The Gesture of Extension
Posing (as) Las Meninas in Velázquez and Eve Sussman
Tatiana Senkevitch
Abstract
This essay considers Eve Sussman’s high-definition video, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, in relation to its prototype, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the light of Lessing-inspired inquiry into the limits of the arts and the new media’s interest in blurring the borders between the dimensions of time and space. It examines how Sussman’s artistic technique—the staging of light, choreographed movement, sound, and gestures, in particular—dilate the presumed statis of painting by amplifying the visual characteristics of the original Baroque painting.
Résumé
Cet article analyse la video 89 Seconds at Alcázar de Eve Sussman en relation avec son prototype
La Meninas de Diego Velazquez, tout en questionnant, dans la lignée de Lessing, les limites des arts
et l’intérêt des nouveaux medias pour l’estompage de la différence entre temps et espace. L’article démontre comment les techniques artistiques déployées par Sussman – la mise en lumière, la chorégraphie, le son, les gestes en particulier – dilatent les aspects supposés « statiques » de la peinture en amplifiant les caractéristiques visuelles de la peinture baroque originale.
Keywords
Illustration 1: Eve Sussman, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, “The Dog Rolls,” video still. By permission of Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, from the publication 89 seconds at Alcázar.
Illustration 2: Jeff Wood (as Philip IV, King of Spain), Helen Pickett (as Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain) Eve Sussman and Claudia de Serpa Soares on set, dress rehearsal.
Brooklyn, May 2003. Photo: Benedikt Partenheimer. By permission of Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, from the publication 89 seconds at Alcázar.
Illustration 3: Eve Sussman, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, “Nieto Passes,” video still. By permission of Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, from the publication 89 seconds at Alcázar.
Illustration 4: Eve Sussman, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, “Forming the Painting 2,” Photo: Kristin Champlin. By permission of Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, from the publication 89 seconds at Alcázar.
Baroque, Velazquez, video art, medium specificity, Lessing
For generations of writers, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, An Essay on the Limits of
Painting and Poetry (1766) was a key source of modern aesthetic thought. From Lessing, Goethe,
for example, learned the importance of the “pregnant moment” in viewing a work of art and applied it to his encounter with the sculptural group of Laocoön. With Lessing’s ideas in mind, he proposed that:
The great significance of this work lies in its presentation of a particular moment. If a sculpture is to convey to the viewer a sense of real movement, it has to portray a fleeting moment. We must be convinced that no part of the whole was in its present position just prior to this instant, and that no part will be in the same position just afterwards. If this is so, the sculpture will forever be a living image for countless millions. (Goethe 17-18).
By defining this sculpture as “a living image” Goethe, however, transgressed the precepts of Lessing’s division of the arts into the static and temporal, or the arts of space and time. To enhance the effect of viewing the Laocoön as a “living sculpture” Goethe suggests undergoing an experiment as he records in the following passage:
In order to experience this sense of movement in the Laocoön group, I would suggest that you face the sculpture from a proper distance, eyes closed. If you open and immediately close your eyes, you can see the whole marble in motion, and you will even expect the whole group to have changed positions before you glance at it a second time. I would describe the sculpture as a frozen lightning bolt, a wave petrified at the very instant it is about to break upon the shore. The effect is the same if the group is viewed at night by torchlight (18).
Lessing’s treatise, which analyzed how the story of the mythical priest’s death could be rendered as both a poetic work and a sculptural object, insisted on the putatively irreconcilable opposition between the verbal and the visual, or, put in other words, between the arts of time and the arts of space. Goethe’s proto-cinematic inventiveness in enhancing the viewing of the legendary group defied Lessing’s tenets of instantaneity: he proved that the static objects can be imagined as unfolding in time and comprehended progressively.
