Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond

Ecsta s y

B a roq u e and Beyond

1

2

Ecsta s y

Baroque Curated by Andrea Bubenik

a nd

Be yond

First published in 2017 by The University of Queensland Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition: Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond UQ Art Museum, Brisbane: 16 September 2017–25 February 2018 © 2017 The University of Queensland, the artist and authors This publication is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced by any means or process without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to locate the holders of copyright and reproduction rights of all material reproduced in this publication. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any reader with further information.

Views expressed in the publication are not necessarily those of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Bubenik, Andrea, 1975- author.

Title: Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond / Andrea Bubenik, Mieke Bal. ISBN: 9781742721897 (paperback) Subjects: Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 1598–1680.

Bourgeois, Louise, 1911–2010.

Art, Australian--Exhibitions.

Ecstasy in art.

Emotions in art.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)

Other Creators/Contributors: Bal, Mieke, 1946- author.

Harper, Melissa.

Helmrich, Michele.

Leach, Andrew, 1976Littley, Samantha.

Smith, Danielle.

Gray, Campbell, writer of added commentary.

Holbrook, Peter, writer of added commentary.

University of Queensland Art Museum, issuing body.

University of Queensland. ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800), issuing body.

Supported by the UQ Node, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800) ARC Project number CE110001011

contents

Foreword – Campbell Gray.............................................................................................................5 Foreword – Peter Holbrook............................................................................................................6 Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond – Andrea Bubenik......................................................................9 Catalogue entries: Nigel Milsom: Judo House Part 6 (The White Bird) – Andrea Bubenik.................................................. 17 Anastasia Booth: Teresa – Andrea Bubenik............................................................................................. 21 Audrey Flack: Ecstasy of St. Teresa & Une Bouchée d’Amour – Andrea Bubenik..................................... 23 David Stephenson: Domes – Andrew Leach............................................................................................. 28 Louise Bourgeois: Arched Figure – Andrea Bubenik............................................................................... 32 Claude Mellan: The Ecstasy of Saint Francis of Paola The Ecstasy of Saint Ignatius – Danielle Smith............................................................. 35 Pietro Aquila: Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne – Andrea Bubenik....................................................... 39 William Hogarth: Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism – Andrea Bubenik..................................... 41 Petrina Hicks: Persephone – Michele Helmrich....................................................................................... 43 Salvador Dalí: The Phenomenon of Ecstasy – Danielle Smith................................................................ 45 Gordon Shepherdson: The Stoning of St Stephen – After the Last Stone – Danielle Smith.............. 47 Hiromi Tango: Insanity Magnet #7 – Samantha Littley........................................................................... 51 Girolamo Nerli: Bacchanalian Feast – Danielle Smith............................................................................ 53 Chris Bennie: Mothership – Danielle Smith............................................................................................. 55 David Wadelton: Show Them You Want It – Melissa Harper................................................................... 59 Gordon Matta-Clark: Office Baroque – Andrew Leach............................................................................ 61 Bill Henson: Untitled 95, 97, 96 – Danielle Smith................................................................................... 65

Ecstatic Aesthetics: Metaphoring Bernini – Mieke Bal.......................................................... 71 Exhibition Checklist....................................................................................................................94 Contributors / Acknowledgements...........................................................................................96

5

6

Foreword Campbell Gray An art exhibition provides a means of exploring a subject in a way that privileges the visual. In this exhibition, Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond, selected works of art gravitate around an idea epitomised by a sculpture located across the world in Rome, in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) has come to exemplify our understanding of the period in which it was made and the phenomenon of ecstasy. This exhibition returns us to the Baroque and to Europe, but also fragments our understanding of ‘ecstasy’ through international and Australian works dating from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.

Three years ago, we worked with Dr Andrea Bubenik on the exhibition Five Centuries of Melancholia. We are delighted to have worked with her once again on Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond. Dr Bubenik is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at The University of Queensland. She brings to this project her art-historical expertise and her insights into the emotional register evident in images ranging from ecstatic saints to bacchanalian feasts and those experiencing states of transcendence. We thank her sincerely for her enthusiasm, good humour, and fine curatorial leadership, and for working in liaison with Art Museum Associate Director (Curatorial) and exhibition coordinating curator, Michele Helmrich.

The UQ Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (1100–1800) (CHE) partnered with the UQ Art Museum on Five Centuries of Melancholia, and we welcomed their renewed partnership in Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italy, 1598–1680) L’Estasi di Santa Teresa d’Avila [The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila] 1647–52 (detail) marble and gilded bronze Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome © DEA Picture Library / Getty Images

This has again proved a most fruitful relationship, with outcomes including the exhibition and publication, and a compelling array of lectures, symposia, and associated events. I especially pay tribute to Professor Peter Holbrook FAHA, Director of CHE’s UQ Node, for the level of support he has committed towards this project. I also thank CHE colleagues Xanthe Ashburner and Sushma Griffin for their various contributions, especially in the area of public engagement.

We extend our great appreciation to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for lending several works to the exhibition, including those by Louise Bourgeois and Nigel Milsom that are exhibition highlights.

Other institutions to generously lend works include Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, and the National Gallery of Victoria. Our sincere thanks also go to those artists and private collectors who have kindly lent work.

Dr Bubenik selected a number of works from the UQ Art Collection, with several works acquired especially for the exhibition. Our thanks also go to those who have assisted with images and copyright.

Dr Bubenik has contributed a scholarly essay to the exhibition catalogue and has arranged for a previously published essay by distinguished art historian Professor Mieke Bal on the work of Louise Bourgeois to be reproduced. Short texts on individual works have been contributed by Dr Bubenik, Professor Andrew Leach, Dr Melissa Harper, Michele Helmrich, Samantha Littley, and Danielle Smith, the latter also providing valuable research support for Dr Bubenik. I also thank Evie Franzidis for her work in editing the publication.

My gratitude goes to the UQ Art Museum team for helping to make this project possible; their untiring commitment is to be applauded.

I regard this exhibition and publication, accompanied as they are by such an array of programs, as demonstrating the type of scholarly project, campus engagement, and outreach to which all university art museums should aspire.

Dr Campbell Gray Director, UQ Art Museum 7

Foreword Peter Holbrook The Greek word ekstasis has a range of meanings: change, astonishment, mental derangement. But at its core is an idea of displacement, a movement outwards—in psychological terms, a going-outside of one’s self. The going-out has a curiously ambivalent value. Greek and Roman philosophers and moralists typically esteemed self-mastery; yet the savagely violent ecstasy depicted in a work such as Euripides’s Bacchae, of 405 BC—in which female devotees of Dionysus (known as Bacchants, or Maenads, that is, “mad women”) frenziedly tear apart grazing cattle and slay and dismember Pentheus, King of Thebes—has its own strange authority. Pentheus refuses to recognise the god; but Dionysus, the deity of wine, ecstasy, and inspiration, must be given his due, for the non-rational and anarchic is part of life as well. Dionysian self-abandonment is both inferior to and above the human—at once bestial and divine. Moreover, ecstasy for Plato and others is profoundly connected to art; as Plato writes in the Phaedrus: if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

Philosophers in the ancient world were themselves prone to such goings-out of the self.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is portrayed as regularly falling into philosophical trances: once, while on campaign, in a harsh winter, he stood motionless for a day and night, lost in contemplation of a philosophical problem and utterly indifferent to his surroundings. The prophetess Diotima explains to Socrates the proper course of love: by rights, lovers should proceed from the love of one beautiful body to the love of all such bodies; next, to the love of beautiful souls (finer than bodies); then to the love of beautiful institutions and learning; and finally the lover should attain “the wondrous vision” of absolute Beauty itself. In this last, ecstatic stage, the lover-philosopher has freed himself from earthly concerns entirely. The Neo-Platonist sage Plotinus is described by his follower Porphyry as having experienced four such transcendental visions during the time Porphyry spent with his master, precious occasions during which Plotinus achieved 8

union with the One, or All—absolute reality and goodness, about which reason and language can say nothing. Both Socrates and Plotinus were themselves models of self-control and rationality; yet their philosophico-spiritual calling was perfectly compatible with such moments of complete departure from everyday consciousness, departures that might well appear mad to those ignorant of, or less in love with, metaphysics.

Similarly, in the Christian tradition, Paul’s famous going-out of the body—“I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven” (2 Cor 12.2)—is only superficially irrational; ecstasy takes Paul out of his body and this world towards a deeper and truer reality, that of God himself.

The French-Romanian existentialist thinker E. M. Cioran (1911–95) claimed that “all metaphysical systems have roots in forms of ecstasy,” a state in which “superficial and individual layers of existence melt away, revealing original depths.”

But, and quite unlike Socrates or Plotinus, Cioran was a pronounced irrationalist, fatally drawn in his youth towards fascism. Thomas Mann’s wonderful short story of 1929, “Mario and the Magician,” gives a profoundly disturbing account of fascism as inseparable from ecstasy.

The so-called magician of the story, a man of grotesque ugliness, entrances his audience at an Italian seaside resort; his shabby trick is simply to demonstrate that so-called freedom of the will barely exists, and he succeeds in converting a group of adults into abject and helpless “puppets,” automatons who dance at his command and indulge the “drunken abdication of the critical spirit.” What each member of the audience learns is his or her unconscious craving to relinquish self-control and individual responsibility and merge with the mass. Such squalid degradation, with the fascist leader a Circe-like figure transforming men into beasts, could not be further from the gentle, kindly, and—if it does not sound too paradoxical—essentially sober ecstasy of a Socrates or Plotinus; nor does it have anything to do with the holy and charitable ecstasy of a saint, to whom it is revealed that the law of the cosmos is love. (Though I should note that Cioran would see it otherwise: over the course of his life he became sensitive to the ways in which prophets have a habit of turning into hangmen: “any true ecstasy,” Cioran insisted, “is dangerous.”)

Ecstasy, then, has traditionally had two values at least: it can be a form of philosophic or spiritual insight, a revelation uniting the human with the divine; or it can be a brutal and morbid eclipse of reasoned self-government. The first is the highest peak of human existence, what William James called the “overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute.” The poet Wordsworth apparently experienced such apprehensions of oneness with ultimate truth. In his great meditative poem “Tintern Abbey” (1798), he gives thanks to those natural “forms of beauty” that have rendered him a “sublime” benefaction, namely,

that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian captured the troublingly ambivalent quality of ecstatic vision. The essential point of The Birth of Tragedy (1871) is simultaneously exhilarating and harshly pessimistic: reality is at its core a meaningless flux, a ceaseless coming-intobeing and passing-away of individual entities, including human beings; hence our conviction that individual things, persons, and so on are the ultimate stuff of existence is nothing more than a consoling illusion. In fact there is nothing other than this endless and unmeaning process of creation and destruction: Nietzsche likens the universe to a thoughtless child playing at the sea-shore, building sandcastles only to knock them down again. Since no individual things, not least human persons, are permanently real, they can hardly be said to exist at all. Instead there is simply the primordial and infinite unity of creation and destruction. The grasping of this terrible absolute reality was, Nietzsche claims, at the heart of the anarchic revels of Dionysus’s

followers, when unbridled drinking, dancing, music, and sensuality abolished the separation of one human being from another—indeed, the principle of individuation itself. For the ecstatic, all is one.

It is easy to appreciate both how lethal, and inspiring, the conceptions of ecstasy I have sketched here might be. At one level, they point to a noble encounter with divine goodness; perhaps also to a sense of fundamental concord with other human beings, a state of mind at odds with selfish individualism and one fostering sympathy and the love of harmony—the Wordsworthian ecstasy noted above. In another direction, however, and as represented by Mann, ecstasy sponsors a demonic regression into mob hysteria and self-destruction, modes of collective bonding that have less to do with true universalism than they do with fascism and the barbarous group madness delineated in, for example, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). As William James wisely observed in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the mystical is by nature the region at once of “the seraph” and “the snake.” Art deals in both forms of ecstasy.

Beginning in the period of the Baroque, the present exhibition offers a rich survey of the different ways in which artists from widely different times and places (including a significant representation from Australia) have taken up the theme of ecstasy over a wide span of art history. I am profoundly grateful to the staff of the UQ Art Museum, and especially to its Director, Dr Campbell Gray, and to Michele Helmrich (Associate Director, Curatorial), who have worked hard to make this show happen. I am also deeply appreciative of the efforts of Dr Andrea Bubenik in curating the exhibition so knowledgeably, enthusiastically, and imaginatively. Finally, my thanks to the staff of the UQ Node of the Centre for the History of Emotions, particularly Xanthe Ashburner and Sushma Griffin, for their commitment to ensuring the exhibition’s success.

Professor Peter Holbrook Director, UQ Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe, 1100–1800) 9

10

Ecstasy

Baroque and Beyond Andrea Bubenik

The glory which I then felt in myself can neither be written nor described, nor is any one able to conceive it, but only such as have been made partakers of it.

I understand that whatever can possibly be desired was there united…

—Saint Teresa of Avila1 Taking as its starting point the mystical experiences of Saint Teresa of Avila, the exhibition Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond brings together historical depictions of ecstasy with more recent works focused on the transcendence of normal consciousness, including trances, moments of expanded awareness, and visionary insight. From representations of saints and mystics to dreamscapes and images of bacchanalian revels, this exhibition also explores how Baroque style—characterised by exaggeration, high drama, extravagance, frenzy, and excess—continues to inform contemporary art. In this visual exploration, religious ecstasy is complemented by the mythological, the historical is juxtaposed with the contemporary. Many forms of mysticism are not represented here— Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Tantra, to name just a few—for these rich traditions merit exhibitions unto themselves.

It is hoped that what is included will provoke thinking on the complexity of ecstasy and its therapeutic and liberating qualities as much as its potential for heightening our appreciation of the creation and viewing of art.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italy, 1598–1680) L’Estasi di Santa Teresa d’Avila [The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila] 1647–52 marble and gilded bronze Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome © DEA Picture Library / Getty Images

Ecstasy resists language. As shown in the quotation above, Saint Teresa (1515–82) understood this, even while writing about her experiences of rapture and transcendence as the culmination of meditation and prayer. Her extensive description in her autobiography of being “transverberated”— her heart penetrated with a spear by an angel, and an ensuing rapture and union with the divine—is emblematic of the mystical tradition.2 As founder of the “Discalced” (barefoot) Carmelite order of nuns, Teresa established sixteen new convents in Spain for which she sought increased autonomy from the Catholic Church. Her tomb at the Convent of the Annunciation in Alba de Tormes, Spain, is a pilgrimage site; her relics, which include her left hand and incorrupt heart, are revered with much devotion. Canonised in 1622, she is one of only four female doctors of the Catholic Church.3 Teresa is well known beyond her faith; famous as a mystic and reformer, and the subject of an intense cult-like following, she has been variously claimed by feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature.

George Eliot cast her as a muse of culture in Middlemarch, while Thomas Hardy used her as inspiration for the title character in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.4 Simone de Beauvoir singled out Teresa as an existentialist heroine, “one of the only women to have lived the human condition for herself, in total abandonment.”5 Perhaps the most striking engagement with Teresa is the discursive novel Thérèse Mon Amour by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva, in which Kristeva hails Teresa as a “borderless woman,” while asking herself: “why do I feel so sure that this Carmelite nun has slipped the leash of her time and her world, and stands beside us in the third millennium?”6

11

This exhibition acknowledges and also perpetuates Teresa’s presence, and reminds us that the chief catalyst for her reception has always been a visual one.

Most first encounters with Teresa are courtesy of Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and his sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52).

Located in the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, this sculpture is one of the most reproduced and recognised images in the history of art, the supreme emblem of religious visionary experience and the Baroque sensibility in art. If Teresa herself has, to use Kristeva’s phrase, “slipped the leash of her time,” this has been made possible by Bernini’s sculpture as much as by its repeated interpretations by internationally renowned artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Audrey Flack, who are both represented in this exhibition. Teresa’s global reception, her status as “borderless woman,” is further consolidated by Australian artists Anastasia Booth and Nigel Milsom, who also creatively adapt aspects of Bernini’s sculpture.

These appropriations insist on the continued resonance of Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, making it imperative to look at Bernini’s sculpture closely, again and again. How many times has it been described? Many art historians relish the opportunity to do so, even with Teresa’s admonishment that the ecstatic experience can strain against words. Bernini has shown Teresa reclining on a cloud that is seemingly suspended in the air, her robes and nun’s habit moving in folds around her, one hand curled upward, the other hanging downward, bare feet emerging from the drapery. Her head is cast back, eyes closed, mouth open; she has been “pierced” with the divine by an arrow that is wielded by an angel above her, while 12

celestial rays of spiritual light beam down.

The adoring face of the angel contrasts with Teresa’s ecstatic expression. The sharp rays of celestial brass light contrast with the sensual white drapery that ripples and undulates, golden lines that strive to reach the pure marble which folds into itself over and over again.

These folds have inspired an entire literature of their own. Bernini defied his medium, sculpting seemingly impossible curves in marble; and Teresa’s robes are as expressive of her emotional state as her facial features. The art historian Howard Hibbard has observed that drapery in Bernini’s work acts as “an agent of feelings.”7 The philosopher Gilles Deleuze made the fold central to his entire discourse on the mathematician Leibniz: “the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.”8 For some scholars, Bernini’s infinite folds highlight a Baroque sensibility that lends itself well to characterising some modern and contemporary art. Mieke Bal, in her poignant essay “Ecstatic Aesthetics: Metaphoring Bernini” (reprinted in this publication), posits a reciprocal dialogue between Bernini and Louise Bourgeois, and positions the Baroque fold poignantly in her discussion: “I am invoking baroque as a theoretical notion that implies—literally, that is, visually, in its folds—a mode of translation, an activity of metaphoring that resists the singular translation of one sign to another with the same meaning.”9 In her discussion of how the radical and innovative sculptural inventions of Bourgeois can be considered through a relationship with the Baroque, Bal revises the way that we tend to look at art as a chain of influence or linear narrative. She asks us to consider how the contemporary work of Bourgeois

impacts our vision of seventeenth-century Bernini, rather than the other way around.

As Bal argues, “Bourgeois addresses, dialectically, polemically, and respectfully, the way Bernini attempted to represent Teresa’s ecstasy ec-statically. Without in the least way imitating Bernini, she, like him, supplements his work ecstatically.”10 To pick up on this cue of representing “ecstasy ec-statically” is to come back to the original Greek term, ekstasis, meaning to be or to stand outside oneself.11 It is important to acknowledge the possibility that in the very act of creating Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Bernini himself worked ecstatically. Explanations for Bernini’s depiction of Teresa’s sensuality and perceived eroticism tend to be couched in very sober reminders of his deep religious faith and coveted position as esteemed official architect and sculptor for the papacy. Bernini worked in the context of Counter-Reformation Rome during which emotionally charged images were deployed by the Catholic Church in order to affirm the faith of believers.12 In other words, the sculpture is often explained through a contextual understanding of the pious Bernini depicting Saint Teresa in a sensual and rapturous state for the purpose of furthering Counter-Reformation ideology.

