Glacial Errata, No. 87

One

One of the things that fueled the rise of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century was that it a religious movement (or quasi-religious movement) that centered women. Specifically, Spiritualism allowed a proximity and a relationship between anyone (but especially women) and a supernatural realm, without any intercession by religious leaders (aka, men).

Spiritualism not only invited anyone to attempt to contact the dead, it privileged the kind of “hysterical” behavior that had often been coded as feminine, de-pathologizing it and instead celebrating it as a method of reaching other planes of existence. Thus the popularity of mediums like Eva Carrière (seen below), whose seancés involved wild contortions, the expulsion of effluvia (in the form of “ectoplasm”), nudity, outbursts and flailings—as she supposedly contacted the spirits.

Traditionally, of course, access to the divine for the most part had to be mediated through male religious authorities—priests, imams, rabbis, and so forth.

Two

This despite the fact, of course, that according to the Gospel of John, the figures at the base of the crucifixion were women:

“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” (John 19:25)

This crucial scene—rendered in heartbreaking detail by Nicollò dell-Arca in his series of terracotta figures in Bologna—remains one of the central scenes in the Passion, and one in which the presence and importance of women in close proximity to the divine is affirmed. And yet, much of the subsequent history of Christianity has always been to downplay the importance of these women and their direct relationship to the divine.

Yes, yes, Peter was the first Pope, Paul wrote all those letters, but it’s here—at the base of the cross—where women had a direct and immediate relationship to the suffering and death of Christ.

Three

Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is considered by many his first major work.

As the art critic John Russell wrote in 1971, “there was painting in England before the Three Studies, and painting after them, and no one ... can confuse the two.”

Four

One of the most striking things about Bacon’s painting is the relationship between these three figures. Bacon’s work comes at a moment when a painter’s two options—primarily—are abstraction, or narrative art. To depict figures in any kind of tableau is to suggest a relationship between them, and from that relationship springs some kind of narrative, some kind of story.

Bacon’s use of the triptych format, as well as his use of stark, striking color fields, creates something different. These are figures—they’re not abstractions in the way we’re used to in abstract art. But they don’t have a narrative relationship to each other. The color field does not represent a landscape. It does not add context. It does not suggest a ground on which these figures might interact. And the triptych structure allows these bodies to be next to each other, without suggesting anything beyond a bare arrangement. We’re invited to contemplate the three of them, and how they might have a relationship to each other—but no answers are offered or given.

In an interview with David Sylvester, Bacon explained: “Of course, so many of the greatest paintings have been done with a number of figures on a canvas, and of course every painter longs to do that…. But the story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own. And this is a very great difficulty.”

Five

I’ll admit that ever since I came across this quote in Gilles Deleuze’s book on Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, I’ve been obsessed with this question: how to create a relationship between figures that doesn’t necessarily involve narrative? At the time I was writing fiction, but it’s something I’ve tried to do in various attempts with my nonfiction as well. Glacial Errata, of course, is another attempt to experiment with that idea—some of these posts are obviously narrative, or simply lists, but in other ones I’ve tried to explore the possibility of what it could mean to put figures in relationship to one another that doesn’t necessarily lead to a narrative structure.

What other ways of seeing—and of reading—might be possible?

And what to make of the fact that, as Martin Harrison points out in In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film, and the Practice of Painting, that the above photo of Eva Carrière herself was used as the model for one of those figures?