by Sheila Heti
Written for Otherworld Uprising, the recent Shary Boyle monograph.
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Shary Boyle lives in a small apartment on the second floor of a Victorian row house in Toronto. When I went to visit her, she was on the verge of leaving to research and work in England for six months. Everything she wanted to show me was packed away in boxes, but among the décor and the furniture that remained there was nothing particularly contemporary; nothing that made one aware that it was 2006. The chairs we sat on in the living room were second-hand and fragile. The small radio was tuned to a classical-music station, and the light coming through the windows had a sparkling, gentle quality, all of which gave that afternoon a feeling of eternity—like a static, bleached-out memory, even as it was happening.
It occurred to me that Shary Boyle wanted nothing in her physical environment pinning her down to some arbitrary now, just as, in the past few years, she has avoided putting anything into her work that would definitively mark thistime and place.
Boyle’s earlier work was full of depictions of bullies from her childhood in Scarborough, clothed in ripped jeans and teased hair and lots of makeup. During our conversation, I asked why she didn’t draw such things anymore.
“I’m afraid there’s so much banality for me in terms of images,” she said. “It’s so saturated. We have every kind picture of life as we know it at this second. I really feel the need to create an alternate world, a vision of what might be magical and beautiful and fantastic about being human. Maybe it’s because I find the world so depressing. Or not the world at all, but culture, what we have done with this culture.”
Until talking with her that day, I never though about how hard it must be to make images in a world so full to bursting with images. I had only felt sorry for myself and my writer friends, that we have to make words for a culture that loves its images best. So I had not before considered what questions and dilemmas an artist might have about which images to add to the world.
Later, walking from her place in the dying sun, I was reminded of a quote from Baudelaire. Finding it on my shelves that night, I read:
"In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand different ways. “Copy nature; just copy nature. There is no greater delight, no finer triumph than an excellent copy of nature.” And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts, even to the novel and poetry. To these doctrinaires, who were so completely satisfied by Nature, a man of imagination would certainly have had the right to reply: “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.""
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Orthodox religious art is perhaps the most straightforward expression of how the quotidian surface of human life is bound up in the ever-present mysteries of being – of the impulse against “just copy nature.” But since such symbols come ready-made, the function of religious art is less to tell us something new than to be a focal point for our meditations about things already accepted and known – like the presence of the divine in life, or moral tales that express our profoundest fears and longings.
As religious art is typically created for a religious community, the receiver of the art and the creator of the art share a vocabulary of symbols. As the art critic Arthur Danto explains in the introduction to his 2006 collection, Unnatural Wonders, religious art therefore calls forth the viewer’s emotions and associations only insofar as the viewer can appreciate the symbols. In the case of much contemporary art, he says, it similar; the “ample wall texts” reassure the viewer “the art has a certain high moral and intellectual purpose,” yet “often the distance between object and argument is so wide that without the text we would badly misread the object.”
He continues:
"This is not that different from traditional art as one might suppose. Think, for example, of how little a realistic 17th-century crucifixion scene tells us about the meaning of the man-and-cross it shows or why it is appropriately hung in chapels. Who would know—who really could understand by means of visual perception alone—that the twisted figure is redeeming through physical suffering the taint of original sin that humanity until then allegedly carried? The meaning of much [contemporary] work is at just such a level of abstractness, relative to the object intended as its vehicle. In this respect, contemporary art and traditional art have a great deal more in common with each other than either has with Modernist art, which sought to convey its meaning by visual means alone."
The difficulty for the contemporary artist is that either they share their symbols with their community, meaning the symbols tend to the commonplace – a nose ring, bleached blonde hair – and make as banal an impression, or else they are esoteric, the artist alone appreciating their total complexity.
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I am thinking now of a pious Christian woman with a wooden cross above her bed. Or a Jewish family with a mezuzah at the front door. These objects are reminders in a world of inertness and banality there is spirit present with us, too, and more meaning to the repetitious gestures of our days than it may seem to bare eyes.
It has always been to my disappointment that such icons are not effective on me. These objects that speak so urgently to the religious have rarely, if ever, helped me by conveying significant stories about my life or my world, at once making life richer and more bearable. I never thought I’d find an icon that could do that.
Several years ago, however, I was at an art fair in Toronto when I was forced by some inner compulsion to stand stock still before a small Shary Boyle statue. At a time when I had little money and no habit of buying art, I wanted this piece for myself. It was not because it made me feelany particular emotion. I didn’t want it to beautify my apartment, but rather—and this was the closest I’d ever come to sympathising with a man who wears a cross hung from a chain around his neck—I wanted it to always be close.