These explications certainly complement our understanding of Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, but they do not exhaust it.

There are few visual precedents—or antecedents—for Bernini’s sculpture. As stated by Bernini’s most recent biographer, Franco Mormando, “one searches in vain for another artistic recreation of this scene charged with the same degree of sexual electricity and sensual luxury.”13 To create his sculpture, Bernini worked from Teresa’s own words,14 yet the challenges of depicting such an extreme moment

of rapture were surely a strain on the artist’s vocabulary. Moreover, Teresa’s own subversive qualities are often neglected in discussions of Bernini’s sculpture.

When Bernini accepted the commission to depict Teresa, she was one of the church’s newest saints—she had died in 1582, was beatified after a forty-year inquest, and was canonised in 1622. Her cult had spread from her native Spain to Italy, but was by no means without its detractors; her mystical writings had initially caused controversy to such an extent that she had been summoned by the Spanish Inquisition in 1576 and interrogated for possible heresy.15 As a female mystic and “conversa” (of Jewish descent), Teresa was initially viewed with hostility by some more conservative factions, especially since the form of mysticism that she promoted stressed autonomy and direct experience of the divine, removing the need for any intercession from the Church.16 As for Bernini, so often characterised in terms of his success and piety, it is worth noting that when he received the commission for Teresa in 1646, he was at a rare low point in his career. After working for two decades as the official architect for the papacy in Rome, Bernini faced trial at the hands of a papal inquiry for work in Saint Peter’s Basilica that had been deemed unsatisfactory. Specifically, there were cracks in the cupola, and the bell towers that he had commenced were found problematic and ultimately dismantled, while the Benediction Loggia had issues with its ceiling and façade.17 Bernini was held financially liable for these problems and his money was seized at the end of 1646. Adding to this professional challenge, he was personally affected by the deaths of his two-year-old son, his mother, and his younger brother, all between 1646 and 1648.18 13

Just as the context of Counter-Reformation Rome cannot fully explain the singularity of a work of art, so the biographies of Teresa and Bernini cannot either. Nevertheless, there is a sharp poignancy to how their narratives—a freshly canonised and controversial saint, a pious yet theatrical artist at a challenging moment in his career—intersected thanks to a particular patron: Cardinal Federico Cornaro. A retired patriarch who was a member of the most powerful family in the Venetian Republic, Cornaro had an abundance of funds at his disposal, and commissioned Bernini to design and build a chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.19 The site was a relatively new one, as the church had been built in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

The convent associated with the church belonged to a chapter of the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by Teresa, who was one of Cornaro’s favourite saints.

It took Bernini six years to complete the work, and his comprehensive vision includes the architecture, frescoed ceiling, stained glass, Teresa, and the sculptures that flank her on either side—sculpted portraits of Bernini’s patron and other Cornaro family members and descendants. Like the viewer who enters the chapel, these figures are in a privileged vantage point to observe Teresa’s ecstatic experience, and alternate between looking on curiously and conversing among themselves, seated almost like spectators in theatre boxes.

These sculptures are rarely seen in reproductions of Ecstasy of Teresa, although they are very much a part of Bernini’s commission and his all-encompassing approach, which was as novel as the sculpture of Teresa herself. Bernini’s first biographer, Filippo Baldinucci (1624–97) commented how “Bernini was the first to attempt to unite architecture with sculpture and painting in such a manner that together 14

they make a beautiful whole [bel composto] … His usual words on the subject were that those who do not sometimes go outside the rules never go beyond them.”20 In 1647, Bernini was no longer Rome’s official architect, and for the first time in two decades he could accept commissions from whomever he pleased. His Teresa defied the medium in which he worked, and his novel fusion of painting, sculpture, and architecture made the ecstatic experience accessible. One of Bernini’s most perceptive commentators is Giovanni Careri, who describes how in Bernini’s bel composto, “the metamorphoses of the spirit become visible …, this mysterious alchemy fuses the divine and the human, life and death, pleasure and pain, fatigue and repose, all events that cannot be represented without the tension that arises from the coexistence of opposites.”21 We are so accustomed to Bernini’s vision that it is difficult to recall that Bernini was once a transgressor himself. By considering him as going outside the rules, enabling a mysterious alchemy, we can then start to imagine a reciprocal relationship: just as Teresa in her ecstasy went beyond the limits, so too did Bernini when sculpting her.

Is it farfetched to propose that viewers who witness Teresa sometimes experience the same? That to look upon Teresa’s ecstasy, to marvel at Bernini’s artistry, could incite ecstasy in viewers beyond its Baroque context? Visitors to the exhibition Ecstasy: Baroque and Beyond are privileged witnesses to a multitude of visions of that which is inexpressible in words, and they face the potential to be transported, overwhelmed, and absorbed by the ecstatic experiences before them. Mieke Bal has argued “for an engaged relationship to the past that is one neither of influence nor reconstruction,” and this is an idea that underpins this exhibition.22 A contemporary

artist dances next to a nineteenth-century vision of a bacchanalian fete; the bel composto of a photographic triptych echoes Bernini; seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury prints show us an evolution of religious ecstasy and are juxtaposed with mythological scenes; the ecstasy of sport is considered along with saints and mystics.

By way of conclusion, let us consider one final commentator on the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and recall that the viewing of art in and of itself is considered by many to be the ultimate catalyst for ecstasy.

The French author Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal, enthusiastically described in his Roman travelogue the experience of seeing Bernini’s sculpture: “St Teresa is represented in the ecstasy of divine love.

It is the most vivid and the most natural expression… What divine artistry! What delight!”23 Today, Stendhal is also known for the psychosomatic disorder that bears his name, the “Stendhal Syndrome,” thus named in 1979 by the Italian psychotherapist Graziella Magherini. 24 When in the presence of great art, viewers experience symptoms ranging from rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion, and can then experience panic attacks, fainting and even hallucinations. At the time of qualifying the disorder, Magherini recorded more than a hundred cases of tourists to Florence all suffering the same physical symptoms.25 Also sometimes referred to as “hyperkulturemia” or even an “art attack,” other noted figures who have been retrospectively diagnosed, along with Stendhal, include Rainer Maria Rilke, who had extreme reactions to works by Paul Cézanne and Auguste Rodin, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who went into a fit in front of a painting by Hans Holbein.26 Today the afflicted faint in front of Caravaggio paintings or swoon in the Vatican museum,

with psychiatrists still tending to a few hundred cases a year, as documented in reputable medical journals.27 As for Stendhal himself, it was on his 1817 trip to Florence, after viewing the tombs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, that he experienced the following: Looking on Volterrano’s Sibyls frescoes, I experienced the most intense pleasure art has ever bestowed upon me. I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed by the contemplation of sublime beauty, which I had been close to, which I had been touched by. I had reached the point of celestial feeling that arose because of the fine arts and passionate feeling. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart, what in Berlin they call “nerves.” The wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.28 The cure for Stendhal was sitting on a bench in a nearby piazza with a book of poetry by Ugo Foscolo: “I needed to hear the voice of a friend sharing my emotion.”29 Never mind that Foscolo is now a lesserknown poet, that the Baroque frescoes by Volterrano that so inspired Stendhal are rarely mentioned in any art history books, that it is the Santa Croce frescoes by Giotto that are so often (erroneously) cited as the catalyst for Stendhal’s ecstasy. Nor should the bemusement with which some regard this psychosomatic disorder prevent us from considering what Stendhal’s experience can teach us. Works of art can, 15

and should, result in extreme emotional and perhaps even physical response. While I am by no means attempting to validate diagnoses of Stendhal Syndrome, I am arguing for the importance of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by art, and how we should seek to understand such reactions in positive terms. Claire Farago has proposed that the art critic is, by definition, ecstatic, that the meaning of the work of art can only be known in a confrontation with a beholder who is ‘enthusiastic’ in the ancient Greek sense of the word: in a moment of enthusiasm, we lower our defences, allowing the work of art to touch or even overwhelm us.30 This points to the need for a journey beyond everyday boundaries of the self in order to engage intellectually with art, and to write art criticism. Rather than doubting Stendhal, let us unabashedly allow ourselves to experience the rapture of Teresa and Bernini, and to take ecstasy beyond the Baroque into the realm of the contemporary aesthetics.

Endnotes 1.

Teresa of Avila, The Life of the Holy Mother Saint Teresa (Dublin: John Coyne, 1809; orig. pub. 1581), 167.

2. Ibid.

3. For the most recent biography of Saint Teresa, see Peter Tyler, Teresa of Avila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

4. “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa?” George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), prelude (Project Gutenberg ebook, release date May 24, 2008); see also Kevin Z. Moore, The Descent of the Imagination: Postromantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy (New York: NYU Press, 1990).

5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans.

Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier, intro. Judith Thurman (New York: Vintage, 2011; orig. pub. 1949), 845.

See also Amy Hollywood, “‘Mysticism Is Tempting’: Simone de Beauvoir on Mysticism, Metaphysics, and Sexual Difference,” in Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 120–45.

6. Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 20; originally published as Thérèse Mon Amour: Récit Saint Thérèse D’Avila (Paris: Fayard, 2008).

7. Howard Hibbard, Bernini (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 203.

8. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1; originally published as Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1988).

9. Mieke Bal, “Ecstatic Aesthetics: Metaphoring Bernini,” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenburg (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 12; reproduced in this publication.

16

10. Ibid.

11. “In classical Greek the term εκστασις may refer to any situation in which (part of) the mind or body is removed from its normal place or function. It is used for bodily displacements, but also for abnormal conditions of the mind such as madness, unconsciousness, or ‘being beside oneself.” Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed., ed. Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 486.

12. See, for example, one of the most popular sites used for teaching art history today, Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy. org/humanities/ap-art-history/early-europeand-colonial-americas/reformation-counterreformation/v/bernini-ecstasy-of-st-theresa.

13. Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 164.

14. He had in his possession the passage from her autobiography where she describes being transverberated.

15. Michael J. Call, “Boxing Teresa: The CounterReformation and Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel,” Woman’s Art Journal 18, no. 1 (1997): 35.

16. Ibid.

17. Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome, 150–51.

18. Ibid., 154–55.

19. Ibid., 159.

20. As quoted in Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, The Art of Devotion, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1; from Filippo Baldinucci, The Life of Bernini (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966).

24. Andrew M. Colman, ed. A Dictionary of Psychology, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) accessed online.

25. Graziella Magherini, La Sindrome di Stendhal (Florence: Ponte Alle Grazie, 1989).

26. José Amâncio Edson, “Dostoevsky and Stendhal´s Sydrome,” Arquivos De NeuroPsiquiatria 63, no. 4 (2005): 1099–103.

27. A.L. Guerrero, A.Barceló Rosselló, D.Ezpeleta, “Stendhal Syndrome: Origin, Characteristics and Presentation in a Group of Neurologists,” Neurología (English Edition) 25, no. 6 (2010): 349–56; Iain Baimforth, “Stendhal’s Syndrome,” British Journal of General Practice 60, no. 581 (2010): 945–46. According to Baimforth, “Italians themselves are immune to this ailment—perhaps due to an over-exposure of Florence’s beauty—while a preference for highly regimented, list-ticking tourism makes the Japanese equally impervious. Those of Anglo-Saxon origin, however, are the most affected, and the worst cases of Stendhal syndrome have even led to hospitalisation at Santa Maria Nuova clinic, where places are reserved for the ‘Stendhal’ patients.”

28. Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987): 324–25, my translation.

29. Ibid., 325.

30. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, “Introduction,” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003), xi.

21. Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, The Art of Devotion, 1.

22. Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ “Spider”: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 88.

23. Stendhal, A Roman Journal, trans. and ed. by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Orion, 1957), 133.

17

18

Nigel Milsom

Judo house part 6 (the white bird) Andrea Bubenik

Dramatic contrasts, surface tensions, and theatricality mark the approaches of many Baroque artists. Australian artist Nigel Milsom evokes similar themes with his explorations of dichotomies: light and dark, pleasure and pain, real and imagined.

In Judo House 6 (The White Bird), Milsom appropriates the supreme emblem of the Baroque ecstatic experience, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. The marble forms of Teresa and the heartpiercing angel are translated into paint, dramatic protagonists who emerge as stark white forms from an enveloping darkness.

Milsom has extricated the saint and angel from their original surroundings—gone are the cloud, heavenly canopy, crowning rays of light, and the coloured marbles of the Cornaro Chapel. Instead, Milsom depicts Bernini’s figures in isolation as if suspended in air, with a pitch-black background, forcing contemplation of the figures in and of themselves, with his stark tonal approach and surging lines highlighting the emotional drama at hand.

As noted by Rachel Kent, Milsom came to know Bernini’s Teresa through a reproduction: “it struck him as uncannily painterly, rather than sculptural … there was also an acute sense of recognition that struck Milsom between the two opposing figures, or life forces, and the overwhelming

emotions depicted.”1 Another painting in the Judo House 6 series also bears the subtitle of The White Bird—Milsom’s portrait of barrister Charles Waterstreet, which won the 2015 Archibald Prize.2 Born in 1975, Milsom lives and works in Newcastle, New South Wales. He has had nine solo exhibitions in Australia since 2002, and in addition to his 2015 Archibald Prize, he has won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2014) and the Sulman Prize (2012). As Milsom himself has stated, “The question is, always, can painting be continually stretched further into the future? … Always, I have one eye on the past and the other on the future.”3 1.

Rachel Kent, “Nigel Milsom: Surface Tension,” Art Monthly Australia 280 (2015): 41. Rachel Kent is chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney).

2.

Milsom’s interest in Japanese-style judo houses has resulted in a number of his series being titled this way: Judo House 6 was a series from 2014–15 shown at the yuill|crowley in Sydney.

3.

Nigel Milsom quoted in Ingrid Perez, “Nigel Milsom: Fresh Paint,” Art and Australia 51, no.

1 (2013): 103.

Nigel Milsom (Australia, 1975–) Judo House Part 6 (The White Bird) 2014–15 oil on linen Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2015, with the generous assistance of Alenka Tindale, Peter Braithwaite, Anon, Chrissie & Richard Banks, Susan Hipgrave & Edward Waring, Abbey & Andrew McKinnon.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and yuill|crowley, Sydney.

19

20

21

22

Anastasia Booth Teresa

Andrea Bubenik

Upon first glance, Anastasia Booth’s copper sculpture Teresa appears to be a wingspan or a bird about to take flight: an ethereal vision that is part of this world but destined for elsewhere. Yet, these carefully polished copper rays are highly tangible; when illuminated, they exude warmth, while the shadows they cast vary and extend their mysteries further.

Like other artists included in this exhibition (specifically, Audrey Flack and Nigel Milsom), Booth has appropriated an element from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Here, the artist focuses on the otherworldly rays of light that exude from above the figure of the saint, the signification of divine love and ecstasy. Booth pays respect to the Baroque materiality of Bernini’s work, but substitutes Bernini’s burnished brass with polished and rosy copper. However, this is no straightforward or slavish copy—the span of Booth’s rays, supported by a careful bracketing system designed by the artist herself, is significantly wider, as if Bernini’s original chapel had restricted them. Booth has reflected on this: Once installed and lit with spot lighting, I noticed how the arrangement of the panels not only referenced divine light but started to allude to figural depiction, pronounced by the panel rising head-like from the center of the arc, the tips of the bow spread eagled with the copper tubing radiating out like arms or wings. …

Looking at this arrangement with its bodily resemblance, it evoked other religious iconography—a silhouette of an angel with outstretched wings, saints ascending to heaven with billowing robes, and martyred bodies affixed to crosses.1 Teresa was part of Booth’s 2016 solo exhibition Preaching to the Perverted at Metro Arts (Brisbane), in which Booth explored past narratives of goddesses and saints, which evokes her “fascination with depictions of female desire, sexuality and authority in a contemporary context.”2 Anastasia Booth was Artist in Residence at Metro Arts, Brisbane, in 2017.

She has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney), Screen Space (Melbourne), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide), Boxcopy Contemporary Arts Space (Brisbane), BLINDSIDE Artist-Run Initiative (Melbourne), and Griffith University Art Gallery (Brisbane).

1.

Anastasia Booth, “Playing with Me: Feminine Perspectives in Fetishism and Contemporary Art” (PhD dissertation, Queensland University of Technology, 2016), unpaginated.

2.

“Preaching to the Perverted,” Metro Arts (website), 2016, http://www.metroarts.com. au/posts/preaching-to-the-perverted/.

Anastasia Booth (Australia, 1988–) Teresa 2016 copper Courtesy of the artist, Brisbane.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

23

24

Audrey Flack

Ecstasy of st. theresa and Une bouchée d’amour Andrea Bubenik

Audrey Flack is fascinated by the heroines of religion and mythology; she has stated that her mission is to present women “as strong, intelligent, purposeful individuals with a powerful physiognomy and inner and outer beauty.”1 Perhaps there is no figure more central to this mission than Saint Teresa. Flack has creatively appropriated from Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa on numerous occasions, perhaps most dramatically in her colossal sculpted head Self-Portrait as St. Teresa (2012).2 As the artist states: The way I visualize Teresa is similar to that of Bernini. She is the antithesis of a middle aged de-sexualized nun, but rather a beautiful vibrant young woman in the throes of intense passionate feelings … That she is a young woman allowing herself to display her sexuality (albeit religious sexuality) is courageous, unique and historically important.3 The first print features a close-up of Teresa’s face, her nun’s habit framing her expressive features in chiaroscuro, flanked by a brightly coloured lipstick and the verse that has famously been attributed to Teresa: I saw in his hand a spear of gold and at the point a little fire

Audrey Flack (USA, 1931–) Ecstasy of St. Theresa 2013 Printed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. pigment print and screenprint, edition 67/75 Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Audrey Flack, 2017.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.

He thrust it into my heart and pierced my very entrails when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also and leave me on fire with a great love…

In the second print, Flack portrays the head of Bernini’s angel, with his serene expression and head of curls vividly swirling. On the left, instead of the spear of ecstasy, is a brightly coloured cupcake—the “Bouchée” of the title (in French, this can mean a mouthful or a pastry). As for the equation, the artist describes it as follows: The equation in the angel print is from a mathematician’s theory about waves a formula. I used it because living near the ocean I became friendly with a carpenter-surfer who has done work for me in the studio. He described the ecstatic feelings he had being in the center of a giant wave before it crashed. There is a trembling and pulsating vibration that occurs. Waves can travel for thousands of miles before they peak. It sounded a lot like Teresa to me.4 To juxtapose these prints enacts a subversion of Bernini’s sculpture. In Flack’s work, the saint has agency and is charged with her own power and femininity, while the angel is an impotent bystander, made irreverent by the frosted cupcake that is wittily labelled “the point of contact between earth + heaven, matter + spirit.”

