I was fortunate enough to receive the Eka Valencic award and endowment for my MA degree show at Central St. Martins in 2018, and the following is taken from my acceptance letter ; it refers to the left hand panel of the diptych on the website :
The Jenny painting is a portrayal of the pathos of the animal situation - in the form of a ram’s skull, and a portrait in memory of my rescue dog Jenny. The face is disintegrating and a yellow bird on the right flies into a green grove in the cheek There is an outflow of water reminiscent of a gushing from a wound. This is also the hair of a witch, opposite whom is a mask - they don’t look at each other. Over the front of the face is an angelic figure with the face of an owl its arms outstretched in protection and containment . Each eye is different under the arch of a ram’s horn.
The following is taken from dissertation notes written at around the same time ; it begins where a discussion of a verse from Petrarch’s Canzoniere has just ended :
But to focus on one detail in his tapestry; in the poetical fragment quoted, the possibility of the confluence of animal and human suggests the lonely figure of the Minotaur, lower part Man, upper part Bull, conventionally situated at the centre of the Cretian Labyrinth as capturer and fierce devourer of any who approach - yet as imprisoned also, sealed irretrievable until death in (our image of) its monstrousness.
A similar creature is found in the penultimate section of Picasso’s Vollard suite - before the end few images of Ambroise Vollard himself, and so in a sense the real , mythic culmination of a series that is itself fragmentary, multifaceted, and accumulated over a period of years, reflecting contemporaneous changes in the artist’s life, as in the case of the much longer and more ambitious Canzoniere.
Worked out in four pieces, of mixed technique including print media (for instance lift ground aquatint), from late 1934 to early 1935, this Minotaur is an image that invites consideration in the context of the Petrarchan protagonist who walks by the riverside, ultimately becoming partly alive, and partly stone. Picasso’s four images share much in common with each other - in fact can be seen as the same image worked over in slightly different ways.
In each image the Minotaur is blind, and walking with a stick, its muscular neck wrenched upwards , as if in search of light, or in the questioning of fate or the Gods. At the centre of each image we see the remonstrance of pain, bringing to mind Petrarch’s image of a creature calling for help, but that cannot be understood. In each the Minotaur walks by the edge of water, as in Petrarch, from which, in Picasso, fishermen, with nets in a wooden boat, stare intently - as did the apostles of Christ - faces magnetically torn from the everyday substance of their work to fix on the troubled Minotaur in his fairy tale parade. Once more in each image the Minotaur walks from right to left, and in each is preceded by a small girl, carrying initially flowers, and in the last three a dove. Almost in the wings of the action is an upright male figure - in the first three images on the right, in the last on the left.
Even though the Minotaur may be understood as an image of Picasso himself in his failing sexual or artistic vision, there is much more to suggest in the series of images, taken as products of the unconscious, and unfolded into a developing sequence.
Led by a symbol of the innocence of animal-bird nature within, the blind Minotaur fumbles to find a way, never released from his unheard bellowing into the sky. Eventually night falls. The darkness is nailed in place by a few rough hewn stars. The figures have wandered all day, now the girl turns around, no longer attempting to lead the Minotaur, who is somehow part of herself, always linked by the umbilical arm. She looks straight at him in the certain knowledge that he is blind. The bird she carries has become a glowing heart between them; the young man freed from the stone he emerged from (at the sculptors cut) has moved to the left. Seemingly he is offered the staff from the Minotaur ; but is reluctant to accept it.
This constellation of figures that constitute the self has ground to a halt.
Picasso - sexual conquistador, scion of the bullfight - at the end of his rope of carnality, baying at the stars, seems to beg to be released. Yet the symbolic staff, the potency of creativity - at its most naked, the need to speak, to act, to walk - cannot be relinquished. There is no fierceness in the Minotaur to be afraid of - only the fierce heat of his anguish, to pity and to minister to, just like the piteous cattle at the gate of the abattoir.
Centre stage - man/animal in brokenness; its cry the stuttering fragments of Celan’s disintegrating verse, its impotence the silence of Bacon’s scream locked in an ice block; its blindness, an acknowledgement of the impossibility of the task, eyes seared by the enormity of what has been seen. The language of poetry itself confronts its own impotence.
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Of all conclusions, this is the strangest, yet also the most compelling and profound -whatever is said in face of the unspeakable must recognise the impossibility within its own language - must destroy itself from within, even whilst speaking.
This is the phrase written repeatedly until it becomes fabric, or a piece of thread disappearing into nothing - animalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoul……..… This is iconic text copied until it dissolves into pattern. This is the time it takes to write “ threehundredpigs”, over and over - the less than one minute it has taken to slaughter them….. ….let alone the garbage skips filled with intestines, coming out of the abattoir….
How to speak of such things?
If the hand that writes is erasing itself, its own intention; if the words it fashions are merely shape on the page; if truths about the industrial killing of animals, closely inscribed, dissolve into the appearance of cloth, the knots of accident, the threads of imperfection …this could be a beginning for an art of the unspeakable, an art of animal suffering.
In the same set of notes, I wrote about the poetry of Paul Celan and the early painting of Francis Bacon, which are mentioned here in relation to the Minotaur’s cry. My own colourful painting is fragmented in a similar way to the poetry of Celan, which will be the subject of my next post.