In the Frame for August

This month In the Frame goes ‘on holiday’, as it has done once before, to highlight a work of art outside the collections of the Archives and Museum. This time we feature the Canadian artist Kim Adams’ Bruegel-Bosch Bus (an installation on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario) comprising a rusted VW campervan out of which sprawls a carnivalesque, comic-serious landscape of detailed miniature scenes built up from action figures, model railway sets, toy dinosaurs, dolls, skeletons and much else besides. A mock-industrial complex sprouts from the rear of the vehicle, small in scale but breathtaking in extent. Myriad scenes demand the patient attention of the viewer: fairground amusements, a fire in an office block, King Kong atop a skyscraper. The artist’s touch is light and most of his references are playful, but the overwhelming scope and detail of the work considered as a whole suggests an ambition on his part to represent the consumerist-industrialist enterprise of Western economies as a modern Tower of Babel. There is no clearer indication of this than in Adams’ acknowledgement of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch in the title of his work, and indeed a comparable vision animates the intent and execution of their work (there are no better examples of this than Bruegel’s Turmbau zu Babel and Kinderspiele, both at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum).

How has Adams’ Bruegel-Bosch Bus merited a place in this series of posts? Certainly not through any direct connection with Bethlem or the Maudsley Hospitals. Remember, this is In the Frame in holiday (and consequently whimsical) mode. Earlier this year, as regular readers of this blog will know, the Art Gallery of Hamilton played host to the works of another Canadian artist who counted Bosch and Bruegel amongst his formative influences, and advanced a searing analysis of twentieth-century society through works of acute vision and considerable technical ability. William Kurelek: The Messenger moved to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in May, where it will remain on display until the beginning of September 2012. Yet there was a time in the spring when it was possible to view works by Kurelek such as Harvest of Our Mere Humanism Years, Behold Man Without God, This is the Nemesis and – most tellingly – The Tower of Babel in close proximity to (well, under the same roof as) Adams’ Bruegel-Bosch Bus. If only the works of Bosch and Bruegel could have been displayed in juxtaposition to both!

Shades of Kurelek 3

Since May the Archivist has been suggesting where within popular culture one might find unconscious homage to the work of the Canadian artist William Kurelek. In pointing out a shared preoccupation (between the works of Kurelek and the Chapman brothers) or an accidental resonance (in the animations of Gerald Scarfe), he certainly has not meant to propose an actual train of causation. Still less does he wish to do anything other this month than point up a playful strategy that is common to Kurelek and Martin Handford, the illustrator of – wait for it – Where’s Wally? (known as Where’s Waldo? in North America).

Many will be familiar with the crowded scenes within which the bespectacled, distinctively-dressed Wally / Waldo character awaits detection. Solving the puzzle demands patient commitment on the part of the viewer. Visitors to William Kurelek: The Messenger, currently on show at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, would be well advised to adopt a similar approach to many of his pictures. For Kurelek was a master of trompe-l’oeil and was possessed of a visual memory that was retentive of detail. He often deliberately placed details in his works that he knew might be missed by the unobservant. The man in the crowd who points to the bomb in the picture highlighted last month is difficult to spot; and so is the man standing unengaged by his surroundings and holding a crown of thorns in Light Trading Day, Toronto Stock Exchange (1971). In painting scenes from his troubled youth, Kurelek often depicts himself as easily overlooked; but in other works the hidden figure is Christ. In Farm Scene Outside Toronto, his nail-pierced hands and crown of thorns lie discarded among other items at the bottom of a farmer’s field. In the Autumn of Life (pictured below) he is suspended on a tree to the near left of picture, only just visible but apparently ignored by the group posing for a photograph outside the family home in the centre of picture. It is worth adding that Kurelek painted many natural and human landscapes of moving intensity which contained no sub-text or hidden message.

Yet in cases where Kurelek adopted this Where’s Wally? strategy, more than playfulness appeared to be at work. He wanted his works to repay careful study, and was prepared to accept the consequence that they might remain opaque to, or be misunderstood by, the casual observer. More than that, his view of reality was that it remained hidden, in part or in whole, to the majority of his fellows. His ambition was to reveal it, in its light as well as in its darkness, but not in such a way as to rob it of all its mystery and majesty.

(click on the image to view a larger version)

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.