Magazyn MSN

In her Notes on Painting (2013), Mehretu says of her compositional process that it is a “battle of small marks in this LONGVIEW of time.”[1] This is the struggle we gaze at, assess, and reassess in her paintings: the conduct and fortunes of marks in an environment that is as much temporal as spatial. It is as if the marks will not be where they are now—in a moment. “The marks are insistent,” Mehretu writes.[2] Standing in front of an unfinished painting in the studio, she says: “Every mark recalls something. This one makes me think of Hammons, maybe because of the hand in it; or maybe the color. And that’s Bacon, the way Bacon would create different figures out of a twist or something.” [3] She makes the marks, but they arrive as strangers, and each mark counters her: its struggle is to exist, self-realize, and quite literally escape erasure. When asked how she knows when a painting is getting good, she describes how it “lives on its own” and that “the freaky bits have got to stay freaky.” She knows the marks are “somewhat violent” [4] when making an image while destroying an image: “that wicked MASS of marks that devour, consume, digest, and decimate their place.” [5]

 

Do maggots sleep? To make a good painting, you have to keep the wound clean. In interviews, Francis Bacon returned again and again to what he saw as his essential struggle in painting: to avoid, at all costs, an illustrative result. Bacon believed that artists’ most defining talent is their judgment in the face of their own work as it emerges, and that this was agonistic: a constant to and fro, between work and maker, that is a kind of bearable suffering.

Approaching a Mehretu painting, we can feel that we are being made witness. We are being asked to “Come and see,” in the uncannily thrilling words repeated by the “four beasts full of eyes before and behind” in the Book of Revelation (4:6), as they herald the destruction of the world and the coming of the Last Judgment. The painting we have approached will amount to both a scene and a moment. Its meaning will not be ostensible, but neither will it be obscure. The encounter is remarkably concrete. As we examine the scene before us, we face an environment that is neither still nor in sequence; instead, it feels elastic and holds perspective open. This elasticity that dilates our sense of time and space gives rise to what is most ineffable about Mehretu’s work: it is as if her paintings are witnessed from within. Their space contains judicial consciousness—one is alert, before and behind, to a judging eye within the painting. I cannot account for the sensation. Who am I with when I look?

On a plane this New Year, I watched my son play the video game Empire: Total War. In it, as a military commander, he swooped over the battlefields seeing the world at macroscale: “up in the sky,” he explained, then at the next minute, looking through the eyes of a soldier at a “singular individual scale.”

 

I grew up living in a succession of British Army barracks, the largest of which were the Kitchener Barracks in Chatham, England. Perhaps the earliest artworks to really impress me with their monumental scope were the battle paintings in the Officers’ Mess. At the age of nine, I would gaze at these dynamic pictures of foreign battlefields, largely ignorant of the colonial wars that they celebrated, or what had motivated them. Death was seen at a distance, and the artists seemed to be impressively good.

 

An example of such a painting would be The Storming of Tel el-Kebir (fig. 5) by Géricault’s pupil Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville. I have learned that it was the British victory over the Egyptian nationalist rebellion led by Ahmed ‘Urabi at Tell El Kebir, to the east of Cairo, in 1882, that cemented their colonial control of Egypt, and the Suez Canal, for seventy years.

 

It is instructive, if a little uncomfortable, to look at de Neuville’s painting alongside Mehretu’s Cairo of 2013 (see pp. 160–63). Mehretu cared profoundly about the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, especially in Egypt, which she knows well, and which she visited frequently at the time. Although 130 years separate them, both paintings were made within two years of the events that inspired them, and they do share certain compositional vectors of momentum and destructive force. However, the former is a case of history written by the victors. It is intended to please only one audience. Mehretu’s sublime painting represents forces of far greater scope and power, but the power represented is no one’s; it is power itself.

 

Strangely, I can’t recall being taught anything about the British Empire at school. President Nasser’s successful nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, and the humiliating end to empire that it signified in Britain, was probably the cause of that. My ignorance was perhaps also the result of a child’s experience of Fredric Jameson’s evocation of the global capitalist sublime, which Mehretu succeeds more than any other artist in visualizing. Indeed, it is almost as if her early visual vocabulary had developed under the pressure of needing to render the displacements Jameson regards as beyond the scope of representation.

 

Jameson describes the onset of accelerated global capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how it affected the lived experience of a Londoner because “the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet these structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.” He goes on to say: “Not even Einsteinian relativity, or the multiple subjective worlds of the older modernists, is capable of giving any kind of adequate figuration to this process.” [7]

 

Confrontation with the unrepresentable has always driven aesthetic development. The most optimistic strain of modernism in the visual arts, the aspect that truly sought to make the world anew, gave rise to purification and simplification. The two limit works, in painting, of this tendency might be said to be Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, on the side of abstraction, and Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World, on the side of representation, both so scandalously pure in their intent and execution as to be true zero-degree works.

In the past five years, due to art-historical discoveries related to their origins, the integrity of both these works has been found to be polluted in different ways.

