Approaches to Suffering
Ana Maria Pacheco’s ‘Shadows of the Wanderer’
A talk by Christopher Wintle
Chichester Cathedral | 2016
Approaches to Suffering
Ana Maria Pacheco’s ‘Shadows of the Wanderer’
Shadows of the Wanderer
Polychromed wood
It is sometimes said that in the arts judgment has two faces. There is the
face of the ordinary art-lover who has some culture, and there is the face
of the specialist who has some inside knowledge. In the final scene of
Wagner’s great opera, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, the young tenor
Walther sings a competitive prize song to a double chorus: one chorus
represents ordinary townsfolk, the other the guild of knowledgeable
Mastersingers. The townsfolk are spellbound, but confess to not
wholly understanding the song; whereas the guild, which has raised
pedantry to new heights, deems it to be ‘well-rhymed and singable’.
Since Walther pleases both choruses he wins the hand of the young
Eva. Today, I’m talking not about opera but about sculpture; and,
perhaps fortunately, I have no competition. But I shall still wear two
faces. The first I call The Naïve Spectator, and the second The Informed
Spectator. The first derives from a brain-child of the music theorist,
Donald Francis Tovey, ‘The Naïve Listener’. When asked, how much
culture a listener needs to be acceptably ‘naïve’, he replied: “A pass
degree in music in the University of Oxford.” In the last fifty years, I
have met just one person with such an attainment. Yet since I have no
qualification in art, my naivety itself will be on trial. The sculpture, of
course, is Shadows of the Wanderer by Ana Maria Pacheco, dating from
2008. In due course I shall unpack its title. But for now, let me put on
my first face, that of …
The Naïve Spectator
Before us, in an imaginary open space, stands a group of eleven largerthan-life carved figures. Their faces are somehow Latin-American. As
always with this artist’s groups, the figures are meticulously positioned.
At its centre is a bare-chested young man. On his shoulders he carries
an older man, also bare-chested: in fact, he is the twelfth person in the
group. The young man looks inward, whereas the older man looks
3
outward: yet, since they are carved from a single piece of wood, they
seem especially bonded. The young man wears white trousers loosely
held up with a piece of cord and suggesting wrinkled cotton. The older
man wears dark trousers, apparently made of some more resilient
stuff. Through its general lightness, the pair stands proud of the other
figures, who, as we shall see, include men and women dressed in black.
Suffering and preoccupation is written on every face, especially on that
of the cadaverous older man.
Shadows of the Wanderer
Polychromed wood
(detail)
As spectators, our first, naive instinct is to relate the pair to an
iconographic tradition that emanates from the second book of Virgil’s
Aeneid (lines 632 ff.) – a work, like The Iliad, dear to the artist’s heart.
The book ends dramatically. Troy burns. Aeneas tries to persuade his
father, the obdurate Anchises, to join him in fleeing the city. He will
also be taking his son Ascanius (‘Iulus’) and his wife Creusia. Suddenly
a benign flame springs from the child’s head, soon followed by a flare
from Heaven indicating the path the family must travel. Anchises gives
in. He will leave with them. Aeneas cries:
Come then, dear father, onto my back. I shall carry you on my
shoulders. Your weight will cause me no trouble.
Aeneas lifts Anchises onto his shoulders, first covering them with a
lion skin, and asks his father to carry the household relics. Together
they depart. Behind them trails Ascanius and, as they think, Creusia.
Others too follow. But Creusia comes adrift. Aeneas realises they have
lost her. He is frantic. He races back to Troy, where he finds all the
shrines ransacked and the mothers and children rounded up. Through
his home
flames roar to the sky in a mad dance of triumph. [:759]
Finally, Aeneas does find his wife, but only as a ghost: for Creusia is
dead. She addresses him with utmost tenderness: be calm, she enjoins;
the Gods have ordained his losses; he now faces years of exile before
he reaches
the Hesperian land, where the Lydian Tiber flows.
Yet there he will find
a blessèd state, royal power, and a [new] royal partner in
marriage. [:784]
From their suffering Rome will arise. It is the silver lining to their dark
cloud. One city dies, another is born.
Our second instinct is to recognize that the enforced movement of
people is both timeless and timely. True, we don’t have pagan Gods
to blame; we don’t believe in ghosts or portents; and we mistrust any
prophecy of lands of milk and honey at the end of some bleak tunnel.
