The Landscape of Sorrow
A MONA Moment |
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In the wake of the September 11 tragedy, I wondered, is there a way for museums, our museum, to play some constructive role for people as they reflect on and respond to those horrific events? The question took on greater meaning as I contemplated my own reactions. To my dismay, I struggled to summon up feeling for the horror. Somehow, the very enormity of the event and the steady stream of information depersonalized it.
It was surrounded by an impenetrable emotional fog, seemingly impervious to feeling. Then something unexpected occurred which gathered up for me a response that was deeply felt and spiritually cleansing. It happened in our Museum.
One day recently our curator, Josephine Martins, asked me to take a look at an installation she had completed in one of our galleries. The five works she had hung were resonant with unsettling, troubling imagery. Here, in this gallery, one found a landscape of sorrow. The collective power of these works was undeniable.
The following week I revisited the gallery, drawn especially to the mixed media painting, Substrata, by artist William Wolfram. Unexpectedly, this painting provided for me that response to the September 11 tragedy I was seeking. On the right side of a large, rectangular canvas, an upright human skeleton painted in thick impasto is entombed in a small, vertical crevice of space the size of a casket. This nameless skeleton appears caught in the moment of death. There is an eerie aliveness to the posture-we see it in resigned frailty, pinched tightly within the narrow walls, yet dignified-we notice the sturdy, delicate, innate beauty of the human skeleton. Stripped away of individuality, it yet retains its portion of humanity in its unmistakable gesture of pathos.
The connection to September 11 emerges to the right of the skeleton where a series of vertical walls are collapsing in toward the skeleton, and a red conflagration of exploding streamers suggest the holocaustal source of our skeleton's calamity. The imagery is shorn of the sordid, the tyranny of gore which infests the American imagination.
Here we contemplate an altar of sorrow. We are reminded that this gallery, this museum, our MONA, is a sort of home, humanity's home, and there has been a death in the family. In this landscape of sorrow before us there is a eulogy of imagery where the liberating value of grief and remembrance quiets and perhaps, refreshes our hearts; where for a moment, in our contemplation of this image of a frail, noble skeleton, our idea of death is informed by the poet Herder as "the lovely youth who puts out the torch and imposes calm on the billowing sea." Or death in the words of Emily Dickinson as,
The bustle in a house,
The morning after death,
Is solemnest of industries enacted upon earth.
The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away,
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.
