Anne MacDonald

EXQUISITE CORPSE 2: Anne MacDonald’s Petals

25 August to 13 September 2000

If the essences of things were in their mass and bulk we would not need the clairvoyance of photography to arrest them for examination and appreciation.  But they are suspended on the invisible dimension whose vibrance has been denied the human eye . . .
Hart Crane (1923)

THE SEMBLANCE OF LIFE – In a crypt in Palermo is a section devoted to infants who after death had been mummified, a popular way of clinging to the departed in 19th century Sicily, a place more than half in love with easeful death. In the midst of these tiny, shrunken, blackened corpses, still ghoulishly clothed in their lacy white bonnets and death-gowns, is a perfect, exquisitely beautiful two-year-old child.  Her mouth a red rose-bud, her long lashes forming shadows on her healthily flushed cheeks, a bright gold bow adorning her luxuriant curls, she has evidently only just fallen asleep in her glass-domed crib. The master-work of a mysterious Sicilian doctor whose secrets of perfecting the mummification process died with him, this century old child is, unlike her shrivelled companions, truly harrowing. This is because she looks alive. Like a photographer, her mummifier has frozen her in time. In fact, sealed in time past and so still, she resembles nothing so much as a three-dimensional photograph in living colour. (Needless to say she is wonderfully photogenic. Postcards of her are the crypt’s best-sellers.) As with this child, in visual imagery death is often most hauntingly evoked as an unseen presence in the midst of life. The more vital and intact that life is – like the poignantly youthful, tightly-wrapped Gladiolus bud bursting with life in Petal – the darker and more insidious death’s presence seems to be. Thinking of the child later it was her beauty that lingered, endowing her with a vestige of immortality, and so it is with the silken beauty of the flowers in Petal, their high detail, suggestiveness, textures, colours and incandescence.

Anne MacDonald’s photographs are haunting reminders of death because they so perfectly simulate life. Her camera homes in on single buds and petals as if it is seeking the essence of the flower. What this close scrutiny offers for our eyes to linger on is attributes of flowers that, in our haste, we don’t engage with or don’t even notice: the perfect rouleau of a rose petal’s edge; the waxen texture of a lily; a silken poppy unfurling into full-skirted bloom. Flowers take on a metaphorical suggestiveness, resembling flesh or fabrics. But beyond these luminous images floating in their impenetrable black is the silent presence of something unseen, something transforming life itself.

The 14 flower portraits in Petal are the denouement of MacDonald’s long romance with flowers as vanitas symbols. Each stage of the vegetative cycle – perfect petal or moist bud, decaying or withered bloom – exists both in isolation and as a component of a grand vanitas sequence. I’ve been familiar with Anne MacDonald’s work for some years and what was of interest to me, given that Petal may be her last flower series, was how did it summarise or distil meanings in earlier works like Flowers of Evil (1990), Ophelia (1993) and Pure (1995) and in what ways did it extend beyond these meanings? In other words, how was the past recapitulated and what was new? 

LIVING AND DYING COLOUR – The first thing that struck me was the colours: blue-cast paleness, autumnal gold and vivid red. MacDonald’s technique of casting her images with blue – the seal of decay and incipient death – was familiar to me, but that brittle gold and the vitality of that red were new and shocking. Initially I recoiled from those three gold lilies, parched and withered like the skin of the aged. They were so dead. (‘Death,’ says MacDonald, ‘is a forbidden subject. Paramount to Petal is death’s double position as anomalous, marginal and repressed, and at the same time masterful, central, everywhere manifest.’) All the more so as the Florentine lily has traditionally symbolised conception; it is the flower the angel Gabriel holds in paintings of the Annunciation and is now called the Christmas lily because of its association with Christ’s birth. Perhaps we shun death because it is largely hidden from us, for as I grew more accustomed to the lilies I began to be taken with their curious forms – one is shaped like a sea-horse, the tip of another has furled into a wonderful curl – so that even their colour now seemed like the gold of alchemy or resurrection, rather than something on the point of crumbling into dust; it was as if the invisible process of death was a force with its own peculiar vitality, paradoxically not all that dissimilar to life.

