Awakening Yet Prisoner – George Steiner: Real Presences Translated by Marta López‐Luaces, Mercedes Roffé, Edwin Lamboy
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Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner ALFONSO MASÓ Michelangelo Buonarroti: Awakening Yet Prisoner – George Steiner: Real Presences Translated by Marta López‐Luaces, Mercedes Roffé, Edwin Lamboy In the speculative intuitions of the aesthetic, the motions of spirit are not those of an arrow, but of the the spiral at once ascendant and retrogressive, as is the stairway in the library of Montaigne. (George Steiner) 1 All art keeps hidden within a whole bazaar of that which cannot be taken for granted, after feeling the attraction to a form and a narrative that exempt us, if that is what we want, from going further. 1. Francis Bacon, Figure With Meat, 1954. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Awakening (between 1513 and 1536) 1 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner Every creative process implies a projection, a transferring onto the matter of the person who leads it . not trying to hide but to bare, beyond the visible flesh, the lives, the buried faces, presences probably unthought‐of by both himself and others; amplified, probably only partially softened, travestied, transsexualized, transubstantiated in a theatre of the world where it is possible to show oneself under the appearance of enlivened signs and objects. Michelangelo discovered too many things about sculpture to be understood by his contemporaries. From there on, nothing is easier for the observer than making other people’s excuses his or her own, categories such as “perfection” or “the appropriate,” unknown to the standards of the artist’s times and even to his own intentions and possibilities, shackled by centuries of incomprehension; celebrated even for his biggest and most superficial sculpture, the David, a work of youth and dissatisfaction, too much wrapping for such little content, such little life, such little contact with the world. A monumental anecdote that diverts attention away from the immediate drama where other less obvious presences strive to appear, to remain. In Real Presences (1989), George Steiner argues that, at present, the endless outpouring of the unimportant2 has given way, in the academic‐journalistic production of the humanities, to the proliferation of exchanges of a tertiary order, where debates expand on what has been said about what has been said in suffocating, endogamic spirals. In this context, the possibility to access the real presence of the poem, the musical piece, the painting or the sculpture has died long ago. It is vital to re‐educate ourselves for the direct contemplation of phenomena and the arts. Going out to “the encounter with immediacy and transcendence in the aesthetic is, of necessity, an argument on Logos and word” (idem, p. 50). 2 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner Art prepares us to see, since the “best readings about art are art” (idem, p. 17). In order to be able to face artistic creation, it is essential to overcome the perplexity that comes when we are in direct contemplation, freeing ourselves from the headphones that continuously talk to us about the secondary and tertiary, about someone’s life and miracles, and avoid that which would keep hold of us, which would make us feel extremely uncomfortable as tourists of knowledge.3 The work of art awaits to question us, to be questioned, to be transformed and be able to transform us in the encounter, as long as we come ready to set out to the initiatic journey that is going to take place, inevitably, if we are willing to inhabit art like a living fragment of a history that includes us, and as such, remains unfinished. Michelangelo is an amazing case of lack of appreciation even to this day. There is always someone among us who considers himself or herself a learned person and yet is unable to remember Michelangelo except for the David; someone who has probably read somewhere that the artist left many sculptures “unfinished.” This theory of the unfinished and abandoned works, lacking any direct experience of the real presence, keeps recurring in all too many books and other academic sources. In order to reach the unknown, the hidden, the postponed, the unutterable, and to imbue it with the necessary traits to show its unavoidability (since what we can’t see or we don’t want to see is also unavoidable) was part of Michelangelo’s conception of art, of what devoting his life to art—his inexcusable duty—meant to him. An incorruptible honesty and commitment to those artistic principles are at the root of his enormous contributions; and yet, they are also the reason of his extreme loneliness in the face of the incomprehension toward his discoveries, and the lack of 3 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner a valid interlocutor. This lack of understanding becomes apparent in the vehement accusations of