Anne MacDonald

EXQUISITE CORPSE 1: Anne MacDonald’s Vanitas

Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click.
Roland Barthes

And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
Shakespeare

In Anne MacDonald's Ophelia, flowers, emblems of the tragic heroine's beauty and fragility, float in a symbolic black void. 'As isolated as suicide’ noted the critic Elwyn Lynn of the cortege of fifty-two images, each individually framed in funereal black, strewn across the gallery space like the scattered coronet in Shakespeare's weeping brook. In 1994, Ophelia was distinguished as the first photographic work to be selected for the prestigious Moet & Chandon touring exhibition of contemporary Australian art. (MacDonald's work was also selected for the two subsequent Moets.) MacDonald has a knack for distilling a complex interplay of meanings in her allegories of the transience of life. Her referents are literary, social and art historical.

Last year, she was one of seven artists invited to participate in Death, an exhibition instigated by the Trustees of the Rookwood Necropolis in Sydney. Rookwood is the largest Victorian cemetery in the southern hemisphere; it contains a special burial ground where members of ethnic communities bury and mourn their dead in accordance with their religious customs. Many of these rituals involve the symbolic placement of food on grave sites. The food is left to stink and rot. Here then, the timeless association of food with celebration fuses with the taboos of death. Macdonald produced Vanitas for the Death exhibition. While this spectral image of a decomposing wedding cake draws on the symbolic life/death ambivalence of food at Rookwood, other, submerged, meanings surface via the photograph's association with peak moments in Western art's long romance with death.

VANITAS AND ITS MEANINGS - To the literary minded, Vanitas is a clear allusion to Miss Havisham's ghastly wedding banquet in Great Expectations. MacDonald's ravaged wedding cake is in an advanced stage of decay, draped with sticky cobwebs, its virginal whiteness sullied by the dark spots and running spores of cancerous mould. In the novel, the celebratory status of food is also a symbolic link between beauty and loss, life and death: that living corpse, Miss Havisham, proposes to be laid out amid the grotesque festive remains at her death. However, time has not yet reduced MacDonald's cake to the gothic ruin of that memorable banquet. Vanitas is a deeper meditation on decay and death than the blighted nuptials and dashed hopes personified by the yellowed Miss Havisham.

To the art-historically minded, the work refers to Dutch vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, allegorical still lifes which symbolised the vanity of human desires, the futility of luxury and wealth, and the evanescence of life. In these meticulously painted, splendidly illusionistic renderings of the good things of life, subtle hints of incipient decay trouble luscious surfaces: a faint bruise on a peach, the transparency of a petal, the droop of a stem. Vanitas paintings cross over with other still life categories of the period: flower, fruit, dessert and confectionery, Ontbijtjes (Laid Tables) and depictions of the five senses. (Miss Havisham's banquet is narrated as a Laid Table still life inextremis.) MacDonald's Vanitas fuses these various categories and refers to many of the traditional meanings associated with them. The more elaborate vanitas paintings show a disturbance in a perfect arrangement of food and the evil agent of that disturbance, usually a mouse or an insect - often a spider. In

Vanitas these agents of defilement reside in the viscous depths of the rotting cake; the gloomy tatters of their handiwork contrast ominously with the bouncy coils of festive ribbons in the crowning bouquet.

Sugar was introduced to Europe in the early 1600s, replacing honey as a sweetener. Confectionery still lifes reflected the interest in desserts which came to a climax at this time when numerous delicacies had been introduced as new luxuries. The seemingly innocuous and often curious arrangements of crystalised sugar, candied fruits and biscuits dusted with icing sugar carried a powerful moral message. Initially, sugar was a metaphor for spiritual sweetness; confections formed part of religious table scenery, along with bread and wine. When it was discovered to be addictive, sugar became the symbol of lust. A lover's aria of the time begins, ‘The memory of sugary lust inspires me with fear. Damned food, it will harm me in a worldly way. If one has tasted something and is not supposed to taste it again, then it becomes empty and pathetic.’ Sugar in a still life, by its very presence, indicated corruption. These two meanings became fused as they are in the more modern symbolism of the iced wedding cake, whose coating of virginal white encases that other morally ambiguous confection - candied fruit. Just as fish or bread in vanitas paintings were symbols of Christ, so MacDonald's wedding cake may be read as a metaphor for the body.

For followers of recent photography, the aesthetic of Vanitas can be compared with, say, The Morgue series by the American photographer Andres Serrano. These photographs of corpses strangely and, to some, disturbingly, transform harrowing images of violent death - suicides and victims of murder, burning or drowning - into art objects of seamless beauty. As in a Serrano, MacDonald's Vanitas is sealed off - embalmed - in its own technical perfection. A discomforting tension is established between its aesthetic beauty and the presence of death at the heart of its subject, manifested as the camera's intimate scrutiny of corporeal decay.

