Discussion of "Brother's Keeper: Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures"

Abstract

Discussion of "Brother's Keeper:Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures" Jane Hanenberg (bio) "History decays into images […]" – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Dr. Boettger's vivid and absorbing paper about Robert Smithson links us to an abundance of psychoanalytic ideas. We read of grief and mourning in Smithson's work. We learn about a life devoted to writing and art. We are also introduced to Robert Smithson's early paintings, which are depictions of a psychic relationship to a sibling he never met. Her paper expands our thoughts about the complexities of mourning, especially in the life of the replacement child. As we are faced this year with the convergence of pandemic losses and the pressing need to reexamine historic losses, Dr. Boettger also develops our thoughts about grief and the complexities of mourning. I'll begin exactly where our presenter does in her 2010 book about land art, entitled Earthworks. The subtitle, Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, takes me to days of undergraduate study in New York when we demonstrated frequently to protest the carnage of the Vietnam War. We counted our country's losses weekly. In the mid-sixties, the pop artist and sculptor Claus Oldenburg dug a trench in Central Park. He informally titled it Hole. It measured six feet long and seven feet deep. Was it a minimalist "hole," a fundamental shape which Oldenburg sculpted in negative space? Or, was it a grave pit which signified the tragedies of the war? This tension, between creation and mourning, is a central theme in Smithson's work and is the topic of this discussion. We learn that Robert Smithson's body of work was audacious and dark. The critic Peter Schjeldahl called it "poetically sublime" (Schjeldahl, 2004, p. 198). The paintings have deeply religious and spiritual qualities. The blood and suffering they depict can be seen as psychic representations of the dead Harold [End Page 595] and his blood disease. Related to medieval depictions of Jesus' suffering, they are the imagistic descendants of the legacy of Grunewald's 16th century crucifixion, which shows Christ's agony in graphic detail. Some of the images of Smithson's work with full-frontal presentation and luminous color recall the religious clarity of Byzantine mosaics. I wonder, though, if their art historical, more modern cousins may be the German Expressionists. These artists, Otto Dix, Emil Nolde and Max Beckman also made raw and vivid paintings using a symbolic iconography of spirituality and death. They all painted crucifixions. At the turn of the century, these artists felt muzzled by strict bourgeois mores of the previous era and the idioms of naturalism. They found themselves transforming religious themes into a visual vocabulary that expressed anxiety and existential doubt. The works that resulted were, like Smithson's religious paintings, fiercely emotive, and shocking. I recall these artists now since they, like Freud, were deeply affected by the trauma of the First World War. Like Smithson, they painted the unstaunched blood of grief. Psychoanalysis offers many ways of understanding the psychic underpinnings of art and the artist's own relation to it. As you have seen in the photographs of his consulting room, Freud surrounded himself with an audience of art objects and was devoted to the art of antiquity. In understanding the artist, Freud cited sexuality and the drives. Melanie Klein gave us the idea of violence in infantile fantasy and the importance of destruction in all creative productions. Winnicott introduced the idea of play, a creation itself, as a serious and essential activity. He reminded us that artists of all kinds experience an inherent dilemma which belongs to the coexistence of two desires; the urgent need to seek the other and the still more urgent need not to be found. This paradox speaks to the oceanic experience of an artist at work in the studio; time becomes limitless and unbounded. In 1915, when Freud wrote Mourning and Melancholia, two of his sons were on the front lines. The book served as a transformational object for him. His fear for his sons and his mourning for the victims of the war created a work of the mind. His hypothesis, long held...