"Men should be caressed or else annihilated," said Machiavelli in his advice to a Medici prince. In the two paintings before us, pale sunlight intermittently caresses and blasts out the rich textures of ruined interiors. Viewed from across a room -- in this case, the daycare-style dungeon that is the cafeteria at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I drink coffee from a paper cup -- these works by Matt Bahen resemble, at first, my favourite photographic subject: urban exploration of grand, ashen ruins such as Detroit, which happens to be my birthplace. Up close, however, the surfaces of the canvas dissolve and coalesce into luscious, pearly impasto. The subtle vibrations of palest greens and pinks illuminate these places, giving way to deep and rich browns spawned in rusted metal, blown leaves, and dried blood. Here, everything -- exterior and interior; stone, brick, mortar, metal; plaster, wood, paint, fabric -- gives way in its own time to light, water, and wind, which break it down to its elements. From the niches of these haunted, imagined walls, maybe saints used to watch over the proceedings; but the saints left long before this scene. And what are we watching?
On each canvas, in the transept of each space, under what was once the dome but now resembles a Roman amphitheatre, two dogs (escapees from baroque paintings?) grapple, playing or fighting, on hind legs. No longer sworn to human masters, Fido has found and joined his own pack. What brought this pair of mutts here? If they are career fighting dogs, we viewers are the sole audience. No, watched or not, they are just two post-apocalyptic strays, whiling away the days (their play decidedly more menacing and combative in one of the panels) under the shattered dome of church or sky itself.
A fable unfolds. As players or fighters, the dogs in this story make uncomfortable bipeds. They need each other to stand; but when they stand, they fight. Forgotten and forsaken, only they can end this conflict or game because the world that used to feed and house them is in ruins. Like the two paintings, the dogs are no matching set, but an incomplete triptych. The missing panel has to come from the mind and spirit of the viewer.
What could make everything "go to the dogs" so spectacularly? Well, for one thing, turning our backs on people or places or ideas that need us. When we abandon something entrusted to our care, it starves (get a load of the countable ribs on those dogs), then eventually dies. Machiavelli would have marveled at such economy of scale. He envisioned active, energetic cruelty; our modern masters have economized, elevated neglect to the new torture, transformed failure to "caress" into the new annihilation. These lost, scavenging canine drifters remind us that Tinker Bell isn't the only casualty of an abandoned idea. American rust-belt cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh and Buffalo are the Tinker Bells of this century. They are also canaries in the coal mines in which most of us work, economies that can -- have, will -- cut and run, leaving survivors to dig their own way back to the surface or not, according to their lights. And what will await the lucky survivors on that surface? Dazzling light, gorgeous ruins, and starving dogs. When shared by only a few, gentrification affords no renaissance.
Naturally, everyone's perception of these or any works is as unique as DNA. Through the lens of faith rather than economics, an atheist, an agnostic, and a believer are three possible if over-simplified perspectives for viewing this diptych.
In many ways, the atheist and the believer may have more in common with each other when looking at these works than they have with the agnostic. The hard-line faithless and faithful have definite, if opposing, perspectives. After all, one must take a position; failure to commit is nihilistic. Just as the decay of a neglected building annihilates interior and exterior, so agnosticism deconstructs the commitment to the divine and secular alike. What more are we without our convictions than dogs fighting in a ruined church?
Are humans wholly compatible with uninterrupted divine faith or atheism, or rather are faith and doubt natural iterations in our search for meaning? Holy texts call out most compellingly as the voices of questioners, their struggles dominating the rising action of story after story. These ancient texts represent most of our lives as states of existential flux. For the elect, the moment of agape is the climax or the punch-line.
Every ruined structure alludes to the divine. For me and many fellow urban explorers, ruined or abandoned spaces are more than spectacular windows on the grotesque; they are grand manifestations of the memento mori tradition. Sooner or later, entropy opens every building up to the heavens (the "vertical" impulse of the imagination, according to Northrop Frye), as well as sideways along the ground (the daily world of the "horizontal" in Frye's mandala). All public buildings, secular or divine, store in their bones the joys and punishments of the cathedral; in turn, the vaults of these great buildings are monuments to the forest canopy.
The idea that nature is a church smacks of soft-minded escapism. On its surface, the generic spirituality of the agnostic abandons the rigours of boredom , social anxiety, and sincere inquiry in favour of the picturesque. Perhaps the resentment from both polarities -- the devout and the denier -- comes from envy, or the suspicion that one has paid for something that was free all along.
In fact, this envy is misguided. Like most stories of the Bible, the middle road of agnosticism is a gruelling, often humiliating journey. The competent agnostic must test his or her ideas daily. Like Sartre's existentialism, agnosticism is a humanism, a rigorous examination of conscience. Moreover, the reward of certainty is unavailable to the agnostic. From this position, the apostolic and atheistic attitudes look like easy fixes.
The world needs keepers of its grand memory to assess its present and project its future, and chiaroscuro seems to be the medium most fit to express essential truths. Black and white thinking has brought us to the edge of ruin. So these two paintings remind skeptics like me to stand firm alongside believers and unbelievers alike, readying ourselves for the day when the masters of these places will go out for cigarettes, never to return; when hand-claps, too faint and too late, will fail to revive us. Meanwhile, our vocation is the purgatorial agony of seeing through a glass, darkly. This deeply personal, ever-changing, unformed vision which we carry inside us is the final panel of Bahen's generous triptych.
I would love to liberate these paintings from their current home. Alas, I have the leisure to see them but not the means to buy them. In case you do, I have included the artist's link (without his prior approval). At very least, treat yourself to their luscious, playful, and jarring splendour over a quick joe in the AGO basement, where you can enjoy them without paying the price of gallery admission.
Curious about the ways that pre-digital people write essays? See images of my agony below. I'm on the ninth draft. Maybe ten's a charm.