Debates on the limits of the arts are a recurring matter in modern aesthetic theory. By placing painting and poetry at the opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to means, Lessing inaugurated the modern concept of artistic medium and heralded “the modernist emphasis on the uniqueness and autonomy of the individual arts,” as Michael Fried has observed (Lessing viii). One
should keep in mind that Goethe’s experiment with viewing the Laocoön did not aim at changing the sculpture’s medium but attempted to trick the eye by implying the imaginary movement of the sculpted bodies. Numerous contemporary films, it so happens, seek to transpose irreversibly the static arts of painting and sculpture into the medium of the moving image, at the same time as new media artists working with canonical works of art deliberately subject them to digital remediation and thus effectively depart from their initial material. This essay considers Eve Sussman‘s remediation of the Baroque masterpiece Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez into a high-definition video, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, in the light of a Lessing-inspired inquiry into the limits of the arts and the new media’s interest in blurring the borders between the dimensions of time and space. More specifically, it investigates the mechanisms of Sussman’s remediation of a painting into another visual medium, the medium that dilates the stasis of painting into a choreographed movement and implies the narrative element without succumbing to the authority of verbal ekphrasis.
Lessing’s preference for the verbal art with its power to ignite the imagination was grounded in the Greek tradition privileging the spiritual and intangible in time against the materiality of space. The ideological dominance of the literary and immaterial over the mimetic arts produced by manual or even corporeal intervention determined Lessing’s unyielding verdict in favor of the visual arts. As he writes:
[…] If painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of imitation, which it can combine in space only, must renounce the element of time entirely, progressive actions, by the very fact that they are progressive, cannot be considered to belong among its subjects. Painting must be content with coexisting actions or with mere bodies which, by their position, permit us to conjecture an action (Lessing 77).
Velázquez’s Las Meninas fulfills Lessing’s idea with remarkable precision: the positions of the bodies, the gazes of the pictorial characters, along with the rendition of space in this painting, all invite the viewer to conjure the dramatic action.
Lessing’s classification of the arts according to their relationships to time and space formulated at the dusk of the historical Baroque, the period that validated the power of seeing over other sensorial means, is rarely considered in the context of the late Baroque aesthetics but rather as a foundational text of the Enlightenment. Lessing’s preference for words over images might have also been grounded in his encounter with the exuberant power of Baroque spectacle based on exploration of multimedia effects along with the lavish excesses of Baroque theatricality that freely mixed spatial and temporal effects. Lessing was also himself a dramatist but one whose plays lean far more to discursive drama than to spectacle.
Attempts to transgress the limitation of the liturgical or performative spaces by engulfing the spectators into a continuous action fueled the energies of Baroque painters, sculptors and architects to a great degree (Ndalianis 151-208). Could a re-reading of Lessing in the light of the resurgence of the Baroque in contemporary art be instructive in understanding certain examples of remaking of Baroque paintings into films (Eisenstein 139-181; Greenberg 296-310)? Could the new media ‘update’ the reception of Baroque masterpieces by forfeiting their original materials and fulfilling the expectations of the viewer? What level of morphological similarity with the original could define the “Baroque” quality of a contemporary work of visual art? While certain conceptual affinities between the Baroque and the Post-Modern are already established in the expanding literature on the Baroque in contemporary visual culture and literature, every new example calls into question the potentials and the limitations of the re-use of this historically grounded term.
The term (Neo-)Baroque has no particularly fixed meaning and is applied in contemporary critical studies to a wide range of cultural events and works of art that bear certain formal, ideological, and thematic resemblances to the historical Baroque, or imitate or reuse certain formal literary or visual devices of the original Baroque. The different aspects of the Baroque returns in contemporary culture range from the theatrical, exuberant Baroque of visual excesses, or the technological Baroque, such as in Angela Ndalianis’s Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary
Entertainment to the tragic, or melancholic Baroque of Modernity, such as in Christine
Buci-Glucksmann’s La Raison baroque: de Baudelaire à Benjamin and the Baroque of the Latin American colonial heritage, such as in Severo Sarduy’s Barroco to mention just a few possible applications of this term. The different aspects of the (Neo-)Baroque as a mostly literary event is discussed in Gregg Lambert’s The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture within the conceptual framework of literature and philosophy mostly. Alain Mérot’s Généologies du baroque, by contrast, focuses on the art-historical understanding of the Baroque as a specific visual style. A full review of the literature on the (Neo-)Baroque is beyond the scope of this essay, however.
