Witnessing Chaos

A portrait painter who has consistently presented a ravaged reinterpretation of her face as a landscape or topography, Susanna Coffey has positioned this visage against the backdrop of journalistic war photos transformed and interpreted through paint to capture devastation with such exquisite totality that they are reminiscent of Joseph Turner’s Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (1835) or Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming Up (1840). But in Coffey’s works the painter puts a version of herself into bombed-out landscapes of fire and catastrophe, creating, as she says, a “culpability of presence.” She has created the nonportrait self-portrait, the body-self as witness to humanity’s atavistic fascination with violence and devastation. These paintings capture the hidden forces of thanatos and the dark gods of war that live in the primal recesses of human consciousness, unable to evolve.

Like Abramovic’s work these paintings may have been motivated by the horrors of September 11, which took place close to Coffey’s home and studio in lower Manhattan. Could anyone who lived through and absorbed the shock of that moment and its images, as she did, not have internalized catastrophe on a grand and physical scale? But here Coffey’s intention is not to re-present that physical site, although she might disclose or reopen it to our consciousness, but rather to represent Baghdad burning, Haiti burning, two of the contemporary human-made disasters she and we were witnessing at the time of this production.

The paintings allow us to observe the end of gravity and surely the end of grace, as in “Fall”, where sky appears to be tumbling to pieces onto an already destroyed cityscape burnt to a crisp. These works create a perfect “now” – no past, no future, just the present incendiary landscape, the moment of witnessing extended to eternity, dusting everything with the fine white, blue, or orange powder of dissolution. "Yet, chaos itself can be a germ of order," writes Daniel W. Smith in his introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s study of Francis Bacon. Order might emerge from this image of devastation, but only that of the deliberately structured painting itself and our reflection of its content.

Is this face peering out to us Everyman or Everywoman breathing in the heat of obliteration? Or is she the only human left to record what has occurred, like a shade in The Inferno gesticulating through the flames? Perhaps this is the last anchorwoman, telecasting to no one, dressed for the apocalypse in what appears to be a blue bathing cap or bandana to match the surreal blue light? The after-glow of a planet destroyed? Camouflaged into the landscape, she has become the color of the painting. We are in the painting because she is in the painting. She appears alone as if there were no remaining human context. We alone provide the connection to other humans. Were these works without a figure, they would stand outside us and we would not be implicated. How then would we witness the devastation up close? How would we put ourselves into the landscape? If this is hell we are visiting, it is the hell of war, a particularly human-made psychic and physical location.

As Paul Klee advised: “Not to render the visible but to render visible.” Coffey’s War Paintings, as I call them, like “The House with the Ocean View”, make visible a response of the entire being, crafted out of the freedom artists have to fabricate and then stand, outside, inside, or on the ground they have created, offering a topography within which the complexity of these catastrophic ideas about the self in an obliterated world can exist.

Strange Bedfellows

Gandhi, Abramovic, Coffey – strange bedfellows. Yet I have brought them together in order to discuss the power of the person to embody truth about war, violence, and peace, and the power of art to do the same.

Even in the case of Abramovic, whose performances through the body directly, it is the persona of the performer, not the actual person, that we finally encounter in the public sphere. Such is the same with Coffey. However close the face in her paintings may or may not be to her actual self, one would not want to confuse these representations with her person. The images are solutions to the problem of representation. They are a way to approach or reveal something the artist wishes to communicate through fabrication; they are not the thing itself.

On the other hand, Gandhi was a man in the world, not a work of art. In his case it is his life, person, persona, image, the representation of the image, his private body transformed into a public body—all of it—that is the object of scrutiny. It is the embodiment of ideas, a totality filled with contradictions but also made known and visible to us as an evolving project. Living his life’s lessons as what he called “experiments in truth,” reiterating over and again in gesture, “My life is my message,” he attempted to perfect the self—not as an end in itself or an end in himself but as a means to an end. And one might say of Gandhi’s body—as Pablo Picasso said of Guernica—that it too was an “instrument of war” whose goal was always “nothing less than world peace.” The liberation of India was only the beginning of his struggle. And to this day the peace movement in India and Pakistan conjures the name of Gandhi and returns to his teachings to bolster its struggle against those who would incite nationalism and nuclear aggression and equate masculinity with such unholy power.

The journey to understand why Gandhi’s life ended in the garden of Birla House prompts me to ask: How can one learn from Gandhi’s pursuit, from what he considered the “truth” of each situation? And how can one define such pursuit in a post-postmodern age that even argues the possibility of truth? Gandhi asked himself such historically bound questions continuously, and at least one eternal one that the Greeks also recognized as essential to philosophical thought: how should one live?

Can we imagine, as Gandhi tried to do, one person at peace, and then, by extension, can we conceive of a community at peace, a nation at peace, a world at peace? When did the desire for such attempted imaginings drop out of our collective hope for the future, or our intellectual, theoretical investigations, only to be re-placed by an acceptance, however unconscious, of endless or inevitable war—a cancer without a cure that can only be managed?

As representations of human desire for peace, the focus on such images as Gandhi’s body and the work of Abramovic and Coffey may seem neoutopian and even naïve. And yet they provide locations wherein an iconography essential for resistant collective consciousness focused on the conditions for a just and humane society can be imagined.