Politics and Empathy by Jan Kather

Politics & Empathy

Contemplating The Raft of the Medusa An exhibition catalog featuring the art of

Daniel Reidy

July 13 - October 26, 2018

Arnot Art Museum 235 Lake Street Elmira, NY USA 14901

The Raft of the Medusa (after Théodore Géricault), 2016-18, oil on canvas, 16’x 24’

Untitled Umbrella, 2017, umbrella, 31”x12”x8 1/2”

Artist Statement Daniel Reidy

here is an ancient understanding at work when we look at depictions of people. Even the most rudimentary depiction sparks an impulse to decipher the narrative at play or the emotional disposition of the subject. When I saw Associated Press photos of Middle Eastern refugees washed up on the shores of Lesbos, I began to form a mental narrative about individuals adrift. I had immediately noticed the intensity of life-vest orange spreading from one picture to the next, and the repetition of this “safety orange” made me think of people, not just migrants or refugees, but all people who are cut off from family, friends or their love. Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa seemed the apparent choice as a departure point to explore this response. The time I have spent with this composition has humbled me. I have never seen Géricault’s original so I can only imagine the awe it must inspire. In poring over the tangle of form in the drawing, I feel I have gleaned some understanding of the artist. Géricault’s optimism, ambition, and humanity come into focus. He could have chosen any moment from this story that is filled with horror and the grotesque or other dispositions that were so enticing to artists of the romantic era. Instead, he chose hope. He chose to depict a glimpse at rescue on the horizon. I approached my own Raft by dividing Géricault’s composition into six panels that hang together. Each panel is painted on a fully saturated orange ground and a line drawing describes the edges of the objects. Color and tone are added to the delineated spaces in such a way that some of the orange ground is allowed to peek through. None of the works in this exhibition overtly speak to any single issue because the works are distanced from their source by process, humor, and contradiction. Creating the Raft (after Géricault) and Conversion (after Caravaggio), as well as other paintings and sculptures in this show, has helped me to understand my own place in the trajectory of art history. I follow the footsteps of artists of the past who have engaged viewers through depictions that showcase their sense of empathy. Though I consider myself an interdisciplinary artist, the figure and the tradition of oil painting remains a central focus in my studio practice. Regardless of media, I feel my work is best when it is born out of an empathetic response to something witnessed or an emotional response to something experienced. Whether it is subconsciously encrypted or overtly illustrated, if we allow it, art seen through the lenses of politics and empathy can motivate us to grapple with the challenging social issues of our time on a more compassionate and humane level.

Untitled (hole), 2015, carved river rock, magic, found object, 7” x 5” x 4”

Reliquary, 2017, kleenex soaked with tear from Catholic funeral mass, stone, 4” x 2 1\2” x 2 1\2”

Bone dice, 2018, found objects

This is what it is to have a sister I, 2016, cup, gold leaf, enamel wood, 4” x 5 x3”

Readymade MoMA

term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1915 to describe prefabricated,

often mass-produced objects isolated from their intended use and elevated to the status of art by the artist choosing and designating them as such. The term “assisted Readymade” refers to works of this type whose components have been combined or modified by the artist.

Brides, 2011-16, grament and latex on canvas, 48” x 56”

Facsimile of a family heirloom, 2016, found object, 8 1/2” x 5” x 3 1/2” Brick from Fire House # 3 family heirloom, 1978, brick, 8 1/2” x 5” x 3 1/2”

Braided Bunny, 2013, photo, found object, 72” x 16” x 16”

The Calling (after Caravaggio), 2017, oil on canvas, 10’ x 10’10”

The Calling of Daniel Reidy Jan Kather

How does one choose to be an artist?

