Mourning Work.wps

-1MOURNING-WORK

IN THE PAINTINGS OF JOHN A. WALKER

S. Orman Mourning- or grief-work describes the complex psychic labour performed by individuals or social groups in response to a loss or trauma of some kind - usually a death - with which they are trying to come to terms. The concept was explored in 1917 - at the time of the First World War - by Sigmund Freud in an essay on mourning and melancholia. (1) Many other psychoanalysts and theorists have discussed it since and it has also been employed by art therapists because they believe that making and viewing art can assist the processes of mourning and healing.

In Walker’s case mourning is not a response to the death of an individual such as a friend or a family member but is a profound sadness prompted by the inhuman behaviour and needless loss of life evident in such events as wars, genocides, racism, murder, torture, slavery, terrorist acts of violence, and the waste and pollution that is risking all human life on planet Earth. Mourning can be a long process that is often hard to resolve or reach a state of closure. In the case of events such as the First World War and the Nazi Holocaust, the scale of human suffering was so great that they cannot and should not be forgotten or ignored by later generations; hence, the establishment of war memorials, monuments, annual days of remembrance and Holocaust museums. Walker was born in 1938 and his early childhood was scarred by Nazi bombing raids in which family members were killed. He soon learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the post war exposure of

the Nazi death camps, and then experienced the fear of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War period; later he lived in London during the IRA’s bombing campaign. It is no wonder, therefore, that he developed a critical and pessimistic view of his own species and its many imperfections. He feels shame and guilt because he is also a flawed human being capable of emotions such as hatred and anger towards others. As he nears the time of his own death, the fact that humanity seems unable to learn from its past mistakes causes him distress; wars, atrocities, genocides and conflicts continue and he now realises he will not live long enough to see any significant improvement. (Of course, this does not mean that the struggle for improvement should be abandoned.) For this reason mourning-work can be regarded as perpetual. If one learns to accept or tolerate the imperfections of humanity then internal stress may be reduced but the downside is that one may end up tolerating brutalities that should never be tolerated or excused.

Grief is not made visible in his paintings via expressionist gestures of the brush but by means of a kneeling female figure with bowed head draped in classical-style robes. This figurative personification was borrowed from a fine funerary statue discovered in a local churchyard in Esher, Surrey. (2) The statue - repeated from canvas to canvas - enables the emotion of grief to be objectified and externalised while maintaining a certain distance from the painter’s own inner feelings. The existence of such statues and similar representations such as van Gogh’s drawing ‘Sorrow’ (1882) and Käthe Kollwitz’s sculptures ‘Grieving parents’ (1932) Vladslo Cemetery, Belgium, made it unnecessary to devise something new. The fact that

such conventional representations cut across the divide between academic and modern art signal an unexpected common denominator.

The paintings are all oil on linen and share the same oblong shape and size: 140 x 100 cm. ‘1914-18’ mourns the millions of soldiers from the ‘civilised’ nations of Europe who slaughtered one another during the First World War.

Deluded by patriotism, the soldiers were both the perpetrators of mass murder and its victims. The figure of grief stands in a vast landscape of war graves marked by white crosses. Ironically, most of the combatants on both sides of the conflict were followers of Christianity - a religion supposedly opposed to killing. (Christ once remarked: ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’) The grieving statue appears within a pyramid of lines of crosses that recede to a vanishing point above the top edge of the canvas. However, the emphatic perspectival recession is counterbalanced by the flatness of the pattern of crosses aligned with the surface of the canvas. Similarly, the symmetry of the composition is relieved by the random scatter or red roses growing among the crosses. The vivid red hue of the roses, of course, is a reminder of the blood spilled on the battlefields. Walker’s own paternal grandfather - whom he never met - died on the fields of

Flanders. His name appears on a memorial but there is no grave because his body was never found. His other grandfather he did know briefly before he was killed in a German bombing air raid during the Second World War.

