Violence

v I o c E ,•E NL

To terrify restive plantation slaves into docility, colonialDutch overlords devised merciless theatrical executions

marked by symbolic mutilation. Certain victims, however,subverted this calculus of subjugation by masking theiragonies in a mocking nonchalance that perverted the"civilized" manners oftheir masters. One such heart-breakingdisplay of unbroken spirit-in Surinam in 1776-culminatedwith a carpenter named Neptune good-naturedly askingonlookers for a pipe of tobacco. Justmoments prior, plumesof Neptune's blood, marrow and bone splinters had soakedthe ground, the result of an unrelenting bludgeoning with aniron crow bar while Neptune's splayed body lay lashed to across-shaped wooden rack. Before pulverizing all of Neptune'sbones-punishment for shooting dead an overseer in a sugarcane field-the executioner had amputated eptune's lefthand-retribution for stealing a sheep.

Through it all, eptune never groaned or sighed. Presumeddead at last and finally untied, Neptune began to writhe

and tumbled off the stubby crucifix. Then he spoke. He damned the departing magistrates asbarbarous rapscallions. Then eptune struggled to comport himself. He used his teeth to positionhis mashed right hand upon his chest and wriggled to lean the back of his head against the rack.Thus regally propped, eptune called for a pipe. Spittle, curses, and kicks met his request.

A Scottish-Dutch soldier and diarist, Captain John Gabriel Stedman, chronicled Neptune's executionin Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). Stedman's publisher,the radical London bookseller Joseph Johnson, commissioned the visionary poet and artist WilliamBlake (1757-1827)to create engravings for the Narrative based upon eighty Stedman field sketches-none of which survive. From these, Blake engraved sixteen, including Neptune's torture: The Executionof Breaking on the Rack (1792) [fig. 1),the oldest work in the Jundt Museum's 2009 winter exhibition,Violence!

Composed of politically charged visual art spanning four centuries, Violence! is a mute cry lamentingthe primary evil: the violation of life. Beyond their historical or cultural significance the exhibition'sprints, paintings, and sculpture are intended to serve as restoratives that purge consciousness oflinguistic detritus, pointing to a truth immune to slanted words. As such, the exhibition space isintended as a place of meditation, a mostly monochromatic sanctuary where purity of feeling mayfind voice.

To echo Blake+the exhibition's guiding spirit-cleanse the doors of perception and you will see.Aye. Purify the eye. But by what means? By fastening upon the line: the irreducible carrier of

meaning and the means of the engraver's tricks of light. Violence! is also a veneration of line-linearprecision on copper plates and fine-grained wood.

Chronologically, from Blake, an imaginary line runs through the exhibition's leading luminaries:Francisco Goya, Winslow Homer, Max Beckmann and Jifi Anderle. Their prints inscribe multipleforms of violence, some considered heroic. Goya affirms bestial domination-encased intheatrical ritual-as a measure of valor and a source of national identity. Winslow Homer portraysthe reverberations of war in quiet acts of heroism off the battlefield. Beckmann reshapes the13th Station of the Cross into an angular, disorienting tangled mass to show a world off kilter.Anderle's riders of the apocalypse obliquely reference the oppressive Eastern bloc apparatus ofparty functionaries, file cabinets and telephones.

Underscoring the exhibition's purpose, Breaking on the Rack represents the power of art to enlargecommon understanding and shape progressive ideas. "In 20 Years two millions of People aremurdered to Provide us with Coffee & Sugar," wrote Stedman, whose friendship stiffened Blake'sabolitionism. Blake's engravings and poetry helped stir political awareness, leading Parliamentto abolish the British slave trade in 1807.

Breaking on the Rack derives its power from a strange tension: Blake depicts a horrific act as slightlyunreal, like a macabre nursery tale designed for a porcelain dish. Such distancing staunchesimmediate revulsion and invites contemplation about slavery and punishment. The severedhand and the adjacent ax, for example, "read" like characters in a hieroglyph. Above these, thetorturer's face is a void, while Neptune's abstracted look belongs to the idealized martyrdom ofhagiography.

In1816Goya (I746-1828) published a book of thirty-three etchings that expressed his life-longadoration for bullfighting. La Tauromaquia ("The Art of Bullfighting") illustrates the sport's evolution-

ancient Spaniards hunted bulls both on horseback and on foot-its techniques, and the storiedfeats of Coya's favorite

32 matadors. Mixing factwith legend, the etchingsdocument how a spectacleof death captivated themasses and accumulatedsufficient ritual power tosymbolize national identity

Plate number 32 in theseries-Two groups of picadorsthrown one after another by asingle bull [fig. 2]-honorsthe bull, the central totemicfigure in Iberian culture.(Rituals uphold the values

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that give a people its sense of cultural identity: death in the bullring celebrates valor) In Twogroups of picadors, the bull, the gored horse, the band of picadors, all radiate a divine light thatsanctifies the ritual killing.

Two groups of picadors ... dramatizes the first of the three stages in a bullfight. Picadors, mounted lancerswho work in teams of two, pierce the mound of muscle on the bull's neck to drain its staminathrough blood loss. Muscle fatigue forces the bull to drop its head, preparing it for stage two, whenthree banderilleros further bleed the animal by planting harpoons near the initial wounds. Only then,paired with a weakened bull, does the matador display his artistry in the final "stage of death."

In1861the illustrated political newspaper Harper's Weekly (est. 1857)hired Winslow Homer (1836-1910)~aself-taught journeyman illustrator from Boston-to rove the Union Army's front lines as

an artist-correspondent. During the next four years Homer drew nearly fifty Civil War pictures forHarper's Weekly, whose circulation topped 200,000 (in a nation of thirty million starved for images).Draftsmen copied Homer's lines on white-coated, wooden blocks and then engraved the lines forprinting. The resulting prints reproduced the original drawing in reverse.