The objects of popular consumption render the ecstatic experience more accessible, offering an entry point for more than just the initiated.

Flack is a much-honoured American artist, whose art has been described as occupying a significant “interstitial position between mass culture and high art.”5 She 25

26

was one of the few women at the centre of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1940s and ’50s, and a pioneer of Photorealism in the late 1960s. Her most recent work has involved monumental public sculpture. Flack’s work is included in many internationally significant art collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has been featured in exhibitions in the USA, Italy, Japan, and Australia. In 2017, Flack was awarded the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, the first American government award to recognise the contribution of women to the arts and society, whose former recipients include Georgia O’Keeffe and Lee Krasner (who was nominated by Flack).6

1.

“Audrey Flack Receives WCA Lifetime Achievement Award, Ceremony: February 18, 2017,” Studio Arts College International, 14 February 2017, https://saci-art. com/2017/02/14/audrey-flack-receiveswca-lifetime-achievement-award-ceremonyfebruary-18-2017/.

2.

First exhibited at Gary Snyder Gallery (New York) as part of the exhibition Audrey Flack: Sculpture, 1989–2012.

3.

Audrey Flack, correspondence with the author, 22 June 2017.

4.

Ibid.

5.

Katherine Hauser, “Audrey Flack’s Still Lifes: Between Femininity and Feminism,” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 2 (Autumn 2001–Winter 2002): 29.

6.

“Audrey Flack Receives WCA Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Audrey Flack (USA, 1931–) Une Bouchée d’Amour 2013 Printed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. pigment print and screenprint, artist’s proof 1/30, from an edition of 200 Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Audrey Flack, 2017.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.

27

28

David Stephenson (USA, Australia, 1955–) 20106 Sant’lvo alla Sapienza, Rome, Italy 1642–1650, Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) 1997, printed 2016 pigment print, edition 2/5 26807 Cappella della Visitazione, Sanctuary of Valinotto, Carignano, Italy 1738–1739, Bernardo Vittone (1702–1770) 1997, printed 2016 pigment print, edition 1/5 26104 San Tommaso da Villanova, Castelgandolfo, Rome, Italy 1658–1661, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) 1997, printed 2016 pigment print, edition 1/5 from the series “Domes” Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery, Hobart.

29

David Stephenson

Domes

Andrew Leach

In his photographs of the interiors of three Baroque domes, American-born Tasmanian photographer David Stephenson captures the negotiation these structures conduct between the terrestrial and the divine.

Around the edge of each centred image are the upper reaches of the arches, columns, and buttresses that return the weight of the dome to the foundations.

But the centre of each of these three examples is occupied by the lantern and the moment of apotheosis it embodies.

Each lantern lets in the lume celeste (“heavenly light”), or its approximation, which is identified by Vincenzo Scamozzi as the first of six species of architectural light that range from the meaningful and divine to the accidental and mundane.1 As such, these three domes give architectural form to Stephenson’s preoccupation with transcendence through contemplation, which he portrays through a wide range of subjects.

Within his larger series “Domes” (1993– 2005), these photographs exemplify the interplay of divine light with architectural composition.2 The three subjects depicted here—Francesco Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome; Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s nearby San Tomasso da Villanova (at the papal Castel Gandolfo); and, just south of Turin, Bernardo Vittone’s late Baroque Cappella della Visitazione in Carignano— are drawn from this expansive and widely collected project, which runs across time and territory and includes examples of dome interiors numbering well over two hundred.3 As examples drawn from this large body of images, these three churches are significant. Their shared debt to the coffered ceiling of Rome’s Pantheon (a compelling image of which is, for instance, held in the Art Gallery of New South 30

Wales [AGNSW]) is quite apparent. This is arguably the original gesture upon which the Italian domes of the early modern era rested, and which, like other artefacts of its vintage, projected a mute but imposing authority over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While interpretations vary in detail and credibility, this ancient dome and its extraordinary oculus is exemplary in managing light and mediating the relationship between the heavens and mortal humans, admitting the pure lume celeste approximated by the lanterns of its Renaissance and Baroque descendants and complicated by their respective geometrical and iconographic programmes.

Sant’Ivo and San Tommaso are a decade apart in their conception, but speak a language shared by the barocchi of the mid-seventeenth century. Commissioned under Urban VIII (Barberini) and realised in the papacy of Innocent X (Pamphili), Borromini’s amplification of the fifteenthcentury university structure is represented

by Stephenson as a transition across the building’s section from the systematically deformed symbolic geometry (which would have been read as the Star of Solomon, reflecting la sapienza) to the emblems that disappear into the light brought in at the apex.

Built for Alexander VII (Chigi), San Tomasso was Bernini’s first complete church, composed of a dome sitting atop a Greek cross; light was brought in both through the lantern and from a series of windows embedded in the drum. The commission coincides with the canonisation of its namesake. The coffering runs the language of the Pantheon through the seventeenthcentury precedent of Pietro da Cortona’s church for Santi Luca e Martina on the Roman Forum—and whose Crucifixion (1661) sits above the altar (out of sight

in this view). The plentiful lateral light is suppressed in this image, which instead suggests a steady transition from darkness to light, the extensive gilding pushed back to evoke a greater kinship with the white marble and plaster of Santi Luca e Martina and greater agency for the light itself.

Working further north and some decades later, Vittone processes the dual legacies of Borromini and his immediate contemporaries, Guarino Guarini and Filippo Juvarra, with whom he makes a counter trinity of the Northern Baroque.

In this chapel, the hexagonal geometry of the Davidic star is rotated to give a kaleidoscopic effect, as the sequence of drums, each with its own fenestration, steps up toward the lantern. The structure is exposed and expressed, arches and beams describing a symbolic system that is at once clear to read and suppressed by the overall effect of the composition: an encounter between reason and emotion that arguably defines the most compelling of the artworks we today call Baroque.

Stephenson’s photographs have been the subject of monographic shows at the National Gallery of Victoria (1998), Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2001) and Art Gallery of New South Wales (1993, 2017), and are widely collected by institutions in Australia and elsewhere.4 His “Domes” series was initiated while in Italy on an Australia Council residency in 1993.

1.

Vincenzo Scamozzi, Dell’idea della architettura universal (Venice, 1615; repr.

1714), 137, https://openlibrary.org/books/ OL24135115M/Dell’idea_della_architettura_ universale. I first encountered these lines in Michael Hill’s discussion of “Sunlight in [Francesco Borromino’s] San Carlo,” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand 33, Gold, ed. AnnMarie Brennan and Philip Goad (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016), 260. See also Ann Marie Borys, “Lume di Lume: A Theory of Light and Its Effects,” Journal of Architectural Education 57, no. 4 (2004): 3–9.

2.

Documented in David Stephenson, Victoria Hammond, and Keith F. Davis, Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture (New York: Princeton University Press, 2005); and David Stephenson, Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

3.

See the Bett Gallery online catalogue at https://bettgallery.com.au/artists/ stephensond/domes/index.htm.

4.

For further on Stephenson’s work, see Susan Van Wyk, Sublime Space: Photographs by David Stephenson, 1989–1998 (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998); Jorge Calado, David Stephenson: Sublime Symmetries (Paris: Gulbenkian Cultural Centre, 2006); and Blair French and Daniel Palmer, 12 Australia Photo-Artists (Annandale, NSW: Piper Press, 2009).

31

32

33

Louise Bourgeois Arched figure

Andrea Bubenik

One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Louise Bourgeois enjoyed a career spanning eighty years in both her native France and after immigrating to the USA, during which she was variously linked by her critics to movements ranging from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism to Feminism. Yet, her provocative work in painting, sculpture, and installation continues to defy neat categorisation.

As Bourgeois herself acknowledged, personal obsessions, traumas, and the subconsciousness were central to her artistic practice, one that is imbued with a remarkable emotional intensity.

Bourgeois seems to have revelled in Baroque sensibilities at the same time that she enjoyed subverting them. Mieke Bal, the most perceptive and compelling of Bourgeois’s many critics, has pointed out that Bourgeois sometimes described herself as a Baroque artist, and engaged with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s work in a number of sculptures, including Homage to Bernini (1967), Cumul I (1969), Baroque (1970), and Femme Maison (1983).1 Bal likens Bourgeois’s Spider (1996) to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in its conception of sculpture-as-architecture, an analogy that enacts Bal’s plea “for an engaged relationship to the past that is one neither of influence nor reconstruction.”2 Arched Figure is a bronze male nude elegantly arched in ecstasy (or hysteria, or both), and positioned on a simple single bed. Contrasts and ambiguities abound in this figure that is vulnerable, isolated, and self-sustained, with the polished and gleaming bronze repelling the simple chequered fabric of the bed. The figure has no head or arms, harkening simultaneously to the incomplete male torsos unearthed during antiquity and to the fragmented and 34

contorted female bodily forms that were the specialty of the Surrealist artists. Bronze is a medium that is often associated with classical sculpture and was used for heroic portraits and virile equestrian monuments during antiquity and the early modern period. But this is no heroic male; instead, this precarious form highlights a naked and physical manifestation of emotional intensity.

The motif of the arched figure is one that Bourgeois used on numerous occasions, and has been linked to her research on Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), a neurologist who observed his patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris experiencing episodes of the “hysterical arch,” or “the celebrated arc-en-cercle opisthotonic posturing that occurred in the context of hysteroepileptic spells.”3 Photographs from the hospital show bodies arched and experiencing intense muscular contractions that, according to Charcot, could also result in immobility or paralysis. Less well known is that Charcot also reported instances of male hysteria, against the medical doctrine and popular consensus of his day that this was a female malady.4 Just as Charcot represented and theorised the arch as an emblem of an extreme emotional state, so too does Bourgeois. By choosing also to feature males in this position, Bourgeois sought to counter stereotypical social and sexual roles attached to women, as much as the idea that an extreme emotional state is necessarily a negative or painful one.

As described by Robert Radford, “Bourgeois is always the sculptor, knowing the relative weight of things, the sense of tension and counterweight between the hardness and softness, the rigidity and fluency of materials.”5 This is an apt characterisation for Arched Figure, with the tactile and

smooth bronze suspended over the cushioned and humble mattress below.

When asked about the “truth of sculpture”, Bourgeois stated that “we’re made of completely contrary elements, opposed elements; and this produces formidable tensions.”6 This cast of Arched Figure was made in 2010, the year of Bourgeois’s death at the age of ninety-eight.

1.

Mieke Bal, “Ecstatic Aesthetics: Metaphoring Bernini,” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 5.

2.

Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ “Spider”: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 88.

3.

C. Goetz, “Charcot, Hysteria, and Simulated Disorders,” in Handbook of Clinical Neurology Vol. 139 (2016), 15. For the photographs, see also Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

4.

Goetz, “Charcot, Hysteria, and Simulated Disorders,” 15.

5.

Robert Radford, “Louise Bourgeois: London,” The Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1151, 122.

6.

Alain Karili, “Conversation with Louise Bourgeois,” Arts Magazine, March 1989, 75.

previous page: Louise Bourgeois (France, USA, 1911–2010) Arched Figure 1993, cast 2010 bronze, fabric and metal Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation Purchase 2016. © The Easton Foundation / VAGA, NY. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.

35

36

Claude Mellan

The ecstasy of saint francis of paola the ecstasy of saint ignatius Danielle Smith

Claude Mellan was a French artist best known for his engravings, who studied theology at university in Paris before travelling to Rome to begin his artistic training.1 He also studied with Simon Vouet (1590–1649), the painter who was primarily responsible for transposing the Italian Baroque style to France. Mellan’s work is notable for a distinctive etching technique where shade and depth are created by parallel lines varying in width and closeness, as opposed to a more commonly employed method of crosshatching.2 He created numerous prints depicting episodes from the lives of saints, particularly moments of religious ecstatic experience.

The first engraving depicts Saint Francis of Paola, who dedicated himself to a hermitic spiritual life after his first religious vision at the age of thirteen. He founded the Order of Minims in the 1450s, a religious order of friars notable for their Lenten vow (veganism) in addition to the counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He was also prominent as a miracle worker and prophet, said to have foretold events such as the capture of Ortranto by the Ottoman Empire in 1480 and the birth of the future King Francis I of France in 1494.3 Although possibly a representation of the saint’s dying moments (the last line of the Latin inscription reads “so my life is lost”), Mellan’s engraving does not explicitly illustrate one specific event or mystical moment in Francis’s life; rather,

Claude Mellan (France, 1598–1688) L’Extase de Saint François de Paola [The Ecstasy of Saint Francis of Paola] 1600s engraving Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Accessioned 1998.

it positions him as a pious man who led a life characterised by visionary and supernatural experiences such as this.

The word “CHARITAS,” held aloft by putti, is one of his symbols—“charity” was the motto of the Minims—echoed in Bartolome Murillo’s 1670 painting of the saint, and the text below extols divine love.

The second engraving features Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Like Francis, Ignatius experienced numerous holy visions from a young age, including the incident illustrated here by Mellan. Following his convalescence from injuries received in the Battle of Pamplona (1521), Ignatius had a vision of Christ carrying the cross while making a pilgrimage to Rome (1537), and heard the words as inscribed

by Mellan on the rays beaming down on him: ego vobis Romae propitious ero (“I will be favourable to you at Rome”).4 Ignatius would go on to found the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in the capital in 1540.

Mellan shows Ignatius in the midst of this mystical experience as fellow pilgrims pass behind him, unaware of the phenomenon occurring.

At first glance, it seems something of a contradiction to associate emotive phrases such as passion and ecstasy with Mellan’s quite chaste and sober depictions of these saints and their experiences. In contrast to the raw revelry of the bacchanalia, or the dramatic sensuality with which Saint Teresa herself is imbued, Mellan’s figures are restrained and serious. However, this comparative lack of “outward signs” of an “inward and spiritual grace”, as labelled by philosopher Evelyn Underhill, cannot be disregarded as less transcendent or divine than their more physically expressive counterparts.5 Rather, by placing significance on the intense spiritual awareness that accompanies a state 37

38

of religious ecstasy, Mellan is suggesting that supernatural experiences can be contemplative and introspective events; a treatment that complements the devotion exemplified in the lives and works of his two subjects.

1.

Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, “Mellan, Claude,” in The Dictionary of Art, vol. 21, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove, 1996), 85–86.

2.

Joseph Strutt, “Claude Mellan,” in A Biographical Dictionary Containing an Historical Account of All the Engravers, From the Earliest Period of the Art of Engraving to the Present Day, vol. 2 (London: Robert Faulder, 1786), 142–44.

3.

Adeline Collange, “Saint Francis of Paola Prophesying the Birth of a Son to Louise of Savoy,” The Louvre Collection Online, http:// www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/saint-francispaola-prophesying-birth-son-future-francis-iking-france-born-1494-loui.

4.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, “The Ecstasy of Saint Ignatius,” https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov. au/collection/works/529.1987/.

5.

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Meuthen, 1911), 431.

Claude Mellan (France, 1598–1688) L’Extase de Saint Ignace [The Ecstasy of Saint Ignatius] 1600s engraving Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Purchased 1987.

39

40

Pietro Aquila

Triumph of bacchus and ariadne Andrea Bubenik

Bacchus (in Greek myth, Dionysus) is the Roman god of wine and the supreme emblem of mythological ecstasy. Baroque artists relished the opportunity to depict Bacchus with his uninhibited entourage.

The revelry is usually set in expansive and idyllic landscapes resplendent with the fruits of a harvest.

Here, Bacchus is seated with his lover Ariadne in chariots drawn by tigers and goats, in a witty and joyous celebration of the classical gods in ecstatic bliss. The lovers are accompanied by bacchantes (or in Greek, maenads, which translates as ‘raving ones’)—female figures who, inspired by Bacchus, could dance and drink their way into states of ecstatic frenzy. Also present are fauns (or in Greek, satyrs), the male companions of Bacchus who are often depicted with goat-like features and legs and associated with fertility.1 Ariadne, who according to one legend was rescued

by Bacchus from the island of Naxos after she was abandoned by Theseus, is being crowned as Bacchus’s queen and lover. The only blemish to the ecstasy is Silenus, companion and tutor to Bacchus, identifiable at the fore as the reeling and overweight drunk who rides a donkey, a less attractive counterpoint to the vision of perfection coming up behind him. The composition is a revival of the Roman

Pietro Aquila (Italy, 1650–92), after Annibale Carracci (Italy, 1560–1609) Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna [Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne] 1674 plate 12 from the Galeriae Farnesianae Icones series, published by Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi, Rome, 1670–92 etching and engraving National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Professor Peter Tomory, 1991.

tradition of the “Triumph,” in which the victorious and laurel-crowned imperator is seated in a chariot in procession.

Pietro Aquila was a seventeenth-century Italian artist who excelled at reproductive printmaking.2 This particular engraving hails from a portfolio of twenty-five prints after the mythological fresco cycle The Loves of the Gods (1597–1602) by Annibale Carracci, a cycle that was monumental in scope and covered the walls and ceilings of Farnese Gallery, one of the largest rooms in the Palazzo Farnese and the residence of the Catholic Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne was the centrepiece of the cycle, flanked by dozens of other seductive mythological scenes, all likely intended to serve as backdrop for the ebullient atmosphere of a vivacious salon party. Once described as “intellectual parlor pornography,” it is noteworthy that even with the revelry at hand, the figures cavort carefully in order to hide their genitals. It is likely that the program of the ceiling refers to Ovid’s Metamorphosis (VIII, lines 160–82).3 1.

For summaries of bacchantes, maenads, fauns, and satyrs, Bacchus, Ariadne, and Silenus, see David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), also available online, http://www. oxfordreference.com.

2.

Reproductive printmaking is a category unto itself, reserved for artists who specialised in copying the works of others or transforming paintings into print. For a discussion on Pietro Aquila, see G. C. Williamson, Bryan’s Dictionary of Painter and Engravers (London: Bell & Sons, 1930) Volume 1, 50–51; and U. Thieme-F. Becker, Allgemeine Lexikon der bildenden Künstler II (Leipzig: E.A Seemann, 1907–50), 51.

3.

For a summary of the commission, and for the work of Annibale Carracci, see Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 7–33.

41

42

William Hogarth

Credulity, superstition, and fanaticism Andrea Bubenik

The tradition of satire in eighteenthcentury England owes much to the artist William Hogarth, best known for his social commentaries in A Rake’s Progress (1731), The Harlot’s Progress (1731–32), Marriage a la Mode (1743–45), The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), and Gin Lane (1751). His scathing political and social critiques were delivered with a sharp wit, often in serial form, analogous to today’s storyboards for films. Notably, Hogarth usually published engravings after his own paintings, thereby securing for himself a solid income without needing to rely on patronage.1 In one of his final works of art, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, Hogarth explores and ridicules fundamentalist religion. As noted by Philip C. Almond, “in this print, what had been core components of religious belief in the middle of sixteenth century are now decried as superstition, to be believed only by the credulous and fanatical,” and further, “what had previously been an accepted part of the intellectual world had now become the subject of ridicule and satire.”2

religious ecstasy, who is being embraced by a minister who thrusts a religious icon down the front of her dress. Immediately above in a pulpit is another preacher who is engaged in a terrifying performance, with puppets representing the devil and a witch, with a text beside him reading, “I speak as a fool.” In the foreground, a woman is giving birth to rabbits while turning to drink from a gin glass.