But we do recognize the horror that follows political and geographical
4
upheaval, not to mention the huge scale of personal loss. The statistics
tell their own story. Between 2000 and 2004, migrations involving
refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons involved
about 5 million people a year. By 2014, the figure had risen to 30 million
and, by 2015, 65 million. It is still rising. The sculptural group gives no
idea of the past or future of its twelve people. In our imagination they
stand for many millions of whatever time.
Paradoxically, our third instinct is to rein in these thoughts. We begin
by measuring Pacheco’s image against countless other representations
of the central pair. These go back over 2000 years. Aeneas and Anchises
have appeared on urns, pots and coins among the ancients, in drawings,
paintings, sculpture and porcelain among the moderns. In the
Renaissance, they are usually accompanied by the child Ascanius. This
is the case with the most famous sculpture, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(or possibly by his father if not by both working together). (See: https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneas,_Anchises,_and_Ascanius) The group dates
from about 1618, and is kept in Rome, in the Borghese Gallery. Here we
see Anchises clutching a tiny statue – the Romans called their domestic
deities penates – and Acsanius holding a torch, possibly a symbol of
Virgil’s benign fire. There is also some decorously positioned drapery,
though not quite a lion skin. A painting by Raphael from 1514 shows
an early stage of the same story. The house is ablaze. Anchises has
been torn from his bed – still apparently wearing his nightcap – and
his right arm hangs loosely over his son. He has not yet been given the
household relics. Again, the child Ascanius is with them.
Let us now look again at the Pacheco. There is no suggestion of Troy;
father and son are not dressed as Trojans, even as Trojans in disarray,
and Anchises is positively not holding pagan relics – rather his bony
hands are out-stretched, as in Raphael. Most strikingly, Aeneas’s son
Ascanius is absent. That is to say, the field of reference is severely
curtailed.
Similarly with the other figures: they are not Trojan citizens fleeing
their city with hastily-assembled belongings. They carry nothing
– and, indeed, they have no hands, only feet. Although their varied
faces and hair seem preternaturally human, with uncanny eyes set
between uniformly elongated noses, their dark, extravagantly fluted
cloaks – sometimes hanging still, sometimes suggesting movement –
seem to belong to neither time nor place. On the back of one figure is a
mysterious cover – wings, or pods maybe – which remains ambiguous.
There is a further paradox: whereas the front pair is on the move, the
figures are standing still. They are not quite refugees after all: rather,
they inhabit a sphere of existence quite of their own. Of this, we shall
say more in due course.
But as we rein in, we also freely associate. There should be no aesthetic
guilt in this. In visual rhetoric, the spectator holds pride of place,
and inevitably draws naively on his or her own culture. The poet
Christopher Reid relates Pacheco’s central pair to Sinbad the Sailor
carrying the Old Man of the Sea, as told in the 1001 Nights. A recent
5
Raphael (1483-1520)
Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo
Detail
Fresco, 1514
Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican
[Image: Public domain]
Wikimedia Commons.
Robert Anning Bell
The Women Stood Afar Off
Beholding These Things
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
popular illustration, by ‘Hanamachi 1326’, shows Sinbad as a bodybuilding hunk tormented by the gleeful Old Man. I myself relate
Pacheco’s followers to a pastel by Robert Anning Bell, a study for an oil
painting in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. This is about a hundred years
old, and is entitled The Women Stood Afar Off Beholding These Things.
The figures are unified as a group, clothed alike and show various
gestures of suffering. Xavier Bray, who curated The Sacred Made Real, a
National Gallery exhibition of 2009, talks of the heightened immediacy
of moving sacred polychrome effigies out of churches into galleries.
This early seventeenth century Ecce Homo by Gregorio Fernández
comes from the Cathedral in Valladolid but is shown in a quasi-secular
space. (See: http://www.wga.hu/html_m/f/fernande/gregorio/1_ecce_h.html)
Neil MacGregor, the former Director of the British Museum, adds that
an effigy shown in a church “is meant to change the way you behave”,
whereas such is not the case in a gallery. Obviously the change readjusts
our response. Others too have imagined a double chorus in opera – the
artist, after all, was a music student. At this point in her narration, just
one chorus is singing – half the followers have their mouths open, half
have them shut – and the soloist, Aeneas, is just entering sotto voce.