By contrast, the shock of the red was immediately pleasurable, for it spoke life and vibrancy. Motion even is suggested in the blur of the chiffon-transparent edge of the unfurling red Poppy 1, exuberant as the twirl of a tango dancer’s skirt. Whether you read the form of the gerbera petal in Daisy as a drop of blood or as the slit of a knife wound, its red is the red of blood. And the bud tight Rose 3 is shaped not like the heart of romance, but a real heart, redly visceral, meaty and veined as a heart in a butcher’s shop. Or it might be what a human heart looks like if we could see through the skin into the body’s dark interior. (Less widely known 17th century vanitas paintings allegorised the frailty of human flesh by taking as their subject the meat markets.)

The expressive significance of colour in these photographs is illustrated by comparing the red rose with Iris, which is next in the sequence and similar in form. This newly emerged bud is the most youthful of the images, its green stalk forming a spine brimming with sap, its texture slightly sticky like something newly born. Yet, like its pale companions, it has a deathly blue pallor. If the red images signify pulsating life, and the gold ones the already dead, the pale ones – which move progressively through the growth cycle – signify death’s hidden omnipresence, Shakespear’s ‘To die, even as they to perfection grow’.  The silken blue Poppy 2, emerging like a butterfly from a chrysalis, will always be dancing into life in this photograph. (In Dutch still life butterflies symbolised the carefree nature of the soul after it is freed from all terrestrial desires.)

From these various stages of birth, life and death, we move to the ultimate flower in the Petal sequence – ultimate too as a vanitas image – the baroque Azalea. This gorgeous bloom, extravagant as a ball gown, has begun to rot, its rich magentas turning to brown. The suggestiveness of this image extends beyond the transitory nature of life to the history of photography itself and its association with still life and death. Not only were flowers among the first subjects to be photographed, but floral still lifes were the only subjects used for early experiments with chemical pigments in colour processing. The blues, mauves and magentas of Azalea have an artificial, almost painterly quality reminiscent of early coloured photographs. Azalea’s colour tones are like a modernisation of these artificial pigments, which were cold tones that ranged from bluish-red to blue-green. In an age where photography was admired above all for its mirroring of the world, the artificiality of these colours was considered repellent, leading an anonymous commentator to describe early colour photographs as ‘the cemetery of aniline colours’.  Azalea can thus be read as a graveside memento to early colour floral photography.

INCANDESCENCE AND THE VOID - The photographic equivalent of life is light. In MacDonald’s Petal this light is a softly glowing luminescence that appears to emanate from the flowers themselves. Like vanitas paintings, the formal elements of these photographs can be reduced to light, dark, and a mysterious shadow presence. And as with great vanitas paintings, Petal is suggestive of the hidden interaction between these elements. The lustrous gleams on the highly polished pewter ware in still lifes by Dutch masters like Willem Kalf act symbolically as metaphysical points of light in an eerily pervasive gloom. This polished perfection makes the brown spot on a nearby pale peach seem like a contagion from the shadow world, just as the blue cast overshadowing the most luminous of MacDonald’s petals is like some pale emanation from the void.

It is revealing to consider Petal in the context of the allegorical meanings of early vanitas paintings. Drawing on the spiritual symbolism of light and colour in religious paintings of the Renaissance, the floral paintings of Roelant Savery (1576-1639) carried a moral message wherein flowers, being beautiful, symbolised the good. Savery’s masterly Bouquet of flowers (1612) has features in common with MacDonald’s photographs: flowers of blue, red, gold and white, ranging from buds to blooms to overblown roses, are carefully arranged against a dense black ground. The radiance of the flowers against this deep blackness emphasises their spiritual significance. Evil, however, is at work, symbolised by insects buzzing near a white bloom, and, creeping about the vase, a mouse, a lizard, a grasshopper and a hideously hairy fly scavenging amidst fallen blooms. While the allegory is clearly a Christian one – impurity ever-lurking to defile purity – these agents of defilement also symbolise the passage of time.

MacDonald’s photographs abstract and distil the meanings contained in paintings like this one, purifying the allegorical relationship to one between beauty, time and the abyss. Time itself, not evil or the vanity of human wishes, is the agent of destruction. While the effects of time are visible, time itself is evoked not by extraneous symbols of corruption like vermin or insects, but as an unseen, insinuating presence. When we read Petal as a kind of narrative, the intact roundness of Rose 1’s edge, for example, heightens our awareness that time has violated the perfect edge of Rose 2, and imperceptibly dulled its luminescence by casting a shadow across its surface. The inexorable process that has withered the three dead lilies is, in the preceding image of the luminous white lily, already visibly at work in the transparency of one of its petals. In each photograph time is present as an invisible carrier between darkness and light, indistinguishable from yet present in both the blackness and the flowers’ incandescence, as if the process of decay is inseparable from life itself.

