The Role and Significance of Nightmares in Art, Slides of Painting

Download The Role and Significance of Nightmares in Art and more Slides Painting in PDF only on Docsity!

THE ART OF NIGHTMARES

Nazir Tanbouli

ABSTRACT

Why do artists sometimes create horrific images that burn themselves into the memory, creating a sense of unease and unsettling the viewer? And why are audiences drawn to such images, seeking them out time and time again? Yet, why do such images appear to be made only at certain times – times either in the artists' life or at times in history? I am interested in the regular but infrequent appearance of the nightmare in art. Depicting nightmarish images, that seem to “pop” out of my unconscious is something I have been aware of in my own drawings and paintings in the past few years. At first I thought I was alone in this. However over the past year and a half, I have been meeting other artists, and attending exhibitions, where nightmare images are presented, and appear to be resonating with audiences. This movement is small as yet, but I think it is significant. For this reason this essay researches the roots of the appearance of the nightmare in visual art, and connects it to the shamanic role of the artist in explaining the world to the tribe Furthermore, the deep connection between shamanism and art itself is explained. Using Freud's discovery of the unconscious, and Jung's notion of the archetype as guides, this paper shows that drawing the nightmare is something that an artist does in his/her function as shaman, seizing upon archetypal and symbolic elements that transform the nightmarish image form the personal unconscious of the artist into the collective unconscious of the tribe – that is, the audience. And by articulating the nightmare through art, the artist reassures the audience that they are not alone, not mad, that the nightmare they are fearing, we all fear it too; and that maybe collectively we can stand against our fears. Starting with the Gothic horror of Fuesli's Night Mare I look at artists' nightmares from the first half of the 20th^ century up to the Abu Ghraib paintings of Fernando Botero.

only one person in the tribe was in charge of the drawing (the shaman - the artist); if it was depiction of everyday life, why wasn't it practiced by every single man and woman of the tribe? These drawings were anything but depiction of the real life: these where the first art form, the art of nightmares. Dr. Nigel Spivey, (a Cambridge professor of classic art and archaeology), in his BBC series, How Art Made the World , noted that the Lascaux cave paintings, with the intricate dot and lattice patterns overlapping the representational images of animals, strongly resemble hallucinations invoked by sensory deprivation. He claims that the connections between the animals depicted , and these hallucinations, led to the invention of image-making, or the art of drawing. (Spivey 2005) The role of the shaman down through the ages is multiple but very specific. The shaman works not for himself only but for the good of the tribe. It is a social function. The shaman is a healer, and achieves healing through entering the metaphysical world. Shaman also act as mediators between the physical and metaphysical worlds. And the shaman keeps and repeats the stories of the tribe: the collective memory. Modern culture has mainly expelled the notion of the tribal shaman, but the shamanic function lives on through the continued practice of art. THE FASCINATION OF NIGHTMARES The formal recognition of the importance of collection and interpretation of dreams goes back at least to the civilisation of ancient Egypt, and probably before that. The Egyptians believed that the dream state revealed important things about the waking life, and needed to be interpreted for meaning. (Oakes 2002). Several millennia on, we are still fascinated by dreams, but more especially by nightmares. More than that, we are quite happy to hear or to see somebody else's nightmares, either first hand telling or through different forms of art and literature. Why? Pleasure and pain are the first experiences we have; they lead the way for our brain to eventually recognize all positive and negative values, good and evil, food and poison, God and Satan. This is because, according to Freud, the personality structure first emerges as the Id, or unorganised part of the personality that contains the basic drives. The Id acts as according to the 'pleasure principle': it is always seeking to avoid pain or displeasure. Later, the Superego develops out of the Id, this is the conscience, which strives to balance or control the Id, yet is related to it. Both are unconscious forces. (Freud, 1995) This pleasure vs pain instinct functions as the most important survival mechanism for all forms of life, from snails to humans in different levels of consciousness: from the single cell protecting its own protoplasm, up to the most modern, most sophisticated human knowledge. The interesting thing is that we all register pain more than pleasure; it is part of the survival instinct, which is exploited by every religious, political and economical establishment in human history. This means that as we are more likely to register negative experience, we are also more likely to register our nightmares more than our dreams. Freud believed that civilisation demands that the basic Id instincts be redirected, through unconscious

