And the Shark

Watson and The Shark (1778)

Anyone who knows me well enough could probably tell you that Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley is one of my favorite paintings. I think the first time I saw it in person I was somewhere between wetting my self and fainting with excitement. It's huge, beautiful, and horrific. I love this painting so much that I've decided to dedicate an entire post to it. With it I want to explore a subject in the painting that has always tickled my curiosity, the shark. The creature is without a doubt one of the strangest depictions of a shark that I've ever seen. (of course you cant really compare it to Damien Hurst's The Impossibility of Death... He did use a real shark after all.) Anyways you can't really blame Copley for not having a perfect understanding of the anatomy of a shark. Real zoology was still in a nascent stage in 1778 when he painted it and Darwin's On the Origin of the Species wasn't even published until 1859.But before we delve in any further here's a little history behind Copley's oh so very scary painting.

The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 

In 1749 fourteen year old Brook Watson was working as a crew member on his uncles trading ship in Havana, Cuba. While swimming near the ship Watson was suddenly attacked by a large shark (probably a tiger shark.) The shark attacked twice, first biting into the flesh of his leg, then finally taking off the boy's leg. Luckily for Watson a small boat of the ship's crew members were waiting beside the ship to take the captain to shore and where able to pull him to safety before he met his ultimate demise. Years later when he became Lord Mayor of London, Watson requested that Copley create a painting of his terrifying ordeal. Well, we could spend a whole other post talking about why this painting was so important to history painting as a genera, and American art over all, but that's not why we're here. TO THE SHARK! 

Brook Watson 

I'm pretty sure if you've ever seen a shark you've never seen one that looks quite like Copley's. I know I certainly haven't. Well, looking at this painting got me thinking, where did Copley get his inspiration for this aquatic monstrosity? He seems to know a little about a sharks basic anatomy. The shape of the jaws are correct which makes me think the artist at least was able to view a specimen of a shark's jaw. There are other things, however, that are just a bit peculiar about this animal. For instance, as many historians have noted, sharks do not have lips, the fins and strange streamer like material on the creatures head are all wrong, and there is something inherently off about it's eyes, nose, nostrils and over all set up of the body. Most would say this is all just because Copley had absolutely no idea what a shark looked like, let alone a tiger shark. I disagree though. I think he might have known what at least one or two kinds of sharks looked like, or what some one else believed they looked like. 

Take a look at the 1821 image of sharks above  from Leclere Buffon's Natural History. He seems to get the basics of a shark, the head of the hammerhead in particular, but the rest is all wrong. The bodies are disproportionate and the fins long and wavy. If Copley was studying images like these there's no reason why his shark wouldn't have long string fins, and looking at the image for Watson's shark it appears he must have seen something like Buffon's drawing.  

Nurse Shark

Aside from old drawings and early zoology it would be so incredible if I could find some proof that Copley looked at an actual shark at some point. I don't think he saw anything like a tiger shark but I believe that he might have seen something smaller. When I first saw Copley's painting my thought was that this shark had to be based on some smaller species and that the ferocious jaws where just added on. The separated fins, placement of the nose, nostrils, and long body on all look more akin to small sand dwelling sharks like nurse sharks or dog fish. Looking at  the image of the nurse shark you can see where Copley might have gotten the idea for the longer nose and strange floppy fins. Then if you look at the images of the spotted dog fish below you can see his ideas for the nostrils and even for putting lips on his shark. With both sharks you can also see where he might have gotten ideas for the entire body of his animal. I think what might have happened is that Copley was consulting several different sources and in the end combined everything he saw in a way that would most bring his subject to life.Of course there's no way to prove this unless I can get a hold of some writings or research Copley did. (Which would be awesome if I could!)

Mouth of a Spotted Dogfish

Spotted Dogfish

Oh, and I can't forget the eyes. There's no explanation for them in nature or early scientific sketches, and rightfully so. They're not the eye's of a shark at all, they're the eyes of a human. At least that's what I see. Art historians have stated that Copley based his expressions for the men in his painting on Charles Le Brun's 1698 studies of expressions. I think he did the same thing for the shark. By giving the shark less wild and more human eyes the creature is made all the more horrific. He becomes a character with thoughts, feelings, and motives. He has a spirit and personality, but that of some cruel and evil thing. He is all rage, malice, and hunger. So though it is strange that Copley would give his shark human eyes it makes sense that he would do just that if it revved up the emotional impact of this image on the viewer. This was to be one of Copley's most dramatic works and every moment needed to be filled with drama. 

Le Brun's Expressions

Before I wrap things up I want to consider one last point. Copley did three versions of this painting. Its interesting to note that with each addition the men stay basically the same but the shark changes. I think Copley realized that this shark was unnatural. Perhaps he did more research, or got some tips from those who had actually encountered a shark. The shark is still strange looking in the other two copies but it becomes more animal, more wild and less calculating and closer to something that we know as a  real shark. To me the first edition will always be my favorite. It has all the drama and emotion to truly brings Watson's terrifying encounter to life.

