Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas (2024)

I. 

 

Regular readers will recall that back in April of this year, I went along to the Horse Hospital to view the overtly political artwork of Gee Vaucher and hear what she had to say about her time working with Crass (an anarcho-hippie collective based at Dial House in Essex and masquerading as punks during the period 1977-1984): click here.  

And they might also recall that in September of this year, I visited the Richard Saltoun Gallery, in Mayfair, to view a solo exhibition by Penny Slinger; another British-born artist who likes to combine elements of surrealism with (feminist-informed sexual) politics and another woman now aged in her seventies (at 77, she's just two years younger than Vaucher): click here. 

 

Anyway, completing this trio of septuagenarian female artists is Marlene Dumas (71), whose solo exhibition of sixteen new(ish) works at the Frith Street Gallery - including the large (100 x 30 cm) canvas pictured here entitled Mourning Marsyas - I went to see earlier this week ... [1] 

 

II.

 

For those, like me, whose knowledge of ancient mythology is patchy at best (but who aren't fortunate enough to have the Little Greek on hand to fill in the gaps), Marsyas was the satyr who - skilled as he was on the double pipe (αὐλός) - mistakenly challenged Apollo to a contest to determine who was the best musician. 

 

All-too-predictably, the Muses found in favour of the latter, and Apollo, proving that the only thing worse than a bad loser is a vindictive winner, punished Marsyas by skinning him alive [2].  

 

There are, I suppose, numerous ways we might interpret this story. But Dumas - who was born and grew up in South Africa during apartheid - always likes to side with the victim, be that Christ hanging on his Cross or a dead member of the Red Army Faction.

 

Thus, for Dumas, Apollo is the villain and Marsyas symbolises not hubris, but the right of the individual to freely express themselves artistically. And so she mourns Marsyas and all others who have died in their attempt to challenge those wielding power and authority. 

 

I've seen it suggested that there's a certain tenderness in Dumas's canvas which is missing from the savage beauty of Titian's Flaying Marsyas painted 470 years earlier. And that might be the case: or it might be pity which is on display here, which is an altogether different thing (often confused with compassion) [3]. 

 

It's a shame that Iris Murdoch isn't around to consult on this question [4]. 

 

 

III. 

 

All in all, I like Dumas's paintings; created, according to the gallery press release, 'through a mixture of chance and intention [...] combining very fast and focused actions with reflective pauses'. 

 

What that means is that Dumas often pours paint directly onto the canvas and then goes from there, teasing out a central figure or a face. Sometimes these figures and faces appear in an instant, whilst at other times they require careful consideration [5].

 

Strangely, despite Dumas openly confessing that her works are "'heavy with the weight of a bad conscience, deceased lovers, past failures and present atrocities'" [6], I found the exhibition quite refreshing; perhaps Nietzsche was right after all and cruelty is indeed one of the oldest festive joys of mankind [7].       

 

Apart from the central work after which the exhibition took its name, there were several other works that caught my eye, including a phallic picture consisting of a pair of big black cocks and a smaller canvas commemorating the 69 people killed at a summer camp on the island of Utøya in July 2011 by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik (what this tells us about her and/or me readers can decide).

 

 

Marlene Dumas: Two Gods (2021) Oil on canvas (150 x 140 cm) 

and Utøya (2018-2023) Oil on canvas (40 x 50 cm) 

Photos by Peter Cox courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

   

 

Notes

 

[1] Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas opened at the Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square) on 20 September and finishes on 16 November 2024. Full details can be found by clicking here. 

 

[2] For those readers keen to know further details, the story of Marsyas can be found in Book VI (lines 382-400) of Ovid's Metamorphoses: click here for a translation by A. S. Kline (2000) on poetryintranslation.com 

 

[3] Nietzsche famously viewed pity as a dangerous pathological condition that weakens the pitier and degrades the pitied. It is thus a form of practical nihilism disguised as a moral virtue. Compassion, on the other hand, is a feeling with the one who suffers; not a feeling for and is born of a true love for others as well as a love of fate. 