These random points, far from taking us away from the artist, draw
us closer to her. Ana Maria Pacheco was born and raised in Brazil, and
inevitably, her work reflects what she saw in the Catholic churches. I
shall explore this later. But for now we can see the connection in the
group sculpture Dark Night of the Soul from 1999. This was shown to
great effect at the National Gallery in London. Here the hooded central
figure may be a contemporary political victim, but he is also pierced
with arrows, as was St. Sebastian.
Dark Night of the Soul
Polychromed wood (detail)
6
So it is at this point that I assume my second face, that of the informed
spectator. Here I gain my knowledge partly by looking over the artist’s
canon and partly by drawing on her own comments. First, though, I
must ‘declare an interest’. I have had many fruitful conversations with
the artist, so have gained my knowledge, so to speak, from the horse’s
mouth.
Shadows of the Wanderer
Polychromed wood
The Informed Spectator
I return to the work’s title, Shadows of the Wanderer. As the artist is well
aware, the word ‘shadow’ recalls a principal archetype in the analytical
psychology of Carl Jung, and represents the ‘negative’, inferior side of
our personality. It is a side men and women need to accommodate
for the sake of their well-being – if, that is, they don’t deny it through
projection onto others. In art, the shadow can be personified in a figure
of the same sex, as with Faust and Mephistopheles; and it is prototypically alien, primitive and dark-skinned. The word ‘wanderer’, on
the other hand, is a general term for a restless, Odyssean spirit, and has
no clinical standing.
Obviously, something of this overlaps with Shadows of the Wanderer.
The artist describes the sculptural area as fusing two spaces, a bright
exterior and a dark interior. Since the restless Aeneas figure looks
inward, it mediates between the two; and, as have already noted, each
dark follower is significantly dehumanised – for without hands no-one
can act or react. Beneath the raised platform there is a further space,
indicating some deeper and yet more mysterious interior. Supporting
the platform are logs: these may serve to conceal a metal frame,
but they also invoke the primeval forests of the mind, our ‘archaic
heritage’. But here the Jungian parallel stops. For eleven shadows
stand behind Aeneas, and not just a single shadow; and their attitude
is not malevolent but cautiously concerned – one shy figure, indeed,
uses his gabardine to cover his mouth, and another looks out of the
group, as if drawing in the spectator.
More still, because the shadows are now of mixed gender, they also
7
Man and His Sheep I
Drypoint
Man and His Sheep II
Drypoint
Study for Sculpture
Man and His Sheep
Oil pastel on paper
Private collection
Man and His Sheep
Polychromed wood
Birmingham Museum and Art
Gallery Collection
The Longest Journey
Polychromed wood
appear to invoke two other Jungian archetypes, the animus and the
anima. Is Aeneas in the grip of multiple male and female aspects of his
own psyche, we wonder? But this question is speculative. For, as Ana
Maria Pacheco insists, none of her installations are didactic; they do
not embody Jungian allegories; and, as with Symbolism, they should
open up feelings rather than close meanings. I myself think of these
shadows simply as suggestive ‘presences’.
The group has a history in the Pacheco canon. Let us go back to 1989
and her group sculpture Man and His Sheep. The leading man is again
predominantly naked and carries a ram’s head on a stick. Behind him
is his ‘flock’, comprising seven figures, again of mixed gender. They
are predominantly dressed in black and interact among themselves;
they all stand on marble tiles, laid straight onto the ‘ground’; and this
time, most of them have hands, which are used expressively. The idea
began as a proposal for an installation on the theme of ‘peace’, using a
sheep rather than a dove. A ‘good shepherd’ obviously has Christian
connotations; yet the main source was an ancient – pagan – sculpture
showing a man carrying a sheep on his shoulders, possibly as a sacrificial
offering. Does the man’s red hand signify a bloody execution? Does the
redness of his cap reinforce this? Thinking the sheep cumbersome, the
artist split the animal from the man. We can see how in three sketches
dating back to 1986. In the first, one of two drypoints, the man wears
the ram’s head (back to front!) while daintily holding his shadows on
a lead with a long glove. This is no ordinary shepherd. In the second,
again a drypoint, he puts the head on a pole, and looks at both it and us
with misgiving. To our surprise he also wears boots with a heel. In the
third, an oil pastel, he interacts nervously with his shadows. We note
that, idiosyncratically, the man now wears a close-fitting white cap
as well as gloves and boots, and that the shadows now hold the lead
attached to the ram’s head. The power structure has shifted. In the
finished work, however, the man is bare-footed and looks to the front,
as does the ram’s head. There is no lead. Yet the man still expresses
anxiety – a feeling evidently shared by his followers. That this finished
version is nevertheless the most statuesque of the images reflects the
artist’s view that public sculpture should be imposing, that it should
always have a ‘presence’ appropriate to its environment. Yet, although
authoritative, the gestural language ensures that Man and His Sheep is
not at the same time authoritarian or even hagiographic, as is often the
case with public effigies.
