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Installation
Sound Real
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Red
Hot Fibre Paper & String Exhibition RedCliffe Gallery Queensland
2002. Installaton(The
Rope} a reply to Charles Baudelaire and Edouard Manet .
Thank
you to Tracy Kay
for her interpretation of the voice of the mother
The
Installation was developed to align thematically with the Red
Hot Fibre exhibition Paper and String and conceptually to engage
with the stories by both Baudelaire and mine on the events surrounding
the hanging suicide of Manets studio assistant Alexandre in 1859
. Forty one individual sections each 200mm x 200mm of cotton linter
paper and of cord were hand rolled to produce a grid in which
the tails of the cords all eventually led to another section of
hand rolled cotton linter paper which housed a small hand painted
copy of Manet's The Cherry Picker painted about a year before
the childs suicide.
The
serpentine labyrinth of cords represent sections of the suicide
cord that the mother of the child sold to others in the village
and emulates the sound element of the installation which presents
both Manet via Baudelaires version of events and my story as told
by "the mother" who repeats a different recollection.
About
the work a short history
(The Rope} a reply to Charles Baudelaire and Edouard
Manet Ross Barber
Baudelaires La Corde Edited and
translated by Wallace Fowlie, Dover Publications Inc. New York
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A small painting
first titled clearly The cherry Picker, later re-titled
on the artists continued insistence in the light of events and
protecting his reputation, The cherry thief, An essay the
rope, the clock, the gift (Terence Maloon) an oblique reference
to Manet via Baudelaires La Cord, a short story, the English
translation tracked down, La Cord written in the first
person for Edouard Manet, a defense of his actions in the hanging
suicide in 1859 of a young boy, Alexandre in the artists bedroom
closet started this journey. Plato says that all representation
written or in visual form is a deceit. He was right and wrong,
an accumulation of small lies can tell us at least something if
not all about the nature of truth.
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My own poor
efforts at story telling The reply written in the voice of the
mother of the child, in which she freely admits that she is just
another writers representation brings no closure, if such a thing
exists, on the matter either. But it does offer this maker of
representations a chance to explore the way that truth is contingent
and with those with the means to make representation. And in doing
so show how the received cultural blind spots of authors and artists
in history permeate their works of art, their realism and their
sense of place in history and culture. Further to that how those
ideas inform our own flawed vision of the world to day.
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(The
Rope} a reply to Charles Baudelaire and Edouard Manet. Ross
Barber
My friend used to say to me, "Illusions
are as numerous, perhaps, as relationships among men, or between
them and things. And when the illusion disappears, that is to
say when we see the being or the fact such as it exists outside
of us, we experience a strange feeling, complicated partly by
regret for the vanished phantom, partly by a pleasant surprise
before the new, before the real fact. If there exists a phenomenon
evident banal always the same, and of such a nature that no mistake
is possible, it is maternal love.
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It is as difficult
to suppose a mother without maternal love as a light without heat;
is it not perfectly legitimate, therefore, to attribute to maternal
love all the actions and words of a mother which relate to her
child? And yet, listen to this little story, in which I was unusually
mystified by the most natural illusion. Introduction to The Rope
Charles Baudelaire
It was something
of a mischievous surprise that we found Edouard Manet at our door
for a second time, though on this occasion he was not a willing
supplicant seeking permission to engage our child as his assistant,
model and companion. His manner had changed, with eyes that did
not make contact, he appeared an apparition hovering on the step,
predicating a hasty retreat as though entry though the door would
invoke an invisible vile substance, that would cling to his person
and render him as he really was, a human with flaws and ‘a sensibility
no more alive or more significant than for other men.’ This time
his vaunted free will and libertine attitudes had been usurped,
perhaps by a need to confess, we are all after all Catholic at
heart. I feel it was this, more than the pitiless eye of our police
chief, that we have all with sideways looks and shared furtive
smiles declared we have felt at one time or another, who charged
Manet not legally culpable, but with the moral task of declaring
to us the death of Alexandre while in his care.
Unlike his previous visit the sense
of purpose was not evident. Before his argument, of a better life
for our son had been delivered with passionate promises of a paradise
beyond the reach of our poor means. It is true on that occasion
my husband followed my lead, as was his nature, and was reasonably
quickly persuaded. After all are not human relationships in some
part, a matter of weighing economies? So it was that our son was
to be delivered from the economy of drudgery, that all of our
class enters into after too short a childhood, and was conducted
into the economy of Plaisir in the house and studio of Manet.
I must confess
that I exist here before you as just another writers representation
of Alexendre’s mother and you might judge me as such less truthful
than that of Baudelaires Manet, in regard to the death of my son,
as I would never in life have had the words or perhaps the opportunity
to respond to his literacy. In fact, Manet’s circle Baudelaire,
Zola, Courbet, those realists all have the goods on me in regard
to my and my classes representations. Baudelaires contempt for
my character and sex is manifestly evident; perhaps his attack
on mother love has a genesis in his own pain. And did not
Zola conjure the basest life and language that my kind are said
to inherit in his ‘social history’ Les Rougons-Macquart?
