I came across the term "syncope" the other day while reading about the fainting game. I'd forgotten about this sometimes-deadly adolescent pastime where kids choke themselves or each other till they pass out. The rush from oxygen deprivation is supposed to be intense and quick, a budget high. It horrified me when I first heard about it from teenage peers growing up in rural Texas and I never dreamed of trying it myself. Growing up the daughter of a minister, fully versed in the tribulations of the afterlife at an early age, my sense of mortality was always acute and I avoided things that sounded like dying.
Of course, what may have been lost on me then but is obvious now is the irony of our own religiously-condoned fainting games: the desire to be slain in the spirit, to buckle to the ground in spasmodic fits and euphoric blackouts. The word "syncope" is a technical term that means fainting or blacking out, and I especially like it because of its suggestion of musicality and syncopation. My fascination with this universal desire for ecstatic syncope is one of the things I'm increasingly exploring in my own work: the fissure, the blot, the blind spot, the interruption, the cacophony of ecstatic visual plenitude, dizzying excess.
What does this have to do with Gabriel von Max (an impressively large body of whose work is now on veiw at Frye Art Museum)? Jen Graves recently mentioned that people most commonly ask her about his paintings: is the woman sleeping or dead? Of course the answer is neither. She is ecstatic. Even if she is "dead" (on the anatomist's dissecting table) or apparently suffering (a martyr crucified), she is glowing, incandescently euphoric, desirable. Her existence is syncopated with unspeakable pleasures, a (non)existance suspended in an exalted in between state.
I would describe the syncope, in this context, as the imaginary, arhythmic musicality of liminal spaces, the breathless pause that can be located in the silent gaps, stutters, and rests that punctuate everyday life. For the 19th century artist this syncoptic escape (this de-cadence, even) from the nerve-racking, breakneck pace of newly industrialized modern city life was a recurring theme. Escape, whether from the ennui of the burgeoning middle-class or from the chaos of the urban landscape, was a perpetual, illusive goal. If anything, the Decadent/Symoblist period of art embodies (and is redolent of) the perfumed angst of juvenile desire, rebellion, and the want to escape. Certainly Gabriel von Max's oeuvre is exemplary of this lust for syncope; it manifests particularly in a bohemian fascination with the occult (a popular preoccupation, it should be noted, throughout the 19th century).
This occult fad arose primarily in response to Darwinism. Freethinkers who considered Christianity and creationism outmoded were often interested in exploring what spirituality could alternatively mean. Both a serious and frivolous fascination with ghosts, table rapping, and séances became a common pastime in the wake of secularization.
If mention of Darwin raises another flag, it should: it brings us around to the monkeys. In the 19th century there was an accepted conflation in the popular (and often, sadly, scientific) imagination between women and primates: both were perceived as equally animalistic, and the bodies of both considered no better or worse than liminal spaces, equally repugnant, over-sexed, primitively biological, and desirable. Half-man, evolutionarily intermediate. While this is patently misogynist on one level, what fascinates me about painters who rendered these primates and these female stereotypes (whether radiant virgins or seductive whores) is the often implied element of sympathetic identification between the painter and his subjects.
Let me explain: Max Nordeau is the infamous physician and social critic who in 1892 penned a much-consulted bible on the social and physiological woes of degeneracy. This work reflected a popular opinion that had been gestating for the greater part of a century, and in it he condemned artists alongside hysterical women as being genetically inferior, diseased humans. Ironically (Nordeau was a Zionist), this is the same logic that influenced and was absorbed by future generations of political conservatives in Europe, and became accepted dogma that paved the way for genocide in the 20th century. But this accusation of evolutionary degeneracy, which was synonymous with decadence and the collapse of empires, was thrust equally at artists and women. Artists were hysterical, physically and spiritually liminal figures.
So we can draw a triangle that connects Gabriel von Max to his fainting women and his languorous monkeys: a triangle that binds them all, in liminality. Partial-creatures, chimeras, ghosts. Max does not seem to be reflected in the occasional males depicted in his paintings, whose backs are turned or whose faces, cast in shadow, frown pensively at the sleeping beauties around them. The tenderness he exhibits towards his menagerie of monkeys and his radiant females suggests an investment beyond rendering cruel stereotypes.
And (let me describe the tenderness for a moment)----
Luminous cheeks and foreheads glitter under the dimmed museum lights. Eyes rolled back sparkle darkly, monkeys with their large flat foreheads and painstakingly-rendered ginger fur cast sidelong glances into a melancholy void punctuated solely by the scent of bitter fruit and the pocked, curling rinds of citrus. Did I mention the skin!? Delicate applications of oil paint make the skin of the young, syncoptic girls glow like phosphorescent onionskin tinged uncannily with the slightest blush of blue. There will always be an infinite wealth of unspeakable knowledge, ecstasy, and possibility located in the liminal pause, in the in between gaps, and Gabriel von Max articulates these gaps with palpable, sympathetic desire. It's nearly contagious.
Go see these paintings!
(It deserves to be more than an addendum, but it must be commented that the Frye is such a unique institution and one of the reasons Seattle is a great place to be right now as the city expands its artistic identity. There are few other museums anywhere that jet out into such deliciously eccentric arenas of art history and mount comprehensive exhibits from a period that is continually ripe for re-reading and rediscovery. Their exhibits are always worth anticipating.)