This is a church in which religious and sexual excitement become conflated, the faces of the observant congregation distorted and miserable. Completing Hogarth’s mocking tone is an ominous chandelier suspended over the scene that is labelled “A New and Correct Globe of Hell.”

1.

For Hogarth’s paintings, see Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (Yale: Yale University Press, 2016); for Hogarth’s prints, see Hogarth’s Graphic Works: Catalogue Raisonné (London: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1989).

2.

Philip Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 272–73.

This extended to the state of religious ecstasy. The right corner of the church setting in this work features a “thermometer” that has been inserted into a diseased brain, and registers in ascending order the following emotional states: “suicide, madness, despair, settled grief, agony, sorrow, low spirits, love, lust, extacy [sic], convulsion fits, madness, raving.” Standing near the thermometer is a young girl, apparently in the throes of

William Hogarth (England, 1697–1764) Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism 1762 etching and engraving Collection of Philip C. Almond, Brisbane.

43

44

Petrina Hicks Persephone Michele Helmrich

Petrina Hicks’s photograph Persephone portrays the Greek goddess in her struggle with Hades. Her sculpted form, however, is also held in a tangled embrace by two luminescent green snakes, reminiscent perhaps of the Hellenistic sculpture Laocoön and its portrayal of an attack by two giant serpents. The work extends Hicks’s ability to imbue her sensuous large-scale photographs with a quality that is strange and unsettling, whether they are images of young people and animals or those that express her abiding interest in “sculpture, archaeology and history, and the representation of women in art throughout history.”1 Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baroque sculpture The Abduction of Proserpina (1621–22) depicts the moment that Pluto (Hades in Greek mythology) abducts Proserpina (also known as Persephone) to be his wife in the underworld.

Yet, the figures encircled by Hicks’s snakes are not those of Bernini. Rather, they appear modelled on the earlier Abduction of a Sabine executed by Giambologna in 1579–83. Giambologna, or Jean Boulogne (1529–1608), achieved renown in Florence for this monumental marble sculpture that featured three twisting figures in a vertical spiral—exemplifying the figura serpentinata (serpentine figure) of the Mannerist artists.

According to myth, when Ancient Rome was founded in 750 BCE, a shortage of women led Roman men to abduct Sabine women.”2 Giambologna depicts the young woman in frenzied struggle, held aloft by a Roman youth, with the older Sabine man crouching below. In

Petrina Hicks (Australia, 1972–) Persephone 2015 pigment print, edition 2/8 Collection of the University of Queensland, purchased 2017.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Michael Reid, Sydney.

Bernini’s sculpture, this figure is replaced by Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the underworld.

The sculpture in Hicks’s photograph resembles a small-scale replica or ornament, its white surface less nuanced than Giambologna’s sculpture, the woman now cast as Persephone. Photographed against a pale studio background, the snakes—most likely benign tree snakes—gleam with sensuous vitality. Their introduction and uncanny encircling of Persephone’s struggling form suggest the sexual overtones of her plight, the artist acknowledging the “pool of symbols we continually draw upon and reinterpret.”3 Inadvertently, the snakes also personify the “serpentine-line” and “line of grace” that William Hogarth (1697–1764) recommended so highly in The Analysis of Beauty (1753).

Unlike the two serpents in Laocoön that inspired mortal fear, Hicks’s snakes disturb with serpentine grace.

Petrina Hicks has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, including Germany, Spain, France, Italy, UK, USA, and Japan. She has won a number of awards, including the 2014 Bowness Photography Prize. Her work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, and most state galleries.

1.

The artist shoots on film, not seeing the result until the film is processed. See “Artists Talk: Petrina Hicks,” YouTube video, 5:25, uploaded by Sydney College of the Arts, 4 July 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=b61pD4UvU_8.

2.

Shannon Pritchard, “Giambologna, Abduction of a Sabine Woman,” Smarthistory, 8 September 2016, http://smarthistory.org/giambolognaabduction-of-a-sabine -woman/.

3.

Petrina Hicks, quoted in Andrew Gaynor, “Petrina Hicks: The Longevity of Myth,” Vault issue 12 (November 2015), http://vaultart.com.au/ISS12/ hicks.php.

45

46

Salvador Dalí

The phenomenon of ecstasy Danielle Smith

The Surrealists’ fascination with sexual practices and politics led to numerous artworks that explored their understanding of evolving human sexuality in the twentieth century. Salvador Dalí’s photomontage is both an erotic expression of the unconscious thoughts motivating physical desire and a methodical approach to resolving one of the ‘problems’ of that desire.

Dalí believed ecstasy to be the solution to the problem of how to transform the repugnant into the beautiful, and his montage frames the prolonged experience of sexual ecstasy as a form of that solution.1 The underlying assumption of Dalí’s belief, and the subsequent construction of this image of ecstasy, is that if the result of such ecstasy—orgasm—can transform the world, it was therefore a Surrealist technique.2 In the short essay that accompanied the collage’s original publication in Minotaure (an influential Surrealist magazine published in the 1930s), Dalí wrote that: Ecstasy is the culminating consequence of dreams, it is the consequence and the mortal verification of the images of our perversion. Some images provoke ecstasy, which in turn causes certain images. They are always genuinely and essentially Surrealist images.3

of an exclusively female phenomenon (an attitude that is countered by Louise Bourgeois’s treatment of the same emotion). Dalí’s work also makes his corresponding idea of translating the state of ecstasy into permanence a reality: the women in the montage are frozen in their euphoria, existing infinitely in a condition known for its transience.4 Salvador Dalí was one of the most prominent artistic figures of the twentieth century, with a versatility extending across painting, sculpture, film, architecture, and photography. Renowned for his Surrealist works infused with symbolism and influenced by the Renaissance masters, he produced nearly 2,000 artworks in his lifetime, to which eight museums worldwide are solely dedicated.

1.

Salvador Dalí, “Le phénomène de l’extase,” Minotaure no. 3–4, 12 December 1933, 76.

2.

Robert J. Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Women in Male Surrealist Art (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995), 252.

3.

Dalí, “Le phénomène de l’extase,” 76.

4.

Juliette Lavie, “The Subversion of Images,” Papers of Surrealism 8 (2010): 4–5.

With its focus on human physicality and emotion, Dalí’s work positions the hysteria of sexual ecstasy as something

Salvador Dalí (Spain, 1904–89) Le Phénomène de L’Extase [The Phenomenon of Ecstasy] 1933 photomontage, reproduced in Minotaure no. 3–4, 12 December 1933, 77. © Salvador Dalí Estate, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/ VEGAP, Madrid. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.

47

48

Gordon Shepherdson

The stoning of st stephen – after the last stone Danielle Smith

Saint Stephen is traditionally recognised as the first martyr in Christian theology, accused of blasphemy against Judaism and stoned to death in Jerusalem in AD 36. In this work, Shepherdson captures Stephen here in the aftermath of the final stone being cast; his ecstasy is realised in the visions of heaven and the Son of Man that came to him in this moment of death.1

omitted here and in turn the context for the stoning—Shepherdson isolates Stephen’s visionary experience as the saint’s defining narrative. As the only witness therefore to Stephen’s fate, the viewer becomes a default participant in his divine moment; the hands reaching down from heaven for Stephen are also extended to the viewer, and his salvation is thus also offered to us.

Shepherdson’s technique of using his fingers to build the surfaces of the image— and the resulting large, bold swathes of earthy tones that model his subject’s body— add to the profundity of Stephen’s humanity in this moment.2 His form is fixed, earthly, tethered by both position and analogous colour to the ground and the mortal world; this solidity heightens the contrasting spectacle of the spiritual encounter that is about to occur. Stephen is literally engulfed by colour as the ecstatic experience transforms him.

Shepherdson is a Brisbane-based artist who has been exhibiting for over fifty years.

As noted by Pamela Bell, “Shepherdson records, primarily for his own satisfaction, the raw experience, the celebration and dark poetry of ‘one man’s stay on the planet.’”4 His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery, and The University of Queensland. Survey exhibitions of the artist’s work have been presented

by UQ Art Museum (then University Art Museum) in 1977 and the Queensland Art Gallery in 1997.

The Stoning of St Stephen – After the Last Stone was a preparatory painting for one of a pendant pair of panels designed for the Cathedral of St Stephen in the centre of Brisbane that were ultimately passed over for being too confrontational.3 Eschewing the group iconography frequently found in images of Stephen’s death—Jewish priests, mob of tormentors, bystanders, and various heavenly beings habitually depicted are all

Gordon Shepherdson (Australia, 1934–) The Stoning of St Stephen – After the Last Stone 1991 oil and wax on paper Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Gordon Shepherdson in memory of his wife Noela Shepherdson, through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2011.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane.

1.

As described in Acts 7.55.

2.

Louise Martin-Chew, “Gordon Stephenson,” in Australian Painting Now, ed. Laura Murray Cree and Neville Drury (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 260.

3.

University of Queensland Art Museum, “The Stoning of St Stephen – After the Last Stone,” UQ Art Collection Online, http://www. artmuseum.uq.edu.au/collection/search. php?request=search.

4.

Pamela Bell, “Gordon Shepherdson,” Art and Australia 15, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 385.

49

50

51

52

Hiromi Tango Insanity magnet #7 Samantha Littley

Hiromi Tango’s Insanity Magnet #7 captures the ecstatic moment in which the artist enveloped herself in rope she had previously woven from the trinkets and remnants of others, to express an intense emotional response. As she describes, the artwork … was born during the dust storm around lunchtime, 23rd Sep 2009, at New Farm Park, Brisbane. I did not know how and where to place my growing grey anger, which was totally overpowering and overtaking my identity … I was possessed and haunted … No one could heal it—except the dust storm.1 The strength of feeling that Tango expresses through the photograph, its inherent performative and theatrical qualities, and the transformative effect of the act itself all speak to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. In particular, there is a sense that Tango has transcended her existing state of consciousness by wrapping herself in the cord. This allusion to envelopment connects to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the fold,” which, he argues, is crucial to an understanding of neoBaroque aesthetics. Equally apt is Tango’s account of being “burning angry … then the energy of the storm even made me more powerful … a big fire … I just breathed in, and reproduced the energy of the time.”2 Her narrative evokes Deleuze’s description

of the sublime form of Bernini’s sculpture: “… when marble seizes and bears to infinity folds that cannot be explained by the body, but by a spiritual adventure that can set the body ablaze.”3 Both Teresa and Tango, then, are consumed as much by their emotions as they are by the folds that enclose them. The suggestion of spiritual rapture in Tango’s work is enhanced when we appreciate that the coils with which she has draped herself recall Japanese Buddhist temple ropes, or kedzuna, spun from hair donated by female worshippers.

Hiromi Tango is a Japanese-Australian artist who works across sculpture, photography, installation and performance.

Her artworks have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney), the Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), and internationally at venues including La Maison Folie, Mons (Belgium), the Singapore Art Museum, and the art fairs Art Brussels and Art Basel Hong Kong. Her participatory practice is a means through which she explores connections between art and science, and their capacity to heal.

1. Hiromi Tango, “Insanity Magnet,” Hiromi Tango (website), http://hiromitango.com/InsanityMagnet.

2. Ibid.

3. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), 121–22.

previous page: Hiromi Tango (Japan, Australia, 1976–) Insanity Magnet #7 2009, printed 2013 pigment print, edition 6/6 Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2014.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and sullivan+strumpf, Sydney.

53

54

Girolamo Nerli Bacchanalian feast Danielle Smith

Bacchanalia were infamous festivals in honour of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, freedom, and ecstasy, with documented origins in the fifth century BC. As members of one of the mysteries (secret religious schools) of the Greco-Roman world, initiates of the Bacchanalia sought a temporary transcendental connection with the gods and the mystical world, achieved through intoxicants and ecstatic dance and music.1 Bertrand Russell described this connection as follows: In intoxication, physical or spiritual, the initiate … finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of everyday preoccupations. The Bacchic ritual produced what was called ‘enthusiasm’, which means etymologically having the god enter the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god.2 Depictions of these Bacchanalia became exceedingly popular in the Renaissance and beyond; they tended towards romanticised imagery of revelry, often set in landscapes populated with nude and mythical figures.3 In Bacchanalian Feast, Nerli places the focus back on the ritualistic and transcendent aspects of the festival and its rites, capturing the participants’ fervent energy and the frenzy of their supernatural experience through

his loose, expressive brushwork. Nerli’s Feast is an event emphasising Russell’s “enthusiasm”: the creation of a union between the human and the heavenly.

This work is one of five variants of the subject painted by Nerli, an Italian-born artist who studied at the Accademia di Belle in Florence. Nerli was influenced by the Italian Macchiaioli (“patches”) painters, who “rebelled against the illusionism of the official art of the academies and advocated painting in the open air, like the French Impressionists.”4 A widely travelled artist, Nerli visited Madagascar, Mauritius, and Bourbon before moving to Australia and later New Zealand. Nerli worked alongside Arthur Streeton and Charles Condor in Melbourne at the height of the Heidelberg School.

1.

Kiki Karoglou, “Mystery Cults in the Greek and Roman World,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–), October 2013, http://www. metmuseum.org/toah/hd/myst/hd_myst.htm.

2.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945), 16.

3.

Sarah S. Gibson, “Bacchanalia/Orgy,” in Encyclopaedia of Comparative Iconography, ed. Helene E. Roberts (London: Routledge, 1998).

4.

Barbara Chapman, “Nerli, Girolamo Pieri Ballati (1860–1926),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: Australian National University, 1986), http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/nerli-girolamo-pieri-ballati-7740.

Girolamo Nerli (Italy, New Zealand, Australia, 1860–1926) Bacchanalian Feast ca. 1887 oil on canvas Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased 1970.

55

56

Chris Bennie Mothership Danielle Smith

Unlike many of the works in this exhibition, which depict their subject in a single rapturous moment, Bennie’s video allows him to reveal the process leading to that moment. For Mothership, the artist has filmed himself dancing alone to German electro music in a dated suburban living room. His movements—repetitive and inelegant—evolve as he becomes increasingly immersed in the music and the dance, stripping layers of selfconsciousness away, and a performative journey towards a pure and immediate experience of existence emerges.1 Bennie states that his work results … from a philosophical exploration of my immediate surroundings in the form of them being extraordinary— continually extraordinary—more so than things that are meant to be extraordinary or spectacular ... I’m of the opinion that the banal can be truly remarkable, and that it’s where real meaning resides, in the experience of the ordinary.2

a transcendental experience turned inward, which examines the sublime possibilities of the mundane rather than the mystical.

Chris Bennie is based at the Gold Coast, Queensland, and his practice spans video, photography, and installation. He has been included in numerous national and international group exhibitions in Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, and Los Angeles. In 2014, Bennie was part of an Asialink Arts Residency at Yokubo Art Space (Tokyo), where he researched communities that had been affected by tsunamis.

1.

Francis Parker and Chris Bennie, “Francis Parker in Conversation with Chris Bennie,” Doctorate of Art Exhibition Catalogue (Brisbane: Moreton Street Spare Room, 2009), https:// docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/cd74bf_3931fa950934 47d2a771f251a6278ec8.pdf.

2.

Ibid.

3.

Ray McBride, “Secular Ecstasies,” The Psychologist 27, no. 3 (2014): 168.

Mothership celebrates the actuality of this ordinary, an everyday kind of ecstasy—what psychologist Ray McBride explains as “a moment in which consensual reality is overwhelmed by an unusual but rewarding sense of connection—between you and the world, your brain and your body, stimulus and stimulated.”3 Bennie’s dance is the antithesis of the Roman bacchanalia—it is

Chris Bennie (New Zealand, Australia, 1975–) Mothership 2004 (stills) standard definition Quicktime file, edition 2/3 Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2011.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

57

58

59

60

David Wadelton

Show them you want it Melissa Harper

Show Them You Want It was awarded First Prize in “The Spirit of Football” competition and related exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004. The painting features two men gazing upwards intensely, mouths wide open, and between them is an expanse of blurred pastel colours. Here, the subject is the ecstasy of sport rather than religion. The two men featured are Aussie Rules football (AFL) players Luke McPharlin (Dockers) and Nick Riewoldt (Saints). They look upward, not to the heavens but to the ball, both intent on taking a “specky” (a mark) and showing the crowd they want it. But the work is not devoid of religious connotation. AFL, Australia’s most popular sporting code, is frequently represented in religious terms: players are cast as saints (here we have Saint Nick); the home of football, the MCG, is spoken of in reverential terms as “hallowed ground” and the “cathedral of Australian sport”; and some liken the passion that fans have for the game to a religious experience.

In this painting, we cannot see the excitement of the supporters; they are depicted only in abstract form. Jo Roberts explains that the blurred effect in the centre derives from football cards: Wadelton used to collect Scanlens Gum footy cards as a child. Like other collectors, his aim was to get every card in the series, because on the back of each then-VFL player’s mugshot was

previous page: David Wadelton (Australia, 1955–) Show Them You Want It 2004 oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Geoff Slattery Publishing as the winner of The Spirit of Football Acquisitive Prize, 2005.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

part of a panorama from which to make a giant football action scene; usually a “specky”. Like most other collectors, he never got a full set, and “usually just ended up with the odd elbow, boot or (most frequently) fragment of fuzzy outof-focus supporters”.1 Feeling let down is a common experience for footy fans; emotions run deep and all too often hopes and dreams end in disappointment. A loss, particularly in the Grand Final, can bring agony, even trauma.2 But every fan has also experienced the flipside, the unbounded joy, the ecstasy, that comes with a skillful passage of play, the long-range goal, an after-the-siren victory.

These moments are precious—your team has shown you just how much they want it and given you the thrill you crave.

David Wadelton lives and works in Melbourne. Since the early 1980s, his work has featured in numerous exhibitions, including surveys Icons of Suburbia at McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, Langwarrin, Victoria (2011) and Pictorial Knowledge, Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong (1998), with recent exhibitions including Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (2014). His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of Victoria and regional and university collections. He has also contributed to experimental music in Australia.

1. Jo Roberts, “Footy Card Collector Gets the Picture,” The Age, 6 August 2004, http://www.theage.com.au/ articles/2004/08/05/1091557994970. html?from=storyrhs.

2. Matthew Klugman, “‘The Premiership Is Everything’: Visceral Agony and Ecstasy in September,” Sporting Traditions 27, no. 2 (2010): 127–39.

