burningman fast, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on black paper, 70 × 100 cm (27 ½ × 39 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
The left half is taken up by a single face; horizontal scratches on its brow, its eyes half closed, its mouth drawn down. At upper right a second, half-scale, paler face. The two do not turn to one another; though in the same frame there is no contact between them, two heads come side by side but not met, and this nearness does not lessen the loneliness. The faces are less faces than masks, brow nose mouth scraped in with a few hard strokes, there is surface not skin. The eyes have given up looking, cut off their contact with the world; despite this the biggest piece of the painting is that large face, as if its size grew as its detail lessened.
The hand entering between the two faces is raised, its fingers open, its palm turned out; whether it is raised to protect or to strike is unclear, the painting has not chosen that moment. It connects to no arm, an ownerless gesture, and because it touches nothing it has stayed clean. At lower right there are letters scrawled in paint, covered over with a thick band; the whole cannot be read, the last word resembles the word child. To treat people as children is the cheapest way of governing; from the person you assume will not understand you are also freed of the obligation to give account. The person with no place to speak writes on the wall, if the channel were open no one would carry paint.
The burning man of the title reads two ways, the victim bound to the stake and burned and the giant puppet set alight each year in the desert; one a punishment, the other a celebration. The word fast beside it summons abstinence, the diminishing of the body, and the sunken cheeks of the faces carry this; but the same word can be read as speed too, the burning fast, the forgetting faster still. The red is one of the places carrying the thickest paint in this series, as it left the tube, heaped wet on wet, dark burgundy veins opened between them by dragging. The left side is the very opposite; the black of the paper is still open, the red thrown in short hard flicks, their tips torn. The fullest and longest-worked side stands right beside the emptiest and fastest side, no transition between. The red inclines to blue without taking any yellow, so it is flesh colour, not fire. Looking long, the eye sates on the red, and turning the head the white of the wall runs green for a while.
Form and Composition
The large head, holding the left half of the crop on its own, covers about seventy per cent of the height. As the half-scale second oval in the upper right quarter stands on the same plane without depth, the difference in size turns into the fundamental tension, while the light hand at the centre binds the two ovals with a diagonal slanting to the lower left.
The head on the left holds the left half of the crop on its own. Its oval form is cut off at the top, the forehead staying outside the top edge; below, the chin descends to three quarters of the painting's height. That is, a single unit covers about seventy per cent of the height. In the upper right quarter there is a second oval, in the same arrangement but at half the scale. The difference in size between the two is the composition's fundamental tension; the small one is not far away but stands on the same plane, and there is no tier behind it to create depth.
The vertical strip between the two ovals is full. There short vertical strokes descend from top to bottom, with dark voids between them, and it works like a fence. This strip is the only vertical force dividing the painting in two. It touches the right edge of the head on the left and stands a hand's width away from the left edge of the head on the right. Within the strip there is also a hook form and a winding extension attached to it; both are near the centre, in the lower half.
Below the centre stands a light-value hand. The fingers open upward, the wrist descends to the lower left and is cut off at the bottom edge. This hand is the painting's lightest patch and sits in the void between the two heads. Its slope is towards the lower left; it produces a diagonal force and binds the two vertical ovals with a slanted line.
On the left edge there is a series of short, sharp strokes. All of them look inward from the edge, of unequal length, arrayed one on top of another. This series covers the whole height of the left edge and bounds the large oval from outside. On the right edge vertical hatchings serve the same function, but they are longer and sparser.
In the right part of the lower band there are marks written with thin light lines. They stand like letters, arrayed in three rows, and the bottom row is closed off as if struck through with a thick horizontal band. That horizontal band stretches from the right edge to the centre and pulls the painting's lower boundary inward. The contour is nowhere a single line; even the faces come out through overlapping patches. The distinction collapses most in the lower left corner, where the dark patch and the light patch enter the same texture and are not separated from each other. The inner order of the two faces resembles each other but works differently because of scale. In the large one the distances between eye, nose and mouth are wide, each read separately. In the small one the same units are crammed and become a single cluster. The nose of the large face stands near the centre of the painting, that is, there is a face fragment right in the middle of the composition. The centre of the face on the right, meanwhile, is a hand's width in from the right edge. The line between the two centres is slightly tilted upward.
