Day & Night: David Haines 2005
Anne Finegan
A vast panorama of sheer sandstone cliffs glow in the last light of the afternoon sun; below, beckoning broodily, is Homer's "wine-dark sea". Against this mythical setting, plastered, enigmatically, two thirds up the cliff-face is the dot of a figure, which, upon close inspection, is revealed to be a human form with its arms and legs spread-eagled, as to achieve a better grip. The scale alone of figure against ground is enough to recall the description so eloquently quoted from Borges by Foucault, of animals "which from a distance look like flies."1
Mysteriously pinioned on the cliff-face, the figure is stuck: undecidably in an equally treacherous ascent or descent.
And equally undecidable is the viewer response which is agitated - 'torn' being too strong a word - between a concern for the figure and the over-riding emotional rush of restless contemplation of a scene which is both serenely beautiful and disturbingly sublime. For the panorama is vast, awakening that complex of emotions which Kant named the supersensible; the mind taken beyond its normal computational limits in the face of giant forms, which, in this instance, are also the dynamical of nature, heightened by the sense of danger. But there is no storm, no swirling masses of tempest, only the terrifying distance sketched by the gleam of the light at the top of the cliffs and the steep fall into shadows of deep calm. Thus excited but also soothed by the stillness and the warmth of sun upon sandstone, the immediate response is not one of of panic. Nature is abidingly restful, at peace with herself in the midst of great awe; and the viewer, well-positioned from some fictive point on another headland, can safely enjoy, or would enjoy, were it not for the perturbation of the figure. An irritating annoyance.
It's not that it [undiscernably neither a he nor a she] spoils the panorama. There are no ugly ropes to pull one back to the real; no intrusion from the world of abseiling to recall the spectator from the vision of nature to the practicalities of sport. How else does one describe the sheer heights of such cliffs lapped by a sea of that colour? No, the disturbance is of another order. There's a mark, a flyspeck, in Barthes' terms a punctum, around which the scene then unwillingly organises itself. This vast, vast scale which dwarfs the spectator, which dwarfs the dot on the wall, is still perturbed by the distraction of the human form in shadow-relief.
The vastness of nature seems to revolve around this figure, simply because the viewer has now noticed it. Contemplation shrinks from the clarity of the infinite 'on' of the cliffs and the sea to a fuzzified point. This one, a shrunken sigularity, an x-marks-the-spot of the spread-eagled figure, achieves a rapid zoom effect which telescopes infinity inwards to a dramatic, and feeble, splat on the wall.
This on its own is irritating enough. The comfortable illusion of German Romanticism's tranquil contemplation, deliciously heightened by the deeps of the sublime, has been spoiled; the trope of a lone wanderer's eye sullied by a troublesome speck. It little matters whether the viewer was identifiying with one of Casper David Freidrich's solitary contemplators, or the pure gaze of Wilson's View On Cader Idris (1770-5); the myth of the wanderer's privileged access to Nature is shattered.
Instead, simply, perhaps, for enjoying too much, for drinking in the entirety of the scene in the pleasure of the roving gaze [for rove the gaze must in a work of this size, the immersive scale demands it], the viewer now has to deal with this detail which the viewer would have preferred to have escaped attention.
From one scene to the next, in the flash of a moment in which the darkened light of sunset deepens, this figure might vanish. For, having seen it, the viewer is caught in the shadows trying to discern the relationship of the figure to the cliff in the race against time. We all know how quickly the shadows fall; part of the cliff is already eclipsed.
Further, in this moment of realisation the dilemnas begin. Has the figure climbed up or down? Is it really a figure or the play of shadow? An aberrant cave form cut into the rock? In accepting this dilemna, the viewer, no longer safe but concerned, is drawn into a combat with the looming void. The instant concern is registered, there is no turning back. The viewer is set on an interpretative path in which the viewer's perceptual apparatus comes into play in an altogether different mode. No longer in the contemplative play of the beautiful/sublime, in a kind of abstracted and pleasurable musing, the viewer is taking stock of risk, calculating gravity against the height of the fall.
