The Marble of Despair
As I wonder today in a world full of discord and rivalry, my attraction for Thomas Couture’s painting “Romans during the Decadence” will remain beyond any historical moments.
For the more significant part of my teenage years, I regularly visited the Museum of Orsay to contemplate this painting for hours. It took three years for Couture to complete his work and the same amount of time for me to observe how a civilization so elaborate could fall restlessly into the depths of debauchery and social misery.
The painting is hung in the Maine gallery like a giant persona telling a story to a crowd of bystanders who ignore that those times are still relevant as the magnificence of the characters is desynchronized with the present time.
Couture created this artwork during the tremors of political unrest in 1847 France before the February Revolution when elitism was prevailing with the disenfranchisement of the workers. The lassitude and beauty of the characters reveal how social classes are annihilated and reinforce the visual disparities.
Some patricians are sinking into the despair of wealth and become grotesquely ridiculous when ordinary people equally suffer this misery of the mind with the forced labor of survival and the decrepitude of their bodies. The magnificence of the background exhibits an architectural scenery where figures of Roman Heroes engraved into the marble of history judge the civilization’s despair. They are the envoys of truth that the patricians of Rome are ignoring to avoid the Cassandras of rising defiance of their orgiastic states.
As I drown into this Dantesque revelation of our civilization, the painting appears even more relevant in today’s pandemic time. The representation of Emperor Vitellius on the left side with the characteristics of a fat lavish old man reminds us how power in times of crisis can belong to men of worthlessness and lead to tremendous social and intellectual emptiness as the heroes have disappeared.
The apathetic figures lying in the foreground confront the disconnection between the great physical suffering of the population during a pandemic with the preserved ones. The marvelous naked bodies are petrified in their decadence and cannot escape a scene surrounded by the idle figures of knowledge afflicted by despair. The orgiastic petrifaction seals the social behavior that annihilates the human condition.
This surreal, decadent splendor reminded me of the recent exhibition at the Blaffer Museum in Houston of Amie Siegel, Medium Cool, as the aesthetic of an Eden collapsing resonates with the extreme beauty of the empty spaces staged by the artist.
Her work aims to carry the voluptuous idealistic scenes forged by great physical suffering to build unreachable Edens.
The video “Quarry” transports you into the land of the dead as the material creates the perfect heaven. The human’s existentialism is cast into marble, and its remaining dust is trapped in the linen of the canvas.
The river of souls lays in the stone nervures with a flow that ends nowhere as the marble is cut to fulfill its utilitarian purpose.
All the works in the exhibition are connected. The pots laying on the marble are offered to the gods of economic power and mark the bridge with Freud’s anti-chamber, its sofa, and the multiple ancient figurines that must be ritually cleansed from the dust of the human soul to reach an absolute level of purity.
The ropes, metallic pillars, dust, and wind remind us how we honor the dead in the methodical construction of modern coffins. The vacuity of aesthetic living spaces symbolizes the disappearance of any trouble ritually erased to let the marble of consumption (Siegel exhibits a Trump Tower piece of marble) be your coffin.
From the physical labor of cutting, sanding, and moving the stone, the perfection of visual emptiness is restful.
Siegel created the Gods’ temple, which can symbolize Bergson’s spirituality to connect to the world. The solitary elevation in the materials and environment separates us from our human condition to model the coffin of our extinction. Even the most rigid material in appearance can be turned into dust as the historical memory of others is forgotten. Siegel tells you the story of death through the lens of ritualized destruction and veneration.
Couture’s sumptuous half-naked bodies introduce us to the soul of the protagonists, and as Siegel reveals with Freud’s sofa, the non-combative postures fully vulnerable physically and mentally unveil the abandon of a civilization. The burden of reality drives them into a stage of self-pleasure and contemplation to avoid the present times
From the bodies’ lavishness to the exhibition of desirable materials, the human moral misery and its finitude are cast into a state of immortality that leads to collapse.
These works of art separated by almost two hundred years communicate the indescribable feeling of vanity and depravation. I watched Siegel’s Video “Medium Cool” multiple times during the length of the exhibition with the same fascination I had when I was a teenager in front of the “Romans during the Decadence.” Some masterpieces unknown by the masses; are timeless. Their historical symbolic of our schizophrenic societies transfigures generations of the structural process as we aim to live above death by rejecting the mortality of others even if the eternal repetition mesmerizes us into a vain beauty of political ignorance of our decrepit future.
The elected gods and patricians are turned into marble dust; they are cast onto the linen canvases to embellish the white walls of our sorrows.
September 2020
