Life Among the Ruins
Love, yes.
—James Joyce
Yet the dark places are at the centre.
—George Steiner
Before Unit London invited me to curate a show of Joshua Hagler’s recent works and write this accompanying text, I knew precious little about the artist. Yes, the name rang a proverbial bell and an image or two came vaguely to mind – yet not much more. Such is contemporary art’s sprawling, ever-changing global panoply that even the most informed observer can hardly be expected to keep pace with everything. Indeed, my first impressions, albeit rough, were that Joshua’s paintings looked unusual and ‘difficult’ – concerning which, more shortly. Yet as I began to get my mind around the art and we communicated further (bless and blast Zoom for a profoundly deaf person such as myself), common ground swung into view. To me at least, this promised a welcome surprise. Firstly, his vision had (apart from other contrasting, upbeat qualities) a certain heart of darkness, a brooding introversion to which I am temperamentally addicted. Secondly, it transpired that we are alike fascinated by time. Thus both of us happen to own copies of Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (2019). Lastly, we share a love for poetry. Here agreement and difference mix. Chacun à son goût.
The old French saying (‘to each his own’) hopefully gives me licence on this side of the Atlantic to invoke such British poets as Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Algernon Charles Swinburne – Victorians as remote from southeast New Mexico where Joshua lives as they are close to my own English schooldays. By contrast, the artist’s literary muses include the modern Americans Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin. In turn, I am also well attuned on this score to his distinct preferences and vice-versa. Thus, our exhibition’s title derives from a poem by Glück that Joshua selected, while for this essay I tweaked Browning’s vivid reverie ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (1855) so that the past informs the present. Significantly, Browning, Hopkins and Merwin were and/or are considered to be ‘difficult’. Analogously, trauma and suffering permeate Glück’s writings. Anyway, what’s wrong with aesthetic ‘difficulty’? Nothing. Whereas almost anyone with a bit of savvy can at some level ‘get’ – to cite at random a few names – Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney (I am thinking about his later, faux-naïf output), and so on – it takes intellectual guts and a keen eye to fathom and appreciate, say, Anselm Kiefer, Brice Marden, Sigmar Polke and Joshua’s imagistic heterotopia.
Make no mistake, Joshua’s paintings, sculptures and videos are sites where disparate, multitudinous fragments jostle, risking chaos. The title for his first solo show at Unit London in summer 2019, ‘Chimera’, sounds telling. Used there as a double entendre, a chimera is at once a mythical, hybrid monster formed from three erstwhile unrelated creatures (lion, goat and serpent) and a will o’ the wisp, an unattainable mirage. These two meanings apply to the works themselves. Sometimes they wax so insistently physical as to present almost a perceptual menace (among the heterodox media and supports are flattened tin pails pocked with bullet holes). Witness the threatening schmears that coalesce into Out of Existence X and IX together with the smouldering Burn. At other moments, the effects wane ethereal like memory traces approaching erasure, akin to thoughts fleeting through a meditative consciousness. (This blurring constitutes a big development from the more precise, previous figuration). As Joshua remarked, ‘I want the paintings to have the feeling of vague recollection, a memory that starts to form but disappears’. Layering always occurs. So does an atmosphere suggesting ruination. Above all, metamorphosis reigns, instinct with temporality and transition. Elusive reality, so to speak, among the ruins – no sooner glimpsed than gone. No wonder Glück’s poem that includes the words ‘the living circle us’ bears the title ‘Metamorphosis’. The piece also opens a view onto the most sombre emotions and perspectives – ones that viewers may be tempted to avoid for the sake of their comfort zones. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to do so since they reflect ontological emphasis and absence understood as a totality greater than the sum of its parts.
Burn
Mixed Media on Wood Panel | 16 x 12 in. | 2021
To wit, Glück pictures a dying man, the poet’s father. The rubric, ‘Night’, and the first lines: ‘The angel of death flies/low over my father’s bed.’ In the fifth stanza, she writes:
I sit at the edge of his bed
while the living circle us
like so many tree stumps.
The topos at stake dates to ancient Greece and beyond, although Glück complicates it with canny reversals. Namely, a katábasis, a descent by the living into the underworld. In Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus voyages into Hades’s realm where dead souls circle him that he must appease with blood. Among them appears Tiresias. Surely a far-fetched reference in the present context? No. The oracular Tiresias speaks about Odysseus’s nostos (homecoming). Joshua has named a painting in the exhibition… Nostos. Furthermore, Ovid’s Metamorphoses – note this noun with an eye to Glück’s poem and Hagler’s morphologies – includes several accounts of a katábasis. By a strange coincidence, too, Merwin paralleled Glück’s simile in a phrase: ‘and somebody dead turned cattle loose/among the stumps until killing time’. Nor does the grimness and death end there.
Nostos
Mixed Media on Canvas | 50 x 45 in. | 2021
Truth to tell, much in Joshua’s scheme resembles a descent into a psychological underworld and its ambit – a katábasis writ large in pigment, sculptural installations and videos. In an ongoing unpublished text, ‘The Living Circle Us’ he mentions what has ‘slowly sunk into the shadows.’ Elsewhere Joshua describes a ‘violence of the mind’, a schoolhouse shooting nearby his Roswell home, ‘holes in the earth’ (another route to the underworld) and the southern New Mexico landscape damaged by fires (flames are a perennial infernal leitmotif and Tiresias scryed his visions within the smoke of burnt offerings). Fourteenth Station alludes to an anguished via dolorosa and xxi approximates a camouflaged deposition. His videos document the paintings installed in the wrecked spaces offered by abandoned buildings. Other pieces confront D. W. Griffith’s epic film Birth of a Nation (1915), in which the Ku Klux Klan play, ugh, a heroic role. Already controversial at its debut, a critic has since called Birth of a Nation ‘the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history’. There could hardly be a more relevant curtain-raiser for the age of ‘Trump-ery’ (to coin a neologism), the Proud Boys, the assault on the U.S. Capitol and other recent malevolence – echoes across decades that the artist cannot have missed. The sculptural ensemble Lethe (2018) with its antique doors, levitated bones, horse rawhide, faded saltcedar and Billie Holliday’s singing in the 1940s ‘I Cover the Waterfront’ (composed 1933) as a mournful blues on the soundtrack clinches the equation between antiquity (Lethe is among the underworld’s six rivers), death (flayed horses) and change (doors are thresholds, sites of passage). Perhaps most disturbingly, Joshua delves in this publication into meta-history with a poem by Allison Benis White that cites the Nazis: ‘On the wall near the window, my father wrote and underlines The crows are Nazis in disguise.’ ‘Meta-history’ because the great humanist scholar George Steiner located Nazism as the prime evil underbelly to modernism and the latter is already over (though the former tendency manifests a dreadful compulsion to repeat itself, as if time were cyclical). Whatever, the critic’s words about twentieth-century culture and its woes have affinities with Joshua’s outlook: ‘The last poems of Sylvia Plath are the classic locus of that [modernist] temptation and vertigo. I am not sure whether anyone, however, scrupulous, who spends time and imaginative resources on these dark places, can, or indeed, ought to leave them personally intact. Yet the dark places are at the centre. Pass them by and there can be no serious discussion of the human potential.’ To his credit, Joshua does not pass bypass them. Rather, echoing Steiner, he centres them.
For instance, Joshua’s own poem ‘This Is The Picture’ ends with the lines, ‘Life will not let him live./Death does not die.’ That is, life and death merge in fearful union. Mutatis mutandis, Plath’s ‘Daddy’ constellates history, trauma, modernist subjectivity and the parenthood theme that haunts Joshua’s imagination. The latter ranges from the fact that his father was an evangelical Christian whose son is no longer a conventional believer, via his iconography relating to ‘Pietà’ and ‘Deposition’ typology (its original religious dramatis personae obviously entails mother, son and God the Father, all of whom Joshua morphs into abstracted meta-types), to the early loss of a brother and the recent birth of his daughter. To recall Steiner’s touchstone, Plath’s ‘Daddy’ fractures language just as Joshua melds, roils and appals – remember the word’s root sense, which is ‘to make pale’ – his imagery to the brink of the unrecognisable:
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barbed wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
In Plath, then, the artist has another distinguished poetic parallel. And in Steiner’s pungent inights – throughout the book In Bluebeard’s Castle he discerns an errant, inverted theology in play in modernism’s contortions as it weaves between art and history’s horrors – a cue to what lies beneath Joshua’s surfaces. Except the utter palimpsests ensure that we never reach it. Their patching and peeling, transparency (some are done on polyester film) and opacity (some are done with mixed media that create a dense impasto) alike conspire to defy visuality. Why else the Self Portrait as Someone Unseen? His is a phantom fantasia.
Self-Portrait as Someone Unseen
Mixed Media on Canvas | 72 x 66 in. | 2012 - 2019
Possibly the closest equivalent among contemporaries to Joshua’s expressive means may be Kiefer’s formidable material layers. When asked If he could visit any artist’s studio, whose would it be?, Joshua replied, ‘Anselm Kiefer. It’s not a studio…. It’s a cemetery and the Tower of Babel.’ The German artist embeds motifs and fragments laden with cultural and personal associations (for example, his provocative early re-enactments of the Nazi salute) to the degree that the surfaces become tantamount to evoking an archaeological dig (fig.). That said, Kiefer is visceral whereas Joshua tends towards pallor and patchwork. Still, Kiefer’s very title, Gehautete Landschaft, ‘Skinned Landscape’, fits Joshua’s phantasmagoria that blends nature and the body. Here at last the narrative lightens and brightens.
At root, the artist’s subjects are those that T. S. Eliot stated with deliberate crudity in his oafish Irishman Sweeney’s manner:
Birth and copulation and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tack:
Birth, and copulation and death.
Be that as it may, Joshua takes such brute facts to an altogether different plane, rendering them cryptic, diaphanous, dissolved into monochromatic fields or motley chromatic mosaics. They approximate daydreams or sleep’s capricious equivalents more than they do unalloyed nightmares. The artist, so to speak, does not wake up screaming (to invoke a catchy Hollywood film noir’s title) instead, he awakes dreaming. Hence The Dream Feeder (Pieta), Animal Dream (as a teenager, I always wondered whether our family dog dreamt; my father also did) and cognate pictures. Sigmund Freud famously defined condensation and displacement as the dreamwork’s main characteristics, not to mention how he employed metaphor to liken remembering and other psychological functions to archaeological excavation. Others in the same vein argue that the missing element frequently felt in dreams typifies a preservation-through-absence comparable to archaeologists’ experiences in what they call ‘ghost sites’ (shades of Joshua’s forlorn local schools where he senses time’s presence). Similarly, condensation and displacement inform the intuitive pictorial process wherein noetic flotsam and jetsam by turns materialise and disappear amid the painterly flux. No wonder he once wanted to be an archaeologist! This is why the chameleonic visual ‘skins’ charged with mnemonic strata have strong temporal overtones. As Carlo Rovelli explains, ‘Time is the measure of change: if nothing changes, there is no time.’ In a nutshell, Joshua is a bricoleur of the psyche who creates tableaux where duration and recognition feel elastic, stretched or contracting every which way. Again poetry elucidates the pictorial dynamics.
The Dream Feeder (Pieta)
Mixed Media On Linen | 120 x 72 in. | 2021
Animal Dream
Mixed Media on Canvas, Linen, and Burlap | 80 x 60 in. | 2021
Think back to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘sprung rhythms’ that not only seek to emulate natural speech’s pulse but also fling together images, ideas, adjectives, metaphors and so on to the verge of what is incomprehensible or unsayable:
Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous
Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven.
In this and the other so-called ‘terrible sonnets’ Hopkins conjures visionary ruins with a Tower of Babel-like voice, making him a soulmate to Joshua’s darker side. Both deal with what Hopkins called ‘inscapes’ where nature, emotions and the self fuse. Now our plot enters its peripeteia (which derives from the Greek verb peripiptein –‘to fall around’ or ‘to change suddenly’), only it is an optimistic dénouement that balances the whole.
Countermanding Hopkins’s ‘terrible’ psychological states were other sonnets that celebrate the world’s renewal and glory. They include ‘Pied Beauty’, ‘The Windhover’ and ‘God’s Grandeur’:
And for all this nature, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs–
Certainly, Joshua never yields to Hopkins’s Jesuit, theological high ecstasy. New mornings, though, do dawn for him. Consider Daylight and its sap or sea-green drift and the roseate, radiant quasi-landscape The Sun Behind the Sky (2020). The wording of Doors in the Darkness speaks for itself. Its bird recurs in The Pretending Face of an Owl at Midnight. By tradition, the owl has spooky connotations. Nonetheless, the owl is also the creature sacred to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, justice and victory. From the owl’s nocturnal aspect Joshua segues to the restful baby Sleeping In (The light of the Sun’s Corona). His daughter’s birth clearly marked a turning point. Temporality announces it.
Sleeping In (The Light of the Sun's Corona)
Oil on Canvas | 89 x 87 in. | 2020
First Day and First Day II have their ultimate origins in sonograms charting his baby’s gestation. They come across as at once tender and tenuous. A spectacular canvas done this year, The Hour (Newborn) turns a birth’s moment into a wondrous, puzzling panorama. Alternatively, the forms sink and emerge from that most capacious modernist construct, the field. Fields can be literal as Allison Benis White employs them: ‘In the postcard I keep of a field in winter, a child’s head is tilted back, her mouth open to snow.’ They may also be formal, as with Color Field painting, or both. Someone Appearing in the Field – a nascent physiognomy interleaved with grassy green tints and shadows – exemplifies this pairing. In From the Field proves more enigmatic: evidently a woman’s head in profile fades into gray-blue shade. Whichever, Joshua’s fields are pregnant with extinction, being and becoming. Throughout the oeuvre, the mixed media may appear haphazard or chaotic yet their very excess has a certain verve as if the materials were realising themselves, redivivus. Lastly, his website notes that Lethe is ‘the spirit of oblivion or forgetfulness in Greek mythology’ but adds ‘one drinks from it before being reborn [italics mine].’ After all, the Odyssey’s katábasis is a heroic station in life’s trajectory and its protagonist returns from the underworld. Flash forward over two millennia.
Homer’s Odysseus was reborn in the twentieth century as James Joyce’s Ulysses in the guise of Leopold Bloom. Apart from the Joyce’s revelatory stream-of-consciousness literary technique, which is a distant cousin to Joshua’s visual ebb and flow whereby impulses intermingle, Ulysses is a roman à clef. Taking the “key” in its literal sense unlocks the novel’s structure. Thrice Joyce alludes to a particular entity that binds existence. Twice the author has his everyday hero ask, ‘Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.’ Once comes the answer: ‘Love, yes. Word known to all men.’
Love subtly, silently, cements together the parts of Joshua’s whole scenario. Without Eros there can be no Thanatos, no dying man in ‘This Is The Picture’; no parentage that is so central to the artist’s anxieties; no bond between Christ made flesh in any Pietà, Deposition scene or disfigured ‘mother and child’ group; no link back and forth to Freudian mourning and melancholia in Glück’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (‘Intense love always leads to mourning’); no mysterious shape-shifting in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which pivots upon the recurrent theme of love; no dialogue between time’s ruins and the passionate, amorous present in Browning’s poem from which, as mentioned, my title stems; no refrain in Billie Holiday’s song (‘I'm watching the sea/Will the one I love be coming back to me?’); and, of course, no new born. Science, philosophy and poetry have it that nothing dies. No love, no life.
In science, the French eighteenth-century chemist and biologist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered the law of conservation of mass that nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Actually, Lavoisier built on venerable foundations, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles’s credo: ‘For it is impossible for anything to come to be from what is not, and it cannot be brought about or heard of that what is should be utterly destroyed.’ A century later Epicurus followed him: ‘the totality of things was always such as it is now, and always will be’. This is the message that Browning, Hopkins and Swinburne also convey in their individual ways – that love and death are always changing parts of some larger whole. Here lies the pathos to Joshua’s convoluted mental and pictorial universe to date. As he once put it, A Horse is a Boat a man is a Chair and the Ocean is a Room into which Every River Empties (2016). Or, to make two final poetic swoops, place Browning in conversation with Swinburne. As the first concluded in ‘Love Among the Ruins’:
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
To which, as it were, Swinburne responded when he poignantly captured all:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Joshua Hagler takes these dual perspectives – vitalist and morbid – into his fresh art, a fitting terra incognita for our beleaguered century.