Melancholia and Memory in Works by Jonathan Field and Paul Baker Prindle
Jared A. Butler
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Arts in Art History
at
The Savannah College of Art and Design
© May, 2013, Jared A. Butler
The author hereby grants SCAD permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and
electronic thesis copies of document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter
created.
Signature of Author and Date______________________________________________________
Christoph Klütsch, Ph.D.__________________________________________________/___/___
Committee Chair
Arthur J. DiFuria, Ph.D.___________________________________________________/___/___
Committee Member
Geoffrey S. Taylor, D.Des._________________________________________________/___/___
Committee Member
Melancholia and Memory in Works by Jonathan Field and Paul Baker Prindle
Jared A. Butler
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Art History Department
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Arts in Art History
Savannah College of Art and Design
By
Jared A. Butler
Savannah, GA
May, 2013
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1
ABSTRACT
2
I.
INTRODUCTION
Senseless Images
Senseless Deaths
Melancholic Documents
3
5
8
9
II.
BLACK HUMOR
A Survey of Melancholy
Prescriptions and Polemics
The Labor of Mourning
14
14
20
23
III.
MEMORIAL AND MIDRASH
Ambivalent Image
Midrashic Gaps
Making Memory Matter
26
27
30
32
IV.
PINNING DOWN LOSS: JONATHAN FIELD'S MAXWELL'S DEMON
From Depression to Dolce & Gabbana
Presidential Paintings
Sports Stars: Breaking Down American Myth
36
37
39
43
V.
"ALL FLESH IS GRASS:" PAUL BAKER PRINDLE'S MEMENTI MORI
Vanishing Figure
Rough Sex and Gay Panic
Charting Progress
47
48
51
60
VI.
MELANCHOLIC IMAGINATION
Life of the Mind, Life of the Community
From Imagination to Understanding
Distancing Some Things, Bridging Abysses to Others
62
63
64
66
VII.
CONCLUSION
68
BIBLIOGRAPHY
72
ILLUSTRATIONS
83
1
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Jonathan Field, Bull, 2009.
83
2. Arturo Di Modica, Charging Bull, 1989.
84
3. “Ballerina and the Bull,” Adbusters, 2011.
84
4. Paul Baker Prindle, Henry Northington, Richmond, VA, 2009.
85
5. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514.
86
6. Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting, 576-3), 1985.
87
7. Gerhard Richter, Rot (Red, 821), 1994.
87
8. Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1981.
88
9. Jonathan Field, The Dance, 2012.
89
10. Vanity Fair, “Ain’t We Got Style,” 2009.
90
11. Jonathan Field, The Slipper Tongue (after W.H.D. Koerner), 2008.
91
12. Jonathan Field, Hope (after George Frederic Watts), 2009.
92
13. W.H.D. Koerner, A Charge to Keep, c. 1916.
93
14. W.H.D Koerner, The Slipper Tongue, 1916.
94
15. George Frederic Watts, Hope, 1886.
95
16. Jonathan Field, Flagbearers, 2012.
96
17. Ralph Lauren Uniform Design, London Summer Olympic Games, 2012.
97
18. Jonathan Field, Lance (working title), 2013.
98
19. Joel Sternfeld, Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 1993, 1993.
99
20. Paul Baker Prindle, Paul Baker Prindle, Aaron Hall. Crothersville, Indiana, 2009.
100
21. Paul Baker Prindle, Matthew Shepard. Laramie, Wyoming, 2008.
101
22. “The War over Gays,” Time, 26 October 1998.
102
2
Melancholia and Memory in Works by Jonathan Field and Paul Baker Prindle
Jared A. Butler
May 2013
For a decade, Jonathan Field has recreated media images in a body of work entitled
Maxwell's Demon. Making massive, spectral copies by inserting steel pins into black velvet or
neoprene rubber grounds, Field has developed a critique of media saturation, interventionist
military policy, and economic inequality in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first
century. Since 2008, Paul Baker Prindle has produced the large-format color photographs of
Mementi Mori, documenting sites where gay and transgendered people were horrifically maimed
and murdered. Combining images of banal locations with striking descriptive captions, his work
solemnly reflects on death and commemoration as it gives compelling visual form to prejudicial
violence. Both sets of images address loss: the former registers decaying vehicles of
representation and the latter memorializes victims of unthinkable terror. Their makers work with
ruined remnants to give material form to the experience of loss, engaging viewers in the labor of
melancholic reflection. Associated with loss since Freud's seminal 1917 essay “Mourning and
Melancholia,” melancholy has a millennia-long history of theorization, and has received
considerable attention across academic disciplines, particularly in the last three decades.
Conceived of as foundational of the imagination, as an integral component of interior life, and as
a mode of deep introspection, melancholia’s constructive aspects, as recent scholarship has
attested, exceed understandings of the condition as a disorder that calls for pharmaceutical
intervention. This examination, the most comprehensive study of either series to date, utilizes
melancholia as an interpretive tool to investigate the mechanisms of Maxwell’s Demon and
Mementi Mori that compel extended contemplation in social, political, and economic contexts
that administer instantaneous practices of perception and memory.
Keywords: Jonathan Field, Paul Baker Prindle, Maxwell’s Demon, Mementi Mori, melancholia,
critical memory
3
I.
Introduction
Art is wretched, cynical, stupid, helpless, confusing—a mirror-image of our
own spiritual impoverishment, our state of forsakenness and loss. We have
lost the great ideas, the Utopias; we have lost all faith, everything that creates
meaning.
Gerhard Richter, 19881
Jonathan Field’s Maxwell’s Demon (began 2003) and Paul Baker Prindle’s Mementi Mori
(began 2008) are ongoing bodies of work that document political, economic, and social crises of
the twenty-first century’s first decade. Field recreates appropriated media images as hand-made
copies composed of thousands of steel pins, and Prindle makes large-format color photographs of
sites of traumatic violence across the continental United States. Suggesting breakdowns in
communication, memory, and identity, both series are melancholic responses to what their artists
perceive as irresponsible politics, economic inequality, and violent prejudice in the United
States. Both projects give material expression to the experience of loss in order to interrogate the
ruination of the American political-economic configuration, marked as it is at the turn of the
twenty-first century by military interventionism, unprecedented economic inequality, and
ideological orthodoxy acute enough to halt the democratic process. As the topic works illustrate,
strategically engaging the viewer in the labor of melancholy registers plurality, conflict, and
ambivalence, complicating the simplistic, partisan dynamics of the present moment. Finally,
these images show how melancholia offers a means of authentic engagement with the existential
dilemmas of the young twenty-first century; it is a psychological attitude that resists naïve
optimism and defeatist self-delusion. Deadpan, and with a generous measure of black humor,
Field and Prindle produce candid objects that adeptly register melancholia’s constructive
potential.
1
Gerhard Richter (13 January 1988) in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961 – 2007, eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans-Ulrich
Obrist (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 201.
4
Since antiquity, theorization of melancholia has associated the condition with creativity
and contemplation. Following Sigmund Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia”
(1917), twentieth-century psychoanalysis and psychiatry largely understood the condition as a
pathological deviation from healthy mourning.2 The father of psychoanalysis thought of
melancholia as a harmful fixation on a lost object that eventually results in self-destructive
tendencies. However, departing from Freud, recent psychoanalytic scholarship and cultural
criticism position melancholia in creative production as foundational of claims to subjectivity
and authenticity and as generative of new social bodies. David L. Eng, a leading voice in
melancholia discourses in contemporary feminist and queer scholarship, wrote in 2000 that “a
critical reevaluation of melancholia in terms of [minoritarian group identities] allows us to
strategize ways of challenging liberal society's refusal” to recognize those groups' multiple states
of suffering; a critical “expansion of melancholia as nascent political protest” locates “crucial
sites of progressive politics.”3 Eng and his generation of scholars at the turn of the twenty-first
century are indebted to such thinkers as Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, and Julia Kristeva, who
by the mid-1990s had forged enduring connections between the experience of loss and political
2
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” (1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV (1914-1916):On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on
Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-analysis, 1957): 237 – 258. For Freud, an ambivalent relation to the lost object complicates the process of
mourning, and conflicting feelings of love and hate hinder efforts to detach the libido from the lost object (257).
Where “mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead,” in melancholia, the due to
identification with the object, the “ego debases itself and rages against itself;” the complicated relation to the lost
object in melancholia thus prevents severance. Ultimately, however, this Freudian distinction between “normal” and
pathological mourning would collapse. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud revised his conception of melancholia,
positing that the ego is in fact composed of discarded object-cathexes: melancholia has "a great share in determining
the form taken by the ego and…it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called [the ego’s]
‘character.’” See Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton, 1960), 23, and Jean Laplanche
and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 205 – 208, first
published in French as Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1967).
3
David L. Eng, "Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century," Signs 25 (Summer 2000): 1276, 1280.
5
consciousness.4 Chief among these sources, Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia,
a treatment of melancholy as a discourse, as foundational of psychic life and as an integral
component of the imagination, shapes this study's understanding of melancholy.5
Surveying this literature will show how using melancholia as an interpretive tool
enhances comprehension of the topic bodies of work. With that account in place, this study will
proceed to link melancholy to refined memory practices and critical historical consciousness. If
mourning loss recalls what remains, that is, if we understand loss dialectically as ruination and
consequent remnant, then melancholic contemplation draws the ruin into the present, reworking
it as the material of imagination and understanding. Ultimately, visual analyses of Maxwell's
Demon and Mementi Mori will demonstrate that the two groups aim to materialize refined
practices of representation through strategies that engage the viewer in the labor of melancholic
reflection.
Senseless Images
Composed of some thirty-four images to date, Field’s Maxwell’s Demon appropriates
internet-acquired images from such sources as newspapers, fashion advertisements, and oil
paintings hung in the oval office.6 He affixes an enlarged, printed copy of the appropriated
image onto a black neoprene rubber or velvet support, and reproduces it by inserting stainless
4
Key sources include the seminal essay by Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," October 51 (Winter 1989): 3
– 18. Crimp compiled that essay and other important writings from 1987 to 1995 in his Melancholia and Moralism:
Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004). Noteworthy, too, is Judith Butler's
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
5
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989), first published in French as Soleil Noir: Dépression et mélancholie (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987).
6
The title Maxwell’s Demon is based on Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s 1867 thought experiment on how
to violate Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all set systems tend toward entropic equilibrium
(entropy cannot decrease in an isolated system). Maxwell sought to show that the law merely has a statistical
certainty. See Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Thomas Pynchon took up this idea of a counter-entropy device in
The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965). Pynchon was a focus of Field’s doctoral
studies in American Literature at the University of Lancaster, Lancaster, England.
6
steel straight pins at varying densities, achieving an impressive degree of tonal gradation.
Punctures ultimately destroy, and replace, the printed copy. The result is a ghostly after-image,
suggesting the elegiac, executed in a style of “drawing” that combines mechanical pin-pushing
with artful image-making.7
The project began in 2003, when Field initially pressed his steel pins into sheets of rubber
on board. His choice of the petroleum product as support was a comment on the Iraq War and
the reality to which the conflict points: America’s economy of consumption fueled by the
depletion of global natural resources and sustained through America’s hegemony over oil-rich
sovereign nation-states. The tandem series New York Times 2003 and Independent 2003 take
images from the major American and British newspapers as the conflict began and escalated,
reproducing a front-page photograph from each newspaper for each month of the year 2003.
Each group’s twelve images construct a history of American and British hegemonies, the two
most potent western powers, at the turn of the twenty-first century. Field, then, reinvents the role
of the history painter that advanced recording technologies and constant television news
coverage have gradually effaced. Where the history painter and the writer of history selfconsciously translate information into knowledge, popular news commentators, wan and with
countenances long-ago coerced into neutrality, report uncritical and unreflective recorded data to
television viewers.
Complex threads of social currency and association haunt the appropriated images. For
example, Bull (2009) recreates an internet-appropriated frontal view of Charging Bull, Arturo Di
7
The comparison of his medium to drawing is Field’s own, made in conversations with the author. When starting
an image, the process is automatic, akin to a paint-by-number exercise. The artist, armed with a thimble, appears
decidedly mechanical as he presses pins en masse into the support. As the original printed image is destroyed, Field
devotes substantial time to adjusting the pin reproduction’s tonal values and modeling. Executing the work depends,
ultimately, on artful selection and abstraction along the lines of drawing. His technique therefore joins frenzied
automaticity with careful deliberation.
7
Modica’s 1989 oversized bronze sculpture of a bull frozen in motion, readying itself for a charge
(Figs. 1 and 2).8 The work references a bull market, a market trend in which investment prices
rise faster than historical averages, prompting increased investor confidence. Di Modica
originally placed the bull outside the New York Stock Exchange on 15 December 1989,
intending it to signify American resilience and financial power in the wake of the 1987 stock
market crash.9 Police removed the sculpture, since Di Modica had no permit to install it, but
after six days in an impound lot, public demands for the bull’s return resulted in its display in
Bowling Green Park, two blocks south of the original site.10 When financial crisis crippled the
American economy in 2008, the bull’s energy and unpredictability, formerly associated with
aggressive prosperity, became the symbol of an unrestricted, self-destructive market. To that
end, in July 2011, the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters released an image
of a ballerina gracefully perched atop the bull, which commentators later interpreted as signaling
the dawn of the Occupy Wall Street movement (Fig. 3).11
Field’s image masterfully renders the bronze sculpture’s dynamism. Its velvet ground
absorbs light more efficiently than rubber, generating an impressive contrast between the steel
pinheads and the black substrate. Soft and lavish, the high-quality velvet carries feminine
associations, which the pins reinforce, evocative as they are of sewing or embroidery.
Juxtaposition between those feminine materials and masculine subject matter recurs in several
8
Photographing the bull from this point of view is all but an obligatory tourist ritual; a clichéd image, an internet
search result in hundreds of virtually identical images of the bull. One of these images was Field’s source for Bull.
9
Robert D. McFadden, “SoHo Gift to Wall St.: A 3 1/2 –Ton Bronze Bull,” The New York Times, 16 December
1989, url = http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/16/nyregion/soho-gift-to-wall-st-a-3-1-2-ton-bronze-bull.html
(accessed 8 April 2013).
10
Associated Press, “Wall St.’s Bronze Bull Moves 2 Blocks South,” The New York Times, 20 December 1989, url
= http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/20/nyregion/wall-st-s-bronze-bull-moves-2-blocks-south.html (accessed 8 April
2013).
11
Laura Beeston, “The Ballerina and the Bull,” The Link, 11 October 2011, url = http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/
1951 (accessed 8 April 2013). Adbusters promoted this article on their website after December 2011
(http://www.adbusters.org/content/ballerina-and-bull). The Occupy Wall Street movement was the topic of the issue
Adbusters 97 (September/October 2011).
8
Maxwell’s Demon images but, as a male animal and a sign of power, the bull connotes a hypermachismo that intensifies the comparison. At 94 by 74 inches, standard dimensions of Field’s
pin compositions, Bull divides into four panels of equal size, which are bolted together when
exhibited. Registering the decay of the bull as a sign of American optimism and its
redeployment as an emblem of Wall Street’s intolerable volatility, Bull exemplifies its maker’s
strategy of appropriating media images to create critical works of art.
Senseless Deaths
Prindle began documenting sites of traumatic violence in 2008, traveling to locations
across the continental United States where men, women, and children were brutally killed
because they were gay or transgendered. Frequently, attacks occurred after victim and attacker
had sex, and many of the crimes remain unpunished. Over the last several years, his journeys,
like pilgrimages, have led him to twenty-three states and the District of Columbia. Months or
years having passed, the sites he photographs are clear of blood splatter, caution tape, or any
vestiges of the human lives lost. Superficially, the images offer to the viewer only the quotidian
locations that the passage of time has scrubbed clean of evidence (Fig. 4). The photographs’
titles cite police reports or media coverage of the murders, typically including two or three
especially distressing sentences. When exhibited, audiences usually have access to the titles only
after an initial walk-through. On a second viewing, the texts transform the images, calling on the
viewer to participate in the process of image-making by reconstructing the traumatic events.
Yet even in combination, the image and text fall short of satisfactory representation.
Attempts to reestablish a memory of the atrocity fail as surely as any memorial fails to capture
the fullness of a lost life. And no image, nor any word, could begin to penetrate the reality of
living in a community that tolerates mutilation and murder as punishments for expressing sexual
9
and emotional inclinations. Through these failures of the photographic sign, Prindle opens a
dialog with the viewer, now an image-maker, filling the gaps within the fragmented image and
caption.
For example, disclosing in its title that “Northington’s severed head was placed squarely
in the center of the walkway, leading many to speculate that the murderer(s) had intended to
make an anti-gay statement,” collapses that photograph’s initial ambiguity. At the image’s
center, a footbridge and its supporting armature form a concentric nest of rectangularity. This
insistent geometry accentuates the space where Henry Northington’s absent skull once rested.
