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Wednesday 30 October 2024

Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair 2008, 2023

 




45cm x 45cm 
Oil on Expensive European Canvas 

In February 2008, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter asked writer Christopher Hitchens if he would be willing to subject himself to the form of torture know as waterboarding. Hitchens duly agreed and scheduled to be 'waterboarded' by SERE in May of that year writing a subsequent article entitled 'Believe me, its Torture' in the August edition. 

 In his life of J M W Turner, Walter Thornbury narrates an incident concerning a studio visit made by the painter’s friend, William Kingsley, in 1839. Kingsley made the mistake of taking his mother along to meet the great man:  ‘..as my mother knows nothing about Art, I was taking her down the gallery to look at the large ‘Richmond Park’; but, as we were passing the ‘Snow Storm’, she stopped before it, and I could hardly get her to look at any other picture; and she told me a great deal more about it than I had any notion of, though I have seen many snow-storms. She had been in such a scene on the coast of Holland during the war. 

When, some time afterwards, I thanked Turner for his permission for her to see the pictures, I told him that he would not guess what had (most) caught my mother’s fancy, and then named the picture; but he said —    

‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like. I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture’.   
 
 ‘But’, said I, ‘my mother once went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her’.    
 ‘Is your mother a painter?”     

‘No’.     

‘Then she ought to have been thinking of something else’. 

Thornbury surtitles his account ‘Lashed to the Mast’ and justifies his anecdote by appeal to heroic precedent. The painter having undergone this experience in all its edifying absurdity reveals art as a technique of suffering and defiant survival, whose representative figure is Odysseus, as seen in Book 10 of The Odyssey, bound by his oarsmen to the mast of his ship so that he can hear the seductive song of the Sirens and live to tell the tale. It is an epic moment, but also lyrical in this sense: that the emblematic persistence of this episode into the modern era depends on some massive alteration to the bounds of personal knowledge and its relations to any collective awareness. As the Turner anecdote makes clear, the formal integrity of a modern artwork depends not merely on its subjective intensity but also its indifference to reciprocal endorsement, even the reciprocities of ‘experience’. The fact that something happens to me, not you, is paradoxically what makes its communicative potential representative of the historical condition of unsociable togetherness. - Kevin Nolan