      Readers who wish to know more on this might like to see the essay by Suzanne Obdrzalek, 'On the Contrast between Pity and Compassion in Nietzsche', in Aporia, Vol. 7 ( BYU, 1997), pp. 59-72. It can be downloaded and read as a pdf by clicking here.

 

[4] The Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was a huge fan of Titian's late masterpiece (painted c. 1570-76), once describing it as the greatest of all works of art in the Western tradition in that it manages to touch on life in all its ambiguity, horror, and misery whilst, at the same time, being a beautiful work that invests the human story with something divine. 

 

[5] It's not surprising to discover that Dumas often refers to the concept of pareidolia when discussing her work; i.e., the psychological phenomenon by which the brain is given to perceive meaningful images (such as faces) in random visual stimuli. I have written on this phenomenon in a post dated 4 June 2015: click here. 

 

[6] Dumas writing in an introductory essay to the Mourning Marsyas exhibition and cited by Adrian Searle in his interview with her in The Guardian (23 September 2023): click here. 

 

[7] See Nietzsche, Morgenröthe (1881), I. 18. Translated into English by R. J. Hollingdale as Daybreak (Cambridge University Press, 1982).  

 

Marlene Dumas

marlenedumas.nl 

frithstreetgallery.com

Hyaena

A spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta)

aka the laughing hyaena

 

"I trot, I lope, I slaver, I am a ranger. 

I hunch my shoulders. I eat the dead." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

There are, as a matter of fact, four distinct species of hyaena. But I suspect that when most peope think of them - if and when they think of them at all - they think of the spotted laughing hyaena.

 

I also suspect that most people think of them with a shudder and a curl of the lip, finding them an uncanny mix of the creepy and contemptible; cowardly pack hunters that torment their prey, or scavengers skulking round graveyards and feasting on the bodies of the dead. 

 

 

II. 

 

D. H. Lawrence certainy wasn't a fan. He regarded the hyaena - like the vulture and baboon - as an example of arrested development; an evil creature that obscenely preserves a "fixed form about a voracious seethe of corruption" [2] and which knows no shame.   

 

The howl of the wolf may unsettle him, but it is the laugh of the hyaena that fills Lawrence with fear and horror - that and the "loathsome, cringing, imprisoned loins" [3] that are amost dragged along in the dust and dirt. 

 

The hyaena, says Lawrence, "can scarcely see and hear the living world; it draws back to the stony fixity of its own loins, draws back upon its own nullity, sightless save for carrion" [4].

 

It's surprising, when one considers his animosity against the poor hyaena, that Lawrence didn't refer back to that ancient belief they were hermaphrodites; i.e., intersexual creatures alternating with fluidity between male and female roles. [5].   

 

For as we know, Lawence was a passionate proponent not only of sexual difference, but sexual dualism: 

 

"Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means being divided into male and female. [...] Every single living cell is either male or female, and will remain either male or female as long as life lasts. [...] The talk about a third sex, or about the indeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue." [6]

 

The truth of this is essential for Lawrence, as it is for early Christian writers, such as Clement of Alexandria ...

 

 

III.

 

Despite being a Christian theologian and recognised as a Church Father, Clement of Alexandria was heavily infuenced by Greek philosophy and literature, particularly Plato and the Stoics. Fragments of his more obscure writings suggest he was also deeply familiar with Jewish esotericism.   

 

Although we don't know for certain when he was born or when he died, we do know that the moral lessons that Clement takes from the animal kingdom are invariaby negative; the hyaena, for example, teaches man what mustn't be done. 

 

Not that he takes seriously the legend concerning its hermaphroditism; rejecting it on the grounds that once the logic of nature - or, if you prefer, the stamp of creative reason - has determined what an animal is, it cannot be changed [7]. Thus, the hyaena, cannot switch sexes; nor does it possess two sexes, or a third intermediary sex between male and female.

