representation's swoon

Perhaps something of Palermo’s psychic ambiguity is suggested in the relational axis between two remarkable paintings held in the Museo Abatellis, a few steps from Lo Spasimo down Via Alloro. Firstly, an anonymous 15^th century Gothic fresco, Il Trionfo della Morte ('The Triumph of Death') startling in its scale (6 square metres) and grim impact. An enormous skeleton archer, riding a flayed, bare-ribbed horse that seems to prefigure Picasso’s suffering beast in Guernica, gallops through a lush hedged garden dispatching volleys of arrows at popes, cardinals, nobility, and courtiers; they twist and clutch at their wounds as they fall. To one side, a gaggle of the poor seems to call out for an end to their misery, but they are ignored, or favoured. In their midst, an expressionless figure looks directly out at the viewer, a brush in his hand – the artist. Elsewhere a group of elegantly attired aristocrats hunt with dogs and a falcon, chat and listen to music by a fountain: revelers unaware of or indifferent to the proximity of Death’s ‘triumphant’ quiver. As a result of war damage to the palazzo that originally housed the fresco, this didactic allegory had been cut into four sections and reassembled in the Abatellis. The ensuing scar remains unrepaired, and rips a peeling X through the very centre of the image, like the overlay of blurred crosshairs in the eyepiece of a rifle, its target the gaunt flank of the horse.

Secondly, Antonello da Messina’s L’Annunziata ('The Announced', 1476), an exquisitely composed, icon-sized representation of the Biblical annunciation, Mary’s encounter with the Archangel Gabriel and her reception of his message. This restrained humanist image is the very antithesis of the fresco’s graphic apocalypse, for it distills a narrative sequence into an enigmatic moment, like a single frame of film in which everything is discreet, suggested, withheld, mysterious. A solitary woman, her luminous face framed by a blue headscarf and a black background, is interrupted while reading. Her left hand holds the scarf lightly over her chest, while her right hand is raised slightly towards the viewer in an ambiguous gesture - of surprise, perhaps, or instinctive defence, self-steadying, or even, in its intimation of the viewer’s presence, a blessing. Her quiet angled gaze focuses on a point just to the lower left of the viewer, as if reflecting internally. The angel remains invisible, unrepresentable. The surface of Mary’s body, like a minutely sensitized seismograph, registers the fleeting presence of something radically other and incarnates its passage - and we are cast as witnesses to the barely manifest signs, both intensive and extensive, of this passage: the dynamic stillness of her suspended hand, the gravity of her contemplative expression, the raised page of her open book as if lifted momentarily by a tiny current of air.

In the space between the narratives and representational economies of these two images – enfolding mortality and becoming, unrelenting threat and fragile possibility, explicit excess and ineffable secret - representation itself seems to spasm and swoon.  This (overtly Catholic) axis between panic and grace informs the uncertain ground on which Palermo’s dreams and nightmares are played out. 

Extract from an essay, 'Performing Palermo: protests against forgetting', originally published in Nicolas Whybrow (ed.), Performing Cities, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

shuttle 15: colouring

'"Transparency, ah, there's the miracle". Transparency, the legacy of the desert where there is no colour, but where the light is large, open, with a transparent quality in which all colours are present at the same time, as possibility. In the desert, Edmond Jabès says to Serge Faucherau, "nothing is there as simply blue, but as a possibility of blue". And just as piling on colour leads to transparency, so "we pile up images and images of images until the last, which is blank, and on which we all agree"' (Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002, 99)

'The wonder of the heat is metaphysical. The very colours - pastel blue, mauve, lilac - are the products of a slow, geological, timeless combustion. The mineral quality of the earth breaks through the surface in the crystalline flora. All the natural elements here have known their ordeal by fire. The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others' (Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 137)
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'The plane drones away. Closing the hood of her car after putting in the water, Daria looks up, squinting, then drives off toward some purple-mountained majesty - a majesty that Antonioni, at one point, had thought to change. Production designer Dean Tavoularis was in Barstow with his painter, Roger Dietz, engaged by the filmmaker in conversation about those distant 'lavender grey' mountains.

"Can you make those red, from there ... to there?" Antonioni asked.

Tavoularis said to Dietz, "What about a crop-duster?"

Tavoularis: "I checked around and there was a bi-plane, kind of à la North by Northwest. And I said: 'Get as much red powder sent from LA, from Hollywood, as you can', and Roger put the red powder in the big bins for the chemicals they would normally use, and I instructed the pilot. 

Watching through binoculars, from where the camera would be, as the plane made several passes over the mountains, I noticed no particular change. 'Do it again', I said. Again, no change. Then, 'What about liquid? Can we get another plane that has a liquid system instead of powder? And can you get red dye instead of red powder? Rust red dye?' So we did that with another plane. I watched again with the binoculars ... 

I did try. I made a valiant effort. I explained to Michelangelo, and I had a couple of photographs to prove it. I don't think he expected that the mountains would ever change. Just wanted to see somebody step up, wanted to see somebody try. That was the important thing. That's what a master is. Life isn't about winning, it's about trying"'.  

Extract from Murray Pomerance, 'Zabriskie Point', in Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, 163-4

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Images from the making of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970); at the bottom, a still from the end sequence

For artist Juli Kearns' detailed three-part descriptive synopsis of Zabriskie Point, with numerous stills and assorted clips, see her Idyllopus Press site here

For an earlier post about Los Angeles, 'Let it shine', see here. For an earlier post about light and the colour blue ('Light'), originally written for Forced Entertainment's Marathon Lexicon, see here