This is even more true of the imposing group sculpture of 1994, The
Longest Journey. Here we meet another unspecified movement of people,
this time by water. Once again, the boat fuses two spaces: the exterior
world for the five diminutive, half-dressed, Amerindian figures at the
rear, and the interior world for the towering spectral presences at the
front. The title comes, not from Shelley or E. M. Forster, but from a
poem by D. H. Lawrence, The Ship of Death (section IV):
Build then the ship of death, for you must take
The longest journey, to oblivion.
And die the death, the long and painful death
That lies between the old self and the new.
8
Yet the artist does not intend to imply that the sculptural journey is
in any way doomed or belongs to the underworld – if anything, it
represents the essential life process. Nor are the five looming presences
‘psychopomps’ in the sense of guiding the five souls to the land of the
dead; indeed, they are painted white and not black, with, as David
Gervais puts it, ’wonderfully free tho’ stylized drapery’; and to an extent
they relate to the outer world, as though on the lookout. Unusually, the
work has no further, iconic background. Rather it comes from a legend
the artist heard told in Brazil of a boat stuck up a tree – presumably
following a natural upheaval. In pre-modern Brazil, boats were the
principal mode of transport through the Amazonian waterways, both
socially and commercially, so trees were always close by water. Thus,
far from representing refugees crossing a perilous ocean, the five
people appear to enjoy the serenity of an inland voyage. By a pleasing
coincidence, the boat itself was bought from a boat-builder, and once
navigated, not the open sea, but the Norfolk Broads.
The most complex of Pacheco’s groups – and perhaps the most arresting
– is the Land of No Return of 2002. Paul Hills has already written about
this from the artist’s point of view (in an exhibition catalogue for New
York). The outer and inner worlds are now sharply separated. First,
there are three flamboyantly naked men with startling ribbed torsos
in an adversarial pose. Their high drama owes to a complex sixteenthcentury sculpture by Giambologna, which the artist himself described
variously as The Rape of the Sabines, Persephone or some other exercise of
brute force. Like Pacheco, Giambologna sidesteps the over-defined title.
Second, there are three women dressed in indigo. Being women, they
do not strike us as ‘shadows’ to the men, and, certainly, their attitude
is benign rather than negative. They play an ancient pagan game of
Buzios, predicting the future with sixteen golden cowrie shells. The
artist derived their crouching position from a small terracotta group
of ‘knucklebone players’ from about 300 BC, and the turbaned head
from a group of women in The Fortune Teller, a painting by Georges de
la Tour of 1635 or thereabouts. To the naïve spectator, of course, they
recall the three Moira, or Fates, known to us as Norns from the start of
Wagner’s Götterdämmerung; yet to the informed spectator this aspect is
of no great significance. Third, between the two groups stands an alert
young woman. As with the presences in the boat, she is clad in spectral
white; yet she has an even more pronounced worldly aspect, as we
gather from her belt, her open gold sandals and her teasingly raised
left foot. As for the title Land of No Return, Hills suggests that it places
these seven figures in a ‘purgatorial limbo’. It is indeed a third type
of space in addition to the inner and outer spaces already described.
It is a space in which the figures act out extremes of aggression and
passivity – or fatalism – while being removed from the very world in
which those extremes are acted out; and it is the acute but detached
attention of the young girl that helps us to enter it – her role, that is to
say, is in part ‘epic’.
Her image, indeed, takes us to the third and final part of this talk,
where I too shall adopt a fresh but slightly detached stance, that of
the philosophical observer. This is nothing new, as we learn from
9
Land of No Return
Polychromed wood
(details)
Private collection
Land of No Return
Polychromed wood
Private collection
Wagner’s Mastersingers. After Walther has won the prize competition,
the wily old cobbler Hans Sachs, who has earlier declined the young
Eva, steps forward, not just to address and unite the community as its
leader, but also, from a dramatic point of view, to bring the work to an
effective close.
The Philosophical Observer
In the Poetics, his treatise on drama, Aristotle sets out two tenets for
art in general. On the one hand is representation, and on the other
what we might call empowerment. Representation defines man: he is
the only species to practise art. A cat, after all, does not scratch images
of rodents in the gravel. More still, man delights in artistic activity,
which is his gateway to engaging with the world. Empowerment also
involves a shift out of the real world. As Aristotle puts it,
We delight in looking at the most proficient images of things
which in life we see with pain – for example, the shapes of most
despised wild animals and of corpses. [Poetics: 2.1]
Through images we can render pain – and any other feeling – both
harmless and delightful. We take pleasure in gaining control of our
feelings. But through images we also acquire knowledge. Again as
Aristotle puts it,
[We] delight in seeing images, because it comes about that [we]
learn as [we] observe, and infer what each thing is.
If a mouse, say, was to carve an image of a cat, it would not only relish
controlling its terror, but it would also distil its understanding of a
ruthless predator. The mouse would thus be empowered. Aristotle also
gives a counter-example: if the image is of something unknown – some
exotic quadruped, say – our only pleasure will be in the execution. And
this indicates a priority. Art celebrates the delights of the muse before
it addresses the cares of man – but to be complete it must, obviously,
do both.
10
So far, I have said nothing about Ana Maria Pacheco’s delight in
representation. Let us return to the Shadows of the Wanderer. Brendan
Prendeville talks of
figures whose being is concentrated in a single gesture of the
whole body, and given its intensest focus in the face … [with]
heads [that] are sometimes pulled down ‘onto or even below
the shoulders’.
The artist describes how each figure is carved from a single log of lime,
which is
a wonderful wood for carving because it has a very compact
grain.
First, a technician cuts and blocks the wood with a big chainsaw. The
artist then works with ever smaller chisels before taking up power
tools to sand the wood roughly. After that, she does fine-sanding
by hand – a laborious task, but one necessary to prepare the wood
for painting. Next, she mixes oil and water-based paints to create a
‘delicate reflection of flesh’ that will establish sufficient ‘presence’ for
the image to come ‘straight at you’. She also stains the wood and uses
cotton buds to apply colour, which, admittedly, is in short supply
here. And finally, she attends to the details. When not helmeted, the
cranium is left bald, or it is carved – sometimes extravagantly – and
painted in different shades. Sometimes the hair is represented by nails.
The convex eyes, she says,
are made of a combination of polyester resin and onyx. The
onyx is highly polished so you think there is a pupil there and
I can control the gaze because it is important to show how the
figures relate to each other [whereas the whites are of resin].
There may also be a suggestion of eyebrows and a touch of eye-shadow,
though there are no eye-lashes. The teeth
are made of acrylic and … look so real … because I put them in
one by one to follow the shape of the structure of the face. Teeth
are important because, when someone speaks to you, you see
their teeth … [Since] we tend to associate [teeth] with a
voracious kind of attitude … not all the figures have [them].
If we were to turn to her many paintings and works on paper, we
would find a similar delight in tackling each medium.
Ana Maria Pacheco’s quality of empowerment is unique in our time.
She confronts pain and suffering with Homeric gusto, but also tempers
them with wit and sensuality. The strength of her images depends upon
three strands. The Amerindian physiognomy of her most unsettling
figures derives from her birthplace in the stark, feudal hinterland
of Brazil, Goiânia, in the State of Goiás; the polychrome carvings of
the Portuguese immigrants to Brazil and the indigenous Amerindian
11
Shadows of the Wanderer
Polychromed wood
(details)
Memória Roubada I
Polychromed wood
Baroque (epitomized by the work of ‘The Little Cripple’ Aleijadinho)
add the direct emotional appeal of effigies used in Catholic churches
and processions; and the polytheistic culture of the African slaves
lends a further menace. In her twenties she studied both art and music
before teaching in Brazilian universities. Her considerable learning is
further grounded in the European classics, from the ancient Greeks
and Romans to Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes and Rabelais,
as well as in the Latin-American moderns: these sources enrich her
iconography as does world mythology and fable. At the age of thirty, in
1973, she came to England, initially to study at the Slade, but thereafter
to live and work: critics have suggested that the distance from Brazil
also plays a part in what she does.
Thus in her oeuvre we meet skulls, bones and decapitated heads
(John the Baptist III, 1993); Amazonian women, execution squads and
cannibals (The Banquet, 1985); cages, chains and ropes (Some Exercise of
Power, 1980); and muzzles, blindfolds and masks (In Illo Tempore, 1994).
