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| GERICAULT 4 |
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"The Artist-in-Pieces" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
Géricault's entire career also reveals an engagement with the problem of creation. "If only I could have made five paintings, but I have created nothing, absolutely nothing." It is a problem of the inability to create, and one that manifests itself in its highest intensity with the fruit of his pro-creative act, the birth of his son, George-Hippolyte. It is perhaps this creation of life that also leads to the discovery that his artistic practice leads only to death, that as an artist, as a man, all he can do is create death, death as an alienating element that leaves no relation to the artist. Painting can't bridge the gap, and neither can literature. The art object only alienates. "My desires are always insatiable, and whatever I do, it is always something other than what I wanted." The artistic process only produces death. "If only I could have made…" Géricault wishes he could deny death, but he can't. He can't make or pro-create legitimately. The creative act will always be caught up in a fantasy of its creation, a fantasy of legitimacy, a fantasy no longer available as he lies on his deathbed, embracing his finitude, embracing the death he created, the "absolutely nothing". Géricault's alienation from his son mirrors his alienation from his other issue, the Raft of the Medusa. "Is it [my painting] so touched with black and white?" "The Medusa. Bah! A vignette!" "It is not worth the pain of being looked at." Géricault's legs/legs allow him to realize his inability to transpose his presence, to transcend his self, to form a relation to history. In creating his body fragments Géricault creates his absence, his distance from history, his alienation from his self....
*****
The art object becomes excrement which cannot be re-incorporated into the body as it remains lifeless, alienating the self to which it once belonged; severed arms, legs, and heads from alienated bodies. "What good are these malicious bits of paper?" While Géricault's fragmented body parts manifest this alienation, it is also a theme surrounding the painting of the Medusa. "The wretches who write such foolishness have certainly never starved for fourteen days, because only then would they know that neither poetry nor painting are able to render with enough horror all the anguish of the men on the Raft." The problem is no one can realize the horror, make it present, make that same experience re-livable. Not even the survivors of the Medusa can realize their own suffering. They must write it down, but even then there is loss. Even during the experience there is loss. The sufferings cannot be shown in Géricault's painting. The most alienating elements of the account of the Raft are repressed visually, while still conjured up to the viewer who knows the story. Feces becomes food. Urine becomes beverage. Your neighbor becomes food. In the Raft, the societal norms of alienation become alienating. It is not enough that I am alienated by my fellow human being. How am I suppose to relate to her when she becomes food? For Géricault this becomes an alienation within the self, with the self. In trying to make this self create, Géricault creates only death and alienation, both with the world and with his self.
Should this conclusion that creation results in death be that unusual for Géricault? No. The processes that he records and re-codes only result in death and destruction. The military scenes end with the death of soldiers. The struggle between man and animal ends in slaughter. The sexual act results in rape. In Géricault's œuvre rarely is death, destruction, or transgression not shown. Perhaps the horse offers freedom from death, destruction, and transgression, but it may already be caught up in a fantasy of the (m)other, and even the representation of the horse ends in death, as seen in Head of a Dead Horse and Horse-Butcher's Cart. Nothing is created in these paintings except death, mirroring Géricault's own failure of creation, the necessity of reconciling creation with death, finitude, a reconciliation that never takes place, resulting in a continual tension, an ambivalence. Géricault's work is not so much the product of a world too steeped in violence, but of a world in which there is too little creation, where creation is an (im)possibility, a world that Marx and Engels would later say makes work alienating. In difference to the Marxist critique of capitalist society, although in a sense allied with it, Géricault, existing in early capitalist France, is alienated from his self not through work, but through his desire to create, the (im)possibility of having this desire filled except through death. While every painting may be an attempt at creation, each of these attempts brings Géricault face to face with the necessity for his own death, for his paintings can only have an after life, a life after Géricault's death. The painting once created must die in its moment of conception, before the first brushstroke, so that it may live in its alienation from this conception, its growth in misinterpretation. The images of body fragments are a crisis in this mis-recognition. They are so easy to recognize as just body parts. But this is not what they are. They have been re-coded. These are not body parts....
*****
...After the studies of severed limbs and heads, Géricault's work turned more and more towards creation for monetary reward. The desire to make money occurs during his stay in London, before his reckless financial expenditures that led to his financial disaster. Having lost the illusion of creating life, of making himself present before himself, of transposing pure presence, Géricault replaced this illusion with the desire for money, displacing the lack of creation, the lack of presence with the hopes for monetary abundance. It is here, perhaps, that a Marxist critique could be helpful as Géricault depicts scenes because they are expected of a "Géricault". He becomes a commodity, an object without desire, an object to elicit desire, an object of illicit desire, having experienced the death of (the) desire to desire. The quest for creation, its frustration, and the discovery of death in creation were of little consequence to the newly freed subject who must find a place in the symbolic world. After having come face to face with the abyss, with nothingness, the subject must try to re-establish the illusion of society, and perhaps enter "reality" for the first time. His mother's legs/legs had provided a fantasy world where the fantasy of the "real" was (ex)posed as never before, perhaps by accident.
In his final confinement, his last de-composition, where the hope of creating was forever lost, new struggles for creation began. "He dreamt of buckets of color and walls fifteen meters high upon which he would paint crowds of victims awaiting the end of tyranny,…men of all races and beliefs, reconciled before the opening doors of prisons." To jump the walls of Jericho. A fantasy, of course, but a fantasy that expresses the desire to paint over reality, and thereby de-compose reality, to un-code reality, (ex)posing reality's illusion. "I really believe that I am a little better. Nevertheless, I dare not cry victory too soon for the fear of falling flat again." And if his last fantasies were clearly fantasies, they grew out of the less apparent fantasies of a unified self, a self that could only be created through history, and not through history as it appeared to Géricault in Napoleon's Louvre. If his career of creation was a series of dead objects that could not reflect his fragmented self, a self that could not form a relation to history, it was in becoming a dead object, surrounded by dead objects that he could enter history....
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