What happens when we look at art through the lens of gesture? An extensive body of literature drawing back to antiquity attests to the fact that we have long analysed the gestures depicted in art as crucial components of figurative expression. Equally, on the other end of this equation, the art criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has supplied us with a grammar increasingly attuned to the gestures of depiction, the artist’s own expressive gestures. At some point in the passage toward abstraction, these were cleared of any external reference to become autographic—or so it has been argued. However, today, the historical break between represented (secondhand) gestures and invented (firsthand) ones appears overstated. Might it not be more productive to see art overall as a process of ongoing gestural negotiations conducted in and across time?
In the following essay, it is proposed that gestures travel, and do so within single works, as well as between works, between artists, and between art and non-art. Accordingly, we are invited to trace a gestural throughline through a broad range of practices, which includes painting, theatre, and wrestling. The various figures brought up along the way are Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, Cy Twombly, Bertolt Brecht, and those practitioners of the lowly French sport of catche. These unlikely bedfellows are connected through the writings of Roland Barthes, one of our most incisive theorists of gesture, whose thoughts preside over this text. To see art through the lens of gesture, as Barthes does, is to focus on its phatic, dialogical, and collective aspects. Central to this formulation is the participatory role of the audience, to whom every gesture is ultimately directed, as much in the static as the performative arts. From this perspective, even an ancient painting constitutes an event, not only as something that happened but as something that continues to happen every time we come upon it.
I
“[A]s always, movement and anguish in the crowd, the clash of arms, the splendor of the vestments, emphatic gestures, as gestures are in the great moments of life!”1
This is how Baudelaire describes a battle scene painting from 1840 by Eugène Delacroix titled The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. The last part of this sentence was recalled by Roland Barthes, who employed it as an epigraph in his famous essay on staged wrestling (or catche in French). “Le monde où l’on catche” was originally published in the journal Esprit in 1952 and then reprinted, in 1957, as the opening chapter of Mythologies. There, the epigraph reads, “…La verité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie” (“…The emphatic truth of the gesture in the great circumstances of life.”), which comes close to the translation supplied above.2 However, in the English edition of Mythologies, this wording undergoes a notable shift: “The grandiloquent [my italics] truth of the gesture on life’s great occasions.”3 How do we get from emphasis to grandiloquence?
We know that gestures have to do with expression; on this point, most definitions of the term agree. Equally agreed-upon is that these are forms of willful rather than involuntary or accidental expression. What gestures relate emphatically is precisely their intentional character, this being the quality that determines their special communicative status among the techniques of the body. Accordingly, we can say that gestures constitute a kind of language, but one that is more activated than our language of words—and more interpersonal (phatic). Every gesture bears an address; it is prepared to be received and interpreted by another, and this is something it proclaims in its form. In the bracketed period within which it transpires—between the clearly delimited points that mark its beginning and its end—something is delivered in the way of content.4 But, more importantly, a gesture also delivers itself as a means of delivery—that is, it shows that it is showing. Here, we can locate the truthfulness of gesture, on which so many authors have remarked. Grandiloquence, however, implies something else: emphasis carried into the realm of exaggeration and hence, potentially, falsehood. Everywhere that the word emphasis appears in Barthes’ original text, it is replaced with grandiloquence. Obviously, the translators did not think that the author had gone far enough in making the case that the gestures in catche are “over the top.” These gestures certainly are so, but this is not necessarily to consign them an anomalous class.
One could say that Barthes’ essay is really an attempt to come to grips with gesture as such, a topic of long-standing concern to this author, elsewhere taken up in relation to the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein (“The Third Meaning”), the singing of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (“The Grain of the Voice”), and, most pointedly, the theatre of Bertolt Brecht (“Marx, Diderot, Brecht”). Barthes’ whole critical approach was very possibly developed within this context of drama, where the gestural element rules supreme. The Brechtian concept of theatre, he notes, is “one of the clearest and most intelligent that dramatic theory has ever produced!”5 His analysis of catche would seem to lean quite heavily on this theory, particularly in its tendency to treat aesthetic propositions and social facts with perfect equanimity. The gesture stands at its epicenter, a point of confluence between artifice and authenticity. This point is highlighted by Walter Benjamin in an early paper on Brecht from 1931. There, he asserts that, as opposed to “the highly deceptive statements and assertions normally made by people and their many-layered and opaque actions, … the gesture is only falsifiable to a point…”6 Gestures are genuine, yet that qualification, “to a point,” is worth stressing. After all, Benjamin is writing about role-playing, make-believe, even if it is undertaken in an analytical spirit. Brechtian theatre might seem to be the antithesis of the bloated spectacle described in “The World of Wrestling,” except that both are founded on gesture. In addition, they share an implicit understanding of the highly ambiguous but also crucial relation of gesture to truth.
