|
|
More self-portraits exist today than at
any other time in our history. Art of this nature has never failed to attract
and compel - think of Narcissus caught, seemingly alone, by the pool - but
has never before been so obviously shallow. Once you had to have talent.
Today, smart phones and social media have sought to open the old gateways and
now, to quote Grayson Perry's 2013 Reith Lecture, modern self-portraiture rains
down upon us 'like sewage from above'. The 'selfie' has become ubiquitous in
an age that seeks simultaneously to democratise and commodify the act of
self-expression.
In his latest collection, Self Portraits, David Pollard
presents a series of imagined self-portraits focusing on artists active in
periods from Ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the
present days. Channelling the voices of artists as culturally diverse as the
likes of Brother Rufillus, Rembrandt, Blake and Khalo (among others, there
are around ninety poems in total) is no mean feat and is achieved by Pollard
with great aplomb. The poems dig deeply into the psyches of featured artists
in an effort to differentiate between the inner and outer selves that are
indicative of an artist's recognition of the tensions between celebrity and
personality.
Who else can be reflected
by his solitude
into the afterlife of his
biography;
who else can see the
glass's ripples
in the skin's slow loss
when poverty allows
no other subject who can
read his sentence
into paint
as I?
(from
'Rembrant Van Rijn')
I was intrigued by philosophical notions that it is nobler to look in at
one's self to divine a sense of one's character than it is to gaze out on the
world in simple wanderlust.
Each poem assumes the voice of one in a long line of painters, illustrators
and sculptors and each of these artists lends their voice to the
re-instrumentation of the act of self-creation, recalling the old Tuscan
proverb 'every painter paints himself' and marking the page with a likeness
that resonates from a place beyond it. In Self-Portraits, Pollard
examines the relationship between the painted image and the poetic word,
locating his ekphrasis within an arbitrary space that seeks to bridge the gap
between 'dumb poetry' and 'blind art' as in this extract from 'Edvard Munch':
The paint has eaten into
the very skin and form
that backs (saving the
skin's own
staring grace) into
itself and darkness
suffers its existence to
struggle
into the hunger of
creation
which the wound knows -
denies it the
transparency
-
invades the call -
made by the passion for
destruction
that impels the fingers'
work
creates as it destroys.
With little objective frame of reference, readers will be aware of tensions
within the poems when prompted to assess the relative truths that Pollard is
asserting on behalf of the speakers. This sense of historical ambiguity is
overshadowed by Pollard's playful recognition of the pluralities within his
poetic 'I', as here from the opening lines of 'Hieronymous Bosch' in which
the painter speaks from within the Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell:
I hide behind the
silvered water
where you seek my image
and find it thus inverted.
Throughout his Self-Portraits, Pollard nurtures these tensions
between pathos and hubris that manifest themselves within the dual speaker's
voice and hint of an association with deceptive iconography
Though, it's worth bearing in mind the slight practical flaw that is to be
expected when creating (and more importantly, reading) a collection
of poetry that makes constant reference to specific pieces of art (at the
beginning of each, Pollard gifts his readers with the dates and locations of
the pieces). Unless the reader is gifted with truly exceptional teleportation
abilities, the collection is most affecting when in the vicinity of a large
screen and a decent search engine.
© Phillip Clement 2014
|