by Danny Evans
By the time I gazed at Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith at the Met for the first time, I had already photographed hundreds of artworks containing depictions of other artworks. While doing so I would fail to register the social minutiae occurring around me—a companion’s complaints of hunger; the unspoken but binding agreement that we wouldn’t linger too long in one wing, opting instead to rush from gallery to gallery, united by the ambition to sybaritically consume every morsel the museum had to feed our insatiable eyes, eventually abandoning the entire project at some unassuming moment, determined by corporeal necessities after all—not to mention the aesthetic merits of any individual work, the evaluation of which I grew less and less capable of as I relied more and more on highly overstimulating short-form video content. In a way, I was happier for foregoing each of these standard activities associated with the museum. A superegoic imperative to behave according to stuffy cultural expectations within that consecrated space had been entirely overwritten by something more immediately gratifying, like the yearning Hebrew inscribed atop uniform, scriptural Greek in “Palimpsest of the Liturgical Poet Yannai over Aquila’s Translation of 2 Kings 23:11-27,” formerly on display at the Met.
But my photography practice began to dissolve as soon as I happened upon the Allegory, situated to the left of the Study of a Young Woman, a more well-known Vermeer that, perhaps due to its structural similarities to the even more well-known Girl with a Pearl Earring, attracts legions of cultureless buffoons—such as myself, parading my phone around the galleries as I furiously photographed every instance of an artwork within an artwork that I could get those insatiable eyes on—to the innocuous gallery located in European Paintings: 1250-1800, hastily dubbed “Behind Closed Doors” by the curator and vaguely thematized around “major political changes that profoundly affected painting in the Dutch Republic beginning around 1650.”
Struck by the imminent dissolution of my routine, which would leave me with one less major refrain to return to in my Instagram story-posting—having, by that time, created a Highlight on my profile to exhibit photos of vastly dissimilar paintings from vastly dissimilar epochs, hastily dubbed “Ekphrasis 🖼️🖌️” by the curator and vaguely thematized around that term, which I would later learn refers most commonly to poetic descriptions of visual art in particular, and not to some interformal meta-genre consisting of any art “about” other art—I elected to write about the Vermeer instead of photographing it, wishing to execute a real ekphrasis, a symbolic exchange to nullify the embarrassment, now overwriting the palimpsest of my consciousness, about initially misunderstanding the word’s definition:
Titled Allegory of the Catholic Faith, the painting embodied—
At that point, just nine words in, the final “d” unsettled me, and a quick search on my phone—which, in that instance, served not as a tool for delivering highly overstimulating short-form video content, nor for representing representations of representations, but rather as a sort of crystal ball which let me ask the symbolic father for the most normative, law-abiding way to carry out a particular behavior, such as ekphrastic writing—confirmed the truth behind my anxiety. Indeed, one is meant to discuss art in what is called the literary present tense, a mechanism in writing that constructs an atemporal world in which eternal masterworks coexist and interact amongst themselves, forever ageless at the level of the sentence.
This confirmation unveiled a secondary concern, deeper in my body: that an apparently unassuming grammatical construction in fact metaphysically delineates the possibilities of experience beyond the level of any sentence at all, granting some categories, like art in its most abstract sense, access to a state of immortality, and dooming others, like physical paintings, to deteriorate as they march through the musty halls of linearity.
***
Titled Allegory of the Catholic Faith, the painting embodies what I had been searching for in my quest to photograph every self-referential work of art I came across. Far from characteristic for Vermeer, it features at least three obvious examples of what I had once called “ekphrasis”: the tapestry, weaving chivalric tropes in green, orange, and blue, draped as if across the canvas itself, alerting the viewer to the real contours of its graphic subject; the black crucifix to the woman’s right, which flaunts a golden Christ figurine, sparkling; and of course the passion scene hung on the back wall, appearing at once typical of its style, yet loaded with metaphorical resonance. In the end the work makes representation itself its subject, provoking an illicit enjoyment, a fulfillment of the incessant desire that had made irrelevant all other aspects of my appreciation of art.