Straightaway Barthes notes that catche is much closer to acting and art than it is to sports. Moreover, it is “the spectacle of excess,” devoted to hyperbolic forms of representation that flout the laws of verisimilitude and its reality-effects.7
It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. … This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of classical art.8
In this remarkably Brechtian analysis of what is generally considered to be a low form of entertainment, Barthes gets at a characteristic trait of the gesture, one that can pass swiftly between popular culture and so-called high art: its openly expressed artificiality, or made-up character. Imported into the wrestling ring—or, for that matter, into Delacroix’s tableau—the battle scene does not invite our passive identification with either the perpetrators of violence or their victims. Here, we do not indulge in vicarious experiences of cruelty and pain. The gesture’s essential quality of exaggeration and overstatement—or, as Barthes puts it, its “rhetorical amplification”—allows the viewer to assume a more active and participatory role.9 One is asked to take sides, all the while realizing that to do so is to become part of the play.
It is due to this element of “rhetorical amplification” that the gestures of catche can be described as grandiloquent. This does not render them pompous, but rather “classical.” “Here,” Barthes writes, “we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.”10 Accordingly, we are invited to consider, for instance, the wrestler’s gesture of defeat and supplication “in the style of antiquity,” which, as Barthes goes on to note, is always “heavily underlined.”11 Barthes draws out this stylistic analogy in some detail:
The function of grandiloquence [in catche] is indeed the same as that of ancient theatre, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying a world of defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of spectacle.12
Such gestural over-determination drives at a point: “what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice.” Crucially, justice is not here proposed as a timeless concept; rather, in wrestling, no less than in classical theatre, we confront an “immanent justice,” which means that it is changeable, in play for the length of the performance.13 The thrill of the event is precisely that we are invited to weigh in on the proceedings. We are asked to deliver a verdict on justice as such.
II
As it happens, Barthes earned his degree in Classical Studies at the Sorbonne in 1939 with a paper on Greek tragedy, and during this time also performed plays as a founding member of the Antique Drama Group of the Sorbonne. After completing his studies, he went on to write for theatrical revues, notably Théâtre populaire, in which he held a position on the editorial board. Much of Barthes’ early criticism was directed toward the stage—a corpus comprising some eighty reviews, articles, and essays—and it is there that he sharpened his polemic against the forced and florid naturalism then prevalent in French dramaturgy. When the work of Brecht was first presented in Paris in 1954, he instantly took to it and became its committed champion. “I like actors who always play their parts in the same way, if that way is both warm and clear,” Barthes writes in 1965; “I do not like actors who put on an act.”14 Here, the problem is specifically with the actor’s pretense that their performance is unrehearsed. In relation to putting on the act of not acting, even over-acting is preferable – that is, if it is intentional.
Such intentionality must be openly demonstrated, rendered acutely visible in actions excerpted from the narrative flow. As with the wrestlers in catche, Brechtian actors also hold their poses “like a pause in music.” In both camps, the break in the action effectively confronts us with a tableau vivant. Brechtian theatre, Barthes notes, “proceeds by successive tableaux,” and these do not need to add up; “all the burden of meaning and pleasure bears on each scene, not the whole.”15 In the segmentation of the storyline, all attention is directed toward a picture that in turn discloses a gesture: a gesture that only starts when something else stops, and that in fact stops it in order to start: that produces the rupture from which it derives its expressive force.
The “rhetorical amplification” of gesture is integral to Brecht’s concept of Umfunkionierung, or the “re-functioning” of society by way of theatre. This concept hinges on the thin line that separates the spontaneous expression of emotion from its formalized reiteration. The transition between these two states of mind, when undertaken emphatically and with cool deliberation, infuses theatrical performance with an alienating element—the “A-effect,” as Brecht puts it. “The first condition for the achievement of the A-effect,” he writes, “is that the actor must invest what he has to show with a definite gest of showing.”16 Brechtian acting inheres in the “gest of showing,” and what it shows is precisely this: a character who is not there, who appears only in the scare-quotes of a “third person” in the “past tense.”17 Nevertheless, this absent figure must be recalled in a compelling manner: “The gesture he [the actor] makes must have the full substance of a human gesture even though it now represents a copy.”18 According to Brecht, the actor “has to learn how to imitate” rather than empathize. Examples: “witnesses of an accident demonstrating to newcomers how the victim behaved, a facetious person imitating a friend’s walk, etc.”19 These are modes of play-acting drawn from everyday life—a reality from which the “facetious” is by no means excluded.
Brecht’s concept of theatre is often described as anti-Aristotelian, yet he was by no means averse to the artificiality of the classical stage, where characters stepped forth masked and intoned their lines as if these were whispered into their ears from those mythical beings that are gods and heroes. “I aim at an extremely classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance,” he says in an interview for Die Literarische Welt in 1926.20 Such distanced expression is particularly conducive to methexis, an ancient word for feedback. It opens a channel of exchange between those on either side of the stage line. For the audience also whispers into the ears of actors and accordingly becomes a covert participant in the theatrical production.
