good people helping bad ones (that’s why they’re bad too), 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
How many bodies there are within a white heap cannot be counted; an arm rises up, a leg hangs from beneath it, in the middle two rounds resembling a chest overlap and it is unclear whose limb ends where. The one who helps and the one helped, the one embraced and the one crushed, melt into the same mass. The title first speaks of helping, then straight after says the helper too is evil; the indistinguishability in the scene answers precisely this. Interlocked groups of bodies are mostly seen in art history in a carrying scene, in deposition compositions, and there the confusion can be resolved, looking closely one can tell which arm belongs to whom. In this mass there is no resolution. Once the rescuer and the rescued enter the same heap, no one is left to bear witness.
Below, three small red infants hold hands; their eyes are closed with crosses, the two teeth in their mouths giving them a fixed grin. Their holding hands is less a protection than a paper chain of dolls cut out, all from the same mould. For an evil to stand no ill-intentioned person is needed; what is needed is the person who does his job, obeys the rules, goes home in the evening. Once the work is split into small pieces no single piece carries a moral weight on its own, and when the result appears no place is found to seek responsibility. Though these three hold hands they do not look at one another, all are turned forward; to stand side by side here is not solidarity, but being in the same line. In the altarpiece the small scenes ranged below would explain the one above; here the lower row explains nothing, it only holds on and stands.
At upper right a white egg-head broken off from the body hangs in the air, its eyes crossed too; no eye, including the largest presence in the scene, looks at anything, everyone moves without seeing. The black of the ground is not paint but the paper itself; the darkness is not laid on but left, so the figure emerges not by light but directly by the thickness of the white. On the shoulders the paint builds up and leaves ridges while toward the hip it dries and turns to dragging, and from between them the black of the paper returns; where the white thins the colour drops to a bluish grey. The orange lines are thrown in a single pull over the drying white, while the two acid-green lines on the breasts are the painting's smallest intervention. White, the colour most easily soiled, and orange and green have already entered it.
Form and Composition
The dark ground surrounds the four edges and leaves an irregular frame of uneven thickness, while the mass above is built from overlapping roundnesses that cover three quarters of the surface. As the three small bodies in the lower band touch with their arms and weave a horizontal chain, the transition stays abrupt because there is no intermediate scale between the large mass and this chain.
The dark ground surrounds all four edges and leaves an irregular frame towards the inside. The thickness of this frame is not constant: a finger on the left edge, two fingers on the right edge, almost none at the top. The light mass touches the top edge at three points and is cut there by the crop. At the bottom edge, meanwhile, the dark area widens, and the feet of the small units end within that darkness.
The large mass above covers three quarters of the painting. Its interior is built from overlapping roundnesses, and the diameters of these roundnesses grow from top to bottom. In the upper part two large circles stand side by side, each with a short line at its centre. As they descend the forms flatten and begin to stretch horizontally. The axis of the mass is not upright but leans to the right from the top; there is a slope running from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. On the left side a long arm descends, its thickness ending in a taper at the wrist, and there a few short red lines mark the place of the fingers.
In the upper right corner a separate oval stands. It has two cross marks on it and is separated from the body by a thin tie. Its scale is about an eighth of the main mass. Its position is right in the corner, and the crop cuts it slightly from the right. This oval is the only independent unit above.
Three small bodies hold the lower band. Their heights are not equal, the middle one longest, the right one shortest. Their arms open to the sides and touch their neighbours, so that an uninterrupted horizontal chain is set up. The width of the chain is about three quarters of the bottom edge. Each has two crosses on its head; the crosses of the one on the right have spilled above the head, outside its body. The gaps between them are narrow and dark, and inverted V forms are made in the spaces between the legs. This threefold series is the painting's most regular rhythm.
The difference in scale is large. The height of the small bodies is about a fifth of the height of the mass above. There is no intermediate scale between the two, the transition abrupt. The contour is loose everywhere; the outer line disappears entirely where the brush has passed dry. The distinction collapses most in the right central region, where the light mass fringes towards the dark ground and the edge cannot be read. On the right a second long extension descends from top to bottom. It begins at the upper right corner, follows the outer edge of the mass, and thins near the bottom edge. This extension and the arm on the left side are not symmetrical; the right one is longer and more upright, the left one shorter and more slanted. The body between the two therefore leans to the right. Horizontal force is present only in the lower chain and in the flat forms in the central region of the mass; everything else is either vertical or slanted.
