Articles - Martin C. Putna
A World Made Unbeautiful
Martin C. Putna
The work of Ivan Pinkava is not easy. Small wonder that it will please his audience to receive the help that the titles of his photographs offer them: Castor and Pollux, Abel and Cain, Benjamin, Sebastian, Salomé, and other Classical, biblical or early Christian iconic figures. Pinkava has imaginary portraits of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath, and other writers who have one way or another been transformed into cult figures of the modern age, into comparable ‘icons’. On top of that, the now-informed audience recognizes a third, hidden group of ‘titles’ – namely, the titles of classic paintings that have also become ‘icons’ and are paraphrased by Pinkava’s photographs, though the ‘true’ title is often not there. Instead, Pinkava offers a telling phrase, something encoded: Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus is concealed behind the title His First Sip, Caravaggio’s John the Baptist concealed behind The Lamb of God, the End of Time. Leonardo’s John the Baptist concealed behind the Italian words Ecco la Luce! Anonymous mediaeval iconographic motifs have sometimes retained their standard titles (the Pieta is still the Pieta, Vera icon is still Vera icon). Elsewhere the themes are encoded in enigmatic statements (for example, the motif of the Crucifixion in the quotation from the Bible: ‘They shall look on him whom they pierced’) or in the real names of Pinkava’s models (as with the motif of the Man of Sorrows in the title Tomáš and David Medek).
The work of Ivan Pinkava is not easy. Small wonder that it will please the interpreter to receive the help offered by standard art-historical categories, like Decadent, Baroque and Mannerist, for it is easy to declare Pinkava to be an admiring postmodern reviver of these trends. That is all the easier because not only does he not reject being ‘reproached’ for anachronism, but he even turns this ‘reproach’ into a provocative creed: ‘I fear any society that has no room for anachronism, any society which is merely modern, monocultural. That, after all, is true Fascism.’
The work of Ivan Pinkava is not easy. In spite of and because of this, it is well worth regarding the aid offered by titles as an initial hint, as drawing our attention to the fact that Pinkava is a photographer whose inspiration comes from belles-lettres, theology and art history, a photographer who is proudly unmodern. One could surely write other, detailed, and perhaps even profound essays on topics like ‘Pinkava and Caravaggio’ or ‘Pinkava and the Bible’. In spite of and because of this, it is well worth looking beyond the titles, bracketing off all the quotations and paraphrases, allusions and references. For many quote from Caravaggio or the Bible, and the effect of works of art thus inspired are indeed diverse. For the titles convey much about Pinkava’s place in the anti-modern trend in (post-)modern culture, but little about what makes Pinkava Pinkava, what makes him unique within that trend; little about what we see in his photographs.
Faces and Bodies
Put crudely, for the most part Pinkava’s photographs show naked people who could have been beautiful but are not, not that they lack beauty. On the contrary, these nudes almost always have something extra that doesn’t allow them to be ‘just’ beautiful, ‘simply’ beautiful. Sometimes the body is damaged (for example, pathological gauntness, scars), more often, however, the face is damaged. Nature makes the body unbeautiful, and the photographer himself makes the faces of his models unbeautiful. That is the case particularly where he is portraying them with the greatest enthusiasm for the beauty of the body, that is, the bodies of young men: he shaves their heads, puts them in poses, and makes them up in such a way that their faces appear dirty, sweaty, faded, neglected, faces that have gone through embarrassing rather than heroic torment (most strikingly so in Abel and Cain, Narcissus, Incest, and Advocatus Diaboli). The Prague critic Nina Vangeli has noted the characteristically heavy eyelids as the mark of the Pinkava ‘dynasty’.
Not even Pinkava’s child models have a beauty of the kind one normally associates with children. Pinkava puts masks on children, which are disturbing for the very fact that they are laughing (as in Castor and Pollux), throws them on a heap (as in Massacre of the Innocents), and confers on them the names of servants of Death (as in Little Charon). The photograph with the title Son constitutes an extreme of this ‘unchilding’: it seems almost impossible that a child’s body should belong to the same being as the face of this cunning roué with a smouldering eyes peering out from under a luxuriant mane like the gaze of a vamp from a film.
