... as the fox says in Lars von Triers lm,
Antichrist.
In an age where meaning is porous and a goulash of opinions relativise the belief
that there is a truth to be known by reason, the relationship between the visual arts
and beauty disintegrates. According to Arthur Danto this ...effectively liberated artists
from the imperative to create only what is beautiful, and at the same time freed the
philosophy of art from having to concern itself with the analysis of beauty... It follows
that creating beauty is but one option for artists, who also have the choice of injuring
or merely disregarding beauty. Writing in 1948, Barnett Newman provided a mission
statement for contemporary art: The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy
beauty. Thus many accept that Arts purpose is to desecrate, transgress and create
altars to the beauty of ugliness because this is where reality supposedly exists. So,
Luc Tuymans can say, I am not so much interested in the spiritual aspects of culture
beauty or poetic descriptions of beauty dont seem real enough for me. Reality is
actually far more important than any form of spirituality. Realism. Its much more
interesting to crawl from underneath to the so-called top.
21
22

In Beauty, the English philosopher, Roger Scruton, attempts to retrieve the concept
from what Jake Chapman memorably called the degenerate sublime. Immediately,
the question arises what is beauty? and how does one judge what is beautiful.
Scruton circles the problem by using a series of philosophical platitudes against which
he measures and tests his arguments.
His rst two platitudes are:
(i) Beauty pleases us.
(ii) One thing can be more beautiful than another.
According to Scruton, the beautiful is not just pleasing to the eye but carries the freight
of multiple meanings and values. A well made bed may provide visual pleasure, but
its importance extends beyond this to an innate desire to order our domestic lives and
make them a place worth living in. Tracy Emins My Bed may nd gallery space in Tate
Britain, but there are few people who would prefer to sleep between soiled sheets
rather than those that are laundered and clean.
But how does the beauty of a well made bed compare, for example, to Berninis
St Teresa in Ecstasy? Scruton describes the former as possessing a minimal beauty.
The latter an intoxicating quality that demands a kind of reverence on the part of the
viewer. The bed may be admired, but the beauty of the Bernini catches us unawares
and draws us into a new attentiveness. Through the contemplation of beauty, new
possibilities of understanding the material world are glimpsed. But before our notion
of beauty escapes into some rhetorical stratosphere, Scruton makes the provocative
point that ...minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more
intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works which (if we are
lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives,
and our desire for harmony, ttingness and civility is both expressed and conrmed
in them.
Beauty provokes these desires in a more intense, puried fashion. Matisse spoke
of his art of serenity, balance and repose as providing the comfort of a good
armchair. It would be difcult to nd contemporary artists speaking today in such
terms or using such benign language. They are more likely to be concerned about, as
Liam Gillick puts it, ...where we all stand in relation to shitting, dying, feeling paranoid
and not really caring.
Scruton challenges this bilious attitude. This movement of ideas can be seen as
in part a recognition of the ambiguous nature of the term beauty. But it also involves
a rejection of beauty in its narrow sense, as an afrmation that the old invocations of
home, peace, love and contentment are lies, and that art must henceforth devote itself
to the real and unpleasant truth of our condition. The ight from beauty is, in fact, a
ight from the reality of who we are. The truth of our human condition is that beauty
affords us pleasure, sometimes an intense pleasure. This is complete within itself and
one that makes the human enterprise meaningful.
23
The true modernist, according to Scruton, does not break with tradition but develops
an hermeneutic of continuity with the past. The tradition is not jettisoned or destroyed
but, rather, restored and puried of distorting accretions. It offers a cultural store
through which contemporary concerns, in all their complexity, might be approached.
In this way, human beings can ...consecrate human life and endow it with more than
worldly signicance. We recognise that Beauty is not a social construct, but that it is a
need anchored in our natures . It reassures us that our world is not an alien jurisdiction
but our home.
At the same time, as Immanuel Kant recognised, beauty also provides us with
transcendental horizons, those longings to reach beyond that which is imperfect, chaotic
and destructive and strain towards a less worldy realm. Modernism was not conceived
as a transgression but as a recuperation, writes Scruton, an arduous path back to a
hard-won inheritance of meaning, in which beauty would again be honoured.
This slim volume punches above its weight. It is a thoughtful assault on the
facetious ephemera that wins too many prizes and litters art fairs. Above all, Beauty
is a prophetic cry against that priestly caste of curators and art theorists who dictate
what is art but on the imsiest philosophical grounds. Scruton believes that beauty is a
universal value that articulates in a unique way the truth of who we are. Beauty is truth,
truth beauty. Scrutons cri de coeur is one worth listening to.
24