Freud, of course, was Jewish and ended his days in London as a refugee from Nazioccupied Austria. ‘ “The Tube” at Treblinka’ commemorates some of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Shortly after arriving by train at the death camp of Treblinka in Poland, prisoners were compelled to undress. They were robbed of their hair and any valuables. Naked prisoners were then driven along an innocuous looking fenced in ‘tube’ or path that led to so-called ‘shower’ blocks. They were herded inside and exterminated via the use of exhaust gases from tank engines. (The Nazi guards cynically named the path “The Street to Heaven”.) Their corpses were then burned on huge pyres. Hundreds of thousands of Jews plus some gypsies were disposed of in this manner during the period July 1942 to October 1943. The testimonies of survivors to these events and the cruel, disgusting behaviour of the SS and Ukrainian guards are especially harrowing to read. This knowledge made the execution of the painting an extremely disturbing experience for Walker. In the painting, a cold eerie sunlight illuminates the empty path. No victims are depicted

because, as in reality, they are absent from the scene. Due to the curve of the path, the entrances to the gas chambers are hidden, consequently the path’s destination remains a mystery but can perhaps be guessed because paths are so often metaphors for the journey of life and the culmination of that journey, we all know, is death. Self-awareness of our own finitude, according to some theorists, means that mourning-work is a lifelong process.

Absence of both people and buildings characterises the canvas ‘Hiroshima, 1945’ (2008), which records the effects of the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city on August 6th 1945 by the American air force.

Paradoxically, the atom bomb was both a tribute to the scientific and technological achievements of humanity and a testimony to its cruelty and suicidal tendencies. Tens of thousands of mainly civilians died - some immediately and some later from injuries, burns and radiation poisoning - and most of the buildings in the city centre were obliterated. Only a few structures remained standing (in a ruined state) and among them was the Nagarekawa (Methodist) Church visible in the left foreground. The painting’s high viewpoint and predominantly brown hue recalls van Gogh’s 1888 sepia ink drawing of the plain of La Crau seen from Mount Major in Provence that Walker has written about as an art historian. (3) However, while the drawing celebrates the fertility of the plain and the value of agricultural labour, the painting mourns the loss of people and a thriving city. The bomb produced a ghastly wasteland and inaugurated the age of nuclear weaponry that continues to threaten

the future of humankind. The German theorist Gene Ray. who has written some illuminating essays on the theme of art and mourning in the work of Joseph Beuys and others, has argued that the Holocaust and atomic bomb attacks were ‘qualitative’ acts of state violence because they changed ‘in an irreversible way our understanding of humanity and its future prospects’. (4)

Unfortunately, the Nazi Holocaust did not prove to be the last genocide in human history. Others have since occurred in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur. ‘Victims of the Khmer Rouge’ (2008) depicts the grief statue standing before the so-called ‘skull map’, a map of Cambodia made from the skulls and bones of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime that was displayed in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phoem Penh from 1979 to 2002 as a testimony to the atrocities committed by Maoist ideologues under the leadership of Pol Pot. (Tuol Sleng was originally a high school that became the main prison and torture centre of the Khmer Rouge.)

It has been calculated that 1.7 million Cambodians died during the period 1975-79 from starvation, overwork, execution and torture. Although the skull is a somewhat tired and overused emblem of death in art, its multiplicity in the skull map renews its potency.

‘Nine/Eleven’ and ‘Monument at Ground Zero’ (2007) both commemorate the Islamist fundamentalist attacks on the World Trade Center towers, New York in which around 3000 people were killed.

In both pictures the scale of the grief statue is uncertain - it could be as huge as the Statue of Liberty, which it naturally evokes.