Brechtian theater is alternately designated as “epic” and “gestic.” The first principle of this form is to foreground the role of gesture in acting: “Epic theatre is gestural,” declares Benjamin. “Strictly speaking, the gesture is the material and epic theater its practical utilization.”21 Considered practically, dramaturgy can be understood as a social praxis, a process that is crystallized in the formation of a “social gest,” as Brecht puts it—“the gest that is relevant to society.”22 Here, then, we are dealing with a modern invention that projects a form forward by returning to its beginnings. The “social gest” is effectively at the origin of acting, which, as we know, is a discipline that evolved out of religious ritual and then, step-by-step, broke with it, transforming myth into politics (the business of the polis). In earlier times, “the great moments of life”—that is, moments of exaltation, when the humdrum affairs of everyday reality are transcended, and humanity is introduced to the “higher powers”—were mediated by a priest or equally sanctified sovereign. Classical drama, Greek tragedy, began when a member of the public first stepped forth, in mask and costume, to directly impersonate these powers and, at the same stroke, to open them up to interpretation and judgment.23 This certainly is a grandiloquent move, yet also quintessentially democratic: it lowers the bar. “[T]ragedy is born when myth starts to be considered from the point of view of a citizen,” write the Classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.24 “It confronts heroic values and ancient religious representations with the new modes of thought that characterize the advent of law within the city-state.”25 With gaining insistence – or, again, emphasis – the audience will be brought into confrontation with the very idea of greatness. Do we all have a share in “great moments” or are these reserved for just a few? And, if so, should they be downgraded?
It is the tragic dimension of catche that Barthes is keenly attuned to:
What is displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. … It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight.26
This makes for some very amusing descriptions of flabby contestants grimacing pitiably while caught in arm-holds and headlocks, banging the mat with their forearms to signal the extent of their pain and humiliation: “I give up!” As we can plainly see in the rings of more recent WWE bouts, these gestures have undergone a prodigious exacerbation in emotional intensity, assisted by a whole host of gaudy outfits and props. Of course, all such expression is a product of theatrical fakery, but of a sort that is deftly woven into the fiction, for these postures of surrender are often revealed as tactical feints. The defeated may suddenly rebound and come out on top. The pleasure derived from such surprise turnabouts has nothing to do with their credibility. To the contrary, the spectators know that the game is rigged through and through; this fact is disclosed in every move. An actual sham in this context would be the attempt to promote the impression that it is a fair fight. In catche, the concept of fairness does not hinge on a presumption that the rules are being followed, but rather that the rules can be unfair and, as such, should be broken—equally by everyone. “Justice is therefore the embodiment of a possible transgression,” declares Barthes; “it is from the fact that there is a Law that the spectacle of the passions which infringe on it derives its value.”27
It is this way in tragic theatre as well, except that there, transgressions are punished. Unlike the tragic heroes, those of catche do not have to learn any hard lessons in the end, and this lends their actions a comedic angle. Their falls are never final; the hubris that takes them down raises them up in the next moment, or in next week’s match. In the theatrical festivals that were held in antiquity, which could last for up to a week, comedies were presented too, but these were reserved for the end. In catche, tragedy and comedy are felicitously conjoined throughout, and Barthes celebrates this merger as the ultimate turnabout sought by this lowly pseudo-sport. It is accomplished to the benefit of the audience, a generalized humanity that can even include post-structuralist intellectuals, as this author proves through his enthusiasm. However, to him, it is above all a formal triumph, devoted to the production of “pure gestures.” In conclusion, he writes, “In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture, which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.”28
If, in classical tragedy, the hero is presented as a problem, as one who impulsively oversteps his or her mortal bounds, it is to bring to light the limits of our agency. Not so in catche. The gestures performed here, quoted from this ancient source, are radically reinterpreted. The “wrestlers remain gods” precisely because they can submit to defeat willingly, emphatically, grandiosely. There is some element of surrender in every gesture, and when performed in an openly theatrical—and therefore also a potentially facetious—manner, it is also a means of preserving power. The disenfranchised are transformed into the exalted. Returning to Brecht, this has all to do with the freedom that is assumed in the treatment of a model. On his production of Antigone, he writes:
What … is in any way creative about the use of models? … The initial invention of a model truly need not count for all that much, for the actor who uses it immediately makes his own personal contribution. He is free to invent variations on the model, that is to say, such variations as will make the image of reality which he has to give truer and richer in its implications, or more satisfying artistically.29
The models have been passed down through the ages – they are always already there, awaiting reuse – but the variations are improvised on the spot. The variations test the models in the light of today: do they still work? And if not, how, artistically, might they be fixed?