Review
Beyond Painting?
John Finlay
(Dachau, Oil on Canvas 1.52 x 2.28 metres )
A recurring philosophical and moral dilemma arising out of the post-World War II atrocities
has been question of the very existence of art after the Holocaust. Theodor Adornos famous
aphorism, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has been repeated so endlessly that it
is almost a clich: an authoritarian remark (later retracted) that inhibits our right to examine
the real nature of such a statement or to discuss it within the context of a wider debate
regarding the arts. The determining remark that all art should have the audacity to tackle
this subject matter without criticism, reproach or moral impeachment, raises the question
of whether it is only ever possible to document the Holocaust, but to commemorate or
portray the events by, for example, means of painting or sculpture, is perhaps to go beyond
the boundaries of representing such atrocities?
So putting on an exhibition dealing with the inexpressible acts that took place
in the Nazi death camps seriously forces one to consider whether this is really an
appropriate subject for an exhibition showcasing works of art. It seems, to reiterate
Adornos phrase, almost barbaric to think of justifying a display of paintings evoking
the unthinkable suffering in Auschwitz-Berkenau, Bernburg, Majdanek, Mauthausen
and Dachau: places synonymous with heinous crimes against humanity. Let me give
you an example. Established as a mental home in 1875, one block of Bernburg hospital,
near Magdeburg, Germany, was handed over to Operation T4 of the Nazi euthanasia
25

programme in the summer of 1940. A gas chamber was installed in the basement, where
it masqueraded as a shower room, while the rest of the building continued to operate as
a mental institution. Between November 1940 and August 1941, approximately 9,000
mentally and physically handicapped individuals were murdered, usually in groups of
60 to 75, in the gas chamber. When Operation T4 ended, its euthanasia centre resumed
executing another 5,000 concentration camp prisoners, mostly Jewish, under the code
name Sonderbehandlungspecial treatment. Faced with such horrors and the moral
opposition of portraying the Nazis murderous ideology, does one decide to neglect
the subject entirelyperhaps risk denying the Holocaust altogetheror face it head
on and confront the enormity of the crimes committed in the camps?
Another inherent problem connected with the creation of the gas chamber is that it
is almost always fettered with the extermination of the Jewish population, but is in fact a
historical misconception: for it was rst designed and introduced in the 1920s as a method
of capital punishment in the United States. The rst US prisoner to be executed by gas
was Chinese-born Gee Jon in the Nevada State Prison on 8 February 1924, the last, a
German citizen Walter LaGrand, executed in the Arizona State Prison on 3 March 1999.
This is chilling reminder that death by execution is still on the statute books in the United
States. More disturbingly, perhaps, there is a very real, direct and insidious correlation
between the industrial-mechanized scale killings carried out in Nazi camps and modern
methods of judicial execution. The sheer inventiveness employed to kill prisoners all
around the worldexecution by ring squad, hanging, electrocution, stoning, beheading,
strangling with a truck crane, lethal injection, garrotting and gassing are a perplexing and
deeply disturbing aspect of a meticulous and, often, highly unpleasant, killing system.
The liturgical process of capital punishment has another frightening connection with
the concepts of technological experimentation and Sonderbehandlung (special treatment)
of the condemned as well as a ministration that involves a set of highly ritualistic and
mechanical procedures in order to kill in large and smaller numbers.
Historically, the image of the electric chair is congruent worldwide with execution
in the United States of America. The American artist Andy Warhols depiction of
the chair at Sing, Sing Penitentiary in Ossining, New York, where 614 prisoners were
executed, was typical of his (and, by association, our) often deadpan response to the
political controversy surrounding capital punishment and other issues relating to torture
and human rights. For the artist it was an expression of the intertwined relationship
between death and repetition within the capital punishment system. Warhols brutally
expressionless image is given a further poetic touch with the word silence inscribed
above the door entrance to the electric chamber, and where death is represented as
a state of continuous waiting and as replication. The electric chairs power is reliant
on both its ability to produce deterrenceinhibit the criminal actand its history
and image as New York States most terrifying death-bringing contraption. Whether a
statement of opposition or purely an objective response, Warhols electric chair hums
with a charge so lethal that it is too powerful and horric to be dismissed as simply
cold, sensationalist imagery. Warhol returned repeatedly to the subject at a time in the
early 1960s when Americans were debating the death penalty and political resistance to
capital punishment was particularly resilient in New York State (the chairs use nally
ceased in August 1963). In the end, Warhols electric chairs are testimonials to our own
indifference to cruelty and death when it does not affect us directly.
26

Of course art history is littered with past images of killings and holocausts: infanticide
(Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents), executions (Manet, The Execution of Maximillian), genocide
(Goya, The 3rd of May 1808), rape (Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women), bombing (Picasso,
Guernica), not to mention the countless images of torture depicting saints and sinners
alike throughout the history of biblical slaughter: martyrdom, agellation, beheading,
crucixion (Grnewald, Isenheim Alterpiece). The masterworks that ll the galleries of
the world today also depict countless aggressors, wars and massacres as well as other
innumerable horrors, cruelties and degradationsreal and imaginaryand all created by
the human mind. Many of these works are considered beautifully painted, engaging, are
studied endlessly and regarded as priceless historical masterpieces illustrating religious
values or traditional moral codes. Yet art works depicting the Holocaust confront us
with contradictions that somehow seem much more difcult to engage with, particularly
when history is so close to us. In many cases survivors of the death camps still live with
these truly gruesome past experiences, so works of art portraying these terrible events
appear to defy the very concept of art as an aesthetic, moral enterprise.
However, after meditating on the latter predicaments and viewing Robert Prisemans
Gas Chambers exhibition in its completeness and intellectual whole, as opposed to seeing
these depictions as a series of separate images, could I then begin to make sense of the
profound contradictions at the heart of such a subject, as well as consider the disturbing
relationships between art, beauty and horror in the context of art history.
On ascending the stairs of the main gallery at COCA (Centre for Contemporary Art in
Christchurch, New Zealand) one is immediately confronted by a discord between beauty
in this case a set of six picture postcard images of the exteriors of the German Aktion T4
euthanasia centresand the darkness of the gallery walls onto which ve huge images
of gas chambers have been projected, and represent the empty, haunted spaces, memories
(Majdanek, Oil on Canvas 1.52 x 2.28 metres )
27

and knowledge of the Nazis atrocities. Here, as in all of Prisemans paintings, the devil is
truly in the detail, the thick impasto in some of these pictures become remnants of the
gassings: for there are no gures or extraneous details in most of Prisemans paintings
beyond the marks of ngernails, hands, scrawls and scratches that bring to mind the last
moments of the desperate, suffocating individuals gasping for air as they succumbed to
the effects of Zyklon B gas. The projections, replaced by the original paintings on linen,
somehow seem to defend our sensibilities, our eyes, ears and minds, from the interior
walls that bear and scream out a truth too ghastly to contemplate.
(Hademar, Pencil & Crayon on Paper 152 x 228 mm )
In contrast, Prisemans coloured drawings deliberately enhance the picturesque, fairytale

architecture of the euthanasia centres and the pretty surrounding countrysideonly a
trail of black soot pouring out from a smoke stack of one of these deceptively quaint
buildings alludes to the unthinkable horror within. Of the gas chambers themselves,
perhaps the most unsettling is the last in a series of projections that gradually darken
and no longer pretend to be places for the fumigation of clothing, bedding, blankets or
disguised, by the use of slick and shiny tiles, as shower rooms for the de-infestation of
people. Established in 1940, Stammlager was the original camp for Owicim (Auschwitz
in German) concentration complex and its administrative centre near Krakw, Poland.
Gassings began on 3 September 1941 when the SS rst tested the use of Zyklon B,
and where the Nazis killed some 250 severely ill concentration camp prisoners and 600
Soviet prisoners-of-war in this experimental gas chamber in the basement of Block
11. A bunker was later constructed outside the prisoner compound and was converted
into a permanent gas chamber, with the ability to hold around 700 to 800 people.
Up until December 1942, the chamber was in regular use, but the precise number of
people murdered here is not known, although estimates vary from several thousand to
a maximum of 10,000 people.
28
(Bernburg, Pencil & Crayon on Paper 152 x 228 mm )
Can, then, the artistpainter, sculptor, photographer, poet or musicianever really

do justice to the representation of the genocide of entire races and the resulting horror
propagated by such evil aspirations? Perhaps not, but I now believe it is a practice worthy
of the effort. We study, remember and endeavour to portray the Holocaust for the same a
reason that we are determined to make sense of the contradiction of how precisely a highly
intelligent, developed and cultured nation assigned itselfits might, skills and imagination
to undertaking the death of millions for what now seems to us the preposterous reason
of not being considered human. It is worth remembering that the deaths of countless
individuals, men women and children were not always mechanized. Massacres, mainly mass
shootings, were committed not only by Nazi death squads, who we mistakenly imagine all to
be psychopaths, but by various helpers, collaborators, other prisoners, local villagers (coerced
by fear or the promise of loot) and watched by ordinary folk, neighbours, friends, children
and loved ones. Progressive and enlightened as we consider ourselves to be, the world we
live in, the here-and-now, still radiates disaster triumphant. (Theodor W. Adorno Dialect of
Enlightenment, 1947). As Robert Priseman has himself pointed out:
Think of Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people between 1975 and 1979,
or the Disappearances in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983 which saw some 200,000 people
vanish, or the loss of 3 million Bangladeshis during secession from Pakistan in 1971. Think also
of Rwanda, Bosnia, Vietnam, Eritrea, Sierra Leone and many, many others.
If we stop remembering, if we become disinterested or start to feel comfortable in the
presence of such horrorsPrisemans images will undoubtedly be comfortless, even
harrowing to manythen it is a black mark against our humanity for, as it has often
been said, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
29

Review
Jill Townsley: Moments of Repetition.

Robert Luzar
Work as an element in a work-of-art can entail more in its investigation than celebrating
the latter, as the pure, ne art object. Jill Townsleys approach to making art emphasizes
the crux of making something, reminiscent of industrial manufacture and craft, and
manifests a principle of re-production that goes largely unnoticed in precious ne art
artifacts. Her installations, videos, and sculptures express a fact of process, at times
marked but always evident of the more discrete performative activity of creation and
play. By exposing repetition in process, down to the simplest elementary building
block, Townsley arguably enables viewers to gain more understanding into what
creates an artwork than through art alone. Where her approach deserves considerable
merit is with how she ventures to identify with craft and production, and the disparate
inchoate phases that act as supplements to the artwork. To open my short meditation
on Townsleys work and labour I will coin Glenn Adamsons description of craft as
supplement:
To say that craft is supplemental, then, is to say that it is always essential to the end in view, but in
the process of achieving that end, it disappears. [1]
If Townsleys material strategies incorporate a play with the supplement she does so in
order to indicate the point in the evolution of a work of art, before it becomes anything,
where it is still vulnerable to aimless production. When the predicament of process
arises it is a moment in which the materials and actions reveal a constitutive property
of having no end or beginning. I will try and elaborate how Townsley approaches these
moments, when the act of labour approaches a level of failure, and the work resides
with a disintegration of the capacity of the material, along with levels of cognitive
concentration.
In March, 2010, the Nunnery Gallery (London, UK) presented Moments of
Repetition, an exhibition solely housing a series of Townsleys artworks. A variety
of approaches, ranging from sculpture, installation, video, drawing, and photography,
represented a culmination of ve years of her intensive investigation into repetition and
process. This period coincided with the time with her involvement in and completion
of a practice-lead PhD, whilst registered at Liverpool University, with a Gladstone
Fellowship from The University of Chester. Through in-depth experimentations in
the studio, a series of exhibitions - notably Second Lives Remixing the Ordinary,
the inaugural show in the new galleries at the Museum of Art and Design, New York
(2008-2009) - and whilst with the university she rigorously explored the fundamentals
of labour inherent in simple actions of repeating. I will examine some of these pieces
and projects, which fall under her series Labourworks, and see how they identify ways
of brining an experiential account of process in its logic.
30
Brass Cube 2003, Wire 2 x 2 x 2 metres
Her materials resonate with conventions of labour-production, synthetic in kind, such

