H O M E E X H I B I T I O N S G A L L E R Y M A N I F E S T O A R T  T H E O R Y L I N K S

ARMANDO ALEMDAR - A DIALECTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF ART NEOMODERNISM ET IN ARCADIA EGO Political correctness has wrought considerable havoc with the traditional symbols of European art, but one symbol, the lamb, has fared better than most. One could say that the lamb has enjoyed a mystical re-birth as a symbol for art in a picture by Andre Durand which reflects with considerable humour, tongue and cheek on a post-modern work by Damien Hirst. The lamb (sometimes a sheep or ram) begins its gamble through the history of art when the early Christians adopted this sacrificial animal to represent an innocence that defeats sorcery - and pagans - gentleness, purity and self - sacrifice. If the lamb bleeds into a chalice it represents Christ’s crucifixion; if it carries a banner it becomes a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. We had to wait to the close of the 20th century and Durand’s picture Et In Arcadia Ego which includes a lamb in a high tech fish tank to realise that Hirst’s Away from the Flock (plate XII) has achieved icon status as a symbol of art - art that has gone astray. Not only does the lamb in Durand’s picture assume new symbolism, but the elliptical title Et In Arcadia Ego takes a new meaning quite different from the analogue that was coined in the 17th century. George III believed Arcadia was a place of prefect bliss and Utopian beauty far removed from reality but Greek authors knew the real Arcadia was the domain of the great god Pan, who played the syrinx in a place that was actually a bleak, rocky country devoid of all the comforts of life. Virgil idealised Arcadia.68 The pastoral kingdom of Arcady has been a constant source of inspiration for innumerable artists. Among the most celebrated pictures by Guercino and Poussin (plate XIII) give central importance to a tomb that is supposed to be the final resting place of an unknown shepherd that died from grief - some say of unrequited passion. The Utopian bliss of Arcady could not heal his broken heart. Et In Arcadia Ego could have other definitions such as: I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady or, Even in Arcady there I am.69 After much deliberation, Erwin Panofsky (Meaning in the Visual Arts, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1955) concludes that it is not the ghost of the shepherd that declaims to us from the depths of the rustic sarcophagus, but Death itself - there is Death even in Arcadia. Just when we thought that the definition of this esoteric anagram had been elucidated by Panofsky, Andre Durand gives it another spin as he titles a picture painted during his tenure as artist in residence at Kingston University’s Stanley Picker Gallery, Et in Arcadia Ego (plate XIV). The Art Lovers could be an ironic subtitle for Durand’s composition which gives as much portent to Damien Hirst’s Away From the Flock as Poussin gave to the symbolic sarcophagus. Durand’s four Arcadian shepherds adopt a very different attitude to the presence of Hirst’s post-modern sepulchre, an attitude unprecedented in any of the other pictures Durand must have considered before he painted his own version of Et In Arcadia Ego. In every picture of this subject the shepherds examine carefully the tomb they have come upon. In Durand’s Et In Arcadia Ego all four shepherds refuse to scrutinise Hirst’s lamb embalmed in formaldehyde. They turn their backs to it. If the artist had not painted himself as one of the shepherds we might wonder what this Arcadian quartet could be thinking. With a self-portrait to remind us of Durand’s personal commitment to the content of his picture we can safely guess that these shepherds could have art historical questions on their mind. This supposition is substantiated by another likeness. The eldest shepherd in the upper right-hand of the composition is a portrait of Dr. Andrew Ciechanowiecki, the classical scholar and collector of renaissance bronzes. We note that Hirst’s icon, like all post-modern endeavours, mocks the autonomy of aesthetics and form and painting generally, however the four generations of shepherds in Durand’s picture understand the truth in Hirst’s flippant comment (quoted above) that there is something definitely wrong with the art world and that he is certainly not a genius. Durand has said that he saw Away from the Flock in the Serpentine Gallery on the day that ink was spilt into the formaldehyde. The thought of a black sheep must have triggered his imagination - a blackened, dead, post-modern lamb. So often a victim in European art, the lamb suddenly became a symbol for art itself; the tank a tomb. Hirst’s pickled sheep had become a symbol of how far art had gone astray. Durand’s Et In Arcadia Ego with its traditionally painterly values evinces an epiphany of Hegel’s Idea made eloquently manifest in the nude shepherd who’s self-contained beauty fills the composition linking the picture’s iconography to ancient Greece. Like Henry Moore, Durand has spent many hours in the British Museum contemplating and drawing that indisputably great piece of sculpture, the so-called Ilissus (plate XV) from the east pediment of the Parthenon which represents a formal discovery as valid as the formulation of a philosophic truth.70 We understand why it was often the artisans who painted the Greek sculptures who were paid higher wages then the carvers when we study the way Durand has rendered the luminous flesh tones of his shepherd in oil on canvas. Here we are confronted with a nude equal to any that preceded it - an implacable Ilissus to greet the millennium. A classical nude emerges and signals a new direction in the history of art which we will title with a tortology - Neomodernism. The Idea and the symbol of the Nude are two of the criteria of a Neomodernist picture but Durand’s Et In Arcadia Ego has Albertian depth, as invented by Brunellesco and tempts us to concur with Arthur C. Danto in the Nation Magazine (“MoMA: What’s in a Name”, July 17th, 2000) and abandon Greenberg’s exceedingly narrow conception of Modern art as a self-inquiry which he saw in modern picture’s “ineluctable flatness of the surface”. The heady mixture of a post-modern icon, the Nude, the sense of space and depth (a Latin title to boot) in Durand’s Et In Arcadia Ego fuses seamlessly into an image that supersedes postmodernism dialectically. No wonder the shepherds do not tend Hirst’s sheep because Away from the flock has been entombed in Durand’s Neomodernist Arcadia. Postmodernism is dead. Spirituality and beauty in painting have been resurrected. We still have the power to recognise and acknowledge the Idea. True, art had gone astray, but Durand’s Et in Arcadia Ego, continues the inexorable dialectical process of movement from so called high art to postmodernism and onwards. The Arcadian shepherd, Hegelian or Marxist, should welcome this U-turn in the history of art. Neomodernism brings back the traditional and eternal values of art and at the same time contemplates the essence and potential of the present. BACK   FORWARD