Additionally, the emphasized orthogonal projection generated primarily by the footbridge’s
handrails lends the work an immersive quality, redoubling the level of absorption achieved
through the photograph’s sheer size. These devices situate the viewer within the scene, inciting
him to define his identification with the event and its absent personages. Disgusted that he had
only moments ago taken pleasure from such an image, or wounded by the unanticipated potency
of his own imagination, or perhaps even ambivalent about such acts of horror, the beholder must
envision the assailant as he carefully placed the thirty-nine year old, HIV-positive homeless
man’s severed head upright and neatly in the center of the James River Park walkway.12
Melancholic Documents
Links between the methods, themes, and aims of the artists and their production are easily
recognizable. Trained in art history and well-versed in its methods, Field and Prindle attend to
12
Northington’s remains were discovered on 1 March 1999. Autopsy results showed that he sustained enough
injuries to have died several times over, even without decapitation, which occurred postmortem. James River Park
is a well-known gay cruising site, which led investigators to conclude that the attack was an anti-gay statement. See
“Henry Edward Northington,” Police Department subsection, Richmond, VA City Website, url =
http://www.richmondgov.com/police/Unsolved/Henry_Northington.aspx (accessed 2 February 2013) and Mark
Holmberg, “Beheading still a puzzle for Va. Police; but suspect is located in 2-year-old slaying,” PoliceOne, 25
March 2001, url = http://www.policeone.com/news/35486-Beheading-still-a-puzzle-for-Va-police-but-suspect-islocated-in-2-year-old-slaying/ (accessed 2 February 2013).
10
the problematic topics of memory and historical reflection prominent in post-war art historical
discourses.13 The pair interrogates the mechanisms of representation. Specifically, they ask how
we use perception as an opportunity for authentic self-expression, how we integrate events into
coherent individual and collective narratives, and how present power structures administrate
perceptual practices and limit capacities for extended reflection. Despite variances in strategy,
Field and Prindle share the goal of compelling reflection in contexts where the logic of blind
consumption and coerced consensus enforces instantaneity as a rule.
Both bodies of work probe how text and image function independently and in tandem as
tools of communication. Calling attention to communication’s fragility, Field suggests how
combinations of text and image lose meaning, and Prindle documents their failure to convey
truth in fullness. Works of mourning, Maxwell's Demon and Mementi Mori are concerned with
loss. Both investigations take a loss of originary meaning as their point of departure, and the
artists interrogate how experiencing loss engages material, presymbolic remnants.14 How can we
experience losses of meaning, or crises of signification? How do we deal with the boundless
proliferation of the sign, with commodity-images exchanging sign-value without end, producing
13
Memory and history are the topics of the third section of this study; that section provides a survey of relevant
literature. The statuses of the monumental structure and public memory, profoundly connected to nineteenthcentury nationalism, were irrevocably complicated following the World Wars. In the Post-9/11 world, new media,
technology, and varieties of fundamentalism further complicate the notion of public memory and its relation to
historical consciousness. Since both artists have considerable training in art history, both would have encountered
these topics in the course of their higher education.
14
Loss is, after all, dialectically linked with the remnant. Pensky notes, “…[for] the melancholic who is able to
recover from the paralytic, illogical thrall of loss—who can sublimate it—meaning translates into the continually
frustrated fascination with the rifts and discontinuities that remain in the proliferation of signs….The melancholic’s
torment is the price paid for a special insight into the real nature of ‘the’ world, the presymbolic conditions that
predetermine the symbolizing subject itself,” Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of
Mourning (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 28.
11
false needs to fill and subjects trained solely to consume?15 What effects does this logic have on
our interactions with material objects and with other human beings?
The works’ lamentations address a “tremendous crisis of thought and speech, a crisis of
representation” that psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva suggests originates in the “monstrous and
painful sights” that damage “our systems of perception and representation,” rendering our
symbolic means “hollowed out, nearly wiped out, paralyzed.”16 Tremendous, and unprecedented
in totality, this breakdown of the symbolic order is, paradoxically, nearly imperceptible:
While political and military cataclysms are dreadful and challenge the
mind through the monstrosity of their violence (that of a concentration
camp or of an atomic bomb), the shattering of psychic identity, whose
intensity is no less violent, remains hard to perceive….One of the major
stakes of literature and art is henceforth located in that invisibility of
crisis affecting the identity of persons, morals, religion, or politics.17
Ruined vehicles of signification, meaningless in the wake of lived catastrophe, are the indirect
evidence of identity’s breakdown. In her reading of the condition as a literary-psychological
phenomenon, Kristeva in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia closely associates melancholy
with meaninglessness, calling it “an abyssal suffering that does not succeed in signifying itself
and, having lost meaning, loses life.”18 She posits sublimatory solutions to the condition,
expounding the melancholic imagination through lucid analyses of works by Albrecht Dürer,
Hans Holbein the Younger, Gerard de Nerval, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Marguerite Duras.
15
Jean Baudrillard conceptualized sign-value, integrating Marxist terminology and sign theory. His blend of
Marxism and semiotics, and his cultural criticism in general, were influential for the development of Field’s
practice. The artist has indicated in conversations with the author the importance of Baudrillard’s theorization of the
term simulacrum, or a copy without an original. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” trans. Iain
Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), first published in French as “L’ échange symbolique et la mort” (Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1976) and Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation,” trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan:
University of Michigan Press, 2004), first published in French as “Simulacres et simulation” (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 1981). See also the secondary source, Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to
Poststructuralism (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1994).
16
Kristeva, 1989, 223.
17
Ibid., 222.
18
Kristeva, 1989, 189.
12
“Sublimation alone withstands death….Like a tense link between Thing and Meaning, the
unnameable and the proliferation of signs, the silent affect and the ideality that designates and
goes beyond it, the imaginary” act transforms loss “in order to make it live.”19 Foundational of
the artful imagination, then, the melancholic “alternation between the exaltation of meaning and
the abjection of meaninglessness contained in the act of signification” painfully discloses “a kind
of insight into the truth of the subject,” specifically insight into the conditions that predetermine
her signifying acts.20
Melancholy, for Kristeva, is a discourse that empowers us to manage the forces that
disrupt the invention of the self. She concludes that it permits us to represent loss, carries us to
the “furthermost bounds of our psychic life,” and is indeed central to that life, or more precisely,
constitutive of it.21 This is the argument implicit in the topic bodies of work: melancholia founds
the imagination, is constitutive of interior life, and offers special insight into the world. As
melancholic objects, the topic works of art thus address the status of the person, modes of
representation, and the shape of interpersonal relations. By cataloguing senseless images and
senseless deaths, the works expose the forces that regulate the ways we become human and
signify experience. In doing so, they embrace this vulnerability, considering it productive.
Significant as melancholia is to art theory and practice, a survey of the term’s relevant
usage demonstrates that perception of the melancholic condition has historically oscillated
between positive and negative understandings. “Vice,” “creative genius,” “disorder,” and “form
of resistance” are all terms that have taken turns describing melancholia, and these competing
views have coexisted within cultures since its earliest known theorization in fifth-century BCE
19
Ibid., 99 – 100. Emphasis in original.
Pensky, 1993, 28.
21
Ibid., 258.
20
13
Greece. Besides this rich, millennia-long history spanning cultures and disciplines, academic
interest in melancholy has spiked in the last three decades. Threads in recent scholarship,
criticism, and creative practice are rethinking melancholia, shifting attention away from its
pathological manifestations, and locating the implicit subject who experiences loss as a site of
social critique. While careful not to generate an inappropriately celebratory discourse on an
incapacitating condition, ample psychoanalytic and psychiatric research reassessing diagnostic
and therapeutic methods since 1980 supports such arguments. An emphasis on treating the
condition as an open discourse, growing suspicion of the corporate promotion of false panaceas
for contrived disorders, and an awareness that conflicting positive and negative emotional forces
maintain the richness of interiority characterize such perspectives in feminist and queer criticism,
postcolonial scholarship, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry.22
Given their prominence in postwar discourses, the topics of memory and historical
consciousness demand summary as well. The public monument became a contested site in the
twentieth century, and the issues of memory and how to remember contentious events became
topics central to art practice and theory. As the weapons of warfare became more efficient and
its tactics more dependent on visibility, televisual representations of war became ubiquitous.
Historically, the duties of registering trauma, composing historical consciousness, and
interrogating the tools of representing memory have belonged chiefly to the artist. Confronting
multifaceted events and problematic modes of representation, the artist ambivalently negotiated
that difficult terrain. Today, since Vietnam, we televise wars. Social media and recording
technologies at anyone’s fingertips make it possible for a person to witness protests in cities he
22
As Kristeva notes elsewhere, despite advancements in biochemistry and pharmacology, a wide variety of
verbalizations of melancholia are available through aesthetic and religious discourses, which deepen knowledge of
the condition and provide essential therapeutic measures. “See Kristeva, “On the Melancholic Imaginary,” New
Formations 3 (Winter 1987): 5 – 18.
14
cannot pronounce, to watch despotic regimes of which he knows nothing collapse, to “Like” the
posting or viral circulation of an image of disaster and “Share” a video of atrocity. The logic of
shock and awe equips our visual culture to efficiently deliver bombarding images, at the cost of
any opportunities for pause or scrutiny. Following a history of melancholy, a discussion of
memory and historical consciousness will demonstrate how the topic bodies of work engage the
viewer in the difficult labor of cultivating a nuanced consciousness of past and present.
II.
Black Humor
Conceptualization of melancholia began long before legible boundaries between
disciplines were established, a fact that complicates attempts to link past formulations with those
of the present. In order to define its specific utility as the key interpretive tool of this inquiry, a
comparative overview must cast a broad net, attending to tropes developed since antiquity.
While competing conceptions of melancholy as an ailment, as a marker of greatness, and as a
universal feature of the human condition have existed since the fifth-century BCE, melancholy at
the turn of the twenty-first century has come to the fore of a host of academic, clinical, and
public dialogs.
A Survey of Melancholy
Theorization of melancholia dates at least to the Hippocratic texts of the fifth and fourth
centuries BCE.23 These ancient writings of the Hippocratic school laid the foundations for
Western medicine; humoralism, the now discredited theory of the four humors, was among the
most influential achievements of Hippocrates (c. 460 – 377 BCE) and his followers, particularly
23
Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good, Culture and Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 43.
This is not to say that other ancient cultures had no conception of depressive states; contemporary surveys on
melancholia begin with Ancient Greece because of melancholia’s etymological foundations in that culture and
because of the relative closeness of Hippocratic methodology to modern medicine.
15
among their readers in the late antique and medieval periods. The Hippocratics associated an
imbalance of the particularly volatile humor melainachole, Greek for black bile, with
despondency, aversion to food, restlessness, and irritability, and determined causeless fear and
depression to be the condition’s chief manifestations.24
In the second century CE, Galen (c. 131 – 201), court physician to the emperor Marcus
Aurelius, refined the Hippocratic humoral tradition, maintaining its association of melancholia
with fear and despondency, and contributed the descriptions of the melancholiac’s dark
countenance and psychology that would color imagery associated with depression to the present
day.25 After Galen, Christian authorities in the West would, for well over a millennium,
conceive of melancholia as chronic form of madness brought on by spiritual malady, which
contrasted the ancient humoralists’ emphasis on the physical causes of pathological conditions.26
The related Latin terms acedia, listlessness or torpor, and tristitia, dejection or sadness, were
Christianized and taken to indicate sinful sloth or despair.27 Where the Hippocratic and Galenic
concepts of melancholia were humoral, and therefore essentially physical phenomena, the
Christian cognates acedia and tristitia can only be understood in terms of the religious
configuration of the Medieval period. Though the church’s dominance in Western Europe
ensured the latter version’s prevalence, Galenic definitions of melancholia persisted alongside
their Christian counterparts. The great Islamic medieval thinkers Ishaqibn Imran, Haly Abbas,
24
Ibid.
Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27.
26
Ibid. 43.
27
Kleinman and Good, 1985, 37. While accidia became the accepted form in the later Middle Ages, accedia and
acidia were also recognized. Spelling has ranged in English from accidie and accydye to the later, but still obsolete,
acedy, to the acedia that appears in modern historical writings. See also Lawlor, 2012, 59n2.
25
16
and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) preserved the Galenic tradition (and, of course, sustained much classical
knowledge in general).28
Nearly contemporaneous with the Hippocratic school, the Problemata, a text attributed to
Aristotle (c. 384 – 322 BCE) or a close follower, initiated a trope that rivaled the Hippocratic
account. Famously, the Aristotelian author of the Problemata asked, “why is it that all those
who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of a
melancholic temperament?”29 Perhaps the most influential ancient account of melancholia, the
Aristotelian exploration of the links between black bile and intellectual or creative prowess
expanded the Hippocratic conception of the humor, attending to the condition’s gamut of slothful
and frenetic manifestations. Indeed, some contemporary sources interpret the Aristotelian
account as a precursor to more nuanced understandings in the twentieth century of manicdepressive and bipolar-spectrum disorders.30
By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Christian church’s authoritative position had
weakened, and renewed interest in classical medicine and anatomy eroded the church’s sweeping
influence on the explanation of human behavior.31 Acedia and tristitia and their association with
mortal sin fell out of favor and, as such, perception of the melancholic state shifted.32 Integral to
28
Jennifer Radden, Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 5.
29
Aristotle, ‘Problem XXX, 1,’ Problems: Books 32–38, Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, trans. Walter Stanley Hett and
Harris Rackham, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957): 154 – 69. While “PseudoAristotle” is probably a more accurate authorial designation, given the text’s uncertain attribution, the consensus is
that the Problemata are “sufficiently ‘Aristotelian’ in character for attribution not to pose serious problems of
interpretation.” See Ann Jefferson, “Genius and Its Others,” Paragraph 32:2 (2009): 182 – 196. See also Ann
Blair’s “Authorship in the Popular Problemata Aristotelis,” Early Science and Medicine 4 (January 1999): 189 – 227
for an exhaustive record of fragments that circulated in early modern Europe in a textual tradition independent of the
better-known ancient text attributed to Aristotle.
30
See Ronald Pies, “The Historical Roots of the ‘Bipolar Spectrum’: Did Aristotle anticipate Kraepelin's broad
concept of manic-depression?” Journal of Affective Disorders 100 (2007): 7 – 11, and Hubertus Tellenbach,
Melancholy, trans. Erling Eng (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1980).
31
Kleinman and Good, 1985, 55.
32
Lawlor, 2012, 38 – 39.
17
the resurgence of the notion of melancholia as creative genius was Marsilio Ficino’s (1433 –
1499) recuperation of the Aristotelian trope, reinvesting it with currency by blending it with
Renaissance metaphysics, alchemy, and humanism.33 The self-described melancholic scholar
elaborated a Neoplatonic astrology, identifying Saturn as the sign of melancholia, and declared
all men of genius to be under Saturn’s melancholic influence.34 In his glamorized mélange of
classical texts with au courant magic and astrology, Ficino did emphasize the need for artists,
scholars, and writers to control the melancholic inclination for it to manifest as a desirable trait.
Albrecht Dürer’s Melencholia I (1514, Fig. 5) registers how popular that eclectic image
of the melancholic genius had become after Ficino’s humanist renewal of the Aristotelian trope.
Dürer’s engraving depicts the melancholic state as the basis of artistic genius. Though he
incorporates traditional iconographical references to melancholy, such as the bat in the
background at top left displaying the title “Melencholia I,” Dürer’s image personifies
melancholic creativity. The winged, presumably female figure’s dark countenance is fixed,
pensive; her head rests on her clenched left fist, and a compass in her right hand indicates that we
witness lingering reflection amidst the labor of artistic creativity. Erwin Panofsky, in his famous
monographic study of Dürer, wrote that she “is what may be called super-awake; her fixed stare
is one of intent though fruitless searching. She is inactive not because she is too lazy to work but
because work has become meaningless to her; her energy is paralyzed not by sleep but by
thought.”35 Drawing on Ficino, Panofsky claims in his reading of the sixteenth-century
33
See Marsilio Ficino, De Vita Libri Tres (Basel: Andreae Cratandri, 1549). The most important English translation
is Ficino, Three Books on Life, Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, trans. (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance
Texts and Studies, 1989).
34
Lawlor, 2012, 51.
35
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 160.
18
engraving that it overcame the distinction between pathology and creative genius, affirming
Ficino’s faith in the individual’s power to counter melancholic devastation with contemplation.36
Later, as the scientific epistemologies of the modern period proliferated,
conceptualizations of melancholia grew more complex. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth
centuries, confidence in the authority of texts inherited from the past waned, and the individual
author’s empirical observations and hypotheses gained new significance.37 As Enlightenment
thinkers eschewed astrology and magic, early modern humanism’s association of melancholia
with brilliance lost credibility. Bookending this development, Robert Burton’s seventeenthcentury writings typified an Elizabethan fascination with the heroicized version of the
melancholic state, and Emil Kraepelin’s influential Textbook of Psychiatry at the turn of the
twentieth century marked the disorder’s increased medicalization. Burton, asking, “who is not a
fool, who is free from melancholy…[who] labours not of this disease,” declared melancholy
universal to humanity and, in his treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), examined the
human condition through the prism of melancholy.38 “The tower of Babel never yielded such
confusion of tongues as this Chaos of Melancholy doth variety of its symptoms,” wrote Burton,
consistently emphasizing its symptomatic openness, and thereby complicating any notion of the
condition as pathology.39
36
Christine Ross, The Aesthetics of Depression (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 32 – 35.
Radden, 2009, 6.
38
Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 – 2000), 56. Original work published under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, The
Anatomy of Melancholy: What it Is, with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Severall Cures of it:
in Three Partitions, with Their Severall Sections, Members & Subsections (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1621). Burton
obsessively rewrote and expanded the text six times; the final edition was published posthumously in 1652. Though
a universal condition, Burton distinguished between the universal disposition, from which, as he says, no man is
free, and the entrenched, habitual form of melancholy, which is more serious.
39
Ibid., 456. In other words, if a condition is symptomatically ambiguous and universally experienced, it becomes
impossible to define that condition as a disease.
