Shades of Kurelek 2

In the painting Harvest of Our Mere Humanism Years (currently on display at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s William Kurelek: The Messenger exhibition), the artist weaves several dystopian motifs current at the time of his working (1972) into a composition that is truly fantastical.

The giant hollow grasshopper, pile of books dressed in professorial garb, and green dish containing chocolate replicas of university buildings in the middle distance of this picture express Kurelek’s fear that higher education, though valued so highly by millions of Canadian parents, in fact did not aid their children’s search for individuality and significance. Here are echoes (albeit unconscious) of Ivan Illich’s trenchant criticism of institutional education in Deschooling Society (1971); and a premonition, perhaps, of Neil Postman’s The End of Education (1995), in which the author argues for the necessity of a sustaining narrative to endue education with meaning. The papers and television sets that people are glued to as they wander around the landscape, entirely oblivious to the danger represented by the chasm that has opened up in the ground, reference another motif, important to Kurelek, that was later taken up by Neil Postman in his Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985).

The people queuing around Toronto City Hall, their crowding becoming greater and their burdens heavier the longer they wait, and their waiting simply ending in death, comprise a strong statement of what Kurelek, a faithful Roman Catholic, saw as the futile ‘harvest’ of modern secularism – a restatement, perhaps, of the theme he had taken up in Behold Man Without God (1955). For Kurelek, as we noted last month, the ultimate symbol of this futility was the atomic bomb, here depicted hanging by a thread over City Hall, unnoticed by all bar one person in the throng.

Particularly in its critique of educational institutions, Harvest of Our Mere Humanism Years is reminiscent – to those of a certain age – to the animation sequences of Gerald Scarfe that were incorporated into the 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall, and from there into the music video for Another Brick in the Wall, in which teachers are memorably depicted as hammers marching in serried ranks, and school either as a meat-grinder into which students are pushed, or simply as a high, all-encompassing wall. With due respect to the work of Illich and Postman, Scarfe’s imagery has probably had a wider impact upon the thinking of a generation than any text of educational sociology. Kurelek was aware of the power of pop-art, and this is the idiom in which he chose to communicate his message.

Shades of Kurelek 1

Last month we wrote that Archives & Museum staff “would love to be flies on the wall at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, on 26 April, to witness a roundtable discussion on creativity, madness and religion, each of which played their part in the biography of William Kurelek (1927-1977)”. Well, we missed the roundtable, but our Archivist did have the opportunity to visit Hamilton to see the retrospective exhibition of Kurelek’s works mentioned in that blogpost shortly before it left to go to the west coast of Canada. William Kurelek: The Messenger, soon to open at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is a rare opportunity to see a cross-section of the artist’s oeuvre. His works are starkly beautiful, accessible yet challenging and (to the Archivist at least) evocative of the work of several contemporary artists whose work is more or less well-known in popular culture. In this post and in two to follow, he highlights the works in which he has found shades of Kurelek.

In a mid-twentieth century article on art and psychiatry, Dr Morris Carstairs, formerly of the Maudsley Hospital, wrote: “Where, I wonder, is the contemporary artist who can turn his innocent eye upon the nightmare realities of this era with its threat of nuclear annihilation? We need a Goya or a Hieronymous Bosch today to quicken our sense of the urgency of the human predicament before it is too late.”¹ The post-hospital career of one of his patients at the Maudsley could be understood in terms of an unconscious response to this call. William Kurelek was perhaps the quintessential artist of the Cold War. Convinced of the imminent likelihood of a nuclear conflagration, Kurelek did not shrink from the representation of the horrors that would be unleashed upon humanity by that outcome, down to the most minute detail. In many ways his work is analogous to the most notorious of the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman, Hell (in both its 2000 and 2008 iterations). The critic Jonathan Jones has called it “a terrific work of imagination, its plenitude of barbarities truly mind-boggling.” “Every time you think you’ve got the measure of it,” he adds, “you notice a new ludicrous yet fearsome, throwaway yet lovingly rendered detail of life in the abyss”.²

Something similar could be said about many of the works included in the exhibition William Kurelek: The Messenger. There was something particularly chilling about seeing his This is the Nemesis (pictured below) on display at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, as it depicts the moment of that city’s annihilation (as well as the destruction of Toronto, on the other side of Lake Ontario) from an elevated viewpoint on the hills to the south. Kurelek does not spare us any of the horror of this scene. Hamilton’s factories, apartment blocks, railways, trees and lakes have all been destroyed or irretrievably blighted. An intense firestorm is raging through the streets of the city, and in its path are the bloodied bodies of its dead and dying citizens. Those not killed outright by the blast are vomiting blood in its parks or racked with pain on makeshift hospital beds. We sense that their time is short. Kurelek brings a meticulous documentary style to this and other portrayals of the apocalypse. Yet there was no gratuitous intent to these representations. Kurelek’s purpose was (to adopt the words of Dr Carstairs) to “quicken our sense of the urgency of the human predicament before it is too late”.

¹ William Kurelek, Someone With Me (Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 1973), pages 521-522; (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1980), pages 174-175.

² Jonathan Jones, ‘The Chapman brothers’ Hell is the best art of our age’, The Guardian, 23 February 2009.

In the Frame for October 2011

This month’s picture is The Deluge by the nineteenth-century painter John Martin. Unlike most of the pictures featured in our In the Frame series, it has been on display in our museum for some time, but its postcard-size dimensions make it easy to overlook. John was never a patient of Bethlem Hospital, but his older brother Jonathan was, following his failed attempt to burn down York Minster in 1829. The artistic output of both men featured depictions of death and destruction inspired by biblical imagery of apocalypse and judgment. The Deluge is none other than the flood from which, according to the Book of Genesis, only Noah and his family escaped. Other works by John Martin – on display at Tate Britain until 15 January 2012 – represent the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sun standing still on the battlefield of Gibeon, and the original ‘writing on the wall’ that prophesied destruction at Belshazzar’s Feast.

Jonathan’s visions were no less bleak, and perhaps more untamed than those of his brother. His London’s Overthrow, which we usually have on display, is on loan to Tate Britain for the duration of the abovementioned exhibition. Hell’s Gates and The Lambton Worm are among the pictures that can be seen in its place here at Bethlem. Each of these artworks has been extensively annotated in the artist’s own hand. Critics have drawn comparisons between the populist work of the younger Martin and the contemporary ‘disaster movie’ genre. There is no doubt that both John and Jonathan looked steadily into the abyss of human despondency. Yet their motive for so doing so was not one of schadenfreude or crass entertainment. They appear to have believed that, no matter how painful the exercise of the imagination could be, it was necessary in order to maintain a grasp on reality.

This coming Saturday (8 October), when the Archives & Museum will be open between 11am and 5pm, the Archivist will give – at 2pm – a short talk on the work of John and Jonathan Martin.