But I hadn’t always walked through the Met like a zombie, photographing works of art that self-consciously call attention to their status as graphic contours of real subjects, ignoring everything else that was happening around me, doomed to deteriorate as I marched through the musty halls of European Sculpture and Decorative Art, looking, looking, looking for just one motif amid innumerable others. In fact, about a decade ago, I am in the museum on psychedelics, undergoing an essentially opposite experience: looking, looking, looking down at a hall of statues on the ground floor, I recognize that I have no sense of whether they are Greco-Roman originals or neoclassical imitations, and, in a panic, that the condition of hyperreality I find myself in renders opaque any difference between these two alternatives.
My goal becomes to find a single piece in the museum that escapes that singular thread, the apparently endless chain of simulacra. Instead, I find the academicist painter-sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea, portraying the scene from the Metamorphoses in which a sculptor kisses his statue as Aphrodite transfigures her body of ivory alabaster into the flesh of a woman.
The painting, which I would have photographed lustfully had I seen it a decade later, presents at least three obvious examples of what I would later call “ekphrasis”: several additional statues in Pygmalion’s workshop, including one enraptured by its own reflection; the masks of comedy and tragedy in the corner, with a shield beneath them that in turn reproduces an embossed reflection of those same masks; and a painting in the background with a Greco-Roman sensibility, locating the artist in that atemporal world in which the classical and the neoclassical coexist and interact amongst themselves, separated only by the three letters of a prefix.
Tripping, I study the didactic beside the painting and learn, to my horror, that Gérôme had also sculpted a three-dimensional version of the same Ovidian scene, and later went on to paint it twice more, each from a different angle, as though the drama could be assessed in the round from some impossible, four-dimensional viewpoint. And if this wasn’t enough, he’d eventually painted The Artist and His Model, a work that predicts the very madness of representation I fall into in the future from which I write, its content composed strictly of nested images of art and artmaking, the canvas of Pygmalion and Galatea—the same version I now view in the Met—in the background, implying a sort of fractal self-similarity.
Gérôme himself appears, too. Self-portrait as crafter of simulations, sculptor of a semblance in polychrome marble; beside the model, a woman of flesh (identical in all aspects but their materials).
What frightens me most about the consistency of imagery I detect in each artwork is not necessarily the sense of endless, spiraling self-referentiality, but rather that which it all seems to spiral around: a monotheistic God and his eventual incarnation in the body of man. In retrospect, I am naive, but I am not incorrect in thinking that this museum, like most or all museums in the hemisphere I was raised in, was built in such a way to insert this narrative, this shared archetypal origin, into the unconscious of each and every viewer that walks its musty halls, employing to this end subtle curatorial layout choices and devices of architectural design that rival Vermeer and his camera obscura in their perspectival trickery.
After peaking in front of a Rothko that basically regurgitates the exact same ideas seen in each previous wing of the museum, from Medieval Art to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism—substituting violent imagoes characteristic of the Judaeo-Christian mythos with barbaric, screaming fields of red and painterly blacks—it becomes evident to me that I will have to find my way out of the labyrinth of Western iconography and cleanse my palette with some other kind of art before getting the hell out of the museum once and for all. I am too high to locate the Astor Chinese Garden Court, a place familiar from early childhood visits to the Met in which I imagine the serene non-representation I yearn for, but I do manage to make my way to the Temple of Dendur.
There I study hieroglyphics for minutes or hours, watching in awe as half-nude figures with the heads of animals transform into semiotically charged pictographs, finally alphanumeric symbols. A private performance of the history of the letter, all staged for me and me alone.
***
A very long while after that acid trip, and a bit less long of a while since my last time photographing “ekphrastic art,” I returned to the Met, this time to view the museum’s newest exhibition of Ancient Egyptian relics and do research for a writing project that I had told several acquaintances was in a state of gestation (i.e., didn’t exist whatsoever)—a sweeping and fantastical narrative told from an Ancient Egyptian point of view, soaked in the divine waters of the Nile. In the years since the hieroglyphs at the Temple of Dendur had provided my impaired, still-maturing mind with an almost voyeuristic distraction from the reflexive maze of Euro-American visual customs, my interest in Ancient Egypt had only grown, and the idea of telling a story through two-dimensional eyes, insatiable or otherwise, now promised a homologous method of absconsion from the reflexive maze of my own writing.
