In the Wake of the Annunciation
Annunciation.
Finitude pierced. God, deus ex machina,
hidden from the participants, but not always from us, the distant onlookers,
sends His proxy, Gabriel, the sexless angel with the gendered Proper Name, to
inform a virgin of her unexpected fortune. Even as Gabriel speaks (in some
versions the communication and the event, like a speech act, are co-terminous) He implants her with His Son. The ethereal
lightening of the infinite short-circuits the physiology and biology of sub-lunary reproduction.
Response. An
instinctive welling-up of disbelief in addressee and witness alike is the
pre-condition of the force of belief. The foundation
is also the ground of rejection; for what will arise above must not touch its
base, least like anti-matter it vanishes upon contact. Mythic exceptionalism alone will do for the Word made flesh - made
image. A late-Medieval genre enacts the sacrifice of experience as the
condition of faith. A small price: practical reason is deferred for the oceanic
sense of religious community; the double-binding of belief by means of a virgin
birth. Faith is called an act: it is more properly called a ritual. The performative relation depicted in the image underpins the performative transaction of the believer. Flash of
feathered wings. White dove of a new dawn. Annunciation.
If we take the Annunciation scene depicted in the
Chapel of the Annunciation, in Sancta Maria Sopra
Minerva, painted by Antoniazzo Romano, in Rome, in
1508, as our point of reference, then two features immediately call for further
explanation; the left to right movement of the narrative (the Annunciation and
the Conception) and the position of God on the left hand side of the image. The
left to right movement is the default directionality of represented time, the
arrow of time in art. However the deity, source of the moral sense of
left/right in the image's mis-en-scene, is
on our left; strange given our culture's (indeed most cultures') negative
tagging of left-handedness - its intimate relation with taboo. This other left/right directionality -called
Left/Right (Moral) in contradistinction to Left/Right (Narrative)- is God's eye view. His preferences trump ours; our
subjective co-ordinates are inverted. God's Right supersedes our 'left'. The
combining of these two co-ordinates, L/R (Narrative), and L/R (Moral) into a
single image can be found in the majority of cases of the Annunciation genre,
where the God/Virgin relation takes the object's right (God is on the image's
[top] right). However, this union of axes is supplemented by the
Virgin/Supplicant relation which is found to be taking place in the viewer's,
subjective priority (the virgin is on our right) following the traditional
sense of good and bad, or mighty and
lesser, as apportioned between (our) right and left. Two 'rights', that of the
subject (third person priority) and the object (second person priority),
therefore combine with the left/right of narrative direction and are further
augmented by the upper/lower relation, as the divider between temporal and
a-temporal (or eternal) entities. In this particular example of the
Annunciation we can even find the inner frame (a frame within a frame) normally
used to differentiate a prior event from the present, used here to frame the
image's key a-temporal entity. Two hierarchies are coded according to different
directionalities and based upon different traditions (based upon second and
third person relations in representation). The arrow of time, so often
presented in this genre as a beam of light (as causality) is present as a pure
directionality which carries the conception of Christ into Mary from (our) left
to right. We are its (third person) witnesses. In an elegant solution, we find
the incorporation of the counter-intuitive L/R (Moral) with the default L/R
(Narrative) as the latter's point of origin.
If we begin with the reflection of this image in the
present, the trail of the Annunciation will lead us up through the hallways of
the arcane to the familiar; the twentieth century photograph. However, if we
step back through the image, we find, waiting behind its serene face, the
secret configuration of its elements - a secret that will lead us away from the
Late-medieval Annunciation all the way back to the Bronze Age Assyrian
statuette.
The Wake of the Annunciation. A trail leading from the genre's pious zenith in the late-Medieval
and Renaissance periods through to the profane nadir of the twentieth century.
Its track is that of a spectre superimposed upon the image (a double-exposure),
ghosts present at the birth of the work of art, palimpsests steering the hand
of the artist. The trail of the Annunciation is the trail of its imprint on
form, its marks upon the history of the image in the continuities of
left/right and their attendant influence upon the image's mis en scene. The guiding hands of this form (both left and right)
dispose and encourage today's deposition of entities in the image and so steer
our assumptions as to their meaning and value. Like a persistent negative,
opposite in values to its photographic image but identical in form. The after-life of the Annunciation.