Watson 2 (1778)

Watson 3 (1782)

Pissed

Look at this image. What are your first thoughts while looking at it? Does it provoke your emotions and fill you with a deepening sense of spirituality, or do you feel nothing, think nothing as you look at it? Do you find it beautiful? Strange? Intriguing? What about offensive?

Well, from the time that this photograph was created in 1987, many people the world over have found it to be one of the most offensive images ever displayed in a museum or gallery. When it was produced, in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts many people, including two United State senators, were outraged that government funds had supported the creation of such an abominable work. As it was displayed more and more, both museums and the work’s artist, Andres Serrano, received multiple death threats. In the following years it has been vandalized and finally destroyed by a pair of hammer wielding young men. You might be asking yourself why. Why would people have such a strong reaction to such a simple image? After all, haven’t a million images of the crucifixion of Christ been displayed before in both private and public art collections? Why then would this particular image rile people so? The answer is in the work’s title.

Piss Christ. That was the title given by Serrano to the photograph of a small plastic crucifix placed in a jar of his own urine. Disgusting right? Now you might understand what outraged people so much about this work. Here Serrano had taken an image deeply sacred to those in the Christian faith and absolutely, and very publicly, defiled it. Its no wonder spokespersons and supporters of the Christian world at once jumped to the defense of what they held dear. It suddenly seemed that in the modern world art had no bounds in what it could explore or destroy. Now it, with the help of some heartless artist, had reached into a world that art had so often respected. Obviously this artist had no respect or understanding of the image of Christ.

Or did he?

Andres Serrano was born in 1950 and raised a Roman Catholic throughout his childhood.  He clearly had an understanding of Christian iconography and its scared nature. So why defile it? But before we answer that question lets ask a second (or a third.) Would this image be so offensive if the crucifix where placed in a jar of water, milk, or blood? Serrano submerged a handful of other miniature figures in these liquids without half the reaction from the public. How would changing the liquid of the jar change the emotional reaction of the viewer, or what if the viewer never knew the crucifix was submerged in urine? These are questions I’ve considered and here are my thoughts. If the crucifix had been submerged in blood I think the meaning would have been altered entirely. I actually think it would be a very emotionally charged image, speaking more of how Christ suffered then anything else. If Serrano had displayed a blood image I wonder if he would be seen as a kind of artistic hero who truly captured the emotion, pain, and sacrifice that many find in images of Christ. What’s more is that if Serrano had only named the image something like Crucifix we would never know that the works subject was displayed in urine. (Fun Fact: The paint color, Indian Yellow, was historically made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves. Urine has been used in the production of art for hundreds of years!) The meaning of Serrano’s image really comes from the title. So why? Why, why, why would Serrano draw attention to the fact that he’s defiling a sacred image? Maybe to get his point across…

According to Serrano he never meant this image to be a defacement of Christian iconography. He meant to make a cultural point. According to him, he saw a world where the image of Christ was being peddled like the latest comic book superhero. (Think Jesus action figures, and Jesus is My Homeboy t-shirts.)

 For centuries and even into the modern era Christ’s image has been used again and again to assert power, control the masses, and even instill guilt or produce a false façade of piety.  Perhaps everywhere Serrano looked he saw a place where you could buy Christ. He saw this even more so in the cheap crucifixes that could be purchased alongside a pack of cigarettes at the local Seven Eleven. I think Serrano looked at the world and was sickened by what he saw. The world before him had effectively taken a piss on something and someone who should be seen as sacred. To him his work was an artistic manifestation of carelessness towards the image of Christ that he saw in the world around him. Still, most people don’t see Piss Christ that way. All they see is an image of Christ submerged in a jar of urine. Many believe imagery like this should be destroyed or never made at all. 

So here’s the next question. What if artists never made art that offended the mindset of the people within their own time period? What if Manet never painted Olympia or the impressionists never fragmented the world into a series of brush stokes? What if one group of people found an art movement’s imagery so offensive that they decided to systematically destroy each work of that kind? Oh wait, that happened! The Nazi party burned and destroyed hundreds of modern works prior to and during WWII. But without getting too sensationalistic on you I just want to say that I think art, at times, should be offensive or rub us the wrong way. If it doesn’t do this from time to time then it doesn’t make you think, make you question, or make you wonder about yourself and the world you take part in. To me, that is one of the many primary functions of art. If people want to stop the production of any work that could possibly offended any group or individual then art really ceases to be (at least in my book.)

