Stations of the Cross

Paintings by Lisa Ruyter
Text by Jack Miles

Our contemporary experience of the world is a photographically mediated experience and therefore an experience of visual depth. But it is a truism that contemporary experience lacks emotional depth. By denying the photographic lens its usual perspectival power, Lisa Ruyter's paintings announce that the visual depth which we human cameras so effortlessly achieve disguises an emotional shallowness that we rarely admit, much less escape.

The lines of the objects portrayed in Ruyter's paintings are foreshortened just as they are in the photographs from which her paintings are genealogically descended. By her use of color, however, she deliberately flattens the very illusion of depth that her hand-drawn reproduction of these photographs creates. Her paintings - in perfect perspective yet without depth - are, as it were, photographs without light and therefore without shadow. Shadow becomes simply one more surface space that may, at will, be made brighter than the object that casts the shadow.

The late Paul Tillich defined religion as the "dimension of depth" in human experience. Ruyter, by her preoccupation with the missing dimension of depth in even the most traumatic of contemporary experiences, produces an art paradoxically religious in its assertion of an unmet need for religion. As the eye protests her gorgeous denial of visual depth, so the mind is invited to protest an entire culture's denial of experiential depth. She paints a world in which everything is gaudily, cheerfully, buoyantly right and yet everything is wrong - a world flooded with light from which, nonetheless, true light has been altogether eliminated. The colors are the colors of a clown, but the clown would weep - if he could.

The pathos of Ruyter's elimination of depth was palpable in her series "Imitation of Life," in which each painting bore the title of a different invincibly shallow American movie. Few critics, however, seemed to make any connection between those highly self-conscious titles and her depth-destroying technique on the canvas. Her new, post-9/11 series "Stations of the Cross" makes the point of the earlier series with a new insistence. The visual and emotional context of this new series is the flattening of that historic cataclysm by news photography. But rather than recover depth through paintings derived directly from photographs of the event itself, Ruyter has produced fourteen paintings derived from photographs of everyday life as lived in its sinister (but denied) shadow; then linked them - en bloc and a priori - to the fourteen traditional Christian Stations of the Cross; and finally commissioned a narrative with a dialectical relationship to the paintings, on the one hand, and the stations, on the other.

A narrative gains in emotional depth when it is simultaneously itself and a second narrative. To see any story as itself and only itself - the grim skill mastered by so many films that present violence or obscenity with emotionally paralyzed sangfroid - is to see it as a Cyclops would see it. Only with two eyes can stereoptic vision be achieved. Only as two stories told at the same time can any one story matter.

Long before September 11, 2001, a monocular, Cyclopean vision of suffering had become widespread in the United States, captured well in the postreligious, aggressively objective slogans that Americans like to post on their T-shirts: "Life's a bitch and then you die," "Shit happens," "You have clearly confused me with someone who wants to help," and the like. To be sure, older, less objective traditions retain enough life in the United States that an American president must avoid the ideology of the T-shirt in moments of great national trauma. However, if the presidentÍs habitual worldview is in truth relentlessly monocular, his attempt to open a second eye on a national trauma - that is, to frame it in a larger, saving narrative - is doomed to seem ad hoc, insincere, and self-serving. And so it has been with George W. BushÍs "War on Terror" as a frame around the cataclysm of September 11, 2001 even for Americans who voted for him in 2000 and intend to vote for him again in 2004.

A second narrative lends saving depth only when the narrator honestly believes it. Because St. Paul believed the story of Christ's death and resurrection, he could tell his Christian disciples that their suffering under Roman persecution was ChristÍs suffering ("Do you not realize that Christ is in you?" [2 Corinthians 13:5]) and, in so doing, lend dignity and even grandeur to their pain. Because, transparently, George W. Bush does not believe the myth he preaches, American suffering remains untransformed, and American anxiety unalleviated.

Ruyter's "Stations" cycle may be seen as a gigantic pun on the English homonyms pane and pain. To the naive observer, each of the subjects of her fourteen paintings appears as if through a four-pane window. To the art-historically sophisticated observer, however, the quadrisection of these paintings evokes the crossed strings of window-like devices that, starting in the Renaissance, bisected an imagined visual pyramid stretching from the eye of a beholder outward to infinity. On sees such a cross-string device in use in Albrecht DÙrer's 1525 woodcut of a draftsman at work on a perspectival drawing of a lute (from his Unterweisung der Messung in the Getty Research Institute library). Conceptually, the glassless pane of the deviceÍs window coincides with the plane of the draftsmanÍs projected canvas. The Los Angeles-based British painter David Hockney has lately presented the art world a fascinating compendium of such devices in his much-discussed Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.

But as for the pane, so also for the pain in Ruyter's provocative new cycle of paintings or pane-tings: The depth behind even the greatest agony is only apprehended by mediation and with assistance. Because the cross of Christ is a cross of pain, the cross that quadrisects these fourteen panes is an allusion to Christianity as a conceptual prism that, for those who employ it, doubles their personal narratives and deepens their experience of their own distress. At one level, the cross of Christ hinders and distorts the Christian's perception of his suffering. Who would deny that "Life's a bitch, and then you die" captures something about human suffering that the Christian myth suppresses? At another level, however, the cross of Christ enhances and clarifies the perception of suffering, transforming the monocular and monstrous into the binocular and human.

In its ambivalent potential, then, religious tradition is very like artistic tradition. At any given moment, it is both a form of vision and a form of blindness. RuyterÍs "Stations of the Cross" is less an apology for Christian religious tradition than it is a confession of the inadequacy of American secular tradition in the present, still-unfolding crisis. The very fact that Americans refer to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 by a number - "nine eleven" - means that they have found as yet no adequate language for this unprecedented disruption of their lives. And as this disruption is replicated, it may become decreasingly American.

The companion narrative to this cycle of paintings is set, by design, in an English-speaking country that is not the United States and at a time in the near future when catastrophes comparable to 9/11 have taken place in several different countries. The central figure in the narrative - not the Christ-figure but a woman married to him - is in flight from history, which pursues her through television and, as she sees it, through video games. She hates photographers, equating them with pornographers. Meanwhile, she is mysteriously drawn to the icons and fragments of religious lore she finds in a cemetery. Her Christianity is the vestigial Christianity of the post-Christian West, but her redemption makes use of that tradition in all its fragmentation, returning her strengthened to the visual and historical inferno whose overwhelming power Lisa Ruyter'seeks both to understand and to rebuke.

--Jack Miles
The Getty Center
27 May 2002

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