A contemporary of Romano's, Garofalo,
in '
At the same time in
Crossing the threshold of the French Revolution, the step
before the door of Modernity in
A photograph that is four hundred years old. What
would better incarnate the very matter of the medieval Annunciation than the
modern marriage photograph? Moving from a marriage made in heaven to mariage ŕ la mode, we arrive in the early
twentieth century. In Gianni Berengo Gardin's photograph of a bride in
Before we tarry with the negative and step into the
shadow of the Annunciation, let us first note two positive uses made from its
structure. One use is traditional, a matter of first and last things: the other
a matter of things in between, of instruction. Doris Ulman
offers the African-American way of death and sacrality
in 'Black Grave, South Carolina', also a Still Life strung out on the sacred
diagonal, and in her atmospheric 'Baptism Scene, South Carolina' (both
1929-30). Whilst in 'Children looking at Ronald C. Moody's Midonz:
Godess of Transmutation' (photograph, 1937) hierarchy
is shown in what is perhaps one of its few positive aspects, that of the ideal,
that which we look up - as the children do, along that same diagonal, to learn
of a positive image for themselves. For,
contrary to figure and opinion, both black and white (and all shades in
between) appear, even if reversed, on photograph and negative alike (negatives
are not black).
The lifting of the veil from the grey muscle it barely
concealed offers the truth of the relation of hierarchy to violence. Twentieth
century photography reveals these relations in an image which appears to
appropriate the symbolic directionalities of the Annunciation in order to
include all and any form of domination within its frame. These gradients of
hierarchy and oppression can be seen in a range of photographs taken from the
Museum Ludwig, Köln: ranging from the economic socialisation of Lewis W.
Hine's, 'Glass Factory' (1908) and Alexander Rodchenco's
violent rhetoric of progress, 'Photomontage for LEF, Nr. 3' (1923), through
images inspired by the destruction of war in Lásló
Moholy-Nagy's, 'Militarism' (1924), and Wolf Strache's,
'Berlin, Kurfürstendamm, After a Major Air Raid'
(1942), to the chilling allegories of oppression and catastrophe found in
William Klein's, 'Playing Children with Gun' (1954-55), and Astrid Klein's,
'30. 1. 33' (1983). Moreover, the tendency of the Left/Right (Moral) formula in
the photographic image of the twentieth century to depict relations of
dominance is not just an aberration, not just a short detour away from the path
of the sacred and of last things. For the Left/Right (Moral) relation will be
found to be returning home when it represents power and its negative effects -
for it is the depiction of the place of power that is its original source and
inspiration. To understand how this can be, we must first retrace our steps,
reversing our passage through time.
The Wake of the Annunciation. Now the wake can be
found stretching-out far behind the Annunciation, a trail receding into the
past, a disturbance marking the sea up to the horizon of our vision, the horizon
of the history of the image. (Now whatever else there may be must lie beyond,
hidden in the past of the past, in the pre-history of the image).
One ancient avatar of the Annunciation may be found in
an image long buried in the sands of
It may be sculpture, however, that is the oldest
source of the valorised left position in the image (our left; object's Right).
In this relationship of hierarchy and power, it is the imperative face of power
that we find before us prompting the homage of kings and vassals. For the face
on the regal statue insists, by asserting the priority of its right hand, that
it is its own point of view that must come first. It is the prerogative of
power to inflict upon those that dare to engage it face to face its own set of
values - not least its own sense of left and right. The second person relation
of the statue reminds us of its priority over us; again the living accept
directions from the dead. The trail we have been following has now lead us to
its terminus, to Gudea's naked right arm (the ruler
of the Assyrian city state of Lagash in 2100 BC famously depicted with his
muscular right arm uncovered) part of a genre of statues and statuettes whose
reign lasted well over a millennium and a half. The shadow of the deity is that
of the strong-arm man hiding, just out of frame, behind the top left corner of
the image.
The vortex of directionalities and depths that
constitute the trail of the Annunciation appear to have at least a double
origin. From sculpture, we are offered the source of the left position for God,
the object's Right, the place of power: in contradistinction to its subjective
opposite as found in the image as such (which offers the right hand as the
valorised side). From the history of narrative directionality and causality in
the image we receive the fundamental movement of the arrow of time represented
as in motion from Left to Right.
The Annunciation: a genre becomes the privileged
manifestation of a set of co-ordinates fecund and profound in the history of
the image. A similar position is occupied by Greek Tragedy in literature, where
it has become the canonic encryption of the
contradictions of the Social and the division of the Self in conflicts of
loyalty (with a Community cast as Religion, State, Family, feudal lord, class,
caste, marriage partner or Ideal); a conflict to which the literature of every
epoch bears witness. Like the conflict behind the labours of literature, the
forces behind (or before) the Annunciation remind us of the reflexive challenge
of civilisation - its foremost contradiction, the sour ubiquity of hierarchy
and its ever-present potential for violence. Even amidst the gold and glory of
its omnipresent Transubstantiation, the ritual transformation of the water of
nature into the wine of civilisation, the Word and the Image, the witnesses of
verbal and visual culture, manifest even in their most sacred forms, the
profane truth that it is not just Nature
that is red in tooth and claw. For the synecdoche that contains the truth of
the Transubstantiation reminds us that the wine in the cup is not red with the
fruit of the grape, but with the blood of humanity. An infinite drip feeding
the altar of temporal ends, masked by the love of infinity.
Copyright 2002 Peter Nesteruk