37
19
Kraepelin, on the other hand, a devoted empiricist and a founder of modern psychiatry,
inherited a century of radical transformations in the study of mental activity, and inaugurated in
his Textbook the diagnostic category of manic-depressive disorder.40 In keeping with his
historical moment, Kraepelin made a distinction between cognitive and affective disorders, a
division that Jennifer Radden argues “reflected cultural presuppositions and assumptions
traceable to the previous century’s contrast between Reason and Passion.…Rather than a natural
or universal division, the separation between emotion and cognition looks to be a creation of
European, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinking.”41 Increasingly precise language
characterized the early advancement of psychiatry, and refined descriptions of observable
behavior that resisted melancholia’s amorphous tangle of symptoms are prevalent in the
Textbook. Further, the “occasional glimpses of gender links connecting the affective with the
feminine” scattered throughout Kraepelin’s extensive writing on manic-depressive states were
also a consistent feature of psychiatry’s first stages.42 Associations with gender had colored
accounts of melancholia since antiquity, and such gendered thinking was legible in Freud’s 1917
essay, which posed melancholic heroes of history (e.g., Shakespeare’s Hamlet) against the
ordinary female patients of Freud’s psychoanalytic practice. That landmark essay solidified the
links between unutterable loss and melancholia that would prove profoundly influential for
twentieth-century accounts of melancholy and depression.
40
The first edition of Kraepelin’s Textbook was published in 1883; in 1927, the ninth and final edition was
published posthumously and, dwarfing the original work, comprised four volumes (and included five definitions of
melancholy). The groundbreaking sixth edition (1899) presented for the first time diagnostic criteria for manicdepressive disorder. See Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch fur Studirende und Ärzte, 8th ed., 4 vols.,
(Leipzig: von Barth Verlag, 1909 – 1913). For the first edition, see Kraepelin, Compendium der Psychiatrie zum
Gebrauche fur Studirende und Aerzte, 1st ed. (Leipzig: Abel Verlag, 1883). The first (partial) English translation
was of the 6th edition (2 vols., 1899): Kraepelin, Psychiatry: A Short Textbook for Students and Physicians, Allen
Ross Defendorf, trans. (New York: MacMillan, 1902). For a complete English translation, see Kraepelin,
Psychiatry: A Textbook for Students and Physicians, eds. J.M. Quen, H. Metoul, and S. Ayed (Canton, MA: Science
History, 1990).
41
Radden, 2009, 21.
42
Ibid., 48.
20
Prescriptions and Polemics
By midcentury, pharmaceutical drugs arrived on the scene. In 1949, the Australian
psychiatrist John Cade reported the anti-manic and mood-stabilizing properties of lithium salts;
the first tricyclic antidepressants appeared in the United States a decade later.43 Following this
“Golden Age” of psychopharmacology in the 1950s, European influence on psychiatry began to
wane. In 1980, the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual was published after contentious revisions.44 The DSM-III was primarily the
innovation of Columbia University psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who collided head on with the
American Psychiatric Association, at the time still under the influence of European
psychoanalysis. Spitzer sought to set diagnoses on the firm ground of observable symptoms,
shunning Freudian concepts and psychoanalytic speculation about the unconscious mind. After
much dispute, politicking and compromise, the revised DSM created wholly new categories of
mental disorder, and new drugs designed for those new diseases, selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors or SSRIs, would hit the market by 1987.45
Psychiatry and biological psychology ever since have sought for neurological correlates
of depressive states, and diagnosis and treatment would follow this trend of physicalization.
Increasingly scientific conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment have meant an emphasis on
melancholy and depression as pathological, and the heroicized version of melancholia decidedly
waned as psychometrics superseded psychoanalysis. However, the prominent psychiatrist and
historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter has recently led a polemical assault on what he views as
43
David Griffiths Cunningham Owens, A Guide to the Extrapyramidal Side Effects of Antipsychotic Drugs (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1 – 12.
44
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., text rev.),
Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980.
45
Cunningham Owens, 1999, 25 – 28, 215.
21
his discipline’s dependence on psychopharmacology, or the treatment of the mind and brain with
drugs; specifically, his critique identifies three interconnected problem.46 First, the
pharmaceutical industry’s commercial interests prevent genuine scientific and medicinal
advancement. Second, regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration permit
companies to test new products only against placebo, rather than insisting that a newly developed
drug be superior to existing ones. Finally, political infighting and compromise among
psychiatrists result in arbitrary diagnostic categories sustained by pharmaceutical promotion
rather than scientifically accurate descriptions of what is actually wrong with patients.
Elsewhere, psychotherapist Gary Greenberg is among the most vocal critics of the DSM, and has
argued that the text serves to vindicate psychiatry rather than to earnestly account for mental
suffering.47 In a similar call for a reexamination of diagnostic practices, since the mid-1990s,
Australian psychiatrist Gordon Parker has argued for the recognition of melancholia as a
diagnostic subtype distinct from the DSM's major depressive disorder, and has lead an
international campaign calling for the forthcoming fifth edition of the DSM to classify it as
such.48
46
Edward Shorter, Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 2 – 10. See also Shorter, “The doctrine of the two depressions in historical perspective,”
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 115 (2007): 5 – 13; Shorter, Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of
Melancholia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Shorter, How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise
and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Additionally, Shorter has written
for larger audiences outside academic psychiatry. Specifically, see Shorter, “Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy,” The
Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2010, url = http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487041881045750837
00227601116.html (accessed 18 April 2013) and Shorter, “Trouble at the Heart of Psychiatry’s Revised Rule Book,”
Scientific American, 9 May 2012, url = http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/streams-ofconsciousness/2012/05/09/trouble-at-the-heart-of-psychiatrys-revised-rulebook/ (accessed 18 April 2013).
47
See especially his Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2010) and The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (New York: Penguin, 2013).
48
See Gordon Parker and Dusan Hadzi-Pavlovic, eds., Melancholia: A Disorder of Movement and Mood (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Parker, “Beyond Major Depression,” Psychological Medicine 35 (2005):
467 – 474; and Parker, “A Case for Reprising and Redefining Melancholia,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 58
(2013): 183 – 89. For a critical response to Parker, see Pete M. Ellis, et al., “Evidence-based guidelines: response to
Professor Gordon Parker’s critique,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 38 (2004): 891 – 895. For
further psychoanalytic and psychiatric accounts calling for a renewal of the term's usage in those discourses since
22
Parallel shifts in recent cultural criticism and production recall the positive view of the
condition that Aristotle, Ficino, and Burton laid bare.49 Emphasis on melancholy as an
essentially subjective experience irreducible to disordered neurochemistry characterizes the
swathe of post-colonial, feminist, and queer theorists who view melancholy as foundational of
subjectivity. As scholar of African American literature Éva Tettenborn has argued, we “must
reread and reevaluate melancholia in contemporary visual practices, moving away from an
understanding of melancholia as a personal mental or emotional disability that calls for a curative
intervention.”50 Cautiously avoiding celebration of a condition that can result in broken
relationships and, ultimately, suicide, these sources attend to examples of cultural production,
rather than actual suffering individuals, to better understand how works of literature, visual and
performing arts deal with loss in a socially constructive way.
the controversial publication of the DSM-III in 1980, see Bernard J. Carroll, "Bringing Back Melancholia," Bipolar
Disorders 14 (2012): 1 – 5; Carroll, et al., “The Carroll Rating Scale for Depression: Development, Reliability and
Validation,” The British Journal of Psychiatry 138 (1981): 194 – 200; Carroll, et al., “A Specific Laboratory Test
for the Diagnosis of Melancholia Standardization, Validation, and Clinical Utility,” Archives of General Psychiatry
38 (January 1981): 15 – 22; and Max Fink and Michael Alan Taylor, "Resurrecting Melancholia," Acta Psychiatrica
Scandinavica 115 (2007): 14 – 20. Since the 1960s, Bernard Carroll has played a prominent role in calling for a
classification of melancholia as a diagnostic category distinct from major depressive disorder, which, like Shorter
and Parker, he views as an arbitrary construct of the DSM-III.
49
Melancholia as resistance is a trope consistently recurring in feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship of the
last three decades, following a trajectory based in the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacque Derrida, Judith Butler,
Julia Kristeva, and others. For examples of this category, see Rory O’Bryen, "Memory, Melancholia and Political
Transition in Amuleto and Nocturno de Chile by Roberto Bolaño," Bulletin of Latin American Research 30:4 (2011):
473 – 487; Pradeep Jeganathan," In the Ruins of Truth: The Work of Melancholia and Acts of Memory," Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 11:1 (2010): 7 – 20; Manijeh Nasrabadi, "In Search of Iran: Resistant Melancholia in Iranian
American Memoirs of Return," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31 (2011): 487 –
497; Angelika Rauch, "The Broken Vessel of Tradition," Representations 53 (Winter 1996): 74 – 96; Angelika
Rauch, "The Trauerspiel of the Prostituted Body, or Woman as Allegory of Modernity," Cultural Critique 10
(Autumn 1988): 77 – 88; Tsu-Chung Su, "Writing the Melancholic: The Dynamics of Melancholia in Julia
Kristeva’s Black Sun," Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31 (January 2005): 163 – 191; Shirley Anne Tate,
"Translating Melancholia: A Poetics of Black Interstitial Community," Community, Work and Family 10 (February
2007): 1 – 15; and Éva Tettenborn, "Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature,"
MELUS 31 (Fall 2006): 101 – 121. The most important anthology on melancholia as constructing political and
cultural resistance is Loss: The Politics of Mourning, David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003).
50
Éva Tettenborn, 2006, 118.
23
Beyond engaging melancholy as a general condition of possibility for interiority, recent
scholarship has located in that claim to personhood a strategy of resistance. Rory O’Bryen, for
example, posits in his analysis of Roberto Bolaño’s novels that melancholic contemplation on the
political front thwarts the finality of defeat by conferring futurity on the ruin or remnant. In the
literary register, O’Bryen argues, Bolaño compels a type of melancholic reading capable of
locating fissures in power structures, “inhabiting that power in its interstices and haunting it from
within.”51 Elsewhere, the invaluable anthology Loss: the Politics of Mourning (2003) explores
in detail that notion of melancholy as generative of political and cultural resistance, gathering
essays that “explore the numerous practices by which loss is melancholically materialized in the
social and the cultural realms and in the political and aesthetic domains.”52 Key elements link
these accounts: each, to a degree and albeit with varying emphases, understand melancholy as
foundational of subjectivity, as a means of authentic engagement with contentious events, and as
a discourse generative of defiant communities.
The Labor of Mourning
The landscape of production in the last several decades offers countless sources for these
investigations. For example, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s prolific engagement with painter
Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre, considered among the most significant interactions between critic and
artist in recent memory, has attended to the artist’s works of mourning in the context of posttraditional identity.53 In an essay published in 1996, Buchloh situates Richter as the postwar
German painter uniquely equipped to visually represent crises in German historical memory and
51
O’Bryen, 2011, 485.
Eng and Kazanjian, 2003, 5.
53
Benjamin Buchloh, "Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter's Works of Mourning,"
October 75 (Winter 1996): 61 – 82.
52
24
in contemporary painting, and locates the artist within a matrix of paternally ordered mourning in
the aftermath of the Second World War.54 Richter's painting, specifically his banal 48 Portraits
of white, male authors, scientists, composers and philosophers, “functions simultaneously,” for
Buchloh, “as a secondary elaboration of the process of identity construction and as a manifesto
of disidentification,” generating a contradictory oscillation between “laboring to construct a
radically different paternal legacy” and emphasizing the “artificiality of any such retroactively
constructed positive paternal identification.”55
Unstable and contradictory, Richter’s works of mourning ambivalently engage
breakdowns of identity and of representation. In doing so, his practice, as Lisa Saltzman has
argued, “becomes an activity that is all about, not the laying to rest, but the keeping alive, one
might even say, the resurrection of history’s subjects, in other words, what remains as history’s
ghosts.”56 Generally marked by a resolute commitment to painting despite an almost nihilistic
rejection of its various forms, as well as by a preference for abeyance over singular
54
Buchloh draws heavily from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s classic study of postwar German
melancholia, Die Unfaehigkeit zu trauern (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968). Published in English as The Inability
to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverly Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975). According to
the seminal volume on postwar mourning in Germany, “not only was the German ego ideal robbed of the support of
reality, but in addition the Führer himself was exposed by the victors as a criminal of truly monstrous proportions.
With this sudden reversal of his qualities the ego of every single German individual suffered a central devaluation
and impoverishment. This creates at least the prerequisites for a melancholic reaction.” Buchloh adopts this
individual and historical mode of mourning the destruction of the paternal image, particularly in his reading of
Richter’s 48 Portraits, a series that Buchloh argues “articulates above all the imaginary construction of a retroactive
paternal identification” by the individual and culturally traumatized postwar subject, see Buchloh, 1975, 73.
55
Buchloh, 1996, 75. Richter executed 48 Portraits for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale and, in
1998, made four photographic sets based on the paintings. The original series belongs to the collection of the
Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; each painting is 70 x 55 cm.
56
Lisa Saltzman, “Gerhard Richter’s Stations of the Cross: On Martyrdom and Memory in Postwar German Art,”
Oxford Art Journal 28 (2005): 25 – 44. Saltzman takes on the topics of commemoration and historical memory in
her essay on Richter’s well-known series October 17, 1977 (1988), also referred to as the Baader-Meinhof cycle,
which is a set of fifteen paintings of varying dimensions that depict the arrests and deaths of Andreas Baader,
Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and other alleged members of the radical left-wing Red Army Faction (RAF),
which existed from 1970 to 1998. In 1977, their operations—specifically the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet and the
kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, President of the Confederation of German Employers’
Association—spurred the national crisis that would be called “German Autumn.” The crisis ended on 18 October of
that year, with the liberation of the jet and the public deaths of the first generation of RAF leaders.
25
interpretation, Richter’s art would prove profoundly influential for Field.57 In the early 1990s,
when planning his thesis at the University of Lancaster, Field attended two important Richter
exhibitions that would color his subsequent work. After seeing the 1991 Tate Gallery
retrospective and Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery in
1995, Field opted to center his research on two Richter paintings: Abstract Painting (1985) (Fig.
6) and Red (Fig. 7).58
The former, according to Field, is a superior work due to Richter’s method of building up
the painted surface through the fusing of organic and mechanical techniques. Executed with
countless actions and counteractions using the mediating tools of the squeegee and spatula, the
sheer quantity of visual phenomena in Red exceeds linguistic description and theorization. That
visual specificity, or the work’s insistence upon its own presymbolic material qualities, hints at
Richter’s veneration of his discipline’s auratic features. Field, sharing that esteem for
materiality, structured the images of Maxwell’s Demon according to a logic of fusion and
concretization akin to that of Red. Blending organic and mechanical techniques (painterly
abstraction and automatic pin-pushing), Field layers information in order to interrogate the
inadequacy of representation. Yet, like Richter, his engagement with lost symbolic modes
manifests as an incessant commitment to his medium and its specific material conditions, as if he
aims to highlight the difficulty, if not impossibility, of authentic communication precisely by
giving visual form to its utter instability.
57
See Field’s “Playing in the Ruins: The Late Abstraction of Gerhard Richter,” Drain Magazine 6 (2006), url =
http://drainmag.com/ContentPLAY/Essay/Field.html (accessed 19 October 2011) for his reading of the two Richter
paintings, and for a detailed account of the intersections between entropy, Richter, and visual specificity in his work.
58
Gerhard Richter, Tate Gallery, London, UK, October 30, 1991 – January 12, 1992. Gerhard Richter: Painting in
the Nineties, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, UK, June 1, 1995 – August 4, 1995. Abstraktes Bild (1985)
(Abstract Painting, Catalogue Raisonné: 576-3) was exhibited at the Tate retrospective; the comparably small oil on
canvas work is 180 cm x 120 cm. Rot (Red, Catalogue Raisonné: 821, 1994) is larger, at 200 cm x 320 cm, and was
shown at the Painting in the Nineties exhibition. It is housed in The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan.
26
Richter’s 48 Portraits and late abstraction and Field’s Maxwell’s Demon thus
melancholically reflect on ruination, and rather than conceal or cipher loss, the artists use debris
to make compelling works of art. Melancholy therefore functions as a generative strategy
capable, Saltzman's words, of “keeping alive what remains as history’s ghosts.” Melancholic
engagement with the past in these works is not, however, a fixation on or pathological
identification with the lost object. Instead, by ambivalently materializing ruination, Richter and
Field project a sense of constant becoming, of transformation, and of openness. Their works thus
illustrate a refined conception of melancholia as authentic engagement, as socially constructive,
and as an open discourse. Comparative analysis of the labor of mourning in works by Richter
and Field indicates clear ties between melancholy and historical engagement. Indeed,
melancholic reflection implicitly figures loss in dialectical relation to what remains and, as such,
enlivens the past and complicates the story of history. These interactions between melancholia
and history are the topic of the next section, which will show how Maxwell’s Demon and
Mementi Mori impel melancholic contemplation as a mode of productive memory.
III.