 

The Origin of the World was painted in 1866, the year after the end of the American Civil War. In 2013, the Institut Gustave Courbet authenticated a separate canvas of a young woman’s head as having once been part of the upper section of the canvas. We are now no longer sure of the artist’s intent. If the picture was indeed cropped, was it Courbet who did it? The crop is what gives the work its power. Either way, the painting has become shadowed by precisely the kind of social mise en scène that it had freed us from previously. It was that freedom that had allowed the painting’s title to feel nothing like an ironic joke for 146 years.

 

In 2015, researchers at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow discovered that beneath the black square on the surface of Malevich’s eponymous painting, the artist had written a racist joke: “Negroes fighting in a cellar at night.”[8] In this latter case, the very foundation stone of modernist abstraction turns out to have been laid upon something worse than a joke.

It seems symptomatic of our times that these diminishments should have occurred so recently and the works become, in the current idiom: so fallen.

 

It is precisely out of the remnants of Suprematism, Constructivism, and schematic drawing that Mehretu began growing her own innovative abstract vocabulary, which she extends, in defiance of Jameson, to express the sublime global flows of coordinates and truths of remembrance. T.J. Demos names this a “geoaesthetic.” It is a language that Mehretu has wielded at a macroscale and through individual eyes. As exemplified by her long view of Egypt, where she also had her own boots on the ground.

 

Demos describes Mehretu’s work as “a modelling of painting that challenges the limits of apprehension—spatially and historically—and thus defies the master (or colonial) gaze.” [9] Yet I do not think the layered perspectives are quite so schematic and contradictory as he suggests. Something is being sought. A kind of sense is being made within the vast complexities of Mehretu’s spaces that is not solely compositional. There is a judicial gaze at work, a searching eye. It is not by chance that Piranesi chose to draw prisons and Mehretu’s stadia are not for sport…

Mehretu said in 2018: “There’s a level of panic that came into me. There’s this subconscious terror that you feel, vibrating close to the surface, and I feel that more than I’ve ever felt that in the U.S. recently. It’s seeping into everyone. I feel like that is what I’m trying to metabolize in these new paintings; elements of that terror.” [10]

 

The California wildfires are no longer burning as I write this in Los Angeles in January 2019. For those who endured them, they were terrible: lives turned upside down in the space of an hour. The United States President, when visiting one of the affected communities in the devastating aftermath, made a slip of the tongue, misnaming the town of Paradise as “Pleasure.” This diminishment called to mind Roland Barthes’s distinction between bliss (jouissance) and pleasure (plaisir) within cultural experience, and Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime contrasted to the beautiful.

 

The definitions of the aesthetic sublime and psychological trauma are strikingly similar until the point comes when they diverge. Both are characterized by an influx of excitation that can either overwhelm you to the point of damage, in the case of trauma, or transport you to a kind of extreme emotion, in the case of the sublime. “Terror is in all cases whatsoever … the ruling principle of the sublime.” [11] And “the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature … is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended.” [12]

 

“And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth … and the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together” (Rev. 6:12–14). Revelation is a prophetic book, a vision of the future that unfolds in stages. We know this vision will culminate in the end of time itself and the judicial sublime of the Last Judgment. It has not yet come to pass, but its permanent and familiar presence in our collective psyche means that in a real sense it has. Indeed, it will only ever occur on the pages of our imagination. We recognize it. We know it. We made it up. An exact accounting, resulting in perfect justice, is at the very center of every individual’s thoughts. In this way, President Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address of 1865, was able to ask the American people to summon up a vision of ultimate justice, where the Civil War may need to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” And no American had any problem following him in this vision of an infallible reckoning.

 

At the climax of the Book of Revelation, only the seventh seal remains to be opened, which, when broken, will unleash the end of time. But when it is, a most surprising and beautiful thing occurs; nothing happens: “There was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” (Rev. 8:1).

 

This halting of the tumult always reminds me of Mehretu’s paintings. Not stillness, but time become place: her “LONGVIEW of time.” It is as if her art has found a way to bring the traumatic back into the arena of the sublime. Formed by the accretion of all her judgments, marks, and erasures, this space has all the held silence of Revelation. It is a judicial sublime.

 

In this, the work stretches toward what Immanuel Kant evoked in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) when he wrote: “Two things fill my mind with ever increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

 

But the seal hasn’t opened. We work in the flux of history. The angel of history, which Walter Benjamin describes in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, is trapped into facing the past as its debris accumulates at his feet. He would like to turn round “but a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.” This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. [13]

 

Both When Angels Speak of Love (Barcelona) and Hineni (E. 3:4) began by making use of a referent image more explicitly than Mehretu has ever done before, printing it across the whole picture surface. All photographs come to us from the past. Yet through her act of making the painting, the referent has been metabolized out of visibility and into the present, so that when we look at the paintings tomorrow, they will still be in today.

 

The bush is not being consumed, the bush is burning with fire.