The absence of a discernable safety harness, and a corresponding party of figures to make up the abseiling team, effectively barrs the way for a sense-making narrative, which would naturalise and neutralize this scene, releasing the viewer. So now, for lack of a plausible interpretation, the viewer is also stuck in the problem of the figure on the wall.
To make matters worse the second image completing this work is a doubled doppleganger of dark clouds brooding in equal intensity to that mythic sea, thus adding to the air of irresolution.
By way of associative memory the clouds begin to shape the void with a body double of the shadow of the figure on the wall, conjuring the hallucinatory absences made present in such works as Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure., or a Derridean/de Man undecidablity stretching over the abyss.2 In Blanchot's novel, Thomas, an obsessional neurotic plays at death many times over, as if by continuing to imagine death, to play death out in advance, he will forestall the inevitable, approaching event.
Like the figure on the cliff-face, undecidably ascending or descending, Thomas gets caught in logically upsetting, impossible figuralities. In one instance, finding himself inside a pit which he has possibly hallucinated from the depths of night during a walk in the forest, Thomas is dominated by "the sense of being pushed forwards by his refusal to advance."3 Thomas seems locked in the kind of paralysed movement of fear in which one is being penetrated by forces which seem to come from elsewhere in the body, as from another source of instruction other than the mind. Imagine that stuck figure, imperiled on the cliff-face, traversed by similar impulsions to movement, to push forward against the fear to advance.
But in which direction? Both encourage paralysis. Descent confronts an undecidable abyss of rocks and waves, compounded with darkness. And it doesn't promise a point at which one could rest, safe and secure. In the interminable mind-games of this undecidability, descent reduces the dreadful height of a possible fall, against an equally perilous ascent giddy with the promise of nearness to the top and the probabilities of one fatal slip.
Then, in the second image, there are those clouds, cast over the shapless void as if the void were shaping itself, in preparation for a body, a psychical body. Blanchot's Thomas experiences the kinds of out-of-body disocciation promised by such clouds4.
Resolution, it seems, will only be offered by displaced figuralities, which are hallucinated or imagined in the transference from the cliff to the paradoxically solid or manifest void of the clouds: clouds "full of a being whose absence it absorbed."5 Between the two images which compose Haines' work, between the clouds and the dark shape of the human, arms outstretched on the cliff, there is only a figure in exchange - psychically disembodied, floating in the contradiction of art's own void.
In respect of literature, Blanchot had arrived at a similar position which he described as "the void in the process of realization; it is absolute :freedom which has become an event."6 In Day & Night the freedom to fall is activated out of the consciousness of the void. Blanchot's terrible secret of the nothingness or void at the heart of the work of literature (or art) manifests: "at this moment, freedom aspires to be realized in the immediate form of everything is possible, everything can be done. A fabulous moment -."7 Transposing Blanchot's insight to Haines' work, "as one realizes the void, one creates a work."8
Notes
1. Foucault, Michel. Preface to The Order of Things. (New York: Vintage, Random House, 1970), vx.
2. Derrida, Jacques The Double Session in Disseminations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight (London: Methuen, 1983).
3. Blanchot, Thomas. Thomas The Obscure in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Trans. Lydia davis, Paul Aster & Robert Lamberton (Barrytown: Stanton Hill Press, 1999), 59.
4. Blanchot, Thomas. Thomas The Obscure , 59.
5. Blanchot, Thomas. Thomas The Obscure, 73.
6. Blanchot, Thomas. "Literature and the Right to Death." The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ibid., 375
7. Blanchot, Thomas. "Literature and the Right to Death", 375.
8. Blanchot, Thomas. "Literature and the Right to Death", 395.
Images from the production shoot: Point Perpendicular NSW
