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Illuminating Mass Graves with a Black Light
When we write about a painter and his works, we submit to the unspoken rule that the eye prevails in this matter... Sight, that noble sense for putting the world at a distance, the sense of purification, of the catharsis of wickedness and the relevance of reality, has risen above the four other senses, to the point that a body of fine arts exists for the eye and the ear, whereas we deny the mouth and the nose the chance to claim their own...Painting? Yes, of course, a noble art par excellence, by definition the home of aesthetics...
Sculpture? As long as we don't touch it...
Poetry, novels, theater? No problem, we need the eye, and without it...
Music? Yes! Music is the quintessential language, the voice of the angels and that which sculpts the very substance of our minds. . . But try to find an art form for the nose or the mouth...
Cooking? Come on. . .Are you joking?.. Perfume?
Or enology which combines the two? And so what?
Classical aesthetics constructed everything around the eye and sight, the senses of human evolution. The quadruped, that animal which was not yet human, followed its females with its nose and tracked its enemies by scent; the result, he didn't see very well. The upright biped, with free hands and a developing brain, this hominid didn't smell quite so well; yet, he saw better, his visual acuity developed. He saw danger faster than he could smell it. Thousands of centuries have destroyed smell and taste to the benefit of that noble sense of sight. . . What have we really gained?
Enough that we see a painting by Vladimir Velickovic and no one would ever think to smell it or taste it. A fool would probably detect oil, turpentine, varnish and their accompanying tastes.. . perhaps. ..
But what if we entered the painting and reassembled ourselves on the velickovian landscape? What odours would seize our nose and attack our throat? Let's approach his painting backwards, with the so-called ignoble senses...
We are well-versed in Velickovic's grammar: crowlike birds, wire fences in a geographic nothingness, gallows and sometimes the ladders used to string up the hangman, reddening lights, immense flames and thickly spiralling smoke, vast desert expanses, sand, burnt earth landscapes, devastation, decapitated cadavers"..in one painting a body with a head, in another a had without a body, devouring rats, acephalous dogs, a man's cadaver falling into a void, a man climbing a staircase that leads to nowhere...
On the other side of the frame, once. we've entered the painter's universe of quintessential war - meaning the death wish - once we're within the material and even the work, we smell the bitter odour of spilled blood, the metallic exhalation of running streams of hemoglobin, the suffocating smoke of a spreading toxic cloud, black like hell; we smell the light but burning air that dances around a blaze; we smell the faceless and decaying corpses, even the unfortunate one with nothing but a head; we smell the wood - oak or beech, pine or silver birch - the gallows creaking in the wind, we smell the ladder, most likely dirtied by soldiers' boots that tramped through the slimy blood of victims, the dried blood of the long ago dead and in dust during walks at Thanatos' side; we smell the parasites holding fast to the crow's feathers, the damp fur of rats; we smell the desert sand cracking inside nostrils long after being inhaled; we smell the sweat of that man climbing the staircase to nothing; above, we smell urine, excrements, more blood, saliva, drool, the slime of a humiliated and tortured corpse that is melting down toward the earth that might become its grave, unless it is cursed with rotting in the open air; in that case we will smell the putrid smoke of its decomposition...
Leaving the canvas, we will still hear the odours that linger... we try to escape from the violence of these reeking smells, these plagues, these stale persistent odours, but their noise captures us: the birds' beaks scratching at the ground for worms probably filled with human flesh; the crackling of fires in the distance; the creak of the gallows; the silent cry of the decapitated figure; the clicking nails of a rat as he flees from men - including us, the spectator - his snout boasting a moustache of human blood; the whistling breeze made by burning skin as it falls into a void toward its metaphysical destiny; or the hangman swaying gently in a Balkan wind, in a wind from the Arab desert and from all the other places where the eternal rebirth of the death wish translates into what makes history now. . .
For those who will have smelled, then heard Vladimir Velickovic's painting in this way, the image will speak differently. And we will see these metaphysical icons in an another way from now on. A painting's silence - the silence of his painting - should never stop us from asking our bodies, the entirety of our bodies, to participate in the feast offered by the artist. Even if the feast takes place at the edge of a cliff. Men dig their mass graves; the painter simply illuminates them with his black light.
Michel Onfray, 2006
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