processes of sublimation. Yet though we may repress Id's instincts, they have not really disappeared. Even when sublimated, they can break out of the control of the Ego and the Superego. Freud felt that dreams stage a the return to what has been repressed. Dreams are “keyholes through which we can see into our unconscious.” (Freud, 1997) They reveal fears, desires and emotions that we are usually unaware of. Dreams are fundamentally about “wish fulfillment;” that is, the symbolic fulfillment, in the form of dreams, fantasies, etc., of an unconscious wish or impulse. Mosby's Medical Dictionary defines wish fulfillment as “one of the primary motivations for dreams in which an unconscious desire or urge, unacceptable to the ego and superego because of sociocultural restrictions or feelings of personal guilt, is given expression.” (Mosby 2009) So we're fascinated by dreams – all dreams, whether nightmare or not – because they allow us to see what we ordinarily don't get to see in real life. And these things are expressed not through verbal language but through symbols, that is, images - and images in juxtaposition. Carl Jung accepted the idea of an individual unconscious (which contains all the thoughts and ideas including the socially unacceptable), but added to it a collective unconscious, or communal memory, that is shared by all, yet is not actually understood in everyday life. (Hyde 1994) Jung described typical characteristics and patterns of perception in human life, as archetypes. A short list of Jung's archetypes reveals well known characters that have appeared in art and literature since the earliest times, and in all cultures: Persona (public mask) Animus (male in women) Anima (female in men) Mother (mothering, nurturing) Shadow (dark side of personality, holding animal and sexual instincts) Hero (savior of the tribe, rescuer) (Hyde 1994) These archetypes, and more, appear in our dreams as “impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche...” (Jung 1968). At this point we need to differentiate between the medical uses of dreams and nightmares, that is therapeutic psychology, and the artistic use. Both are intended to help humanity but in different ways. While Freud was interested in interpreting dreams of individual patients with disorders, the role of the artist is different. The artist sublimates his/her desire into the art work; in doing so, the fantasies become available to others. Freud said that “the artist's first aim is to set himself free; by communicating his work to other people suffering from the same arrested desires, he offers them the same liberation.” (Freud, quoted in Storey, 2006) The artwork allows us to access the fantasy. So why do we want to access the nightmarish in art? THE FUNCTION OF THE NIGHTMARE IN ART There is a going on relationship between arts and the control of systems

Nightmare art comes either in times of social and cultural upheaval (as a primeval reaction by the artist that responds to a need among the masses) or in times when the system itself wants to control, stop or even impose a social and cultural upheaval. Surrealism took shape when Andre Breton, training as a doctor (and working in a warfront neurological ward), encountered Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Excited by the possibilities in exploring the unconscious which he saw as a process of liberation, he founded a collective of like minded artists and writers, the Surrealists. (Polizzotti 1995) However one thing notable about Breton, he treated the surreal more like a doctor than an artist: automatic writing and cadavre exquis , for example, resemble more like experiments in a scientific lab than the collaging of Max Ernst. But the fact is that Surrealism, and the more anarchic Dadaism, took shape during the horrors of WW1 and the social and political upheavals that resulted. Reality was horror manifested and people needed the nightmare art. It cut through the drone of the bad news, and the relentless propaganda, exposing it for what it was, but at the same time exposing our own human complicity: in it are images we recognise as being in our own nightmares. The nightmare art of Otto Dix, Gorge Grosz, Max Ernst and Francis Picabia to name a few, brought out into the open the fears and horrors that circulated in the wider society only as an inchoate mass of ideas. Picabia's take on the situation in Spain. Francis Picabia La Revolution Espagnole 1936- Oil On Canvas Source: Christie's Images, New York, USA http://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images/1100- Picasso's Guernica 1937 Oil on canvas. Image: Artquotes http://www.artquotes.net/masters/picasso/pablo_guerni ca1937.htm

A decade later, Picasso's Guernica , as has been frequently noted, expressed war through the nightmarish image, and doing so gave a cry – more of a harrowing shriek of warning – of outrage at the Fascist destruction. “This is the reason why the painting has such an impact. Instead of a laboured literal commentary on German warplanes, Basque civilians and incendiary bombs, Picasso connects with our worst nightmares. He's saying here's where the world's horror comes from; the dark pit of our psyche." (Schama n.d.) Simon Schama believes that Guernica does what great art really has to do: to come crashing into our “lazy routines.” Great art, he says “spoils the fun” of the illusions of everyday life. Great art like this can “rip away the scar tissue … rob us of our sleep...” (Schama 2006) Here Schama is even hinting that great art has a nightmare quality. Post-Guernica, and post WW2 if we look at art, (particularly painting) fashionable art has moved away from the subject, unless to “comment” on it, and away from representation. In the west, America imposed or at least supported abstract painting as part of fighting socialist thinking and deleting any other possible ideology than Capitalism, which soon became then Consumerism. (Guilbaut 1995) What began as ideology developed its own momentum as a norm: by the sixties and the seventies, if you were not an abstract painter you were not a “real” painter, you were old fashioned and conservative, maybe a communist; (ironically some of the greatest abstract artist like Pollock and Rothko took their own lives). The nightmare image, when it has appeared, became less the painted manifestation of the subconscious, than based on images drawn directly from real life: e.g. collage made from war reportage, Warhol's silkscreened electric chair, the grotesquely oversized toy sculptures of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. They are in most cases ironic, often explicitly so. But despite their horribleness and strangeness, these are not really nightmare images. They just present the horrors of the world, alongside life's utter banalities, in a sort of equivalency; as a kind of “that's all there is, and nothing else to think about.” These images haven't been mediated by the dream state, they don't hit the psyche. Francis Picabia, untitled drawing Image: LA Times http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/ 04/review-francis-picabia-at-patrick-painter-inc.html

