Death of Christ/ Death of the Artist: Slippage of Meaning

in Contemporary Performance Art

and Photography

Urszula Szulakowska

ABSTRACT The heroic modernist image of the artist as a messianic figure was

invalidated in the 1960s and 1970s by leftist and feminist critics. The image of Christ-Messiah had

been central to the creation of this male artistic myth in the 19th century. The image of Christ re-appeared

in the work of artists in the 1980s and 1990s, but in an abject form as Christ-Crucified, or as

Christ lying dead in the tomb. These images expressed the dejected condition of painting and of the

role of the male artist after the antagonistic critiques of radical theorists. However, the same icon of the

Dead Christ also appeared in a revolutionary leftist context, but with a different connotation, as in the

films of Pasolini, for example, as well as in the press photograph of the dead Che Guevara

taking the form of Mantegna’s Christ. The same image has also re-emerged, only

half consciously, in the performance work and photography of Polish artist Krzysztof Gliszczyński,

where it has triggered an important discourse concerning the generation of meaning in art and the

inter-relation of artist and audience.

FULL TEXT

From the late 19th century and early 20th century in western Europe the modernist avant-garde was developing

a new concept of its political, social and cultural role. In the framing of the self-image of the artist and his

public persona, the concept of Christ the Messiah was fundamental. An image of the male artist (and writer

and poet) was promoted in which he became a messianic figure whose political purpose was to lead society

from corrupted bourgeois culture to an enlightened Utopian society by rejecting traditional academic creative

modes in favour of new subject matter expressed in experimental forms and materials. The products
of this experimentation became, in effect, religious icons, gateways to higher levels of consciousness, as in the

works of Malevich, Mondrian, Delaunay, the Futurist group and many Surrealists.

This strange situation in which art became a religious cult with strong Christological overtones was the

result of the existential vacuum in the social psyche of western Europe caused by the retreat of institutionalised

religious belief.1 This absence of the divine order in social and cultural spheres after the Enlightenment was

partly alleviated through the fetishism of art products and by the new image of the artist as priest-like, both a

mystical seer and political revolutionary.

However, this trace in modernist art of Christian dogma was also involved with pagan

spiritual meanings as in the figure of the Hermetic magus and the Theosophical medium.

The magus is an ambiguous figure created in the 16th century magical writings of pagan influenced

natural philosophers - Cornelius Agrippa most especially. His ideas were based on Hellenistic hermetic

texts of the 2nd century, themselves influenced by early Christianity.2

The magus was both divine and human, glorified and suffering and his esoteric knowledge was

placed at the service of humanity. In the mid-19th century the imagery of the Messiah Christ and

the magus underlay the teachings of the Eliphas Levi in the occultist revival in Paris which was

closely related to modernist artistic developments. Levi’s concept of the magus had a significant

influence on the artistic and political practice of Andre Breton and the Surrealists. The Polish historian

of magic and alchemy Rafał Prinke has examined the effect of the ideas of the Polish magus and

cultural theorist Józef Maria Hoene-Wronski on the French avant-garde. Wronski was a political

messianist who anticipated social and political redemption for his country Poland in recompense

for her Christ-like sufferings during the partitions from 1772. Wronski influenced the Polish poet
in exile Adam Mickiewicz who was also a theosophist and a disciple of Jacob Boehme. It was

Mickiewicz who was the source for Eliphas Levi’s messianism in which the modern magus would

be a Christ-like figure who would suffer and be sacrificed for a political and spiritual cause. This, in

turn, was adopted by the French Symbolists and Surrealists as an image for the avant-garde artist.3