he answer may be hidden in Daniel Reidy’s exhibition at the Arnot Art Museum (July October 2018) titled The Raft of the Medusa: Politics and Empathy. The museum’s Falck Gallery has rarely been so animated with vivid color and expressive brush stroke, while simultaneously fusing our memory of European art history with contemporary reportage. The view from the second floor balcony is nothing less than breathtaking when viewing the 16’ x 24’ Raft, flanked by to-scale revisionings of Caravaggio paintings. Undoubtedly, The Raft of the Medusa (after Théodore Géricault) commands the space, however, it is the painting to the right, The Calling of St. Matthew, that resonates with me. I fondly remember seeing the original by Caravaggio (1599) when visiting a friend in Rome in 1992. Digging through the many film negatives and prints from that trip, I found my original darkroom photograph. With this discovery, I vividly recalled walking into the cool darkness of the Church of S. Luigi dei Francesi. Unlike many museums today, this church was filled with an eerie silence, pierced only by a few whispers of two or three other visitors. Although the painting is large (10.5ft x 11ft), the magnificence of the marble pillared surroundings, as well as the dim lighting, caused me to remember it as rather small in scale. Reidy’s true-to-size painting, installed with minimal environmental distraction in the Falck Gallery, took me by surprise: The Calling of St. Matthew is in every sense, larger than life. As a student of art history and of Sunday school classes, I knew exactly what the narrative of the painting was. Matthew was a tax collector who was called to follow Jesus, giving up a lucrative and luxurious life for one of service to others, particularly the poor, the sick, and women. It appears that Christ is the rear figure on the right, pointing directly at Matthew. The painting depicts the transformation that occurs at the moment when Matthew, who is counting money with other tax collectors in a tavern, psychically steps from the material world into the spiritual world, as suggested by the ray of light that parallels the visual line from Christ’s hand directly to Matthew, who points quizzically to himself. Similarly, “conversion” is apparent on the opposite wall in twin paintings based on Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul on the Road to Damascus. The Biblical story of the conversion of St. Paul repeats the idea of capturing that split second when the world unexpectedly turns on end for a person, when black seemingly becomes white, or when long time foes suddenly become friends. Reidy

helps us “see the light” as we view the world through his artwork. With little prompting, we begin to ponder how unexpected change dramatically defines our own world today. I can imagine a conversion or transformation that took place at some time in Daniel Reidy’s life as an artist. There was surely a moment (or several) when he knew he would dedicate his life to his art. I envision him “seeing the light,” when the desire to evoke the ineffable replaced imperatives dictating the slavish, photographic representation of reality. Surely, his passion for visualizing experience, combined with an obsession to closely examine the world, compelled him to become the innovative artist that he is today. Interestingly, the helpers in this quest were not people, but were the paintings left to us by artists of the past who shared Reidy’s devotion to expressing ideas visually. His artworks are often direct homages to artists such as Van Gogh and Duchamp, tacitly revealing the lessons he has learned from them. By choosing Romantic and Baroque art as inspiration, Reidy provokes empathy in the viewer. Empathy, the ability to see and feel the pain of others, is clearly at the core of this exhibition. As visitors to the Arnot Art Museum, we sense our good fortune to surround ourselves with Daniel Reidy’s vision. We are witnesses to a revelation about art, art history and the relevance of both to the contemporary world. Subtly, but equally importantly, we recognize how Reidy’s art celebrates the transformational moment. This exhortation to see the familiar in a new way is literally the calling of Daniel Reidy. Although I cannot promise an epiphany, I suspect most people will experience their own transformation in thought and feeling after immersing themselves in this grand exhibition..

The Conversion Black (after Caravaggio), 2016, oil on canvas, 91” x 67 1/2” The Conversion Red (after Caravaggio), 2016, oil on canvas, 91” x 67 1/2” 8

Overview of the Falck Gallery

The Storm (after Van de Velde), 2017, oil on canvas, bric-a brac, 24 x 30” At left: Man of War in the Storm, Van de Velde the Younger, oil on canvas, 24” x30” The Storm (after Van de Velde), 2017, oil on canvas, bric-a brac, 24 x 30” Opposite: The Crossing I (after Jacques-Louis David), 2018, oil on canvas, 8’6” x 4’4” The Crossing II (after Jacques-Louis David), 2018, oil on canvas, 8’6” x 4’4”

Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (excerpt)

Lord Byron (1788–1824) TIS done—but yesterday a King! And arm’d with Kings to strive— And now thou art a nameless thing: So abject—yet alive!

Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind Who bow’d so low the knee? By gazing on thyself grown blind, Thou taught’st the rest to see.

Is this the man of thousand thrones,

With might unquestion’d,—power to save,—

Who strew’d our earth with hostile bones,

Thine only gift hath been the grave,

And can he thus survive?

To those that worshipp’d thee;

Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,

Nor till thy fall could mortals guess

Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far.

Ambition’s less than littleness!

