New York Notes 3: Sculpture, Flesh, Art

This is Louis-Claude Vassé's eighteenth-century sculpture The Nymph of Dampierre. I've never really spent much time looking at sculpture, so it was good to see a wealth of white marble and dark bronze at the Met's sculpture court. This one caught my eye because I think it represents a kind of internal limit to very possibility of sculpture. As the photograph shows, so much of the sinuousity of the whole sculpture (the serpents and shells on the fountain pedestal, the elegant arch of the body) finds a concentrated emblem in the hair that she holds and washes.

At least when seen in three-dimensions with the fall of the light and the shade (see the following series of rather nice photographs), this really does express very well the struggle of sculpture to hew life and animation out of the coldness of raw, stony matter. There is something eerie about the way that such a fleeting and transient moment of embodied experience - the water running through the lissome coils of hair, the touch and dexterity of her fingers, the left hand just barely lifting a heavy set of strands - is preserved into the eternity of marble.

It's perhaps Keats's gorgeous work of ekphrasis, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', that best captures the uncanny nature of this, what he terms a cold pastoral: 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time' (ll.1-2). But I think the compelling nature of Vassé's piece runs even deeper than merely a temporal issue, insofar as the nymph washing her hair exemplifies the clash of the aesthetic and the corporeal, marble and flesh.

I wonder if Jean-Luc Marion's notion of saturated phenomena might be useful in understanding the specificity of sculpture as an art form, and sculpture of the human body in particular. For Marion, a saturated phenomenon is an experience that shatters our horizons and proves nearly impossible to fully comprehend or intuit. Two of his examples are flesh and the idol, and I think much of sculpture's unique hold on us comes from evoking both together in a complex, stunning and sometimes troubling relationship.

Flesh is considered a 'saturated' phenomena because it is not something I can see, feel, or experience in a simple way, but rather it is the unique complex of 'subject' and 'object' which enables me to see, feel and experience the world. Put simply, I am my body, and the experience of my flesh is uniquely private and my own:

flesh only ever refers back to itself, in the indissoluble unity of the felt and the feeling. Flesh is referred to itself as it auto-affects itself. In consequence, it eludes all relation - my pain, my pleasure, remain unique, incommunicable, unable to be substituted - in an absoluteness without compromise...[flesh accomplishes] what it alone can accomplish - to render me to myself, to assign me to myself

(Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, p.100)

This, in turn, gives a special philosophical privilege to touch ('the strangely intimate exteriority of flesh and...the depth/superficiality of skin', p.103) as the medium of intersubjectivity, the way we try to come to touch (in all its resonances) others, to feel what they feel. Flesh is uniquely one's own, and yet it is also that which enables contact with others, it is offered/given to others to touch, to strike, to wound, to hold. Flesh alone has this enigmatic ontology.

The idol, or painting, is considered a saturated phenomena in a rather more simple way: it is a certain element of the visible that exists at an unparalleled intensity. An artwork arrests our gaze, absorbs our gaze, exceeds our gaze. Marion contends that the 'phenomenality' of the artwork can never be reduced to that of an object or 'objectivity' because, quite simply, every time we return to a great painting, we are - in a very real sense - looking at a different painting. In the same way that a novel or poem always holds something in reserve, and demands the pleasures of re-reading that always uncover something new and different (sometimes radically and revolutionarily so), a painting does the same in the field of the visual:

The intensity it deploys would demand an almost indefinite succession of looks...on each occasion it is appropriate that a new, irrepeatable and unsubstitutable meeting takes place. The computation of my visits to the same museum for years or months sketches less my own physical history than the temporal deployment of the paintings that on each occasion I put in a new light. My own look, always different on each visit...makes the painting differ from itself...it will never be a closed object, exhaustively seen

(In Excess, p.71)

In short, a painting will never be exhaustively 'seen', just as we will never 'finish' reading works of literature (as individuals, or even as a culture). There's always something more to be given, hence art's ability to live on and on, and continue to exert its relevance: as if Shakespeare, or Caravaggio, or Vassé are not only our contemporaries, but still ahead of us.

I muse that the magic of sculpture (cf. the recurrent trope of a sculpture that comes to life, as with Ovid's myth of Pygmalion, or The Winter's Tale's Hermione) comes from the crossing over of the saturated phenomenon of flesh with that of the idol. Vassé's superbly poised nymph, captured in the transience of intimacy for two hundred and fifty years, evokes the ungraspable enigma of the flesh (what does she feel?) Yet of course she does not feel, and cannot be felt, cannot be 'touched' (inside). By contrast, and perhaps by way of some compensation, she is granted the privilege of the idol, of the artwork: she is, as Marion puts it, a'consecrated' (p.59) visibility. Like the beloved of any sonnet, she will live forever with an ungraspable, irreducible radiance. She will demand and invite re-lookings that will never come to terms with her, and we will never fully 'see' her, however naked or otherwise she may.

I've tried to show that this is not just about the old conflict between art's immortality and human frailty, but about two types of phenomenality that are at the limits of our experience. The radiance of the idol and the privilege of the artwork is her glory, but the beautiful evocation (and yet necessary absence and denial) of the warm, living flesh is her uncanniness.

The final word, perhaps, can go to Shakespeare, and a little bit of magic:

PAULINA

Music, awake her; strike!

Music

'Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I'll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away,
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs:

HERMIONE comes down

Start not; her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful: do not shun her
Until you see her die again; for then
You kill her double. Nay, present your hand:
When she was young you woo'd her; now in age
Is she become the suitor?

LEONTES

O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

(The Winter's Tale, III.2)