Eve Sussman’s video piece, 89 Seconds at Alcázar, projected in a twelve-minutes loop, stirred significant interest at its première at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Based on the iconic Las
Meninas (The Maids of Honor) by Diego Velázquez, the video is an extension in time of its actual
painted prototype, for Sussman improvises imaginary moments leading up to and immediately following the famous scene in the artist’s studio in Alcázar (Fig. 1). As a response by a contemporary artist to a canonical Baroque painting and a remediation of the painted canvas into a digital medium, Sussman’s video offers a striking example of the revival of the Baroque paradigm,
if not a complete stylistic hybridization. Sussman’s essay into the (Neo-)Baroque suggests two particular lines of inquiry, among others. Firstly, it exemplifies the transposition of one visual work of art into another visual work of art with a change of medium in the light of (or as a re-evaluation of) Lessing-inspired debates on the role of the medium in the expressive limits of the arts. Secondly, Sussman’s work reconsiders the role of gestures as tools of visual remediation from the spatial art of painting into the sequential art of film. While Sussman’s video explores the juncture between the visual and the temporal as a generic attribute of video production and thus the more or less familiar territory of contemporary art, her particular focus on the injection of movement into the static and, as this essay contends, inevitably figurative art of painting underscores the visual autonomy of video art without succumbing to the authority of the verbal. She thus shifts the premises of the Lessing-inspired debates on the limits of arts into the territory of the new media.
Sussman’s choice of Velázquez ’s famous painting as her subject matter was in some ways conditioned by the status of the painting in the history of art and critical thinking. Eulogized as an epitome of the art of painting and a historical precursor of modern art’s age by the nineteenth-century critics, Las Meninas became a model of the representation of power in Foucault’s milestone study Les Mots et Les Choses [The Order of Things], first published in 1966, making the painting a part of non-art-historical discourses. Sussman opted for the decidedly non-Foucauldian approach by acting herself as an artist encountering a work of another artist, or a viewer unconditioned by theory. In the booklet dedicated to her video, Sussman described her encounter with the real painting in the Prado as a moment of “astonishment” and an “arresting experience” that ran counter to her own expectations of such an event in a placid museum space (Rufus Corporation). She perceived the famous painting as if it existed in opposition to the museum space, as “an inanimate object that defies its own lifelessness and the lifelessness of its environment,” in her own words (Rufus Corporation). Compelled by Velázquez “filmic sequence” of mid-gestures, Sussman finds her creative impetus in the desire to know “how the scene actually came to be” (Rufus Corporation). This encounter recalls the topos of the artist taken prisoner by the work of another artist when liberty could be regained by producing a work of art in response to the captivating original. “We should not forget that museums have also been a place for artists,” as Svetlana Alpers reminded us in her The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (181). Arguing for a co-creative extension of a studio and a museum, Alpers suggested that in the Baroque master’s two most ambitious works—Las Meninas and The Spinners—“museum and studio are brought together, or imagined together to great effect “(183-4). Having discovered the impossibility of filming Velazquez’s painting in the museum space, Sussman sought her liberation from imaginary captivity
in the Prado by remaking the space of Velázquez’s painting’s in a garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and by impersonating his characters, the “dramatis personae,” as Leo Steinberg aptly called them, including the artist himself, by contemporary actors (53). There, in Williamsburg, the painter along with the king, the queen and their entourage turned into pictorial objects in a new work of art created in response to its historical prototype.
To what degree, however, might Sussman’s response to Las Meninas have been determined by the painting’s special status in the canon of Western art and the edifice of its critical reception (Stratton-Pruit; Brown; Brown, Elliott, and Garrido; Alpers, Interpretation)? Sussman’s approach to the painting seems not to betray her adherence to any specific art-historical or philosophical narrative, if not completely to obliterate her knowledge of many existing interpretations of Las
Meninas. Her transposition of the painting into the medium of digital video capitalizes mainly on
the visual, painterly factors already present in the painting. She approached Velázquez’s masterpiece diagetically, seeking to provide, in her own words, an “invented view out from the painting “ (Rufus Corporation). Sussman’s remake of Las Meninas thus corresponds to the principles that defined the original Baroque painting, namely by depicting “the actions and consequences of inner movements and impulses of the soul,” and by keeping “the main emphasis on external action”, as Alois Riegl succinctly outlined in his lectures on the Roman Baroque (93).