Like much of Shary Boyle’s work, it has that twinned, paradoxical character of both familiarity and strangeness, as though the image or figure has been with us all along, and at the same time was just unearthed from the ground.
The sculpture is about the height of a thumb, and there are two heads, one on top of the other. The head of an old woman serves as the base (she has no neck), and, growing from the top of her head or perhaps perched on it (also without a neck) is the head of a young girl in the bloom of her youth. The sculpture is hollow inside and is delicately painted on the outside. This was one in a series of fifteen pieces made from the same mould but each one painted in its own way.
I think I bought the plainest one, since it came closest to the essence of what the work was about for me: aging. Indeed, I sensed I was buying it to help me with the process of growing older, which I knew it would, though I couldn’t have said how. Yet it felt like an urgent and necessary purchase. I was 24 at the time.
For the first several years I owned it, I strongly associated myself with the girl perched on top; her gaze seemed to mirror my own curiosity about the world, and my openness. I understood myself to be young like her, attractive, unwrinkled—the object of the admiration of men (at least in theory). I loathed the idea that one day all that would be lost, and I’d end up like the old woman on the bottom, sagging, wrinkled, self-contained, unsexy, ironic—surely a worse existence.
I moved around a lot, and did not have the piece on display in every apartment. When I settled into the place I live now, however, I placed it on a small shelf near the front door, so I would pass it every time I left or returned home again. And although I only bought it six years ago, I already have a completely different relationship to it. Recently, the young girl has not looked curious to me but vacant, receptive, needing to be filled.
The essayist Mark Grief write in his article “The Afternoon of the Sex Children:
"We know the beauty of the young, which it is traditional to admire—their unlined features, their unworn flesh,” but we also can know that the beauty of children is the beauty of another, merely incipient form of life, and nothing to emulate. One view of the young body is as an ideal. The other is as an unpressed blank."
That is how the girl’s head looks to me now. I neither relate to this blankness, nor envy it. As for the old woman, I’m starting to appreciate her virtues. I no longer see her as a degraded and ruined version of the girl, but as a completion of what the girl’s head promised: a settling into her flesh and herself, which before was only potential.
Of course, all this might look different next Tuesday.
But I’ll bet that for the woman who looks at the crucifix—surely she doesn’t do it every day, but when she does, she finds its meaning always slightly altered. When she is going through a hard time, perhaps it reminds her of the depth of her strength. When life is good and she has much to be grateful for, it gives her something else. That wooden cross has always been inert to me, but this sculpture of Shary Boyle’s is a living thing.
Like the cross, it has become a symbol of my faith—in this case, faith in aging be okay. I didn’t have this faith before I got the sculpture, but I have some of it now. In these times, growing old feels like more of a sin than any outright sinning. I can fuck whoever I want, but to deal with the inevitable decrepitude of my flesh? I can’t do it with platitudes about beauty being skin deep. Nor with religious iconography. And certainly not with the help of Bridget Bardot, who replied in a recent interview that the thing that revolts her most about her body is her own skin.
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I never thought much about the word “iconoclast,” and it is one of those words you probably don’t think too much about until you’re confronted with the true meaning of it, which I was when reading Northrop Frye’s introduction to Milton’s Paradise Lost:
"Man can do nothing directly to achieve his own freedom: what he can do is to indicate his willingness to be set free by knocking down his idols, and so allow the Word of God to circulate freely in human society. The prophet is not a Utopian or a social planner, but an iconoclast, a breaker of the false images that man worships."
For the past few months I have had that vividly in my mind, but always replacing “prophet”with “artist” (though artists can be prophets): The artist is not a Utopian or a social planner, but an iconoclast, a breaker of the false images that man worships.
The world is full to bursting with false images for worship. So how can the Word of God circulate freely in human society with such obstacles, and how will we be set free?
The sculpture of the two heads—this is an iconoclastic work. Boyle’s art doesn’t so much create feelings as break some of the spells that certain images in our culture have spun before our eyes. This is the work of the religious artist, too—to break the spell of banality in order to allow the spell of mystery to overtake us. The religious artist and the secular artist share a purpose, but the secular artist’s work, in speaking to a secular audience, is achieved by opposite means: not by idolatry, but by iconoclasm.
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And this is how she does it. She takes off all her clothes, gets down on her back and then pushes herself up into a bridge. With one hand she grasps an ankle, and folds the other arm under her for support. She holds this posture—awkward, but not impossible—and in the patient sustaining of this pose, a fluorescent orange stream leaps from her mouth. It lands between her breasts. From between her breasts jets a bright-green stream in a smooth arc to land on her cunt, and from there jumps a third stream, ending in a little blue puddle at her feet.
