On Compassion and Longing - Berlinde De Bruyckere
// On Compassion and Longing //
Image and Genesis in Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Work
Images. They were there all along. They date from a time when we didn’t even know what they were. They stared down at us, while we were resting on the cold rock without noticing them.
Now we long to know where they come from. We want to know why images stayed with us, even when we cut out their eyes, dismembered them. We long to know what kept inspiring their compassion for us. We long to know why we often made them cry, and why even more often they forgave us.
Berlinde De Bruyckere is familiar with this longing.
A metal bar protrudes from the wall. From the bar dangles a wax body. Moulded, fashioned, deformed, cleft. Skinny legs, hipbones jutting out, one-armed. Jelle Leopard. Who is this creature? From what world has this body travelled to us? The voyage must have taken a long time: the body is covered with grazes, it has eroded, it has been decapitated. What remains are the traces of yore, the wounds of a creature exhibited from a pole.
A table. On it another creature. Is this monumental body an animal, a thing, a human being? It is all of these at once. It is One. A long black tail remains from what once was a horse. The formless body of a horse that writhes in agony, folds up in itself, at times swells, like the mutations of a primeval nature that predates our time. What is this creature? Is this the remains of the history of rejected genes? Or is this the primeval, essential shape, the matrix from which all humans, animals and things will originate? Is this creature One precisely therefore?
Images don’t belong to us. They belong to the gods or to lovers. Images have been thrown down at us out of compassion, or they have been offered out of longing.
To understand the history of the image, we must begin with stone. We have always “come across” stone and it has always stayed with us. The stone that was its own beginning, that retained its fanciful shape and was never touched by human tools, appeals to the creative force of nature. This stone’s design results from nature weathering, eroding, carving, washing, battering it. Stones, therefore, are considered to be of divine origin. They have fallen from heaven onto the earth, or have been thrown down by the gods. Though without figurative features, people believed that stones reflected the face of the deity that cast it. But in the course of history humans gradually came to depict faces on stones. The images became equipped with arms, eyes, a mouth. People were no longer content with the amorphous black, with the meteorite, with the umbilicus of the female deity.
Thus the first image was born from aniconic gravity: it tumbled down on earth, a present from an invisible face that was to be applied onto it by human hands, inspired by the longing to see that which cannot be seen. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures, too, seem to cause some tremor as they arrive. They have tumbled down from a cosmic world in which humans and animals were not yet separate, in which the aniconic and the iconic had not yet split, in which conic also meant cubic, in which even the sexes were not yet separate, in which plinths did not exist, in which things simply lay or hung about. And there also the creature One was lying.
These bodies slowly grow towards us and are usually not fully-grown yet. Hanne’s feet are lagging behind in the transit zone between this world and the world that precedes it. According to an odd tenet in many religions for that matter, the feet are the last part of the body to be shaped. Feet touch the ground, allow us to move, bring us in contact with this other great creation: earth itself. Hanne hasn’t arrived there yet. She is glued to the wall, curled up in her foetal position. She is the image nascent. Her thick head of horsehair hides and protects her naked body. Hanne floats around in a time that is not ours. It is the vulnerable time that dates back to the era when the universe decided to create, separate, unite, cause to grow. Only much later someone would rise and walk erect.
From the history of art it is obvious how the third dimension is met with both fear and delight. The effect sculptures produce is quite different from that of two-dimensional works. As we look at sculptures, we sense our own body—a confrontation that might be frightening. Indeed, fear probably was the predominant emotion that prompted the iconoclasts to destroy images. The iconoclast actually believes in the image, as he or she believes in himself or herself. The iconoclast believes that the image possesses powers that can rival with the human senses. The eyes of the image are therefore cut out—anything that can look, is alive. The head must be cut off—anything that can think, is alive. Missiles are aimed at Buddha’s genitals in Afghanistan—anything that can procreate, is alive.
Some of Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures, such as La femme sans tête (The Woman without Head), indeed look as if they were the subject of a violent attack caused by the fear images may inspire. A body without head is archetypically linked to an iconoclastic murder. But neither the artist, nor the viewer were the perpetrators of the iconoclastic act. That confuses us and creates an interesting tension in the artist’s work, for at first sight we are confronted with a work that has been “destroyed”. Or rather, with a work that once, somewhere, was mutilated and is now presented to the public in all its raw corporality—a corporality that is at the basis of the fear of images and evokes the fragments of the history of destructive mania.