Memorial and Midrash
The twentieth century’s traumas irreversibly complicated the concept and function of the
historical monument. The First and Second World Wars, American intervention in such
locations as Southeast Asia, and the rise and fall of the Eastern Bloc rendered impossible the
representation of a coherent public identity in patinated bronze or smooth marble. While the last
century inaugurated new, traumatic forms of warfare, such as the machine gun, systematic
genocide and the nuclear bomb, the discourse surrounding war has changed. Given our entry
into the information age, television and the Internet have brought modern warfare into daily
27
life.59 Further, if the aesthetic revolutions of modernism were not sufficient on their own to
dismantle the confident, nationalist icons of the nineteenth century, postwar ambivalence toward
the nation-state and any conception of a singular cultural identity cemented public skepticism of
the heroic monument. Traumatic events vexed feelings of national pride and demanded
remembrance in ways both multifaceted and self-conscious. The monument, then, “has
increasingly become the site of contested and competing meanings, more likely the site of
cultural conflict than of shared national values and ideals.”60
Ambivalent Image
Still, loss demands symbolic expression and, ironically, the postmodern diaspora of
identity only increased the need for some degree of socially normative representation of
mourning. Thus, Maya Lin’s abstract, negative monument to the Vietnam War typifies the
materialization of public ambivalence as well as the artistic search for an appropriate form of that
expression. Walking about the obtuse V-shape as it gently descends, “like a wound in the earth
that is slowly healing,” visitors read the names of the dead cut into polished granite, facing all
59
Consider Marshall McLuhan’s prescient words: “the public is now participant in every phase of the war, and the
main actions of the war are now being fought in the American home itself," McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and
Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 134.
60
James E. Young, “Memory/Monument,” Critical Terms for Art History, Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 235. Young is a leading voice in studies of memory and the
memorial in contemporary art history. Among his most widely cited works include At Memory’s Edge: AfterImages of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); The
Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and “The
Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267 – 96.
Among the key examples he attends to is the Harburg Monument against War and Fascism and for Peace (1986 –
93) by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalez-Gerz. The “disappearing” monument is a forty-foot hollow aluminum pillar
which visitors could mark, inscribing their encounter with the monument. As viewers filled each five-foot section
with graffiti, it was incrementally lowered into the ground, until the last lowering on November 10, 1993. Young
has called this a “countermonument” that formalizes impermanence, reminding us of the negative spaces of
memory: the murdered, maimed, traumatized, tortured, and absent victims of history. See especially his “CounterMonument” contribution to Critical Inquiry and chapter 5, “Memory against Itself in Germany Today: Jochen
Gerz’s Countermonuments,” 120 – 51, in At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art
and Architecture.
28
the while their own countenances reflected in the black stone (Fig. 8).61 Successful as it is in
registering tragedy while remaining open to personal vision, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s
major achievement is its call for the viewer to define his or her position relative to the
memorialized event. Its mechanism is literal: the face and figure mirrored amidst the recorded
names impel reflection within the beholder.
Recent expansion efforts have, however, jeopardized that restrained efficacy. In 2003,
the 108th US Congress authorized the construction of a 35,000 square foot, 85 million dollar
underground visitor’s center at the National Mall that would supplement the extant black granite
Wall.62 Bringing “stories to life” using “state of the art technology,” and “giving a face to the
faceless” with a “Wall of Faces,” the education facility will house and display some 200,000
personal items, clothing, and photographs of deceased American soldiers.63 Further, a “fitting
tribute to those who have sacrificed all in Iraq and Afghanistan” and an exhibit tracing the
history of the United States’ military conflicts “from Bunker Hill to Baghdad” will weave the
Vietnam War, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, into the fabric of American military
history since the nation’s founding.64
One could hardly concoct a clearer example of revisionism. The proposed education
center rewrites the history of American intervention in Southeast Asia, celebrating it as valorous
61
Tom Lashnits, Maya Lin (New York: Infobase, 2007), 32. A veteran who in the 1970s was spat upon as he
returned home to Chicago from Vietnam commenced organized resistance to Lin’s monument, claiming that, “[one]
needs no artistic education to see this memorial design for what it is—a black scar.”
62
See Vietnam Veterans Memorial Visitor Center Act, H.R.1442, 108th Congress (2003-2004), url =
http://beta.congress.gov/bill/108th-congress/house-bill/1442 (accessed 7 February 2013). Rep. Pombo, Richard W.
(R-CA-11) introduced the House bill on 26 March 2003, and it became law on 18 November 2003. Jennifer
Favorite is pursuing the most complete investigation to date on the expansion efforts. A Ph.D. candidate at the
CUNY Graduate Center, her dissertation, in progress at time of writing, is entitled, “Added Museums at U.S. War
Memorials and the Reinterpretation of National History.” She presented the paper, “Up Against the Wall: The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center on the National Mall,” at the Southeastern College Art Conference,
20 October 2012, in Durham, NC, USA.
63
“About the Education Center at The Wall,” The Education Center at the Wall, website, url =
http://www.buildthecenter.vvmf.org/pages/about (accessed 7 February 2013).
64
Ibid.
29
alongside the Revolutionary, Civil, and First and Second World Wars, which are traditionally
perceived as justified conflicts. Comically, the center’s timeline of the Vietnam War, itself
advertised as a major attraction, only tracks the years after French forces left the former colony.
And if the spectacularization of many thousands of dead men and women fails on its own to
offer adequate evidence of post-9/11 regression and repression, consider the education center's
omission of substantial accounts of public resistance to the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. Digital technology accomplishes this erasure of historical memory, with interactive
media giving form to “the same hopes and aspirations” we all share as citizens of the
superpower.65 After all, what better means of engaging history exist than countless LCD
monitors? What can obscure the crises of such categories as the commemorative monument and
the labor of recollection more efficiently than the interactive touchpad? And what form can
secure authoritative adulation more ably than 58,000 photographic portraits of dead soldiers?
This reinterpretation of the public conception of American military history counters
Maya Lin’s skillful negotiation of the divergent cultural and historical tasks that commemoration
of contentious events demands.66 She took on the traditional role of the artist as the “first to
engage in the labor of mourning and the symbolic work of memory,” a role Benjamin Buchloh
describes in the contemporary landscape as “dubious,” “contaminated,” and potentially
constitutive of “yet another ideological condition, perpetuating the mythology rather than
constituting an initiation of memory and historical insight.”67 If the artist is to assume such a
role, “then inevitably he or she also must be the first to confront the status of the traditional tools
65
Ibid.
Her monument, of course, was not uncontroversial. To assuage criticism, The Three Servicemen, a figurative
bronze statue by Frederick Hart, was dedicated on the National Mall in 1984. See Karal Ann Marling and Robert
Silberman, “The Statue near the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian
Studies in American Art 1 (Spring 1987): 4 – 29.
67
Buchloh, 1996, 69 – 70. See also his “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of
Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 39 – 68.
66
30
available for commemoration…at the level of their profound corruption by totalitarian power.”68
Lin’s accomplishment, then, was her confrontation with a multidimensional event that resisted
univocal definition, and the product of that confrontation was an ambivalent mode of expression
that initiates serious historical contemplation.
A scar in the earth, Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a paradigmatic case of
melancholic reflection. Diametrically opposed to that reflection, the expanded visitors center
embodies the impulse to conceal loss by distorting memory. Akin to the Wall, Maxwell’s
Demon and Mementi Mori compel reflection by marking loss without inventing mythology or
perpetuating naïve delusion. Their mode of elegy proposes a model of history as composed of
contentious events irreducible to the singular definitions and false resolutions that typify post9/11 American political consciousness. Further, they suggest that the individual must
continually engage those contentious historical events, reinvesting them with vitality, and
thereby sustaining the discourse of critical memory.
Midrashic Gaps
One could argue the model the topic works propose is midrashic. Midrash, a form of
rabbinic biblical exegesis that dates to late antiquity, is the interpretation of and commentary on a
scriptural passage that expands upon elements of the narrative in order to make the material
meaningful in subsequent contexts. Like the rabbinic scholars of late antiquity, both artists
respond to social crises by reusing fragmentary remnants as generative tools; investigating a set
of connections between midrash and intertextuality will clarify this comparison. On the topic of
memory, Prindle has noted in personal correspondence that Mementi Mori articulates his
68
Ibid., 70.
31
conviction that all memory is midrashic.69 That conclusion draws from the mingling of his
Jewish upbringing and post-structuralist education. In academia, examination of the continuities
between midrash and post-structuralist literary theory became fashionable by the late 1980s, and
the activity of Biblical interpretation was thought of as something like a precursor to
deconstruction.70
According to David Stern, the well-regarded scholar of Jewish literature and history,
rabbinic midrashim in the first five centuries of the Common Era elevated the conception of
textual polysemy to the category of orthodoxy, treating editorial pluralism as an essential feature
of the revealed text.71 The plurality of available interpretations in midrashic exegesis should
then “be understood as a claim to textual stability,” rather than one of radical indeterminacy, that
“points to a fantasy of social stability, of human community in complete harmony,” which
“counterbalanced the Rabbis' sense of their nation's position in the larger external world, a far
more multitudinous, fragmented, and disagreeable world.”72 In similar fashion, historian of
religion Daniel Boyarin has suggested
that the rabbis, faced with the disruption of their times, the destruction of the Temple and
Jewish autonomy in Palestine and with the necessity for appropriation of Scripture for
their times, found in the creation of a radically intertextual literature the ideal generative
and reconstructive tool, which preserved the privileged position of the Biblical text by
releasing it from its position of immobilized totality….The midrash realizes its goal via a
hermeneutic of recombining pieces of the canonized exemplar into a new discourse. We
69
Prindle, personal correspondence with the author, email message, 17 November 2012. He describes this
conclusion as the product of his Jewish upbringing intermingling with his training in post-structuralism.
70
See David Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 132 – 161; Daniel Boyarin
"‘Language Inscribed by History on the Bodies of Living Beings’: Midrash and Martyrdom,” Representations 25
(Winter 1989): 139 – 151. The pair of historians of religion has written extensively on midrash; both attempt to
understand the method of interpretation in the light of recent developments in literary theory, while at the same time
showing care to maintain the historical specificity of that method and its tradition. Elsewhere, Carol Bakhos’s
edited volume Current Trends in Midrash (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2006) compiles essays
on a range of methodological and comparative topics in midrash studies, with special attention to the field’s
expansion into social history, women’s studies, and literary theory.
71
Stern, 1988, 155.
72
Ibid., 156.
32
thus see how its intertextuality served both the revolutionary and conservative needs of
the midrash and its authors, preserving the old wine by pouring it into new bottles.73
Both scholars utilize contemporary literary theory to reevaluate midrashic exegesis while
preserving its specificity. Though rabbinical “authors would certainly not have recognized our
critical terminology and concepts,” the new theorization of midrash “enables us to read both the
text and its commentary in a stronger mode—not as the arbitrary and awkward combination of
documents, but as the representation of ambivalence.”74 The intention Stern and Boyarin share,
then, is to define midrashic intertextuality as a combinatorial strategy of safeguarding textual and
social stability during a specific period of social crisis.
In like fashion, lacking so many factual details about the murdered subjects of Prindle’s
portraits, viewers must work with available fragments, namely, a physical site and a short,
descriptive caption. The photograph and caption define certain parameters, but the gaps between
these fragments guarantee a broad set of potential interpretations, encouraging more nuanced
emotional and intellectual responses. In midrashic practice, the material of the historical
document is isolated from its initial context, reinterpreted, and recombined in order to ensure
lasting relevance. Similarly, Prindle’s tactic is to pluck material from a fixed context to reuse as
fragments for commentary and interpretation. Extracting media images from their contexts,
Field comparably reimagines bygone matter as opportunities for interrogation in the present.
Both midrashic strategies seek to instill within the viewer refined practices of memory-making.
Making Memory Matter
Memory, as Holocaust scholar Oren Baruch Stier terms it, is a “social phenomenon built
out of the material bequeathed by history;” history attends to “events in the past and their
73
74
Boyarin, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Intertextuality and Midrash,” Poetics Today 8 (1987): 555.
Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 49.
33
meaning for the present,” and memory “involves the impact of the events of the past and their
meaning in the present—the ways the past becomes a present reality.”75 Memory is a concern,
both personal and collective, for the past and its continuing presence, and functions to shape
individual and social identity. On the other hand, for historian Amos Funkenstein, the essence of
historical consciousness lies “in the attempt to understand the past and to give it meaning.”76 For
Funkenstein, “the more the use of the contents, symbols, and structures of collective memory
allows…conscious changes and variations in number, the more complex and less predictable the
story of history becomes.”77 Historical consciousness is therefore a “dynamic heuristic
construct—the degree of creative freedom in the use and interpretation of the contents of
collective memory” that operates as “a developed and organized form” of collective memory.78
Funkenstein thus establishes a dialectic between memory and historical consciousness,
where the use and interpretation of memory’s contents and structures determines the complexity
of the historical account. Naturally, memories are mediated, now more than ever, by technology,
cultural products, and political and social agendas. If, as Andreas Huyssen notes, there is one
certainty in contemplating memory in the twenty-first century, it is that “we cannot discuss
personal, generational, or public memory separately from the enormous influence of the new
media as carriers of all forms of memory.”79 Given Funkenstein’s dialectic, if new media, new
technologies, and advanced capitalism administer practices of memory, what are the consequent
effects on historical consciousness? Do mass culture, virtual media, and sensory saturation
75
Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2003), 2. Emphases in original.
76
Amos Funkenstein, “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,” History and Memory 1 (Spring –
Summer 1989): 12.
77
Ibid., 11.
78
Ibid., 11, 19.
79
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 18.
34
induce a state of collective amnesia and a subsequent contraction of spaces from which to
critically engage the past? How can we distinguish productive memory practices from
problematic ones? And can we participate in that differentiation if we outright reject the
mediating structures and devices in question, nostalgically fancying a lost, more desirable state
of affairs?
Such examples as the Education Center at the Wall and its simplistic representation of
American military history “from Bunker Hill to Baghdad” suggest a moment of crisis. That
brand of memorialization represents a closure of the historical record and an expropriation of the
creative freedom to work and rework the materials and forms of memory; we are asked not to
sojourn to the open space of reflection, not to understand and not to make meaning, but to
descend into the cave for dictation. Viable alternatives are nonetheless conceivable. “Lived
memory,” writes Huyssen, “is active, alive, embodied in the social—that is, in individuals,
families, groups, nations, and regions.”80
Lived memory and technological development, Huyssen continues, are not mutually
exclusive: “[discrimination] and productive remembering are called for, and mass culture and the
virtual media are not inherently irreconcilable with that purpose.”81 New forms of
communication, transportation, and visualization have always impacted human modes of
perception, and nostalgic fixation on illusory pasts is no means of safeguarding criticality,
consciousness, and authenticity in the future. The topic bodies of work illustrate this fact;
neither project would be possible without new media and technologies. Refining memory, then,
depends upon working with the materials and techniques available in the present.
80
81
Huyssen, 2003, 28.
Ibid., 29.
35
Refining memory in this social fashion further depends upon understanding the other
without imposed preconception. Funkenstein’s intent was to “contribute something to the
demystification of collective entities and meanings.”82 In part, the late historian sought through
his work on Jewish history and thought to show that “the Holocaust is neither incomprehensible
nor meaningless….It was, instead, an eminently human event in that it demonstrated those
extremes which only man and his society are capable of doing or suffering.”83 To participate in a
constructive social body, we must demystify the individual and collective other, and this means
we must conceive of new ways to represent ambivalence and emotional nuance. Consider how
Prindle’s ambivalent photographs humanize even homophobic assailants. Shock and gore would
compel us to judge the alleged murders inhuman. Showing mug shots and bloodied murder
weapons would narrow the imagination and stir up hatred in place of melancholic introspection.
Omitting these indices, Prindle empowers the viewer to imagine the network of relations that tie
each killer to a social fabric, instead of thinking of them as monsters in isolation. If we
demystify the villain, we can envision the ideological and social frameworks that produce such
prejudicial violence. We can then think about these deaths in terms of their determination by the
larger systems of state and social forces that arrange themselves not as viable means of
producing better communities, but as forms of power organization that profit when citizens can
no longer approach the other as a human being.
Thus, by complicating the contents of memory and history, melancholic reflection can
raise consciousness and build communities. Engaging the viewer in the labor of melancholy,
Field and Prindle reimagine remnants as opportunities for discourse, understanding, and action.
Open discourses, their melancholic tactics function as sources of speech and participation. They
82
83
Funkenstein, 1989, 22.
Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 337.
36
offer a kind of productive acceptance, contrasting nostalgic fixation on delusory notions of the
past. Both bodies of work engage the new technologies, media, and agendas that comprise the
contemporary landscape, and search for ways to reconfigure ruinous matter. Finally, like Lin’s
black Wall, the melancholic projects of Field and Prindle are means of registering ambivalence
in social and political situations that otherwise demand submission to ideological battle lines.
IV.
Pinning Down Loss: Jonathan Field’s Maxwell’s Demon
Human actions were deprived of all value. Something new arose: an empty
world…For those who looked deeper saw the scene of their existence as a
rubbish heap of partial, inauthentic actions.84
Field, an art historian, theorist and artist by training, engages in a critical project that
resists the erosion of historical thinking into the mere accumulation of information by
smartphones, cable news talking heads, and other icons of cutting-edge technology and mass
media. Responding to an economically determined visual culture and the symbolic order it
imposes, he ritualistically penetrates that consumer culture’s uncompromising conventions and
compulsions; to this effect his practice is most literal. Puncturing and destroying the internetappropriated image attached to the black support, his apotropaic, piercing gestures interrupt those
pilfered images’ purposes: to look good, to sell, to control, and to deceive. His works are thus a
call to action to take perceptual initiative, to seek out real situations and relations, and to commit
to a world beyond fatalistic assent.
An emphasis on labor links the considerable effort required to create knowledge from the
flux of events with his own rigorous practice on one hand and the work expected of his viewers
on the other. Self-consciously selecting, abstracting, and electing to withhold information about
84
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1977),
138 – 39. Published in German as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928).
37
depicted events and personages (e.g., from his titles), Field offers viewers a frustrating lack of
specificity that impels them to transgress the static fixation that pop news and culture enforce.
He equips audiences with visual fragments that prompt them to test out the interaction between
text and image, casting into doubt the stabilities of the word and the image and the systems of
communication they inhabit.