At the exhibit, I was at first drawn to the gallery focusing on Ptah, patron of craftsmen and architects, primarily worshipped in Memphis, the ancient capital of Lower Egypt. Ptah, I wrote in the literary present tense, which I supposed applied to the study of comparative religion despite its glaring differences from that of literature, stands out among other Egyptian creator deities, such as Khnum the potter and Atum, progenitor of the Ennead pantheon, in several capacities. For one, his depiction across the corpus of Ancient Egyptian religious art, a category covering such vast distances in time and space that its very designation as a singular field seems questionable, is remarkably consistent.[1] Unlike other deities, who may appear in human, animal, or therianthropic forms—such as Anubis, operator of the scales of fate in the weighing of mens’ souls, variably a man, a jackal, or a man with the head of a jackal—Ptah is always shown with an anthropoidal head, accented by the square beard associated with human rulers rather than the curled beard that identifies deities.
Even more notably, Ptah is said to have accomplished the act of creation using not clay (like Khnum), nor solar energy (like Atum), but speech. By fabricating names in his ib, a term translated variably as “heart,” “thought,” or “mind,” and subsequently speaking them aloud, Ptah would implant life into the objects of the world and birth the deities of Memphite theology.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, but before that beginning and that word, there was another beginning in Lower Egypt, and another word to complement it—one composed of a series of stops, fricatives, and pharyngealized sounds with no equivalent in modern English, now lost to the shifting sands of indirect translation.
***
For a moment, enveloping myself in the cult of Ptah had indeed invoked a feeling of freedom from the musty halls of Abrahamism, but it soon dawned on me that this movement consisted of simply replacing one mirror with another. There was a stupidity in thinking of Ancient Egypt as a respite from the preoccupations of the West, whether in my past (rendered in the present) or my present (rendered in the past). If anything, the art and religion of this culture offered a possible root for the very complexes that would go on to characterize the infinite procession of copies of copies, from Vermeer to Gérôme to Rothko and beyond—with the Oedipal structure of kinship finding its prefiguration in the triad of Ptah-Sekhmet-Nefertum, or Osiris-Isis-Horus. At the very least it was another clue that these patterns were unavoidable, regardless of what region or time period I chose to peruse in a museum; perhaps this implied that the observation of said patterns had more to do with sociocultural preconceptions and personal fixations contained within the viewer himself than the specific content of any given work.
My trajectory, from a preoccupation with images of images to one with the constitutive power of language, seemed in fact a mere replication of the route I had taken on the day of the acid trip, from Western artistic representation to Ancient Egyptian religious signification. Like Gérôme, it was my fate to forever find my own subjectivity, my own fascinations, my own self-consciousness, at the core of whatever structures I encountered, be them imaginary, symbolic, etc.
Beyond the gallery focused on Ptah came a room devoted to Seth, a word that, in the context of the exhibition, was intended to signify a deity associated with chaos, sandstorms, violence, and a range of other disquieting notions, but, for me, instead referred to my father’s first name. An informational placard on the gallery’s wall read:
Perhaps no other deity plays more complex roles in ancient Egyptian mythology than the god Seth. In some stories he kills his brother Osiris, steals the throne of Egypt, and rips out the eye of his nephew, Horus. In solar theology, however, Seth is a powerful protector of Re and stands at the prow of the night barque, fighting off those who would harm the sun god. At some times, the king revered him as an ancestor god, and at others he was vilified and his representations erased or defaced.
Seth’s multifaceted roles are paralleled by the animal that represents him, an enigmatic composite creature rather than a known species. This hybrid form incorporates strange, disparate features: a long, downward-curling snout; tall, squared ears; and an erect and sometimes forked tail. Seth also manifests as a man with this animal’s head. The creature’s appearance is connected to the was scepter, an important symbol of dominion typically held by deities.