The Arnot Art Museum colllaborated with Elmira College to sponsor Provost and Professor of American Studies Dr. Charlie Mitchellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lecture inspired by viewing Daniel Reidyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Raft. Dr. Mitchell (pictured opposite) has kindly agreed to publish his lecture in this catalog.

Arnot Art Museum Rick Pirozzolo introduces Daniel Reidy on opening night, July 20, 2018.

The Raft of the Medusa Introduction and Artist’s Talk

Dr. Charlie Mitchell

want to begin with a question posed by the writer Julian Barnes in his 1989 novel The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. The question comes in the middle of Chapter 5, and thus more or less in the middle of the book: “How do you turn catastrophe into art?” Given that Chapter 5 is a two-part reflection on Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa it seems an appropriate place to begin this talk in the shadow (perhaps literally) of Dan Reidy’s (and our) conversation with this painting. I will draw on two other books that expand upon that question: Susan Sontag’s On Regarding the Pain of Others and art historian Linda Nochlin’s Misere: The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century. To “How do you turn catastrophe into art?” let us add the following questions: “Why attempt to turn catastrophe into art”? “What happens to our understanding of the catastrophe?” “What happens to our understanding of art?” There may be a few more questions to consider that pop up along the way. Barnes’s “novel” is one of those clever but accessible post-modern texts that plays with different styles and narrative voices. Each chapter stands alone as an independent story or essay connected by several recurring threads: the tale of Noah’s ark, the woodworm, the experience of being adrift. Taken together they add up to an engaging and thoroughly sobering reflection on what I hope we can still call the human condition: how have the representatives of homo more-or-less sapiens made sense of the mysteries of existence, come to terms with disappointments, betrayals, and disasters large and small? And the story of the Medusa—both the event and the artifact—is the literal centerpiece of that tableaux—a fold-out color reproduction of the painting is included.

The chapter is presented in two parts. Part one is a retelling of the story of the wreck, the abandonment of the raft, and the horrors that followed. Here Barnes draws on the published account of two survivors in 1818. The second half begins with the question noted above—How do you turn catastrophe into art?—and includes a recounting of the history of Géricault’s

painting and Barnes’s own (or is it Barnes’s narrator’s own?) reflections on how the painting works. Wittily, of course, that question applies not only to Géricault’s painting but to the narrative of the two survivors, which is, whatever its documentary aims, a carefully crafted creation; it also applies to Barnes himself, who constructs his own work of art—his novel—around this particular catastrophe. And so from “How” to “Why” the questions we are asking extend well beyond Géricault’s early 19th century painting. They include those of us in this room as we consider one work of art that, perhaps, links an older work of art’s depiction of a catastrophe to catastrophes of our own time and, dare I say, making. Barnes’s discussion of the painting itself and of Géricault’s process and intentions is fascinating and I highly recommend that anyone interested in the story—the wreck, Géricault’s painting, Dan’s painting—run out and get a copy of the book immediately. I want to highlight some of the more provocative—as in, thought-provoking—aspects of Barnes’s argument: 1. The impulse to make art out of catastrophe has become an automatic process: a. We have to understand it b. To understand it we have to imagine it and so we need the act of imagination c. We need to explain it—justify it, forgive it, however minimally: d. Why did this happen? e. Perhaps, in the end, what catastrophe is for is to produce art 2. The significance of what Géricault chose not to depict in the painting: a. The Medusa striking the reef b. The moment when the two ropes were cast off and the 150 or so people on the raft abandoned c. The mutinies, acts of cannibalism, and executions d. A factual representation of events e. The moment of rescue 3. From this, Barnes concludes that Géricault’s first concern was not to be political, symbolic, theatrical, shocking, thrilling, sentimental, documentational, or unambiguous. 4. Of course, for audiences of the time much of that would have been unnecessary, redundant a. The details of the story—at least as presented in the account of the two survivors—were widely known in Europe and England and viewers of the painting would already have had strong opinions about the event and what it meant, who was to blame, etc. 5. So why paint it? Barnes answer is that Géricault was looking to make a name for himself as an artist has particular interests, mandates, parameters that transcend, perhaps preempt, addressing a charged political issue head on: a. Art prioritizes form: color, shading, cropping, balance i. As Barnes notes, the survivors in Géricault’s painting look healthy, classical forms full of muscle, a raft-load, as it were, of Borghese warriors and thinking men b. Through time, as the original story fades, the viewing experience changes c. We do not look at the painting in the same context as the original viewers; we do not bring the same familiarity with the story to the viewing experience 6. Barnes’s conclusion: “The painting has slipped history’s anchor. This is no longer ‘Scene of a Shipwreck’ let alone ‘The Raft of the Medusa.’ . . . the picture’s secret lies in the pattern of its energy. Look at it one more time: at the violent waterspout building up through those muscular backs as they reach out for the speck of the rescuing vessel. All that straining—to what end? . . . there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love)— how rarely do our emotions reach the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.” Barnes’s reading thus begins with an account of a horror set in motion by acts of incompetence and arguably criminal neglect; he goes on to consider a famous and influential work of art constructed around that incident; he ends with the observation that the inevitable fate of such a work of art if successful as a work of art is to drift from its original context of criticism and outrage and be transformed into a reflection of each viewer’s own individual emotional state. A moment of supreme agony rooted in cruelty and injustice is transformed by art not into a timeless call for vigilance and action but into a comment on the intractable human condition: there even with the grace of God go I. We pity ourselves, not the victims. I want to move on now briefly to Linda Nochlin’s Misere. Nochlin focuses on the development of what she calls the “protodocumentary” approach in 19th century representations of human suffering—hunger, poverty, alienation—a development which

