This recent collage by
LauraTringaliHolmes provoked the following comment by
DouglasHumphries ~
”....but I have to ask ... as you may - or may not know ... I love looking at collage styles ....and I do notice the device of putting dark bands over the eyes - or x's ...etc ..... it has a strong effect ..... perhaps it ends up, in time ,becoming a bit of a cliche - but I still find it striking .
....but what does this device mean -- in words . Is it explainable ?”
Provoked, puzzled and perplexed, I went a-googling. I stumbled across Dada, Surrealism, Freud and Derrida, and – in the ways of the internet – many delightful and irrelevant detours (Lady Gaga as the Antichrist? Who knew?).
Here are some thoughts, gleaned from a range of sources, and stripped of some of the more obfuscating jargon.
Firstly, and rather obviously, the eye has been a symbol for thousands of years. Eyes are perhaps the most psychologically and symbolically loaded elements of the face. (The mouth possibly second most significant, then trailing in a nondescript third place we have ears. Noses not so much, except perhaps for the smallest mask in the world – the clown’s red nose.) Eyes are vulnerable – there is a squeamishness about damage to the eyes that is stronger than the emotions evoked by harm to other body parts (remember the eye transplant scenes in
Minority Report?). Eyes are decorative. Eyes are windows to the soul. Eyes represent both seeing and being seen ~ the power of the mutual gaze.
So what does it mean to obscure the eyes, occlude the gaze? Again, there is a long history of hidden eyes as a powerful symbol in art, in literature, and in society. Think of blindfolded Justice, where the loss of external sight seems to promise an enhancement of internal vision and objectivity. Think about the black square placed over the eyes of a person or criminal whose identity is being protected. Think, even, of celebrities wearing dark sunglasses to evade attention. Hidden eyes are associated with mystery, hidden identity. It is a strange paradox in that a blindfolded person seems vulnerable, stripped of dignity; while a deliberate blanking out of one’s own eyes (by wearing sunglasses, for example) reads as cryptically powerful. Aligned with this is the common trope of an eyeless being to create horror and fear (think of the eyeless monster in
Pan’s Labyrinth, for example).
The impact on the viewer is profound. Any form of blanking out the eyes, whether with sunglasses, blindfolds, black rectangles, text, disruptive image, or blurring, triggers a disconcerting sense of stalled exchange between viewer and viewed, an interruption of the empathy effect. Ironically, crossing out or erasure of an element in a picture draws our attention to it and makes this area more significant; and incomplete faces serve to thus provoke speculation about the complete face, which remains unseen. So, in art, hiding the eyes creates a paradoxical sense of both absence and presence (what Derrida calls “a visible absence”), and a heightened sense of anxiety and unease in the viewer.
It is, in art historian terms, “additive subtraction” ~ a dissociative device which creates an energy of engagement as the viewer tries to close the gap and cover the distance created. Erasure, it turns out, is just a particularly profound form of focus and preservation.
As a viewer, you wonder ~ Is the subject of the picture unseeing, or am I – as the viewer – unseen? Perhaps the artist is using figurative distortion to create a mood of disquiet, or to evoke in the viewer a frisson of desire for illicit knowledge? There is curiosity about the faces that cannot be seen, lest we be seen by them; whose gazes are turned inwards on themselves. Maybe the artist is trying to say something about her subject’s vulnerability; or about the subject’s inability to see clearly both internally and externally, consciously and subconsciously? Perhaps the artist is wrestling with the concept of identity, creating a face without memory: a personal
tabula rasa. And, yes, maybe it’s just a cliché, a cool device that adds an appealing decorative element to the page.
Enough academic discourse. Let’s look at some examples. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
I
derkert’s
Jane is a shockingly good example of this device.
Jane seems lost, overwhelmed. Trapped and caged in a gridded tank, her speechless mouth open but breathless, and strangely hinting at a hidden smile. But I cannot see her eyes, so I cannot read her mouth. Is it a scream, perhaps, after all?
Remnants of an apocalyptic cityscape loom over her head: there is no succour there; it is far away and it seems almost ruined. The blindfolded eyes (in a startling, sanguine red) reduce her to object, rather than subject of the piece, and create an unwilling voyeur out of the viewer, enhanced by her almost-nakedness. Your eyes are invited to wander her curves, while she cannot see you watching her. “Who is she?”, you wonder; “How did she get here?”, “Who will save her?”. A painfully beautiful helplessness imbues this piece.
II
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LizCohn’s
Pearl Choker is aptly named. The large-scale erasure of the eyes (in a texture interestingly reminiscent of a barcode) obliterates the identity of the sitter. Her complacent smile remains, together with her staggering jewelry which inevitably draws all the focus in this piece. “This is all you need to know about me,” she seems to be saying. “I have beautiful jewelry.” And just in case our eyes wander to her cleavage instead, a row of arrows directs our attention back up to the pearls.
In contrast to Jane, above, this woman seems to be confident, powerful, amused. As a viewer, I have the unsettling sense that her gaze is on me, and she is finding me altogether too bourgeois, too grubby, too ungroomed. And, moreover, my jewelry is non-existent.
III
GregPDX’s
Mixed Media Collage 182 has a very different impact to the previous pieces. The immediate response is a snort of mirth. The main character seems to have deliberately chosen to hide his eyes – not from us as the viewers, but because he doesn’t want to see what’s going on behind him. “I don’t want to know,” he says prissily.
The text of the occlusion on his eyes is a witty incongruity that creates a spark of interpretive energy in the viewer. And so I know what else he’s thinking ... “I don’t care what those two are getting up to. Whatever it is, it’s not healthsome.”
IV
Life time stories by
sozialfuzzi has a quite unbearable tenderness about it. The piece uses
sous rature or erasure throughout, with the background text misty and vague. Odd phrases loom through the textures; the colours are faded to well-washed monochrome, like a much-loved nightie that has been laundered into a ghost of itself. The viewer is tantalised, straining to make out recognisable phrases. We want to know.
The text used to blank out the sitter’s eyes (“here you are with your story and no one wants to hear. here you are with your fiction and no one wants to see. except for you.”) is exquisitely poignant. The irony is that the artist has borne witness to the personhood of this individual, and as viewers we yearn to hear his story, to collaborate in his fiction. Erasure, here, creates powerful presence, and potent connectedness. We feel a mourning of loss of identity – both that of the sitter and the awareness that our own stories will one day be similarly lost and gone.
And yet there is the red heart, and the assertive, confident pose of the sitter with his brave moustache. Maybe our grandchildren will find our photographs one day, and make collages out of them to post on deviantart. What will they paste over our eyes, I wonder?
“Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind."Georges Rouault (1871-1958), French painter.
(Thanks to
Athalour for the interesting discussion and some of the comments on the pieces.)
Available as a News article here ~
news.deviantart.com/article/13…Curious to see more? How do you "read" these?
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