From Depression to Dolce & Gabbana
His most successful works take as their subject matter images with complicated back
stories. For instance, in The Dance (2012, Fig. 9), he plucks a Vanity Fair fashion photograph
featuring au courant celebrities posed to imitate a scene from the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t
They? (1969). The film, directed by Sydney Pollack, is itself based on Horace McCoy’s 1935
novel about the desperation of the Depression-era 1930s.85 Set at the climax of a weeks-long
dance marathon, the Vanity Fair photograph features four couples arranged across the
foreground in poses that melodramatically convey the figures' extreme exhaustion, with
onlookers cheering from bleachers in the background (Fig. 10). To copy the image, Field
inserted several thousand steel pins into a rich, black velvet ground, the allure of which
complements the ostensibly glamorous subject matter (celebrities clad in designer garb). When
bolted together and hung on the gallery wall, the work's four individual panels add up to sizeable
85
The Vanity Fair photograph appeared in the “Ain't We Got Style” feature in August 2009, advertising garments
by top labels. See the portfolio on the magazine's website, url =
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/08/30S-fashion-portfolio200908#slide=1 (accessed 5 April 2012).
The film and novel are They Shoot Horses Don't They?, directed by Sydney Pollack (United States: Cinema
Releasing Corporation, 1969) and Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses Don't They? (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1935). A blurb accompanying the Vanity Fair photograph, irksome in its sincerity, reads, “As depressing
Depression films go, Sydney Pollack’s 1969 opus takes the stale biscuit. Heart attacks, broken dreams, and
breakdowns on the dance floor as ‘30s dance-marathon participants down on their luck compete for prize money.
Rather like a reality show without the chance of 'Page Six' celebrity. Here, our cast gives their thespian all, in
everything from D&G to Brioni.”
38
dimensions (94” x 74”), spanning the viewer's visual field and thereby immersing her within the
scene.
Ridiculous in its bravado, Field’s large, glimmering composition stands in as the ghost of
a long-dead reality. Coming in and out of focus as the viewer approaches, The Dance calls to
mind pixilation, radioactivity and ephemerality, and imparts a sense of the spectral image’s
fragility.86 This fragility eulogizes the Great Depression's unrecoverable reality, irrevocably
concealed as it is by precessions of mediation that culminate in what amounts to an
advertisement for designer labels Brioni and Dolce & Gabbana. The indifferent figures seem to
relish their elusiveness, mocking the viewer's inability to access that decayed reality. The deep,
black negative spaces that litter the composition, voids accentuated by the pins' gaudy twinkle,
draw the beholder beyond those constellations of reflected light that form the image, suspending
its unity. Figures and forms surrender to the impenetrable, plush black velvet, just as our words
and images become clichés, evaporate, and disperse into a cloud of entropic black noise. There
is nothing beyond the dancers but boundless black, and the elegy’s critical force emanates from
that black ground. The Dance is not a memorial to the clichéd image, but to the human person
herself, clad as she is, like the work’s figures, in the diamond dust of commodity images. Field
strips away those configurations of assembled advertisement-identities without positing a prior,
ready-made subject or sociality; black is the substrate that supports the pins, and emptiness
sleeps beneath the costumes of overcapitalized humanity.
86
These key words are taken from Field’s statement for the series Maxwell’s Demon [End Time] as it appears in the
associated catalog Maxwell’s Demon (Savannah, GA: Jonathan Field, 2010).
39
Presidential Paintings
Occasionally, his critical intervention adopts an unambiguous political dimension. The
companion works The Slipper Tongue (after W.H.D Koerner), 2008, and Hope (after George
Frederic Watts), 2009, recreate two extant oil paintings (Figs. 11 and 12).87 Both works, like
The Dance, are comprised by four panels of velvet on board that, when bolted together, total 94”
x 74”; The Slipper Tongue is oriented horizontally and Hope vertically. The former appropriates
W.H.D. Koerner’s A Charge to Keep (c. 1916), a depiction of a cowboy racing up a soft wooded
incline upon his steed that gained notoriety as President George W. Bush’s favorite painting (Fig.
13). Bush evidently identified so strongly with the lead horseman in terms of physical
appearance and cowboy bravado that he titled his official memoir after the painting and posed
before the painting in his official presidential portrait.88 By January 2008, however, Scott
Horton reported that Bush had comically misinterpreted the piece.89 The horseman, not at all the
righteous evangelist Bush believed him to be, was apparently a horse thief fleeing from a lynch
mob in Nebraska. Harper wrote that the image was initially captioned Had His Start Been
87
For a thorough analysis of The Slipper Tongue and Hope see Alexandria Pierce, “Elegiac Documents: Jonathan
Field Pins Down the Presidents’ Favorite Paintings,” Art Papers 33 (March/April 2009).
88
George W. Bush and Karen Hughes, A Charge to Keep (New York: Harper Collins, 1999). The portrait was
painted by John Howard Sanden and unveiled at the White House on 31 May 2012. Bush acquired the painting on
loan from his longtime friends Joe and Jan O’Neill shortly after becoming the 46 th Governor of Texas in 1995. Bush
sent a memorandum to his staff after hanging the painting in the Texas governor’s mansion: “I thought I would share
with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a
look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail.
This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One
greater than ourselves.”
89
Scott Horton, “The Illustrated President,” Harper’s Magazine, 24 January 2008,
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002237 (accessed 25 April 2012). The information spread rapidly in
2008, when Horton published his piece, and credit was initially given to Jacob Weisberg’s The Bush Tragedy (New
York: Random House, 2008), the first chapter of which was first published in The New York Times, 1 February
2008, url = http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/books/chapters/1st-chapter-bush-tragedy.html (accessed 28 April
2012). However, at least three sources predate Horton and Weisberg: Sidney Blumenthal, “From Norman
Rockwell to Abu Ghraib,” Salon, 26 April 2007, url = http://www.salon.com/2007/04/26/torture_policy/ (accessed
28 April 2012); Jonathan Hutson, “Horseshit! Bush and the Christian Cowboy,” Talk to Action, 12 May 2006, url =
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/12/7393/57216 (accessed 28 April 2012); and Michael Horner, “The
Roundup,” Milwaukee World, 23 February 2004.
40
Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught, that it originally illustrated “The
Slipper Tongue,” a Western short story by William J. Neidig about a criminal’s capture and
escape, and that it only subsequently reappeared in 1918 under the new title A Charge to Keep
after a Christian hymn written in 1762 by Charles Wesley.90 However, investigation of Neidig's
short story reveals that the image, while vaguely similar in composition, is not the painting that
would hang in the Oval Office during the Bush presidency, which adds an additional layer to the
threads of decaying meaning Field's art registers (Fig. 14).
Field executed the reproduction after the apparent misinterpretation became public
knowledge. Making the most of the numerous links Bush has forged between his political
philosophy and A Charge to Keep, Field compares the thief and his escape to the role the Bush
ideology played in instigating and prolonging the Iraq War. Even if A Charge to Keep was not
originally intended to represent a horse thief in flight as the popular account holds, Bush still
took it to signify an evangelizing Methodist cowboy, which remains a problematic symbolization
of the presidency and of American foreign policy. A parody of state powers enveloped in a
study of the systemic tendency toward disorder thus lends the work a potent criticality. The
convoluted history of the Koerner painting and its misinterpretations therefore renders The
Slipper Tongue among Field’s most successful works. Deftly executed variation in pin density,
plunging negative space in the left panels, and the original work’s dynamic composition
reinforce its appeal.
90
William J. Neidig, “The Slipper Tongue,” The Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1916. The image was reused the
following year for the George Patullo story titled, "Ways That Are Dark,” The Saturday Evening Post, 14 April
1917. Horton claimed it acquired the title A Charge to Keep after being reprinted to illustrate Ben Ames Williams’s
"A Charge To Keep," published in Country Gentleman, 1918.
41
The associated piece Hope is based on President Barack Obama’s favorite painting of the
same title completed by George Frederic Watts in 1886 (Fig. 15). 91 The symbolist painting
presents a woman atop a globe, hunched over, blindfolded, and embracing a one-stringed
wooden lyre. The ethereal color palate, absence of iconography traditionally associated with
hope, and the figure’s languid pose seemingly depict despondency rather than hope. Paul
Barlow, in a 2004 text written for the Tate Britain exhibition, The Symbolic Paintings of G.F.
Watts, notes that the “isolated, blindfolded and barefoot woman seems, despite the title, to be on
the edge of despair. This is not the ‘sure and certain hope’ of Christian tradition.”92 Her lyre's
one unbroken string is “her only hope of music,” and “seems as likely to snap as to sound.”93
The original work remains in Watts’s native United Kingdom at the Tate National
Gallery, but the artist donated a copy painted in the same year to the United States, where it was
hung in the White House during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency.94 President Obama first
encountered the painting through a sermon delivered by the controversial Reverend Jeremiah
Wright in 1990.95 Influenced by Wright’s sermon and his reading of the painting, the president
mentioned the work in his first book, Dreams from My Father (1995). Later, he borrowed the
91
Watts executed two versions of the paintings in 1886; the first version is now held in a private collection and was
exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery the year it was completed. The second, softer version leaves out the star that
appears at the top of the first version and was exhibited at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and
Albert Museum) and at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, in 1889. Watts presented the second version to the Tate
Museum in 1897 (reference number N01640). See the Tate’s entry on Hope: Frances Fowle, “George Frederic
Watts and assistants, Hope,1886,” December 2000, url = http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/watts-hopen01640/text-summary (accessed 30 April 2012).
92
Paul Barlow, “Paul Barlow looks at George Frederic Watts’s Hope,” 1 September 2004,
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/where-theres-life-theres, accessed 20 January 2013.
93
Ibid.
94
Ben Quinn, “A painting called ‘Hope’ wins fans as Barack Obama’s inspiration: A London museum attracts
tourists with the artwork that inspired the famous phrase, ‘audacity of hope.’” November 28, 2008,
http://www.csmoniter.com/2008/1128/po4s02-woeu.html (accessed 20 January 2013).
95
The sermon was transcribed and posted at PreachingToday.com, but has since been removed. It was subsequently
published on a number of internet blogs. In any case, the version posted on PreachingToday.com was likely an
incomplete version of the original sermon, and there is no agreement as to which version of the sermon is the one
President Obama actually heard. An extended version with more political overtones appears in Wright’s What
Makes You So Strong?: Sermons of Joy and Strength from Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., Jini Kilgore Ross, ed. (Valley
Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1993).
42
preacher’s phrase, “audacity of hope,” titling his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote
address and his second book, published in 2006, after the line from Wright’s sermon.96 These
Obama-penned texts elaborate his ambition to repair the nation’s broken political system, and as
such, unambiguously relate to the doubt-ridden, restrained hope of the girl in Watt’s painting.
Field’s reproduction of the painting translates the figure’s displeasing pose, blindfold
and, though barely perceptible, her one-stringed lyre. However, owing to the nature of his
medium, the coloration that informed the reception of the original work is of course absent,
which detracts from the image’s decidedly melancholic tone. Moreover, the static figure and
composition, when rendered in pins, do not compensate for the tonal information lost due to the
absence of the original work’s misty browns, greens, and blues. While some of Watts’s
contemporaries thought “despair” a more appropriate title, Barlow discusses in his reading of the
painting its history of compelling moral contemplation, the universality of its vocabulary, and its
strong applicability to the doubt-ridden Victorian religious milieu.97 Reverend Wright’s coopting of the work probably stretches its intended meaning, but not nearly to the degree that
Bush and others misunderstood A Charge to Keep. And Watts’s vision of a vulnerable,
pessimistic shade of hope taking shape within uncertain conditions certainly retains in the
present its appeal to ordinary individuals outside the fine art sphere. The image’s back story is
thus less provocative than that of The Slipper Tongue, and though the work seems to allude to the
naiveté of Obama’s position, its critical potential is restrained in comparison to other selections
from Field’s oeuvre. Thought of in tandem as a project of recording history, the two presidential
96
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995),
subsequently published in paperback in 2004 by Three Rivers Press, New York; Obama, “The Audacity of Hope,”
Keynote Address delivered at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, FleetCenter (now the TD Garden), Boston,
MA, 27 July 2004; Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York:
Random House Large Print in association with Crown Publishers, 2006).
97
Barlow, “Paul Barlow Looks at George Frederic Watts’s Hope,” 2004.
43
works do register a transition in American political dispositions from Bush’s hyper-masculine
bravado to the feminine imagery of Obama’s lyre player.98 As such, the pair clarifies the manner
in which the roles of the artist and historian are conflated, affirmed, and questioned in Field's art.
Sports Stars: Breaking Down American Myth
Field’s work since The Dance has shifted from overt political commentary to an
interrogation of popular media images. Specifically, his recent artworks dismantle the mythic
American sports hero. In November 2012, he completed Flagbearers, a reproduced image of
four Olympic athletes standing proudly upon a white medal podium brandishing the American
flag (Fig. 16). The leftmost figure, swimmer Ryan Lochte, wields the flagpole, decathlete Bryan
Clay and rower Giuseppe Lanzone stand upon the podium’s highest tier, and soccer defender
Heather Mitts takers her place on the silver medal tier at right. Ralph Lauren Corporation
released the original photograph on 10 July 2012, unveiling its design for the American opening
ceremony uniform at the 2012 London Olympics (Fig. 17).99 Inspired by Navy uniforms, the
design incorporates Ralph Lauren’s preppie, classic Americana aesthetic.
In the days after releasing the product image, Ralph Lauren came under fire for
manufacturing the uniforms in China. By 16 June 2012, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and
eleven cosponsors introduced the Team USA Made in America Act of 2012; the next day,
Representative Daniel Lipinski (D-IL) and two cosponsors introduced the American Clothing for
98
This is the salient point in Pierce’s reading of the two works.
This marked the third occasion Ralph Lauren designed American Olympic uniforms; the other occasions were the
2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, and the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. See Hannah
Elliott, “Ralph Lauren Unveils Opening Ceremony Uniforms for London Olympics, Forbes, 10 July 2012, url =
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2012/07/10/ralph-lauren-unveils-opening-ceremony-uniforms-for-londonolympics/ (accessed 2 April 2013); Andrea Mandell, “First look: Olympians get prepped in style by Ralph Lauren,”
USA Today, 10 July 2012, url = http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/fashion/story/2012-07-10/RalphLauren-Olympics/56119200/1 (accessed 2 April 2013); and Feifei Sun, “Ralph Lauren’s U.S. Olympic Opening
Ceremony Uniforms,” Time, 11 July 2012, url = http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/11/ralph-laurens-u-s-olympicopening-ceremony-uniforms/ (accessed 2 April 2013).
99
44
American Olympians Act to the House of Representatives.100 Aside from public outrage over
their production overseas, the uniforms’ design caught additional flak for their obvious
militaristic references.101 In sum, the controversies over the uniform’s manufacture and design
revealed much about the statuses of patriotism, globalized means of production, and
aestheticized militarism in the American public psyche.
Specifically, the uniform debates
demonstrated that American policy makers are quick to cash in on the political capital garnered
from reinforcing the misreading of US and China economic relations as competitive rather than
collaborative. Additionally, they indicated the degree to which the Olympic Games, or at least
their representations, function to brand, market, and profit from national and corporate identities,
rather than as opportunities for international competitive excellence.
The public persona of Ryan Lochte, the most recognizable of the uniform models, lends
further interest to the image Field selected for reproduction.102 During the London games,
Lochte could be seen sporting fluorescent clothing and accessories, custom-made sneakers with
his name on the soles, and diamond-studded US flag grills. The eleven-time Olympic medalist
explained his unique style in a video produced by Speedo, one of his sponsors: “[all] the stuff
that I do, like, the crazy shoes I wear—like the grills I wear on the podium, the crazy shoes, all
that crazy stuff—like, rock star.”103 Endorsement deals with Speedo, Mutual of Omaha, Gillette,
Gatorade, Proctor and Gamble, Ralph Lauren, Nissan, and AT&T earned Lochte a reported $2.3
100
See Team USA Made in America Act of 2012, S.3387, 112th Congress (2011 – 2012), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgibin/bdquery/z?d112:s.3387: (accessed 3 April 2013); American Clothing for American Olympians Act, H.R. 6132,
112th Congress (2011 – 2012), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR06132: (accessed 3 April 2013).
Both bills remain in committee at time of writing.
101
Paul Achter, “Is Team USA’s militaristic uniform a problem?,” CNN, 28 July 2012, url =
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/27/opinion/achter-olympic-uniforms (accessed 3 April 2013).
102
Although, it should be noted, Field was not aware who Lochte was when he began making the work.
103
Angela Riechers, “What’s the Deal with Ryan Lochte’s Hip-Hop Tropical Frat-Boy Wardrobe?,” The Atlantic, 1
August 2012, url = http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/whats-the-deal-with-ryan-lochteship-hop-tropical-frat-boy-wardrobe/260618/ (accessed 3 April 2013).
45
million in 2011 – 12, and in June 2012 he became the fourth male to grace the cover of Vogue.104
After trademarking the phrase “jeah” in August 2012, Lochte began filming the six-episode
reality television series, “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?,” which premiered on the E! network in
April 2013.105
No longer the mere world record-setting athlete he once was, Lochte has become
archetypical of style choices designed to fabricate a marketable public identity. Clad in
commodity images, he intensifies the tension present in the Ralph Lauren advertising photograph
between branding and the labor of sport at the highest level of competition. On the one hand, the
four athletes are models of dedication, tenacity, and endurance. On the other, they model a
hackneyed, militarized conception of the United States stamped with massive and garish Polo
Ralph Lauren insignias. Field’s reproduction employs this tension to consider the effects of
hyper-commidification on the reality of sport: does athletic excellence function as a means of
achieving fame and multi-million dollar endorsement deals, or is it a good in itself? Do the
spectacles of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies detract from the real labor of over 10,000
mostly anonymous athletes? What about those ten Olympians or so whom popular media deem
beautiful, inspirational, or tragic enough to warrant constant coverage? Do glitter shoes and
diamond mouthwear breakdown the meaning of lifelong, laborious training?
