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Twenty years ago, at the Picasso Museum, the Barcelona public was able to discover and admire the work of Egon Schiele, which in 2018 has toured the main art galleries of the world, still awakening a powerful and pertinent remnant of controversy. The work of the Austro-Hungarian artist, largely saved by Rudolf Leopold -collector and creator of the Viennese Leopold Museum, where many of them are usually found- can be disturbing due to the explicit nature of the nudes, but above all due to their defiant rawness. The exhibition is usually frontal, devoid of history to justify or contextualize it. Here, in the absence of a narrative that makes even the intolerable comprehensible, would lie its artistic value, at least from the point of view of Theodor W. Adorno's "negative aesthetics."
For the Frankfurt thinker -who for much of his life had present the trauma of Auschwitz, as the epitome of the destruction of humanist values- art that does not provoke discomfort actually collaborates, consciously or not, with an authoritarian production system that does not take the individual into account. Decades earlier, Schiele himself had inscribed on the margin of a watercolor, during a brief confinement in prison, that "to repress an artist is a crime, it means murdering life in gestation." However, reconciling artistic freedom of expression with the protection of civil rights, something that would seem simple, is not always so. That art possesses the power to question reality and confront the viewer with uncomfortable truths, with a tendency to be denied, is unquestionable. But does all art achieve that thaumaturgy, merely by being annoying? Who separates art or discourses that would allow prejudices and dogmas to be torn down -in favor of the construction of an autonomous criterion- from those others that, on the contrary, corrupt or indoctrinate self-interestedly?
"To repress an artist is a crime, it means murdering life in gestation," Schiele inscribed during his stay in prison.Cities as open-minded as London or Berlin circumvented that complex dilemma by modifying the promotional posters for Schiele's work. Initially, they showed naked men and women against a neutral background, with lost or provocative gazes. A white strip came to cover the most sensitive areas of the bodies with a motto, a masterful slogan, inscribed as a justification: "sorry, it's been a hundred years, but it's still too daring." A maneuver that, far from any improvisation, would seem part of a marketing strategy, who knows if carried out to attract even more public or encourage reflection. In the era of digital baroque and the massive and interested reproducibility of the hoax - what has been somewhat corny called "post-truth", with the predominance of thefake news- the movement could have been perfectly scripted. In any case, the campaign is excellent, because it recalls the transgressive essence of art -an almost obligatory trait, since romanticism- without really transgressing, that is, making it attractiveergoconsumable under the pretext of probable indigestion.
In many media outlets, this retraction was sold as a product of popular pressure – with different degrees of censorship, by the way, depending on the city – in the face of a work that, undoubtedly, cannot be to everyone's taste. An interesting article in The Guardian reflects, following Schiele's exhibition, on the display of adult content in public spaces, taking into account that it can not only offend adults, but also minors (who, not having a guarantee of their ability to process the content in question in a non-harmful way, should legitimately be excluded from the debate). Speaking of Schiele, perhaps this consideration seems very conservative and unnecessary, as he has become, despite his cursedness, a reference in painting, just as Baudelaire is in the field of poetry.
The question of freedom of expression in art, however, is far from being resolved, even among those who claim to be unconditionally supportive. A few months ago, La Vanguardia raised the same question in connection with a contemporary sculptor whose work – inspired by the figures on Greek vases and installed on a promenade in Valencia – explicitly reproduces all kinds of sexual acts. Without entering into artistic evaluations – for which most, perhaps, would not be qualified, not enjoying the comfortable historical perspective – what is surprising about the case is that not only is there no "promotion" mechanism that enables critical reflection, but that the maxim that Schiele – that of artistic freedom of expression – found so difficult to defend is taken for granted. And not only that: it is deployed backed by public money. A "false transgression" that taxpayers would be within their rights to question because it is a double moral somersault, and with a net on top.
