THE LANDSCAPE
The landscape is, in the first instance, the place where not so much man
himself, as rather the traces of his presence are to be seen: the
inhabited world (urban landscape) or the laboured world (agricultural
or industrial landscape). Showing the inhabited or laboured world,
rather that the humans that inhabit or labour it - the scene rather than
the drama, has the major advantage that it makes visible complex
relations that threaten to remain invisible when concentrating on purely human
interactions: think of what is revealed when showing castles amid the
laboured land or of sky-scrapers amid an ocean of slums - not to mention
more sophisticated images like Brueghels 'Tower of Babel'. Of this kind
of landscape, there is also a more 'sublime' (erhaben) version: the ruin - also as
industrial ruin, or, broader still, as an archaeological site, where
the remains of human activity are still visible, whereas what motivated
it has disappeared. To phrase it with Bertolt Brecht 'Und
von den Stätten wird bleiben: der durch sie hindurchging, der Wind.' (Of
these cities will remain: that which passed through them — the Wind!)
At the opposite end of the inhabited and laboured world of man, is the
uninhabited and untouched - virgin - world of nature:
the idyllic or sublime nature.
As a rule, there is no trace of humans here - at least not of working or
acting people: if there are people altogether, it is 'passers-by', whose
physical presence merely makes them look irrelevant, not only in the
spatial sense of inconspicuous in the face of the overwhelming presence
of nature, but also in the temporal sense of being merely a wrinkle on
the crest of waves in another dimension of time. This landscape is not
so much the scene of the human drama, as rather the indifferent crust of
the earth that carries the human doings, indifferently and
unperturbed. It is in such spatially and temporarily transcendent
landscape that the Flemish Primitives used to situate the nevertheless
crucial Biblical events.
Robert Piccart's landscape belongs to neither type - rather is it a
reversal and sophistication of the latter. It departs from an impression
that often imposes itself in many a deserted landscape: that people must
have been passing here fleeing from disaster or under way to some evil
undertaking; or that the now peaceful place must have been the scene of
some murder or execution, if not of battles, like
the now peaceful landscape of Flanders fields.
In such a landscape, humans are not physically present, but rather as
'revenants', ghosts that have not found their resting place, or that may
rise from death at any moment. A deserted landscape is the place par
excellence where such ghosts use to dwell: the living in the inhabited
world all too easily tend to forget the violence that turned them into
survivors, and that, precisely therefore, is all too often relegated to
the inhabited world. With Piccart, such relegation is made undone: the
expelled ghosts have taken a physical shape, and thereby transform the
landscape into the scene of its opposite; a 'history painting': the
depiction of some important event.
THE DRAMATIS PERSONAE
It is, however, not so much the dead that are risen here, as
rather killers: two groups of armed men, one in uniform and one in civil
dress, standing next to corpses (detail).
And they are not so much risen, as rather catapulted from other contexts
into this orchard
- no 'revenants', as rather displaced persons - or, more eloquently, in
French: 'des dépaysés'. No doubt, their equivalents must have been active
in this landscape, but that they are displaced from elsewhere to the here
and now, reminds us of the fact that they are not only of all times,
but also of all places. The here is turned into the everywhere, whereas,
conversely, the events are removed from the context in which they have
been photographed - and are thereby turned into events that could happen
everywhere and whenever - so that the everywhere is also the here, an
impression that is only intensified in that the soldiers are drawn from
diverse conflict zones in the present world.
On top of that, the 'dépaysement' only intensifies the expressiveness of
the images: in that the scenes are displaced from their urban context
into a deserted and desolate orchard, we come to see what they
really show: how unscrupulously the killers are standing there, whipping
(detail) or kicking
corpses (detail). The 'dépaysement' turns out to be an excellent method of
providing a universal meaning to what is only a documentary here-and-now,
a method that is far more convincing than, for example, the 'mythologizing'
à la Odd Nerdrum ('the eternal warrior').
And it is not all killers there in the orchard: there is also the
peaceful group op children with balloons on an excursion (detail), and a pair of
unsuspecting ballerinas walking in tutu (detail).
Apparently, they have nothing to do with the soldiers and their victims:
there is no interaction whatsoever between the groups, and they seem not
even to be aware of each other's presence. That only highlights their
objective relations: not only that these children have fathers and that
these girls will soon marry men, but also that only the children of the
victors will grow up - the others are killed or will never be begotten
by the fathers that are heaped up as corpses. And also: that the life at
school or in beauty is a life after or behind the fronts.
THE DRAMA IN THE LANDSCAPE
The landscape itself is not a mere backdrop to the proceedings on the
foreground: structurally and contentually, it is intimately entwined
with it. The sharpness of the dead branches on which mistletoe
parasitises, contrasts with the strange light that tries to break through the
clouds and that casts darks shadows on the trees and the grass on the
right. From that shadowy zone, the horizon sinks to the right, to
dissolve into the light over a meadow, to which three figures
flee (detail). More in the foreground, the group of schoolchildren contrasts
against the lighting background, which refers us again to the right,
where the ballerinas light up against the dark background that wraps the
killers in the shadow.