Why is it that young men and children in particular are the objects of Pinkava’s cruelty? Because it is precisely young men and children who ought to be beautiful in his vision of the world. Because it is precisely this ‘damaging’, this making the beautiful unbeautiful that has the most painful effect. Because it is precisely through the making unbeautiful of what should be beautiful that the question arises which one may put in various ways and which one may consider the driving force of the whole of Pinkava’s work: Where has beauty gone? Who has damaged beauty? Why is beauty no longer just itself? Why is it no longer innocent? Why is it necessary to portray damaged beauty for it to be truthful?
This question is absurd for the majority of modern art and modern art theories. What beauty? First, after all, objective beauty does not exist, and all individuals have their own experience of aesthetic pleasure, no matter the stimulus. Second, the meaning of art – and particularly of photography – does not, after all, lie in portraying some beauty or other. Modern art may document, be provocative, propagandistic, polemical, shocking, create the most disgusting thing, take delight in upsetting the audience, modern art is allowed to do all that – but heaven forbid that it portray beauty.
Only in this comparison does it become clear why Pinkava is really, profoundly anachronistic. Not because he takes his subject matter from the Bible, paraphrases Caravaggio, or photographs carefully posed nudes, but because in his work he asks not only absurd, but also impudent, ridiculous, inexcusably naive questions about Beauty; simply because such a question occurs to the audience when looking at his work; because in Pinkava’s work the audience has the opportunity to record these special extra qualities, these admittedly even almost imperceptible sediments, stains, deformations and distortions on the bodies and faces, as references to the canon of beauty, which in our day cannot, however, be depicted other than per negationem, through deviations from that canon.
Apart from his principal method of making bodies unbeautiful Pinkava uses a further two means in his progress along the via negationis.
In the first of these means, we have to give some title to the titles we bracketed it off a few lines ago, that is the words in Pinkava’s titles that entitle Pinkava to the appellation ‘Mannerist’. This time, however, I do not mean Mannerist in the general, vague meaning of a precious or mannered style (however much these might apply to Pinkava), but Mannerist as in drawing from the source of a particular artistic method, the conceit normally employed in emblematic writing. The Mannerist emblem consists in linking together the emblem and the lemma, which is not a simple naming of what is in the picture, but is a clever riddle, whose solution will then help us to understand the meaning of the picture. This is precisely the case in many of Pinkava’s photographs. Sometimes Pinkava’s title is formulated as a riddle (They Shall Look on Him Whom They Have Pierced and His First Sip or, O Sweet Blood!), but it is not necessarily so. The ‘straightforward’, apparently descriptive titles, like Abel and Cain, Tomáš and David Medek, Narcissus, and Charon, also have the character of lemmas, that is, of riddles. Solving them is then a component of the work demanded of the audience. All those who solve them correctly will find that Abel and Cain are indistinguishable. Which one is the murder and which the victim? There are also two Christs (Tomáš and David Medek): which is the true Christ? Narcissus is pretty hideous. On the other hand, Charon is actually pretty attractive. Still, one and the same model represents both Narcissus and Charon. Why in the first case is the model ‘made unbeautiful’ so radically, whereas in the second case he is left relatively beautiful? Is Narcissus Charon and Charon Narcissus? The resolution of the relationship between word and image is not usually the end, but the beginning of inquiry: the fact is that the resolution is usually the realization that titles and things do not tally, that the traditional iconographic order does not function, that no beauty is unproblematic, tends to be the solution.