as foam, wire, and plastic. When Townsley takes a wire, for instance, and makes it
visible as a coil, nestled in a multiplicity of other coils she provides the material with a
design, a spiral. Each coil appears static, as if freezing the centrifugal movement that
builds a nest of spirals. This, in turn, allows us to perceive the intricacy of a disorienting
operation. With its human scale, the coils assemble into a large cube, making its size
approachable, its presence hardly overwhelming. These factors enable us to then to
experience aspects of weaving and repeating.
The unit of repetition can be inspected further in the eight-foot pyramid,
Labourwork 5 - Spoons. We can clearly see how three plastic spoons, bound by a rubber
band, act as one of 3,091 parts used to assemble the overall mammoth structure. It is
by rendering this unit materially present that Townsleys work initiates the expressive
logic of repetition, and both with a highly physical and conceptual potency.
When seeing the video recording of Labourwork 5, where the pyramid slowly
disintegrates, this more abstract repetition slowly and progressively becomes apparent.
Kate Armstrong addresses this abstract kind of repetition in relation to the process of
31
(L) Detail of Spoons, 2008

(R) Spoons, 2008, 9,273 Plastic Spoons, 3,091 Rubber Bands, 2.59 x 3.48 x3.48 metres
art production, where she describes it as ...something in every system that cannot be
fully understood or fully cognized: the unrepresentable. [2]
We may wonder if seeing a physical reaction of materials, as in the de-composition
of a form, is a way of providing a closer proximity to repetition as ontologically
unpresentable. Yet when Labourwork 5 does collapse, as the video displays it
progressively and slowly crumbling, Townsley is offering the viewer the chance to
hypothesize where exactly abstract repetition occurs. It lies somewhere within the
tension and dissipation of physical energy, which is released as each rubber band
breaks. Seeing the demise of a pyramid is like viewing the fall of an architectural
goliath and allowing an effective approach to understanding repetition through the
familiar materials of plastic and rubber. Not by repeating through manufacture of the
object-unit, or the larger sculpture, but by seeing these material constructs naturally
dissolve, do we begin to get a glimpse at the process as a series of abstract forces.
Abstraction is reiterated by the purely geometric shapes and forms present in
these works, either as squares, cubes, or triangles. Considering these compositional
motifs as architectural constructions, recalls Wilhelm Worringers dictum that works
of art which he exemplied through gothic ornamentation (spires, repetitive coiling
lines) and a plethora of of non-representational designs each directly expresses the
forces that govern an impulse for creating the work. Worringer comments how this
activity and impulse stems from an obsession with a kind of embodied matter, and is
characteristic of the graphic motif of a line:
The unsatised impulse existing in this confusion of lines, clutching greedily at every new
intensication, to lose itself nally in the innite, is its impulse, its life. [3]
It is the motif of the line that particularly making this impulse, as a process of vitality,
immanent and graphic in matter. In Labourwork 7 - Scribble to the Count of Five,
Townsley employs the line in an obsessive activity of marking it out onto paper. In
part she tries to provide a limit to scribbling black lines endlessly, lling out the white
paper into a black square. Her decision is to use 500 repetitions of scribbling, while
counting to ve (repeated ve times) in order to arrest, what is otherwise an impulse to
repeat without end. In its nal appearance the count satises the drawing of a larger,
homogeneous black square. In contradistinction from the spoons, or coils, here one
can barely nd a part, or elementary unit within it; the black line disappears into a
black, graphic mass.
32
1 Meter Scribble Square 2007 (Gel pen and paper 1 x 1 metres )
Both the square and the scribble can be distinguished, as Townsley also presents a video
derived from documenting the process of her executing the square from beginning to
end, from white to black; but as an opaque mark both motifs coincide. Townsley marks,
records, and presents what can appear as a monument of process: an opaque surface,
or limit to perception and spatial access. In its black surface it appears as an enlarged
detail of the microcosmic line. With this gesture she in turn brings a critical perspective
to the moment of repetition, that phase of labouring and scribbling for an obscene
length of time. The opacity of this surface reects nothing more, no recollection of
the experience, except a repression of the act of a compulsion to repeat. What makes
Townsley repeatedly scribble, even to ve-hundred cycles?
The video that accompanies the scribble drawing could be perceived as a method
of rendering a motive that is either unconscious, or which only Townsley was conscious
of during the extensive endurance activity of scribbling. What we see are ve monitors,
playing a video recording of the development of the drawing. We see a beginning, a white
page, and an end, a black square, and then the sequence plays again. It is perhaps the loop
as much as the black mark that the instant of repetition and its cessation for accomplishing
its representation can be perceived as simultaneously surface and interval. As a point the
square demonstrates a mark as a limit to an absolute encounter of repetition. To use
Gilles Deleuzes articulation, repetition is a notion without a concept. It is, as he states,
...not a specic form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the
pure and empty form of time.[4] Counting to ve, and scribbling 500 cycles is a purely
functional strategy to bring some presence to an empty form of repetition, just enough
to touch upon it without completely erasing the count altogether.
Whereas one can use the spoons to cast his imagination, and try to sense the effect
of repetition, the black square is a visible testament to the inert quality of the black line
that scribbles it into place. Repetition may be without any entity. One cannot see it as
a black obstruction to visibility and intelligibility. The video, however, with its frantic
sounds of marks scouring a surface, draws our attention to be, even partially, in the
moment of something seemingly senseless as pure repetition. With both the video and
the marks we experience the gesture of drawing upon repetition, in its moment of and
as an operation. There is perhaps no tangible conceptual framework to be identied
in this moment, which is why one can at least listen, see, and almost feel repetition as
a hazy presence.
33