THE “EXPLOSION OF REASON”: THE LURE OF THE IRRATIONAL

One of the best known of Goya's Caprichos is The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. In this print, the figure is sleeping while the monsters (owls and bats) fly about him. He said, in his text that "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels." Goya was right about two things here. Firstly, when one sleeps, the logical part of the brain does not operate: Id takes over from Ego and reveals all manner of things. Secondly, that while reason sleeps, unreason allows for unbridled fantasy, creativity. This corresponds to Jung's notion of the Shadow archetype as being despite functioning as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow also contains creativity. (Perry n.d.) The sleep state liberates the brain from logic and reason - it is only upon waking that the Ego tries to make sense of the dream. What interested Breton and many of the Surrealists was the possibilities that this brain liberation might offer. The younger generation of Surrealists, that was influenced by Jung as much as surrealism, such as the director and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and playwright Fernando Arrabal, continued the investigation in the avant-garde or underground art movements that interestingly were more about cinema and theatre than painting (which, as we've seen, was consciously rejecting the surreal and the psychology of the image). Fernando Arrabal says vis-à-vis his theatre work that “ We are unable to explain the world solely through the means of reason. Time and space is an illusion … we cannot live holding on to this overwhelming reason, which prevented us from flourishing.” (Mouchet 1994) Arrabal goes on to link Paula Rego, The Family 1988, Acrylic on canvas backed paper, 213 x 213 cm Image: The Saatchi Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/rego_paula_the_family.htm Paula Rego Snow White Swallows The Poison Apple 1995, Pastel on paper, mounted on aluminium, 178 x 150 cm Image: The Saatchi Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/rego_paula_swallows_poisoned_apple.htm

creativity (talent) to irrationality “there is no talent without madness” but also claims that madness has its own system. By focusing on the irrational, Arrabal and others wanted to go back to the invocation practices of the shaman. Jodorowsky makes this explicit, saying of his surrealistic quest film The Holy Mountain (1972), “I thought the film could be as sacred as an initiation or a holy book, and we had to live it. I wanted to approach the film like a shaman.” (Mouchet 1994) The Holy Mountain, like his other films, is filled with nightmare images. The conquest of Mexico re- enacted by costumed frogs and chameleons. In Santa Sangre (1989), to cite a few scenes, there is an elaborate elephant's funeral concluding with the corpse being eaten; a religious cult venerates an armless woman; and the Day of the Dead provides a backdrop to horrific murder and a red light district fiesta. What is interesting about people like Jodorowsky and Arrabal is that despite never being fashionable they have continued to work and now, at the ages of 81 and 77, have yet another generation of audience and adherents who are ready to engage with the idea of the irrational, the shaman and the confrontation with one's archetypes. Having packed out the BFI in 2007, “Jodorowsky has legions of disciples he doesn't even know about.” (Rose 2009) Rose also quotes Jodorowsky as saying that “Today you make conceptual art. You try to astonish the people, but you are saying nothing deeper for the human soul. Nothing! I always think that art is a form of sacrifice." WHAT DOES NIGHTMARE ART DO, FOR ARTIST AND AUDIENCE? Speaking of Goya, Leon Golub said “if there is any thing Goya was doing, he's facing his own demons and if the artist does that, then he's gonna come through. There was forces going through him, ripping him apart and through his art he was controlling them, if he didn't have his art he would have ended up in the asylum.” (quoted in Hughes 2002, my italics) Paula Rego has said of herself that is she ever stopped painting, “ "The nuthouse awaits," she states baldly. "Yes, the psychiatric unit. It's a real possibility, not just a fear." ” (Roberts 2009) According to Jodorowsky, art is a form of sacrifice; to Golub and Rego, art is the saviour. Sacrifice and salvation – we immediately recognize these themes from the most ancient and significant of mythology. If we apply that idea of the practice of art, we need to admit that art is a self healing, sacrificial act, necessary to the artist to controll and capture what he can't comprehend. Art is a routine of discipline for meditation and reflection; it works as a tool for soul searching and coming to terms with the self. And, just as described by Jung and by Joseph Campbell (Campbell 2007), it is the hero's journey: one man's sacrifice carries within some feeling of healing and salvation for the rest. Anselm Kiefer has observed of his own practice:

involved: “Unilever initially invested £1.25 million in Tate Modern, but it puts the value of the press coverage it has created at £2 million up to 2006.” (Dight 2007). To make work in this way, or with an eye to this end of the art market, or to participate in the structure of consumerism, is to turn the artist from shaman into Dr Frankenstein. Because art is about fiddling in the unconscious. Carsten Holler's slides which netted Unilever so much publicity, as thousands took their children to the Tate Modern to play on the art, told us only that art is a laugh, a game, and we should enjoy it in the here and now: precisely the same empty statement that every single advertisement for credit card, holidays and cheap loans was offering at the same time. Holler's slides reinforced that consumerist agenda. The good thing is that the nightmare recurs in art when it is needed. Today, in 2010 is very different form the heady days of late 2006 when Holler's slides were installed. Today the certainties of both conceptual art and corporate eminence are falling. Nightmare art is rising because the conceptual art that supporting that era of corporate dominance, rule by brand and simulacrum of “sophistication”, is falling. Likewise, academia is falling, as cutbacks begin to be implemented; in fact the whole establishment is falling: maybe seemingly slowly as of yet, but as Goya said: "And those who are about to fall will not take warning from the example of those who have fallen, but nothing can be done about it. All will fall." Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos Fernando Botero, an artist who is collected assiduously, and commissioned for public art and private collections is on record for saying that he will not sell his Abu Ghraib pieces but will eventually donate them to a museum (“it would not be proper to profit from such events.” Forero 2005), though tellingly, “the series's entry into the visual world has not been easy. In the Bay Area, they were shown not in a museum, but in a library at the University of California at Berkeley. Still 15,000 people saw them.” (Jong 2007) Artists have started to return to the nightmare because artists have got fear, horror, depression and stress, and unlike the masses they can articulate it. Artists have started to return to the nightmare because artists need to depict it, explore it, expose it, reveal it, announce it. Artists have started to return to the nightmare because audiences have started to want it again, to need it. Audiences no longer want to be told that everything's alright: the nightmares that face them when they open the bills and read the papers tell them that it's not alright. Audiences want to see man and monster. By articulating the nightmare, the artist reassures the audience that they are not alone, not mad, that the nightmare they are fearing, we all fear it too; and that maybe collectively we can stand against our fears. Nightmare art is not a constant practice for artists. Guernica is 'one thing' Picasso did in a massive and long career. Yet The Night Mare remains Fuesli's best known work, as is Arnold Boecklin's haunting mise-en-scene, Island of the Dead (1886). Fernando Botero felt compelled to produce works showing his trademark chubby characters as Abu Ghraib victims. By depicting the dreadful Abu Ghraib images in his signature style Botero transforms horrific documentary evidence into something more disturbing: nightmare images that are truly subversive. Botero did not even use the notorious photographs or documentary evidence: he painted from his own appalled imagination. (Jong 2007) Botero has said of his practice “you adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.” (quoted in Crow, n.d.)

The artistic life will soon cease to be “fashionable.” In fact it can never be. Artists have to recognize that, they must be devoted and willing to self-sacrifice for this and this only. Lucien Freud has observed that “many people are astonished that one would sacrifice the possibility of comfort and what is thought to be an agreeable life., to life of uncertainty … where you are engaged in incomprehensible activity with results which are fairly unlikely to effector change your situation in an economic way and that seems to many people astonishing.” (Freud 1988) And this is the role of artist, the shaman: self- sacrifice leading to a greater release, a shared salvation. It is one act: the one man on the cross, the one man struggling with the dragon, the same man carrying the stone to the top of the mountain yet for the stone to fall once again. The artist's job is steal the holy fire reserved only for the gods, for people to gather around the flame; and for our heart to be eaten again and again by the bird of prey as a consequence of what we have all committed. Word count: 5000 words http://laimagenfija.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/botero-y-abu-ghraib/ (^) http://dearkitty.blogsome.com/2007/05/15/more-prisoners-than-ever-torture-in-jails-in-iraq/