by Jon Lackman | 20 April 2007 | Uncategorized
Blogger Millinerd (“a student in Princeton U’s art history PhD program” who in “a previous life … graduated from the same town’s Theol. Seminary”) writes:
“What is remarkable is that [T.J.] Clark’s most recent book, which he was visiting our department to discuss, leaves politics behind to focus back on the object. Clark is still just as much of a Marxist, but the agenda barely makes its way into the pages. Instead there is what has been termed a ‘diaristic’ reflection on one particular painting of Nicolas Poussin, which is almost the very thing Clark built his career opposing.
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And so, a long and ruminating meditation on Poussin’s 1648 Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake ensues. This ‘free association’ (his words) methodology may be dangerous for the direction of the discipline, but one must at least admit T.J. Clark has earned the right to ruminate at leisure.
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Here we were, a group of art historians in an American academic community, the day after what was probably the worst disaster in the history of U.S. higher education. I’m not blaming anyone for not mentioning it. It would perhaps have been poor taste, even unprofessional to mention the killings. After all, we were hosting a lecturer who was here for but a day. But then again, the title of the book is ‘The Sight of Death,’ and Poussin’s painting is about death and its poisonous shock.
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What is most real in the painting is the shrieking woman, just as what is most real in this nation right now (before the political hijacking begins) are the dead at Virginia Tech and the wrenched they’ve left behind. It seems facile to proclaim heaven and hell in living color just after the tragedy, but it would surely be strange to avoid the topics as well. In Poussin’s painting death is most real; but subtly suggested in the background is much more. The dark possibility of damnation yes, but also the glorious sunlit cityscape of the New Jerusalem, to which some souls, previously caught in the net of the gospel, will soon joyfully ascend.
Perhaps such an interpretation is yoking the painting to some ‘tawdry ideology’s service,’ but I prefer to think of it as free association.”