In the 1970s as a result of the criticism of left wing radical cultural historians and feminists

the messianic role of the male artist came under scrutiny and his cynical complicity in the investment

market of international capitalism was exposed. 4 Further, the ideas of French and German

post-structuralists, such as Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” in 19675 and the

neo-Marxist Frankfurt School6 (including theorists such as Habermas) were widely

influential on American and British critics, theorists and historian. Such radical leftist critiques rejected

the vision of the male artist as a self-directed creator of his work, in favour of a notion

that it was not the author/ artist who created the meaning and purpose of the art-work, but rather

the recipient audience. According to this theoretical model the artist was no more than a

transmitter of pre-existing texts. This denial of the possibility of artistic originality was instrumental

in killing painting (and free-standing sculpture) as a valid art form and a commercial commodity

through-out the 1970s in favour of conceptual and perfomative modes. 7

It was the cloak of religiosity and magic, that was ripped away from the male artist. This process

lasted through into the early 1980s when the pressure of market forces retrieved painting as

a market commodity in a pseudo-movement loosely described as neo-expressionism,

but only male artists were involved. Neo-expressionist artists returned to the portrayal of the human

body and to mythical subjects. 8 The art-works often carried abject Christological
references in which the degraded body of Christ became a self-portrait of the artist himself, but

a sense of hopelessness pervaded and the Messianic role of the artist was lost, leaving only the

investment cult of the artist’s signature. 9

In Italian Renaissance and Baroque art Christ’s body had been perfect and sexually potent, as in Leo

Steinberg’s well known analysis of depictions of Christ in the 15th and 16th centuries.10

However, in northern European art in this period there was another, quite different, vision of the

body of Christ on the cross which was that of Everyman dying neglected and alone. This was a

castrated body. Nevertheless, for example, in the Isenheim altar painted by the Germans

Niclaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald in 1512–1516 (Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, Alsace),

the wounded body of Christ-Everyman is resurrected in a perfected glorious body in the central panel.

In contrast, when the Christ image was used by male expressionist artists in the 1980s, it was only

as a castrated body, a reflection of their own sense of futility. Specific examples of this are the

noteworthy series of performance photographs by the German artist Arnulf Rainer in which he is

shown crucified on a cross, as in the Isenheim crucifixion. Another German artist fixated on the sign

of the cross and on grotesque appropriations of the crucified Christ is Jiri Dokoupil who has used this

theme of crucifixion for several decades since the 1980s. Occasionally Dokoupil included representations

of Christ hanging on the cross appropriated from artists such as Rembrandt. 11 A less frequent

image in recent art is that of the Dead Christ in the tomb. The prototypes usually are the Christ in the

Tomb with Two Mourners by Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1490) (Milan, Brera) and

more rarely, Hans Holbein's Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1520-22 (Öffentliche

Kunstsammlung, Basel) where the figure of Christ is shown totally alone in the tomb, decaying.
This type of Renaissance religious imagery has had a great influence on the Italian film director, poet

and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-65) who, despite his left-wing ideology, in the design

of his filmic mis-en-scene often took recourse to the religious tradition of western painting. 12 He

was interested in the conflicting ideological scenarios that are encapsulated in famous master-pieces.

In the famous last scene from Mama Roma (1962) Pasolini recreates Mantegna’s Lamentation

when Ettore, the hero, dies in a prison hospital. Here he expresses his feelings of empathy with

the underdog, the dispossessed of society, the marginalized. The camera shoots his body from

Ettore's feet. Pasolini often uses the word "sacred" to describe his images by means of which he infers

the other images that are present in the mis-en-scene but are excluded from the frame. Pasolini

creates the sense that what is visible in his film is just one aspect of reality and that the essential —

and sacred — aspect , in fact, remains unseen. Pasolini is attracted by something that is invisible

to the audience's eye, like god, and the invisible images carry something mysterious.

Another Christ image in a Left-wing atheistic context is that of the dead body of Ernesto "Che"

guevara (1928 – 67) photographed in 1967 by Freddy Alborta. There were factors to Guevara’s

image that lent themselves to comparison with the figure of Christ descended from the cross. He

was in his thirties when he died, had long hair and a beard and he gave his life as a martyr in the

cause of the dispossessed poor in a deeply Catholic country. Guevara was executed on the orders

of the Bolivian president in 1967 after he failed to instigate a revolution in Bolivia. The British leftist

art historian of the 1960s and 1970s, John Berger, referred to this particular photograph of Guevara

as an iconic image of both the revolutionary hero himself and of the political forces that he represented

since, according to Berger, it located the figure of the dead Guevara within a Christology of redemption

by martyrdom.13 After his execution Guevara’s body had been flown to Vallegrande where he
was photographed lying on a concrete slab in a laundry room. Hundreds of the local people

filed past the dead body in tears, regarding it as Christ-like in its martyrdom.