III
Delacroix, too, is working over a model in his Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople. This is history painting writ large, which means, on the most basic level, that it is the representation of a historical scene. Here, something that occurred in the past is recalled and preserved, as picture, for future purposes. However, the importance of the event depicted therein has been established in advance; it is part of the historical record and, as such, can be assumed by the painter as already known by the viewer. Moreover, other paintings have treated the same or similar theme. Therefore, what is being proposed is a reinterpretation of both this history and the other history paintings that have covered it. Finally, perhaps, it is the very idea of history and history painting that Delacroix is reconsidering in this work. In the Crusaders, we again come up against greatness: great for whom?
This battle scene shows us the culminating point of a military campaign launched under a religious pretext but in fact determined by economic necessity. As instigated by Pope Innocent III, the original aim of the Fourth Crusade (1202-04), was to recapture Jerusalem, then under Muslim control. Unable to marshal the forces required for this effort, the crusaders settled on sacking Christian Constantinople, an easy target due to years of political mismanagement under a succession of incompetent rulers who had bankrupted its treasury and pawned off its defenses. This, then, is a moment more ignominious than great. Soldiers on horseback appear at the center of the composition, trampling their defenseless victims, many of them women, who lie strewn on all sides, either dead or in languid postures of deep dejection. Baudelaire’s description deals with the gestures of the figures within in the picture—depicted gestures—but his words could also be applied to Delacroix’s gesture of depiction, which is equally emphatic and/or grandiose.
Perhaps this gesture is born from the imaginary conflation of an ancient battle scene with one more present to the artist: the drawn-out event of the French Revolution. Ten years earlier, in 1830, Delacroix had completed what is possibly his most emblematic work, Liberty Leading the People, which was unveiled at the Paris Salon the following year. This painting commemorates the July Revolution. In it, a woman of the people, the bear-breasted Liberty, leads a varied group of insurgents forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen. She holds in one hand a musket and in the other the flag of the first French Revolution—the tricolor—which became France's national flag after these events. Her fellow fighters span a range of social classes united in their cause. The man in the top hat to her left (which some say the painter modeled on himself) stands for bourgeoisie; beneath him is a student wearing the hat of the École Polytechnique, the bicorne; and beside him, donning a beret, is a member of the working class. The young boy holding pistols to the right of the female figure embodies the hopes of the coming generation. The optimism of this picture—which, despite some early criticism, would come to be regaled by the lay public and state officials alike—is communicated unambiguously.30 The united front of fighters advances triumphantly into a bright future. The sun’s most favorable rays beam down upon them like stage spotlights, casting the carnage all around into the shadows. Violence is here treated as inevitable, the collateral damage of a worthy cause.
The Crusaders painting might evoke this scene at the level of its basic structure, a figural pyramid, but it produces the exact opposite impression: the advancing troop seems to have come to a halt. The soldier furthest in front has pulled the reins on his horse. The animal swings back at the neck, giving us a profile view of its head and a wide-open eye that surveys the battle scene in evident anguish. Most importantly, though, the entire scheme of light and dark values has been reversed. The central grouping of fighters is now caught in the murk whereas the results of their actions—prostrated figures, burning buildings, an overturned jewel box, scattered booty—are glaringly illuminated.
Both paintings are of course comprised of multiple gestures. Every figure performs their own gesture, which is rendered by way of the artist’s gesture. However, to read these works gesturally, we must push past the specificity of this or that gesture toward their shared feature, that which animates the picture overall. Gestures are a form of advance communication; they communicate an attitude vis-à-vis what is to be communicated as content. In his appreciation of Delacroix’s Crusaders, Baudelaire reaches for a musical analogy that is particularly apt in this regard. To him, the painting “is a symphony of storm and gloom, which, quite apart from the subject itself, accounts for the picture’s deep impact.”31 If this work is to be understood symphonically, then the gesture bears its leitmotif. The painter had to search for it, this germinal element within which the entire painting is already held in potentia. The thematic motif, once found, drives the work ruthlessly forward, for in it are already prefigured a whole succession of developmental variations. It has to do with war, of course, but beyond this, a necessarily vague impression, dreamily drawn away from any real-world referent, of tumultuous forms arrested and drawn back into darkness, a black hole. This is one way to describe the painting’s animating principle, a gestural thrust that will be carried from the first brushstroke to the last. And beyond: this gesture re-interprets (by reversing) the prior gesture of Liberty, in which the forms emerge from obscurity, radiant as on day one of creation, to start history over.