This is perhaps my favourite of Shary Boyle’s sculptures. As with all her pieces, to fully grasp it, one must imaginatively put oneself in the experiential state of the figure. We are not merely looking at the woman here- we are the woman. Or consider the porcelain lady with red flowers growing out of her arm. She gains no pleasure from this wonder. It’s as if a woman’s beauty, even if amazing, cannot be integrated into her ego. It’s this tension between how a figure appears and how it’s feeling—which is present in almost all of Boyle’s work—that contributes to its spark of meaning.
At first I saw only the beauty in the woman arching her back, but then I sympathetically imagined—like the Christian who suffers to see Christ on the cross—what it must be like to maintain that posture: a terrible effort! What awkwardness, exertion and stamina are necessary in order for the figure to create those fountains. It is not a matter of girl + fountains = rare and strange charm. Its surface appearance and interior life, synthesised, are a manifest model of creation.
Though the making of art might, on a surface level, look like someone sitting and typing at a computer, or standing at a canvas or kiln, the essence of the act, the living soul of that ordinary posture, is this icon, which argues that creation is a sustained contortion. A significant part of the artwork’s beauty, always, is that it springs from the human body, which wills it and sustains it, but nothing can be produced without taking the posture.
While writing this article my mind was half on something else: the seeming endless labour of a book I was writing. I wanted to email Shary in England: Has anyone bought the piece with the three fountains coming out of the girl? I needed its wisdom. I wanted her to make it small, out of smooth gold, so I could wear it on a thin chain around my neck. I wouldn’t even take it off in the shower.
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A week ago, I accidentally deleted from my computer the Shary Boyle penis sculpture. It depicts a woman’s kneeling legs, which morph into a torso that resembles an erect penis. Or perhaps it’s the erect penis that’s kneeling, ankles crossed, in the posture of a woman giving a blow job. I suspect this sculpture too painfully recalled a recent, heart-sickening affair of mine, which was not sufficiently far enough in the past that her piece didn’t remind me of all its more sordid aspects.
The sculpture is like a contemporary companion to a more ancient image which also attempts to symbolize the male/female union, drawn from Plato’s allegory of love. In it, the human creature was once a monstrous thing of great harmony. Man and woman were joined at their backs, with two heads, four arms, four legs—and this creature tumbled over itself like a wheel, arms and legs extended, as it moved across the earth. But these creatures were cleaved in two, and since then, we have been fated to wander as half-souls, in search of our mate, to try and achieve that original wholeness.
In Shary Boyle’s sculpture, both man’s submission to and dependence on woman and woman’s submission to and dependence on man are expressed. It’s a fragmented, and perhaps limited, vision of sexual and romantic bonding for a time in which we come together and split apart, not as whole creatures, but limited parts of wholes.
Yet how painful (and what a relief!) to see the inner truth, the iconoclastic truth, in place of those all-too-pervasive illustrations—such as models groping each other in advertisements—which feel less true than this kneeling penis, which I understand so well, for I’ve been there, felt like that – closer to that than any image of a sexy man and sexy woman doing it. This sculpture is something for those who now and then desperately need to lift the heavy veil and let the fresh air circulate.
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Beauty is not the meaning of art, nor its purpose. The philosopher Elaine Scarry argues that a work of art must be beautiful, for it is by its beauty that we can identify it as art and trust it. If beauty is absent from a work, we can shrug off its truths as rather paltry; we don’t alight to it the way we do to beautiful works. But its beauty is not the message. It is only, so to speak, the seal of God, saying, My word is here.
Then one has to ask, What is the word?
According to Alain de Botton, the ancient Romans put on one side of their coins the image of the goddess Fortune to remind them that at any moment in their daily life—such as while going about the business of buying olives—a chariot might throw itself tumbling into the square and knock their eldest son dead.
On the back of our penny is a goddamn maple leaf which reminds us—what? That we live in a country of so many maple trees?
There are objects of art which could be of such utility but are relegated instead to the marginal realm of appreciation. As the philosopher John Dewey writes in Art as Experience: “Objects that were in the past valid and significant because of their place in the life of a community, now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin.” Set apart from daily experience, works of art merely “serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture.”
What worse fate is there for what might be handled as a work of genuine iconoclasm, to instead be beheld in a state of disinterested, primarily aestheticcontemplation.
It’s not good enough! I want these images in wide circulation: on our coins, on our street lights, made into icons to hand out to girls when they first get their periods, or to couples when they move into their first high-rise apartment, to hang over the sink. It will tell them what they can expect, and what their daily postures really look like, and really mean.
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