And Courbet represented the condition of The Stonebreakers albeit
from the safety of his carriage. I must confess some malicious
mirth that Courbet became a victim of his own ‘realism’. An eye
more truthful and mechanical than his (a camera) captured him
in an act of sedition and forced his hasty retreat from the police
to another country. They, the lot of them in my view are
the children of their grasping class, seeking to distance themselves
from less elegant ancestry and in doing so propose a view of our
class that supposes us to be dumb animals, not favoured with a
will to improve
The gulf between
us, my husband, Manet, and myself could not have been wider that
night or forever. Manet for his part seeking to distance himself
as quickly as possible from us and the act, appeared stuck with
his own phantoms of horror, the closet, the rope, the small body,
and guilt mixed with delicious memory of not the child that was,
but his daubed representations of his ‘small catch, his companion’,
the thief of his heart, ‘transformed into a small gipsy sometimes
into an angel, or an Eros’ with an immoderate taste for sugar
and cherry liquors, ‘he had carried the violin of the vagrant,
the crown of spines and the nails of passion, as well as the torch
of Eros.’
My own tearless, speechless, shock
was interrupted by the stuttered remarks of my husband, who as
a man that things happen to rather than for, this time spoke first
of what he in his heart had always known of our bargain, “After
all, it is perhaps better thus; it would have always finished
badly!” Manet by way of explanation perfunctorily told us that
he was not of course to blame in any way, after all he was away
from the house on unspecified business, Manet then took leave
of us after telling us of the indecent cause, Alexandre’s sin,
his larceny of a cherry liquor coupled with guilt and the fear
of being thrown out of paradise on Manet’s return.
I was now at Manet’s door to see
my son laying in the room, in the house of his petty crime and
in the eyes of god, his grand larceny, to steal and to take his
own life meant the gates of paradise had closed for Alexandre,
both on earth and in heaven.
Manet it was plain saw my arrival
as an indisposition, but was I imagine able to drag up some sense
of pity for my situation and nervously waved me to enter. My dulled
trauma turned to a pain so intense I could hardly stand. My eyes
took in the terrible laceration and I looked to Manet, who sensing
my rage averted his look to the rope still hanging from the closet.
He made a dash for it as though it was his life that now depended
on its concealment from me. In truth I did not as Baudelaire asserts,
ask in a pitiful state for the rope to be handed over, but being
closer launched myself at the object and tore it and the terrible
nail that it hung from, out of the closet. Manet and I faced each
other for the first and last time, as equals sharing our respective
guilt’s and then I left with the terrible object in my possession.
It is of course
true that on the following day Manet received letters and personal
entreaties from the relatives and neighbours to be given at least
a fragment of the rope to keep as a relic of memory, which in
his story smacked of a macabre fascination, but on hearing of
the number of requests, I measured the need and cut the rope and
sent a piece to all who asked. Manet asserted through Baudelaire
that it was by way of trade that the pieces were distributed,
but it was a compensation of another sort that motivated the division
of the cord, a sharing of the pain, something that Manet could
never understand. If small gifts were given in return, if a few
sous passed to us, what of it? A half decent burial consecrated
or not, is not cheap.
Manet left town not long after and
then France with Baudelaire, I heard they took themselves to London
for a time, I can only assume that Manet’s story was contrived
in that place, far from the truth of the matter and is to my
mind, a tasteless defense, a vehicle for delivering to the public,
gothic horror, transported to the everyday, a chimera masking
both Baudelaires prejudices, and Manet’s manifest guilt. As for
my guilt I have dealt with that myself.
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La Corde Charles Baudelaire
To Edouard Manet
My friend used to say to me, "Illusions
are as numerous, perhaps, as relationships among men, or between
them and things. And when the illusion disappears, that is to
say when we see the being or the fact such as it exists outside
of us, we experience a strange feeling, complicated partly by
regret for the vanished phantom, partly by a pleasant surprise
before the new, before the real fact. If there exists a phenomenon
evident banal always the same, and of such a nature that no mistake
is possible, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to suppose
a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it
not perfectly legitimate, therefore, to attribute to maternal
love all the actions and words of a mother which relate to her
child? And yet, listen to this little story, in which I was unusually
mystified by the most natural illusion.
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"My profession
of painter impels me to look attentively at faces and facial expressions
which I encounter on my way, and you know what pleasure we derive
from this faculty which for our eyes makes life more vivid and
meaningful than for other men. In the distant.neighborhood where
I live, and where large spaces covered with grass still separate
the buildings, I often noticed a boy whose fiery and mischievous
expression appealed to me at first, more than all the others.