Certainly, Delacroix’s gesture is tied to an argument; it “says something” about right to use force. In Liberty, the violence is justified by his gesture whereas, in Crusaders, it is questioned. Educated viewers encountering the latter work in the Salon of 1841 would have known that, although it depicts a battle scene from long ago and far away, it is one that bears on the fatherland (la patrie). Most of the soldiers that invaded Constantinople were recruited from areas in present-day France, and these would go on to occupy the region, leading to the period known as Frankokratia—Greek for “rule of the Franks.” As the July Revolution gave way to the July Monarchy, Delacroix’s thoughts on the political fortunes of his home country may have soured; if so, the sentiment is delivered with strategic tact. However, these gestures, considered in their own right, are neither cunning nor critical. Even when they seem to be operating in an underhanded manner, whispering their message rather than declaring it forthrightly, they are magnificent in the truest sense of the word: magnifying, aggrandizing, swept up in the lofty enthusiasms that propel them on and on.
Delacroix was a prolific writer who left behind a voluminous archive of correspondence and diary books. Curiously, considering the volatile period he lived through, beset by continuous power wrangling and rapidly changing political regimes, this receives scant mention on the page. We know that he was devoted follower of Napoleon Bonaparte and tied Bonapartism to republicanism with an obstinacy noted by his more critically minded contemporaries, who came to draw a red line between them. This is to say that he was far from a radical, more a law-and-order man, despite all his fiery romanticism. It is from the memoirs of Alexandre Dumas that we learn that this painter was initially alarmed at the revolutionary ardor that gripped the French capital in 1830, and that he went on to commemorate in Liberty.
When I saw Delacroix near the Pont d’Arcole on 27 July, he pointed out a few of these men that one only sees in times of revolution, who were sharpening their weapons on the pavement, one had a saber, the other a foil. Delacroix was terribly afraid, I tell you, and showed his fear in a most energetic fashion. But when Delacroix saw the tricolor flag floating above Notre Dame, when he recognized—he, a fanatic of the Empire, whose father was prefect under Empire of the two most important cities of France, whose brother, having been promoted to general, was wounded on five or six battlefields, whose second brother had been killed at Friedland—when he recognized, we have said—he, the fanatic of the Empire—the standard of the Empire, ah! ma foi, he did not restrain himself! Enthusiasm replaced fear, and he glorified the people, who at first had frightened him.32
Delacroix was thus roused to action, but he would participate in “the three glorious days,” as they became known, in his own way, reaching for the brush rather than the saber or foil. While at work, he wrote this to his brother: “The spleen is going away … if I have not fought for my country, at least I will paint for her. This has put me in a good mood.”33
Such comments disclose something of the emotional volatility and moral ambiguity of gesture in general. Inflecting Delacroix’s hold on his subject matter—his painterly “touch”—is an acute change of heart, an affective convulsion. And by the time that he turns his attention to the Crusaders, this mood-swinging element may well have become even more pronounced. This painting, which was set to be exhibited in the Salle des Croisades at Versailles, was given a quite specific brief by the Salon’s organizers: to depict the triumph of Christianity over the heathens. Bearing this prompt in mind, the downbeat tone of outcome is striking. Many in the press greeted it with dismay, criticizing the work as an act of aesthetic self-sabotage. Delacroix’s famously brilliant palette, one reporter complained, has turned “dull and muddy.”34 Equally, the painter is taken to task for his drawing ability, deemed “disjointed,” and giving way to an “incoherent composition.”35 “This entire painting,” the observer goes on to note, “has an odd look, an accidental quality not completely justified by the nature of the subject the artist has chosen to represent.”36 A sense of confusion reigned over the public’s reception of the Crusaders, and this was generally explained as an error on the artist’s part: the mistreatment of a model.
Baudelaire was among the few to approach the painting’s pervasive gloom and murk as an intentional effect—a “symphony”—and this is because he refused to read it literally, as a statement for or against anything other than a way of painting. “[Q]uite apart from the subject itself,” there is the gesture; in Baudelaire’s estimation, it is at the crux of this artist’s genius. “In the matter of sublime gestures,” he writes, “Delacroix has rivals only outside his art.”37 These gestures have been inherited by the artist from the “Old Masters,” but he does not copy them slavishly.
It is because of this wholly modern, wholly new quality that Delacroix is the latest expression of progress in art. He is not only the inheritor of the great tradition, or in other words of the abundance, the nobility and power in composition, but, worthy successor that he is of the great masters, he has, in addition to their gifts, the mastery of suffering, passion, and the sense of gesture!38
There is no such thing as a first gesture. It is by way of quotation, repetition, that any gesture can be identified as such. Buried within it is a whole succession of sources that reach ever further backward in time. A modern painter, the standard-bearer of the Romantic movement, Delacroix, by his own admission, took inspiration from the ancients.39 He openly quoted figures from the Renaissance painters Giorgione, Titian, Michelangelo, etc., who in turn plumbed still-earlier Greco-Roman models. The grandeur of his work overall certainly has to do with its relation to history, the grand cultural heritage—or, as the French say, “patrimoine“—that it asks to be measured against. However, crucial questions persist in every individual instance. Is the model mined for its historical gravitas, or does the artist seek to lighten this load? Just where is the emphasis placed? At what point does time-honored grandeur turn grandiloquent?