61

62

Gordon Matta-Clark Office baroque Andrew Leach

This video work documents the interventions made by Gordon Matta-Clark into an office building in Antwerp that would soon be destroyed, leaving the documentation itself and a few scattered elements of removed building fabric as the enduring collateral of his architecturally scaled gestures. Using a series of large semi-circular cuts extending across the building’s five levels, Matta-Clark explicated an alternate and compelling spatial logic for a commercial building of no outstanding merit.

Why Baroque? At one level, the work exposes the otherwise hidden spatial coherence of a structure originally composed of walls and openings determined by convention.

The “great” Baroque architects did this both in buildings conceived ex novo and in the amplification of churches conceived on stricter compositional lines by predecessors in both the immediate and distant past.

On another plane, the video captures the kernel of the architectural performance: creative destruction in the moment before elimination. This is not the same kind of subversion seen in Matta-Clark’s shooting out of the windows of New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies a year earlier to expose the impotence of critical debate on the city’s housing crisis.1 Nor is it the kind of deconstructive gesture seen in his Splitting (1974). Rather, it is a form of creation beyond convention, drawing the gaze through reality and either into the abyss or towards the heavens. But it is structured, measured, controlled. As Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark (USA, 1943–78) Office Baroque 1977/2005 (stills) b&w and colour 16 mm film, transferred to video Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. © Gordon Matta-Clark Estate / ARS, NY. Licenced by Viscopy, Sydney.

claimed, this is anarchitecture, in which the physical work itself is a germ that leads beyond, and which claims as part of itself the performance of response.

A New Yorker who spent formative spells in France and Chile, Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell in the age of Colin Rowe and literature at the Sorbonne. Dying of cancer aged thirty-five, Matta-Clark has been the subject of major posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA) in Antwerp (Gordon Matta-Clark – Retrospective, 1968–1978) in 1987, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007 (You Are the Measure), and elsewhere. Among the numerous books dedicated to his art are Object to be Destroyed (2001), Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between (2003), City Slivers and Fresh Kills (2004), and Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (2006).2 1.

As discussed, alongside other works, in James Attlee, “Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier,” Tate Papers 7 (Spring 2007), http://www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/tate-papers/07/towardsanarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-lecorbusier.

2.

Pamela Lee, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); James Attlee and Lisa Le Feuvre, Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between (Manchester: Nazraeli Press, 2003); Steven Jenkins, City Slivers and Fresh Kills (San Francisco: San Francisco Cinematheque, 2004); and Gloria Moure, ed., Gordon MattaClark: Works and Collected Writings (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2006). The Gordon Matta-Clark collection is held by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. See http://www. cca.qc.ca/en/search?query=gordon+mattaclark&rk=collection-object-370196.

63

64

65

66

Bill Henson

Untitled 95, 97, 96 Danielle Smith

In Bill Henson’s theatrical triptych, details of a lavish and ornate interior bookend and juxtapose the image of a waifish young junkie. This work is less about the figural and physical expressions of an ecstatic state than other works in this exhibition; rather, Henson situates his subject within similar conditions to those of Bernini’s Saint Teresa. In a way, it is Henson’s work that most embodies within this exhibition the Baroque notion of bel composto—the unification of the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a harmonious whole—a notion for which Bernini is credited, and for which his Teresa is renowned.1 Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel physically surrounds the viewer, enclosing them in with Teresa, creating a spectacle that provokes a visionary experience of their own.2 Henson’s triptych has a similar effect: the architectural features on either side of the central figure act as a framing device, forming perceptible limits to the space that he occupies and thereby forcing the viewer to become an occupant of that space and moment. The viewer is essential to bel composto—it is they who complete the aesthetic process of reassembling the elements of the separate arts into unity.3 Simon Schama notes that “there’s never a time when Bernini isn’t conscious of the spectator” in the arrangement of his works, and the same can be said of Henson.4

previous page: Bill Henson (Australia, 1955–) Untitled 95, 97, 96 1983–84 three type C photographs, edition of 10 Collections: Gene and Brian Sherman & Terrence and Lynette Fern.

Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Henson’s stylistic approaches can also be likened in many ways to the Baroque, especially in the stark contrasts between light and dark that he employs in his work. His photographs have often been considered in terms of their painterly qualities, and the spotlight effect highlighting the curves and angles of both the architectural elements and the figure evokes Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro in particular.

Bill Henson is an Australian photographer, and one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. He represented Australia at the 1995 Venice Biennale, has exhibited extensively both domestically and internationally, and his work is held by every major Australian gallery. Survey exhibitions have included Bill Henson, National Gallery of Victoria (2017) and Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005). Monographs include Lux et Nox (2002) and Mnemosyne (2005); both published by Scalo (Switzerland). A second edition of Lux et Nox was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009.

1.

Giovanni Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), 47.

2.

Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture (London: Laurence King, 2005), 118.

3.

Careri, Bernini: Flights of Love, 68.

4.

Simon Schama, “When Stone Came to Life,” The Guardian, 16 September 2006.

67

68

69

70

previous page: Louise Bourgeois (France, USA, 1911–2010) Arched Figure 1993, cast 2010 (detail) bronze, fabric and metal Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation Purchase 2016 © The Easton Foundation / VAGA, NY. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italy, 1598–1680) L’Estasi di Santa Teresa d’Avila [The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila] 1647–52 (detail) marble and gilded bronze Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome © DEA Picture Library / Getty Images 71

72

Ecstatic Aesthetics metaphoring bernini Mieke Bal

While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” The image of a royal robe with ample folds cannot today but evoke that historical aesthetic and its contemporary counterpart that we associate with Gilles Deleuze (1993), with the idea of the fold. The image is thoroughly baroque. Walter Benjamin, whose work on German baroque drama has inspired extensive philosophi­cal commentary on the baroqueness of his thought as exemplary of modernity in general, is here not speaking about art but about language.1 Comparing the task of the translator with that of the poet, he creates a powerful image of the former’s product as both rich (royal) and encompassing (ample), expansive yet enveloping.2

His essay on translation, in line with his more straightforwardly philosophical musings on language, takes an explicit position against the idea of translation as derivative.3 Instead, it proposes a philosophy of language in which the translation serves not the original but the liberation and release of its potential, which he calls “translatability” and which is located in that which resists translation. Although his essay—somewhat embarrassingly to our postmodern

Louise Bourgeois (France, USA, 1911–2010) Femme Maison 1983 marble Collection Jean-Louis Bourgeois. © The Easton Foundation / VAGA, NY. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.

taste—abounds in organic metaphors, essentialism, and a terminology of purity, the gist of his philosophy of language through translation can be seen, retrospectively, as a critique of logocentrism. The “pure language” that translation is called upon to release in the original is—far from the core of truth of the hermeneutic tradition—located nowhere more precisely and definitively than in the folds that envelop it. Elsewhere, when describing the task of the critic, Benjamin uses equally baroque imagery to upgrade the function of the critic compared with that of the commentator (the philologist).4 In this case, the image is fire. Fold and fire: two images that refer language to the domain of visuality, and philosophy to the—baroque—aesthetic. Images, moreover, which are central to the work of two philosophers of our time, John Austin and Gilles Deleuze, who doubtlessly are among the most influential in the cultural disciplines to which art history belongs.

John Austin, whose philosophy of language liberated language from the stronghold of meaning in a way that resonates with Benjamin’s, introduced the concept of performativity—today widely used, and abused—into the discourse on art. For him, fire is the image of the fleeting nature of speech acts: not a semantic core, but rather something that, although it can do great damage (Butler 1997), is not a thing but a temporally circumscribed event; something that, like fire, hovers between thing and event. Deleuze, explicating and updating Leibniz’s baroque philosophy, demonstrated that the aesthetic motif of the fold is far more than an element of decoration; indeed, as a figure it also defines a specific type of thought.

A thought, it is now well known, that Benjamin exemplifies, and that connects from within, so to speak, the baroque of 73

the seventeenth century, permeated with religion and authoritarianism, with the baroque of our time, which tries hard to be liberated from both.5 In this paper, I will confront Benjamin’s essay on translati­on, as a sample of philosophical discourse, with an art-historical issue, in order to explore a few elements of the key question of the latter: how to do art history?6 Two works of art—one from the seventeenth century, the other from our present time, both considered baroque—represent, as a dual case, my view of the relationship between philosophy and art history. I propose that relationship as an ec-static form of translation. Moreover, I will later argue that this form of translation is not only ethically responsive but also, in the strict sense where philosophy and art history blend, aesthetic. On the one hand, I will put forward Giambattista Bernini’s famous Ecsta­sy of Saint Teresa, from 1647, located in the Cornaro Chapel of the Santa Maria della Vittoria Church in Rome. This is a major object of inte­rest for the “typical” art historian (Lavin 1980) and the less typi­cal but more influential philosop­her (Lacan in his Seminar 20).7 It is in this double status that it will here serve as my historical object. On the other hand, I will propose Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture Femme Maison, from 1983, not studied in any detail by art historians or engaged by philos­ophers, as my theoretical object. I hasten to add that these works will exchange functions as my argument develops.

This exchange, in fact, embodies my argument. In an anti-instrumentalist conception of theory, I contend that the relationship between philosophy and art history is best reframed as the relationship between history and theory—two aspects of both philosophy and art history—which 74

in turn stands for the relationship between object and analysis. But theory here is not an instrument of analysis to be “applied” to the art object, supposedly serving it but in fact subjecting it. Instead, it is a discourse that can be brought to bear on the object, while at the same time the discourse can be brought to bear on it, for this relationship is reversible in both temporal and functional terms. The historical interpretation of objects of visual art requires a fluctuating, mobile, and irreducible tension between past and present on the one hand and between theory and history on the other.

In what I have elsewhe­re dubbed a “preposterous” history, historical interpretati­on is by definition an activity of a philosophical nature.8

The status of my sculptural objects as visual art is equally subject to doubt. While it would be pedantic to argue about Bernini’s relevance to the (art)-historical concept of baroque, it would not be so to scrutinize his work for its implications for that concept.

Louise Bourgeois, in addition to calling herself a baroque artist, created a sculpture titled Baroque (1970), as well as one called Homage to Bernini (19­67). Since Bourgeois and Bernini can be considered exemplary of what art history calls “baroque,” it is through the two works Ecstasy and Femme Maison that this concept will be defined as both historical and philosophical. In defiance of art-historical practice, I will treat these two works together, as if they had no separate existence, and as much theoretically and philosophically as in terms of their visual existence or “nature.” The relationship between these works and between these works and the concept of baroque will be construed in terms of translation according to the metaphor in the epigraph from Walter Benjamin’s philosop­hy of language.

Needless to say, the figure of the fold will be deployed as baroqueness’s synecdoche.

Theses on the Philosophy of Art History

The past can be seized only as an image which flas­hes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never to be seen again.

For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Image, recognition, disappearance: history depends for its conditions of possibility on the self-centered anachronism of the present. In spite of Benjamin’s current popularity, these words of his are not heeded in the academic environment, where “the call for history,” to use Jonathan Culler’s critical term (1988) has been resounding loud and clear for decades.

And especially not in art history, whose objects are images, whose primary tool—iconography—is predicated upon recognition, and whose greatest magic consists of “disappearing” the object under the dust of words.9

But philosophy is a discourse in the present that—unlike historical thinking—engages past thought in the present but does not “reconstruct” or causally explain it. If there is a relationship between philosophy and art history, then it is a philosophy of art history. Such a philosophy can only be invol­ved in recog­nizing for the present, “as one of its own concerns,” the objects of its inquiries that flare up for only brief instants, like scenes that snapshots are unable to grasp and of which they can only inscribe a trace. The philosophical attitude I would like to propose in this paper is not to make the best of a sad situation but rather to endorse this image of history

as truly important for the present, which is our only lived temporality—a matter of life and death. Not stoic resignation but ecstatic enthusiasm is involved in heeding the warning that was Benja­min’s last, given to us to honor, on the eve of his—and Enlightenment culture’s—suicide.

To make this proposal more concrete, I will bring Benjamin’s “Theses” to bear, “pre-posterously,” on a much earlier, much more practical, and much less ominous text: his introduc­tion to his own practical piece of work, “The Task of the Transla­tor.”

I would like to translate his position on the philosophy of history (“every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably”) into the practice it solicits. Thus it is more suitable to recognize, as one of our own concerns, his ideas as a practicing philosopher in the routine present of 1923 than his apocalyptic vision on the threshold of his death. According to Benjamin, history, including the history of art, is neither a reconstruc­ti­on of nor an identifi­cati­on with the past; it is a form of translati­on.

Translation: tra-ducere. To conduct through, pass beyond, to the other side of a division or difference. If this etymology of translation is acceptable, it can be recognized in Benjamin’s celebration of translation as liberation (80), transformation, and renewal (73), as a supplemen­tation that produces the original rather than being subservient to it: Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the origi­nal language and the birth pangs of its own. (73) 75

It is the consequences of this philosophy of translation as a phi­losophy of language that I contend to be extendable to the historical interpreta­tion of visual objects that defines the rela­tionship between philosophy and art history as I see it.

Moving One of first consequences is the principle of dissipation. As soon as one undertakes translation, the object translated does not stay within the “duct,” the conduit. It attaches itself left and right, engages not only a single “destiny” but attempts many en­countered on its way. It also leaves elements behind, irre­trievably lost; thus the sense that translation is always reductive.

But this dissipation is also enriching. And in anticipation of what follows, it is also ec-static. The translator endorses a loss of (linguistic) self to dissipate language.

A second consequence derives from the notion that transla­tion traverses a gap, an irreducible difference between the “original” and its destiny in the new environment. The prepo­sition “trans-” is as deceptive as the verb “to carry” (ducere).

For even if the translation effectuates the passa­ge, it can never really build the bridge. The gap remains, and even in the best of translations—the result of the act of translating—manifests its scars. Dissipation plus gap equals infinite process, without origin or end. Translation is an ongoing activity (after a translation has been printed, its reader continues the task), and because it emphatically has neither origin nor end, the process through the dissipated field, crossing (out) gaps, and hauling along history’s remnants, a verb—“translating”— not a noun, is needed here.10

There is an illuminating parasynonym of this Latinate word, namely its Greek 76

version: metaphor.11 Nuances differ; literally, “metaphor” means to carry beyond, not through; transference rather than translation, if we confine the former to its psychoanalytical meaning.12 Benjamin’s insistence that a trans­lation changes the original beyond its initial state, revea­ling or rather producing the translatability that is its “essence” (71), justifies the metaphor of translation as metap­hor. Translating as metaphoring, in Benjamin’s conception of it, can be considered distorted representation; as Sigrid Weigel formulates it in her study of Benjamin, metaphor is “translation without an original” (1996, 95). Below, I will risk decompo­sing these words to sub­stan­tiate this claim.

Two meanings of translation will be left behind, lest their obviousness get in the way of the complexity of the argument. The first is the usual sense of passage or transfe­ rence from one language into another. For Benjamin, this sense recedes before the supplementation of each in the service of the emergence of “pure language” (74), but as mise-en-scène of some key problematics of art history, it cannot be overestima­ted.

Linguistic translation successively stages the problems of the subject (Who speaks, in a translation?), of context (Where is the trans­lated text, or, to speak with the title of Niranjana’s 1992 volume, how can we “site” translation?), and of moment (What is the historical position of a translated text?).

But once those consequences become clear, translation can no longer be considered just an exchange between languages.

All these ques­tions pertain to any work of historical interpretation. This is one reason why both history and philosophy are considered activities of translation here, and why they must be not only realigned but even enmeshed. Sighting, citing, and siting translation require an account of the literal,

or concrete, result of each of these verbs: spectacularization, recycling, and location.

This leaves straightforward translation from language to language far behind.

The second sense of translation to be discarded concerns intermediality. Here, my reason for bracketing this issue is strictly political. Reflection on the complex and problematic relations between words and images tends to solicit defensive­ ness. The emphatic indivisibility of film notwithstanding, art historians often allege the visuality of images so that they can bar literary scholars from access under the banner of disciplinary purification (e.g., Elkins 1999). Others, nonbelievers in purity, abuse images as illustrations in terms of the fidelity that for Benjamin (78– 79) marks bad translations. They invoke images, point to them, but their discourse does not engage with them qua image.13

I will bracket these two meanings of translation in order to foreground those three aspects of translation that allow it to become a suitable model for historical work: it is multiple (dissipating), metaphorical (transforming), and active (a verb rather than a noun rendering its “essence,” in Benjamin’s sense). In Greece, the word “metaphor” identifies moving vans. Moving, then, in all its possible meanings, may be our best bet yet.14

This pun would please the artist whose face is best known through the photograph made of her by Mapplethorpe, in which she carries a work—Fillette—which resembles both a French bread stick, a baguette, and a hyperbolic penis. In the photo, her aging, wrinkled face smiles like that of a naughty girl. Bourgeois works so much with metaphor—so many of her works can only be understood if one takes the puns of their titles into account—that “literalizing,”

translating metaphors might well be the underlying principle of coherence in her widely variegated work.

Early modern Bernini, on the other hand, is much more earnest, at least if we believe art history. But there is room for doubt here. His clearly erotic representations of swooning saints make art historians feel obliged to blushingly insist on his deeply devout walk of life and on the mystical, not erotic, nature of the scenes he depicted.

But, on the face of it, Bernini does not poke fun at language and the body the way postmodern Bourgeois does.15 Yet, once we deploy Bourgeois’s punning as a searchlight to look back “pre-posterously,” Bernini’s thresholds between registers of representation—his transitions from painting to sculpture to architecture—so keenly analyzed by Giovanni Careri, come to help us site the activity of translating in his Ecstasy.16

Art historians have tended to see this activity through the systematic principle of analogy that Benjamin would call “bad translation” (72), based on “resembling the meaning of the original” (78).17 This form of translation is based on the principle of logocentrism, where meaning is the endpoint of interpretation, centripetal, transhistorically stable, and transmedial.

It ignores what Benjamin defines as the “mode” in translation, its translatability (70–71), and limits itself to the “inaccurate transmission of an unessential content” (70)—unessential because (only) content.

Note that Benjamin’s remarks on translation build upon his resistance to two, not one, conceptions of language, which together flesh out what logocentrism is. He opposes the idea that the word coincides with the thing—a vision in turn relevant for his engagement with Hebrew, where word and thing are indicated by the 77

same noun, dabar. And he opposes the idea that words convey meaning, a notion implying that meaning is “whole” and stable enough to be the object of conveyance.

The two conceptions Benjamin resists have referentiality in common. The first considers reference absolute, the second sees it as mediated by semantics yet primary. But if meaning is unitary, whole, and stable, nothing really happens in the transition from semantics to reference. And although a sculpture or image is not a set of words, iconographic analysis in facts treats it as if it were just that. Careri opposes to that habit a more Benjaminian mode of translation that, as the latter has it, “lovingly and in detail incorporates the original’s mode of signification” (78). In line with this injunction, Careri analyzes not so much the singular meaning of singular elements as the “multiple syntactic and semantic modalities” that produce that meaning but also determine its effectivity (Careri 1995, 85, italics mine).