To achieve this desired emotive and action-driven interpretation of Velázquez’s painting, one deliberately not fitting into a single theoretical scheme, Sussman infused the new spatiotemporal regime of Las Meninas with the correlatives of Baroque painterly effects generated by the new medium of video. Horst Bredekamp’s recent study of “lebende Bilder” addressed a similar problem in relation to the cinematic re-workings of the Old Masters paintings, such as in Godard’s and Pasolini’s movies. He suggested re-thinking the visual work of art less as an object than as an act, partly on the model of linguistic speech acts (Bredekamp 103-125).
Entering the picture frame affectively
To understand Velázquez’s painted characters affectively, Sussman entered inside the frame of the historical painting, endowing its illusionistic pictorial space with the properties of a cinematic set. My use of the term “affective mode” refers to Peter de Bolla’s application of it in aesthetics, such as an “affective response” to a work of art, and in the theory of historical re-enactment, such as the “affective knowledge” of history (120). Sussman places herself in the category of filmmakers rather than video artists, based on her preference to work with real actors (Conner 70). For staging
painting, including the king, Philip IV, and the queen, Mariana, both reflected in the mirror, and she added a real dog matching the mastiff from the painting (Brown, The Technique of Genius 181). Robert Whalley and Rebecca Graves, her stage designers, faithfully recreated the setting of Velázquez’s studio in Alcázar, while Karen Young, her costume designer, reconstructed the lines and color patterns of seventeenth–century Habsburg court attire. Removing the fourth wall and dressing up actors in period costumes, Sussman, however, did not create the static apogee of a
tableau vivant as a possible emotive response to the gripping power of the original tableau. Bill
Viola, who in many ways pioneered the video restaging of old masters’ painting with the deployment of contemporary actors as pictorial characters, affirms the limits of the remade pictorial surface to an even greater degree. Sussman‘s treatment of space in Las Meninas differs from the ‘tableau’ status of space in the videos by Viola, which usually recreate spaces encompassed by original paintings. Sussman moves inside Velázquez’s pictorial space and extends it beyond its physical limits by making the video visually homologous to the original painted tableau (Murray 35-57). The attribute of the ‘vivant’ in her video tableau highlights the non-fixity of the given pictorial event that is grounded in the distinct, albeit sketchily outlined, psychological motivation of her characters. Sussman’s stages the re-enactment of Las Meninas as an empathetic response to the painting that represents an event; she concerns herself with how the ‘accident’ depicted in that painting could have occurred in the daily life of that court setting.
The new mise-en-scènes invented by Sussman occur in the sequence of rooms outside the studio depicted by Velázquez that the king, his retinue and the artist would supposedly pass on the way to his studio (Fig. 2). As if challenging Lessing’s claim that a single moment in painting “must express nothing transitory,” Sussman seeks to inject the transitory back into the single moment of
Las Meninas (Lessing 20). 89 seconds at Alcázar’s effectiveness in creating a theatrical setting
without leaving Las Meninas’ pictorial authenticity behind lies in Sussman’s genuine curiosity of the ways in which Velázquez’s spectacular painterly effects might exist outside its original medium and agency. The title selected by Sussman emphasizes the accidental nature of her intervention into the life of the Habsburg court of Philip IV. Could any minute-and-a half of this court life, as she implies, be rendered as a looping spectacle of power dynamics, protocols, intrigue and banality—all underscored with choreographed gestures and patterns of movements defined by the actors’ bodies clad in costumes? Could there be a new plot for her extended action stemming from Velázquez’s notoriously irresolvable mise-en-scène in Las Meninas?
