"Getting
to 'hEaVEN n eARTh' - PaS de Probleme"
by Vince Cherniak
*note: to view images or read it's details, please click on the image or respective figure listing with in the text*
The ability of art to inform on a host of sensual levels - from aesthetic, emotional, technical and intellectual concerns - is one of the many reasons we return to art time and time again. It helps us comprehend and celebrate the human condition. One of the main reasons an artist returns to a theme and a medium is that there are so many inexhaustible ways an artist can explore the matrix of those concerns, over time.
It was in seeing the work of Gerard Pas for the first time in the early Eighties that I was reminded of this amorphous, protean power of art that stimulates on so many levels. At that time, it seemed to me, Pas was in the throes of moving through many transformations at once: expressively, from a punk performance artist (fig. 1) in the gritty urban centres of Europe and New York to a dedicated visual artist in more pastoral surroundings in London, Ontario (fig. 2); thematically, from a discourse of the ugly and negative, to a reconsideration of the beautiful and positive; technically, from the communicative means of the oral and gestural, to the refined and studied gaze of Jack Chambers-inspired high realism in paint.
And yet through those early years of transformations and shifts in Pas' artistic biases and interests, there has been one constant concern in this artist's body of work that is brought to the fore in the current hEaVEN n eARTh show: the power, and perhaps fundamental purpose of art, to instruct the moral imagination.
It might be said that the starting point, the muse, in Pas' oeuvre has always been his personal encounter with illness and pain. Afflicted with polio as a child, he suffers from an atrophied left leg. At the age of 10, Pas was a "Timmy", the poster child for handicapped kids (fig. 3). In The Saints, the twelve paintings that are at the core of this exhibit, Pas evokes an empathy, which draws upon the life experiences of an artist who has suffered. The depicted figures here, with various prosthetic devices such as braces, crutches and respirators has been a kind of recurring leitmotif in Pas' work throughout the years.
The subjects that he draws upon to portray the Saints come from all walks of life, from the artist himself, to friends, to the famous. In one painting, the now-quadriplegic actor Christopher Reeve is shown as Superman, but here with a tracheal ventilator and blow-ability switch, the device that enables control of his wheelchair (fig. 4).
"I think that is the most beautiful paradox of all," says Pas. "Here is this ideal, this Modern Greek hero, this Odysseus or Ulysses, yet now when people see him he is the epitome of frailty. He can't even move. He is paralyzed."
It's important to note that Pas has been examining the place and status of the physically and emotionally challenged long before works such as My Left Foot, The Piano or Shine brought a certain romanticism into the popular culture regarding the plight of artists with disabilities. But Pas' work is more in tune with the clinical observations of Oliver Sacks, who makes compassionate arguments for the human ability not only to be adaptive to impediments and disabilities, but to be just another variation on the human type; not abnormal, but merely different. What Pas' discourse aims at is similar to the role of a physician like Sacks, who, through his case histories, suggests that neurological deficit and disease is never a mere loss or excess. In illness there is always a reaction on the part of the individual to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve their identity. The scientist and artist alike are trying to illuminate how we all are striving to preserve identity.
It is the moral imagination which is significant here, because Pas extends the problem of communication for the challenged artist -- the problem of being the "other" - to everyone, where we can see ourselves equally in the dilemma of being the other. Pas moves from the dualism inherent in our mythic figures, such as Superman, to the condition of Everyman, represented in the Saints by his own healthy children,Joshua (fig. 5) and Nicole (fig. 6). As the critic Susan Sontag has articulated, "illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."
For Pas, coming to terms with this dual citizenship stimulates our moral imagination; it is a precondition for our spiritual enlightenment. "The whole prospect of The Saints," he says, "is about realizing the human condition. We all have to carry a burden - but after a time, you realize that it is the burden that makes you human. As with death, when you see death, or how death has hurt you, and you feel the absence of that person, it is much easier to be empathetic. Empathy is the hug, the embrace ...it says 'I know, I have been there, I know the pain that you are feeling, and let me tell you that there is hope.'"