104
Patrick, Rishe, “Ryan Lochte Swims Towards Larger Endorsements with 400 IM Gold Medal at 2012 London
Olympics,” Forbes, 28 July 2012, url = http://www.forbes.com/sites/prishe/2012/07/28/ryan-lochte-swims-towardslarger-endorsements-with-400-im-gold-medal-at-2012-london-olympics/ (accessed 3 April 2013); Vogue, June
2012, Annie Leibovitz, photographer.
105
Darren Rovell, “Ryan Lochte Trademarks ‘Jeah,’” ESPN, 17 August 2012, url =
http://espn.go.com/olympics/swimming/story/_/id/8279078/filing-shows-ryan-lochte-trademarked-phrase-jeah
(accessed 3 April 2013); John Boone, “Ryan Lochte Reality Series Coming to E!,” E! Online, url =
http://www.eonline.com/news/376257/ryan-lochte-reality-series-coming-to-e-so-what-would-ryan-lochte-do-hereare-a-few-predictions (accessed 3 April 2013). The New York Post reported in April that Lochte’s stated ambition is
to be the next Kim Kardashian; see “Ryan Lochte wants to be the next Kim Kardashian, New York Post, 4 April
2013, url = http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/ryan_lochte_wants_to_be_the_next_iG3gS8d0GSo04PF4AXc5kJ
(accessed 4 April 2013).
46
Presently in production, Field’s latest image, with the working title Lance, again
incorporates the sports star motif in a four-panel, steel pin copy (Fig. 18). A larger than life
Lance Armstrong atop a bicycle dominates the left panels and, with determined eyes heroically
fixed on a distant finish line, threatens to peddle through the image’s surface. Trailing behind, a
second racer occupies much of the right panels. Spectators are visible behind Armstrong in the
lower left quadrant, and distant mountains in the background anchor the composition.
Structurally, the image recalls The Slipper Tongue’s dynamic composition. Both works present a
three-fourths view of a central figure upon a vehicle of motion (be it a horse or a bicycle) with
secondary figures in pursuit and mountains in the distance.
Continuities in subject matter further link the two works. Former president Bush mistook
Koerner's central figure for a true American hero but, if not a horse thief racing off with his
plunder, he was a hyper-masculine, evangelical cowboy that became a symbol for thoughtless
American foreign policy during the Bush presidency. Lance Armstrong was a living symbol of
survival and a contemporary American hero by all accounts until the United States Anti-Doping
Agency and Union Cycliste Internationale banned him from cycling and stripped him of his
seven Tour de France titles in August 2012 for allegedly using and trafficking performance
enhancing drugs.106 Mistaken for heroes, the pair of figures symbolizes lost ideals: The Slipper
Tongue exposes the breakdown of the intrepid, moral American hero image, and Lance traces the
disintegration of the audacious image that offered hope to millions. Indeed, heroes abound in
Field’s work. Constructing a typology of American myth, Field draws the cowboys, Olympians,
soldiers, and celebrities in his images from their mythological framework. We realize, given that
106
“Lance Armstrong Receives Lifetime Ban And Disqualification Of Competitive Results For Doping Violations
Stemming From His Involvement In The United States Postal Service Pro-Cycling Team Doping Conspiracy,”
United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), 24 August 2012, url = http://www.usada.org/media/sanctionarmstrong8242012 (accessed 4 April 2013).
47
new distance, that those heroes, beliefs, and behaviors are not absolute, natural phenomena, but
are cultural constructs etched over time and more similar in form to the pin constellations than to
the flat, instantly produced images that flood our visual world.
Unlike those mass images, Field’s handmade copies take months to produce, and his
medium translates that effort, evoking a protracted sense of time. A newfound patience permits
us to carefully read the image between the lines, or between the pins, accessing subtext otherwise
lost. Weaving these subtextual discourses into a consistent body of work, Field registers a
network of political, economic, and social realities in a critical history of the twenty-first
century’s first decade. Over ten years, he has developed and honed a medium, defining its logic
of organizing and working through information. Increasing layers of subtext and steel pins mark
out an interstitial space where the fragmented components of Field’s subject matter enter into
discourse with the viewer. Executed during an era of information saturation and an attendant
loss of understanding, Maxwell’s Demon, therefore, recalls Kristeva’s formulation of melancholy
as a constructive discourse that sets imagination into motion. Provoking reflection, Field’s
works resist the flatness of the contemporary imagination.
V.
“All Flesh is Grass:” Paul Baker Prindle’s Mementi Mori
By exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera,
the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which
rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and
unexpected field of action.107
Prindle’s work to date can be seen as an enduring test of the mechanics of visual and
textual communication that has resulted in a well-defined artistic strategy of interrogating
107
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936) in Illuminations, 218. The
section title cites Isaiah 40:6 and 1 Peter 1:24, a well-known biblical passage that suggests mortality in keeping with
the memento mori genre. Mementi mori are artistic or symbolic reminders of death's inevitability.
48
memory, photographic representation, and a physical site’s capacity to preserve an event. An
undergraduate education in art history motivated this development; encounters with poststructuralism in particular engendered the artist’s fascination with the functions and failures of
passing information. Since the end of his MFA education at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, the large-format color photograph has supplied an almost exclusive technical support
for his practice. This choice of medium, however, is far from an unproblematic rehearsal of
photography’s ability to mimetically represent. Rather, Prindle’s photographs frustrate the
medium, exposing its inability to articulate the complex tapestry of subjects and settings.
Vanishing Figure
Two prior series laid the experimental ground that produced Mementi Mori. A group of
photographs exhibited under the title Proscenium (2008) generates phenomenological
experiences out of amassed images and provocative figures. Neon signage, elaborate light
fixtures, and dark corners fit only for clandestine activities comprise half the subject matter of
this series and establish a specific, exotic physical space. Sensuously lit shirtless men with
suggestive eyes and poses add personages to the space, unambiguously defining it as a gay
nightclub. The figures and objects offer themselves to the viewer for integration into narratives,
despite the absence of any factual information (e.g., the venue’s name, its floor plan or layout,
city location, the names of the shirtless men, and so on) that might color the viewer’s constructed
experience of the space.
The figure disappeared altogether in Prindle’s subsequent work. In Gloria, for example,
anthropology meets titillation and taboo in a series of photographs of gay cruising grounds.
Finely focused close-ups of used condoms and discarded wrappers appear alongside images of
tight-fitting blue underwear torn off and abandoned during secret meetings. Here, Prindle
49
explores an interest in location by testing the genre of landscape photography and its ability to
register how individuals and cultural groups inhabit their spaces. Cataloging this constructive
process through discarded traces, his aim is for the photographs to function as portraits that index
the absent men and their illicit activities. If post-structuralist theory and related discourses of the
last four decades have dismantled the notion of the centered, autonomous subject, then classical
portraiture’s conventions fail to access the human, substituting a contrived avatar for the
dynamic processes of subject formation boiling beneath the veneer of composure.
This frustration with portraiture and an iterative development of artistic methods, in
tandem with a personal experience of traumatic memory loss due to a near-fatal accident,
generated the Mementi Mori series. Tallying near sixty to date, these photographs mark the sites
of brutal homophobic murders across the continental United States. Often dismembered,
tortured or otherwise maimed, the victims of these homophobic attacks frequently had sex with
or made advances toward their murderers. Cases of this sort, rich with intrigue, beg to be
imaged: a man, self-identifying as heterosexual, takes on another man in a car or in the woods,
finishes and, pierced by shame and awash in homophobia’s pall, destroys his temporary lover,
aching to thereby destroy his own tendency to succumb to forbidden temptation. Thus, the
attacks, particularly when preceded by moments of sexual climax, conflate presymbolic
experiences of sexual gratification, humiliation, and terror.
Prindle’s images record none of this drama. Instead, he photographs the traumatic sites
as they are after time’s passage has erased any memory of the event. Often enough, if not utterly
banal, these locations prove to be fairly pleasant, and thus initially appear to be occasions for
detached aesthetic enjoyment. When exhibited, nine to fifteen selected images, typically without
descriptive labels, hang unframed on gallery walls, a decision that accentuates the photographs'
50
materiality. Withholding at first any information about the images, Prindle invites his viewers to
amble from picture to picture, disinterestedly contemplating the ostensibly ordinary sites.
Viewers gain access to the pictures’ titles—quotations from police reports or eyewitness
testimonies—after such an initial walk-through, and only then are they compelled to reconstruct
the sites’ horrors on their own terms. This transformational effect is impressive: formerly
harmless pictures stimulate a cascade of images and associations. The beholder envisages the
attacks with his available visual and emotional vocabularies, effectively becoming image-maker.
Prompting deliberate reflection, this transformation reveals the viewer’s presumptions and tests
his ability to envision. Self-consciously noticing his own expectations of what violence, victim,
and attacker look like, the viewer examines the perceptual conventions that fashion his
interaction with the world.
The photographs, even when integrated with their textual counterparts, lack an
identifiable point of view. The seeming neutrality of the images’ documentary-photographic feel
does jar with the text selected as their titles, which, despite the presumed objectivity of their
investigative sources, tend to evoke sensational, horrible violence. Identification with victims is
thus the expected response, but the tension sustained between the photograph’s banal neutrality
and its horrific caption lends the viewer a considerable degree of mobility. The position of the
victim, in other words, is far from forced upon viewers, a fact that complicates the works’
reception and contributes to their efficacy. A viewer with homophobic prejudices might judge
an attacker’s actions justifiable when “defending” himself from the advancements of another
man. Implicitly, however, the photographs and excerpted texts ask if torture and slaughter are
appropriate responses to unsolicited sexual propositions. Calling audiences to reimagine the
human lives exterminated, Prindle’s works dismantle that hollow attempt to justify murder.
51
In practical terms then, Mementi Mori maintains a viable activist dimension. Prindle’s
concerns, however, are more fundamental than gay rights activism (although he accepts this facet
of his work). He probes time’s passage, unreliable memory, and significant physical spaces
sanitized by passing time’s indifference; in the most succinct terms, his work is about loss. The
call to reestablish the memory of each victim can only end in failure, and through that failure,
Prindle asks how the photograph functions as a vehicle of meaning production. His point of
departure lies in the photograph’s structural dependence on the caption, with this dependence
operating as a wedge with which Prindle breaks the medium apart. The fragments—photograph,
caption, exhibition space, and viewer—discursively rearticulate themselves as a conceptual
medium through which the viewer participates in the reconstruction of the traumatic event.
Rough Sex and Gay Panic
This strategy’s best-known precedent is Joel Sternfeld’s series On this Site: Landscape in
Memoriam (1997).108 Sternfeld’s (b. 1944) photographic work routinely explores the symbiotic
interactions between landscape and figure, probing how people make their environments and, in
turn, how environments make people. With antecedents in 1960s social-landscape photography,
Sternfeld’s images locate physical spaces as material manifestations of social life.109 The
photographs of On this Site record seemingly banal places that accompanying texts identify as
108
The series of photographs was published in Joel Sternfeld, On this Site, rev. ed. (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl
Publishers, 2012). First published as On this Site: Landscape in Memoriam in 1996.
109
Lee Friedlander coined “social-landscape photography” in 1963 to describe his photographic work. The term
was subsequently associated with the work of Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, Diane Arbus, Duane Michals, and
Bruce Davidson. Social landscape refers to a fusion of traditional documentary and landscape photography through
a new approach to photographic picture making. The new approach was defined by the urge to examine things as
they are, “to call attention to inconsequential events and details…and so to invest these things with significance…as
a kind of underplayed activism,” (Chahroudi, 1987, 3). See Martha Chahroudi, “Twelve Photographers Look at
Us,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 83 (Spring 1987): 1, 3 – 31.
52
the sites of important or gruesome events. The body of work investigates how the forces that
produce those disastrous events regulate their mourning and commemoration.
In May 1993, Sternfeld made the first photograph of the series when he visited the spot in
New York City’s Central Park where the body of Jennifer Dawn Levin was found on 26 August
1986 (Fig. 19).110 On the night of the murder, Levin was seen at the nearby bar Dorrian’s Red
Hand with Robert E Chambers, Jr. Apparently made soon after dawn, the photograph focuses on
an uncentered tree, its thick trunk awash in morning light and its sprawling branches framing the
pocket of space where, presumably, the eighteen-year old Levin’s strangled and half-clothed
body once laid. A highly-publicized trial portrayed Levin as a promiscuous girl who went out to
bars looking for “rough sex” and paid for her sexual deviance with her life.111 The “rough sex
defense” resulted in a plea bargain after a two-year trial; Chambers was convicted of
manslaughter in the first degree instead of murder in the second degree, and served fifteen years
for the crime. Shortly after the trial, the tabloid television news program “A Current Affair”
released home video footage of Chambers allegedly cavorting with girls clad in lingerie and
110
The photograph is reproduced in Sternfeld's book On this Site, 41. The caption reads,
"Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers were seen leaving Dorrian's Red Hand, an Upper East Side
bar, at 4:30 a.m. on August 26, 1986. Her body was found beneath this crab apple tree in Central
Park at 6:15 a.m. that same morning.
An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled. She was eighteen years old when she died.
Chambers, who was nineteen at the time of the crime, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
111
Selwyn Raab, “Lawyer Weighs Plea of Insanity in Park Slaying,” New York Times, 30 August 1986, url=
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/30/nyregion/lawyer-weighs-plea-of-insanity-in-park-slaying.html (accessed 28
March 2013). See also Eric Konigsberg, “Staying Loyal to a Killer, From His Trial to Their Arrest,” The New York
Times, 4 November2007, url =
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/nyregion/04chambers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 28 March 2013);
“We Remember: Preppy Killer Robert Chambers,” Gotham City Insider, 23 October 2007, url =
http://www.gothamcityinsider.com/search?q=In+more+than+8%2C000+cases+of+reported+assaults+in+the+last+1
0+years%2C+this+is+the+first+in+which+a+male+reported+being+sexually+assaulted+by+a+female (accessed 28
March 2013).
53
making jokes about strangulation as the trial was in full swing. Chambers, who would become
known as the “Preppie Killer,” was free on bond throughout the trial.
Contextual and formal similarities exist between this photograph and an example from
Mementi Mori. Made in 2009 as a memorial to Aaron Hall of Crothersville, IN, Prindle's image
is of a large tree in full daylight positioned left of center with branches shading ground covered
by thinning grass but clear of excess shrubbery (Fig. 20). The image’s caption reads, “The
beatings included repeated pummelings with fists and boots and dragging Hall down a wooden
staircase by his feet as ‘his head bounced down all of the steps,’ in one of the accused’s words.
He died naked and alone, in a field, where he had crawled after his killers dumped his body in a
roadside ditch.” The incident reportedly began in April 2007 when Hall was drinking with
Coleman King and Garrett Gray and made a pass at them. After beating Hall and dumping him
in a field, the men returned two days later, wrapped the body in a tarp and hid it in a garage.112
Incidentally, Gray was the son of the county coroner, and it was in the coroner’s garage that they
hid the body.
Prindle encountered some difficulty when he arrived in Crothersville to photograph the
site and research the case. The artist recounts his experience with local law enforcement:
So I go to this town, it’s a 2-cop town and it’s not even incorporated and it’s in Southern
Indiana on the Kentucky border. I had called that morning and the dispatcher had said
“Sure, honey come on down,” and she was as sweet as sugar and I get there and the
police officer said “I ain’t giving you shit...if you want information you can go to the
112
A third man, James Hendricks, reportedly helped the two hide the body. Allegedly, Hendricks wanted to return
to the scene to recover a camouflage jacket he liked that belonged to the victim. In July 2008, Hendricks was
sentenced to a four year prison sentence after being found guilty of assisting a criminal. See “In Their Own Words:
Aaron Hall’s Killers Describe the Gruesome Details,” Advance Indiana, 2 May 2007, url =
http://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2007/05/in-their-own-words-aaron-halls-killers.html (accessed 28 March 2013)
and “Hendricks Sentenced to 4 Years in Aaron Hall Killing,” Crothersville Times, 2 July 2008, url =
http://crothersvilletimes.com/?p=300 (accessed 28 March 2013). The Advance Indiana blog is dedicated to the
advancement of equal rights in the State of Indiana. It cites an article in the Crothersville Times that outlined the
probable cause affidavit filed in the Jackson County Circuit Court, posting the following url:
http://www.crothersville.net/times/050207_murder.htm. That link, however, is broken, and it remains difficult to
locate specific mention of the case in established local media.
54
county seat and that’s 60 miles away.” And I say you have to give me that information,
he was like “...we do have to give you that information, but that information is at the
county courthouse and I’m not giving you anything and I don’t want you poking around
here, I don’t want you taking pictures, and I don’t want you here. People want to forget
it.”113
Hall’s murderers eventually plead guilty to manslaughter in January of 2008; with good
behavior, their sentences would amount to fifteen years.114 While the story received ample
national coverage in the blogosphere, local media gave the murder little attention. Subsequent
claims that the men had concocted the story of Hall being gay in order to gain the sympathies of
homophobic rural Indianans further complicated the story.115 By 2009, when Prindle traveled to
Crothersville, local authorities made it clear to the visiting artist that the town’s residents were
eager to forget the murder, lenient prison sentences, and debates over hate crimes and gay rights.
