Keep Things Strange

As an art historian, I take delight in quickly “placing” and “bullet-pointing” works of art I encounter—whether in a museum, book, or blog.  Talking with Bynum, I had a major aha! moment: I really need to push back against my instant, automatic, often unthinking digestion of objects and images.

For months now, “keep things strange” has been replaying in my head like an earworm everywhere I go—Kalamazoo, the Cloisters, the library, the Gap.  “Keeping things strange” – i.e., confronting the weirdness of objects, sitting with the discomfort produced by otherness, and denying normalizing tendencies— has been transformative for me. Lately, everything looks strange to me. Needless to say, my perfect dissertation project no longer seems so tidy. But I’m not going to get into that here. Instead, I want to talk about an art film from 2006 and a 12^th century sculpture.

The three and a half minute film “Flash in the Metropolitan” was created by artist-collaborators Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer who filmed after-hours, in the middle of the night, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a 16mm camera and a handheld strobe-light. In the film, a strobing light emerges from pure darkness and approaches several recognizable works, some free-standing and others in vitrines. Though historically and geographically diverse (from medieval European sculptures to African masks) all of the works in the film are associated with some cult or ritual function.

What is so incredible about “Flash” is that it transforms familiar art objects into strange, haunting, mystical, ephemeral images. As the film jumps from object to object, the historical contingency so painstakingly enforced by gallery divisions and wall-texts dissolves. Beyond the fact that they are taken out of museological context, the objects are bathed in new light (literally!) that transforms their formal and affective qualities. In the film, objects that I have seen countless times in pristine glass, brightly lit, and accompanied by explanatory text are turned into uncanny doubles, given new life, and “made strange” again.

Since the film isn’t currently on view nor online anywhere, comparing a film still with an official Met museum image might help demonstrate my point. Here we have a late 12^th-century “Enthroned Virgin” of likely Scandinavian origin, a lovely example of the “Throne of Wisdom” type of sculpture that was very popular in the 11^th-12^th centuries.

Enthroned Virgin, late 12th century, Poplar with remains of polychromy; H: 34 in

The high-resolution photograph from the Met website allows an impossibly perfect point of view: front and center, lit equally from all directions, and zoom-able! Something about this “objective” photograph appeals to my art-historical training as a categorizer and cataloguer. My mind automatically scrolls through index cards and checks off all the formal hallmarks of Romanesque sculpture: elongated body emphasized by repetitive, linear drapery; stylized, geometricized facial features; static, stable composition of figure in a seated position, etc. Next I think about iconography: Mary as symbolic furniture, a seat for Christ, a vessel for God incarnate, reflecting a growing cult of Mary in the 12^th century. Next stop: relevant bibliography. Ilene Forsyth’s groundbreaking book on “Throne of Wisdom” sculptures is recalled, especially her suggestion of their varied functions as reliquaries, objects to be carried in procession, and even props in liturgical dramas, standing in for Mary and the Christ child in performance plays of the nativity cycle. I remember that the medium of wood itself may have been celebrated in the 12^th century, as evidenced by large schools of specialized craftsmen at this time (especially at Auvergne, but elsewhere, too).  Form, iconography, function, material: check, check, check, check. Object processed and filed.”

And yet, the still image of the same sculpture from “Flash” helps me see something else entirely. Viewed in profile from the right side of the Virgin, cropped at the bust, lit harshly from a single direction—this is surely a more limited point of view. And yet it is a much less limiting one.  Looking at this less clinical and more elusive image, my mind has a chance to wander. I notice totally different aspects of the sculpture. I notice how the gentle downward tilt of the chin and the bright, upwardly gazing eyes combine to produce an expression of both calm and wonder.  I notice that the reflected left-side of the face is not at all a mirror-image of the right side of the face, and for a moment I even think that I’m looking at two sculptures side-by-side. I am shocked by how eerily life-like she appears: the softness and fullness of her cheeks, the gentle curve of the heavy shadow, the realism of her pursed lips. I’m surprised by how downright lovely she is. I return to the Met museum photograph: is this really the same sculpture that I unflinchingly filed under “Romanesque—stylized, non naturalistic”?

The film still confronts me with an essential contradiction. Despite the compelling realness, energy, and (dare I say) beauty of the Virgin’s face and expression, the sculpture still seems static, lifeless, and wooden. There is a constant slippage here, back and forth—from matter to being, wood to woman. It’s a strange, uncanny, uncomfortable effect.  And it’s an effect I would have never noticed through “close-looking” at the museum-sanctioned photograph. Instead, I could only see this effect through the intentional estrangement enacted by the film.

And this makes me think: might the evoked duality of realness and artificiality in the film help access a medieval perspective? It’s fair to say that medieval viewers did not see sculptures illuminated by strobe lights on 16mm film, and yet these conditions are no less contrived than the white plinths, glass vitrines, and track lighting of current museum display.

Was this uncanny tension between real and artificial intended and/or experienced? I wonder if such sculptures were carved in an “abstracted” or  “stylized” manner (as we see in bright light) to better produce effects of uncanny realness in dim and mutable candlelight. Perhaps woodworkers or patrons intended this dual effect. Or maybe church authorities exploited the transformative capacity of such sculptures, manipulating effects of light and shadow in order to animate statues in liturgical performances. Did “Throne of Wisdom” sculptures tap into a medieval “uncanny valley?”

In this experiment, I’ve had all the fun and done none of the work. The real task would be to put these observations into greater context, and in dialogue with the scholarship of Forsyth and others. I admit that these observations may not prove useful to understanding “Throne of Wisdom” sculpture, and that’s okay, that was never my goal.

Instead, this has been an exercise in the method of “keeping things strange”—purposefully fracturing and repositioning one’s viewpoint.  To many, this approach may seem like an application of object-oriented ontology or other speculative realisms. But to me, it’s an extension of formalism—one that self-consciously reckons with the troubling artificiality of our engagement with medieval objects. “Keeping things strange” disrupts the normalizing tendencies of our practice. What we do is weird. Maybe we’re better off admitting it.

Joy Partridge is a Ph.D. candidate in medieval art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY.