Seeing Darkness Gallery

Hello, and welcome to Seeing Darkness. Seeing Darkness is an online art gallery located on the internet at seeingdarkness.blogspot.com. The gallery curator is Brendan Bennett who is an online art history student at Crafton Hills College, Yucaipa, California. The Seeing Darkness gallery hosts exhibitions that are spiritually and emotionally dark by nature which tend to make an audience feel disturbed, squeamish, or uneasy. This gallery specializes in pieces of artwork concerning death, agony, torment, and destruction. So, dim the lights and enjoy the exhibit!

Living Death Exhibition

To live, one must eventually die, and to die, one had to have lived. The Seeing Darkness gallery's current exhibit is the Living Death exhibit. The purpose of the Living Death exhibition is to expose the realities and value of death and in turn, life. Life and death are two contrasting states which humans are on an endless journey to understand, and after touring this exhibit, the curator intends for the audience's understanding of life and death to enhance. The pieces of artwork in this exhibit are all connected by their exploration of death, destruction, and demise. Due to the fascinating subject of life and death, as well as the fact that Gardner's Art Through the Ages textbook offers an abundance of information, the curator picked the pieces he did. The artists showing in this exhibit include Francis Bacon, Otto Dix, Henry Fuseli, Francisco Goya, Andrea Mantegna, Masaccio, Timothy O’Sullivan, Claus Sluter, Martin Schongauer, David Wojnarowicz. Enjoy, and be thankful for death because without it, there would be no life.

Claus Sluter,Well of Moses,Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon, France,1395–1406.Limestone with traces of paint, three dimensions

Claus Sluter who resided in the Netherlands was commissioned by Phillip the Bold in 1389 to manage the sculptoral program at a Carthusian monastery called Chartreuse de Champmol ("character house" in English). Sluter designed a large fountain called the Well of Moses which was attached to a well and intended to be the water source of the monastery. The design includes Moses and five other prophets (David, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zachariah), and above the prophets are Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist, and Mary Magdalene. Christ's blood symbolically flowed down the fountain past the prophets.

This work has a clear connection to this show for a two reasons. First, the well was originally called the Fountain of Everlasting Life (fons vitae), but it was given the name Well of Moses later. The term everlasting life is a contradiction because life is only temporary, for it is interrupted by death. Also, the fact that this well represented life is a reminder of life's counterpart, death. Life and death are two parts that create a whole since one is not attainable without the other. Next, Claus Sluter died before completing this work. This truth is another reminder of the short journey of life and the unstoppable force of death. Someone who tried to bring everlasting life into this temporary world died before achieving it. So, for these two reasons, there is a clear connection between this work and the exhibit.

David Wojnarowicz, “When I put my hands on your body,”1990.Gelatin-silverprint and silk-screened text on museum board, two dimensions

David Wojnarowicz was a gay activist and did many works which expressed his thoughts and feelings on this subject and the subject of AIDS. He was born in New Jersey in 1954 then proceeded to live and do most of his work in the New York art world until he died in 1992 in New York City. This work laid text of a silkscreen image to communicate the artists feelings about AIDS affect on the human body and soul. This powerful technique of using an image with text is still used today for advertising.

This work belongs in this show because it has a direct connection to death. Clearly, this piece shows death as part of the forefront of the image. The inspiring force behind this work is David's experience with death of friends by AIDS. Also, David himself died of AIDS at young age of only thirty-eight. Conclusively, David is now one of the skeletons in his silkscreen image and is a part of the text lying in front of the crumbling corpses.

Francis Bacon, Painting,1946.Oil and pastel on linen, two dimensions

 

Francis Bacon was born in ireland on 1909. He specialized in expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, and he is most known for his raw and brutal imagery. Bacon is even quoted saying that his art expresses the "brutality of fact." This work was created by Bacon in response to World War II. The butchery in this image is intended to be a reflection of the realities of war and all the tragedy that accompanies it. The image shows a spread carcass in front of a man who has blood dripping from his upper-lip, exposing him as a carnivore. The blood running from this man's mouth is the blood spilled on the battlefield, and he is the war machine consuming human life as meat.

This image exposes the brutality of war and the death that accompanies it. War is a butchery, and the meat that enters the butchery of war belongs to cognitive humans. Death is the essence of war, and they stand side-by-side.

Andrea Mantegna,Foreshortened Christ,ca.1500.Tempera on canvas, two dimensions

 

Andrea Mantegna was born and resided in the Italian city of Padua, near Venice. He learned to paint in a fresco program that took him nine years to complete. Mantegna is accredited with creating the first consistent illusionistic decoration of an entire room in the Camera Picta in the palace of Ludovico Gonzaga. This artist designed this work to challenge his skill of perspective and represent the emotional tone of a foreshortened life of Christ. His intentions were to depict the biblical tragedy of Christ's death. This work expresses Mantegna's mastery of perspective where he scaled the feet so that they would not consume the body, so the feet are not realistically represented. Also, he used harsh lines to convey a harsh emotional tone.

This painting has an obvious relation to the exhibit. Christ's life was cut short. Death is not only inevitable but also unpredictable. This peaceful cadaver and its onlookers express a powerful emotional tone that represent the great tragedy of a foreshortened life.

Otto Dix, Der Krieg (The War),1929–1932.Oil and tempera on wood, two dimensions

 

Otto Dix was a part of Neue Sachlichkeit ("new objectivity" in English) which was a group of artists who were enlisted in the German military during World War I. Dix was an avid reader of philosophy and read Friedrich Nietzsche  most frequently. From Nietzsche and war Dix developed an intense understanding of the depth of life, and he nderstood life to be a cyclical pattern of life and death. This work is intended to expose the nature of war. To the left you see a group charging into battle as a group, the middle shows the aftermath of a battle, the bottom shows the aftermath of an aftermath which is a decaying corpse beneath the earth, and the right shows a man, intended to be Dix himself, pulling another man to safety. The exposure of death and tragedy brings the audience completely into the painting. Ultimately, this painting has astounding depth when all the panels are considered. Like other Neue Sachlichkeit artists, Dix's art's purpose was to expose the bare realities of the time.

This painting is a part of this exhibit because of Otto's understanding of death. Not only was he in a war where he saw and experienced death of allies first hand but he also researched and studied philosophies of life and death. Dix's deep understanding of life made him qualified to paint on behalf of death.  As a member of the audience, a person feels like they're a spectator on the battlefield. So, it is clear why this piece is a part of the exhibit.