For my own analysis, I will take my cue from Careri’s brilliant interpretation, and his clear and convincing articulation of his method, a particular brand of reception theory.

Through what I would call a “pre-posterous” translation of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage in cinema, Careri, carefully avoiding the term “baroque” in order to estrange his readers from its traditionally banal and confusing usages, qualifies Bernini’s Albertoni Chapel as a pathetic work: ... in which the uniting of sensorial elements with intellectual and cognitive ones is achieved through a violent shock—by a paroxystic mounting of tension and by a series of conceptual, dimensional and chromatic leaps from each element to its opposite. (1995, 83) 78

He thus grounds the effectivity of what I would like to call the “ecstatic aesthetic,” not in the content or the textual sources, thus firmly rejecting iconography as a method of translation, but in the “tension of representation to ‘go outside itself’” (83). In other words, he translates what he sees, the “original,” into something that comes to terms, as Benjamin has it, with “the foreignness of languages” (75), defined a bit later as “the element that does not lend itself to translation” (75). This aspect of Bernini’s work, the untranslatability that defines its effect, can properly be called “pathetic,” or, for my purpose here, moving.

Moving House Over a period of many years, from the 1940s onward, Louise Bourgeois has produced a great number of works under the generic title Femme Maison. Generic, not serial. These works do not form a series but a genre. Through a great diversity of media and styles, they explore the ambivalent relationship between women and (their) houses. Sometimes, the woman has lost her head, imprisoned as she is in her life as femme sans/cent tête(s), to speak surrealistically. Or she falls from a roof. Or she escapes the house and manages to communicate through it, using it, headless herself, as a prosthesis. How can we know if the house is an asset or liability, a possession or prison? Sometimes she manages to climb onto the roof and shout out her freedom, albeit dangerously.

Are these works metaphors, say, in the dualistic sense, translating the melancholia of the trapped woman from the realm of feeling, a sense of a lifestyle, to the realm of the senses, of visibility? It is difficult to ignore the extent to which the comical absurdity of this situation coincides with

the tragical absurdity in which many women were trapped at the time. But to interpret the Femme Maison works in this way, in other words to translate them in the sense of transmitting this as their singular information content, is, as Benjamin would insist, impossible.

There are at least two translations, simultaneously necessary yet incompatible.

The one moves from feeling, melancholia or frustration, to visibility through concretization, the figuration of the trapped falling into a trap, a visible, deforming prison; but also within the language of the title: maîtresse de maison becomes femme-maison, a literal translation of the English “housewife.” The other retranslates what we see into language: the woman whose head gets lost in the house, because in a moment of Bovaresque stupidity she has lost her head, is a woman without a head. This visual pun is a linguistic pun, but also a metaphoring, a transferring from the domain of words and images to the domain of historicist linearity.

We cannot ignore the visual allusion to Max Ernst’s visual pun of his generic femme cent tête. Providing another version of Ernst’s work, Bourgeois can also be alleged to translate it in order to appropriate it, thus staking out her claim to a place in surrealism. Can these two translations— into a women’s issue and a surrealist pun— work together as a critique of the sexism of the surrealists?18 But then the metaphor of the lives of women imprisoned in their houses contradicts the act of the woman artist debating with her colleagues. Nor can we deduce from the style or content of these women’s lives their figuration or their humor, a conclusion that would make them translatable in terms of their historical moment, school, or style, just by applying a label like “surrealist” to them. Such labels

are as confining as the houses of which, they say, women are the “mistresses” (maîtresses de maison).

In fact, Bourgeois escapes academic categories because she fights the one translation with the other. Actively metaphoring from one side of our categorizations to the other, her Femme Maison genre offers a perspective on the constructive possibilities of translation as generated by the impossibility of translating “badly,” in the semantic singular, informationally. In the first place, the internal anachronism of the postsurrealist and postmelancholic sculpture alleged here, Femme Maison from 1983, deconstructs from within—a spatial term to be taken literally—the attempt inherent in art historical methodology to translate in such a manner. Instead, and in spite of the impossibility of “psychoanalyzing” Bourgeois’s work, she “masters” her own discourse on her past too well to avoid a collapse of unconscious and rhetorical material; her work lends itself singularly well to a mode of translation that is, in Jean Laplanche’s terms, anti-hermeneutic (1996). That mode, dissipating and crossing gaps that it leaves in place, is analytical: unbinding.

Indeed, the reason that no singular meaning—either women’s melancholia, or surrealist jokes—can “fit” the works in the way that an iconographic interpretation would require is the absence of a key or code with which to do the translating.

Instead, Benjaminian translation comes closer to Freudian free associating, which is “only the means employed for the dissociation of all proposed meaning” (Laplanche 1996, 7, italics mine). For this sculpture associates its namesakes with itself, only to propose conceiving of the objects titled Femme Maison not as 79

a series but as a genre that traverses the differences between media. Therefore, the 1983 Femme Maison, I contend, proposes the genre not as surrealist or feminist, but, through the preoccupations of Bourgeois’s time, as baroque. This term is not a translation of the sculpture nor a code to translate it with, but an enfolding that embraces past (Bernini) and present (Bourgeois) into a fold that, as Deleuze would have it, embodies baroqueness.

Here, the term “baroque,” in its most visual content, point of view, does not characterize the two works independently but rather marks the relationship between a contemporary and a historical baroque work: Moving from a branching of inflection, we distinguish a point that is no longer what runs along inflection, nor is it the point of inflection itself; it is the one in which the lines perpendicular to tangents meet in a state of variation.

It is not exactly a point but a place, a position, a site, a “linear focus,” a line emanating from lines. To the degree it represents variation or inflection, it can be called point of view.

(Deleuze 1993, 19) No; I am not proposing to classify this sculpture as baroque rather than surrealist or feminist. I am invoking baroque as a theoretical notion that implies—literally, that is, visually, in its folds—a mode of translation, an activity of metaphoring that resists the singular translation of one sign to another with the same meaning. The baroqueness of Bourgeois’s work is more like the royal folds of Benjamin’s translation, including the fold of thought upon which Deleuze insists, than like the decorative prettiness too often associated with that historical style. Let’s say that Bourgeois addresses, dialectically, polemically and 80

respectfully, the way Bernini attempted to represent Teresa’s ecstasy ec-statically.

Without in the least imitating Bernini, she, like him, supplements his work ec-statically.

More precisely, she examines through this sculpture the way the seventeenthcentury artist attempted to translate the transfiguration—itself a form of translation in the sense of metamorphosis à la de Certeau—of the mystic. Femme Maison as theoretical object houses this inquiry into the modalities of the historical object. The issue of philosophy-and-art history, then, has moved house.

Flaming This retrospective examination requires metaphoring, if not moving, vans.

Bourgeois’s work metaphorizes baroque sculpture, in particular Bernini’s Teresa, through two elements that characterize both works. The first is the integration of interior and exterior of the represented body. The second is the integration of interior and exterior of the space where the viewer stands in relation to that body.

According to common art-historical lore, Bernini aimed to translate a text—say, the description of her own ecstasy by the Spanish mystic—into sculpture. In Michel de Certeau’s conception of mysticism, Bernini would thereby demonstrate a deep understanding of mysticism. As Hent de Vries writes in a commentary on de Certeau’s text, such an understanding involves “[formalizing] the different aspects of its writing, of its ‘style’ or ‘tracing’” (1992, 449), thus producing the “fabulous” event/experience that the mystic herself could not, precisely, “render.” Mystical experience cannot, by definition, be “expressed,” because in this view, it is always/already an aftereffect. It comes after the shattering of language, and it

is situated in a void, which requires a new mode of “speaking” such as the one Bernini attempts. That mode of speaking is a formal espousing, a tracing, and it is performative: it is a form of acting, both theatrically and socially. Thus the subject is, or attempts to be, “larger than”—not “prior to”—discourse. The performative speech act has an illocutionary force— according to de Vries, a promise without the social conditions on which promises can be effective speech acts. This is why it is also, by definition, a failed or failing speech act. One is tempted to add that the necessary failure of the speech act is a function of the aporia of subjectivity that results from the mystic attitude. The subject is “larger” than discourse, but, far from transcending it, she cannot be prior to it and therefore can only “do” mystical experience by way of abandonment.

This is an unavoidable abandonment of subjectivity—necessary for the transfiguration—through the abandonment of discourse. Bernini’s work, then, is the indispensable prosthesis through which Teresa’s ec-stasy can come to be, preposterously, as an aftereffect.19

This is clearly not simply a translation of words into images. The text itself is already an attempt at translating: the writer sought to render a bodily experience in language.

Moreover, the experience itself was a translation—a transfer—of divine love into the ecstasy of this human being, as well as of the spiritual into the corporeal. This transforming translation as such is not at all new in Western culture.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a much-used model for the arts in early modernity and invoked by de Certeau, is one of Bernini’s “sources,” if not here, at least, explicitly, in an earlier work. The very concept of transformation implies a program of study

of the possibilities of inter- and multimedia translati­on. Take his famous Daphne and Apollo in the Galleria Borghese: clearly, the job was difficult. At first, it looks like a great success of triple translation: within the myth, from myth to plastic form, from sculpted human flesh to vegetation. The young woman’s hair flowing in the wind because of the speed of her flight is transformed into rather rigid branches at the moment her flight is stopped by the man who is pursuing her. The narrative movement rigidifies into an image that will stay forever, never aging.

But it is at the threshold, namely, the surface, that Bernini is confronted with untranslatability. In this early work, he is stopped in his tracks; in the later Teresa, he challenges that limit by means of “royal folds.” At the site where Daphne’s soft skin begins to change—translated from one materiality into another—the laurel’s bark is both fine and coarse, differentia­ting and detaching itself from the soft skin at the very moment when the transformation ought to produce a perfect blend. One can speculate on the meaning of the precise site on the female body where this untranslatability manifests itself, which, at least in the common, albeit extremely infantile, conception of femininity, is her genitals.20

But Daphne’s transformation was not her own. It was in fact a violation and destruction of her agency. In contrast, Teresa willed, according to the volo of the mystical postulate, her transformation.

Bernini’s task, therefore, became much more challenging. In Teresa, the transformation is much more radical, more successful, as metaphoring, to the extent that material layers can no longer be distinguished. There is a narrative reason for that difference. In contrast 81

to Daphne’s transformation, this one is willed—the mystical volo—by the subject who is at the same time subjected to it, even if she lacks the subjectivity to carry out her will. But, through the retrospective “criticism” embodied in Bourgeois’s work, the difference also acquires art-historical and philosophical meaning. Elsewhere, I have argued for this retroversive historical relationship as pre-posterous (1999); in other words, “post-” precedes “pre-.”

In a Benjaminian allegorical manner, the difference is articulated at the precise site where folds and flames coincide. Bernini has created a sculpture that captures a moment between thing and event. As a result of her extreme pious passion, Teresa the mystic, on her own account and in line with clichéd metaphors of passionate love, is both beyond herself and burning. Her state is called ecstasy. That word expresses extreme intensity but also, etymologically at least, de-centering. This last aspect tends to be ignored. But Bernini didn’t ignore it, and Bourgeois reminds us of it. She does so by placing more figurative emphasis on the ambiguity of inside and outside, which is just as important in Bernini’s sculpture but can be more easily overlooked there because the arrow as well as the doxic interpretations of ecstasy get in the way of the work’s aesthetic. Bourgeois’s critical work is important, for the eccentricity of ecstasy is, in turn, a defining feature of baroque aesthetics and thought.

The site of Teresa’s baroqueness is, not surprisingly, the folds. Ecstasy knows no center: neither on the picture plane, nor in the fiction, in the guise of linear perspective’s vanishing point. The transformation of Teresa, set on fire by the divine love that pierces her heart, emanates from the interior toward the outside, where her body’s envelope, 82

the lusciously folded drapery that iconographically marks the sculpture as baroque, equally transforms into flames.

Her whole body becomes a flame: each part of it, of its cover, its surface beneath which nothing else remains, becomes a flame; fire comes to overrule previous shapes. More than ever, the folds exemplify their function of baroque device par excellence, suspending the distinction between interior and exterior as they take the shape of flames.21 From the point of view of iconography, this is undeniable.

But there is more to this metaphoring. The saint’s body, although in paradoxical willing abandon, figures a will-less body, neither standing nor lying. In the shape of the letter S, it unwillingly “imitates” the shape of the flames sketched by the folds of her habit.

To measure the importance of this feature— of the wavering, not only between thing and event but also between inside and outside—it is useful to consider, by contrast, another commenta­ry of our time. In his Seminar 20, in a desire to translate “badly” and in contrast to what Bernini appears to be doing, Jacques Lacan reverses this totalization of the interior’s exteriorization, thus canceling the decentering of ecstasy.

When the psychoanalyst-philosopher sees in it the desire to be penetrated, he relegates the mystic’s heart back to its false function of center in favor of a phallic interpretation that the sculpture had so superbly avoided. He demonstrates the blindness that comes with obsession when he claims that Teresa’s jouissance is a matter of her desire to be penetrated again and again (encore) by God, the transcendental phallus.22

As well as finding this a rather implausible way of eliminating the narrative dimension of the sculpture—by turning its event into a reiteration—I submit that this is indeed

a translation of Benjamin’s “bad” kind, an “inaccurate transmission of an unessential content” (70).23 In contrast, and through narrativity, visual representation stipulates that she has already been penetrated, by the flaming arrow. Here/now what matters is that the fire spreads throughout her entire body, including its surface. The ecstasy is a literalized ec-stasis, according to a conception of metaphor that is neither monist nor dualist but rather pluralist, a conception of metaphor as activity and as dissipation. The surface, the skin, participates in the fire, and in the process loses its status as limit (of the body).

Hence, the participation of the clothing. The transformation—here, transfiguration—is total.

It is the figure of the flame that translates baroque language, including its modality.

There, fire “metaphors” passion. You just have to read Racine’s Phèdre to realize to what extent this metaphor emerges from its own death when it is literalized and made active again after having been abused into meaninglessness in an overextended baroque poetry. As I mentioned earlier, for John Austin (the initiator of the analytical philosophy of speech acts), fire, the flame, is precisely the paradigmatic example of speech act as performative: hovering between thing and event.24 Indeed, in Bernini’s work, the momentary arrest, the resolution, or the hesitation between narrative movement and arrested visuality, could not be more adequately metaphored than by these generalized, incorporated flames. How does one translate a flame?

Given the metonymic logic of narrativity, any attempt to do so consumes it. As soon as one attempts to trace its shape, one falls back onto cold marble and the flame disappears.

Is it a coincidence, then, that the flame is also the image Benjamin used to characterize the work of the critic as distinct from that of the philologist? In a beautiful passage quoted by Hannah Arendt in her introduction to Illuminations, set in a characteristically melancholic tone, Benjamin supplements Austin’s emphasis on the occurrence in time of the performance of speech acts by insisting on the present (“being alive”) of the critic’s activity. The image of the flame represents both the importance and the presentness of that work: While the former [the commentator] is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter [the critic] is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.

(Benjamin 1968, 5) This ongoing and, in Benjamin’s language, life-saving relevance (“goes on”) of critical work demonstrates what preposterous history can be. But thus criticism is synonymous with translation. It is one form translation can take. Especially when juxtaposed to the passage quoted earlier from the “Theses” (“every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably”), criticism is here embodied by the modern artwork “re-working” Bernini’s prosthetic supplementation of Teresa’s failing subjectivity. This is Bourgeois’s critical intervention against Lacan’s subordination of the sculpture to a doxic, and perhaps not coincidentally, phallogocentric commonplace.

83

But if mysticism, for most of us, can be safely relegated to the baroque age, the ecstasy that is its paroxysm cannot. The question here is how it can regain meaning from its confrontation with our time.

Transfiguration, including its collusion with death, is not unrelated to what Georges Bataille called alteration.25 According to Krauss’s account of it (1999, 8), this concept simultane­ously grasps two totally different logics that can help to further clarify the paradox of Benjamin’s philosophy of translation. The first logic is that of decomposition, the blurring of boundaries through matter’s tendency to dissipate.

The second is what we would today call “othering,” the logic of radical distinction.

The two meet where death decomposes the body and transforms the former subject into a soul, ghost, or spirit. The two meet, that is, in the transfiguration, which both “melts” the body and elevates it to something else—here, sanctity. This is why flames can so aptly replace decomposition.

But flames themselves are in movement.

The resolution of the hesitation between narrative movement and still visuality could, therefore, not be better shaped than in this all-consuming fire.

Unlike Daphne’s metamorphosis, Teresa’s transformation into a voluptuous fire consumed her entirely. Daphne was still subject to a division between inner body and outer layer, so that her transformation confi­ned her to the fragmentation to which a subject remains con­demned when exteriority and interiority are divided.

Teresa, by contrast, escapes fragmentati­ on, division, but at the cost of her total absorption into the otherness of her desire.

She relinquished subjectivity.

The integration of Teresa’s inside and outside fires can also be seen as programmatic of a sculpture that integrates 84

within the architecture that houses it. The sculpture is integrated within a chapel in which the viewer must stand in order to see it. This integration is precisely part of the challenge posed by Bernini’s representation of a holy woman in the unified composition of a chapel. He pushes the inquiry into narrative sculpture as far as he possibly can within a discussion of the unification of sculpture and architecture.

Virtuality Bourgeois intervenes on this dual level.

The integration of interior fire with exterior flames that were meant to affect the faithful viewers turns the play with fire into a metaphorization of the second degree.

Bourgeois responds to Bernini at the point where the latter’s sculpture is integrated within the architecture the woman inhabits.

More radically than Bernini, Bourgeois insists that woman and habitat are neither one nor separable. The metaphoric act—the multiple translation that supplements the untranslatability of the “original”—happens at the threshold of these two orders of scale. The chapel invites the viewer into its interior. It is from this interior position that the latter is invited to see from the outside, but, metaphorically, to enter inside, the experience that consumes also limits. The chapel thus creates a fiction of presence.

This is how it activates what is today called virtuality (Morse 1998).

Bourgeois’s 1983 Femme Maison quotes Bernini insistently, in ways that the earlier works in this “genre” did not. This citational practice is not limited to a simple recycling of the figure of the fold. Femme Maison also quotes the attempt to integrate scale and space, the entanglement of body and its dissipation, the volo of the subject doing the abandoning. But as a form of translation and criticism, quotation—

Benjamin’s ideal of writing—is a response.

In a project of integration pushed even farther, Bourgeois translates the one level of integration, of body, skin, and dress, into the other, of sculpture and architecture. Where Bernini pursued a double integration, Bourgeois translates Bernini’s project in order to release from it what matters most: not meaning, not information, not a unification of diverse media and dimensions, but the tensions, the thresholds, and the modes of signification that both separate and integrate them. For Benjamin, this would be the “purity” of language, reine Sprache. In the post-purity age that is our present, I propose to preposterously give Benjamin credit for having at least implied that this purity could be an originless, endless multiplicity.26 Instead of “badly” translating this notion of the reine Sprache to be released by translation, I propose to translate it as “language as such.”