Walker was not in New York in 2001 and so both paintings were made using photographs of the scenes of destruction. It is of course paradoxical that a monument to 9/11 should be present while the attack on the twin towers is in progress. While some New Yorkers walk their dogs by the water’s edge, flames and smoke engulf the twin towers across the estuary. In the ‘Monument’ canvas the iconography of ruins, dark palette and pictorial style recall the paintings of the Sublime associated with Romanticism but also British war paintings from the First and Second World Wars. Many monuments to 9/11 have been produced and more are planned but few it seems are or are going to be as effective as the grief statue depicted by Walker.

In ‘Esher, Surrey in the year 3000’ (2006) - the final canvas in a landscape series

about Esher - global climate change is presumed to have resulted in the end of humanity and nature.

All that remains are clouds of brown dust swirling around the statue of grief, graveyard crosses and headstones and dead trees. This vision of the future is obviously extremely bleak and reflects Walker’s fear that it is already too late to rescue the planet. If he is wrong, then the painting will serve the useful function of acting as a dire warning. In ‘Oil wells on fire’ (2007) and ‘Waste Dump’ (2008) the environmental theme is continued.

The setting depicted in the former canvas is the Kuwait desert after the departure of Iraq’s army in 1991. In a needless, reckless and vindictive act of vandalism Saddam Hussein’s armed forces had set over 600 oil wells on fire creating an appalling level of damage and pollution that took firefighters months of work to rectify. This event was the result of a war of aggression but this image and ‘Waste Dump’ are also emblematic of the industrial pollution that is taking place across the whole planet but especially in rapidly developing industrial nations such as China and India.

Such pollution not only damages nature but also the health of humans.

‘Execution by Torture’ (2008) depicts the crucifixion of a Jewish religious prophet and two thieves that took place in the Middle East during Roman times.

The Roman method of execution was a particularly cruel one but Walker eschews a close up representation of the victims’ bodily agony in order to avoid the sadistic voyeurism associated with so many images of violence. Viewed from a distance, three wooden crosses are silhouetted against the sky. A stark rocky landscape, dark purple in hue, illuminated by flashes of lightning is intended to convey metaphorically a protest at the suffering experienced by all those who are tortured to death. Walker is an atheist and therefore does not believe in Christ’s resurrection. Nevertheless, he is moved by Christ’s passion and is sympathetic to many of his teachings.

As James Todd Dubose has remarked: ‘A central task in all mourning is the movement from private emoting and meaning-making to public and interpersonal

sharing of such experience.’ (5) This explains the purpose of Walker’s mourningwork series. Gene Ray has rightly argued that human progress requires ‘radical social transformation, a global reorganization aimed at neutralizing relations of domination’ and that art’s power ‘to intervene into everyday life is extremely limited’. However, what it can do is prompt critical reflection on the part of viewers and enable them to confront unpalatable truths about human society and history. He concludes that ‘art and culture can make modest but real contributions to a collectivised labour of mourning and transformation’ and that ‘every form of criticality … is welcome as a needed contribution toward cumulative shifts in public awareness and consciousness’. (6) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, Vol. 14. 1917. (Reprint, London: Hogarth, 1957).

(2) Personifications of abstract ideas such as liberty and victory by means of female rather than male figures has a long history in Western art and culture. The gender bias is thought to derive from the feminine gender of abstract nouns of virtue in many Indo-European languages. This issue is discussed by Marina Warner in Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). There also seems to have been a division of labour regarding the emotions in society - women have been thought of as expressing grief in public more than men. Sorrowful female figures became very popular as additions to tombs and

graves in nineteenth century cemeteries especially those in Paris. The photographer David Robinson calls them ‘saving graces’ and has documented many examples; see his book Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries, (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995).

(3) ‘Van Gogh’s drawing of La Crau from Mont Majour’, Master Drawings, 20 (4) winter 1982, pp. 380-85, plus plate 18.

(4) Gene Ray, ‘Mourning and Cosmopolitics: Joseph Beuys in context’, (2007), http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=3297

(5) Dubose, James Todd, Mourning, evil and grace a hermeneuticalphenomenological approach, (Dissertation: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duquesne University, 2004.) p. 123.

(6) Op. cit.