Philip IV is a common theme running throughout the extensive art-historical literature. The painting creates a strong argument as Velázquez’s plea for the recognition of the art of painting as a noble pursuit and for his own admission to the rank of nobility. The ‘Baroqueness’ of Sussman’s restaging of Las Meninas reveals itself in the seriousness with which she reconstructs the protocols of the court life based on observation of the daily ritual of subordination, courtesy, and graceful demeanor. The structure of a figurative painting may create conducive ground for converting a pictorial performance into figurative acting, if one recalls Diderot’s famous equation of a tableau with a theatrical set (Diderot 88-9). What are the limits, however, to the new mise-en-scènes from outside Velázquez’s “text” that a contemporary artist might introduce without inscribing a certain narrative, or adding a sheer cinematic ekphrasis to the painting’s notorious openness (Sager Eidt 18-20)? Two factors played important roles in containing the narrative drive characteristic of many cinematic re-mediations of paintings: Sussman’s subtle choreography of gestures and movements as well as her inventive construction of sound.
Sussman’s “moving into” the stilled frame of painting is significantly informed by some distinctly Baroque takes on illusions and appearances. With just a few strokes, Sussman draws on the unraveling enigma of the court’s life sketching the emotive palette of tension, hidden drama, and undisclosed disturbing news. The reflection of fire playing on the face of Maribárbola, the court dwarf, the handkerchief that Queen Mariana presses to her chest, the invitation for a conversation that King Philip sends to the nun: these are the compressed, fragmented details that outline Sussman’s characters without spelling out much of anything specific in the unfolding action. (Fig. 3) The conversion of the royal family—the king and the queen—into the central characters in the court drama is one of the most dramatic extensions of the original painting. The king and the queen are no longer just a mirror reflection and not “the frailest and the most distant forms of reality” as in
Las Meninas. In 89 Seconds, they become the reality, a visual reality of the new canvas unfolding in
time (Foucault 15).
The king and the queen stand in the center of the spontaneous, unscripted extension of Velázquez’s painting. Their appearance in the extended video ‘canvas’ infuses the new work with the dramatic intensity of an event of which the contours are unknown. Even the tranquil beauty of the Infanta Margarita, caught by the camera dancing with her father, an intimate addition that Sussman introduces to the stiffness of the daily life among royalty, is tinged with the frailty of happiness against an unknown menace. As the result, the enigma of Velázquez’s concetto remained tactfully unresolved. The viewer of Sussman’s work does not know what actually happens in
Alcázar on that day, what agitates the royal family, and why exactly they gather in the artist’s studio. The soundtrack of the video sharpens the aura of undecipherable elements of daily life in the palace and enhances the moment of suspense. Whispers, sighs, murmuring voices, unintelligible dialogues, rustling silk, the cries of a street vendor, the crack in the fireplace: the sonorous, yet indeterminable presence of life emerges from a resolute sacrifice of words in favor of what is accessible to the eye as a figurative, animated, pictorial sequence of images. In Sussman’s Alcázar, Velázquez’s characters are flesh and blood but they do not pronounce composed lines, for they do not belong to the world of historical drama, but to that of painterly illusion. In this respect, Sussman’s approach radically differs from that of Peter Greenaway’s recent The Night Watch, 2007, that required the full dramatization of pictorial characters and concretization of their action.
Sussman did not have a precise script for her video, relying instead on the expressiveness of the fragmented reality that she learned to embrace through her experience with cinema verité. She had, however, to invent dialogues for her actors to allow them to inhabit their characters. The lines that the actors pronounced during the screening were suppressed to the point of unintelligibility in the final cuts of the video. The retouching of the soundtrack is reminiscent of the invisible preparatory drawings rendered by Velázquez directly on his canvases, a technique that he acquired during his studies in Pacheco’s studio in Seville (Veliz 11-29). The invisibility of Velázquez’s preparatory work highlighted by the free, sketchy character of his brushstrokes helped establish his reputation as a virtuoso painter during the Baroque period and later provided him with the status of the precocious “impressionist” among modernists. Las Meninas, according to Jonathan Brown, is “the largest oil sketch ever painted” (Brown, Velazquez. Painter and Courtier 261). The loose style of brushstrokes allowed Velázquez to introduce quick changes to his canvas, as if responding instantaneously to the veracity of compositional accidents. The cleaning of Las Meninas revealed, for example, that beneath the current head of the painter, glancing at the viewers with poise and dignity, is another one that was turned more directly at the Infanta Margarita and her entourage; the girl’s head also underwent a change of direction (Brown, Garrido 191). The layering of two moments in one frame is a testimony to his practice of pentimenti, the minor changes in the painting surface that reflected the revisions and the imbedded material changes that the artist made during the process.