Given my ambivalent relationship with my father, Seth, and the wearisome shape of my fate—to forever find my own subjectivity, my own fascinations, my own blah blah blah, at the core of whatever structures I encountered, be them blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah, or “etc.”—wading through the muddy text of this placard was exceedingly difficult. From the fact that Seth was sometimes revered as an ancestor god and at others vilified; to his multifaceted roles and strange, disparate features (phrases I pictured myself using to describe our ambivalent relationship to an extraterrestrial); to most of all his wielding of a mystical implement called a was—a meaningless, if unavoidable, interlinguistic pun that I related automatically to my engrossment in the dense mystery of the past—I found it all to be almost too much to bear.
Having promptly decided that, no matter what direction it ended up heading, my story would certainly not feature Seth as a character, I recalled the analysis session I had been very late on time to that morning, in which we discussed my propensity for applying conceptual schemata to disparate events in my life, organizing reality itself through the act of formalization, like Ptah’s utterances, breathing life into the lungs of otherwise inanimate entities. In the session, I had deemed this habit “crazy-making” (a phrase my terror before the Seth placard confirmed the accuracy of), spoken of an intention to avoid it in the future, and even wondered if it originated in that hyperreal dimension of my sociopolitical circumstances that I had first clocked long ago on LSD.
But the truth was, my tendency to search for a meta-position from which I could order the chaos of worldly occurrences—such as the unfortunate linkage between an Egyptian desert god and my father’s given name—had little to do with the contingent historical climate I found myself in. Correlates could actually be found nearly anywhere, anytime. In early Christianity, for example, that tendency to search for such a meta-position—a second floor for looking, looking, looking down at earthly statues—was known as hermeneutics.
In the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, this interpretive practice is divided into four interlocking levels:
1. Literal, comprising the raw, material substance of articles recounted in a text—“by eternity, as God is before all things”;
2. Allegorical, in which the text becomes a surface for encoding hidden meanings in relation to a particular figure, e.g. Christ—“by time, as the flower before the fruit”;
3. Tropological, consisting of an analysis that finds within the text a groundwork for ethical concepts and organizational structures (such as the Church itself)—“by choice, as the fruit before the flower”;
4. Anagogical, an eschatological interpretation, unveiling an apocalyptic movement towards the end of history—“by original, as the sound before the tune.”
The first and last interpretations—a phenomenon in its absolutely physical meaninglessness, and the power it comes to inhabit when viewed as a single step in some vast teleological process—are, Augustine writes, the most difficult to comprehend. For me the four levels were all nearly impossible to tell apart, yet I couldn’t help but agree.
It was much easier to uncover secret messages and moral lessons in the texture of my life than to understand where it might end, or might have begun.
Floating between different tenses in the same location, I ask no one in particular, or rather the big Other, or maybe some little other: could Vermeer have known about Augustine’s specialized definition of “allegory” when he named his painting? Does the Dutch allegorie connect in any solid way with the Latin figura, or refer to something else entirely, like a specific genre of painting? Most importantly, did Vermeer even name his own works?[2] “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say is or was,” a friend sobs months later, mourning alongside me at the funeral, wondering in which tense to speak about the dead, which one the dead themselves respond in.
Regardless, it had at last become clear that my theoretical outlook, along with that of various 20th-century writers, filmmakers, and artists who I had once believed ushered in a fresh philosophical approach, was entirely ahistorical. I supposed it was more likely a question of disposition, having to do with the affective state of the body at a given moment and not with any kind of unique circumstances or talent for deconstructing one’s surroundings.
“Can you forgive me? I know I am wasting my time, but I am still looking, looking, looking for a map of the ground floor, for a way out of the museum, for a book to help me follow the history of it all, the history of the letter, or whatever’s there beyond it, but ‘history books,’ you remind me, ‘aren’t about history: they’re about other books.’”
______
Danny Evans lives in Chinatown, New York City. He recently rekindled his love for prose and verse after many soul-sucking years writing commercial copy. Danny has been published in GUM Magazine and has a forthcoming publication in A Common Well.Beyond writing, Danny has also played guitar in and composed songs for a range of acts including OLTH, Cash Only Tony’s, and many others. He has toured the continental U.S. with several of his bands and performed at European festivals. Find Danny on Instagram at @repetition.automatism and on Substack at @myheartisachainsaw.
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