Let me be more explicit. On the condition that we interpret “language” as semiosis and “pure” as unconfined to a particular medium, Benjamin’s formulation of the translator’s task can help us to understand the full impact of this response and the pre-posterous history it facilitates. For such a formulation articulates how Bourgeois “explains,” supplements, and further pursues Bernini’s work, by transforming, seeking to “release in [her] own language that language [as such] which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in [her] re-creation of that work.”

To achieve this, Bourgeois speaks the language of the baroque fold and all it implies for us since Deleuze’s work on Leibniz. She “metaphors” that language by literalizing it. According to Deleuze’s Leibniz, the fold represents infinitude by

engaging the viewer’s eye in a movement that has no vanishing point. As I mentioned previously, the fold theorizes and embodies relationship without center. In an important but enigmatic sentence, Deleuze describes the baroque response to the truth-claim of Renaissance perspective Leibniz’s idea about point of view as the secret of things, as focus, cryptograp­hy, or even as the determination of the indeterminate by means of ambiguous signs: what I am telling to you, what you are also thinking about, do you agree to tell him about it, provided that we know what to expect of it, about her, and that we also agree about who he is and who she is? As in a Baroque anamorpho­ sis, only point of view provides us with answers and cases. (1993, 22) Baroque point of view establishes a relationship between subject and object, and then goes back to the subject again, a subject that is changed by that movement and goes back in its new guise to the object, only to return to its ever-changing “self.” Scale is one important element in this transformation.

Subjectivity and the object become codependent, folded into one another, and this puts the subject at risk. The object whose surface is grazed by the subject of point of view may require a visual engagement that can only be called microscopic and in relation to which the subject loses his or her mastery over it.

The mystic subject about to abandon her subjectivity is easier to understand in such a thought-fold. This codependency is the baroque alternative for a historical attitude derived from the romantic response to classicism, which is based on a mastery and reconstruction of the historical object 85

combined with reflection on how the subject grasps it. A baroque historical view of the Baroque, on the other hand, abandons the firm distinction between subject and object.27

It is within this double context of the subject–object relation in art as well as history that I would like to place Bourgeois’s work on Bernini’s folds, as the principal work of Bernini on Teresa’s mystical aporia. In Femme Maison (1983), the fold envelops the eye and the architecture in a single movement.

Unlike Bernini’s folds, Bourgeois’s refuse any regularity. On one side, towards the bottom, the folds own up to their deception, transforming the infinitude of the surface when the base of the sculpture turns out to be simple matter. Elsewhere the folds come forward, detaching themselves from the interior mass, betraying their banal secret of Teresa’s transfiguration through reference to Daphne’s detached bark.

Here and there the folds form knots, citing that other baroque figure (Allen 1983). By the same token, they transform the infinitude of the texture into inextricable confusion, and liberation into imprisonment. The cone-shaped, sagging body refuses to be elevated in the flames of transcendence. Firmly fixed on its diskshaped base, the body remains heavy and does not believe in miracles. But still, its sagging pose is as abandoning as Teresa’s S-shape.

For Bourgeois is not deeply devout. Nor would her historical position encourage her to be so in the way Bernini’s did him. In a post-Catholic culture, she is therefore able to point out that Bernini’s devotion does not exclude the sensuality the nineteenth century has taught us to unlearn. The translation of one form into another and 86

the simultaneous translation of the senses are all the more powerful, multiple, and active since this house-woman is not transcendental. On top of the body, like a secular chapel, stands a skyscraper, the angular emblem of twentieth-century architecture. The gigantic body of folds and the folds of flesh simultaneously render the mutual dependency and threat that this inextricable integration signifies.

The sculpture absorbs architecture in a disillusioned but also joyful, if not ecstatic, endorsement of the materiality of the body, the house, and sculpture.

Sculpture, the site of translation, functions as Benjamin’s “pure language” or language as such, which it is the translator’s task to release. The house confines women but also offers them the mastery that imprisons and protects the body it weighs down so heavily. But to prevent us from kneeling down before tragedy in a transcendental escapism, the folds, knotted around the neck of the building, are also, literally, just that: folds. Fabulations or fabulous fictions of presence that flaunt their fictionality.

Between figuration and conceptualism—yet another route for her metaphoring activity— Bourgeois winks at us when, from a specific viewpoint, the surface full of secrets is no more than a dress, a habit unlike Teresa’s habit-turned-flames. Fabric that lovingly envelops, warms, the house with its royal folds. Care, humor, comradeship, and the maternal excess that suffocates surround the architecture. The level at which this work absorbs and releases Bernini’s search is this: the level of the most paradoxical integration, the fullest one—of the arts into the one art-as-such, pure, ideal, non-existent—that Benjamin induces the translator to pursue.

Here, translation can no longer be traced as a one-directional passage from source to destination. It mediates in both directions, between architecture and sculpture, building and body, body and spirit, body and clothing, clothing and habitat...

Ecstatic Aesthetic So where does this leave the relationship between philosophy and art history? The history part of the relationship, as I have argued many times, can only be preposterous. Bourgeois translates Bernini by transforming his work, so that after her, in the present that is ours, the baroque sculpture can no longer ever be what it was before her intervention. The art part is best conceived of—translated into—translation according to Benjamin. But on one condition. The philosophy part must heed Richard Rorty’s injunction to rigorously turn away from the represen­tational obsession to be a mirror of nature (1979). It is that obsession that underlies the idea of history as reconstruction, just as it underlies the logocentric conception of translation, and of art. Such an obsession can only remain locked up in either illusionary projection or tautological conflation.

An example is provided by Michael Baxandall’s superb tautology: “The specific interest of the visual arts is visual” (1991, 67). This line demonstrates what his paper argues: that the language of artspeak can only be indirect, a crudely inadequate approximation. The critic characterizes the art historian’s discourse as ostensive, oblique, and linear. This is as good as any formulation of the kind of translation that Benjamin sought to ban. Since the advent of poststructura­list critique, we know that the language that constitutes the matter of all texts cannot be described according

to the Saussurian axiom that suggested a one signifier–one signified equation.

Language may unfold in linear fashion, but that unfolding in no way accounts for the multiple significations construed along the way, sometimes falling into dust before the end of the sentence. Meaning cannot be atomized, nor is it simply accumulative.

Hence, putting one word after another may have the semblance of linearity, but producing meaning does not.

To bring Baxandall’s analysis of art discourse to bear on my own analysis of the triple relationship between Benjamin, Bourgeois, and Bernini, I will happily admit that I have not succeeded in adequately evoking the visual nature of the objects under discussion. Nor did I try. But nor did I succeed in writing ostentatiously, as Baxandall claims art history must.

The photographs that “illustrate” this argument—it is unnecessary to insist on the inadequacy of the notion of illustration!— do not provide enough visuality to enable my readers to see what I saw when, some months back, I took notes for my description, my translation. My language was indirect, as is the nature of language.

It was also linear, but at the same time it circled around, avoiding an imaginary center. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, Bourgeois’s work itself presents the inadequacy, not only of descriptive language, but of the very idea of a “literal” translation between images and words. It does this not so much because language is linear but rather because, in the “purity” released by the translation, its dissipation, visuality “as such” is temporal. The time it takes to see Bourgeois’s sculpture, and to see Bernini’s through it, prevents any unification of the objects. It cannot be unified in either one of the specific “languages”—the Catholic baroque or the postmodern baroque—for being construed 87

in the mind of the person (here, me) who would subsequently wish to describe it. If words fail images, then it is not because images are beyond meaning (Elkins 1999), but because meaning is always already dissipated by the translation that attempts to grasp it; because, that is, meaning is itself ec-centric.

Teresa’s flaming soul moves outward, not inward. Bourgeois’s body that envelops the house, that secular chapel, insists on it, against Lacan. We know since Freud that man—neither man nor woman—is not master in his own house, no more than the maîtresse de maison, with a hundred heads or none, is. The theoretical metaphoring that this work performs is to show—perform, not state—that the image is not master in its own house either: its meanings cannot be confined; they ceaselessly escape attempts to grasp them. Even in his own textbook of translation, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explicitly cautions his readers against “reading off the page,” in other words, against translating symbols and figures. Even if he too sometimes falls for the allure of content. But this happened only later, after he had been pressured to adapt his work a bit more to the intellectual styles of the day. Up to the first edition of 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams contained no reading code, no reductive, summarizing hermeneutic, as Laplanche rightly remarked. The commentary on Irma’s dream, so centrally important for the theory as a whole, is what he calls a de-translation (1996, 7).

But don’t misunderstand this reference to an antihermeneutic as a plea for refusing to interpret, a yielding to a vague metaphysical belief in the uniqueness of art. Semantic indetermination is not the same as infinitude. Even endlessness 88

is not the same. Even though each interpretive step takes place at a crossroad and therefore must leave behind other possibilities, each such step is nevertheless concretely derived from a material aspect or element of the image.

My reference to Freud’s caution concerns something altogether different.

British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas speaks of the unthought known (1987).

This concept seems suitable enough to deploy simultaneously, in the face of works like Teresa and Femme Maison, interpretation and the refusal of that form of interpretation which is like “bad” translation: a precise equation that admits to no more than the stingy exchange of one signifier for another. The concept of the “unthought known” refers to what the senses sense, of which one has a sense, but which rational thought can only encircle, not translate into a singular meaning. Such translation would be its death, for the work would cease to operate on the multiplicity of levels—rational and affective, theoretical and visual—required for it to continue to be recognized by the present “as one of its own concerns” lest it “threaten to disappear irretrievably.”

The house-chapel offers that kind of metaphoring that preserves the unthought known between rational interpretation and strong, sitable, sightable and citable affectivity, with content but without fixed content; a house where, indeed, the ego is not master. In the end, after the preceding remarks on translation, I submit that Freud’s enigmatic penultimate sentence of the third of his New Introductory Lectures, “Wo Es war soll Ich werden,” is best left untranslated (Freud [1933] 1965, 80). Even Lacan, who was notoriously hostile to reductive translation and who could not resist trying, came up with a

number of “good” alternatives to the “bad” French translation, which reduces it to a one-sided moral imperative: “le Moi doit déloger le Ça.”28 Lacan tried his hand and failed; his translations, one by one, were “bad.” Laplanche’s insistence that psycho-analysis, qua ana-lysis or unbinding, opposes translation is in line with Benjamin’s view of the latter. Neither of them—but perhaps Bourgeois does imply it—mentions that there is a philosophical reason for this lack of mastery.

Beyond the philosophy of language, this reason reaches into the realm of ethics.

For a question remains if Bourgeois’s Femme Maison is to be brought to bear meaningfully on Bernini’s Teresa: what does it mean that the central meaning of Teresa’s mystical experience has been set aside by the later artist? In other words, that ec-stasy has been made ec-static. My phrasing announces the answer, but let me spell it out anyway.

Translation has a philosophical force to it, even more so since it is an event suitable for a particular occasion. In his essay on the problem of translation in philosophy, philosopher Lawrence Venuti (1996, 30) insists, like Benjamin, that “faithful” translation in the smooth sense of catering to the target audience, is “bad.” For it is an appropriation that obscures the “remainder,” the Benjaminian “untranslatable.”29 A translation, for Venuti, “should not be seen as good, unless it signifies the linguistic and cultural difference of that text for domestic constituencies.” A translation must not be invisible. He argues that the ethical value of this difference resides in alerting the reader to a process of domestication that has taken place in the translating, on its behalf but also at the source text’s expense. Hence, the ethics of translation consist in preventing that process from

“slipping into a wholesale assimilation to dominant domestic values.” This is how his overt subject matter—specifically philosophical translation—shifts. He continues: “The best philosophical translating is itself philosophical, in forming a concept of the foreign text based on an assessment of the domestic scene. But the concept ought to be defamiliarizing, not based on a ratification of that scene” (1996, 30).30 This view would not wish Teresa’s ecstasy—the key element in the source text—to become invisible in the new work. But the point that no such ecstasy would be acceptable—aesthetically as well as socially, or perhaps even ethically—in the target world, for today that is, must also remain visible. Nor should it become so idiosyncratic that an unwarranted “othering” of a religiosity from the past would result. The “conceptually dense text”—Venuti’s term for philosophical texts under translation—must be made intelligible, yet remain, in its foreignness, both informative and provocative. Clearly, Benjamin would agree with this injunction to both dissipate and release the text’s otherness but not to remain an outsider to the target culture. The latter must be able to estrange itself from its own assumptions, so that the automatic othering of what comes at it from its outside can be replaced by a negotiation.

Instead of either erasing or othering ecstasy, Bourgeois’s sculpture updates it. The desire of the subject in abandonment of subjectivity to experience de-centering may have been sacrificed in the negotiation. But instead of the ongoing quest to understand ecstasy in terms of the mystical postulate around volo (I desire), the decentering that results and that Bernini has so lovingly supplemented with his own narratorial subjectivity is very much present in the modern work. Teresa’s first-person text, 89

after thematizing her loss of self, needed a prosthetic “third person” to be visually told.

In this version, her dissipation may appear less desirable. But then, who said mystic ecstasy, desired as it may have been by its historical practitioners, is in itself desirable?

Perhaps giving up the self, as housewives did under the influence of romantic love and surrealists did under the influence of psychoanalysis, drugs, and philosophy, provides a great experience of ec-stasy. The loss of self, as has been argued in different contexts, has great benefits.31

At the end of the day—and at the end of this inquiry—the point of the aesthetic issue is aesthetic again. But the aesthetic is not most characteristically embodied by a lone man in black by the sea.32 Rather, we have here a woman abandoning her subjectivity and discourse, for better or for worse, but housing whoever wishes to be “touched,” not in the hastily translated mode that Lacan fantasized but in the untranslatable, multiple senses this word harbors, for whose remainder we can read the sculptures.

Unlike Kant’s—or Friedrich’s—monk, this subject refrains from overcoming the awe.

The aesthetic thrill is not one of a barely sustained threat to one’s subjectivity. The subject, if it survives the flames, remains ecstatic. From that sideways position, sited on the edge, perhaps more is in store. Perhaps not. Bourgeois doesn’t say. Bernini can’t know. Teresa can’t tell. We’ll see.

This essay was originally published in Critical Issues 4 (Sydney: Artspace, 2000), and later as a book chapter in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, edited by Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–30. Reprinted with permission.

90

Endnotes: 1.

Benjamin (1977); Buci-Glucksmann (1994).

2.

Benjamin’s 1968 essay “The Task of the Translator”, central to my argument as my primary “philosophical object,” will henceforth be referred to by page numbers only.

3.

On Benjamin’s philosophy of language, see de Certeau (1982, 1986) and Derrida (inc. 1982, 1987). These texts were discussed by de Vries (1992) in terms more focused on (Jewish) mysticism and the “mystical postulate” than those I will use here, although, as I will hint later, mysticism is not to be neglected as the bottom line of Benjamin’s vision of translation.

Moreover, Bernini’s Saint Teresa foregrounds the link between mysticism and translation on an additional allegorical level.

4.

In the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, quoted by Hannah Arendt (Benjamin 1968, 5).

5.

But that liberation is harder than we thought.

See de Vries (1999) for the tenacious presence of religion in the kind of philosophy today that, in Deleuze’s terms, would most definitely be qualified as “baroque.” Needless to say, in spite of his caution in endorsing Benjamin’s thoughts on language, Derrida is also a baroque thinker.

6.

As my friend Hent de Vries pointed out, the status of this essay by Benjamin as “philosophical” is subject to debate.

However, disciplinary “purity” is the last thing I am worried about here. Given, on the one hand, Benjamin’s status as a hot item within philosophy, and, on the other, the philosophical issues his views on language broach, I feel justified in using this text here. I use it as a sample if not of philosophy stricto sensu, then at least of the kind of thought dear to philosophers and that, I contend, is embodied in visual art when it is attended to as “meaningful” without being a “conveyer” of meaning; without being “translatable.”

“Philosophy,” then, takes place between the two essays by Benjamin and the two sculptures of baroque aesthetic.

7.

Mitchell and Rose (1982).

8.

See the “Introduction” to Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Bal 1999). The reverse might also be true, although

9.

that may be a profoundly a-philosophical response to philosophy. If I may for a moment challenge these disciplining conventions, I would suggest that Derrida’s postmodern—and post-Holocaust—response to Benjamin suffers from a lack of historicizing within philosophy, in spite of its insistence on dating (Derrida 1982, 71; 1990, 1040).

12. Transference is at the heart of Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytic theory of literature or, more precisely, of reading-literature (1987).

There, the site of transference is, indeed, “beyond” the text rather than “through” it.

The uneasiness in art history about the need for language to “do” the discipline is a longstanding commonplace. It keeps recurring, and was recently most emphatically reiterated

by Elkins (1999). More words to say that words fail. This outdated romanticism today serves to keep “others” out of a field whose boundaries the words are busy policing. My uneasiness concerns not the use of words to talk about images but the extent to which those words point to images, point out their specifics, or fail to do so. The standard arthistorical discourse, which uses images as illustrations of its own arguments that concern the images, emphatically, only tangentially, is the one I mean with this verb “to disappear.”

In line with Maaike Bleeker’s comment on the Cartesian split between mind and body in terms of discursive performances, following Drew (1990), the relationship between art works and art-historical discourse could be characterized as dys-appearing, provided the word is taken as the active progressive verb form (Bleeker 1999).

14. To emphasize metaphor’s active nature, but avoiding confusion with the slippery activity implied in the more usual verb “to metaphorize,” I will use, neologistically, the verb to metaphor.

10. Benjamin’s commentary on Genesis suggests as much. See his essay “Ueber Sprache ueberhaupt und ueber die Sprache des Menschen,” in (Benjamin 1980). In his time and context, the endgame could not help but lead to “God.” Today I would suggest multimedia and transnational practice as a good alternative. For the implications of the activity of translating within the latter, see Spivak (1999).

11. De Certeau (1982, 238) equates translation with metamorphosis. This is certainly justified in his context (mysticism). Strictly speaking, however, this choice is predicated upon a formalist bias (morph means form) as well as on an unwarranted emphasis on the outcome, not the process.

13. I have written extensively on this problematic elsewhe­re, an argument I am reluctant to rehearse (Bal 1991, 1997).

15. In his masterful study of Bernini’s multimedia chapels without which the present article could not have been written, Giovanni Careri wryly responds to that prudish distortion by reminding us that “in the seventeenth century the boundaries between the spirit and the senses were not drawn according to the Victorian criteria that we have inherited from the nineteenth century” (1995, 59).

16. The fact that ecstasy is the trade of the mystic, and that mysticism, in turn, is the main focus of de Vries’s article on Benjamin’s philosophy of language, albeit admittedly only indirectly important in that philosophy, makes the case I am building here even more tight (1992, 443).