Olympia, Edouard Manet, 1863

         Here's another thought. Maybe we need to all work on being a little less sensitive in certain regards.  What I mean is that there are things that each one of us holds sacred; we hold beliefs and values in our heart, in our souls, that can’t be taken away unless we want them to be. The fact is no image, no words, or actions of others should be able to take those things away from any of us. Despite what Serrano meant by his image, or what various individuals believe he meant, that image does not or should not compromise the beauty and love behind the atonement and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  It is up to us how we perceive and take in the world. We ultimately choose what will offended us or tarnish our beliefs.

One the same note, the whole time I was researching this particular post the recent event Everybody Draw Mohammed Day kept popping into my head. If you don’t know what that was it was when the creators of South Park were served with death threats for having insinuated the presence of the prophet Mohammed on two of their show’s episodes. (If you ever watch South Park you pretty much know that no religion or religious figure is considered too sacred to be represented.) Following these threats a journalist thought it would be an amusing cultural study to establish an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Her thought was that if everyone was drawing the Prophet then they (those who were dealing out death threats) couldn’t possibly kill everyone. Well, by the end of it all this particular journalist had change her name and to go into hiding and for the most part the whole ordeal has been pushed to the back of world populations minds. But this instance reminded me of the death threats that pursued Serrano for his Piss Christ. The fact is that ideas are strong things, especially when those ideas take on a physical form. To deny the anger that people felt towards Serrano would be denying the power that art holds in this world. In fact, it is because of this loathing toward Serrano’s now destroyed work that the work has become so iconic. It really is ironic that in their wanting to destroy the photograph and protect the image of Christ, these people have branded it deeply into the psyche of contemporary culture. In a way they have elevated the work, where as it might have gone completely unnoticed had they never protested against it in the first place.

In the end I think that Piss Christ is an example of awfully beautiful art at its best. It’s an object that, yes, ruffles one’s sensibilities. Also, it asks to be taken at more than face value. Often times to truly understand a work you have to look at the culture and time in which it was created, who it was created by, and what their motivations ultimately were. I believe that we would all do ourselves and the world a huge favor if we allowed ourselves to examine our initial reaction to artistic objects, look beyond and ask questions about what we’re seeing to gain a deeper understanding of a work, and then finally form our own judgments. If you find something beautiful, thought provoking, or mind shattering, take it and hold it in your heart and mind and push yourself to grow and understand. On the other hand, if you find something confusing, pointless, or utterly offensive, raise your fists to the sky, shout for the entire world to hear how you and the masses have been wronged, or simply walk away. But please oh please you destroyers, you who think the world should not see such things, don’t ruin another’s chance to reexamine their world and themselves or their chance to grow.

Its funny, that for me, so much thought, so much emotion can be held in an image that is nothing more than a jar, plastic, and human waste.

Piss Christ, Andres Serrano, 1987

The Impossibility of Death...

I was just watching a video about the development of sculpture on smarthistory.org, and while displaying an image of Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the narrators questioned its meaning and whether or not it really could be considered a sculpture. Here are my thoughts…

Damian Hirst, The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Some one Living, 1991

 First of all in, my mind, it is a sculpture and in that case a work of art. If you look back to someone like Duchamp and his Fountain (which I talked about in my previous post) you can see the early beginnings of artists pushing the idea of what can be considered a sculptural work, or art for that matter. Robert Rauschenberg also did this. He, like Duchamp, took “found objects” and incorporated them into a larger work. What’s key with Rauschenberg, is the ability for his works to stir emotion. Looking at an image of one of his works you may not feel it, but I promise you if you have a chance to come face to face with one in a gallery you will feel something (even if it is a bad something). Yes some may look at a Robert Rauschenberg and see a pile of junk pulled out of the backyard or an old dusty barn, but as for me, I see an autobiography and someone searching to express a memory or an emotion in ways that words, or even paint and canvas, often can’t.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1954  

        Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59

Perhaps, though, I am bias. I have very little artistic capability, which I blame myself for entirely. I was given all the means to be a pretty decent artist. My mother put me in art classes at a very young age and I did well enough. Then I took more classes in college and did a whole two years of sketching and drafting in design school. But in the end I did not push myself. I lacked the discipline and was lazy when it came to developing skills in the areas of painting and sketching. Well, sadly, I still needed a way to express myself. Since my lack of practice had made the brush and pencil obsolete I had to find a new medium with which to express myself. The medium, naturally for me, was collage. I could find images, textures, and colors from the world of printed pictures and words and reaappropriated them to facilitate my own meanings.

Now I’m not saying artists like Rauschenberg or Hirst are not (unlike myself) talented; on the contrary. I think that in these forms they found a process of communicating ideas and emotions in a way a two dimensional painting or print could not, and also in a way that a bronze or plastic sculpture could not. Hirst, in particular, needed an object that would cause the profound horror of sudden death to scream its way in to the minds of his viewers. I don’t think he could have done this with some gelatin mold of a shark. It needed to be real, threatening, and also morbid in its process of decay.  The Physical Impossibility… speaks of two fears in the human mind. The idea that death is often sudden, painful and horrific, and also that every one of us, though we are absolutely alive and vigorously so, will one day decay into the nothingness of the grave. This brings me to another question. What dose Hirst’s work say in light of the twenty first century mindset and why choose a decaying shark to say it?  Well…here come my thoughts again.