The second means is the occasional disruption of an unending series of scars, shaven heads and grubby brows in a picture of a person who is not made unbeautiful neither by Nature nor the artist. For example we have a few portraits of young women (Zora and Little Jana), for whom the appellation ‘angels’ offers itself. Pinkava’s ‘angelicality’ does not suggest some sophisticated, concealed eroticism, as is so often the case in modern art, nor does it suggest an histrionic and, if possible, repulsive hermaphroditicity, as is so frequent in postmodern art, but something more original, the refreshingly cool presence of an amiable being, with whom any contact is free of erotic oppressiveness. That is why these bodies may remain intact. That is why these ‘angels’ may remain messengers: with their quiet, radiant existence they can remind us that, after all, beauty does exist – but beyond this world.
After all, it is as if Pinkava had succumbed to the desire to portray sheer beauty in this world, where human likenesses and relations are exposed to the same immense pressure of emotionality and urgency, under which other, typically Pinkava characters did not become so unbeautiful. He succumbed and brought into being The Annunciation and Young Man with Olive. The young man in The Annunciation is an angel simply on account of the biblical title, but the other young man is holding his olive in such a way as to be about to give the Blessed Virgin his olive instead of a lily. The fact is, however, that these ‘angels’ are passionate, erotic, provocative, in contrast to their female counterparts. One has to ask oneself, where Pinkava found these angels.
The Annunciation and Young Man with Olive reveal that Pinkava is no omnipotent demiurge who creates the world of his beings entirely in accordance with his own will, according to his own plan. Reason knows that beauty has fled the world. None the less, beauty has slipped back by means of desire. Reason knows that such slipping back is dangerous, because a descent into sentimentality, indeed even into kitsch, threatens beauty at every step; not even Caravaggio or the Bible can save anything from kitsch. Therefore one cannot acknowledge The Annunciation and Young Man with Olive as anything else but an exception to the rule, as a demonstration of temporary ‘succumbing’.
That is why today he has to make the faces of his models appear dirty, sweaty, faded, neglected, faces that have gone through embarrassing rather than heroic torment.
That is why he has to talk about beauty only by problematizing its absence.
Characters and Their Stories
Beauty’s eloquence is in its absence. Pinkava’s photographs have yet another dimension, the dimension of silent stories. This is evident in the series of portraits from Czech contemporary culture, for example the rock musician Filip Topol, the poets Vìra Jirousová, Bohdan Chlíbec, and J. H. Krchovský. Behind each name is a problematic life and problematic personality. Behind each name is a story, which the photograph cannot recount, but can draw the audience’s attention to its existence, can stimulate a sense of touching the story and the desire to know more of it. In this, Pinkava’s photographs succeed superbly. Pinkava was quite justified to include in this book even portraits from other times and made ‘only’ for non-personal reasons – the portrait of a man from a completely different generation and with different ways of thinking, but with a silent story that is equally problematic and powerful – the portrait of the theologian, leading personality among the Roman Catholic dissidents, political prisoner, Oto Mádr.
Nevertheless, Pinkava’s anonymous models also have their authentic stories, which are no less problematic or (melo)dramatic than the stories of his named subjects. Sometimes Pinkava, not publicly or immediately, reveals a little of his models’ stories and thereby demonstrates that he does not use his models just as dummies for a window display. Not only the bodies and faces, but also the stories of the bodies and faces constitute a component of the same ‘dynasty’, the same world vainly seeking beauty and innocence.
On top of that, the boundary between the well-known personalities and the ‘anonymous’ personalities is disputable. Pinkava uses some well-known figures as anonymous models; other people appear in his works now under their own name, now under the name of a mythological being. On top of that, the personalities portrayed belong to an élite, almost esoteric, stratum in Czech culture, not to the media ‘icons’. Indeed, few Czechs seeing Pinkava’s photographs will, for example, know the verse of Vìra Jirousová. On top of that, as soon as Pinkava’s pictures cross the Czech frontier, the ‘privilege’ of the non-anonymity of the personalities completely vanishes. There are just faces and bodies.
Perhaps the stories of Pinkava’s figures should be told out loud? Perhaps every photograph should be accompanied by Pinkava’s own statement on the story of the person in the picture, an albeit subjective statement, a statement about the artist’s encounter with this or that face’s of body’s story? Or, even if it does not always work, at least wherever the depicted story really has something to do with the manner of depiction, where the story serves as the missing key, lemma for the picture, as in the case of Young Man with Own Knife (self-harming) or as in Young Man with Poppies (experimentation with drugs)?
Doubtless, by all this the artist might indulge his audience. But it would also be a debasing of the absolute demand that Pinkava makes on his art, his anachronic, stylistically pure, uncompromising, proudly exclusive, esoteric art. It would be a deviation from absolute faith in the eloquence and power of the naked, supplemented by nothing, made easy by nothing. And Pinkava is an absolutist.
Following and Looking
Ivan Pinkava has given pride of place in the book to the portrait of one prominent Czech figure: the portrait of the theatre producer Petr Lébl. It is as if the reason for that was just external; it is the earliest of all the photographs included in the book. The portrait of Lébl could, however, also serve as an inner beginning, if we want to understand the evolution of Pinkava’s work. The portrait of Lébl is an exclamatory ‘Too soon!’ – ‘Too soon’ for a systematic making things unbeautiful, ‘too soon’ for the heavy eyelids, and, chiefly, ‘too soon’ for the problematic story. In Pinkava’s portrait, Lébl’s story is still to unfold. Czechs know that it was a story of great art that ended in great tragedy. Nevertheless a young man, eyes shut, slightly parted lips, is looking into Pinkava’s lens; we would search for his future story vainly in his fine-featured face, and if we would look for it at all, then it would only be because we knew about it before and felt that we ought to seek it.
From Pinkava’s portrait, Lébl’s story set out on its own way, and from Lébl’s portrait Pinkava’s story set out on its own way. Stage by stage the difficulty of the story increases. After Lébl’s come the imaginary portraits of writers with similarly closed, yet eloquent eyes. After these imaginary portraits comes the chief, ‘classic’ period of beings made unbeautiful, interspersed with a series of portraits of Czech figures in the arts, this time authentic figures, with open eyes, their stories now present in their eyes and faces.
And finally portraits of the actors from the Teatr novogo fronta (TNF) in Prague, who don’t need to be told to pose or to be made unbeautiful, for in their own artistic style they have done enough posing and making unbeautiful. Deprived of the protection of head hair, eyebrows and clothes, but with ‘healthy’ bodies, these beings look like living aids to the teaching of anatomy or recent arrivals in some internment camp, ominous messengers from the dystopian human future. Whereas Pinkava’s earlier photographs express the (dis)harmony of diverse emotions and moods, and whereas anxiety plays an ever stronger role in them, in the TNF portraits anxiety outweighs all other feelings. Is this humanity? Is this Pinkava’s final Ecce Homo? In comparison with the TNF actors, the lacerated torso in one earlier photograph using the same words of Pilate is benevolent. And if he means Ecce Homo in keeping with the Gospels, these words will perhaps be followed by another fearsome Calvary along which the image of naked humanity as conceived by Pinkava is to walk. Hadn’t he better pause to think, whether it would not be better to set out for somewhere else? Can he also bear the potential consequences of this journey? Won’t he fall under the weight?
There is somewhere to rest and someone to rest with. Man may be naked, but he is not entirely alone. There are things for him here. Balanced, reconciled, humble, silent things, given for the succour and comfort of man. Pinkava’s still lifes, as if coincidently slotted in among human figures still-born in the true, spiritual sense of the word. But this is not enough for them to have to be called Vanitas. In Pinkava’s work the sight of seashells, an extracted feather, empty pods, an egg, or the back of chair is a sight in the true, that is, spiritual sense. And one does not even have to give this sight the elevated name ‘contemplation’. We can watch this sight without worry. Let us watch slowly, quietly, let us consider, let us allow anxiety to dissipate and questions to cease.
And after that, what will be, will still be.
Martin C. Putna, Prague 2004