17. Lavin (1980) interprets all levels of signification as different ways of conveying the same meaning. In the same vein, Perlove (1990) translates that meaning into theological “originals.”

18. On Ernst and surrealists’ attitudes toward gender, see Krauss (1993; 1999).

19. For the text in which Teresa attempted to render her mystical experience, see Bilinkoff (1989).

20. Needless to say, Freud’s narratives of little boys seeing “in a flash” the absence of the mother’s penis—seeing, that is, the unseeable, absent, synecdoche of his self—set the tone for an ongoing identification of male and female identity with the genitals, a naïve mythical theory. See Bal (1994). Laplanche says of such theories that they are “a code [...] founded on anatomy and function[ing] as a binary myth, plus/minus,” which becomes a semantic theory with universalist claims (1996, 9).

91

21. Lavin (1980, 122) translates. For him, the flame-like pattern of the folds is a “visual counterpart of her own metaphor” so that the folds/flames seem “not only to cover but to consume” her body.

22. See, for the relevant fragments, Mitchell and Rose (1982, 137–61); the French original is Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XX, Encore (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).

23. Given Benjamin’s opposition to a simplistic semiotic conception of language, any transmission would have to be inaccurate, any content inessential.

24. Speech act theory, with its insistence on the meaning-producing effect of utterance, remains a compelling framework within which to rethink contemporary art. Austin’s theory ([1962] 1975) has been subject to—failed—attempts to “normalize” it, as Shoshana Felman (1983) argues. For Felman, incidentally, seduction is the paradigmatic speech act.

25. Rosalind Krauss uses Bataille’s term to elaborate a concept for the analysis of surrealism beyond the formalist argument that considered surrealism not formally innovative.

See Krauss (1999, 7–8).

26. Here I would venture to take issue with Derrida as de Vries renders his thought (1992, 463).

27. Part of this paragraph is taken from my book on this subject (Bal 1999). On the similarity and difference between baroque and romanticism in this respect, see the suggestive remarks by Octavio Paz (1988, 53–54).

28. For an excellent critical commentary, including Lacan’s alternative translations, see Bowie (1987, 122–23).

29. Venuti speaks of “domestic” where I prefer the term “target” for the audience of the translation. The term “remainder,” which refers to all that gets lost in translation, is taken by Venuti from Lecercle (1990).

30. For more elaboration of this point, see also Venuti (1994, 1995).

31. Precisely in terms of overcoming cultural prejudice. See Bersani (1989) and van Alphen (1992).

92

32. As the Kantian example of the sublime, of David Kaspar Friedrich’s painting, Spivak (1999, ch. 1) offers an unsettling account of the restrictions pertaining to Kantian sublimity. Reasoning from art to morality, she thus gives a welcome counterpart to the more usual argument (Crowther 1989).

References Allen, Suzanne. 1983. “Petit traité du noeud.” In Figures du baroque, edited by Jean-Marie Benoist.

Paris: PUF. Alphen, Ernst van. 1993. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Austin, J.W. 1975 [1962]. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Oppositi­on. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1994. “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 97–115. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. ———. 1997. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Translated by Anna-Louise Milne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baxandall, Michael. 1991. “The Language of Art Criticism.” In The Language of Art History (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts), edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 67–75.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated

by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.

———. 1977. The Origin of German Drama.

Translated by John Osborne. London: New Left Books.

———. 1980. Gesammelte Schriften. Werkausgabe.

Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bersani, Leo. 1989. “Is the Rectum a Grave?”

October 43 (Winter): 197–223.

Bilinkoff, Jodi. 1989. The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Elkins, James. 1999. On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bleeker, Maaike. 1999. “Death, Digitalization and Dys-appearance: Staging the Body of Science.”

Performance Research 4 (2): 1–8.

Felman, Shoshana. 1983. The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bollas, Christopher. 1987. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis and the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1987. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoa­nalysis in Contemporary Culture.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bowie, Malcolm. 1987. Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. In Vol. 5 of Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 533–621. London: Hogarth Press.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller, with an introduction by Bryan S. Tur­ner.

London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

———. [1933] 1965. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, edited and translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton.

Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1993. The Optical Unconscious.

Cambridge: The MIT Press

Careri, Giovanni. 1995. Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion. Translated by Linda Lappin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1999 Bachelors. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Crowther, Paul. 1989. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Laplanche, Jean. 1996. “Psychoanalysis as AntiHermeneutics.” Translated by Luke Thurston.

Radical Philosophy 79 (Sept./Oct.): 7–12.

Culler, Jonathan. 1988. Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1982. La fable mystique, I, XVIeXVII siècle. Paris: Gallimard.

———. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated, and with a foreword, by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 1975. Le Séminaire, Livre XX, Encore. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Lavin, Irving. 1980. Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library/ Oxford University Press.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1990. The Violence of Language. London: Routledge.

Mitchell, Juliet, and Jacqueline Rose, eds. 1982.

Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne. Translated by Jacqueline Rose.

London: MacMillan.

Derrida, Jacques. 1982. D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée.

Morse, Margaret. 1998. Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 1985. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, edited by C. McDonald.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translating: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1987. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée.

Paz, Octavio. 1988. Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

———. 1990. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’.” Cardozo Law Review 11 (919): 921–1045.

Drew, Leder. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Perlove, Shelley Karen. 1990. Bernini and the Idealization of Death: The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni and the Altieri Chapel. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press.

93

94

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 1999 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Venuti, Lawrence. 1994. “Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identities.” Current Issues in Language and Society 1: 214–15.

———. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge.

———. 1996. “Translation, Philosophy, Materialism.”

Radical Philosophy 79: 24–34.

Vries, Hent de. 1992. “Anti-Babel: The ‘Mystical Postulate’ in Benjamin, de Certeau and Derrida.”

MLN 107: 441–77.

———. 1999. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Weigel, Sigrid. 1996. Body- and Image-Space: Rereading Walter Benjamin. Translated by Georgina Paul, with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines.

New York and London: Routledge.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italy, 1598–1680) L’Estasi di Santa Teresa d’Avila [The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila] 1647–52 marble and gilded bronze Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome © DEA Picture Library / Getty Images 95

Exhibition Checklist

Measurements are in centimetres, height x width x depth, rounded to the nearest half-centimetre, and refer to image size.

Pietro Aquila (Italy, 1650–92), after Annibale Carracci (Italy, 1560–1609) Trionfo di Bacco e Arianna [Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne] 1674 plate 12 from the Galeriae Farnesianae Icones series, published by Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi, Rome, 1670–92 etching and engraving 40.5 x 70 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Professor Peter Tomory, 1991.

Bill Henson (Australia, 1955–) Untitled 95, 97, 96 1983–84 three type C photographs, edition of 10 100 × 80 cm each Collections: Gene and Brian Sherman & Terrence and Lynette Fern.

Chris Bennie (New Zealand, Australia, 1975–) Mothership 2004 standard definition Quicktime file, edition 2/3 duration 0:23:00 Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2011.

Petrina Hicks (Australia, 1972–) Persephone 2015 pigment print, edition 2/8 99.5 x 76 cm Collection of the University of Queensland, purchased 2017.

Anastasia Booth (Australia, 1988–) Teresa 2016 copper 200 x 270 x 30 cm Courtesy of the artist, Brisbane.

William Hogarth (England, 1697–1764) Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism 1762 etching and engraving 47.5 x 38 cm Collection of Philip C. Almond, Brisbane.

Louise Bourgeois (France, USA, 1911–2010) Arched Figure 1993, cast 2010 bronze, fabric and metal 117 x 193 x 99 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation Purchase 2016

Gordon Matta-Clark (USA, 1943–78) Office Baroque 1977/2005 b&w and colour 16 mm film, transferred to video duration 0:44:00 Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Camera: Eric Convents. Assistant: Dirk Geens.

Audio: Roger Steglaerts. Montage: Roger Steylaerts, Eric Convents. Music: Andre Stordeur “syntheses”.

Realisation: Eric Convents. Producer: E.C.F., Roger Steylaerts.

Salvador Dalí (Spain, 1904–89) Le Phénomène de L’Extase [The Phenomenon of Ecstasy] 1933 photomontage, reproduced in Minotaure no. 3–4, 12 December 1933, 77.

Reprinted in 1968 by Arno Press, a New York Times Company.

Audrey Flack (USA, 1931–) Ecstasy of St. Theresa 2013 Printed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. pigment print and screenprint, edition 67/75 56 x 40.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Audrey Flack, 2017.

96

Une Bouchée d’Amour 2013 Printed at the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. pigment print and screenprint, artist’s proof 1/30, from an edition of 200 39 x 33 cm Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Audrey Flack, 2017.

Claude Mellan (France, 1598–1688) Ignace en Extase [The Ecstasy of Saint Ignatius] 1600s engraving 43.5 x 29 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Purchased 1987.

Saint François de Paule [The Ecstasy of Saint Francis of Paola] 1600s engraving 41.5 x 28.5 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Accessioned 1998.

Nigel Milsom (Australia, 1975–) Judo House Part 6 (The White Bird) 2014–15 oil on linen 230 x 194 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales – Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2015, with the generous assistance of Alenka Tindale, Peter Braithwaite, Anon, Chrissie & Richard Banks, Susan Hipgrave & Edward Waring, Abbey & Andrew McKinnon.

Girolamo Nerli (Italy, New Zealand, Australia, 1860–1926) Bacchanalian Feast ca. 1887 oil on canvas 17 x 28 cm Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased 1970.

Gordon Shepherdson (Australia, 1934–) The Stoning of St Stephen – After the Last Stone 1991 oil and wax on paper 140 x 150 cm irreg.

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Gordon Shepherdson in memory of his wife Noela Shepherdson, through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2011.

David Stephenson (USA, Australia, 1955–) 20106 Sant’lvo alla Sapienza, Rome, Italy 1642– 1650, Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) 1997, printed 2016 from the series “Domes” pigment print, edition 2/5 101.5 x 101.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016.

Hiromi Tango (Japan, Australia, 1976–) Insanity Magnet #7 2009, printed 2013 pigment print, edition 6/6 50 x 75 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2014.

David Wadelton (Australia, 1955–) Show Them You Want It 2004 oil on canvas 51 x 183.5 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Geoff Slattery Publishing as the winner of The Spirit of Football Acquisitive Prize, 2005.

Additional images Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italy, 1598–1680) L’Estasi di Santa Teresa d’Avila [The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila] 1647–52 marble and gilded bronze 350 cm (height) Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome Louise Bourgeois (France, USA, 1911–2010) Femme Maison 1983 marble 63.5 x 49.5 x 58.5 cm Collection Jean-Louis Bourgeois.

26807 Cappella della Visitazione, Sanctuary of Valinotto, Carignano, Italy 1738–1739, Bernardo Vittone (1702–1770) 1997, printed 2016 from the series “Domes” pigment print, edition 1/5 101.5 x 101.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016.

26104 San Tommaso da Villanova, Castelgandolfo, Rome, Italy 1658–1661, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) 1997, printed 2016 from the series “Domes” pigment print, edition 1/5 101.5 x 101.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2016.

97

CONTRIBUTORS / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AUTHORS OF CATALOGUE ESSAYS Dr Andrea Bubenik is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The University of Queensland. She is an Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre (ARC) of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800), and curated the exhibition Five Centuries of Melancholia held at the UQ Art Museum in 2014. Her monograph entitled Reframing Albrecht Dürer: The Appropriation of Art, 1528–1700 (2013) concentrates on aspects of the reception of Albrecht Dürer. Andrea’s research focuses on histories of printmaking, early modern court cultures and collecting, and links between art and science (ca. 1400–1700).

Dr Mieke Bal is Professor Emeritus in Literary Theory, currently based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. From 2005 to 2011, she was Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She works as a cultural theorist, critic, and video artist, and her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to seventeenth-century and contemporary art to feminism and migratory culture. Her many publications include Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), and Narratology (3rd ed., 2009). Her internationally exhibited documentaries on migration include State of Suspension (2008), Becoming Vera (2008), and Separations (2010); her installation Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism (2013) has been exhibited worldwide.

AUTHORS OF CATALOGUE ENTRIES Dr Andrew Leach is Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney.

Dr Melissa Harper is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts, UQ. Michele Helmrich is Associate Director (Curatorial) at the UQ Art Museum.

Samantha Littley is Curator at the UQ Art Museum.

Danielle Smith is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Edinburgh.

AUTHORS OF FOREWORDS Dr Campbell Gray is Director of the UQ Art Museum.

Dr Peter Holbrook is Professor of Literature at UQ and Director of the UQ Node, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800).

CURATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the support of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (1100–1800), and the inspired leadership of Professor Peter Holbrook (Director of the Centre at the UQ Node). Many thanks are also due to the UQ Art Museum, and particularly its Director Campbell Gray, which has generously enabled and hosted the exhibition, and contributed to all aspects of its development. My research assistant Danielle Smith has been central to this project since its inception, and I thank her for her many hours of hard work and thoughtful collaboration, as well as her contributions to the catalogue. Michele Helmrich acted as coordinating curator and oversaw details throughout the curatorial process, from the loans to the catalogue, and I thank her for her diligence and patience as well as her contribution to the catalogue. Other catalogue entries were written by Dr Melissa Harper, Professor Andrew Leach, and Samantha Littley, and I am delighted to have their inspired words included here. For her fastidious and timely editing of the catalogue, I thank Evie Franzidis; for his expert eye and innovative approach to the catalogue’s design and layout, I thank Brent Wilson. Xanthe Ashburner (Education and Outreach Officer for CHE) and all the staff at the UQ Art Museum, especially Holly Arden, Gordon Craig, Nicola Garrett, Kath Kerswell, Matt Malone, Sebastian Moody, and Sonia Uranishi, have contributed in various ways to ensuring the success of the exhibition, before, during, and after the curatorial process, and I am thankful for what has been a fruitful collaboration. I also gratefully acknowledge the lenders to the exhibition, and those who have granted their permission to publish images. Discussing Teresa with Audrey Flack has been one of the many pleasures in the lead-up to this exhibition, I am grateful for this dialogue as much as her generous gifting of prints to the UQ Art Museum. Finally, I wish to thank Professor Mieke Bal, whose inspired and brave work was an impetus for my own approach to this exhibition.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS UQ Art Museum acknowledges those institutions and individuals who have helped make this exhibition possible. We thank Professor Peter Holbrook FAHA, Dr Andrea Bubenik, Xanthe Ashburner and Sushma Griffin at the UQ Node, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe, 1100–1800), who partnered with UQ Art Museum to present this exhibition, catalogue and associated events. We thank all those who contributed to the catalogue. Our gratitude goes to the lenders to the exhibition, with special thanks to staff who assisted, and to all those who assisted with images and copyright. We especially acknowledge contributions made by the artists and their estates. We thank the following: Dr Michael Brand at Art Gallery of New South Wales, with Justin Paton, Wayne Tunnicliffe, Emma Smith, and Jude Fowler-Smith; Jenny Harper at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, with Felicity Milburn, Gina Irish, Airi Hashimoto, and Rebekkah Pickrill; Tony Ellwood at National Gallery of Victoria, with Jane Devery, Ted Gott, Kylie King, and Kathleen Burke; Emeritus Professor Philip Almond FAHA, The University of Queensland; Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, with Ashley Park, and Stan Charnin; Michiko Okaya, Lafayette College Art Galleries & Art Collections, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA; Wendy Williams, Louise Bourgeois Studio, New York, and Jean-Louis Bourgeois; Rebecca Cleman, Electronic Arts Intermix, New York with Karl McCool, and Anny Oberlink; Lachlan Henderson, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane; Jack Bett and Emma Bett, Bett Gallery, Hobart, with Mish Meijers; Michael Reid, Michael Reid, Sydney, with Will Sturrock; Roslyn Oxley, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, with Alex Robinson; Gene and Brian Sherman, and Terrence and Lynette Fern, with Alison Renwick and Aaron De Sousa; Ursula Sullivan, sullivan+strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; Jan Minchin, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne; Kerry Crowley OAM, yuill|crowley, Sydney; Artists Anastasia Booth, Chris Bennie, Audrey Flack, Bill Henson, Gordon Shepherdson, David Stephenson, and Hiromi Tango; Ella Mudie, Viscopy; International Art Services, with Ross Hall, and Sean O’Malley; For permission to reprint Mieke Bal’s essay, we thank the author and the previous publishers, with special thanks to Michelle Newton at Artspace, Sydney, and Jeff Moen at University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. 98

Curator: Dr Andrea Bubenik Coordinating Curator: Michele Helmrich Curatorial Assistant: Danielle Smith Catalogue Designer: Brent Wilson Editor: Dr Andrea Bubenik Copyeditor: Evie Franzidis Copyright: Kath Kerswell Printed by: Cornerstone Press, Brisbane.

The University of Queensland Art Museum Board: Louise Doyle, Assistant Director-General, Access and Communication, National Archives Professor Tim Dunne, Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Dr Campbell Gray, Director, UQ Art Museum (ex officio) Professor Jason Jacobs, Head of School, School of Communication and Arts Jennifer Karlson, Pro-Vice-Chancellor – Advancement Winthrop Professor Ted Snell AM, Cit WA, Director, Cultural Precinct, University of Western Australia, Director, UWA Museums Professor Iain Watson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement) (Chairperson) The University of Queensland Art Museum personnel: Dr Campbell Gray, Director Dr Holly Arden, Senior Education Manager Nicholas Ashby, Museum Preparator Isabella Baker, Curatorial Assistant Stephanie Baldwin, Advancement Manager Gordon Craig, Project Manager Christian Flynn, Registration Technician Nicola Garrett, Education and Public Programs Officer Michele Helmrich, Associate Director (Curatorial) Kath Kerswell, Senior Registrar Samantha Littley, Curator Matt Malone, Registration Officer Sebastian Moody, Digital Communications Officer Melanie Moore, Executive Assistant/Finance & Administration Officer Beth Porter, Administration and Finance Coordinator Mariko Post, Visitor Services Officer Brent Wilson, Production Manager The University of Queensland Node, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800) personnel: Professor Peter Holbrook, Director Xanthe Ashburner, Education and Outreach Officer and Research Assistant Sushma Griffin, Project Officer Emma Miller and Erika von Kaschke, Communications and Media Install team: Ian Berry, Yannick Blattner, Alex Forrest, Michael Littler, Caro Toledo Photography: the artists (pages 18–20, 26–27, 48–49, 54, 62–63, inside cover), Art Gallery of New South Wales (pages 16, 30–31, 34, 36, 66–67), Christopher Burke (page 70), Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu (page 52), Electronic Arts Intermix (page 60), DEA Picture Library / Getty Images (pages 4, 8, 68, 92), National Gallery of Victoria (pages 38, 56–57), Carl Warner (pages 22, 24, 40, 42, 44, 46, front cover).

99

100

101

102