she sees emerging simultaneously with the spread of the industrializing forces that created the misery in the first place. What purposes, she asks—intended or contingent—were served by such representations in both “fine art” and popular illustration? She is particularly concerned with the ethical and moral issues raised by such images. Do the images invite empathy, sympathy, condescension, judgment, indifference? How? Do the victims remain human beings whose sufferings we deplore and seek to relieve or do they become objects of detached, even bemused observation, a kind of circus-freak side-show or roadside accident we cannot help but stare at? Nochlin looks at a series of lithographs Géricault made in London in 1821, two years after he completed Raft. The lithographs depict London street scenes populated by the poor and the disabled. For Nochlin, these lithographs represent Géricault’s conscious movement away from the more sensational and allegorical style of the Medusa toward a gritty realism associated with London’s “crusading” illustrators. Indeed, she argues that Géricault was first influenced in this direction while in London in 1819 to attend the public display of his Raft at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, a venture that was both critically and commercially successful (more on that below). The most important part of Nochlin’s argument is that the very features that made Raft a critical and commercial success—its idealized figures, deliberate composition, careful attention to questions of form and style—made it less effective as a representation of suffering than the lithographs which, in keeping with the work of the London illustrators, strove for realism through a kind of artlessness: this is real because it is not as polished as a work of art would be; it reflects a reality that demands attention because it is not art. That brings us to Susan Sontag. Her Regarding the Pain of Others is something of a classic, a small, spare, but vital book that ranges widely over the questions we have been flirting with here: what does it mean to represent human suffering? What are the risks and responsibilities in doing so? Sontag devotes several pages to the Brazilian photographer Sebastio Salgado who has explored a wide range of subjects in his career. In the late 90s he turned to a project on human migration which included a series of large format photographs of refugee camps and people fleeing war and famine. Salgado was clearly driven by all of the “right” motivations. He is known for his deep sensitivity to the subjects and has served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Sontag does not question Salgado’s politics or his sincerity; rather, her focus is on the very nature of his photographic work. After addressing some minor criticisms of these pictures—including the complicated dynamic of their being exhibited in fancy art galleries where decidedly first-world citizens gawk at pictures of starving Africans while sipping sauvignon blanc—Sontag concludes: The problem is in the pictures themselves, not how and where they are exhibited: in their focus on the powerless reduced to their powerlessness. It is significant that the powerless are not named in the captions. . . . [they are demoted to] representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights. Taken in thirty-nine countries, Salgado’s migration pictures group together, under this single heading, a host of different causes and kinds of distress. Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to ‘care’ more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any political intervention. With a subject conceived on this scale, compassion can only flounder—and make abstract.”