For students of photographic discourse, Vanitas establishes an elaborate dialogue with photography's paradoxical status as both 'flat death' and that which captures and preserves life's fleeting moments. In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes writes of the shift in the practice of commemoration since the advent of photography. Earlier societies erected monuments to immortalise Death (and the memory of the living). A photograph - the fugitive testimony by which we now preserve memory - is itself ephemeral: 'By making the (mortal) photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of "what has been" modern society has renounced the Monument.' Vanitas resonates with these ideas about the nature and role of photography. The rotting cake is like a ruined funerary monument, with its architectural structure, fluted columns, stuccoed surface, even its marbled bouquet of fading roses. Its mural size is in itself monumental, suggesting, as MacDonald writes in her notes to the work, 'the elemental density of a sepulchral monument constructed out of stone or marble'. Photography's symbolic association with death is predicated on its being a framed cut in real time; this is further alluded to in the image's evocation of time: Vanitas has recorded a late moment in a process of decay rather than a 'fleeting moment of life': we have the sense that the process of decomposition is taking place before our eyes.

How does a work of art convey death? A recent publication which explores the subject claims it is impossible. For many years a famous painting exerted a fascination over me. Until recently its power was largely a mystery. Strangely, for it has been neither a source nor a referent of her work, nor have I ever discussed it with her, it was Anne MacDonald who led me to see why. As I became more familiar with her work over a period of three years, the secrets of this masterpiece began to unravel like the unfolding plot of a detective novel. 

ART AND DEATH - In Art and its Objects Jeanette Winterson writes of being profoundly moved to an appreciation - and ensuing investigation - of the power of superior works of art by her chance sighting of a painting in an Amsterdam gallery window. Her awakening occurred when she was in her mid-thirties. These moments of epiphany, even for one who spends one's life looking at art, are rare. No work of art is truly universal in the sense that anything approaching a majority of people are swept away by their response to it. Simone de Beauvoir makes this perfectly clear when she writes of her disappointment and boredom with the Parthenon.

My moment of epiphany occurred twenty years ago in Brussels on sighting Marat assassine (The Assassination of Marat, 1793) by Jacques-Louis David. I glimpsed it on the far wall of a gallery in the Musees Royaux and had to look away. (Our first instinct is to avert the gaze from death. Moreover, this is a work of breathtaking beauty.) As I stared sightlessly at other works in the museum I regained my equilibrium by rationalising my response before I returned to it. As a student of art history I simply couldn't get over the fact that a neoclassical work - that coldest and most rational of figurative styles, with its supreme control, its restraint, its grandeur of design and heroic calm – could convey such tragic vulnerability, such terrible poignancy. (This emotive stuff was the business of romantic painters like Delacroix and Gericault.) And to be, at the same time, formally, so austere, so perfectly simple, so consummately graceful, so exquisitely beautiful. Eventually I realised that what had moved me was largely inexplicable. It was the power of the painting's presence.

When I returned to it I recognised that I was in the presence of the supreme portrayal of death.

The Marat is heroic in scale; the hero’s death, for the first time in art history, is unheroic, as existentially lonely and bewildering as being suddenly murdered in your bath, as Marat was.  The ‘friend of the people’ lies slumped, like a Grunewald Christ who has collapsed off his cross, in his strangely sheeted and table-clothed bath, which doubles as his writing desk.  His life’s breath is almost depleted; death is imminent.  Apart from a crude packing case and a few clues to his martyrdom, the rest of the tableau is bare.

Afterwards I read that Marat assassine had, shortly after its completion, been adopted as the icon of the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror. Given its effect on me, I was not surprised to learn of its role in shifting the Revolution back in upon itself. I also learned that the supreme painter Jacques-Louis David was one of the six leading political figures of the Terror, along with Robespierre, Danton and Marat. David had signed countless death warrants and watched as hundreds confronted the horror of the guillotine. He was genuinely grieved by the murder of the loathed and dangerous Jean-Paul Marat, so was emotionally equipped to depict him as a kind of Everyman whose death represented martyrdom for the Revolutionary cause.

David's biographer, Anita Brookner, describes him as being in a hypermanic state - en delire - during this period when he produced his greatest works: 'It is as if David is animated at a subliminal level by a sense of the historically apposite... murder and treason are in the air he breathes. 'This explains the power of Marat assassine. Here is an artist who understands death. More to the point, he presides in its company, colludes with its terror. In 'the divine Marat', as Baudelaire called it, the presence of death is, through some process of osmosis, subsumed into the very fabric of the work.

Metaphysics accounted for the uncanny power of the painting but not for how the presence of death is achieved formally. Outside of the quest for formal perfection and the centrality of death, what can an eighteenth-century painting of a dying martyr have in common with contemporary photographs of flowers, luxuriant draperies and a time-ravaged wedding cake? Whenever I looked at Anne MacDonald's works I thought of the Marat and I couldn't say why.