More than once he modeled for me. At times I made a gypsy out
of him, at other times an angel, and still at other times a mythological
Cupid. I made him carry the vagabond's violin, the Crown of Thorns
and the Nails of the Passion, and the torch of Love. I took such
keen pleasure in the comic manner of this boy that one day I begged
his parents, who were poor people, to let me have him, and I promised
to clothe him well, to give him some money and not to impose on
him any other work save that of cleaning my brushes and running
my errands. This child, cleaned up, became a charming creature,
and the life he led with me seemed to him a paradise, compared
to what he would have had to undergo in his father's hovel. Yet
I must say that this little fellow amazed me at times by strange
fits of precocious sadness, and that he soon showed an immoderate
liking for sugar and liqueurs; to such an extent, that one day
when I saw he had again committed, in spite of my many warnings,
a new theft of this nature, I threatened to send him back to his
parents. Then I left, and my business kept me away from home for
quite some time.
"Imagine my horror and astonishment when, on entering the house,
the first thing I saw was that little fellow, the mischievous
companion of my life, hanging. from the closet door! His feet
almost touched the floor; a chair, which he must have pushed aside
with his foot, was overturned beside him; his head was twisted
over one shoulder; his swollen face and his eyes, wide open with
a terrifying gaze, made me believe first that he was alive. To
get him down was not as easy a job as you may think. He was already
stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance at the thought of
dropping him abruptly to the ground. I had to hold up his entire
body with one arm, and with the hand of my other arm, cut the
rope. But all was not over when that was done; the little monster
had used a very thin string, which had cut deeply into the flesh,
and I had to pry with narrow scissors between the two rings of
swollen flesh, in order to release his neck.
"I neglected to tell you that I had called loudly for help; but
my neighbors had all refused to come to my aid. In that, they
were faithful to the custom of civilized man who I don't know
why, never wants to get mixed up with the business of a hanged
man. At last a doctor came and declared that the child had been
dead for several hours. Later, when we had to undress him for
the burial, the rigidity of the corpse was such that, renouncing
hope of bending the limbs, we had to slash and cut his clothes
in order to take them off.
"The police inspector, to whom, naturally, I had to report the
accident, looked at me quizzically and said: 'There's something
fishy about this!' impelled doubtless by some innate desire and
habit of frightening, on the off chance, the innocent as well
as the guilty.
"One supreme task remained .to be done, and the thought of it
alone caused me terrible anguish: I had to inform the parents.
My legs refused to take me there. At last I summoned courage.
But, to my amazement, the mother showed no emption, and not a
tear trickled from the corner of her eye. I attributed this strange
behavior to the horror she must have been feeling, and I remembered
the well-known saying, 'The deepest suffering is mute.' As for
the father, he merely said, half stupefied, half dreaming: 'After
all, it is perhaps better that way; he would have come to a bad
end anyhow!'
"In the meantime the body lay stretched out on my couch, and,
helped by a maid, I was busy with the final details, when the
mother came into my studio. She said she wanted to see the body
of her son. I could not, in truth, prevent her from enjoying emotionally
her grief and refuse this supreme and sad consolation. Then she
begged me to show her the place where her child had hanged himself.
'Oh, no, Madame,' I replied, 'that would upset you.' And as my
eyes involuntarily turned toward the sinister closet, I saw, with
a feeling of disgust mixed with horror and anger that the nail
had remained planted in the panel, and a long piece of rope was
still dangling from it. Quickly I went over to tear off those
last vestiges of the catastrophe, and was about to throw them
out of the window, when the poor woman seized my arm and said
to me in an irresistible tone of voice: 'Oh! Monsieur! Give me
that, I beg you, I implore you!' It seemed to me that her despair
had doubtless so bewildered her that now she had feelings of tenderness
for what had served as an instrument of death for her son, and
wanted to keep it as a horrible and precious relic. She seized
the nail and the string.
"At last! At last! It was allover! Nothing remained for me to
do except to resume my work, more avidly than usual, to drive
out gradually that little corpse which haunted the recesses of
my mind and whose ghost wore me out with his wide staring eyes.
But the next day I received a bundle of letters: some were from
tenants of my house, others from nearby houses; one from the second
floor, another from the third, another from the' fourth, and so
on; some in a half-joking style, as if trying to disguise under
an obvious banter the sincerity of the request, others grossly
insolent and misspelled, but all concerned with the same purpose,
namely to obtain from me a piece of the fatal and beatific rope.
I must say that among the signers there were more '"women than
men; but they all, believe me, did not belong to the lowest and
commonest class. I have kept those letters.
"And then suddenly a light dawned on me, and I understood why
the mother was so bent on snatching the string from me and by
what kind of trade she in tended to be consoled."
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