Sussman’s meticulous staging of light is one way of approximating Velázquez’s dazzling technique of endowing pictorial surfaces with life and vibrancy. Technical studies of Velázquez’s works have brought to light some secrets of his trade. Among these was the artist’s inclination
towards textured, imperfect fabrics, mostly linen, in selecting his support, based on the observations that rough surfaces optically assisted the glittering effects of light in a finished painting. Las
Meninas, for example, was painted on a canvas with a number of little knots and surface glitches
that would catch the light (Garrido 15-16). In his selection of pictorial pigments, Velázquez also sought a way of enhancing the effects of translucence in the preliminary layers. He mixed into his colors a larger than usual amount of the calcium-based pigments, to increase the reflection of light off the whitish ground. His daring technique of scattering tiny flecks of material to reflect natural light was another way of retaining the mysterious luminosity of his surfaces (Garrido 17-18). The appearance of glitter in the skin, hair, fabrics, and embroideries in Velázquez’s portraits made his characters come alive, if seen from the proper distance, accommodating the access of light to enhance the optical impression. It is tempting to endow Velázquez’s painting method with the prescient anticipation of the cinematic appropriation of light but his precocious achievements came out of a long tradition of painterly technique developed in Renaissance Venice and in the Netherlands, the best examples of which were available for Velázquez’s close studies in the royal collection that he supervised for years during his long service to the king (Mckim-Smith, Anderson-Bergdoll, and Newman 34-50).
Sussman’s attentiveness to the art of painting makes a video homage to the Baroque mastery of brushwork. She is not afraid, however, to retouch the famous Old-Masters’ darkness (that is often explainable by the deterioration of pigments) by filling her visual space with diaphanous light and brightening the colors toned down by the passage of time. The shafts of light thrown on Maribárbola, the court dwarf, the gentle shuffling of feathers on Queen Mariana’s headpiece, the trembling of the camera over dappled surfaces, fabrics and faces, the rays sliding down the contours of the meninas’ bodies, all these delicate details come close to the effects of paint. This cinematic oscillation operates on the same wavelength as the artist’s hand. (Fig. 4) This vitality of light, however, is not a gratuitous trick of her videocam but an approximation of the video technique to that of the old master’s brushwork that endowed his painted characters with “living” qualities. As the scholars of Velázquez’s technique pointed out:
Las Meninas is tenderly crafted and the soft tones of browns seem to emanate from the skins
and garments that cover those tones. This sense of emanation reinforces the illusion of presence, of seeing real people standing just beyond our space (Mckim-Smith, Anderson-Bergdoll, and Newman 65).
light. Her actors were supposed to establish a double rapport with their painterly prototypes: their movements were to fit the actual figuration of the court characters engaged in the original
mise-en-scène but they also were to appear as the indelible extension of the painterly world. Choreographed
dance movements, a “kind of corporal writing,” “a poem independent of any scribal apparatus” in Mallarmé’s words, assisted Sussman in transmitting the painterly forms into the actors’ bodies (Mallarmé 130).
From Gestures of Brushes to Gestures of Bodies
Life at the Spanish court imposed certain restrictions on the body: codified movements and poses served as distinct markers of the social and political status of its members. During his long service to the court, Velázquez had to perform several roles at once, of which those of a virtuoso artist and a poised courtier were the most definitive of his status. The prototype of Gracián’s ‘galante pintor,’ Velázquez embodied the ideals of the court etiquette and manners described by the Spanish Jesuit writer of courtesy books. The connection between the artist’s mode of social bearing and his behavior in painting that was “superior, articulate, purposeful, withholding, cool” as Svetlana Alpers astutely pointed out, indicates the way Velázquez’s paintings were described and understood in his period (The Vexations of Art 156).