Scattered throughout these works, one can see evidence of the mentors and stylistic influences that Pas pays homage to: a New York fashion model wearing a "halo helmet"(fig. 7), a leather cap for handicapped people with a propensity to fall on their heads, emanates the same seemingly internal glow of hallowed light of the Rembrandt "Man in a Golden Helmet".
And the lean, cool aesthetic of De Stijl co-mingles with an expressionist free hand in these works. For Pas, De Stijl represents the rational and reductive take on the body and human environment, which Pas brings into a dialogue with the personal and subjective -- much in the way Sacks moves from clinical description to a humane understanding with his subjects.
The iconic portrait of Max Beckmann (fig 8.) returns here in The Saints, incorporated in an earlier Pas work, Beast/Beauty. Beckmann, who saw the ravages and destruction of war in his native Germany, is for Pas a reminder to the artist-- and collective social imagination alike -- of our obligations to speak and speak truthfully, of what lies dark in the human soul: the Dionysian potential within us all to destroy and fall from grace.
But overshadowing all of the post-modern appropriational play in these paintings is the spiritually guiding hand, or spectre, of Joseph Beuys.
Beuys is the great shaman of Twentieth century art, the artistic prophet who did so much to bring awareness of what has been lost and marginalized in society by technological and ideological hegemony. This influential German artist has informed much of Pas' work in the past, and he continues to bear his torch into the new millennium.Beuys' message of the possibility of healing and renewal lives on: one need only look to Pas' most recent work, "Portrait of Chuck Close" (fig. 9), and sculptural installation "ReFormation" in South Africa.
In ReFormation (fig. 10), Pas scoured the streets of Johannesburg for refuse and rejected consumerist objects, and out of the broken and fragmented, created a new "whole" form - reconfiguring the International Symbol of the Disabled into a new sign of hope and miracle.
To instruct and inspire the moral imagination, it may be argued, is at the heart of exploring the human condition. It is Pas' concern because it is everyone's concern; how we move from our own individual space and the confines of our egos -- the internal world of conflicts and problems we each uniquely and collectively face, to the world we aspire to, through hope of redemption.
Pas reminds us of our need for hope by his appeal to mythologies in these works. This turning to stories and experiences common across cultural boundaries suggests there is a universal construct of human weakness, frailty and dilemma that there are repetitive consequences of human action/inaction,In "Phaethon's Faux PaS", the artist personally appropriates the Phaethon myth (fig. 11), distilling his own disillusionment with the art world and the trappings of our materialist culture into the symbols at the bottom of the canvas. And in grappling with depression in "Sisyphus' Descendants",
Pas suggests there is a duality manifest in the disparities of human struggle: to be bound to earthly limitations, while aspiring to heaven. To aspire, as an individual, to overcome personal crisis and limitations, and yet to be dependant upon and cooperative with the social economy where everyone is seeking the same salvation. Yet the Sisyphus myth (fig. 12) , rather than being a despairing tale, is fresh with hope. The human spirit triumphs over the eternal setbacks, because it is in the effort to succeed that we have our definition, not in the reality of the limitations and inevitable failings of our efforts. In Beckett's words, "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Between heaven and earth, Pas asserts, we find our definition in our search for grace and hope to overcome our pain, our fears and our despair from the complexities in our personal and social affairs. And EVEN ART, he reminds us, is capable of giving us hope, and bestowing the grace we need to carry on.Vince Cherniak
March 17, 2001.
List of Figures / Images
About the Author
Vince
Cherniak is an independent journalist, writer, filmmaker and student of architecture
and philosophy. His works have been published in many of Canada's major newspapers
and periodicals. He has worked in various forms for regional television broadcasters.
Vince Cherniak and Gerard Pas have known and worked with each other for more
than 15 years. Their most recent project is a documentary film on Gerard's work
directed and filmed by Cherniak (fig. 13).
E-mail: vrcherniak@yahoo.com