Colour and Light
The face on the left and the face on the right are different lightening ratios of the same cadmium red, and because the red stands constantly inclined towards blue it reads as flesh, not fire. Because the white is laid into the wet red it nowhere stays white but turns to pink, and the black ground, sliding from petrol green to night blue to purple, is saved from flatness.
The large face on the left is covered from top to bottom in cadmium red, and the small one on the right in the same paint dirtied with white. The difference between them is not colour but the degree of lightening. No yellow at all has got into the red, it stands leaning constantly towards blue. Because of this, warm though it is, it is not fire colour but rather flesh colour. Perhaps two thirds of the surface is filled with the different intensities of this single red, and the rest is the darkness beneath it. The ground is black, but not a flat black. At the left edge it slides to a dark petrol green, in the middle region to night blue, at the lower right to purple. Where the red thins the black comes out from beneath it and brings the colour down to maroon; where it stays thick the red breaks away from the ground entirely. The thickness of the same paint is here the only setting of the value.
The white has nowhere stayed white. Because it was laid into the wet red it has turned to pink; the hatchings above the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the cheeks of the right face are all the same watery candy pink. Only on the forehead of the left face does the white drop to a bluish grey, where the navy beneath has mixed in. The lightest point of the surface is there too, and it stands on a face like dirt. At the upper right there are vertical bands. Fuchsia, violet and lilac drawn down in order, like a curtain. This region is cooler and pinker than the rest of the painting; here is the place where the red slides to blue. Between the bands a few short orange strokes, the only warmth inclined towards yellow on the whole surface.
The green at the left edge is about a handful. A dark, dirty pine green, almost mixed into black; though it is the opposite of the red it is so dim that it puts up no resistance. Its existence shows how saturated the red has been left. The vertical mass in the centre, between the two faces, is built with thick scrubs passing from red to pink. The paint is there at its densest; the brush was drawn down in one go and heaped up at the edges. The patches to its right turn to blue purple, a blurred area where red and navy have mixed has formed. To seek a direction for the light is futile. The faces shine to the same degree everywhere, there is no darkening under the nose, no shadow beneath the chin. The transition between the dark ground and the bright face has not been softened either; the red stands like a slab on top of the black. The insides of the eyes are blue purple; there is no other place on the whole face that stays cool, only there.
At the lower right there are letters written in red. Beneath them a thick pink band has been drawn, the paint heaped up there and, in some places on the letters, thinning and letting the black through. A paler version of the same pink repeats in the lower left corner as a few horizontal scrubs, where the ground has gone purple.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The two faces standing side by side is close to the death mask and the arrangement of mourning, and the lines on the faces call up tribal paints marked before a ceremony. The name in the writing sets up a voice that compares the person to the saviour and withdraws the claim to martyrdom; the burning man in the title swings between punishment at the stake and the giant puppet burned in the desert.
A huge face covers the left half. Its forehead is wide, its eyes half-closed, its nose long, its mouth drawn downward. On its forehead and cheeks there are horizontal lines; they stand like painted or scratched-in marks. On the right there is a second face, smaller and paler, its eyes almost shut. Between the two faces stands a hand raised up, its fingers open. At the lower right there is a sentence written in letters; the whole cannot be read, but its last word looks like the beginning of a name. The distance between the two faces is less than an arm's length.
The two faces standing side by side in this way is close to the arrangement of the death mask and of mourning paintings. One large and in front, the other behind and faded; they could be two states of the same person, or two separate people. The lines on the faces recall tribal paints, the face marked before a ceremony. In ceremonies concerning fire the painting of the face is common; the person steps out of their own identity and enters their role. Looked at as two states of the same person, one would have been taken while alive, the other stays belonging to what comes after.
