ANNE MACDONALD: VANITAS
By Victoria Hammond
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
Last year, Anne MacDonald 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.
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 oftencontain 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.
ANNE MACDONALD: SILK
By Victoria Hammond
Each of these immaculate photographs seems like a revelation of the expressive power of fabrics in art. On first seeing them, two things immediately sprang to mind: their clear associations with Renaissance painting, and their correspondence with an ancient Greek myth. This last is one of few narratives to pivot on the symbolic power and age-old allure of luxurious fabrics, and it is the intensity of Anne MacDonald’s photographs - the quality of the fabrics as emanations of light – together with the dark presence of vanitas, that reminded me of the myth. The story goes like this. Glauce, a princess of Corinth betrothed to the hero Jason, received a wedding gift in an envelope of silk. When the parcel was unwrapped and its contents revealed the young princess and her ladies stood back murmuring in amazement, for inside was a garment of marvellous beauty. The figured cloth from which was made gleamed as if woven by a magic hand; and when lifted from its envelope the tunic floated into graceful folds as if it had a life of its own. Impatient to see its effect, Glauce had her ladies drape it about her while another of them fetched a large mirror.
Enjoying the gown’s silken caress, Glauce stood before the mirror, captivated by her own reflection. The garment bestowed upon her an aura of unimaginable splendour. It had re-created her as a work of art. She spun around, delighting in the swinging movements of the swishing fabric. So dazzling and alluring was she that Jason would doubtless fall upon his knees in adoration of her.
The princess ran outside to greet Jason on his return, hardly aware of a prickling sensation in her skin. In the sunlight the gown took on a celestial radiance and she stood entranced by the shimmering of its golden edging. The prickling became a burning itch. Her face grew pale, then livid, as the magnificent garment clung to her in a deadly embrace, squeezing the very breath out of her so that she could barely scream, “Take it off! Take it off!” as she clawed frenziedly at the fleshy fabric. But even as her ladies attempted to remove it, the enchanted cloth stuck faster as it interacted with the light, growing darkly stained in the places where its vibrant colours released their poisons and dissolved into the princess’s flesh.
The exquisite material of the gown had indeed been woven by a magic hand: that of the gift-giver, the divine witch Medea. She had fashioned the bewitching garment with its cunningly concealed gift of death as retribution, because the princess - so much younger than she - had stolen from her the love of Jason. And just as Medea had schemed, Jason on his arrival at the scene found not a vision of living perfection, but a spectacle of disintegration and death. Not even strong Jason could remove the magic garment - now stained, creased, ripped and tear-marked - for in places it had become inseparable from the princess’s flesh, and so, its rents carefully stitched by the ladies, it served as Glauce’s shroud and on what was to have been their wedding day she was buried in it.
It is hardly necessary to identify which of the individual photographs in Silk appear to have absorbed key moments of this ancient vanitas tale, but I do wish to point out that part of the appeal of this story with regard to MacDonald is the way the interaction of the light on the magic fabric mimics the function of her camera and photography’s chemical processes – not to mention the lurking presence of death in both instances. Even the mirror in the story is echoed by the oval dressing-mirror format of the photographs. Though a drama about powerful emotions - love, passion, jealousy and revenge - the fate of Glauce is in essence a symbolic story of beauty’s fatal attraction: the more perfectly beautiful the object, the more elusive, and the more subject to dissolution and catastrophe – which is exactly what Anne MacDonald’s photographs, whether of flowers, wedding cakes or fabrics, have always been about.
Fabrics were similarly associated with intense emotions – often involving death or its insidious presence - in Renaissance paintings. Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition (c.1435) is the chief inspiration for this current series of Anne MacDonald’s photographs. As is the case with many such paintings, our eyes are so fixed on the faces and human gestures in the drama, we barely notice that two-thirds of the composition is given over to draperies and embossed materials. And it is the way light falls on these fabrics, together with their colours, folds and movement, that emphasise the grief of the mourners as Christ’s limp body is taken down from the cross, and give the painting its dynamism and aesthetic cohesion. MacDonald has picked up on details in the painting – a gold-edged red tunic, the sensuality of the Magdalene’s gown, Nicodemus’s richly embossed cloak; the blue folds of Mary’s mantle and the rich vermillion of John’s - and found costly fabrics in Madrid and Florence with colours, patterns and textures that have this kind of suggestive richness and intensity. The rip and fine stitching in No 4 may be a reference to the five gashes running with blood on Christ’s otherwise immaculate body, for MacDonald often equates fabric with flesh.
In these and other vanitas details there is a feminine aspect to the making of the photographs in Silk: cutting, sewing and staining, as well as folding and arranging in order to control the fall of light to create contrasts of intense luminosity and shadowy folds. Sometimes the effect is painterly: the creeping stain in No 14; the way the frayed edge of No 5 bleeds into the black; the decorative golden border of No 1, which recalls Rembrandt’s illusionistic brushwork or Titian’s portraits of popes and cardinals in their regal reds. The intense vermillion of this photograph – a blood red - all but pulsates with life and the word that best describes the image is ‘majestic’ – strange, given that there is no figure in it.
The absence of figures in MacDonald’s photographs, where it is fabrics that elicit qualities associated with a human presence, is a culmination of developments in draped art that go back to classical times. By the High Renaissance the movement, majesty and suggestive poetry of fabrics took on a purely artistic life, and with the advent of the Baroque period, silken cascades and voluptuous billowings, by virtue of being pure artifice, came to stand for art itself. It was no mere case of art for art’s sake: fabrics were there to invoke the power of art, just as they do in Anne MacDonald’s photographs. Beauty, said the American painter Agnes Martin, is the mystery of life, and art has a tremendous power in serving to reawaken our awareness of it.
ANNE MACDONALD: PETAL
By Victoria Hammond
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 ofEvil (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.
ANNE MACDONALD: OPHELIA
By Victoria Hammond
Anne MacDonald’s Ophelia has the distinction of being the first photographic work to be selected for the prestigious Moet and Chandon exhibition. This technically accomplished, solemn yet lyrical work has provoked one critic to describe Anne MacDonald as Australia’s “definitive flower photographer”. While this was no doubt intended as a compliment, Ophelia is far more than a series of silky, exquisitely arranged and presented photographs of flowers. Elwyn Lynn came closer to the mark when he perceived that each of the 51 delicate blooms emerging from their dense black backgrounds, contained within heavy funereal frames, were “as isolated as suicide”.
Ophelia is MacDonald’s virtuoso piece, the culmination of a series of works which elicit the presence of beauty in objects and narratives associated with death and mourning. The flowers act as a potent symbol in the counterpoise MacDonald establishes between beauty, freshness, femininity and the erotic on the one hand, and fragility, decay and death on the other. Most of all perhaps, flowers symbolise the transience of life, the union of these opposites. Ophelia herself represents all these things. The play, Hamlet, is strewn with flower imagery, much of it delivered by or associated with Ophelia, who is likened to a ‘rose of May’. Hamlet, the dark to Ophelia’s light, compares life itself to ‘an unweeded garden/ rank stale and unprofitable’.
Shakespeare’s Ophelia is a tragic figure, an innocent with no control over her destiny, which is shaped by the crimes, intrigues and moral turpitude of those around her. At each discovery of a sequence of ugly deeds, she slips deeper into madness, largely defined by her inane sing-song cataloguing of the meanings of various flowers. Yet she is the one character in the play whose essential purity remains untarnished by the ‘rot’ in Denmark. Even her madness has an ethereal quality. Confronted with the collapse of her world’s moral and social structure, madness is her only recourse. Her value is recognised only after her death, when she is grievously mourned. The loss of Ophelia is in fact the turning point of the play. What has been up to that moment merely falling apart at the seams fast degenerates into devastation.
Shakespeare concentrates his language at the point of Ophelia’s journey toward death, swiftly oscillating back and forth between fragmented images of life and death, establishing stark contrasts, as in the two names for the one flower: the breezy ‘long purples’ and the harrowing ‘dead men’s fingers’.
The poetic lamentation of Ophelia’s death, delivered by Hamlet’s mother, who later grieves that she had anticipated a bridal bouquet for Ophelia, not a funeral wreath, is the textual complement to Anne MacDonald’s Ophelia.
The impressive, introductory bouquet corresponds to the ‘fantastic garlands’ which the piteous Ophelia has unwittingly woven as a wreath for her own death. It also represents Ophelia herself. MacDonald responds to the life/death juxtapositions in Shakespeare’s text by establishing one powerful contrast only: that between the luminosity of the flowers and the black velvet abyss over which they are arranged as if floating, the whole overlaid with a blue cast, the pall of death. On close inspection a few of these vibrantly fresh flowers are already showing signs of decay.
In allegorical still life of the 17th century, particularly vanitas paintings, reminders of the emptiness of earthly pleasures and possessions, flowers were symbols of the evanescence of life. The painter would indicate corruption, in exquisitely painted and otherwise perfect flowers, by the introduction of a bruise, a spot, the unnatural transparency of a petal or a drooping stem. Here, Anne MacDonald writes of how her work process, and the modern process of photography itself, echoes again and again, the death-in-life preoccupation of the traditional vanitas painter:
When making a photograph the object before my lens is fixed, frozen forever in the moment taken to release the shutter. The object becomes an image and enters what Roland Barthes describes as “flat death” . . . Cut flowers already show the faintest hint of corruption and decay . . . faint bruises already visible. Petals are beginning to droop, their edges about to curl and discolour. As well as entering death when submitting to the act of being photographed, these flowers are in the process of undergoing actual death. Like many of the objects I choose to photograph, flowers are memento mori (literally, ‘remember you must die).
I place the flowers in an unnatural darkness. They are isolated against a black backdrop. They appear to fall or float in blackness. It is the black of velvet (seduction): the black of damp earth in a freshly dug grave (suffocation and decay); the black of a deep dank pool (coldness and isolation). They are further dislocated from the realm of the living. I print the photographs with a blue colour cast. It is the cold blue light of moonlight, of the mortuary, of bruised skin and the first tinge of colour on a decomposing corpse. The image is separated from life by a veil of corruption.
I use heavy wooden frames to isolate my photographs from the real world. My images of flowers become untouchable, immaterial, ideal. This glorification is another kind of death.
The fine craftsmanship and poetic conception of Ophelia is a result of its being conceived and executed over a relatively long period of time. The original source of inspiration for the work were two mid-nineteenth century paintings: La jeune martyre (1855) by Paul Delaroche and Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851). Interestingly, it was Delaroche who, on being shown an early dagguerotype, exclaimed “From now on painting is dead”. Little could he have known that for decades to come much photography would contrive to mimic the aesthetic effects of painting, and that his superb painting of a drowning woman would, a century and a half later, inspire a photographic work. Anne MacDonald visited the Louvre and became fascinated with La jeune martyre in 1990:
The corpse of a beautiful young woman – according to Edgar Allan Poe, “the most poetic topic” – floats on the surface of a lake or sea. Her pale hair and pale ice blue gown form gently undulating folds as they sink into the dark rippling water.
At the time MacDonald was utilizing both flowers and drapery in her symbolic vocabulary. (After Ophelia, drapery has re-emerged in her work.) What was to become Ophelia was thus initially conceived as sumptuous materials arranged to simulate drapery floating in water. Then, after seeing Millais’ Ophelia, drapery and flowers were brought together. Millais depicts Ophelia serenely embracing the release of death. Encircled by a flowery arbour, she floats downstream amidst a scatter of flowers towards death, giving herself up in passive rapture to the swirling current, hands cupped open in supplication. Her rapturous expression is both beautific and sexual. (The white lilies in MacDonald’s Ophelia signify purity and are at the same time distinctly erotic.)
Anne MacDonald has drawn on the formal devices of this painting (and to a lesser extent, the Delaroche) – the sense of pull of the current’s movement reinforced by the horizontal floating of the figure and the dispersed flowers are echoed in the imaginative construction of her work, a seemingly random horizontal scatter of 51 individually framed flowers. Over a period of months spent shooting individual images of flowers and drapery, MacDonald gradually refined her means and eliminated the drapery, using only flowers as the lucid symbol of Ophelia and her death.
Ophelia was a subject much beloved by nineteenth century painters. Her attributes – pale beauty, youth, lost innocence, and her fate – madness and suicide by drowning, were the stuff of which Victorian male fears and fantasies about women were made. Her madness had a strong appeal. In the latter half of the nineteenth century a legion of flower be-decked, alarmingly seductive, dishevelled, tubercular Ophelias, shown glowering or wild-eyed in the grips of dementia, graced Salon and Academy walls. Millais’ gentler, more sympathetic Ophelia is far closer to Shakespeare’s rendering of her. Macdonald, however, has travelled far beyond these literal transcriptions. In her work, the absence of Ophelia, the density of blacks and the funeral progression of images approximates Shakespeare’s evocation of irredeemable loss.
In recent years, much feminist and deconstructivist criticism has centred around Victorian pictures like La jeune martyre and the host of Ophelias. While it is undoubtedly true that the consistent equation of feminine beauty and desirability with enervation, illness and death indicates dangerously perverse attitudes to women and sexuality, it is equally true, and less readily discussed, that Victorian attitudes to illness and death were vastly different to our own. The achievements of modern medicine have schooled us to distance ourselves from human mortality, and even to regard it with a kind of horror. For the Victorians, illness and death occurred with far more frequency, and so were intimately bound up with their life’s experience. They were close to death, fetishizing it with elaborate rituals and the accoutrements of mourning. Inevitably, it permeated their art.
When I first began to know Anne MacDonald and her work, I wrongly assumed that she possessed a rare and interesting Victorian sensibility. Later I learnt that her art was deeply personal. I was struck by the direct uninhibited manner in which she spoke of love, loss and death, and by the simple lucid way in which she wrote of these things. Without drama. Without fuss or self-pity. What others may repress, deny, or seek to deaden, she acknowledges and transforms into beauty. This clarity of mind is present in her work which, ultimately, operates in a similar manner to the symbols it contains, as a tribute, a remembrance.