As much as Townsley is perhaps demystifying the complexity of repetition, revealing
the literal episodes and phases of a works evolution, we should not overlook the effect
the level of endurance, the investment of making the work, has on our capacity to
pay attention to what is being done. Enduring entails working in the midst of a time
that eventually, at some point during the prolonged period of labour, slips into a time
erased of sense and purpose. To use Nietzsches phrase:
Duration in vain without end or aim is the most paralyzing idea...[5]
The viewer can easily imagine the boredom that would emerge and seize the mind during
the crafting of large quantities of wire, binding spoons, or scribbling. Countless hours,
and days gone evoke a sense of empathy with the material and the hand that wields it.
Conversely, we may wonder if Townsley is able to recall and return to the points when
her endurance shifted into periods of mindlessness and pensive paralysis.
Considering these activities as mindless should not be understood as an insult;
labouring within a practice of craft, before, or outside of art, in that space that
behaves as a supplement to pure art, means that one chooses to work devoid of being
supported by an idea of the beautiful, or marvelous - feelings that give passion and
meaning to the work. It is the way Townsley uses numeration that confers a critical
distance, and allows us to experience a fragment of this unfathomable repetition. To
repeat to 500, or 3091 emphasizes the number as a focal point to Townsleys acts.
If repetition is in itself void of any concept, something of an empty duration that
one can only engage through endurance, number functions to prevent the act from
being completely forfeited. Historical examples, such as Eric Saties lengthy musical
performance, Vexations, demonstrate how one arrives at a number that marks a limit
to the act.
(detail) 840 Satie, 2006 (Video and Chalkboard, 1250 x 820 mm)
Saties act inevitably failed at the fteenth hour of the performance; at 840 repetitions
of the same melody, the number accomplishes the instant when the mind ceases
to endure a repetition that is a priori aimless. Townsley references Eric Satie, with
Labourwork 8 - Satie 840. Again, she incorporates the loop of a video to show her
hand inscribing numbers in chalk on a blackboard. Replacing Saties sonic interval with
that of an ephemeral rendering of a number, Townsleys gesture is seen as an erasure
of each instant of Satie repeating the melody. This action provides a summary of
how repetition, as a fundamental operation of process, can be expressed in her work.
34

No material, or frequency of labouring with process as repetition can accomplish a
representation of its limitless, and incorporeal state. It can at best be approximated.
Townsleys approach to making, in the sense of an approximation to repetition is to
reveal the process of some key ne art situations: tying, weaving, or scribbling.
Revealing a mechanical process, either through elastics, spoons, or wire, reects
a gesture of acts of failure. Her work oversteps the conceptual quip that one can
understand the work by seeing its mere image, or reading its text; for one has to spend
some time, a few moments watching a loop, or feeling the physicality of a large cube
or pyramid to begin to approach something as unrepresentable as the empty notion,
which compels a simple act to repeat.
Notes
[1] Adamson, G., Thinking Through Craft, Oxford: Berg, 2007, p. 13.
[2] Armstrong, K., Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2002, p. 6.
[3] Wilhelm Worringer, Form In Gothic, transl. & edited by Herbert Read. London: Shocken Books, 1964,
p. 79.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, Repetition And Difference, transl. Paul Patton. New York: The Athlone Press, 1994,
p. 276.
[5] Nietzsche, F. W. (1901) The Will to Power, transl. by Walter Kaufmann, & R. J. Hollingdale. New York:
Random House, 1967, p. 55.
35