Delacroix recycles what might be termed a gestural grammar, a repertoire of bodily poses, expressions, and gesticulations that is always more or less set. What he adds to this formula is his very own gesture, which might be said to operate more on the level of syntax. It is the energizing supplement that thaws these familiar figures from out of the deep-freeze of history and restores them to contemporaneous life. But that is not all, for this gesture also detaches and departs from the codified form, and it does so with a rashness that was keenly registered in many of the most unfavorable reviews that came this painter’s way. Delacroix was frequently charged with excessiveness, a tendency toward undignified over-expression that rubbed against the grain of the lofty themes he took up. Yet this was also the seal of his modernity. Under the sway of Baudelaire’s musical analogies, we observe his gesture take flight as though in pursuit of its own private interests. Romantically, it is oriented upward, toward the ineffable, the numinous, the sublime, but, at the same time, it remains in touch with the ground, and perhaps more so than any gesture before. In other words, there is within it a pronounced element of bassesse. This what drives the painter’s colors back to the mud of the earth, making for the murk and gloom that so offended the period eye. And in all those disapproving judgments of Delacroix’s indeterminate lines, which fail to properly distinguish one depicted figure from another, there is the painter’s own physicality asserting itself, a living body left behind in slithering traces. This is not the exalted body of the historical model—a virtual body—but an actual body, one that belongs to the painter, but also one that could stand in for anyone else’s—the body as such.
IV
“The grandiloquent truth of the gesture on life’s great occasions.” In the opening quote of Barthes’ essay on catche are conjoined references to both Baudelaire and Delacroix. The words of the poet are inspired by a picture furnished by a painter who consistently departed from the hard-and-fast polemics of representation in favor of a fluidity that belongs to paint as a material substance—and, we can add, one that was made to reverberate with the materiality of the painter’s own body. The modernity of Delacroix, as Baudelaire announces it, hinges on the foregrounding of the physicality of gesture over and above any of its pre-scripted meanings. Equally, with Barthes, it is evident that what is to be prized most in art is a kind of dumb embodiment. This (counter-)quality is emphasized in his writings as the signal trait of those works that matter – that is, those works that demand a formal analysis despite—or in opposition to—their rhetorical thrust (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, a case in point). To be clear, Barthes’ formalism is anti-ideological as opposed to non-ideological; it is polemically oriented against every high-minded concept that has been ascribed to our physical being—above all, as a “prison-house of the soul.” Here, then, we invited to consider the body in itself, as an entity divorced from the control center of a “myself.” That this “my” is not readily relinquished is part of the critical gambit: think again, Barthes advises. Aspirational thoughts cannot match what actually happens on the ground, in the arena, in the battle scene—whether it be that of wrestling, theatre, or painting. Here, he suggests, ideas come second to the expression of attitudes and the production of affects. Nevertheless, this amounts to a theory of art and, moreover, one that is steeped in politics.
So, we are not concerned here with any promise of return to some state of original innocence. The bodies of Barthes’ wrestlers are by no means free of history. Rather, they stand to demonstrate to what extent all of us are permeated in our physical being by tradition, convention, the law. Barthes seizes upon their gestures as the very flashpoint of struggle between being-for-self and being-for-others. These are at once the most telling and volatile signs of our “species-being,” as Marx would put it, for in them freedom and subordination are inextricably conjoined.40 The figures that appear in Delacroix’s paintings likewise are socio-historically sedimented right down to their fingertips. Their gestures are inherited somewhat like evolutionary traits—but ones that remain always open to re-adaptation. Classical gestures are neo-classicized and then romanticized; they are “set fee,” although never completely. Purely painterly gestures, even as they are unburdened of any overtly referential function, still reach back in time and conduct a history.
The paintings of Cy Twombly, to which Barthes was very partial, offer a case in point. At the start of an essay on this artist’s works on paper, Barthes argues that one must be “bold enough” to declare them “insipid.”41 Insipid, from the Latin insipidus, denotes absence of flavor (sapidus), as in unseasoned food. Applied to Twombly’s work, this adjective suggests a kind of stylistic bluntness: his paintings side with the prosaic, the plain, the unrefined. If we were to consider this artist as an actor, then he would be precisely the kind who doesn’t “put on an act,” who always plays his parts “in the same way.” This sense of stubborn insistence—communicated by that immediately identifiable gestural mark that designates every one of his efforts, from the tiniest sketch to the most monumental canvases, “a Twombly”—is certainly what endeared him to this critic. It could be argued that this mark undergoes little to no development over the course of the artist’s career. Rather, it is put through the paces, continually challenged by new material circumstances: alternations between acrylic and oil pigment; the brush traded in for a crayon or pencil; canvas giving way to paper, etc. Ultimately, all these changeups in the studio program seem to have been devised to exploit its already existing potential. As with the gesture that drives it, Twombly’s mark does not “get better” with time; it just becomes more fully itself—that is, increasingly “insipid,” or, to apply another one of Barthes’ favored adjectives, “gauche.”