 

However, Clement is obliged to address the fact that the genitalia of the female hyaena closely resembles that of the male; the enlarged clitoris is not only shaped and positioned like a penis, but is capable of erection. The female also possesses no external vaginal opening, as the labia are fused to form a pseudo-scrotum. Traversing the length of the pseudo-penis is a central canal, through which the female urinates, copulates, and gives birth. [8] 

Interestingly, although Clement describes the female hyaena's peculiar anatomy in exactly the same manner as Aristotle, he comes to his own conclusion: it must be due to the animal's moral shortcomings. In other words, hyaenas have a body that's arranged in such a queer fashion, because of a defective nature and the fact that, like men, they are prone to lasciviousness ... [9]

 

 

IV.

 

Despite the fact that, as a Lawrentian, I'm supposed to despise them, I'm starting to feel a certain admiration for the hyaena, which have limped on the face of the earth for millions of years. 

 

And this is not just because they challenge certain ideas about sexual dimorphism, but because they also curdle the line of distinction between cat and dog. For athough phylogenetically closer to felines, hyaenas are behaviourally and morphologically similar to canids; they hunt like dogs, for example, but they groom, scent mark, and defecate like cats ... 

 

Perhaps they only laugh because they don't know whether to bark or purr ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Edwin Morgan, 'Hyena', in Glasgow to Saturn, (Carcanet, 1973). The verse can also be found in Morgan's Collected Poems, (Carcanet Press, 1990). To read on the Scottish Poetry Library website, click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 295.  

[3] Ibid., p. 299.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ovid gives reference to this in Metamorphoses; see 15: 408. 

      Although Aristotle rejected this belief and few naturalists following him gave the idea any credence, still the queerness of the hyaena was taken as a given and its reputation amongst those who, like Lawrence, read everything (including animal behaviour and anatomy) in moral terms, was irretrievably damaged.      

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 66 and 126. 

 

[7] Christian ontology - building on its Platonic origins - insists upon the fixed nature of being; there is no transformation of essential forms; one species cannot become another and nor can one sex transition into the other.    

 

[8] In fact, the hyaena is the only placental mammal where females lack an external vaginal opening and have a pseudo-penis instead. This isn't something that seems advantageous; not only does it make mating difficult, but giving birth isn't a barrel of laughs either, often proving fatal for mother and cub (approximately 15% of females die during their first time giving birth and over 60% of firstborn cubs are dead on arrival).

 

[9] See Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 2021), pp. 19-21. 

     

    

Reflections on Exile

Able was I ere I saw Essex

It's been suggested, rather snidely, that my Essex exile is entirely self-imposed; something voluntarily entered into and which I'm thus responsible for.      

Of course, I'm far too fatalistic a thinker to accept this piece of naive psychologizing which rests upon the rational-moral fallacy of a free-willing subject exercising complete control over the course of actions and events.

But, however it came to pass, my Essex exile is an unfolding reality and a profoundly unpleasant one at that.

It's not that I feel banished from a beloved homeland - something that the Greeks regarded as a fate worse than death - so much as shut-out from a way of life which, limited as it was in opportunity and human contact, was nonetheless my own; i.e. a piece of chaos to which I'd given style. 

Thus my Essex exile is more a form of aesthetico-existential deprivation rather than geographical displacement. I do miss London: especially Soho. But mostly I miss the series of small habits, daily routines and rhythms that enabled a reassuring and necessary consistency and continuity of self (or at least the impression of such).

As Deleuze and Guattari note, even nomads happy to wander homelessly in that savage realm of dangerous knowledge outside the gate have to keep enough elements of subjectivity in order to be able to respond to the dominant reality when they wake up in the morning.

And so, as poets from Ovid to Oscar Wilde have discovered, exile isn't much fun or easy to bear if it involves a loss of soul and not merely a loss of familiar streets and favourite haunts.