EPIDERMAL EXHIBITIONS
Indeed, the attitude of those portrayed by Schiele may seem lascivious, a trait equally present in many of his unsettling self-portraits. Not only has idealization become impossible: more than an enhancement of sensuality, in a morbid sense, his work reveals a scandal of the opposite sign: the apparent self-contempt, of carnal reality -cadaverously exposed- goes hand in hand with an explosion of creativity manifested in the lines of his drawings, capturing impossible foreshortenings, and in the masterful color palette of his paintings, which reflect landscapes in a sensation of cracking or that dance defiantly over nothing, in the absence of a background. There are multiple layers, the effects of glazing. They suggest a tendency towards abstraction, but -in Schiele's case- without completely losing the figure, as if to achieve maximum psychological expression. Nature is shown brutally epidermal, implying that what lies beneath is, in fact, the very thing that is shown.
The logic of the tattoo stops time and fixes an identity that must transcend. It arouses satisfaction and pride, inasmuch as it positions and allows recognitionIt is symptomatic that that promotional slogan ("Sorry, 100 years old but still too daring today") functions as an appeal, in an era like ours, in which body worship is celebrated and eternal youth is postulated as a real possibility, and filmmaker. Nothing is more illustrative of the search for a defining and massively accepted transgression - a fashion of extreme differentiation - than the tattoo, inscribed on the most visible and superficial part; the organ - for the skin is one - that becomes maximally significant, by wanting to represent something like an entry point to interiority. The logic of the tattoo seeks to stop time and fix an identity that must transcend and reach others. It arouses satisfaction and pride, insofar as it positions and allows recognition. A mark of exceptionality that is advertised in a more or less exclusive way, depending on where it is located. The celebration of this unique reality, in the form of an exhibition, contrasts with its perverse utility in not so remote times.
The tattoo can also be understood as an ominous record, a rubric that culminates the reification of the body, converted into cheap or free labor. Without going back to ancient times or the era of discoveries and colonizations, concentration camps - during the 20th century, in the cradle of modern civilization, counted inmates with a completely savage system. And that's not all. The inmates of the Buchenwald camp who had their skin previously decorated with tattoos were destined for a macabre fate: to be compiled, collected, and "studied" in a doctoral thesis. The conversion of the person into a manipulable thing, subjected to an subhuman life, has been recalled with great scandal by the artist Santiago Sierra (National Plastic Arts Award in 2010) in his series of "remunerated actions". People who cannot refuse the acceptance of an economic exchange, due to being marginalized, are portrayed in attitudes that good conscience would find offensive. For example, allowing a line to be tattooed on their back, a work that is in the Tate.
If it is true that the celebration of the body as a thing in Schiele's work still scandalizes -beyond marketing campaigns- it may well be due to that idea that was intended to be shown in the first installment of the post dedicated to the centenary of his birth. That is, to the inextricable eros/thanatos link, which Schiele himself also explicitly stated in words. And not moved by the mere will to transgress, but thinking about the embodiment of irrepressible principles and needs in the human being, even more so in the artist, who behaves practically like a shaman, oblivious to times and fashions: "Art cannot be modern, art is eternal," he wrote.
Even if the support he uses is as simple and translucent as paper -skin color- the gravitation of his figures reveals an ontological weight of great beauty.To make of the beautiful form, of the a priori sensual body, a memento mori-a reminder of one's own death- is something that even the most sinister tattoos, those with skulls, deadly animals, or characters in ancient languages displayed as character traits, and which could well mean anything, or worse: nothing, do not usually achieve with true radicality. Of course, more harmful -for oneself and for society- is to vitally display a coherence with the most absolute reification. The tattooed arm of the condemned man played by Sean Penn inDead Man Walkingillustrates that tremendous emptiness, which seems fueled by thedictumof Dostoevsky's character who postulated "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." We find no lyricism in the sinister impulse of such a character, unlike the not merely epidermal art of Egon Schiele, who confronts death with a creative attitude.
Even if the medium he uses can be as simple and translucent as paper -skin-colored- the gravitation of his figures reveals an ontological weight of great beauty. In a letter Egon Schiele addressed to Oskar Reichel in 1911, he explains the function of his art in terms of illumination. He does not disguise the messianic tone, nor the conception of his task as an act of love: "my being, my non-being, reoriented to permanent values, sooner or later has to transmit my strength to other more or less formed beings, as if it were a religion of believers. The most distant will observe, the far ones will look at me and my deniers will live from my hypnosis. I am so rich that I have to keep giving myself away."