Sternfeld’s and Prindle’s photographs position the landscape in opposition to the
religious, political, and economic structures that determine the practices of commemoration. The
trees’ branches seemingly caress the sites of those gruesome tragedies, imbuing the scenes with a
sense of natural innocence. All the while, growth and weather efface physical records of the
113
Stephen Perkins and Paul Baker Prindle, “An Interview with Paul Baker Prindle,” December, 2010, url =
http://www.paulbakerprindle.com/Paul_Baker_Prindle_Interview.pdf (accessed 2 November 2012), 15. Published in
conjunction with the exhibit Mementi Mori at the Lawton Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, 3 – 31
March 2011.
114
Jon Murray, “Crothersville man pleads guilty in death,” Indy Star, 17 December 2007, url =
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071217/LOCAL/71217055&nclick_check=1 (accessed 28
March 2013). They were sentenced to thirty years, but with good time could be out in fifteen. King, 18, and Gray,
19, would thus be released from prison at the same age Hall was when he was killed (the thirty-five year old Hall
also had a daughter aged ten at the time of the attack. See also “Judge Accepts Hall Killer’s Manslaughter Plea
Agreement,” Advance Indiana, 16 January 2008, url = http://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2008/01/judge-acceptshall-killers-manslaughter.html (accessed 28 March 2013).
115
Gabriel Rotello, “The Gruesome Death of Shorty Hall: Indiana’s Matthew Shepard,” The Huffington Post, 14
June 2007, url =http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gabriel-rotello/the-gruesome-death-of-sho_b_52158.html (accessed
28 March 2013). Coverage that emphasized the murder as a hate crime lost traction after the claims that the
perpetrators might have invented Hall’s homosexuality. Such claims, if indeed true, are perhaps more disturbing
than the alternative: not only do a pair of intoxicated men bludgeon another man to death and create the story of the
victim being gay in order to excuse their crime, but they successfully evade murder charges using the “gay panic”
defense. For limited coverage of the question of Hall’s sexuality, see comments from his brother, Thomas, at
Indiana NBC affiliate WTHR’s archives: Jennie Runevitch, “Crothersville: Victim’s family says murder was ‘hate
crime,’” WTHR Eyewitness News, 12 June 2007, url = http://www.wthr.com/Global/story.asp?S=6433072 (accessed
28 March 2013).
55
events. That organic process of Nature’s reassimilation of the marked site contrasts the
revisionist public mediation of the Levin and Hall cases (and recalls Maya Lin’s vision of a scar
in the earth slowly healing). In both circumstances, defense attorneys and local media depicted
the victims as miscreants who instigated their own awful deaths, and both defenses were
successful insofar as they avoided more severe charges. The “rough sex” and “gay panic”
defenses, together with the problematic public memorialization of the slain Levin and Hall,
therefore demonstrate how authoritative structures determine how historical material is
remembered, forgotten, and rewritten.
The “gay panic” defense made national headlines after the October 1998 murder of
Matthew Shepard in Laramie, WY. Shepard, a twenty-one year old University of Wyoming
student, met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson on the night of 7 October 1998 at the
Fireside Lounge in Laramie. After befriending Shepard, the pair robbed him, beat him with a
.357 magnum, tortured him, and tied him to a fence to die. He was discovered eighteen hours
later in a coma from which he would never awake, and was pronounced dead on 12 October
1998. Against charges of first degree murder, McKinney and Henderson claimed Shepard’s
advances temporarily drove them to insanity, excusing their vicious acts. In November 1999,
Judge Barton Voigt threw out McKinney’s “gay panic” defense, gutting the defense team’s case
for the lesser charge of manslaughter over murder in the first degree. Both twenty-one at the
time of the murder, McKinney and Henderson eventually plead guilty to charges of murder and
kidnapping in order to avoid the death penalty.116
116
See Dave Cullen, “Overruled,” Salon, 28 October 1999, url = http://www.salon.com/1999/10/28/laramie_4/
(accessed 28 March 2013); Cullen, “Quiet Bombshell in Matthew Shepard Trial,” Salon, 1 November 1999, url =
http://www.salon.com/1999/11/01/gay_panic/singleton/ (accessed 28 March 2013); “New Details Emerge in
Matthew Shepard Murder,” 20/20, ABC News, 26 November 2004, url =
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Story?id=277685&page=1#.UVs2u5Ocd8E (accessed 28 March 2013). The last
source, a transcript of the ABC news program 20/20’s coverage of the incident, is controversial. Reporter Elizabeth
56
In 2009, Prindle traveled to Laramie, WY, to photograph the fence (Fig. 21). No public
monument marks the site, and the nearby street names were changed to discourage the mass
numbers of reporters and pilgrims who traveled to Laramie after the attack. Even the original
fence has reportedly been dismantled.117 Prindle’s photograph of the site is unremarkable. The
composition is not nearly as fastidiously planned as other examples from his oeuvre; desert fauna
litter the bottom third of the image, and a lightly clouded blue sky fills the top two-thirds. A
sizeable tree in the foreground dominates nearly all of the left third of the photograph, and a bush
is positioned midground at the image’s center. Beyond the bush at center, a split-rail fence spans
the image, but shrubbery obscures much of its length.
Unlike the examples discussed above, the caption is as underwhelming as the image
itself. Where most of the selected texts communicate sensational violence, the Matthew Shepard
caption is diagnostic. “Matthew’s major injuries upon arrival consisted of hypothermia and a
fracture from behind his head to just in front of the right ear. This has caused bleeding in the
Vargas disclosed her finding that methamphetamine drug abuse (by all three men involved) and robbery were the
attack’s true impetus. In rewriting the murder as a drug related robbery, Vargas ignored Henderson and McKinney’s
defensive tactics, namely the so-called “gay panic” defense. The question is not whether or not McKinney and
Henderson are homophobic. Rather, we must consider the effects of a defense that posits same-sex attraction as
cause for justifiable homicide on our system of criminal justice. Do such defense tactics legitimize prejudicial
tendencies in our legal system? What is the relation between this definition of justifiable homicide, extremist
religious ideology, and prejudicial social norms? Finally, what does the urge to define an event like the Shepard
murder in binary terms say about our information providers? For critical perspectives on the 20/20 coverage, see
Elizabeth Blair, “‘Ten Years Later,’ The Matthew Shepard Story Retold,” NPR, 12 October 2009, url =
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113663235 (accessed 29 March 2013) and Casey Charles,
“Panic in The Project : Critical Queer Studies and The Matthew Shepard Murder,” Law and Literature 18 (Summer
2006): 225 – 252.
117
The fence visible in Prindle’s photograph of the site is of similar construction to the original, which was removed
by 2004. The extant fence is about 50 yards from the murder site. See Monica Zapata, “Ten years after Matthew
Shepard, no change,” Denver Post, 8 October 2008, url = http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_10661633
(accessed 29 March 2013); John Moore, “Murderer: ‘That Matthew Shepard needed killing,” Denver Post, 4
October 2009, url = http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_13464996 (accessed 29 March 2013); Scott
Stiffler, “Lesléa Newman mourns Matthew Shepard, with the moon and the stars,” Edge Boston, 22 October 2012,
url = http://www.edgeboston.com/entertainment/books/features//138242/lesl%C3%A9a_newman_mourns_matthew
_shepard,_with_the_moon_and_the_stars__ (accessed 29 March 2013); and Joe Dziemianowicz, “Theater review:
‘Laramie Project Cycle,’” New York Daily News, 15 February 2013, url = http://www.nydailynews.com/
entertainment/music-arts/theater-review-laramie-project-cycle-article-1.1264575 (accessed 29 March 2013).
57
brain, as well as pressure on the brain.” Cultural representation of the Shepard murder is
extensive, and the image of a split-rail fence acquired considerable symbolic value after the
incident. The image of Shepard’s body hung from the fence was likened to the Crucifixion, and
the man became an icon within the American public consciousness. Given the proliferation of
Shepard imagery, what conclusions can we make about Prindle’s choices in executing a
photographic memorial to such a publicized murder?
The indistinct position of the fence in Prindle’s photograph is the obvious contrast
between that example and other images of the site (Fig. 22). When the image of the fence first
circulated and gained symbolic currency, “I was first coming out of the closet,” Prindle noted in
an interview, “and I remember that silhouetted fence on the little Chiron above the news anchor’s
shoulder and how that fence came to really symbolize, not only that event but just the whole
culture of homophobia.”118 Nearly a decade after the attack, Prindle produced the Proscenium
and Gloria series and conceptualized his MFA exhibition. Recall that the images of Proscenium
include figures, and that Gloria records physical evidence of taboo sexual encounters. With the
image of the split-rail fence in mind, and after a personal experience of memory loss, Prindle
“realized at that time it wasn’t actually the site that held any information, or did anything for
me.”119 Increased reduction of indexicality defined this process of photographic
experimentation, where the figure, residual traces (e.g., the discarded condom wrappers and
underwear of Gloria) and, ultimately, the site itself were successively discredited as repositories
of meaningful information.
118
Perkins, 2010, 4 (sic). “Chiron” is the proper spelling for the astrological and mythological centaur; the accepted
spelling for a television graphic supplementing a news program is “chyron.”
119
Ibid. A major accident in 2002 bound Prindle to a wheelchair for two years and would inform his subsequent
work. Left with no memory of the event, he suffered disappointment when, upon returning to the site, he was
unable to remember anything more than scattered sense data. He found himself dependent upon other people in
order to recall the accident. It was then he realized the degree to which memory is a social phenomenon, and
decided to examine that notion through his photographic work.
58
By its own logic then, Mementi Mori could not include an image of the fence that
privileged its status as a public symbol for gay rights. The same vegetation that conceals the
fence precludes expansive views of the rural landscape, which serves as a second major
divergence between Prindle’s image and comparable examples. This constricted view jars with
conventional visual representations of the American West’s big sky and limitless land. Susan J.
Balter-Reitz and Karen A. Stewart, in their study of the visual arguments in media coverage of
the Shepard murder, argue that photographic representation of Shepard's murder “limited the
range of discourse about this event because it directed the narrative to the Western landscape.”120
Focusing analysis on the 27 October 1998 Time magazine cover, which presented a threequarters view of the fence receding toward the Wyoming wilderness, Balter-Reitz and Stewart
claim that the incorporation of the mythic West decenters Shepard from the story of his own
death; the comparably tiny portrait of Shepard, seemingly included on the cover as an
afterthought, reinforces this decentering (Fig. 22). Further, shifting the argument frame “from
law to landscape disavows human agency,” excusing the attackers’ actions:
Henderson and McKinney are cast not as villains, but as agents of the land. Instead of
murderers, they become stewards of the West. In historic times, they would have been
hailed as heroes; they purified the landscape by eliminating the disruptive influence
personified by Shepard.121
The transfer of guilt took other, less abstract forms in the wake of the Shepard murder.
According to John Lynch’s reading of televisual representations of the tragedy, visual elements
and dialogue of the NBC film The Matthew Shepard Story (2002) “dehumanize McKinney and
Henderson, place blame squarely on them, and help relieve the public of any culpability for the
120
Susan J. Balter-Reitz and Karen A. Stewart, "Looking for Matthew Shepard: A Study in Visual Argument Field,"
in Visual Communication: Perception, Rhetoric and Technology, ed. Diane S. Hope (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press,
2006), 123.
121
Ibid.
59
crime.”122 In a reenactment of Shepard’s beating at the start of the film, McKinney and
Henderson “sound like animals, literally grunting and howling” as slow motion sequences make
“their actions appear unnatural and inhuman;” effectively, the pair is “sequestered from the
human community, not to mention the community of straight, White residents of Laramie,
Wyoming.”123 Elsewhere, Thomas Dunn has claimed that “the wider heterosexual public sought
to escape culpability for Shepard's death” by framing “that violence as a private incident among
three individuals” for which the public bears no responsibility.124
Prindle’s unconventional handling of the Western landscape therefore resists the transfer
of guilt. Further, selecting such a clinical caption avoids characterizations of Shepard as martyr
and his murderers as inhuman. If, for Amos Funkenstein, we can make sense of the Holocaust
only if we understand it as “an eminently human event” that “demonstrated those extremes
which only man and his society are capable of doing or suffering,” then we can make sense of
the Shepard murder only if we identify its public dimension and recognize its players as ordinary
human agents. To this end, the caption emphasizes Shepard as a body unable to maintain
homeostasis; it identifies him, naming him “Matthew,” but describes his suffering body rather
than the attack or the perpetrators. And he is anything but the crucified, Christ-like figure
popularized after the murder. Matthew is not a martyr, or a saint, but a man with a broken skull
dying of exposure because two other men, not monsters, beat him and tied him to a cow fence.
122
John Lynch, “Memory and Matthew Shepard: Opposing Expressions of Public Memory in Television Movies,
Journal of Communication Inquiry 31 (July 2007): 228.
123
Ibid.
124
Thomas Dunne, “Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories,”
Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13 (Winter 2010): 618.
60
Charting Progress
Documentation of these tragedies establishes spatial and temporal markers that build a
narrative of the social perception of the LGBT community from the 1990s to the present. Take
the Shepard murder to be the first temporal point; 1998 is then the first coordinate on our graph.
James C. Hormel, a former dean at the University of Chicago Law School, was the first openly
gay man nominated for an ambassadorship, but Republican congressional leadership openly
stalled his nomination due to his sexuality.125 At a press conference on 15 June 1998, Trent Lott
(R-MS), Senate Majority Leader at the time, compared homosexuality to alcoholism and
kleptomania; other hopefuls for the upcoming 2000 election, like House Majority Leader
Richard K. Armey (R-TX), cited the Christian Bible to support their social policy.126 Two years
earlier, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, which rationalized
itself as a “judgment [that] entails both moral disapproval of homosexuality, and amoral
conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian)
morality.”127 Recently, The Atlantic positioned 1998 as “a watershed year in the battle for gay
rights in America—in a bad way,” and in 1999, Frank Rich at The New York Times noted that
“homophobic epidemic of '98…spiked with the October murder of Matthew Shepard.”128
By the time Prindle began exhibiting the photographs of Mementi Mori more than a
decade later, stateside perception of homosexuality had shifted considerably. Poll data show that
125
Garance Franke-Ruta, “How America Got Past the Anti-Gay Politics of the ‘90s,” The Atlantic, 8 April 2013, url
= http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/how-america-got-past-the-anti-gay-politics-of-the90s/266976/ (accessed 8 April 2013).
126
David Lightman, “Rhetoric on Gays Rekindles Republican Debate,” Hartford Courant, 30 June 1998, url =
http://articles.courant.com/1998-06-30/news/9806300165_1_hormel-nomination-senator-lott-james-c-hormel
(accessed 8 April 2013).
127
House Judiciary Committee, Report together with Dissenting Views (to accompany H.R. 3396), 104th Congress,
H. REP. NO. 104-664, at 15 – 16 (1996), url = http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-104hrpt664/pdf/CRPT104hrpt664.pdf (accessed 8 April 2013).
128
Franke-Ruta, “How America Got Past,” 2013; Frank Rich, “Journal; Summer of Matthew Shepard,” The New
York Times, 3 July 1999, url = http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/03/opinion/journal-summer-of-matthewshepard.html?src=pm (accessed 8 April 2013).
61
when Aaron Hall was murdered in 2007, public opinion was roughly split over the legality of
same-sex marriage; in 2013, a growing majority of Americans favor gay marriage, and in 2013,
an exponential number of US senators came out in favor of equal marriage rights.129 While
highly educated urban dwellers have consistently favored marriage equality and other gay rights
issues, polls show that rural populations are incrementally changing their minds.130
A decade of rapid shifts in public perception of homosexuality therefore sets the context
for Prindle’s documentary practice, and treating the production of Mementi Mori and the murders
it documents as temporal points graphs that shift. However, despite empirical data that log
changing opinions, Prindle’s photographs record no difference between a homophobic assault
that took place in 1998 and one that occurred in 2008. Moreover, while urban dwellers are
statistically more accepting of gay and transgendered persons, 41 of Mementi Mori’s 56
photographs document murders that occurred in cities with populations exceeding 100,000; eight
photographs document sites in New York City alone.131 Aside from the homophobic slaughters
they eulogize, the images recall less severe forms of prejudice: schoolyard bullying,
discrimination in the workplace, and other violations of dignity that occur at any time and place,
regardless of more progressive social policy and opinion. Prindle’s project, therefore, renders
129
Sarah Kliff, “Whatever the Supreme Court decides, these nine charts show gay marriage is winning,” The
Washington Post, 26 March 2013, url = http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/whateverthe-supreme-court-decides-these-nine-charts-show-gay-marriage-is-winning/ (accessed 8 April 2013); Dylan
Matthews, “In 2011, only 15 senators backed same-sex marriage. Now 49 do,” The Washington Post, 2 April 2013,
url = http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/02/in-2011-only-15-senators-backed-same-sexmarriage-now-49-do/ (accessed 8 April 2013); Frank Newport, “Half of Americans Support Legal Gay Marriage,”
Gallup Politics, 8 May 2012, url = http://www.gallup.com/poll/154529/half-americans-support-legal-gaymarriage.aspx (accessed 8 April 2013). The last source states that 2011 was the first year Gallup tracked a majority
of poll participants (53%) in favor of equal marriage rights; support for marriage equality in 1996 was 27%; 68%
were opposed.