Dr. Charlie Mitchell with Daniel Reidy

Sontag also addresses the problem of the aesthetic qualities of Salgado’s work. These are aesthetically beautiful images. As a little experiment I encourage you to do a Google Image search for Salgado’s photographs. The resulting page of results looks like a contact sheet and at that scale it is difficult to distinguish the photos of penguins and sea lions—products of Salgado’s current “Genesis” project—from those of Rwandan refugees. Light, shadow, texture, and framing obliterate the subjects. They are reduced to pure form. Sontag raises the same questions about Salgado and the other artists she discusses as Barnes and Nochlin pose regarding Géricault’s Raft: does the image become a challenge to reflect on the human, and thus presumably reversible, causes of this suffering, or does it turn the suffering into an object for aesthetic contemplation, something toward which we (non-suffering) viewers breathe a sigh of relief ? Does the representation of suffering become a spectacle? This brings us back to Julian Barnes’s novel. The Raft of the Medusa makes cameo appearances in several other chapters both directly and by allusion. In one, a middle-aged Irish woman named Amanda Fergusson attends her father’s deathbed revisiting key scenes in their contentious life together. The central memory is of a proposed visit to Dublin to view “Monsieur Jerricault’s Great Picture” after it had completed its successful run in London. Her recollection of the accounts of the London exhibition included the following details: “24 feet long by 18 feet high; Admission 1 shilling; Description 6 pence; 50,000 spectators had paid to see this new masterpiece of foreign art, shown alongside such permanent displays as Mr. Bullock’s magnificent collection of 25,000 fossils and his Pantherion stuffed with wild beasts.” But rather than take her to see Géricault’s painting, her father took her to see a competing exhibition, “Marshall’s Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft. Admission 1 shilling 8 pence, back seats 10 pence, children in the front seats at half price.” In point of fact, Géricault did earn approximately 20,000 francs from the exhibition in London where, according to biographical sources, attendance was enhanced by several theatrical performances based upon the plight of those abandoned on the raft. Clearly, the story was “hot.” And Barnes did his homework: the painting did move on to Dublin where it was markedly less successful owing to competition from the Panorama (the one that Amanda Fergusson’s father brought her to). So on the one hand, you have Géricault consciously marketing the painting in London, presenting it as in and of itself something of a spectacle in a venue that did not exactly discriminate between fine art and entertainment (those stuffed wild beasts). And on the other hand, the painting became merely one of several “spectacular” re-creations of the event, one of which—the clearly vulgarized panorama in Dublin—proved far more popular with audiences. In Barnes’s telling—and this seems to be consistent with the history of the painting’s exhibition—The Raft of the Medusa became one of a series of spectacular entertainments, largely shorn of its political or social edge, while the memory of the catastrophe was in fact still very fresh. Form co-opted meaning from the very beginning. I will conclude by looking at one more chapter in Barnes’s novel, his rendition of the story of the German liner St. Louis that departed Hamburg in 1939 with approximately 900 Jewish refugees expecting to disembark in Cuba; a majority of them had applied for US visas and intended to wait in Cuba until those were approved. Barnes weaves the well-known facts of this story into his narrative of distress, betrayal, and abandonment: political infighting in the Cuban government and the cynical manipulation of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiments leads to the cancellation of the St. Louis’s landing permit in Havana; the lingering effects of the global depression feed into this sentiment: they will take our jobs, become wards of the state; several international organizations attempt to negotiate with representatives of the Cuban government on behalf of the passengers but these efforts fail; bribes are demanded and some are paid but to no avail. After leaving Havana the St. Louis sailed toward Florida, but appeals to the US government to take in the refugees were ignored. Worldwide media attention is overwhelmingly supportive of and sympathetic toward the refugees; this sympathy and support does not translate into offers of refuge. On June 6, 1939, the ship returned to Europe where Jewish organizations, most notably the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, arranged for four European countries to take in the passengers so that they did not have to return to Germany: 288 to Great Britain, 181 to the Netherlands, 214 to Belgium, 224 to France. 254 of those who had been admitted to France, Belgium, and Holland were killed in the Holocaust following Germany’s invasion of those countries in 1940. Julian Barnes’s move from the Raft of the Medusa to the story of the St. Louis highlights the connections some of us, at least, have made between Dan Reidy’s reimagination of Géricault’s painting and the various refugee crises of our own time: from the southern border of the US to the Mediterranean, the details hardly need updating. The St. Louis was just one more migrant caravan. But there is one detail Barnes includes that makes these connections both more palpable and more urgent. During the six days in Havana harbor, Barnes notes, the St. Louis became something of a tourist attraction with thousands crowding the piers to watch and wait for something to happen. Where there are spectators there is spectacle. In the end, I suggest, there is much more at stake here than a question for the artist “How do you turn catastrophe into art?” Equally, perhaps more important, is a question for us: How do we respond to the representation of catastrophe?

