Good Evening, Light

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Good morning, Darkness.

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Géricault's Raft: A Metaphor for Haiti

Photo, Damon Winter/ The New York Times

Géricault, Théodore. The Raft of the Medusa, 1819. Oil on canvas; 193 1/4 x 282 inches. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The images streaming in on the New York Times website from the disaster in Haiti are essentially, images of ghosts. Photographs depict pileups of the dead on dusty streets. Shockingly, the corpse of an infant lay on the top of one of these piles in the photograph I have singled out from the series above.

Harrowing, haunting, perturbing, and profoundly moving,

the photographs were taken with a primary objective in mind:

to bring the damages and deaths in Haiti clearly into the vision of a greater populace.

No one can refute the fact that these images function as photo reportage.

I am inspired, however, to view in these images an overlapping purposiveness: a revolutionary artistic statement which acknowledges the media and communications atmosphere of the zeitgeist, while appealing to the sensibilities of one radical, monumental antecedent, Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa.

Géricault's 1819 work currently hangs in the Louvre, perhaps the most hallowed art institution

in the world. It's hard to believe today that the painting was the source of outrage when debuted in the 1819 Salon of Paris. Géricault knowingly chose to paint the provocative narrative scene that did not come from classical mythology or religion -- but rather, straight out of the tabloids of his day -- in an effort to launch his career as an artist.

In its literal, historical interpretation, the painting serves to document a tragic event that otherwise would have been suppressed by the French government -- the shipwreck of a French boat off the coast of North Africa, in which the captain of the boat left the 149-person crew to die at sea. The crew spent an alleged 4 to 5 days at sea, floating on a makeshift raft fashioned out of debris. By the time the crew was rescued by another ship, only 15 people had survived.

One look at the painting, and we are exposed to an unabashed portrayal of humanity at its bleakest. The figures that make up the composition of the painting are tinged a bilious, sea green. They are framed in a pathetic, yet purposively tenacious struggle as they clamor to reach the attention of a distant ship located on the vanishing horizon. Corpses festoon the immediate foreground of the painting. The aesthetic value of the painting cannot be wholly contemplated without some knowledge of the event taking place.

Géricault masterfully depicts the human descent into darkness, madness, and death. Although there is evidence of cosmetic consideration taken here, the image is in no way "clean" -- the artist is known to have studied the corpses of morgues in order to more faithfully record the contours, shape, and sinews of the human body. The great parable lurking beneath the obvious is one that refers to a tragedy caused and exacerbated by those deemed in authority and control.

Referring to Haiti, the photographer was faced with the daunting task of delivering to the public a visual account of the damage that took place after the devastating earthquake. The photos that result on the website are unrestrained, yet carefully curated selections. These photographs, as explicit in their presentation of death as war zone imagery, reach today's viewer much in the same way images of Vietnam reached shocked viewers in the 60's and 70's.

In the age of twitter and "real time", these photographs both document a distinct moment in time, even a distinct point in the aftermath of the earthquake.

By far the most profoundly disturbing image in the series is the one which I've included in this post. In it, a pile of unknown corpses lie disarrayed outside of a morgue, partially obscured in the shade. Among these nameless dead is an infant, lying on top of the pile near the immediate foreground. To the viewer's right, a man sits, framed in a position which suggests sobbing. In the photos caption, we are told that the man sobbing at right is the infant's

father.

The photograph is such a well-curated image that it aesthetically compares to The Raft of the Medusa. In the same manner that Géricault props his bodies, inventing their death poses,

the bodies of the fallen Haitians scatter the expanse of the photograph, littered throughout the ground with little observance or attention from any nameable force except the grieving father.

Both artists give form and expression to ineffable, inexpressible depths, documenting

these moments, but also giving them up to God.

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The Triumph of a Heart: Sebastiano Leta Jewelry

All jewelry, Sebastiano Leta. for more, click here

the nerves are sending

shimmering signals

all through my fingers

the veins support blood that gushes

pulsively toward.....

--Bjork, "The Triumph of  a Heart"

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The Image of My Sister(at 23 years of age, standing next to a tide pool in Mount Dessert Island)

Albertus Seba, Large Engraving of Shells. Amsterdam 1734-1769

I. The Photo

In the cunning light of autumn a figure

contemplates a tidepool’s civilization of urchins

starfish, sea lettuces

the grotto’s crustacean shell a pretext for discovery

and certainly, strange things appear

sane here, reflections of skin, hair, and lips multiplied

in the vertiginous verdigris of waves

washing away intention

washing away associations.

She stands, diminutive in her child’s shoes,

this woman not-quite twenty-four,

pausing over the chasms, the waves,

the steely white light of coastal Maine telling no lies,

softening the penumbras that mask sea shapes.

II. The Dream

Together I go with you

into the black grotto

where time fell asleep in the groovelets

and the shallows

into the black grotto

carved from the shell of a

boisterous barnacle and feeling like it too.

Together we uncover all things nautical

The violence overgrown

thick in sea moss, algae you say

The penumbra looming deep as years.

Our friends the limpets, the seahorse,

The fiddler crab, these sea queens lacking

Teeth and voices, as we once did

In darkened bedrooms.

In darkness, whose shadow is a twin,

You and I continually entering the grotto,

This mysteriously spotted oceania,

raiding the hollows of memory winedark.

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Patti Smith Live at the Bowery Ballroom, New Year's Eve 2009

Patti Smith with her son Jackson and daughter Jessi, photograph by Annie Leibovitz

I was lost in a valley of pleasure.
I was lost in the infinite sea.
I was lost, and measure for measure,
love spewed from the heart of me.
I was lost, and the cost,
and the cost didn't matter to me.
I was lost, and the cost
was to be outside society.

--excerpt, Rock n' Roll Nigga

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