We journey into the underworld; we travel magically through air, fire
and water; and we peer through the gloom by candlelight – one of
Pacheco’s striking techniques is sfumatura, the shading of dark into
light. We are also confronted by angels and saints, and an abundance
of actual or imaginary beasts with uncanny powers. We are arrested by
a tone in which high moral purpose and a chilling surreal exaggeration
is offset by eroticism and earthy humour. And we are dazzled by the
many books, texts by different authors interspersed with her often
delightfully relaxed pictures.
But there is another dimension still. We recognize political images of our
own time directly transmuted into her art. Memória Roubada I of 2001 is
the first of two similar installations (Memória Roubada II has its heads on
open shelves without doors). The title means ‘Stolen Memory’, and had
already been used for six paintings back in 1992. Before us is a cabinet
with three shelves. Cabinets, like many of the boxes in Pacheco’s work,
store away – or, in psychological terms, store up. But this one, raised on
12
legs for rhetorical effect, throws open its doors – seemingly to unleash
its pent-up energy. On three shelves are six heads, three male, three
female. Two are on the top, three in the middle, and one on the bottom
– as many, the artist says, as she could include without overloading the
composition. These heads, Amerindian in style, represent ‘presences’:
they are not, for once, decapitated, an implication she avoids by fixing
the chins upon the shelf and thereby deflecting attention from the
neck. (The top head with the open mouth derived from a photograph
pasted on her studio wall, showing a Manchester United footballer in
full cry after scoring a goal.) The heads gaze down at a pierced heart on
the slate floor. The origin of the image lies in the Portuguese-Brazilian
practice of including a small Catholic sanctuary within the house, with
an icon of the Virgin pierced by a sword. This reflects a passage in Luke,
chapter 2 (:35). Simeon, a devout old man, tells Mary of the turbulence
her child would unleash on Israel: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through
thy own soul also …” Yet, to bring the suffering into the modern world,
Pacheco gives us not a sword but seven daggers. The choice of seven
is not just for visual effect, but rather positively to avoid matching
the number of heads on the shelves. More still, the gold leaf in which
they are covered resonates with the gold discovered in the Brazilian
interior by the colonialists. On the doors of the cabinet are inscriptions
in Portuguese. These were stimulated by a poem written by a friend
when Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America in 1492 was being feted.
What Columbus unleashed, the poet claims, was a conquest leading to
an indigenous population
shot in the ears / [with] severed hands / poked eyes /
[and] castrated sexes
These, therefore, are the stolen memories epitomised by the daggers
at which the victims gaze. That is to say, the image begins with an
icon introduced to Brazil by the imperial conquerors; it is usurped
by the Amerindian victims of colonial imperialism; it is returned to
us, deconsecrated, by a thoughtful contemporary artist who is heir
to both sides of the culture; and it is received in the first instance by
another colonial people, the British, whose culture is imbued with
the relative restraints of Ruskin and Protestantism. It is the task of the
philosophical observer to define an artist’s stance, and I believe it is the
Memória Roubada stance that also informs, if not quite so directly, the
work we are considering here, Ana Maria Pacheco’s magical, haunting
and overwhelming Shadows of the Wanderer.
© Christopher Wintle
Chichester Cathedral, Tuesday 19 July, 2016
13
Sources
For some of the comments by Ana Maria Pacheco, Xavier Bray and Neil
Macgregor, I have drawn on a transcript of an open discussion at St.
John’s Church Waterloo on 29 November 2010 provided by the artist’s
dealer, Pratt Contemporary. I have also drawn on essays by Christopher
Reid and Brendan Prendeville in the short monograph Ana Maria
Pacheco, Shadows of the Wanderer published by Pratt Contemporary in
2010. Most helpful has been the volume of Collected Essays: Texts on the
Work of Ana Maria Pacheco, published by Pratt Contemporary in 2004.
The words of David Gervais are taken from a letter to the author. It
has not, alas, been possible to contact ‘Hanamichi 1326’ for permission
to use his or her drawing.
Acknowledgement
I am most grateful to Susan and Bernard Pratt for help with this talk in
many ways.
Images
All images of work by Ana Maria Pacheco © Pratt Contemporary.
The pastel by Robert Anning Bell, The Women Stood Afar Off Beholding
These Things appears by kind permission of the dealer Abbott and
Holder (London).
Raphael, Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo (detail); fresco, 1514, Palazzi
Pontifici, Vatican. [Image: Public domain], Wikimedia Commons.
15