Review
Unspeaking Engagements
Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry University,
12 February 19 March 2010.
Steve Swindells
The artists in Unspeaking Engagements explore processes of physical and/or durational
engagement as a means of constituting the artwork. Each address their own or the
viewers awareness of their body in relation to time and space. At issue are questions
of how such awareness can be cultivated, felt, represented and ultimately proliferated
through the work of art. Unspeaking Engagements showcases artworks as sites of shifting
experiences, in differentiation from artworks that require detached observation and
propose xed or nal interpretations.
The exhibition proposes a detailed understanding of major questions within
international contemporary art practices - who does what, how, when, and to whom
and consequently links theoretical debates about the intersection of performance
and performativity to more recent critical issues of relational or participatory art.
Moreover, the international basis of Unspeaking Engagements highlights different terms
for understanding common methods and aims. Theories and sensibilities developed
in one part of the world can be radically tested in another, provoking unexpected
intensities and new formations.
Andrew Spackman, a Senior Lecturer at Coventry School of Art and Design has
written a compelling ctional and actual review of the exhibition. In one aspect of his
review Andrew poses a number of reactions, questions and problems that emanate
from the altered-states the work suggests.
i. The artists start with the notion of the body, but present dislocated versions of themselves.
Fictional characters playing out challenging, riddle-some, but seemingly futile and purposeless tasks.
ii. The artists seem to attempt communication but the language is obscured. It is beyond
international, but is not merely personal either. Perhaps the work and the viewer are being placed in
a state of oscillation. The work oscillates between states of something and nothing. Could something
be knowledge and nothing is experience?
iii. If oscillation is occurring, what is the transmitted wave? And why does the artist seek to set this
oscillation in motion? Why do they feel the need to mess us about? Repetition is good. Repetition
seems to be the pivot point that all other things balance/rotate. Repetition is the works forcefulness,
whilst its message is a quiet deadly whisper.
iv. Has the xed, knowable, known become a problem for artist? A stuck space. Is oscillation a
narrow band of avoidance?
36

v. Is the search for avoidance also a search for a slow space, a frozen moment before we entered the
now? Are these artists looking for freedom? A potential form of freedom in place of our narrow
experience of freedom that is our contemporary experience. Could this be called Liminal Liberty?
vi. Is modernism still alluring to artists because it is considered dead and so no one can own it. New
endings of the project could be written and re written without need to test their viability.
Unspeaking Engagements is an international exhibition of visual art at Lanchester Gallery,
Coventry University in collaboration with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The
exhibition is curated by Brian Curtin and Professor Steve Dutton. The exhibition
includes artists from Thailand, Ireland, Singapore, Taiwan and Britain though many
have transnational afliations. Unspeaking Engagements was shown at the Art Centre of
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok during 2009.
37
Carl von Weiler
38

Review
Life: A Users Manual

Art Shefeld 2010
Steve Swindells
This is the fth citywide event organized by Shefeld Contemporary Art Forum
(SCAF), co-curated by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher. The title for Art
Shefeld 2010, Life: A Users Manual, is taken from Georges Perecs 1978 novel of
the same name, where the inhabitants of a ctitious Parisian apartment block leave
objects and traces of their lives behind in their ats. The writing, similar to elements
of the exhibition is primarily constructed from several elements, each adding a layer
of complexity and the resulting stories construct a trail of everyday life consumed by
spaces, places and things in the world.
In contrast to many other types of city wide contemporary art events, Life: A
Users Manual is understated which reects something of the organisers sensibilities
to present the unspectacular acts of everyday affect as a way of negotiating the world
today.
At the Millennium Gallery, Susan Hillers work, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists,
1972-76 is a conceptual looking grid of 305 postcards that show British coastlines
battered by high seas. At the time of the work Hiller argued conceptual work always
seemed to be at, arguing in classic conceptualism there is no notion of affect that seems
to acknowledge the potential for contradiction. Hillers work plays with contradiction
and emotion to create a space for differentiation. Shoum (2009) by Katarina Zdjelar
depicts a man from Belgrade translating the lyrics of Shout by Tears for Fears. The
resulting performance provides a phonetic interpretation of the original sound track
in which continuous mishearing provides a humorous mistranslation. Zdjelar is
interested in how the persistence of doing something unfamiliar produces difference,
and alternative ways of being.
At S1 Artspace, Haegue Yang has created a sensorial installation of various media
that focuses on the notion of abstraction. Architecture, cloths stands, lights, dry-ice
and candles all reect a mysterious space that is both subjective and romantic while
touching upon specic cultural narratives. Haegue Yang represented Korea at the
Venice Biennale in 2009.
Art Shefeld 2010 Life: a Users Manual is spread across the citys gallery spaces:
Bloc, Millennium Gallery, S1 Artspace, Site Gallery, Yorkshire Artspace, Shefeld
Institute of Arts Gallery and other public sites.
39