The raised hand opens a separate layer. The hand that swears, the hand that blesses, the hand that says stop; the posture of all three is close to one another, and which it is is determined by the scene around it. Here around the hand there is neither book nor court nor crowd. It stands like a gesture left in the air. For an oath to be reckoned valid, someone must be present opposite. Above it, at the middle level, upright and horizontal bars join and set up a shape close to a cross; it is not certain, but it faces that way.
The name within the writing draws the scene directly into a comparison. A sentence seems to have been built that compares itself to the saviour or refuses that comparison. This can be counted as the inverted form of martyrdom narratives. A voice that withdraws the claim to be a martyr, that refuses to sanctify pain. Whoever does this casts himself outside the narrative. The burning man in the title, on the other hand, works in two directions: the person bound to the stake and burned, and the giant puppet burned each year in the desert. One is punishment, the other celebration; in both a figure is set alight and the crowd watches.
When the word fasting is placed beside this fire, the idea of abstinence and mortification comes into play. To go without eating, to reduce the body in order to be purified. The sunken cheeks and deep eye-sockets of the faces are in a state that could carry this reading. On the left edge vertical rays shoot upward; they stand like the direction of a flame. What comes at the end of the fast is, in some narratives, a vision, in others a collapse. At the lower edge there is a dark strip, closing off the bottom of the scene, and there a few small patches have gathered like the trace of a crowd drawing near and away.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The hand raised in the air stays suspended on a moment's intention between protecting and striking, and because it is connected to no body it stands in the middle as an ownerless gesture. While the two faces, without turning towards one another in the same frame, enlarge their loneliness, the half-legible writing in the lower right is like a reproach that could not come out, carried to the wall.
A hand has entered between the two faces and risen upward. The fingers are open, the palm turned outward. This gesture may have been raised to protect, or to strike. The difference between them is a matter of a moment's intention, and the painting has not chosen that moment, it has left it midway between the two. Whom the hand belongs to is also unclear; I cannot see an arm connecting to either of the two faces. In the middle of the scene stands an ownerless movement. I tried to find where the arm comes from, and could not. The fingers are separate from one another and their tips pale; this hand has touched nothing, it has stayed clean.
The face on the left is enormous. The eyes are half closed, the lids grown heavy, the gaze slipped downward. Its surface is as if scraped; gone over, wiped out, painted again. On the forehead region there are dark patches, as though something had been taken away from there. Whether it is a face about to fall asleep, or a face that has passed out, I cannot tell. What the two have in common is this: it has stopped looking. Before us stands a face that has cut off its contact with the world, and despite this it is the largest part of the painting. The nose and chin are set with a few thick strokes, the rest left indistinct. It is as though the less its detail, the greater its size.
The face on the right is smaller, further away. Its eyes are again lowered, its mouth slightly ajar. The two faces do not turn towards one another. Despite being in the same frame there is no contact between them. Two heads that have come side by side but have not met. A closeness of this kind does not lessen loneliness, it multiplies it. The gap between them has been filled with red brush strokes, and that area is not a body but like noise. Between the two there is no shoulder, no neck, no body either. There are only heads; their bodies have never entered the painting.
In the lower right there is a sentence scrawled in letters. It cannot all be read, the letters are piled onto one another, some left half-finished. The word at the end resembles the word meaning child, and it is underlined with a thick line. It is as though, when something that cannot be said fails to come out of the face, it gets written on the wall. Both faces are silent, but somewhere in the painting there is a voice, and that voice has turned into writing. I think this is a reproach; a reproach of which it is unclear to whom it is said. Some of the letters are large, some small; the speed of the writing is irregular. It has not come from a calm hand.
On the left edge vertical, sharp traces have shot upward, like flames or branches. The darkness has gathered most there. While the faces remain within the light, the edges darken. In the lower part, among the dark patches, a small round form stands, I could not make out what it is, it waits right below the hand. On the right edge vertical patches have run downward, as if descending from a wall.