Sussman draws on such behavioral understanding of Velázquez’s style in her 89 Seconds by reworking gestures of different kinds from the painting into their extended counterpart in the video. (Fig. 5) This particular attention to gestures brings her into dialogue with Renaissance and Baroque theory of pictorial composition that Velázquez learned from his teacher Pacheco. The rules of verisimilitude grounded in Aristotle’s Poetics were equally important in the construction of action in Baroque drama and painting. Gestures as means of visualization of action expressed affetti and constituted the links constructed between the viewers and actors in theatrical performances, or between the viewers and bodies in painting (Puttfarken 107-9). Aristotle recommended particularly paying attention to gestures in elaborating plots. As he says of the writer in his Poetics:
At the time when he is constructing his plots, and engaged on the diction in which they are worked out, the poet should remember to put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the vividness of an eyewitness as it were, he will devise what is appropriate, and be least likely to overlook incongruities (17.25).
The Aristotelian requirement of visualizing with ‘the vividness of an eye-witness’ validates Sussman’s transmission of the painted action from the static art into the actors’ movements of her
video. These gestures, developed in collaboration with choreographer Claudia de Serpa Soares, function as attributes of a specific historical style and extended markers of Velázquez’s brushwork. The subtlety in identifying these gestures became crucial in rendering them within the range of historical authenticity, at least with respect to the authenticity of pictorial characters. The positions of bodies clad in Baroque-style dresses, the turn of the king’s head, the slight movement of Velázquez’s eyes, the way the King touches his chin while he stares out at us in the smoky mirror, or Queen Mariana’s squeezing of a handkerchief—all these gestural motifs, rendered with respect to the subdued, accidental, visual rhetoric of Velázquez’s pictorial actors, tease out the inner emotions from the instantaneous moment of painting into the temporal dimension of video. These gestures, akin to the art of ballet, are visual signifiers in the absence of words.
Sussman’s artistic interpretation of gestures as the indici of movements is a perceptive gesture in itself that validated her remediation of Velázquez from a historical tableau, a framed object in the museum, into a visual tableau, a “moving picture” that acquires the status of a new art object. She reinstalled the original pictorial frame of Las Meninas by attaching an imaginary pictorial frame to her video that is usually screened in a darkened room in museum settings. By bringing a video based on a historical work of art into a museum space she again gesturally fulfilled the centuries-old desire of a static art being able not just to render but to become a moving object (Mondloch).
Aby Warburg’s passion for interpreting Renaissance paintings as examples of the persistence of intermediary states of bodies in movement brought to the discipline of art history the perspective of the “image-motion,” though the term itself was coined by Gilles Deleuze. Warburg, as Philippe-Alain Michaud has explained, “set himself the task of reconstructing the unfolding of the figure in its duration within the representation, a reconstitution he would try to accomplish by exploring, in stages, the passages leading from the world of things to that of images” (86). Warburg’s studies of the relationships between the spectator and the movement of images seem pertinent in explaining Sussman’s interest (among other contemporary artists) in applying movement to the assumed stasis of painting. The Warburgian notion of seeing images in duration undergirds her intention to liberate the immobilized viewer of Las Meninas from the visual riddle of Velázquez’s implied plot. Sussman, however, seeks to return to her characters the properties of actual bodies—not just to refigure their formal outlines—and to endow these new “image-motions” with psychological motivations expressed in gestures that could be grounded in Velázquez’s paintings.