Film Theory
Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas

Silent Light (2007)
Sam Ishii-Gonzales
It is with his third feature lm Silent Light (Stellet Licht, 2007) that the Mexican lmmaker
Carlos Reygadas has come into his own. It is here that his thematic and formal concerns
his interest in spirituality, materiality and singularity (and roughly in that order) attain
a new purpose and clarity. Oddly enough this has occurred not through a rejection of
his earlier cinematic inuences, so as to forge his own original path, but rather through
a full-scale immersion into the work of a key precursor; an immersion that has allowed
Reygadas to, paradoxically, nd his own voice, to render concrete his own perspective
on the world. There are a number of important art cinema reference points for
Reygadas, including Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky. The key inuence on Silent
Light though is Carl Dreyers Ordet (The Word, 1955), about religious faith, set amongst
Christian farmers in the Jutland region of Denmark in the 1920s. The characters in
Dreyers lm argue over a number of religious (and secular) belief systems only to
be confronted at the end with the unexpected and miraculous the resurrection of
the dead brought about by the unlikeliest of sources: a mentally unstable young
man and the innocent belief of a small child. Reygadas transposes Dreyers work to a
farmland area of Northern Mexico inhabited by Mennonites, a religious community
consisting of the descendents of German immigrants who left their homeland to
escape persecution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Reygadas cast his
actors from among the members of the Mennonites community of this region with
the exception of his two female leads, whom he found in Mennonite communities
elsewhere in the world: the non-professional actress who plays Esther is Canadian, and
the non-professional actress who plays Marianne is German. The setting of the lm
and the casting of the actors are an inspired transposition of Dreyers work. They are
the rst of many.
Silent Light is not simply a remake of Ordet. There are fundamental differences in
story and plot. At the same time it should be evident to anyone who has seen both
lms how they are related to one another since there are any number of thematic,
visual, and auditory allusions made to Dreyers work, most obviously in the scene
of the wake and resurrection near the end of the lm. Where Reygadas really shows
himself an heir to Dreyer though is in his attention to the expressive potential of
cinematic form, particularly the rhythmic possibilities of the long take. For Dreyer, the
control of cinematic rhythm is the distinguishing trait of a great lmmaker. Dreyers
understanding of rhythm evolves over his forty-ve year career. Most crucially in
the shift that occurs from silent to sound lm. Dreyers silent lms (especially Passion
of Joan of Arc, 1928) demonstrate his mastery of rhythm via montage, rhythm as a
consequence of alternating shots that replace one another in rapid succession,
40

sometimes for purposes of harmonic compliment, sometimes for purposes of atonal
disruption. Dreyer, however, came increasingly to believe that sound lm required
another approach to cinematic rhythm, one that used sound spoken word, ambient
noise, music as a rhythmic component within the shot, rather than across shots,
alongside the movements of the camera and the gestures of the actor. These elements
in combination allow for a specic sound-lm rhythm. [1] This belief led Dreyer to
the long take aesthetic that characterizes his last two lms, Ordet and Gertrud (1964).
Still: Silent Light
In Ordet the rhythm is so masterfully, and so minutely, controlled that initially it seems
almost to have been snuffed out. First time viewers will, no doubt, be puzzled by the
slowness with which events unfold, with which the actors move and say their lines. And
yet, as the lm proceeds, the glacial pacing becomes increasingly more compelling, even
logical, and what initially feels labored takes on a new quality, a sense of inevitability
an inexorable movement that brings us to the threshold of a revelation. The climax
has extraordinary force and power, but only if you experience the lm as an organic
whole, only if you experience the denouement as the harmonic resolution to all that
has come before it. (At the level of structure, the climax provides closure through the
cessation of movement. At the level of the narrative, however, the end is an opening.
This tension between levels is part of what makes the nale so emotionally complex
and rewarding.)
As the lm scholar David Bordwell observes, The primary function of [Dreyers]
long takes is to foreground the shot itself as a component of cinematic perception.[2]
The shot is no longer simply a narrative unit in a larger signifying chain, but imbued
with its own signicance. Each shot, as Bordwell says, ...creates its own rhythmic
ensemble.[3] We are not asked simply to scan the image and (impatiently) await the
arrival of the next one but to become absorbed, fascinated, by what is placed in front
of us and to take it in at a certain deliberate, measured pace. This is what we nd as
well in Reygadas: a request that we remain within this shot, that we immerse ourselves
in this thing, that we become absorbed in the beauty of this world. From the opening
nearly ve-minute long take of a blanket of stars and the sun slowly emerging over
the horizon (and which will be rhymed with the nal shot), Reygades demonstrates a
similar attention to and mastery of duration. I dont wish to suggest to the reader that
41

Silent Light has the same tempo as Ordet. It doesnt. But it certainly does have a very
different pace from a typical mainstream narrative lm. In total, the lm, which runs a
126 minutes, has 226 shots with an average shot length (ASL) of roughly 34 seconds per
shot. By comparison, a contemporary feature lm of the same length would typically
have close to 2,000 shots and an ASL between 3 and 6 seconds; hence, moving at
nearly eight or nine times the speed of this one. (On the other hand, Dreyers lm,
roughly the same length as Reygadas, has only 114 shots or roughly half the number
of shots as Silent Light.)
Some viewers may balk at this kind of pace, but I would suggest that one of the
greatest strengths of cinema is precisely the way it allows us to take in an image at a
different rate or speed than we have become accustomed to in our modern consumer
society, which teaches us to look through images rather than look at them. As the art
critic Paul Galvez recently notes, in the context of painting and poetry, In a world
where images and words slip easily off the surface of things [] moments that make us
slow down to take in the substance of experience in all its complexity are needed more
than ever.[4] The long take is one of the means whereby cinema resists the reication
of images (the transformation of images into consumer goods to be exchanged at
will). Silent Light, with its precise framing and camera movements, asks us to attend
to its images with heightened awareness and absorption. It encourages a movement
into the image rather than a movement across or through them. In the process, the
seemingly mundane is transformed into something else something unexpected,
miraculous, sublime and because Reygadas focus is on the ordinary, without
recourse to professional actors or sets or digital effects, he allows us to rediscover what
is extraordinary about our everyday reality.[5]
It is the two lmmakers different approaches to cinematic realism that nally
distinguishes one from the other. Without dismissing realism out of hand, Dreyer
always insisted that it be combined with another word that modied or qualied its
meaning; his two favorite being spiritual realism and psychological realism, which
he seems to use interchangeably. What interests Dreyer are the fears and desires of
his human characters. Ordet is a lm about human belief. It afrms a world of belief, a
world we can believe in, a world that makes sense for us. Reygadas, by contrast, afrms
the world itself, with and without man. Reygadas faith is not in man but in the world.
Silent Light is about belief in this world. Pure and simple. His is a spiritual realism of
another sort. A spiritual realism without psychology, which is to say without man; a
non-anthropomorphic realism of the type found in object-oriented philosophy. This
shift of emphasis results in a qualitatively distinct resurrection scene. Admittedly, the
resurrection in Silent Light doesnt have half the impact of the equivalent scene in
Dreyer, but neither is it meant to. Everything that occurs in Ordet is a preparation for this
moment. It is the thematic and formal culmination of all that came before it. This is
not the case in Silent Light where the wifes resurrection is embedded in a natural world
that is itself miraculous. So whereas Ordet ends with a medium close-up on Inger and
her husband Mikkel, the nal six minutes of Silent Light returns us to nature returns
us, in fact, to the location where the lm began. We watch as the light slowly fades,
certain that the cycle of life and death will begin again the following day and the day
after that.
42

