Big Think

staci van Solkema commented on Sean Scully Examines His Evolution as an Artist on March 18, 2009, 1:19 AM

This may seem like a bit of an excursion into history, but I feel it is necessary since the myths about this topic are so imbedded in our culture that the comprehension of definitions about the human form should not be assumed. Whenever I here the term "figure", I think of three things. First I think of drawing from it and my classical education. Then I think of Art History and how the figure has been represented through time. This leads me to the third thing: the philosophical debate between what constitutes a nude, or naked and how it relates to the body in contemporary art practices. I do believe in the classical academic tradition of teaching from the human form. I also believe it is possible for the body to act as a kind of vehicle for transcendence, but not through any theory based on the "ideal" form of beauty. Not through something that is displayed. Rather, it is within the very flaws and imperfections... the humanness, the mortal identity we create around us, not the mythologized image of perfection that we find a voice. The figure (in Art History) is inextricably linked to religious allegories derived from Renaissance and Baroque imagery paradoxically signifying moral condemnation, and idyllic beauty. The figure is this sense relies on Cartesian binaries of form and matter (a concept that can be traced back to Plato and his hierarchy of: mind/male, matter/female). I think Nanette Solomon gave a good warning with this quote: "Art historians make sense in (and of) their discipline by connecting objects and events with seamless narratives that appear to tell logical stories... they are also worked through artist who (consciously or unconsciously) work within these prearranged tropes so that work can be inserted into 'well valued' discourses". Enough of the "Figure". Think of Rembrandt's ambiguity in his " Bathsheba Bathing". Bathsheba was not nude, nor was she naked, she was empathetic, unknown, identifying with the whole or humanity. Helene Cixous says it best: "It's the troubled air of our secrets... the obscurity, those that govern us and that we're not really aware of. We are in the secret. The secret surrounds us... in our breast, like a luminous heart... the dough, the depth, the tactile, that which we have lost, we who live flat, without density, in silhouettes on a screen: the interior radiance.. It's intimacy. We can never see it, except by slowness and agitation. The moment before 'just after' - not yet. It does not yet have a name". This is where the body begins.