Colour and Light
While the melon orange strips carry the warmth of the upper half at the edges of the masses, in the lower body the white takes up the black and drops to a bluish grey, so the lower part of the body stays cooler than the upper. The unadulterated matte black paper fixes the bottom of the scale, and because the acid green, the opposite of the orange, is set right beside it, the two leave a thin vibration.
The orange lines wind about the edges of the white masses. In some places they follow the contour, in others they plunge into the body and disappear. Their colour is close to melon, a light and saturated orange; not mixed into the white, set over it. These thin strips carry the only warmth on the surface to the upper half, because there is no other warm colour there. At the end of the left arm there are a few short red notches, hotter and smaller than the orange. The white is not a single white. Where it is laid thick it is opaque like chalk, in the chest region almost raw. Where the brush has passed swiftly it has taken up the black beneath and turned to grey blue. Over the legs this bluish white covers broad areas, and the lower part of the body stays markedly cooler than its upper part. At the edge of one hip the white has thinned so much that the black has passed through it and brought the colour down to lead.
The ground is unadulterated black and wholly matte. There is no brush mark on it, because it is not painted, it is the paper itself. This flatness fixes the bottom of the whole scale; every lightness on the surface is read against it. The edges of the white in some places scatter like dust and mix into the black, in others they are cut like a razor. The same two colours meet at two separate hardnesses, according to how the edge has been left. In the lower band there are three small figures and all the saturated warmth is gathered there. The one on the left a dark blood red, the one in the centre a terracotta escaping more towards orange, the one on the right a rust colour. The three look like the same paint mixed with yellow in different proportions. The crosses in their eyes and the teeth in their mouths are set in white, and so a bond is built between them and the large white mass in the upper half. Beneath the reds the ground is again black, none of them stands on a floor.
Short acid green lines are scattered over the white. Their number does not exceed five, each a finger in length. This green is the opposite of the orange and set right beside it; because both are small they do not collide, a thin vibration remaining between them. At the lower left a broad mustard yellow patch, at the lower right a dirty area verging on olive green, both looking as if they emerge from beneath the white. The brown works in secret too. On the outer edges of the white masses, especially at the left shoulder and at navel height, a dirty brown band has formed where black and orange mix. That band is the only intermediate tone between the two extremes. The light here comes out of colour. On the black ground there can be no such thing as shadow, and so all the brightness is bound to the white's own thickness. The egg-shaped head at the upper right, because its surroundings are not dirtied, is the brightest place on the surface. In the lower right corner there stands a small signature thrown in white.
Iconography, Myth and Title
Where the helping hand ends and where the helped body begins is uncertain in the white heap, and so both are counted as part of the same complicity. Touch being contagious is the source of the prohibition; the three figures below are cut from a mould like a chain of paper dolls, and no eye in the scene has a gaze.
On a pitch-black area there is a large, white heap, and this heap is made of bodies interlocked with one another. How many people there are cannot be counted. One arm has risen up, one leg reaches to the right, in the middle round masses ride on top of one another. At the upper right there is a head apart from the heap; a white oval with two orange crosses on it. Below, three small red figures hold hands, all with crosses on their eyes and two small teeth in their mouths. The black around the heap opens nowhere.
What the white heap is does not close onto a single reading. It could be an embrace, a struggle, or bodies piled on top of one another. In rescue scenes too such a mingling occurs; the arms trying to pull someone out merge into the same mass as the limbs of the one being rescued. The title speaks of helping and immediately afterward says that the one who helps is also bad. This sentence explains the indistinguishability in the scene: because it is not clear who is pulling whom, both are counted as part of the same heap. Where the helping hand ends, where the helped body begins, is uncertain. When the rescuer and the rescued enter the same mass, no one is left to bear witness.
The idea of complicity is a common theme of old law and old moral narratives. Whoever extends a hand to the wicked is defiled, contact is contagious. Touch being reckoned contagious is the starting point of the prohibitions on touching. The whiteness here is meaningful for this reason; the colour easiest to soil has been chosen and orange lines have entered it. The greenish short lines on the body, on the other hand, resemble something else; a marked body, parts on which a mark has been made with a pen. They also stand like the lines that show where the cuts go.