Whether in making the connections between images, or in contemplating an isolated petal, the viewer uncannily senses this presence in the photographs. The writer Hart Crane described this apparently metaphysical facility of photography as getting at ‘the motion and emotion of so-called inanimate life’, attributing this ‘baffling capture’ to ‘the eerie speed of the shutter’.

ESSENCE – Flowers are so infinitely suggestive that their symbolic function is often ambiguous. As vanitas painters were well aware, their combination of beauty, fragility and short life span made them ideal emblems of mortality. Traditionally they have signified both life and death, and states of being ranging from youth, virginity, innocence and purity, through rites of passage, love, femininity and fecundity, to wilting and decay. Flowers are the most poetic of symbols, not because of some clichéd idea of beauty, but because, like good poetry, they always suggest far more than their surface meanings disclose. Flowers are secretive. They seem to hold the key to some mystery, which is why they have fascinated scientists. In visual documentation of natural history specimens, and in images which referred to their medicinal properties, flowers often bridged the gap between art and science.

In the 20th century, the camera moved ever closer to flowers, probing this mysterious essence. The traditional associations of flowers, by now sentimentalised via popular imagery, gave way to newer, tougher meanings. Karl Blossfeldt peered so closely at his exotic specimens as to render them strange, bristling with surreal life; Imogen Cunningham revealed the architectural magnificence of their structures as well as their hothouse sensuality; the initially charged eroticism of Robert Mapplethorpe’s tulips and calla lilies became, with time, morbid, deathly. If I were asked to describe in this brief way what Anne MacDonald’s photographs reveal about the essence of flowers, I would say, ‘Floating in death, dying, dead, they mysteriously symbolise life.’ For what MacDonald’ camera elicits is the secretiveness of flowers. Science has demonstrated that flowers do indeed hold secrets, ones that may over time be revealed. Here is one.

At the end of the 19th century the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries conducted experiments on the character of flowers. Working with such plants as asters, chrysanthemums and violas, de Vries concluded that certain characteristics – the colour of a petal, the length of a stamen – were generationally ‘transmitted’. This inheritance he described as being ‘built up out of definite units’. At the time de Vries was unaware of the enormity of his discovery: he had in fact identified one of the great mysteries of life – what we know now as genes. This scientific association of flowers with the essence of life, while providing a counterpoint to their vanitas associations, connects with significant attributes of flowers in Petal: the sticky new-born skin texture of buds, their bursting with life, the veins, the unfurling, the blurs of movement, the blood redness, and, above all, the incandescence from which all this life seems to draw its energy. Yet the drama here is not one of further growth but the status of these flowers as effigies.

This life/death duality is emphasised in the tension between the life-like ‘naturalism’ of the flowers and the under-stated theatricality of their presentation.  MacDonald has positioned the flowers pointing downwards – an allusion perhaps to the famous drooping of blooms in vanitas paintings – as if they are falling into, as well as floating on, their sea of black. Sealed off in the seamless technical perfection of the photographs, the flowers are removed from us, already inhabiting another dimension. The various shapes of the photographs echo the forms of individual flowers, emphasising their isolation; there is nothing more solitary than death. Subtly alluding to mourning, these individual shapes have all the finality of a door banging shut.

Over the years MacDonald’s photographs of flowers, drapery and despoiled wedding cakes have proven photography to be the ultimate vanitas medium. After all 17th century vanitas painters strived for an illusionistic mirroring of the world that is in essence photographic. Yet early vanitas photographers mimicked the conventions of vanitas paintings: Charles Aubrey, for instance, placed a skull near a vase of flowers; Eugene Chauvigne often selected flowers visibly injured by time or blight. By the last decades of the 20th century, it was understood that vanitas elements resided in the pure forms of the flowers and the nature of photography itself. MacDonald reduces and refines even further so that her metaphors for life and death reside in the purely photographic aspects of the image: life in the essence of the flower as light, entombed within the deathly flatness, the sealed surface and the black velvet darkness.

Victoria Hammond

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