With this term, Barthes implies that Twombly’s work comes from the side of the body that society deems weak and therefore wrong. He writes, “The fact that his ‘graphisms,’ his compositions, are ‘gauche’ refers TW to the circle of the excluded, the marginal—where he finds himself, of course, with the children, the disabled…”42 Accordingly, the largely apolitical Twombly is slyly assigned a left-leaning position: gauche not droite. This, again, is something that is not communicated directly by his work, but rather by way of an attitude that produces an affect: the “idiosphere” that enfolds his way with gesture.43 Twombly’s doodling lines—every one of which turns in on itself, solipsistically, as if concerned only to reinforce this artist’s own aesthetic idiom—also carry an oppositional thrust. As Barthes goes on to note, these gestural lines militate against anything that might impede their course. They are for the free play of the hand and against the restrictive functions of the eye:
the “gauche” (or the “lefty”) is a kind of blind man: he doesn’t quite see the direction, the bearing of his gestures; only his hand guides him, or that hand’s desire, not its instrumental aptitude; the eye is reason, evidence, empiricism, verisimilitude—everything which serves to control, to coordinate, to imitate; as an exclusive art of seeing, all our past painting has been subject to a repressive rationality. In a certain sense, TW liberates painting from seeing; for the “gauche” (or “lefty”) undoes the link between hand and eye: he draws without light…44
Hand-eye coordination is here deliberately disrupted. Twombly’s hand turns a blind eye to seeing and, moreover, to the gaze, that which manages pictorial perception in the widest sense, and assigns to us all a position within the “scopic field,” whether we want it or not.45
Of course, none of this would amount to much in the absence of a foil. One must assume that Barthes was drawn to write on Twombly for much the same reason he wrote on wrestling and Brecht. Here, again we are faced with a form of modernism that is infused with the spirit of classicism, the cultural legacy of the Ancient Greeks. Twombly’s gestural lines turn in self-reflexive circles, but without arriving at a state of self-sufficiency; they continue to point outward, and not only indexically to the hand that drew them and the body behind it, but iconically to the works of earlier, figurative artists that left their mark on this only ostensibly abstract one. One could say that Twombly’s abstractions are in effect impressions of pictures, faint in one sense but emphatic in another. Absorbed through the eyes, these pictures, it seems, were straightaway redirected to the memory of the muscles. There, they were divested of symbolic import and retained only as dynamic form, as compositional rhythm, as that which, having moved the eyes, will then move the hands. If, by way of example, the ghost of Raphael’s School of Athens is conjured in Twombly’s painting of the same title, it is not so much as a recollection of the original picture, dimmed and distorted by time; it appears rather more directly, as if reencountered anew. His painting is an event, the acting out of an innervation.
Twombly leaves us in no doubt as to the elevated nature of his sources. References to Greco-Roman antiquity as well as its Renaissance reworkings abound in his titles. And they appear as well inside works, through those lines that so readily pass between drawing, scribbling, and writing, to spell out the names of the gods and goddesses of the Olympic Pantheon (Venus, Apollo, Dionysus) as well as their heroic mortal subjects (Ajax, Achilles, Hector), and finally the authors and texts dedicated to their exploits (Homer, Virgil, Xenophon’s Anabasis). But in the face of this treasure-trove of high-minded humanism, what should we make of the painting entitled The Geeks? Does it reduce, through the elimination of a single letter, this glorious history to the level of a cruel carnival sideshow?
Misspelling is one of Twombly’s signature strategies, another prompt to push his output toward the margins, the realm of children and the disabled. A gauche weakness, yes, but one that is wielded with a certain bravura. Barthes cautions against any too-literal reading of Twombly’s words. They reference writing as such, the signifier over and above any signified—en matière brut. The artist, he claims, merely “alludes” to writing, and through writing, to culture, but “then he goes off somewhere else.” And not to calligraphy, as some might suppose. Barthes is adamant on this point: Twombly’s lines, considered as “graphisms,” have nothing to do with the so-called “fine hand.”46
TW has his own way of saying that the essence of writing is neither a form nor a usage but only a gesture, the gesture which produces it by permitting it to linger: a blur, almost a blotch, a negligence. Let us make a comparison. What is the essence of a pair of pants (if it has such a thing)? Certainly not that crisp and well-pressed object to be found on department store racks; rather, that clump of fabric on the floor, negligently dropped there when the boy stepped out of them, careless, lazy, indifferent. The essence of an object has something to do with its destruction: not necessarily what remains after it has been used up, but what is thrown away as being of no use. This is the case with TW’s “writings”—they are the scraps of an indolence, hence of an extreme elegance; as if there remained, after writing, which is a powerful erotic action, what Verlaine calls la fatigue amoureuse: that garment dropped in the corner of the … canvas.47
This is sexy stuff, and it lends to the aesthetic bond between the critic and the artist a distinctly gay flavor. It is almost impossible to think of their shared love of “the classical” without factoring in its homo-erotic aspects. Barthes’ writing draws this out, subtly but unmistakably. Alongside classical thespians, those practitioners of catche that he was so fond might well have recalled the men who wrestled nude in the Olympic games and were immortalized, resplendent, on antique goblets. And in all of his only semi-ironic praise of this sport, there is perhaps a further nod to the more down-and-dirty gymnastics of the bathhouse. On this point, one could easily be led into a disquisition on the blur that is produced in staged wrestling between otherwise strictly patrolled gender roles. At the extreme of masculine expression, the codes sometimes suddenly switch, and we are faced with a willfully objectified, exhibitionistic body, preening, coquettish, glam. But this approach risks restricting his underlying argument about gesture: that it comes from “the circle of the excluded”—that is to say, a broader circle.