Society, Power and Technology
The complaint scrawled in haste on the wall tells how, had the channel been open, no one would have carried paint, and how the person with no place to say it writes on the wall only as a last resort. The surface recalling a burnt wall shows how, once a neighbourhood has burned, its old residents cannot return, and how, without anyone being forced to move, staying becomes impossible.
At the bottom right there are letters, as if scrawled on the wall in haste, half of them illegible. As far as I can make out, a sentence complaining of being treated like a child. It begins with a swear word. We all know where writing of this kind is written; in the underpass, in the gap between apartment blocks, on the facade of a building due for demolition. The person who has no place to say it writes on the wall. Had the channel been open, no one would have carried paint.
Treating people like children is the cheapest method of governing. Do not worry, they say. We have thought it through, they say. The necessary measures have been taken, they say. If you assume that the person across from you cannot understand, you are also freed of the obligation to account to him. Then the same person is scolded at the ballot box for not behaving maturely. This is a two-hundred-year-old contradiction; treating the citizen like a child and expecting adult responsibility from him. Banks use the same language too. It is assumed from the start that the contract will not be read, and so it is written in six-point type. Then when a problem arises, you signed it, they say. To hide the information and ask for consent is a thing that occurs only to one who looks down on the person he is dealing with.
On the left a huge face stands, worn out, the hollows beneath its eyes sunken, its gaze slipped downward. On the right there is a second, smaller face, worn in a similar way. The two do not look at each other. Between them a hand is stretched upward, its fingers open. That hand is asking for something or trying to hold on somewhere. We also know how much use a single hand raised in a crowd is; a raised hand has meaning if it can be counted, if it cannot be counted it merely stays in the air. And for a great many hands to be raised at the same moment, people must first see one another, and these two faces are not turned to each other.
There are vertical traces running downward all over the surface, recalling a burnt wall. When something burns in the city, what is left is a surface like this too. After fires the first thing done is the clearing of the rubble, the second is the forgetting of who was responsible. The third is the rise in the value of the plot. Once a neighbourhood has burned, its old residents cannot return to it again, because whoever returns cannot pay the rent. The building put up in its place is taller, cleaner, with a card reader at its door. No one asks where the old neighbours have scattered to. The thing we call the city changes hands little by little in just this way; no one is forced to move, it merely becomes impossible to stay.
This is why the word speed in the title struck me as meaningful. Burning is fast, forgetting faster still. The length of time a disaster stays on the agenda is now measured in days, then another image comes and takes its place. The writing is painted over, the wall is smoothed again, a signboard is hung. Beneath the scrawled letters there is a broad strip, and that strip has already covered a part of the writing.
Art History and Comparison
In Basquiat's panels the struck-through word reads all the more, because erasure is a technique of emphasis; the paint here has really closed the letters off, and the sentence has turned into a residue without being completed. Whereas Brassaï's wall scratchings emerge by subtracting from the surface, the two faces here emerge by adding paint; one scratches, the other piles on top.
There is an enormous face covering the left half; scratches on its forehead, its eyes half-closed, its mouth drooping downward. On the right a second, smaller face, which also looks in the same direction. Between them stands a raised hand. At the lower right there are letters written in paint and then covered over; parts of a sentence can be read, the rest is lost.
To insert writing into the painting became the sign of the generation that passed from wall to canvas in the early eighties. In Basquiat's panels words are listed, then struck through; their being struck through makes them read all the more, because there erasure is a technique of emphasis. The writing here does not work like that. The paint applied over the letters has really closed them off, the sentence is not completed, and what remains is a residue whose meaning cannot be worked out. The writing carries no message, it only shows that once, something was written there.