As I became more familiar with her techniques and innate sense of theatre, I saw that my literal reading of the painting was blinding me to its formal devices. (Brookner states how the Marat established an art-historical precedent: for the first time art and life were fused.) I discovered that its formal simplicity - its seemingly accurate reportage of the circumstances of Marat's death -masked a highly complex and brilliantly stage-managed piece of theatre. Jacques-Louis David was not the Revolution's Director of Public Festivals for nothing. For a start he had transformed the physically repugnant Marat, with his ugly face and a body encrusted with the disgusting sores of his leprous skin disease, into a quasi-religious image of Christlike beauty, his form arranged with all the balletic grace of a performance by Nijinsky.

Beauty in art is commonly thought of as existing 'for its own sake'. This is not so; beauty is always inextricably bound up with the meaning of a work. Through MacDonald's Ophelia, where barely perceptible hints of decay despoil the flowers' succulent surfaces, I learned that in art death must be conveyed through beauty. David's beautification of Marat went beyond serving the cause of the Revolution, though an attractive martyr is more likely to inflame the passions of the populace than an ugly one. Beauty was a necessity. This is because its formal perfection represents intactness, and it is thereby an analogy for that which is alive. And this is why Marat is shown at the point of death rather than actually dead. Death cannot be revealed; rather it must be sensed as a silent, insidious presence. (This is why personifications

of death in art, skeletons for instance, seem melodramatic or border on the comic: to reveal death just doesn't work.) A work of art hints at death through defiling beauty's intactness. The more exquisite an image of transience, the more we are affected by its death. (Andres Serrano knows this: his most shocking images are also the most beautiful ones.) It is the same in Vanitas. Anne MacDonald's task has, in one sense, been more difficult - to make us see that a cake was once an object of great decorative beauty, of architectural magnificence even.

At some point another connection between MacDonald and the Marat dawned on me. I had always, unconsciously, thought of the Marat not as a figurative painting at all, but as a still life, as, in fact, a vanitas painting. David had had the audacity, the genius, to transpose the devices of the still life painter onto the representation of a dying human body. The whole mise-en-scene of the Marat is reminiscent of the Laid Table still lifes, which often contain finely painted table-cloths and draperies. Anne MacDonald's Annunciation series showed me that draperies can have connotations of a shroud. I now saw that the draped sheets, the turban, the green cloth in the Marat are in effect his shroud, imparting to the whole the sense that Marat's bathroom is also a morgue. MacDonald's habit of casting her images with blue to seal them in the cold light of death corresponds to the eerie green light suffusing the Marat, which culminates in the deathly silence of the stark greenish wall behind him that occupies nearly half the picture. The same blank silence hangs in MacDonald's black voids. The faint bruise on the petal, the brown spot on the apple, has been translated into the small searing red cut in Marat's healthy flesh, and its faint dribble of blood, just below the collar bone. This modest though deep wound sets the teeth on edge, just as we are unnerved by the absence of the piece of icing in the top tier of Vanitas. We don't care to think about what dark state of mush the interior body of that cake might be in beneath its decent envelope of icing, what cloying odour of putrescence it might give off. And above it, ossifying, sits the antithesis of the putrid - flowers.

Marat wore a vinegar-soaked turban on his head (he wears it in the painting) to ward off infection which, at the time, was believed to be carried by foul-smelling miasmas emanating from decomposing flesh and fissures in the earth's crust. The rent in his flesh would have been keenly felt by a contemporary audience. Clefts, cuts, fissures, were causes of deep anxiety. While this is obviously bound up with the psychology of the Terror, our own horror of the body's internal organs is no less neurotic. As Wendy Steiner has written of Serrano's The Morgue series:

The form of the body - the skin, the comely exterior - hides contents that are as shapeless and nightmarish as Freud's id. One of our primal terrors is that this form will spring a leak, letting the insides - fluids, organs, life - spill out, to become visible and, in the process, deathly... The flawlessness of bodily form is a reassurance of mortal safety and a denial of death.

This terror of the internal erupting through the skin leads to the final lesson about the Marat, which I came to understand through MacDonald's Vanitas. It is to do with prescience and a stillness which suggests imminent movement. The most hidden of the secrets of David's evocation of Death's presence is the trace of tension in Marat's slumped form, which suggests this latent movement. (In the countless copies that have been obsessively painted of the masterpiece in the past 200 years, not one, to my knowledge, has managed to capture this: in them Marat looks doped or merely asleep.) Marat's body is at that critical point of passivity where soon, when he exhales his last breath, it will sag completely and his head will loll right over the side of the bath. The painting's pathos is in its moment. 

In the bottom tier of the wedding cake the icing has parted, leaving a gap which suggests something more final than cadaverous insides. The base of the cake is beginning to sag; soon the whole structure will collapse into the penultimate stage of decomposition - formlessness. It will become an obscene heap of liquefying matter. The shuddering thud of that sudden collapse, the ensuing formlessness, these are the ultimate horrors. Vanitas and Marat assassine both prefigure this moment.

Victoria Hammond

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