Next to the light-architecture, there is also the purely geometrical
structuring of the whole. Read in the two dimensions of the plane, the
image is articulated in twointertwined rhythmical progressions:
that of the six groups of figures that are symmetrically arranged around
the foot that, in the middle of the bottom side kicks a corpse, and the
rhythm of the trees, that is organised on both sides of the tree that,
leaning against the golden section, divides the plane in a rather light
and a rather dark zone.
Behind the combined rhythm of these two articulated strips, two
diagonals cross each other: the strip of trees on the horizon that
descends from the right to the left, balanced by the ascending
transition of shadow to light.This structuring in the two
dimensions of the plane is only enhanced through the intriguing
structuring of space read in its three dimensions. Parallel to the plane
runs a movement through the barrel of the bazooka and the gaze of the
soldiers with the machine guns to the right. At right angles with this
movement - albeit slightly leaning to the right - the two killers with
their hands in their pockets are looking forward, whereas the man in the
middle kicks backwards.
And the crossing diagonals of horizon and transition from dark to light
in the two-dimensional plane finds its echo in two diagonal movements
that lead into the light that breaks through the clouds, and from which
the first one - over which the ballerinas walk unsuspecting along the
proceedings of war - departs from the right lower angle, whereas the
second - over which the figures flee to the light(detail) - departs from the
middle of the lower side, at right angles with the movement of the
whipping figure.
AN IMPORTANT STEP
FORWARD
To fully appreciate the merits of this image, it is worth to remind that
the modern plastic arts have been very successful in avoiding one of the
most important tasks of art: depicting human existence also in its
political dimension.
That is deplorable, not only because so many crucial political developments have
been taking place during the last century, but above all because especially the
handmade image is predestined to construct a synthetic image, in which
complex relations can be made visible by combining representations that
cannot be seen from one single perspective. The potential of such an
image have only been developed to turn sense into nonsense, like with
Surrealism.
This failure has much to do with the fact that the classical formula of
history painting - in its glorifying as well as in its critical form -
can no longer convince in our era, because there is no longer talk of a
subject that could claim to represent mankind as a whole, like in the
olden times of the advent of the 'world religions' and their secular
heirs after the French Revolution: all contemporary economical, national
or religious subjects cannot but be particular in a steadily globalising
world. In expectance of the emergence of something like (the
avant-garde) of a new encompassing collective subject - a human world
without heathen, outlanders or human prey, the inhabitants of the world
seem to deliberately have chosen to no longer understand themselves as
members of a universal subject: after the relegation of the
'proletariat' to the realm of fable, the world seems to have been
transformed into a playground where everybody hopes to belong to the
predators, when necessary appealing to national formations of all kinds,
not to mention the meanwhile somewhat provincial world religions. No
wonder that especially the plastic arts have abandoned history painting
in as far as it glorifies or criticises the feats of such formations, to
withdraw itself in a vain ritual of (self-)negation, that only seemingly
allows to uphold a semblance of universality.
Piccart's image is a first step to break that double deadlock.
In the first place, it escapes the pitfalls of the presumed visibility
in the perspectival and/or documentary image.
In many a history painting - already form Altdorfers 'Battle of Issus'
onward - the view on the military exploits bereaves us from a view on
the motives of the battle, so that history painting threatens to
degenerate into a mere 'genre painting' where the conflicting parties
are essentially interchangeable.
Piccart rather shows us some rather trivial events from the periphery of
the spectacle, events that are rather non-events, a pause, that all the
more highlights the roguish indifference of the killers, that is only
surpassed by the unworldly ignorance of the survivors in whose name the
whole proceedings are set up.
Only as such can it become part of a more encompassing synthetic image.
The killers are not confronted with their enemies, rather are they
standing shoulder on shoulder with another opposite: the peaceful
undertaking of culture. Only thus can the invisible made visible: the
real action that is the major crime of our age - the choice for the
particular, for the encapsulation that succeeds in binding the
aggression internally, only to unleash in the outer world. Therewith
- as already announced in the panoramic size - history painting is
elevated to a higher and more contemporary level:
higher, in that the attention shifts from the heroic or scorned violence
to the particularism that lies at the roots of it, and more contemporary
in that, from the point of view of humankind as such, it becomes all too
apparent how humankind is raging here against itself.
And, precisely because this image seems so unworldly and unreal, is it
the reflection of the actual Western, especially Western-European
consciousness. To many Westerners, the fall of the Iron Curtain seemed
to herald the end of the struggle between 'capitalism' and 'communism'. Instead,
in Europe with the Balkan war, and in the United States with 9/11,
entities turned out to be alive and kicking that many deemed to have
disappeared forever, although they have been in a constant rise
especially after the French Revolution. Because the struggle between the
'totalitarian' and the 'democratic' forces had made us blind for that
seemingly unstoppable advent, the killers on Piccart's image are
'revenants' indeed, at which most of us look somewhat orphaned and
paralysed.
Rather than glorifying or criticising from some particular point of
view, this image confronts us with a poignant question: whether what it
shows is 'sublime' in the sense of belonging to the nature of the beast
- so that nothing is left but to make sure that we will belong to the
survivors, or whether, rather conversely, it is the repugnance for what
shocks us in this image that is the 'sublime' - our true nature, that
threatens to succumb under the weight or our less respectable - all too
human - propensities.
© Stefan Beyst, June 2012