Contemporary time has afforded us a lot of comfort and, along with that, security. In earlier times, depending on who you were, the goal was to stay alive and to find yet again another way of making it through the next month, week, or even day. The futility of life was constantly knocking on your door like the embodiment of death pictured works from the time of the Black Death. But today things have changed. It’s as if we have caged death, chained him up and locked him in a closet in the back of some sterile hospital room that we can look into for a moment if we have to, if someone we love has been so unlucky to find him. But then we let the glass doors of the ER slide close behind us and go out into a world of central heated homes and bustling grocery stores that provide us our food and shelter and we forget. We tell ourselves death won’t find us here, not in this safe modern world. But deep down each of us knows that death cannot be caged, even by the arms of modern medicine. No, he is lurking somewhere beneath the surface, and when the time is right he’ll strike and remind us that even we, a modern society, could not escape him.

Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph of Death, 1562

Hirst tells us this through the jaws of a shark. He transcends the security of modern times and takes us back to the days of fight or flight. He makes us the toothsome prey and death the stealthy unblinking predator. We may be masters in our contemporary metropolises, but in the wilderness of the world, in the depths of a wild ocean we are no stronger, no more adapted then our prehistoric predecessors. We too can fall victim to such savage ends at the hands (or mouth) of a creature, that like death, has shared this world with us since the beginning. We tell ourselves its impossible, that that primal fear, that awful unforeseen death cannot find us here in a well lit museum filled with the calls of children and excited patrons. But as we look back into those empty eyes and try to push another shiver away, we find a feeling that tells us that the impossible is possible, that we have surly looked into the eyes of death. Here is Hirst’s genius, his goal.
K.

My Awfully Long Introduction...

Hello, hello and welcome to my first ever attempt at a blog. Please bear with me through my wandering thoughts and feeble grammar, and please oh please share your views on what I have to say. My goal here is to take a closer look at the art that is often misunderstood at first glance and seen as meaningless, offensive, or too horrific to consider. There are times when we might wish we could only find pristine beauty before us, such as the comfort of a pastoral landscape, or the serine balance of a marbled Greek beauty. But if these things express the pinnacle of enjoyment and harmony that are part of this world, what of the blacker states of being that exists along side them? The banal and ugly, death, fear, sorrow, sweeping boredom, and the grasping reach of decay are also a part of our world. It is my belief that through mediums such as art, music, and literature artists (in their various ways) have encouraged us to recognize and embrace the full spectrum of what it is to be human.

You’ll notice as this blog goes along that art may take the forefront to subject matter more often then not. This is because art has so often taught me to see beyond my own first impressions and also better understand myself. I remember the first time, in my art history studies, that I saw one of Rothko’s paintings in a text book and Duchamp’s Fountain as a slide in survey class. I didn’t get them and I certainly didn’t like them and that was that. But now I ardently love them both.

Why?

 I learned to look beyond the form that was merely before me. Art challenges you to look beyond, but if you don’t know what you are looking for that doorway is often closed. Enter art history. Sometimes we are so removed from a time, a place, or the artist’s daily experiences we do not understand what the object in front of us says about any of those things. For instance the Fountain was nothing more to me than a flipped over urinal. It was not until I had learned that the work was a challenge to the art world, a pushing of the boundaries of what was recognized as artistic, that I began to see the beauty and power behind such a trivial everyday thing. So in looking beyond, and learning the history, this particular work began to take on much more meaning for me.

On a final note I love art for its subjective abilities that allow me to better understand myself. Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster pretty much tells you upfront what the meaning is behind it. Goya has created a political parable and scrawled across it a warning that when reason sleeps the society and politics of the human world suffer. Yet for me this work came to mean something wholly different. In a video clip I watched recently on smarthistory.org they made this lovely statement…

 “Art can help us remember someone we care about or help us remember ourselves.”

That is what Goya’s work did for me. At the time when I first came upon it, and had no further context then what I was seeing, I saw myself in that nightmarish image. I knew what it was to sit, as that man sat, surrounded by the horrors of what I believed to be his own mind. In my case my reason had slept, and I had pushed away things I knew to be true, leaving myself surrounded by my own reasonless thought. I believe the art we come to love the most are those pieces that we find ourselves in. Art is often a comment on the human condition and sometimes a more personal comment on what we feel and see within ourselves. In studying art I have often found it to be a strange ever changing mirror that tells me of myself, and even my time and my place within that time.

K.