Berger considered that this photograph resembled two paintings of outstanding historical importance,

namely, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Mauritshuis, The Hague (1632) and

Mantegna's Lamentation (1490). As in Pasolini’s radical political filmic critique, in Alborta’s photograph

Christology has been lifted out of the bounds of institutional church dogma, floating free in the perception of

the congregation, of the audience for the ritual performance of the Church and hence no longer institutionalised

and Catholic in a confessional sense, but only in a generic one. Is this still a Christian/ Catholic image? Yes,

intensely so, despite it floating free from its original context. The Catholic trace remains and if that trace is

not perceived as being Catholic, then the image makes no sense, it cannot be read and it cannot speak. Freddy

Alborta, decades later, admitted that he had been very aware that he was in the presence of a legendary Christ

figure.14

In the traditional genre of the artist’s self-portrait the imitation of the image of Christ is rare. There exists

Albrecht Durer’s Self—Portrait, Alte Pinkothek, Munich (1500) and, for example, in modern Polish art there

is the work of Jacek Malszewski which involves an ironic questioning of both of his own self-identity

and of Poland as the “Christ of nations”. 15 In contemporary Polish art there has emerged recently a unique

class of work in the mode of self- portraiture made by the established Polish artist and professor of painting

at the Akademia Sztuki in Gdańsk Krzysztof Gliszczyński (b. 1962). Gliszczyński’s art is an instrument

for investigating the painful borders between life and death, memory and forgetting, gain and loss, history

and its obscuration in a subtle investigation into the issues of post-war and post-communist Polish national

and his own personal identity as a Pomeranian Pole. He deliberates how individual subjectivity is generated
through the interaction between personal memory and collective political history, as reflected in his recent

series of self-portraits from 2007. (Fig.1)

Fig. 1

To address these problems of national and individual identity, Gliszczyński has adopted the theoretical model

of Hannah Arendt concerning the retrieval of fragments of history lost in the fracturing of historical continuity

by Fascist and Stalinist regimes. For example, in The Mythology of Red (Mitologia czerwieni) Gliszczyński

ritually processes and re-processes the physical materials of his constructions, never entirely destroying them.

He creates a dense surface of jagged marks meticulously created from the impression of his fingernail, a visceral

response to his meditations on history as collective and individual memory. These marks of his finger nail take

the form, deliberately of a cross form and it is a subdued and subversive Christological reference. 16 These

works have been re-exhibited in a recent installation, Iosis (2012) (Fig. 2)

Fig.2

In his conceptual development since the 1990s Gliszczyński has been investigating the Hermetic tradition,

specifically, alchemy, as in his installations, Urny (Urns) (produced in 1998–99). Gliszczyński gathered the

residues of dried-up paint from his palettes and paint pots and pressed them into tall glass vessels that recalled

alchemical alembics and stills. Eventually, he eliminated the glass containers and collected the drops of paint
that fall onto the studio floor in order to create a free-standing monolith. The urns are funeral urns, a public

commemoration of history. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3
Gliszczyński’s work has evolved into a performance aspect, already largely present in his ritualised painting

practice. His latest performance work re-enacts the death of Christ, both in the mass and in history, and this

sacred sacrifice is re-enacted in Gliszczyński’s performance as the ritualised entombment of the artist himself.

In addition, Gliszczyński creates a complex inter-relation between the Christian theology of God the Father

and God the Son and himself and his own son. His son embalms the body of his father by pouring wine onto

his “shroud.” Into this, also enter further alchemical themes, themselves historically developed from Catholic

Christology and Eucharistic doctrines in which the distillation of wine created healing medications. The wine

in alchemy is also understood to be the Eucharistic blood of Christ in a chemical form. Initially

Gliszczyński had introduced the theme of alchemical and Eucharistic wine into photographs and paintings

and the performance was added only as an after-thought. (Fig. 4)

Fig.4
In his earlier paintings, in works such as Levitation (2002), his own recumbent form had already appeared

as in the pose of the Dead Christ, although Gliszczyński, in fact, was not aware of the existence of Holbein’s

painting even during his recent performance. In the performance work Gliszczyński’s body becomes a canvas

which is painted by the action of pouring on of wine. (Fig. 5, 6)

Fig.5

This theatre of the shroud and the oblations of wine were intentionally referential to Christian dogma and

Gliszczyński was at this stage only subconsciously, half-aware, of this Christological context.

