Is it imaginable that artists that depict war are not necessarily protesting it, but might be using its affective potentials for their own ends? And, consequently, that their artworks should not be construed as a defense of the inviolability of human life, but rather as acts that participate in its destruction? The thought occurred to me during a visit to Vanessa Baird’s retrospective at Munch Museum in Oslo, fittingly titled Go Down With Me. The exhibition is host to no shortage of ravaged and humiliated bodies, in particular a new pastel frieze inspired by the ongoing massacre of civilians in Gaza, that could easily be construed as a heartfelt indictment of injustice. But Baird’s work is also suffused with a tangible desire for destruction of the human form that brings forth the libidinal aspect of our consumption of violent imagery and makes it difficult to tether her images to a straightforward moral agenda.
The exhibition’s scale betrays an aspect of Baird’s oeuvre that is related to this ‘sadistic’ impulse, namely her penchant for quantity. As a result, the exhibition display takes on a notably expansive character, with walls covered either by salon style hangings or by reams of paper stretching from ceiling to floor. The inclusion of a number of oil paintings on canvas from the early 90s underscores how tempo has become an increasingly dominant trait in Baird’s work. There is a striking difference between the older paintings’ relatively slow procedures and the rasher, frenzied facture that seems to take over as she turns to a more drawing-like register, using mainly watercolour and pastels. Compared to her more recent works, the oil paintings appear restrained and ambiguous, concerned with nursing complex meaning through the juxtaposition of carefully rendered figures and symbols. Her drawings – in a wide sense of the term – are looser and wilder and seem eager to replace moderation and subtlety with metrics related to efficiency and impact.
The painting Self-Portrait (Big Fart) (1992), which paraphrases Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker (1904), is indicative of this difference. The grey-black strokes making up the background radiate outward and combine with the yellow edge of an explosion behind the figure to form a heroic bang that comically elevates it. Big hands and feet give the body a restless, dysmorphic appearance, but the figure retains its sturdiness and precisely delineated shape; its texture is dry and stony. The body is kept intact, so to speak, and this solidity echoes the presumed durability of the substrate or medium. As a feminist comment on the canon, Baird’s strategy here is to infiltrate the model, to enshroud the woman artist in the attire of genius to forge an ironic amalgamation of patriarchal monumentalism and its playful subversion, inhabiting the idol without toppling it.
With the ascendence of ‘drawing’ as Baird’s primary medium, her subversions turn rawer and more irreverent, but also sillier. The entrance to the exhibition is a corridor plastered with a jumble of typical images from recent years: frantic spectacles where human figures indulging in or suffering abject and degrading acts, sexual and otherwise, stare despondently at us or gleefully empty their bowels in our faces. Considered biographically, it is as if Baird has replaced her subservience to artistic convention, which she initially only allowed herself to turn against within the normative framework of painting proper, with a fuck-all attitude that lets her to tear off drawing after drawing without heeding the integrity of either artworks or bodies in order to obtain a velocity of image making that dispels the possibility of contemplation. This strategy of creative incontinence, alongside the preponderance of platitudes in Baird’s work, is too seldom discussed. Maybe because acknowledging it would disrupt the attempt to set her up as a chronicler of the existential depths of the everyday in order to make her graphic excesses more amenable to viewer identification.
An untitled watercolour and charcoal drawing from 2009 offers a poignant metaphor for a collapse of the idea that artworks help us elucidate the human condition: a woman wearing a semi-transparent blue dress stands facing us in a dim interior, her blood red neck painfully stretching towards the ceiling, as if her head is being torn from her body by invisible forces, a nebulous evil that comes from everywhere at once, or is one with the image. This sickening transformation looks like something out of a horror film, which is a fitting analogy for Baird’s mode of image making, that is, her willingness to feast on clichés and wanton depravity in order to evoke immediate affective responses. And as is common in horror films, Baird’s scenes often take place in domestic environments where crackling fireplaces, paintings on the wall, and checkered tablecloths create homey atmospheres that contrast the destruction or degradation of the bodies that inhabit them. Also contributing to this stylistic honing of ‘shock value’ is Baird’s somewhat antiquated expression – her “old hand,” as an artist friend aptly put it – that makes her pictures look like pages torn from old children’s books.