Both faces stand more like masks than like faces. The eyebrows, the nose, the mouth are scratched in with a few hard strokes; there is not skin but surface. In Ensor's carnival masks this effect was used to build a crowd, the masks piled one on another and none of them pointed to an identity. Here the number of masks is two, there is no crowd, yet the same absence of identity has been kept. The faces do not look at each other, both are turned outward, towards the side where the viewer stands. To my mind the closest relative of this paper is not painting but photography. The scratched faces Brassaï found and photographed on the walls of Paris were like this too; two eyes and a mouth someone had scratched into the plaster with a nail, and behind it a hand whose owner is unknown. Wall painting is anonymous, unsigned, without a history. The two faces here are anonymous too; but the difference is this, the scratching on the wall subtracts from the surface, whereas the faces here have emerged by adding paint to the surface. One scratches, the other piles on top.
The hand in the middle is a separate matter. The fingers open, the palm turned outward, the wrist left low; in sacred painting this pose would be a sign of blessing or of warning, and painters followed the rule down to the angle at which the fingers should stand. Here it is unclear which body the hand belongs to, it has emerged from between the two faces, ownerless. Once the sign language breaks down, only an organ remains of the hand, and it hangs upon the surface.
Among the works made on black paper in 2019, this seems to be the only example into which writing has openly entered. In the rest of the series the titles are long and talkative while the inside of the painting is silent; here the talk has overflowed onto the surface of the painting, and then been suppressed. The vertical patches on the left edge resemble a plant or a flame, and it is hard to say anything definite. The dark strip running along the lower edge stands like a line drawn beneath the whole scene, holding both faces up above.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
On the right side the red is heaped up without any thinning, and as the wet coats lifted one another, dark burgundy veins formed, pulled rather than mixed. The left side, on the contrary, is empty; the red there is flung in short hard flicks, and the two extremes stand side by side on the same paper with no transition zone, one the fullest and one the fastest.
The amount of paint on the paper is one of the highest I have seen in this series. The red is almost not thinned at all, heaped up as it came from the tube with a broad flat brush. In some regions two or three coats one over another and all placed while each was wet; the lower layer was lifted up by the dragging of the upper, and dark burgundy veins formed between them. These veins came out not by mixing but by pulling. Paper does not drink this much paint, it holds it on top; I guess that during drying the surface formed a skin and lifted slightly at the edges.
The left side is the exact opposite. There the black of the paper is still open and the red is only in pieces, flung in short and hard flicks. Each flick is separate; the brush struck the surface and lifted straight away, so the tips of the marks are torn. Between them there are untouched black bands. The width of the brush here has changed too; the marks on the left edge do not exceed a centimetre, the drags in the middle approach five centimetres. This region is the emptiest and fastest part of the picture, the right side the fullest and longest-taking part. The two extremes stand side by side on the same paper and there is no transition zone between.
The tempo worked inside the large face is separate. There pink and grey are dragged wetly over the red; the light strip on the bridge of the nose is left with a single pressing and the edge of the brush, its edges seeping into the red around it. The grey patches over the brows and the forehead, on the other hand, are placed by dragging at the moment the brush had almost emptied; the surface of the paper took on a matt and rough texture there. The red beneath the mouth, meanwhile, has run, descended two fingers' length and dried there.
The letters at the lower right are written with paint, not scratched. They were flung with the tip of the brush, one by one, after the dark ground beneath had dried; the navy underneath reads through them, that is the paint stayed thin there. The broad pink band right below them, on the other hand, is full and in a single pull, left by the hand going from right to left. At the end of the band the paint ran low and the edge became jagged. The second face on the right is built with thinner paint too; there the red is in a single layer and the dark ground beneath goes right into the face, so the face looks as if it could not fully separate from the paper.
A seventy by one hundred horizontal paper; hung at eye level the large face comes the same size as my own face. Looked at from a metre and a half the red swallows the whole area and the eye is left with no place to rest. Come down to half a metre and at least four separate tones of the red separate out, and the black paper beneath comes back here and there from among them. Looking a long while, the eye grows sated with red, and when you turn your head the white of the wall veers to green for a while.
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