In fact, at first the shroud was thrown into a rubbish bin, but then retrieved after some further consideration.

Gliszczyński has not placed the original shroud on public exhibition, only the photograph of his own body

within the shroud, as well as the performance.

Fig.6

The shroud, however, even in spite of (or maybe because of)

its absence, due to public interest has gradually acquired a relic-like status, somewhat like the Shroud of Turin.

What is noteworthy about Gliszczyński’s performance is that it was not a public action. It was filmed

and photographed in his studio with only himself, his son and the photographer present. The shroud,

folded away after an interior, private action, has since been opened out and has become a public icon. Like

the Turin shroud Gliszczyński’s is a copy of his body, almost a negative impression of his own form and flesh.

The whole issue of Gliszczyński not being entirely aware of the Christological implications of his action,

whereas audience and critics read his performance thus, raises important questions concerning the generation

of meaning in art. How is this produced? In this case a basically unintentional action, focused largely
on alchemical symbology, with less consciousness of the Dead Christ/ Turin shroud context is generating

an ever-richer and more complex text in which the video and photographs of the action have become

implicated as semiotic devices.

The passivity of the artist is also a recognition of the impasse of art in the present time. The texts and

discourses pass through the artist as a transmitter, as a canvas on which time and history paint and

draw and inscribe their texts which he transmits. There is a subversive theme, that of the abject… the

dead body of the father… in Freud’s and Lacan’s analysis. 17 (Freud hypothesizes that civilization

originates with the murder of the primal father.) 18 This inverts the Christian narrative in which the

son is sacrificed to the father. Here the meaning is more confused, the father is sacrificed to himself,

the artist to his own art and the theme of martyrdom inevitably returns. No other artist has portrayed

himself as being dead and being entombed in Gliszczyński’s manner. There needs to be another action

to clarify the meaning of the action and to effect a closure of something that is unfinished. Gliszczyński

as an artist remains in the tomb. When will he arise? - and to what ?

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1 Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Autoportrait retour series of self-portraits (2000s)

Fig. 2 Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Iosis (2013)

Fig. 3 Krzysztof Glszczynski, Urny (Urns) (1998–99)

Fig. 4 Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Duorum. Colheita Douro, Portugal (2009) (wine dregs)

Fig. 5 Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Winnienie (2013), action

Fig. 6 Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Winnienie (2013), action

REFERENCES

Apollon, W. and Feldstein, R. (eds.), Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999.
Barthes, R., “The Death of the Author (1967)” in: Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings

in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Eric Dayton (ed.), Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview, 1998, pp. 383-86.

Berger, J., "Che Guevara: the moral factor", The Urban Review, 8, 3, September, 1975, pp. 202-8.

Bonito Oliva, A., Trans-Avantgarde International, Milan, Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1982.

Foster, H., Recodings, Washington D.C., Bay Press, 1985.

"Frankfurt School" in: Encyclopædia Britannica,

online:http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/217277/Frankfurt-School, (accessed 10th September 2014).

Gliszczyński, K., Autoportret à retour-Krzysztof Gliszczyński, catalogue of exhibition, CSW Łaźnia, Gdańsk, 2007.

Kossowska, I., Symbolizm w polskim malarstwie przełomu XIX i XX wieku, Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii

Nauk, Warszawa, 2002.

Lippard, L., Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972; a cross-reference

book of information on some esthetic boundaries, New York, Praeger, 1973.

Minguzzi, S., Pasolini on Mantega- Lamentation over the Dead Christ

online http://www.scribd.com/doc/156383324/Pasolini-on-Mantegna-Lamentation-Over-the-Dead-Christ

(accessed 11-09-2014).

Minguzzi, S., cristo in scurto www.silviaminguzzi.co m/cristoinscurto/pasolini.htm (accessed 11-09-2014).

