The confrontation between a modern viewer and a painting from
the past is generally an incomplete and even an uncomfortable meeting
; usually no more than a few seconds are spent gleaning the
few familiar parts from amongst a group of oddly dressed and strangely
coiffed characters engaged in some obscure business of another time
or place. An effort of some kind is required to penetrate into the thing
more deeply.
A
pedagogue perhaps might relate the facts which art historians had recovered
to explain the unfamiliar details: Dr. Tulp is conducting a scholarly
lecture, demonstrating a dissection from a textbook which we see propped
open at right (written a hundred years earlier by an Italian surgeon
named Vesalius); that the men we see with him are not pupils but fellow
members of the Amsterdam surgeon's guild, of which Tulp had just been
named rector; that the observer in the foreground turns to acknowledge
the presence of the viewer, who originally would have been a fellow
surgeon in the guild hall where the painting was hung, so that we ourselves
complete the circle of onlookers. The cadaver, which at first seems
merely to be a prop, is in fact a player; he is a local small-time criminal
called Adrian the Kid, who'd been hanged for stealing an overcoat.
All of this, of course, is little more than data; it helps a curious
viewer to identify what is here to be seen, but it still does nothing
to take us past the surface that separates us from the doctors of Amsterdam.
Could it somehow be possible to contrive some alternative means of putting
a viewer on more intimate terms with these ghosts from the 17th century?
A most ingenious and ambitious method might be to create another, integrated
work of art, that could subsume the viewer visually, or even physically,
into Rembrandt's painting. The picture's flat image could not do this
by itself; rather the space that is implied within it would have to
be extrapolated, and the positions occupied by the figures carefully
calculated and plotted; an apparatus will then be needed to fix these
coordinates, perhaps using the head and hands, and to allow the viewer
some means of conveniently finding his or her location in the reconstructed
space of this environment. Properly arranged, facing an image of the
painting, these structures might let the viewer take a place, as it
were, inside the work itself for a moment.
Here we find an elegant, beautifully crafted means of walking in and
out of a famous picture. Hands and heads can be placedprecisely where
they need to be to assume the location of the figure in the imaginary
space of the painting. For a moment we step into this twilight zone
where distinctions between ourselves and the imaginary place that exists
inside the painting begin to disappear. Only after steeping back from
this tempoary merger do we start to notice the precision of the apparatus
and later still the remarkable ingenuity that slips us in and out of
this experience.
And it is reflection after the experience of the installation that raises
the complex questions about the role of the viewer, and whether the
work exists as an object or something else; questions that are hard
to pose and which may prove impossible to answer in the end. A bit closer
are the questions about the fusion of a picture's imaginary space and
the real three-dimensional space of the installation, in which the viewer
lives and moves. This interpenetration between the seer and the seen
was one of the principal concerns of Baroque art; and Carole Garmon's
work shows us that it has not yet given up all of its secrets.
Donald Schrader