The kaleidoscope of vignettes titled News from the War (June 14, 1862) Ifig. 31,portrays the off-stagemoments of epic violence: a crestfallen woman holds the source of her sorrow, a letter; on board aship, mail call has rewarded one sailor and left his mate dejected~a story told through arm position

ews from the War also contains a rare self-portrait. The artist sits on a barrel, sketchbook

in hand, oblivious to the onlookers crowding forglimpse. Beneath the scene is the inscription, "OurSpecial Artist" the honorific Harper's Weekly editors-whovery quickly realized his worth-conferred upon Homer.

Like many German artists, Max Beckmann (1884-1950)volunteered for duty when World War I erupted in

1914. Physically unfit for combat Beckmann served as amedic in a typhus hospital in Flanders and elsewhere.He sketched what he saw, bodies in operating roomsand morgues. A nervous breakdown led to Beckmann'sdischarge in 1915. Beckmann returned to painting in1917 with biblical scenes, such as Descent from the Cross.In 1918 Beckmann made an etching of the painting; 4

the resulting print Descent from the Cross [fig 4j, is the painting's skeletal reverse.

Beckmann-once called the "German Picasso'v-detested being labeled, particularly as anExpressionist. Near his life's end, he defined abstract art as a personal transformation of

nature's forms, which, he advised, shouldbe learned by heart "so you can use themlike the musical notes of a composition."Beckmann also transformed the oldmasters. Beckmann's Descent followsthe scheme of Rembrandt's etching,Descent from the Cross (1642), but evokes thetrenches. Beckmann's elongated Christresembles a wounded soldier or corpsecarried by orderlies; the plank from thecrucifix resembles a bi-plane's wing, theringed black sun, its cowl. Descent is afrenetic modern symphony of limbs-rightangles and triangles-climbing and crossingin jarring counterpoint, like a shell'saftershock. The perspectives clash-thekneeling women are seen from above, theorderlies from below-but both are joinedby Christ's arms.

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The name JifI Anderle (b.1936) lacks theaura of Goya, Blake, Beckmann or

Winslow Homer. This may change asthe Czech printmakers work becomesbetter known. Apropos of his work

as an actor in the 1960s with the Prague-based Black Theatretroupe, Anderle uses the humanface to express his prodigious imagination-fed by an intimacy with the world's masterpieces.Anderle's 1982etching, The Riders of the Apoccdypse Bring Death, Hunger, Warand PestUenceThroughout theWorld quotes one of the fifteen woodcuts Albrecht Durer published (1498) as a book; the back ofeach, huge illustrated page contained the running text of St John the Devine's first centuryRevelation.

In the Revelation, the allegorical riders appear individually, as the first four of seven seals, orheavenly judgments upon the earth. In Durer-following artistic convention of the time-the fourhorsemen ride abreast Perhaps St John aimed his apocalypse at the sins of Nero's Rome; andperhaps the fifteenth century's ominous close inspired Durer's apocalypse peasant revolts,famine, the black death, comets and blood rain over Nuremberg. With characteristicparsimony, Anderle reduced what Goethe termed Durer's "brain-confusing" phantasmagoriato a few, trembling ghostly lines. The heartless faces and crazed eyes of Anderle's elderly ridersevoke the grey Communist bureaucrats who strangled Eastern Europe from 1944 to 1989.Ostensibly treating the past-called "Diogenes language" by Eastern bloc artists=permitteeAnderle to criticize the present order under allegorical cover.

Lines of pain cut the world. Violence begins as an electrical impulse: neurons fire, fiberstwitch. Even in its most refined forms, violence springs from an instinctual core shut to directrational analysis Art originates from the same primal energy uncorrupted by avarice, hate andfear. Violence! reminds us that "eye sight is insight"

Tony Osborne, Guest EssayistAssociate Professor, Communication Arts

Gonzaga University

IMAGES

Cover: Ruth Weisberg (American, b.1942)Deposition (detail), 1968, Photo-Etching,16" x 19.5"Anonymous Loan

L William Blake (British, 1757-1827)after J.G. SteadmanThe Execution of Breaking on the Rack, illustration for Narrativeof a Five Years Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam,1793,etching and engraving,713" x 5.25"Collection of Gonzaga University

3. Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910)News from the War, from Harper's Weekly (June 14, 1862)wood engraving after a drawing by the artist, 186213.38" x 20.38"Collection of Gonzaga UniversityFrederick and Genevieve Schlatter Endowed Print Fund

2. Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, (Spanish, 1746-1828)Two Picadors Thrown Down One After Another By a Single Bull(Plate 32), from the series La Tauromaquia c.1815,etching and aquatint,9.50" x 13.75"Anonymous Loan

4. Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950)Descent from the Cross (Krellzavnaflme) (Plate II),from The Faces (Die GesicFlter), 1918,drypoint,12.06" x 10.13"Collection of Gonzaga UniversityThe Bolker Collection: Gift of Norman and Esther Bolker

5. JffIAnderle(Czech,bI93~,The Riders of the Apocalypse Bring Death, HLlnger, Warand Pestilence Throughout tfle World, after DUrer,from Cycle: Dialogue with the Grand Masters, 1982,etching and drypoint.37.63" x 25.56"Collection of Gonzaga UniversityThe Baruch Collection Gift of Dr. Anne Baruch

This publication is funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign, 2008- 2009©Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington 99258-000l