Prinke, R.T., “Uczeń Wrońskiego –Éliphas Lévi w Kręgu Polskich Mesjanistów”, Pamiętnik Biblioteki

Kórnickiej, no. 13, 2013, pp. 133-54.

Rohdie, S., The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1995.

Royal Academy of Arts, A New Spirit in Painting, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts,

London, UK. 15 January 1981 – 18 March, 1981.

Ryder, A., “Politics after the Death of the Father: Democracy in Freud and Derrida”,

Mosaic, 44(3), pp. 115-20 online: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/summary/v044/44.3.ryder.ht ml

(accessed 16/09/2014)

Smith, B., The Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture, Melbourne:

Oxford University Press, 1988.

Steinberg, L., The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Chicago, University of

Chicago Press, 1983.

Szőnyi, G. E., John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exhaltation through Powerful Signs, New York,

State University of New York State Press, 2005

Szulakowska, U., Alchemy in Contemporary Art, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010.

Zizek, S., How to Read Lacan … 7. "God is Dead, but He Doesn't Know It"
online: http://www.lacan.com/zizbobok.ht ml (accessed 13-09-2014)
1
U.Szulakowska, Alchemy in Contemporary Art, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, pp. 1-5.
2
G. E. Szőnyi, John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exhaltation through Powerful Signs, New York, State
University of New York State Press, 2005, pp. 169-74, 236-40.
3
R. T. Prinke, “Uczeń Wrońskiego –Éliphas Lévi w Kręgu Polskich Mesjanistów”, Pamiętnik Biblioteki
Kórnickiej, no. 13, 2013, pp. 133-54.
4
B. Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford University
Press, 1988, passim.
5
R. Barthes, “The Death of the Author (1967)” in: Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Eric Dayton (ed.), Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview, 1998, pp. 383-86.
6
"Frankfurt School" in: Encyclopædia Britannica,
online:http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/217277/Frankfurt-School, (accessed 10th September 2014).
7
L. Lippard, Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972; a cross-reference book of
information on some esthetic boundaries, New York, Praeger, 1973, passim.
8
See the catalogue of A New Spirit in Painting, exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK. 15 January
1981 – 18 March 1981.
9
H. Foster, Recodings, Washington D.C., Bay Press, 1985, passim.
10
L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1983.
11
A. Bonito Oliva, Trans-Avantgarde International, Milan, Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1982, passim.
12
S. Minguzzi, Pasolini on Mantega- Lamentation over the Dead Christ online
http://www.scribd.com/doc/156383324/Pasolini-on-Mantegna-Lamentation-Over-the-Dead-Christ (accessed 11-
09-2014); See also the series of texts on Pasolini and other iconic depictions of the image of the Dead Christ as
used by contemporary artists and photographers, online S. Minguzzi cristo in scurto
www.silviaminguzzi.co m/cristoinscurto/pasolini.htm (accessed 11-09-2014). Another important text is S.
Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 122-24.
13
J. Berger "Che Guevara: the moral factor", The Urban Review, 8, 3, September, 1975, pp. 202-8.
14
Berger "Che Guevara: the moral factor", The Urban Review, 8, 1975, pp. 202-8.
15
I. Kossowska, Symbolizm w polskim malarstwie przełomu XIX i XX wieku , Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii
Nauk, Warszawa, 2002.
16
Szulakowska, Alchemy in Contemporary Art, 2010, pp. 185-90; Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Autoportret à retour-
Krzysztof Gliszczyński, catalogue of exhibition, CSW Łaźnia, Gdańsk, 2007.
17
S. Zizek, How to Read Lacan … 7. "God is Dead, but He Doesn't Know It" online:
http://www.lacan.com/zizbobok.html (accessed 13-09-2014); W. Apollon and R. Feldstein (eds.), Lacan,
Politics, Aesthetics, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999, pp. 105-7.
18
A. Ryder, “Politics after the Death of the Father: Democracy in Freud and Derrida”, Mosaic, 44(3), pp. 115-
20 online: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mosaic/summary/v044/44.3.ryder.ht ml (accessed 16/09/2014)