I have had a vigorous correspondence with two friends about my posting of 4 June, in which I responded to the dreadful death of George Floyd. The detail of our discussion doesn’t matter in the present context, but clearly they had misunderstood an important aspect of what I wrote. It has set me thinking, however, about the rather wider subject of how art comes to be misunderstood. I’ll come at the question from another direction.
I read this week, in the art magazine Apollo, a very interesting piece by Kathryn Murphy, about the tradition of painting, coming down from renaissance art, on the subject of the encounter between the risen Jesus and Mary Magdalene by the empty tomb. These are usually entitled Noli me tangere, which is the Latin version of the words supposedly addressed by Jesus to Mary, meaning “Do not touch me”. It engaged me for a number of reasons, but one element of her article gave me particular cause to reflect.
I have taken an interest for some time in the work of David Jones, but was surprised to discover that he also had produced a print on this theme. In this image Jones depicts the Roman soldiers sent to guard the tomb as British “Tommies” from the 1914-18 war. The meaning of this might not be clear initially. Was Jones just being unimaginative? Is he trying to make some kind of symbolic point? I think the latter, and in the context of Jones’ other work, arising from his own experience as a soldier at the front during that war, I think I can see why he makes this choice. The soldiers, of course, sleep through the removal of the stone sealing the tomb. They are oblivious of the key event. My response to this is to read it as a comment on the sense that the ordinary “Tommy” didn’t have the faintest idea of what was going on, despite being at the centre of events of major importance for the course of the war. They even sleep through angelic trumpets (bugles?).
I do not know whether or not this is a widely-accepted reading of Jones’ print, but it is my attempt to appreciate the interest of his artistic depiction of the resurrection theme. The point is that symbols have to be read, and they are not self-evident. What is more, they have to be read in context unless they are to appear arbitrary and merely idiosyncratic, and my reading depends upon my wider acquaintance with Jones’ poetry and illustrations.
This possibly points to the problem of misunderstanding that arose in the interpretation of my piece, on the part of my friends. They read it as people apparently deeply involved with left-wing politics in Britain, and made assumptions that I would share a range of significances they assumed to be natural. In the event I found these to be surprising. We spoke different symbolic languages, according to which we decoded experience quite differently.
This situation I realise reveals a wider difficulty I have encountered in the reception of my own painting, although I expect that it is one I share with other artists. I have always been aware that there is normally a level of symbolism in my work. It is often metaphorical in ways that are not made explicit. (Almscliff Crag, for example, is never simply Almscliff Crag.) Unlike the renaissance painters working on the subject of Noli me tangere, I don’t work within an established tradition of iconography. I spend quite a bit of time wondering what I might do about that.