fickleness or senile eccentricity—as it was in the case of the Rondanini Pietà. In what sense was it unfinished? Michelangelo worked on it until four or five days before his death, as on so many other works, willingly, not in order to fulfill a commission. Here, he is not trying to reproduce the commonly accepted iconography of piety, but the deep emotions that witnessing such a moment would provoke, the immediate empathy with the grief of those two bodies—to find oneself, see oneself, experience oneself, simultaneously, in those two bodies that suffer and keep close to one another, to embody their own construction‐destruction. Michelangelo was deeply religious. In this work he answers only to his God and himself. And for him, at that point in his life, it would have been insulting to present a dramatic tale that would prevail over the real presence of the extreme grief, the extreme abandonment of that moment, a moment he can only understand by embodying it, by being simultaneously those two beings—himself, abandoned in the arms of that brief life he still has left, and notwithstanding, still supporting, still upholding the dying one on his own shoulders; he himself being the piety, piety of himself, piety of the sorrow and the guilt, sorrow and guilt that pierce our invisible lives (whether or not it is at the expense of the divine). Why that decision, why that image? Suddenly, titans are of no use anymore. It is necessary to lighten the weight for the task of leaving the immediacy of humanity. It is necessary to drain away the body, to erode it, to erase it, to blur it, to fragment it; it is necessary to offer one’s remains as part of an expiation, to scratch in it the body itself, punish it, punish‐compensate, furiously, fearfully, warmly, for the offences, the indelible faults, and to offer oneself, already a corpse, to support the weight of what cannot be effaced. 4 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner Is it empathy with other distant remains, with other, very close, remains that we will never get to rebuild? Remains of ruins, like the ones in the ancient friezes, deep human remains. Ruins added here voluntarily, carefully tied to the side by a part whose only function is to join and hold—a right arm separated from the body, repeated (the other right arm is hidden behind the back), a second right arm, a remain as an axis, a remain whose remaining vigor contrasts with the other arms tied to the body, to the immediate torso, to which it couldn’t belong not even in a different time. Scratched, over scratched, the torso; surpassed the materic limit that could have allowed the construction of an anatomy, barely functional. Through it, we get access to something more than just a representation. We are invited to be part of a living process, an active process of dematerialization that is not completely conquered by death as long as there is a persisting thread of breath to sustain itself, to sustain ourselves, to hold itself and to hold us; to transport one another, to be able to be, through grief, through the awareness of a separation, of a past, irreversible split. In the face of the current erosion of death, there is no need for mirrors to hold the earthly beauty that mellowed the days; there is no longer a need for anatomic definition, but a spiritual intensification. Sustaining oneself in the unavoidable paradox demands not to lose the tension, the emotion, and the expression, unretainable by the representation resources known at the time. It demands to choose between gravity and the embrace, it demands to be at the same time weight and lightness so that the body, which is two bodies, faints while ascending and ascends while fainting—through the intense curve that helps to rise the combined matter, through the enormous weight that the disjointed arm (the extra arm) conveys to the legs, which have already left this life. 5 Alfonso Masó Michelangelo: Awakening Yet Prisoner We had seen remains from antiquity that were enormously expressive. Michelangelo unveils for us an aesthetic of remains and offers it to us from the union between a misunderstood expressionism and an unconceivable collage. That right arm, which is also that of Michelangelo, had been waiting to reappear in the Rondanini Pietà at least for thirty years, as we can see in the Pietà he drew at the time (1520‐26): the arm of the given artist, recurrently defeated by the weight of death—something that reappears also in the Palestrina Pietà. In that drawing, the Virgin appears in the back, just sketched, holding, blurred, willingly relegated to the background, one more time. We find the same blurring‐fusion on both paper and stone . until his last Pietà. It was perhaps then that Michelangelo let himself die, having already given a closure to his last struggle, the answer finally found, breaking up the identification of beauty in art with beauty in the body, once he had reached his full strength and virtuosity in the mimesis of representation.