130
Shankar Vedantam, “Shift in Gay Marriage Support Mirrors a Changing America, NPR Politics, 25 March, 2013,
url = http://m.npr.org/news/Politics/174989702 (accessed 8 April 2013).
131
Aside from being travel-accessible, the point of Prindle’s inclusion of so many murders in locations such as
Boston, New York City, Chicago, and California’s metropolitan centers is to illustrate homophobia’s ubiquity,
despite the perception that large cities are more accepting of the LGBT community, or the notion that in 2013
support for gay rights is universal.
62
visible violence potentially obscured not by prejudice alone, but by the spread of more tolerant
attitudes in time and space.
VI.
Melancholic Imagination
Maxwell’s Demon and Mementi Mori document political, economic, and social crises
unique to the contemporary American context. Their makers mine the fragmentary evidence of
careless war, absurd commodification, and vicious prejudice for sources of socially constructive
discourses. Works of mourning, the projects share a melancholic tone that provokes
conversations otherwise missed, making overlooked parts reveal something substantial about the
whole. Evaluating these series of images using melancholia as an interpretive lens shows how
they locate interstitial spaces as occasions to discursively build historical consciousness.
The section above on memory and historical consciousness made a comparison between
the topic bodies of work and midrashic commentary, which privileges the space in between text
and reader as a site of meaning production. While Prindle’s Jewish faith and interest in poststructuralist accounts of the dispersed subject adequately justify that association of his practice
with midrash, a more concrete link between Jewish thought and the artist is identifiable. The
German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) is among Prindle’s most
significant theoretical influences, and an investigation of key Arendtian concepts will show how
both topic bodies of work use midrashic gaps to augment imagination and understanding.
63
Life of the Mind, Life of the Community
An Arendt epigraph introduces Mementi Mori’s artist statement, and Prindle’s
presentations and talks on the body of work cite her more frequently than any other thinker.132
Among the vast corpus of literature on Arendt’s life and work, Jennifer Ring’s The Political
Consequences of Thinking (1997) uniquely considers the impact of her Jewish identity on her
intellectual work, and features a chapter that explores how Biblical and Rabbinic influences
shaped her output.133 Ring’s initial descriptions of the Talmudic tradition and its characteristic
interpretative openness draw structural associations between Talmudic study and democracy.134
As Ring points out, what may ostensibly “appear to be an invitation to chaos rather than order, is
in fact a remarkably open system, based upon interpretations organized horizontally, through
history, rather than vertically.”135 This apparent “disorganization, then, really resembles more
the ‘disorganization’ of democracy: a plurality of responsible voices, each qualified by virtue of
practice, experience, and assumed responsibility to render judgment worthy of serious
consideration.”136 The technique itself of Talmudic study is dialogical, making the “tradition of
132
The epigraph is, “Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the
hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.” Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 164.
133
Jennifer Ring, “Biblical and Rabbinic Approaches to Thinking,” in The Political Consequences of Thinking:
Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 173 –
193.
134
The Talmud, Hebrew for learning or instruction, emerged from the oral tradition of interpretation and
commentary following the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and is considered second only to
the Torah in importance; indeed, the boundary between Torah and Talmud is fairly indistinct (Ring, 1997, 179 –
181). The Talmud is composed of the Mishnah (Hebrew for recitation or recapitulation), which for the first time
compiled the Oral Torah into a written code organized by subject matter during the second century, and the Gemara
(from the Aramaic “to study), which elaborates and comments upon the Mishnah.
135
Ring, 1997, 182.
136
Ibid., 182 – 83.
64
rabbinic learning a powerful source of community cohesion, a source of speech rather than
silence.”137
Ring concludes that this fusion of “the life of the mind with the life of the community
resembles what Hannah Arendt was searching for in The Life of the Mind,” and that the conflict,
dialog, and interpretation built into the structure of Jewish thought determine the central
concerns of Arendtian thought.138 Arendt in The Life of the Mind sought to explain thinking’s
relationship to political action and political catastrophe by exploring the relation between thought
and moral judgment. Early on, she associates the need to think with meaning, rather than with
the pursuit of truth: “[the] need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest
for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.”139 Thinking resists pre-established
categories and imposed habits of perception; as the quest for meaning, it is open-ended.
Everything is phenomenal; that is, “nothing is singular,” but everything “is meant to be perceived
by somebody….Plurality is the law of the earth.”140
From Imagination to Understanding
In the context of her corpus in toto, The Life of the Mind elaborates a two-fold association
of thinking with judgment. The first way Arendt links thinking to judgment is by arguing that
thinking as internal dialog “loosens the grip of the universal over the particular, thereby releasing
judgment from ossified categories of thought and conventional standards of assessment.”141
Second, “actualizing the dialogue of me and myself which is given in consciousness, produces
137
Barry Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985),
169.
138
Ring, 1997, 183 – 84. The Life of the Mind was incomplete at Arendt’s death and was posthumously published.
139
Arendt, 1978, 15. Emphasis in original.
140
Ibid., 19.
141
Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves, “Arendt’s Theory of Judgment,” from “Hannah Arendt,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2008/entries/arendt/ (accessed 11 March 2013).
65
conscience as a by-product,” a conscience that, in her view, offers negative absolutes rather than
positive prescriptions, telling us only “what not to do, what to avoid in our actions and dealings
with others, as well as what to repent of.”142
At moments of crisis, “thinking ceases to be a marginal affair,” since, according to
Arendt’s model, “it prepares the individual to judge for him or herself instead of being carried
away by the actions and opinions of the majority.”143 Living as we are after twentieth-century
totalitarianism “in a topsy-turvy world, a world where we cannot find our way by abiding by the
rules of what once was common sense,” we find our categories of thought, judgment, and
common sense vexed.144 In such conditions of crisis in understanding and judgment, the
imagination, or the gift of the “understanding heart,” is our sole anchor to reality, for it
alone enables us to view things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that
which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias
and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see
and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own
affair.145
The loss of meaning in modernity is a chief concern throughout her oeuvre, and she attempts to
mitigate the problem of meaninglessness with this account of imagination as understanding.
Totalitarian thinking replaces common sense, which assumes a common world within which
individual agents think and act, with logicality, which stakes its claims to validity independent of
the living human condition. History then becomes a matter of consistency and causality, losing
142
Ibid.
Ibid.
144
Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in Understanding,
1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (Schocken Ebooks, 2011), 383. Original work published in
Partisan Review 10:4 (1954).
145
Ibid., 387.
143
66
its value as the story with many beginnings and no end, or as the story of “beings whose essence
is beginning.”146
Distancing Some Things, Bridging Abysses to Others
Thinking, judgment, and imagination, interlaced in Arendtian political theory, therefore
converge in a concept of history as coming into being when “the chaotic maze of past
happenings emerge as a story which can be told;” the meaning of the effect is not deducible from
whatever causes we may assign to it: “the event illuminates its own past.”147 With explicit
references to Arendtian thought, Prindle’s body of work adopts this concept of history. His
photographs do not register information causally or with the presupposition of finality, which is
what causality entails according to Arendt’s critique. Rather, he offers viewers fragments of
information constitutive of a beginning (without a definite end or interpretation). He constructs
an event out of the banal index of the seemingly ordinary site, the affective caption, and the
situation of the living viewer. That transformational event, the product of a participatory strategy
akin to Arendt’s participatory political theory, is a momentary aesthetic encounter, which affirms
the viewer’s condition as a being whose essence is new beginning, thereby locating her agency in
imagination, or her “understanding heart.”148
Linked essentially to action, as if two sides of the same coin, understanding for Arendt
becomes “that form of cognition, in distinction from many others, by which acting
men…eventually can come to terms with what irrevocably happened and be reconciled with
146
Ibid., 385.
Ibid.
148
An ephemeral event, the aesthetic encounter is as much about loss as anything else. We find ourselves connected
intimately to the work of art but—fragile, fleeting—we lose that moment. There is thus a melancholic dimension to
the aesthetic experience itself. See Michael Ann Holly’s “The Melancholy Art,” The Art Bulletin 89 (March 2007):
7 – 17. A revised version of the essay is reprinted in and introduces Holly’s subsequent book, The Melancholy Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Holly’s book expands upon his notion that the aesthetic experience is
essentially melancholic, and that the history of art is an essentially melancholic discipline.
147
67
what unavoidably exists.”149 Those horrific deaths of the Mementi Mori photographs, then,
become a means of authentically engaging reality’s darkness and density. More, the photographs
compel contemplative, retrospective assessment, which defines judgment for Arendt, and wrests
meaning from the absurdity of the post-totalitarian contemporary situation. If, in Arendtian
terms, selective, imaginative contemplation of the past is the guarantor of agency in the present,
then thinking must take a form emancipated from preconception and prejudice.
Ironically, Prindle achieves his goal of activating the viewer by stimulating within her the
passive vita contemplativa. Following a dialogical structure, Mementi Mori casts off the bonds
of any imposed and illusory certainty. Further, Prindle's aim is to represent all absent
personages, including assailants, as human beings. Recall Arendt’s comparison of imagination
to the “understanding heart;” the “distancing of some things” and “bridging abysses to others”
that imagination makes possible, when free of preconceived categories, allows us to represent the
other in fullness.150 Mementi Mori’s post-structuralist portraits of absent subjects are thus
lessons in an Arendtian understanding of the world and of the other.
Prindle’s explicit references to midrash and Arendt in artist statements, presentations, and
personal correspondence suggest that reflection on these linked topics contributes to the
interpretation of his project. This examination has identified structural affinities between the
topic works that validate a reading of Maxwell’s Demon in these Arendtian terms. A passage
that Field routinely includes in exhibitions as wall text verifies this point:
We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake
war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the
same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these
149
150
Ibid.
Arendt, 1954, 386 – 87.
68
scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true
relationship.151
Printed on a piece of copy paper, the Haruki Murakami quote is also taped to a wall in Field’s
studio. The excerpt expresses a concern with meaninglessness and an urge for authentic
engagement with the world and with the other that is present in the Arendt texts glossed in the
preceding paragraphs. Murakami and Arendt call for self-examination and commitment to
existence; we exist, the other exists and, with some imagination (in the Arendtian sense), we can
commit to our situation. Further, where Arendt insists we accept and engage absurdity,
Murakami expresses a frank acceptance of the fake world we inhabit. Accordingly, Field and
Prindle share the impulse to work with the “topsy-turvy” world they encounter, to face that
landscape of loss honestly, and to ask others to think with them. Using melancholia as an
interpretive tool thus makes it possible to unpack the mechanisms in their projects that function
to raise beholders' consciousnesses and build new communities. Reflecting on loss, and
therefore engaging what remains, Maxwell’s Demon and Mementi Mori are critical memorials,
fostering interrogation of the past and present in order to imagine future alternatives; midrashic,
embracing interpretive openness and building dialog; and Arendtian, reminding us that we are
“beings whose essence is new beginnings.”
VII.
Conclusion
But perhaps this is a place where belonging now takes place in and through a common
sense of loss (which does not mean that all these losses are the same). Loss becomes
condition and necessity for certain sense of community, where community does not
overcome the loss, where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very
sense of itself as community. And if we say this second truth about the place where
151
Haruki Murakami, quoted in “The Art of Fiction No. 182,” Interview with John Wray, The Paris Review 170
(Summer 2004), url = http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fiction-no-182-haruki-murakami
(accessed 2 November 2012). Murakami (b. 1949) is a popular experimental Japanese novelist.
69
belonging is possible, then pathos is not negated, but it turns out to be oddly fecund,
paradoxically productive.152
This examination proposed that Maxwell’s Demon and Mementi Mori are melancholic
documents that engage the most salient issues of their historical moment and that a refined
understanding of melancholia provides insight into the mechanics of that engagement. That
specific conception of melancholy as an open discourse, as constitutive of the self, as
foundational of the imagination, and as an authentic acceptance of the world exceeds “the
conventional understanding that ‘loss’ belongs to a purely psychological or psychoanalytic
discourse.”153 Conceptualizing melancholy beyond pathology shows how the two bodies of
work “think about loss as constituting social, political, and aesthetic relations,” to materialize a
horizon “in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom the irrecoverable
becomes, paradoxically, the condition of new political agency.”154
The images that commenced this analysis, Field’s Bull and Prindle’s Henry Northington,
Richmond, VA, remain keystones of their makers’ respective projects. Bull encapsulates Field’s
commitment to breaking the spell of a proto-totalitarian financial culture. Probably his most
obvious critique of American neo-liberalism, Bull contextualizes such works as Dance and
Flagbearers, revealing them to be acerbic appraisals of the ever-increasing financialization of
human life. Northington brings Prindle’s strategy of absence into focus, remedying the visible
terror of the purposefully displayed severed head with devices that transform viewers into imagemakers, lending them the tools to understand the scene’s missing players as human beings.
Through representations of loss, the projects, then, seek to build communities in a
particular context, that of the early twenty-first century in the United States. However, their
152
Judith Butler, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, 467.
Ibid.
154
Ibid.
153
70
shared ambivalence and sophisticated historical consciousness ensure relevancy beyond that
limited moment. Field's copies of American and British newspaper photographs measure the
continuation of those potent hegemonic powers at the turn of the new century, and his replicas of
the favorite paintings of Presidents Bush and Obama gauge shifts in American foreign policy
during those presidencies. Similarly, by reducing horrific violence to a neutral image of an
ordinary site, Prindle's photographs test how viewers conceive of gay and straight identity,
prejudicial violence, and justice. As such, they graph public responses to homosexuality and
homophobia at the turn of the century, charting perceptions as they change over time and space.
The specific material conditions of the mediums the artists respectively develop achieve
these objectives. Field has invented a medium and its logic of layering visual phenomena, and
Prindle pulls apart the conventions of the photographic image, its traditional requirement to
preserve information, and its dependence on the caption. In this light, the pair assesses the
degree to which combinations of text and image can retain and convey truth through procedures
that give visual form to the ruinous content the artists compile. Materializing loss, both create
systematically open modes of representation that involve the viewer as image-maker, as sleuth,
and as contemplative. Not merely illustrative of ruination, however, Maxwell's Demon and
Mementi Mori offer audiences ways to think about loss constructively, to make memory matter
in the present, and to imagine better futures.
71
72
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ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Jonathan Field, Bull, 2009. Steel pins on black velvet, 94 x 74 inches (courtesy of the artist).
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2. Arturo Di Modica, Charging Bull, 1989. Bronze, 11 x 16 feet (http://www.chargingbull.com).
3. “Ballerina and the Bull,” Adbusters, 2011 (http://www.thelinknewspaper.ca).
85
4. Paul Baker Prindle, Henry Northington, Richmond, Virginia. “Northington's severed
head had been placed squarely in the center of the walkway, leading many to speculate
that the murderer(s) had intended to make an anti-gay statement,” 2010. Polychrome
archival print from color negative, 50 x 40 inches (courtesy of the artist).
86
5. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving, 9 ½ x 6 ½ inches, Gemaldegalerie, Dresden,
Germany (SCAD Digital Image Database, http://did.scad.edu).
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6. Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1985. Oil on canvas, 71 x 47 inches
(http://www.gerhard-richter.com).
7. Gerhard Richter, Rot (Red), 1994. Oil on canvas, 79 ¾ x 126 inches, The National Museum of
Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (http://www.gerhard-richter.com).
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8. Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982. Washington, DC, black granite, c. 500 feet
(SCAD Digital Image Database, http://did.scad.edu).
89
9. Jonathan Field, The Dance, 2012. Steel pins on black velvet, 94 x 74 inches (courtesy of the
artist).
90
10. Vanity Fair, “Ain’t We Got Style,” 2009 (http://www.vanityfair.com).
91
11. Jonathan Field, The Slipper Tongue (after W.H.D. Koerner), 2008. Steel pins on black
velvet, 94 x 74 inches (courtesy of the artist).
92
12. Jonathan Field, Hope (after George Frederic Watts), 2009. Steel pins on black velvet,
74 x 94 inches (courtesy of the artist).
93
13. W.H.D. Koerner, A Charge to Keep, c. 1916.
94
14. W.H.D. Koerner, Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been
Caught, 1916 (In William J. Neidig, "The Slipper Tongue," Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1916,
11).
95
14. George Frederic Watts, Hope, 1886. Oil on canvas, 56 x 44 inches, Tate Gallery, London,
England (SCAD Digital Image Database, http://did.scad.edu).
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15. Jonathan Field, Flagbearers, 2012. Steel pins on black velvet, 90 x 82 inches (courtesy of
the artist).
97
16. Ralph Lauren Uniform Design, London Summer Olympic Games, 2012
(http://www.forbes.com).
98
17. Jonathan Field, Lance (working title), 2013. Steel pins on black velvet, 94 x 74 inches
(courtesy of the artist).
99
18. Joel Sternfeld, Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, May 1993, 1993 (Sternfeld, On this Site, 41).
100
19. Paul Baker Prindle, Aaron Hall. Crothersville, Indiana. “The beatings included repeated
pummelings with fists and boots and dragging Hall down a wooden staircase by his feet as ‘his
head bounced down all of the steps,’ in one of the accused’s words. He died naked and alone, in
a field, where he had crawled after his killers dumped his body in a roadside ditch,” 2009.
Polychrome archival print from color negative, 40 x 50 inches (courtesy of the artist).
101
20. Paul Baker Prindle, Matthew Shepard. Laramie, Wyoming. “Matthew’s major injuries upon
arrival consisted of hypothermia and a fracture from behind his head to just in front of the right
ear. This has caused bleeding in the brain, as well as pressure on the brain,” 2009. Polychrome
archival print from color negative, 40 x 50 inches (courtesy of the artist).
102
21. “The War over Gays,” Time, 26 October 1998 (http://www.time.com).