Pissing, shitting, pissing, crying, bleeding, and vomiting bodies recur throughout the exhibition. The persistent theme of incontinence expresses a longing for transgression beyond that of just upending social norms. Attacks on the integrity of the human body as a metonym for an eradication of distinctions in general (ethical as well as aesthetic) is reminiscent of Bjarne Melgaard’s practice. But unlike Melgaard, who pursues a thoroughly uninhibited ‘prostitution’ of the artist, where compromising the self in order to eviscerate any remnants of a confining identity has become a guiding virtue, Baird seems bent on simultaneously defending against the destruction she has set in motion. She backs away from the abyss, as if compelled by a need to reconnect with or reanimate the idea of the artist as a purveyor of moral truths, to afford her transgressions a positive social meaning. This rescue attempt is augmented in the reception and interpretation of her work. She is commended for thwarting female stereotypes, for showing us the burden of nurturing, for raising her middle finger to the institution of genius, for expressing political engagement through art, etc. Still, the current of decay and disintegration that runs through her work imparts her images with an inhuman drive that refuses to be curtailed by this programmatic intentionality.
Symptomatically, the intentional management of the image in Baird’s later work has a revealingly banal quality. It’s as if these bids, sourced from a rehashed template of critical gestures, at reclaiming authorial ownership are unable to keep up with the unstoppable discharge of visual material and inevitably end up as mere traces of an artist subject that has fallen victim to the tempo of its own production. Take, for instance, the decision to paint masturbating and hanged people inside found amateur landscape paintings. Is it meant seriously as a belated critique of National Romantic attitudes, or is the inanity and uninventiveness of this operation precisely the point? I see a similar evacuation of agency in the incorporation of humorous or sentimental snippets of text in many of the images, in particular the Gaza-frieze, where Baird quotes a Palestinian poet and a father who has lost his child to a hospital bombing, and encourages us to “boycott Israel.” What we are confronted with here are arbitrary references to a realm of language-mediated meaning which the image has broken free from, a vain attempt to put it to work as sign of protest.
There is a tendency to commend artists when they respond to humanitarian crises, yet what the artistic image contributes to our processing of these events is unclear. Maybe such artistic responses fill a role as manifestations of our own indignation, symbolic confirmations of our shared commitment to justice, indictments of evil on our behalf. In any case, contemporary art seems poorly equipped to meaningfully assist the tidal wave of images transmitted through social and traditional media in raising awareness about the atrocities being committed. Furthermore, it is clear that the graphic horror of war is an emotional trigger that also serves the artist as a muse, that inspires them to produce. The mediation of war is already adjacent to snuff when photos of torn-up bodies become fuel for the affect-driven and compulsive media consumption bolstered by image-sharing platforms, regardless of individual user intent. Art’s regurgitation of these images does not take place outside the libidinal compact between media and users. Rather than trying to set itself up as an adequate moral response to the humanitarian catastrophe she cites, Baird’s Gaza-frieze – to its credit, I think – admits to this licentious dimension of our dealing with war imagery: in between the mangled remnants of human bodies, a woman stands with her back to us, presumably transfixed by the horrific view, figuring as an avatar for numbed voyeuristic participation.
Baird remodels actual suffering into a morbid tableau populated by imaginary characters from her personal menagerie. This testifies to a possessive rather than documentary relation to the event. As a statement on the social function of art, Baird’s Gaza-frieze is closer to Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Insult to Injury (2003) – where they added cartoon faces of clowns and puppies to figures from Francisco Goya’s revered print series Disasters of War (1810–20) – than it is to the somber and accusatory original which, it should be added, was created at a time when art could reasonably claim to serve as an instrument of moral enlightenment by bearing witness to war’s abuses. This is not, in the end, about art’s permissions or the ethics of representation, but about how our relationship to art is affected by the changing role of information in our culture. Images in particular are perhaps best viewed as agents of attention capture that are increasingly unmoored from truth and shaped through feedback from the media environment in which they operate, where the traffic they generate is the only relevant measure of success. Their purpose, that is to say, the outcome they are designed for, is clearly not aligned with the values or goals of the social systems in which they are generated and circulated. Yet we still tend to relate to images, especially artistic ones, as if they by default have society’s best interests at heart. Baird’s abrasive output challenges this Enlightenment assumption that artistic images are a means of humanist education for the audience.