Only rarely art historians have been preoccupied with the question what happens with the image after its destruction. Not always images were removed from their niche: often their remained where they had stood, on the plinth, wounded. The bodies of Jelle Leopard and Hanne are situated on the long timeline of the visual history of the injury. They have been invited by the artist to be looked after, to be looked at in a new manner. Also Creature has responded to the artist’s invitation. Its knees are embracing a shelf that projects from the wall; its torso (which lost its head a long time ago) is covered with a blanket, like a hooded cloak. A hood serves either of these two purposes: it can smother, but it can also provide warmth. It can inspire fear, but also delight. And that precisely is the double trace the history of sculpture has left.
To Berlinde De Bruyckere sculpturing means uniting. She constantly explores the boundaries and the possibilities of “full plasticity”. For De Bruyckere sculpture involves stuffing felt, pouring wax, sewing together fabrics, covering things with animal skins. For her the act of sculpturing is therefore an act of healing, of restoring, of bandaging. This is an art of recovery, the art of sculpturing of the post-iconoclastic era. Like this artists seems to collect images from the transit zone between humans and animals, she also retrieves images from the zone between destruction and restoration, between fear and redevelopment. In a certain sense her work visualizes the post-trauma. It represents that which comes after the shock, after the collapse.
Berlinde De Bruyckere also creates subtle, composed drawings with pencil and watercolours. Originally the second and third dimension are closely related. It is actually a matter of genetic merging.
Plinius relates that the daughter of the potter Butades drew upon the wall the outline of the shadow her beloved had left behind. Her father filled the outline with wax, thus creating the first image. Filling in the emptiness within the contours of that which is absent—the shadow—was at the origin of the image. The image originally makes use of the prefiguration.
We notice that the first image is the image that causes the beloved to become present. It is the image that enables us to lend a shape and colour to emptiness and absence, the image that converts the vague trace of loss and absence into the shape of comfort and the colour of a presence. But the first image of the ancients also elucidates the intimate relationship between two- and three-dimensionality. From “writing on the wall” to that which dangles from a pole from the same wall.
Berlinde De Bruyckere’s drawings are essentially prefigurations. Jelle Leopard has been drawn. He has left a trace on the wall. As he embarked upon his long voyage, long before he fell down upon the earth and the artist caught him with her pole, he had already cast his shadow. He had written on the wall. And the artist has covered this writing with colour. This was the first act of healing. The wax presence would come later.
Among the Portraits we might recognize Hanne, who remained hidden behind her thick animal mop of hair. Eyes pierce from the black. Further back the artist can’t go. Here she has gone back in time to the shadow, the time when the genesis of the image became visible. Here the amorphous black, the umbilicus of the mother goddess appears once more. There is a cosmic belief that all things visible have originated from a black hole, i.e. from a so-called ineffable motif, which is primaeval, feminine and “vulval”. This image swallows up and watches. The first image was a black face.
In societies like those of the Berber women, which have not yet been contaminated by male visuality, the vulva motif is still to be found on fabrics and ceramics. It is a shivering creature that spasmodically vibrates on the surface. From there, from this watching-black that is still genderless, first all that is visible emanates. Then it is followed by the figurative. Still later by a mop of hair. And finally the third dimension appears. But without feet.
I wanted to know why the images often cried over us, but even more often forgave us. I think Berlinde De Bruyckere knows. Or she knows part of it, fragments. I suspect her sculptures have whispered it into her ear. We must listen to them tenderly and look at them with a mild heart. We must be patient, take our time, and then, once, we too will know. And the wax sculptures and the drawings and the felt creatures—they will whisper: “We are here for you, for your answers. It’s not our fault. We have always been here. We come from Then. When you were still crawling about the wet earth, we helped you up and when you started to walk erect and longed for the most beautiful fruit, we gave it to you. We felt compassion for you.” And Berlinde De Bruyckere whispers to the sculptures: “I will heal you, stitch up your wounds, bandage you, revive you, support you, mould you, knead you, draw you, cover you. Longing.”
Link Tekst: BAM (Instituut voor Beeldende, audiovisuele en mediakunst)
http://bamart.be/en/pages/detail/81
// Lieselotte Gilis //
2087
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