For those disinclined to be generous in regards Reygadas transcription of Dryers
work, lets not forget that Dreyers lm was itself an adaptation of a play by Kaj Munk,
a Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Germans in 1944 for his vocal criticism
of the Nazis as well as his role in the Danish resistance. In regards to Munk and his
play, Dreyer would say it was necessary to become possessed by Munk himself and
then to forget him. One must preserve him and free oneself from him at the same
time. [6] A similar thing happens with Silent Light. Reygadas both preserves Dreyer and
frees himself from him. Silent Light evokes Ordet only to nally become its own unique
entity. It is thus not only the perfect homage to a canonical work of cinema but to
the auteur that created it, because this is the true lesson that one learns from someone
like Dreyer: the only true auteur is the one who nally goes his or her own way; who
discovers the power of cinema for themselves.
Notes
[1] Carl Dreyer, Dreyer in Double Reection, ed. Donald Skoller (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 129.
[2] David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 151. For
those who might wish to consider the formal properties of the lm in more detail, Bordwells chapter-length
analysis of Ordet is exemplary.
[3] Bordwell 160.
[4] Paul Galvez, Inner States: Gustave Courbet, Artforum (May 2008), p. 346.
[5]] Reygadas use of actors both compliments and perfects Dreyers contention that cinema requires a new
use of actors. Dreyer believed that lmmakers need to discover a form of acting specic to the medium, one
that understands the difference between, as he puts it, pretending and being (Dreyer 53). It is precisely this
being rather than pretending that we nd in Silent Light.
[6] Dreyer 165; emphasis added.
43
Contributors
Fr. Martin Boland is the Dean of Brentwood Catherdral and writes The Invisible
Province blog at http://theinvisibleprovince.blogspot.com
John Finlay studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (1989-92) and
received his doctorate from the Courtauld in 1998. He is an independent art historian
of French history and culture, specializing in twentieth century modern art, and is
a regular contributor to Apollo, Sculpture and H-France. He is a regular contributor to
to a number of international art journals and magazines including Sculpture, Apollo
and Bonhams magazine. He is also a cultural commentator and currently writes a
weekly art column for New Zealands national newspaper, The Press.
Sam Ishii-Gonzales is a Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media
Studies and Film, The New School in New York City
Robert Luzar has an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design
(UAL), London and is currently enrolled on the PhD progremme at Central Saint
Martins College of Art & Design (UAL), London.
Robert Priseman studied Aesthetics and Art theory at the University of Essex
before taking up Painting full-time in 1992.
Ramesh Ramsahoye studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (198992) and received an MA from the Courtauld in 1993. He is an independent art
historian specializing in seventeenth century Dutch art. He is also a scholar of Italian
Renaissance Art and Architecture. He lives and teaches in County Wexford in the
Republic of Ireland.
Jeremy Spencer completed his PhD in the Department of Art History and Theory
at the University of Essex and lectures in Contextual Studies at the Colchester
School of Art and Design.
Dr Steve Swindells is Reader in Fine Art at Hudderseld University.
44
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Art Theory, Critique and

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One-point perspective and other Renaissance

Gentile da Fabriano, The Strozzi Altarpece, tempera on panel, 1423

In many textbooks, Gentile da Fabriano is represented as an artist whose work typied

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

It is generally agreed that mathematical perspective was invented by Brunelleschi in

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

(Above) Gentile da Fabriano, The Presentation in the Temple, 1423

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

(Dachau, Oil on Canvas 1.52 x 2.28 metres )

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

(Majdanek, Oil on Canvas 1.52 x 2.28 metres )

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

(Hademar, Pencil & Crayon on Paper 152 x 228 mm )

In contrast, Prisemans coloured drawings deliberately enhance the picturesque, fairytale

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

(Bernburg, Pencil & Crayon on Paper 152 x 228 mm )

Can, then, the artistpainter, sculptor, photographer, poet or musicianever really

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Jill Townsley: Moments of Repetition.

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Brass Cube 2003, Wire 2 x 2 x 2 metres

Her materials resonate with conventions of labour-production, synthetic in kind, such

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

(L) Detail of Spoons, 2008

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

1 Meter Scribble Square 2007 (Gel pen and paper 1 x 1 metres )

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Carl von Weiler

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Life: A Users Manual

Artfractures Quarterly | Issue 04 | Summer 2010

Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas