Joe Wenderoth
Picturing Animals: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine
There is forever a world; there is never the world. Nevertheless, we routinely speak of and assume the world. What is the world? Perhaps the world is less a vain assumption of one true place... and more a recognition of the one site upon which or through which a meaningfully related series of worlds appears. In any case, world itself remains a certainty, in lived life, despite endless proofs to the contrary. And this certainty allows a speaker to claim the definite article for his most mysterious object: the horizon itself, or that there is anything. Chaim Soutine painted this certainty, painted the the of it, which refuses to be fully obliterated by poetic knowledge.
In his paintings he rooted out stubbornly similar glimpses of animals and objects, and then he cut the canvas to pieces. Once the scene was disintegrated before him, he proceeded to work on each part separately. Eventually hed put it all back together. The final picture creates not only the sense that the the has been somehow secretly shattered, but also the sense that it is pregnant with a shattering, which is perhaps pregnant with yet another shattering, and so on. The picture creates the sense that the shattering does not ever cease—the sense that the shattering is the process through which we stay with ourselves, as ourselves. One might argue that manifestation of this process makes apparent a kind of eternity; this eternity, however, is only thinkable as the radiant lack upon which every manifested place, every moment, devolves.
The question then becomes: how does this new-found eternity (only ever made apparent by implication and by willingness to acknowledge a grave accident at the core of the process)—relate to the specific scene that devolves upon it? What "human" relevance, if any, does the convulsive image—shattered but nevertheless fully stitched together in our view—elaborate? I believe we begin to answer this question when we look into the incompleteness of the shattering.
In our habitual ignorance of reality... we posit the world as a not-shattering place; when knowledge of shattering arises, however, it does not—it cannot—arise fully and by itself. Knowledge of the shattering cannot arise without ignorance in tow; it cannot arise, that is, apart from the intention of that ignorance, which preceded it and for which it must immediately go to work. The shattering can only be known by way of the pressure it exerts upon ignorance of shattering. Soutines pictures make something very clear: the shattering cannot be removed from us, just as it cannot be incorporated into us, which is to say, just as it cannot ever bring itself, sensibly, to completion. The shattering, like Nothing, cannot be known directly—it can only be known by way of the pressure it exerts upon its antithetical force. For the shattering to be complete, and to come into view as such, it would have to bring an end to what can be shattered—it would have to bring an end to the the—and this would mean its ceasing to be itself, i.e. its ceasing to perform a shattering. The great Argentine poet, Antonio Porchia, has stated it more succinctly:
Nothing that is complete breathes.
This poem can be taken a few ways. Firstly, and I think least obviously, it can be taken to say: the Nothing (that which endlessly shatters the somethings) "is complete" (it keeps itself itself), by breathing, by taking into itself that which is not itself (the somethings). Secondly, the line can be read: no something can ever be completely something, for to be completely something would mean its ceasing to take in, to "breathe," what it is not—the Nothing. Both readings say almost the same thing: "breathing" is the process wherein the Nothing is taken into a something, thereby continually sustaining that something as a potentially new version of itself.
Soutines pictures are a picture of this breath. They make apparent the shattering of the world that our lust for manifestation—our lust for world itself—must have always already assumed. They make apparent, at the same time, the failure of this shattering to complete itself. This failure, more than anything else, becomes ours, for in this failure the relationship between our most definitive power and our most definitive vulnerability is made apparent. Often, the animal in the picture hangs there before us, whole and intact... but skinned, and conspicuously ready for the carving knife; that animal is evidence of our having transcended where we are (evidence of our ability to carve and to figure) just as it is evidence of our inability to maintain transcendence (our being bound into the hungers implicit in the real). In the work of art, the intention of our power, our butcher-skill, becomes difficult to define. In other kinds of work, we take a world apart in order to devour it and soothe a hunger, or to reassemble it for other practical benefits, but in a work of art, disassembly takes place so that it can fail—so that the world might again assert itself believably, and so that we might feel ourselves as the power that is bound to pursue its potential resonance.
Soutine understood that, to be a great work of art, a picture could not conceal or deny its own ceasing to be true, just as it could not oversimply proclaim or romanticize that ceasing. Rather, its achievement is to make resonant the work of the maker—the honest throng of emotions and the effort by which they are channeled; this work, after all, is more true than any of the truths it makes apparent.
Ed. Note: Some links to Soutine paintings online:
Cleveland Museum of Art.
Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
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