Last Dying Breath of Thomas Edison I Last Dying breath of Thomas Edison II Last Dying breath of Thomas Edison III 2018 oil on canvas 49” x 37”

Unnecessary Flowers, oil on canvas, 72 “ x 66”

“The heart of

man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too” Vincent van Gogh Quote from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh ‘s Twelve Sunflowers Created: 1888 / 1889 Philadelphia Museum of Art

Untitled (after Van Gogh), 2018, oil on canvas

Free to a Good Home, 2015, oil, spray, and latex on canvas, 87” x 73 1/2” Maybe Artificial Flowers, 2016, oil, spray, and latex on canvas, 87” x 73 1/2”

Hamlet Act 5 Scene 1 Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Opposite: Bather with Hand, 2015, oil on canvas, 62 1/2” x 56” Below: Ode, 2013, cast iron baby, fabric, loud speaker, iPod (sound: 10:31 min. loop of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 48” x 12” x24”

Memento Mori, 2018, oil on canvas, 72” x 36”

The Skull, the Hand, & the Empty Chair Jan Kather

an Reidy’s exhibition Politics and Empathy (also known as The Raft of the Medusa) teems with symbolism. In the group of paintings presented here, symbols are easily spotted: the empty chair; the open hand; the skull in the hand, harkening back to William Shakespeare’s scene in Hamlet where gravediggers have unearthed the skull of Yorick, Hamlet’s beloved childhood court jester. Of all these symbols, it is the empty chair that asserts itself as a potent metaphor for politics and empathy in 21st Century America. In her January 8, 2016 Washington Post article, Amber Phillips presents an array of facts to prove the point. President Obama used the symbolism of the empty chair in his last State of the Union address. He left one seat empty in Michelle Obama’s guest box “for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.” Former First Lady Laura Bush also employed the empty chair, using one empty seat in her guest box in 2003 to symbolize “the empty place many Americans will always have at their tables and in their lives because of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.” Empathy is sometimes replaced with irony in the political arena. How can anyone forget the 2012 Republican National Convention’s dramatic (comedic) Clint Eastwood talking at an empty chair? In his rambling speech, Eastwood pretended the empty chair was Obama, sometimes implying the president had offered obscenities. “What do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that -- he can’t do that to himself.” Was Eastwood’s surreal performance a strangely covert signal of support for Obama? The inconclusive meaning of the empty chair became clear only to the viewer who brought their own preconceived ideas, as Eastwood’s intent could be read multiple ways.

Reidy’s series of empty chairs evoke a gamut of emotions. The black chair could symbolize sadness or depression, with a hand reaching in for the rescue, similar to the theme of rescue in Reidy’s Raft. There is an ambiguity to the hand in most of the paintings. Is the hand reaching inward to help, or, conversely, reaching outward in a pleading gesture of grasping for help? The “reaching hand” has been an inspiration to Reidy in the past. His Watson and the Shark (after Copley) is not in this show, however, it foreshadows the ubiquity of the outstretched hand that we see in many of the paintings in Politics and Empathy. Just as Reidy suggests in his opening essay that Géricault chose a hopeful moment, similarly, he also provides some hope for the viewer who invests time and thought into analyzing each painting:

Rocker with Hand in Black, 2016, oil on canvas, 48” x 56”

Hope resides in filling the empty chair with a bowl of fruit, so lively that it appears to teeter on edge. Hope dwells in his friend sitting regally, yet at ease, in a chair with playful, pinkish red arm rests. Or maybe most clearly, hope is inherent in Reidy’s sense of tragicomedic humor, found in the umbrella hooked around the arm of the empty chair, symbolic of preparing for a rainy day that, in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, never comes. There are no definitive answers here, just questions to guide us to conclusions as varied as our own personalities. And that, friends, is the endlessly intriguing fun and fascination that comes with the viewing of any of Daniel Reidy’s exhibitions. Rocker with Hand , 2016, oil on canvas, 48” x 56”

Cool Rocker (left) and Warm Rocker (right), 2015, oil on canvas, 49” x 36”

Detail of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, 1778, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art

Ghost Champ, 2014, found object, marble, rug

This is what it is to have a sister II, 2014, rock, rug