Good Jenny Saville And The Absurd Essay Example

Perhaps the predominant turn in philosophy since the end of the First World War has been a move toward an adoption of the absurd. Before that war, there was more of a universalist approach to the world, but the events between 1914 and 1918, accelerated by the events between 1929 and 1945, took those universalist elements and dropped them squarely on their heads. Before 1914, even war was kind of a civilized affair, with warring armies frequently taking off Christmas, or even the entire winter; the Christmas truce during the First World War would be the last of its kind in human warfare, though. Then, the promise of technology turned into a menace beyond the power of the human imagination, as the accomplishment of splitting the atom, which meant that electrical power would be available without having to mine for fossil fuels, also meant that one could create bombs of a power never before conceived. The promise of the Industrial Revolution, with its magical engines, also meant that one could design tanks that could run right over people and trees and other obstacles. Mustard gas, which would eventually form one of the building blocks of the drugs used in chemotherapy, also became a weapon so awful in the maimings it produced that international law was written to ban its use during wartime. The ability to send rockets into the sky, and to fly airplanes vast distances over enemy territory, meant that it was possible to rain death and destruction from the air without having to send a single ground troop into a town or country. The world had changed, and the promise of technology had turned into a violent danger that rendered any meaningful explanations of the world useless, at least from an absurdist viewpoint.
It was, in part, this historical movement that led to Absurdism, developed by Soren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus. The idea of any sort of certainty is laughable, according to this philosophical viewpoint, because the information that is available to humanity to consider shows that there is nothing that is ultimately reliable in this plane of existence. Christian absurdists such as Kierkegaard used this as a sign that the world was flawed and that one should look with hope toward an afterlife with Jesus Christ in Heaven, while atheistic absurdists such as Camus simply looked at the world with a black laugh, dismissed any attempts at certainty and objective representation of reality, especially in any form of morals or ethics. If there is no certainty, then there is no reason to maintain an artificial structure of ideas, because that structure is just as flawed, and just as fake, as such earlier platitudes as the glory of war, or the open realms of human possibility. What had been Manifest Destiny was really genocide against a group of indigenous peoples in North American whose only crime was not to have been exposed to the same diseases that had run rampant in Europe and to have developed that egotistical sense of personal property that would see the gorgeous American prairies criss-crossed with barbed wire, or that sense of entitlement that allowed men to hop off trains and shoot so many bison in the prairies, before jumping back onto those same trains, that the species would spiral toward extinction.
The images of Jenny Saville tend to focus on the nude form, particularly that of women. Her work is not an airbrushed sort of portraiture, though. Instead, they show the flaws that are present in the skins of many of her models. One of these is Reverse, which appeared at the Gagosian Gallery in London. The image is a close-up of a woman’s face, apparently lying down on a mirror or other reflective surface. Her mouth is open, and her gaze looks slightly to the left of the viewer, but still outward from the canvas. Her upper lip has a gash that seems to have healed, and the mottled look of her skin does not show any major flaws but still shows the variegated colors that are at work in realistic skin. The combination of a variety of colors to produce the face, instead of using a monochromatic approach, suggests that this could be any person. The inclusion of the gash and other blemishes on the woman’s face shows the absurdity of trying to maintain a perfect appearance and the irony of those who spend so much time at the altars of Botox and other technologies, or who use Photoshop or other airbrushing technologies to remove any flaws from visual images of themselves. The suggestion is that this is what is real – right before us – and maintaining any sort of idyllic notion of beauty is ridiculous. People do not go about in the world looking like they look on the front covers of magazines or even when walking around in fashion shows; it takes an incredible amount of preparation to carry out that look. This is someone who real, who is cut, who is broken, who is the viewer.
Some of Saville’s other works take classic works from the past and transform them in an absurdist fashion. Reproduction drawing IV (after the Leonardo cartoon) takes Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings for Madonna and Child with St. Anne and adds what appear to be at least two extra babies to the picture. So this is no longer a drawing with triangular perspective, focusing on the Christ Child, but instead is a couple of women holding three happy babies. Note the muscular right arm of the Madonna, which does not appear to be realistically attached to her body but nonetheless is holding one of the babies in place, but then appears to be an extra appendage in addition to the one holding the baby’s shoulder. The suggestion here is one of a multiplication of perspectives, in which the focus on one Child has become a focus on the next generation, or perhaps the absurdity of focusing on just one Child when there are so many children, so many perspectives, so many belief systems out there. The implication from an absurdist perspective is that there is no one objective religious set of beliefs (if one follows Camus’ perspective). If one looks at this from the Christian absurdist perspective, one could conclude that the point is that a narrow-minded focus on doctrine rather than the larger message of compassion in the Gospels is almost certain to alienate people rather than draw them close, leaving the Church looking much more like a prison operated by a warden than a gateway to faith and grace.