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| GERICAULT 3 |
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"The Artist-in-Pieces" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
Géricault's work is in another sense a struggle with history or an alienation from history, and if the body fragments de-code and re-code a tradition in terms of death, Géricault's engagement with history also ends in death. It ends not only with the death of history, but also the death of a type of history, the de-coding of this history. The type of history that dies in Géricault's work is the history of the retrieval of the subject, a belief that the subject may return to itself fully centered by reflecting on the past. For Géricault, history is a series of fragments collapsed on itself. It is Napoleon's Louvre, a choice of the best from the standpoint of the present, and, when Géricault goes to the Louvre, it is not to retrieve the past, but to write it in his own subjective terms. "His copies themselves present hidden originals." The past may be represented, quoted, but this quotation alters its previous meaning. David's career, in its shifting relation to power, past, and present reveals this in how he was able to manipulate the meaning(s) of his work, giving the viewer the opportunity to see what she wants to see. Géricault's work draws its disturbing conclusions from David's œuvre, and in this way Géricault is the inheritor and upholder of David, re-reading David's text, and drawing conclusions from it that David himself was either not willing to or did not see himself. It is all a myth. It is all a fantasy of the I/eye.
The struggle with history is brought to light in the studies for the Race of the Barberi Horses, a struggle between past and present, the timeless and the time-bound, the immortal and the mortal, life and death. The struggle Géricault represents with this subject mirrors the struggle happening with history; as man struggles with horse, the present struggles with past, struggling to control the past, to harness the past, to tame the past, domesticate the past, as man tries to tame horse. The problem is that the present wants to control the past and to do so in the present's own terms. The present, however, does not own terms. It receives them from the future. The present does not know itself until it is no longer present. The present can only give terms to the past. While the past should be allowed to run free, to be riderless, it must be controlled, not so as to provide a means of reflecting upon the present in comparison to the past, but in order to provide a means of reflecting the present in comparison to itself. It is a struggle to find terms for the present, and in this struggle the past becomes the mirror image of the present. Géricault may show the riderless horses attended by athletes either presented in modern dress or as classical nudes. The difference is not between timelessness and being time bound, the eternal and the mortal. The difference is no difference. Difference is effaced. Continuity, unity triumphs, and this goes against Géricault's experience. "I search vainly for support; nothing is solid, everything escapes me, everything deceives me." Géricault knows only difference in that it cannot be known and must remain difference. He paints this difference in his portraits of the insane, his images of Africans, and his images of Arabs. If the Race of the Barberi Horses could not be completed, it is the discovery of the fragmented, lost past, which made the seeing of the past in terms of the present seem a deception.
The Raft of the Medusa takes on the same problem in opposite terms. It is an attempt to see the present in terms of the past, and it ends in not even being able to see the present in terms of the present. It ends a tradition of triumphal history painting, and already foresees a failure of Modernism, a failure to find a representation for a fragmented, heterogeneous present. Géricault began with several scenes from the account of Corréard and Savigny; the mutiny, the cannibalism, the rebellion, the sighting, and the rescue. He had a replica of the raft built. He made wax models and placed them in various positions on the raft. He interviewed the survivors. He wanted to quote the experience. Repeat it. But he could not. He opted for the terms of the past: monumental figures, sculpted figures, a meaning to their struggle. He opted for the terms of history painting, because there was no way to present the present in its own terms. One may view much of later nineteenth century art as a struggle to state the present in its own terms, to find a language for the present, a language of full presence, a trap of Modernism as it would appear in Courbet and Manet, a desire to make modernity present to itself. The Raft may be one attempt at it, one form that fails in the illusion of full presence, as the figures strive to reach the present lost in a decaying past, frozen in the terms of the classical past, frozen in time and subject to a different form of de-composition, while they try to escape the gaze of the present. Much of Géricault's later work would attend to the problem of re-presenting modern life to itself, a struggle to find terms within which to express it, terms which the present could have no control over, terms in which Géricault could express his self, terms which would not lead to alienation from both others and his self.
The hopelessness of this project of a unified experience of full presence is already witnessed in Géricault's legs/legs. The fragmentation of the self is also a fragmentation of the past; the death of the imaginary ego, also the death of history with which the ego identifies as in a mirror. It is all this and also the fragmentation of the present, and the death of the present, the death of the dream of full presence, the parasitism of absence; the absence of the severed limb; the absence of the experience of standing before the severed limb; the already fragmented experience of standing before the severed limb, the severed head; the fragmented experience of standing before the white canvas. The corps morcelé cannot buy into the illusion of unity and full presence except by means of the greatest deception, a deception that is briefly dropped in Géricault's standing before the corps morcelé, and recognizing it for its fragmentation. Creation is accepted as not pure, but tinged with death and destruction. The past cannot be told in its own terms fully, and neither can the present. The project of retrieval of the past is shown to be a project of a retrieval of a lost present, a lost experience of unity in the present, the loss of the belief in a myth of unity. History does not reassure. It fragments. It speaks in the terms of death and loss.
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