and a dynamic element of culture. In his essay “Notes on Gesture,” Giorgio Agamben proposes that the defining element of cinema is not the image but the gesture. Elucidating the distinction between image as psychic reality and image as material reality developed by Gilles Deleuze, a crucial thinker for (Neo-)Baroque theory, Agamben points out that in modernity “the mythical rigidity of the image has been broken and here properly speaking, there are no images but only gestures” (55-6). He explains that:
Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reification and obliteration of gestures […]; on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridge’s snapshots or in any sports photograph.) The former corresponds to the recollection seized by the voluntary memory, while the latter corresponds to the image flashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory. And while the former lives in magical isolation, the latter always refers beyond itself to a whole of which it is a part. Even the Mona
Lisa, even Las Meninas could be seen not as immovable and eternal forms, but as fragments
of a gesture or as stills of a lost film wherein only they could regain their true meaning (Agamben 55-6).
Sussman’s work on Las Meninas illuminates Agamben’s point from her artistic perspective. She respectfully interrupts a certain kind of litigatio, a paralyzing power that is continuously at work in every image and liberates, to a certain degree, Velázquez’s characters from the frame of verbal interpretation. She alters the original medium of the painting, yet her response to the Baroque prototype preserves its inherent visual integrity in such a way that it is not dissipated by the temporal factor. She exposes Velazquez’s pictorial artifice to the viewers analogically, by putting the mechanics of the new medium to work as a correlative of the original brushwork. If the dog, the only object that does not acknowledge the presence of viewers, according to Michel Foucault, moves around a bit at the end of the video, while the Infanta and her retinue solemnly dissolve the
tableau vivant’s gathering in the artist’s studio, Sussman’s gesture implies that the accident of
painting continues. To invoke Agamben once again, “the gesture is an exhibition of mediality: it is a process of making a means as such” (58).
How then is Sussman’s remediation of Velázquez exemplary for the broader (Neo-)Baroque aesthetics? This trend that precariously borrows its name from a style/period is identified, more generally, as a fertile ground “that incessantly stretches and impregnates” (Goyer, Moser 7) contemporary visual and literary culture, or, more specifically, as a repetition of the original Baroque that emerges in the midst of modernity and “recurs historically precisely in the moment when one tradition of modernity exhausts its own possibilities and transitions into another, and even as the symptomatic principle of this exhaustion” (Lambert 170).
Sussman’s 89 Seconds at Alcázar is more than a symptom of the (Neo-)Baroque: it validates this term’s critical meaning on the level of form and content. Her return to Velázquez acknowledges the historical gap between the new work and that from the original Baroque and adds a new aspect to the existing critical readings of the famous masterpiece. Sussman’s preference for the figuration of emotions is not, however, her self-conscious (Neo-)Baroque venture but the confirmation of the generative power of the Old Master’s oeuvre. 89 Seconds at Alcázar makes its persuasive point in suggesting that the best response to a work of (visual) art is another work of visual art. The process of exposure from a painting into a video, or a film—such as in Sussman’s case, or in Alexander Sokurov’s or, most recently, in Lech Majewky’s painting-based films—is a manifestation, in many ways, of what has been called the post-medium stage in contemporary art and a critical glance at Lessing’s idea of the medium specificity (Krauss). These artistic experiments with medium specificity convert the old into the new Baroque and suggest that the (Neo-) Baroque is possibly one of “the epochs in the history of western literature and art when the boundaries between the spatial and temporal arts seemed to be especially porous “(Mitchell 112).
Sussman’s visual restaging of Las Meninas also confirms that the gesture can be theorized as a shared attribute of painting and cinema, in line with Agamben’s hypothesis. Las Meninas, as art historians persuasively argue, conveys Velazquez’s claim for the nobility of painting. This painting’s tour de force of thought and technique “meant to demonstrate once and for all that painting was a liberal and noble art that did not merely copy, but could re-create and even surpass nature” (Brown, “On the meaning of Las Meninas” 73). Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds at Alcázar proves that emulation more than mere imitation is still a crucial force in the act of artistic creation for contemporary artists as much as it was for their Baroque predecessors.
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Tatiana Senkevitch is a historian of European art and architecture with a focus on artistic theory and practice of the Baroque period, as well as the Neo-Baroque in various media. Her research also includes Russian art and aesthetic theory of the 20th century.
