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| GERICAULT 1 |
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"The Artist-in-Pieces" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
The difference in the studies of severed limbs, Géricault's legs/legs, was to not re-present severed limbs, but to instead make death something that was not normal, to see death ab-normally. Géricault presents these severed limbs as they had rarely been presented before, not in the ways that death and fragmentation had normally appeared in the visual field. In a sense, Géricault's legs/legs operate outside of the semiotic field, while in another sense, his legs/legs provide the very center of the field, that which controls vision, de-sensitizing it, and making it natural. Géricault's legs/legs re-sensitize vision, re-code the nature of death, while de-coding the visual experience. Death is not a preoccupation of this daily visual experience of the nineteenth century; it is the very occupation of looking, something that is accepted as normal. Géricault's legs/legs both re-codes and records this normalcy, making it strange once again….
*****
Géricault de-codes death from the visual field through his body fragments. He takes death out of its daily narrative, and while a removal from the real world into art will always be a re-presentation, what Géricault's legs/legs carry out is a "presentation" of death, death stripped bare, without its daily narrative in the streets of Paris. In a sense it is a de-contextualization, a taking away from its normal context, but this is somewhat misleading as Géricault's legs/legs are engaged with this normal context, (ex)posing this context, revealing that death was present in its "original" context of the streets of Paris. What was invisible because it was so visible is made visible once again. From the streets to the morgue to the studio and to the morgue again, re-cycling the real, making a return on death, Géricault's severed limbs and heads are not a narrative about death, they "are" death. Plain and simple. Unusual and complex. Death becomes de-naturalized and seen in painting. The codes are broken through a process of de-composition, a de-coding of the narrative elements allowing that which could always be seen to be seen de-narrativized, where the narrative that is stripped away is the traditional, historical narrative of significant human action which tries to deny death by narrativizing death, moralizing death. Artists had brought corpses into the studio before. There are the legends of Leonardo and Michelangelo studying dead bodies, but this was within the narrative of scientific knowledge, within the narrative of the necessity to study anatomy. There is nothing necessary about Géricault's legs/legs. Bosch showed death within the narrative of hell. The dead Christ had been shown within the narrative of religious redemption. David shows death in the narrative of Roman history or in the narrative of the Revolution. Gros shows death within the narrative of military victory and defeat. Géricault does not give death a narrative that affirms human action and progress, and in doing this he de-codes what had been driving all the other narratives.
Previously Géricault had studied the dying man in the hospital, but this was still caught up in the narrative of life's struggle to overcome death and its ultimate failure, a desire to bridge the gap between the dying man and his experience, and an alienation from this experience. I don't know where you're going? I don't know how it feels? I believe the gap may be bridged. The Murder of Fualdes and General Letellier after his Suicide are still coded within the narrative of murder and suicide. The body parts, however, offer no aspect of narrative normalization except for the viewer's own fantasies, and yet this is the very implication of Géricault's de-coding of the history of art. It has always been a fantasy of the viewer's own making. The only thing that has ever been before the viewer's eyes has been death, and all that has kept the viewer from seeing this death are her fantasies. Géricault's legs/legs reveal the need for the viewer's normalization of vision, of the visual field, the need to avoid looking at death, at the void, the absence structuring life. The viewer caught up in the need to find a narrative for Géricault's legs/legs becomes aware that this has always been the process of the gaze, the gaze of the Imaginary seeing the mirror as showing something, the gaze of the Symbolic knowing there is nothing there. Géricault decodes the act of looking and poses this act as not being natural, as being fantastic. The body parts do not present death for the viewer's contemplation on life, but instead for the viewer's recognition of the radical alterity of death, to recognize death's otherness, to view the gap between life and death, a glimpse of the abyss, death without its ideological trappings. It was a discovery that Delacroix had to run from, and much of Delacroix's career may be viewed as an attempt to re-inscribe death back into its proper narratives, to write a Romantic narrative about death. Indeed, it is a discovery that Géricault himself tried to (a)void in the future. He would suffer the mental breakdown, travel to England, look at the poor and marginal, but rarely would he turn to death again. Only in Head of a Dead Horse and Study of Géricault's Left Hand (c. 1823) does Géricault reduce the narrative elements to the extreme that he does in the studies of body fragments, and here the subjects seem too personal/alienating; the head of his most beloved animal, and his rapidly deteriorating body. They are still powerful images, but they do not open up to the dizzying effects of the severed limbs and head.
At the same time as this radical de-coding of the viewing process takes place, Géricault, being the primary viewer, takes the implications of this de-coding of vision and re-codes it into the artistic process. Not only does Géricault present a painting of a severed limb or head, but he also shows the death of creation, the latent hidden-visible aspect of death within the very act of creation. If the de-coding of vision brought on by Géricault's legs/legs unveils the viewer's play of fantasies, the re-coding of this vision into the artist's vision implies the artist's own fantasies. The act of creation becomes a fantasy….
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