To exercise indolence within this vexed and challenging milieu is a sign of “supreme elegance.” This is the message expressed by the gesture of the boy who casts off his pants, a message retained in the heap that lies at his feet. The result of an action, this garment, folding onto itself, becomes tinged with agency. In this mess, we find not only the essence of the object that was acted upon—the instrumentalized thing now reasserting itself—but the essence of gesture, which is devoted to “permitting it to linger.” The essence of gesture, according to Barthes, is this permission, which always appears in a moment of reprieve, a pause in the run-of-the-mill relations between the users, the used, and the used-up. Arguably, the whole purpose of gesture, its very own intention, is to interrupt the deterministic unfolding of our actions in and upon the world—and, to be clear, this is not to bring life to a standstill, but to reactivate it in another direction.
Basically, interruption is the condition upon which a gesture rests: to become legible, it must be held. However, this period of stasis—whether it comes down to just a beat in live performance or else is committed to posterity in the aesthetic object—is charged, pregnant not only with meaning, but dynamic potential, physicality, eroticism, and perhaps above all, the promise of liberation. Gestures incline in an emancipatory direction: the permission they gain is thereafter shared, equally, with anyone and everyone that comprises its audience, whether gathered in the wrestling ring, the theatre, or the art gallery. The bodies of the opponents in catche are arrested, pacifically, at the height of their domineering power and pitiful submission. In actuality, they deliver no blows nor block them. Like the struggling figures on a theatrical stage, they are engaged only in creating a scene. Much the same can be said for the fighters that appear in Delacroix’s Liberty and Crusaders: from the theatre of war, their gestures take only that which is theatrical. But this is not to say that the results are inconsequential, because play-fighting can impugn the real thing, enfolding it in an aura of burlesque travesty. This perception is rendered acutely in the works of Twombly, no foreigner to history painting. For instance, in The Age of Alexander (1959-60)—at 118 1/8 feet high and 196 ¼ feet wide, a very grand tableau—the battle scene reappears as a wayward array of gently scratched and splattered marks that could be compared to bird droppings, shit-smears. Again, one is invited to ponder the costs of conquest and the fate of a democracy in the turn to empire—a tragedy. But what stands out more emphatically, or again grandiloquently, is the radical discrepancy between real-world violence and these at once crude and dainty daubs.
Twombly’s gesture is ceded to his materials—brush, pigment, canvas—but without losing touch with the body behind it. This is the body of a painter, whose every move in the studio (as well as, potentially, outside it) is directed toward a painting to be. Step by step, the painting is brought to completion as a picture to see and also to judge. However, the gesture, because it is “blind,” is granted a stay. Lingering, the gesture gets to keep going, even—or especially—after its pictorial arrest. And it pulls its beholders right along with it, whether we know it or not. As Barthes advises, the question should not be “what happened here?” but “what is happening?”
Canvas, paper, or wall constitute a stage on which something happens (and if, in certain forms of art, the artist intends that nothing happen, that too is an occurrence, an adventure). Hence, we must take the picture (a convenient name, even if an old one) as a kind of theater à l’italienne: the curtain parts, we watch, we wait, we receive, we understand; and when the scene is over and the picture, we remember: we are no longer the same as we were before: as in ancient drama, we have been initiated…48
Gestures “happen” over and over again; quoted from the past, they are projected into the future. We latch on to them especially when we are looking for openings in our present—which is also to say, another way to deal with it. Their “grandiloquence” is the measure of a play-acting truth that we seek to restore to the otherwise intractable givens of our so-called realpolitik. They bear the weight of this battlefield inheritance; we buckle beneath it, but when we do so theatrically, in an over-the-top manner, it is in pursuit of release. Gestures repeat what is passed down through historically crystallized and reified models, a crushing legacy, but one that can always be aligned to the moment—now—with a shrug that, no matter how subtle, announces change.