The three red figures in the lower row are made in a different language. A round head, a round body, short arm and leg; it fits the description of a doll. Although their eyes are closed with crosses, their faces still carry expression, because the two teeth in their mouths give them a fixed grin. Their holding hands forms a row more than a protection; like a chain of paper cut-out dolls, all cut from the same mould. Right beneath the confusion above, an orderly and repeating series. Figures cut from a mould set up a narrative of a collective without individuality.
The single head at the upper right has stayed outside this series. It has no body, has broken off from the heap or has not yet joined it. Its eyes too are crossed, that is, it does not see either. No being in the scene has a seeing eye; neither those in the heap nor those below. Both the one who helps and the one who is helped move without seeing. A crowd that moves without seeing takes its direction from another's hand. The coloured patches descending at the right edge stand like a piece that has separated from the heap and fallen to the ground; where they arrive cannot be made out.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
In the upper mass formed by mingled bodies, the one who helps and the one who squeezes, the one embraced and the one harmed, cannot be told apart; good and harm stand within the same movement. The face of the largest being is cancelled with crosses, and while no one sees the event, the three small figures below remain like children who watch from below and cannot speak.
It is not possible to count how many bodies are inside the light-coloured mass above. An arm can be made out, beneath it a leg, beside it two rounds resembling a chest, a little further off a hip. All of them are interlocked. Whose limb ends where is uncertain. The one who helps and the one helped, the one embraced and the one squeezed, cannot be told apart. The heap itself refuses this distinction. Where two bodies are so mixed together, good and harm stand within the same movement. At the upper edge of the mass an arm reaches up, its end not visible; below, a leg hangs out. The heap spills in both directions.
This large mass has no face. The only thing that could be counted as a head is a white oval in the upper right, standing as if broken off from the body; on it there are two crosses. That is, the largest being in the scene does not look. No one has taken on the work of seeing. An event is happening and those within the event cannot see it. That head's connection to the body has not been drawn either; where the neck ought to be there is a dark gap.
At the lower edge three small red figures are lined up. Their arms are opened to the sides, they touch one another. Small marks like their navels, nipples, teeth have been set simply, as if taken from a child's drawing. Their eyes too are closed off with the same crosses. All three stand beneath the tangle above, they are far smaller than it and do not mix into it. This is a position like a child watching from below, without quite understanding, an event among the grown-ups. It cannot say what it saw, nor can it forget what it could not see. The stance of all three is the same as one another; the arms are opened at the same angle, the legs at the same spacing. A single movement repeated three times.
The ground is black. Behind the figures there is no space, nothing carries them. The heap stands in the air, and so do the small ones. The darkness begins at every edge and gnaws at the forms. In some places the edge of the white merges into the black and disappears, and you cannot find where the body ends. How is a body without an edge to protect itself, this question stands beneath the painting. In some regions the light paint has been layered over itself and thickened, in others the black beneath has come back.
On the left there are thin red lines, a few of them seeming to drip downward. The impression arises that the mass is leaking something from there. It is not very clear, it could be a paint trace. But those small red lines are the only sign of injury in the whole painting, and they fall exactly between the large heap and the small figures. Something is running right above the heads of the trio and no one looks up. The same red has been used on the bodies of the small figures too; the ones below seem made of the same substance as the trace above.
Society, Power and Technology
The weight of the mass above bears down at the level of the three small figures holding hands, because evil, in order to keep standing, is dependent on people who do their jobs and go home in the evening. These figures' standing side by side is not solidarity but being in the same line, and the word procedure comforts by making the decision look as though it belongs to someone else.
The mass up above is so large that the three small beings below reach only as far as its hem. The small ones are holding hands, standing on their feet, crosses in their eyes. The whole weight of the body above bears down at their level. The title speaks of good people helping the bad, and it describes exactly this scene. For an evil to keep standing it has no need of ill-intentioned people; it needs people who do their jobs, who follow the rules, who go home in the evening.
No one counts himself as bad. The clerk who fills in the form does not, the official who serves the eviction order does not, the worker who prepares the list does not. Everyone holds one link of the chain and sees no crime in his own link. This is exactly why systems are divided up this way; once work is broken into small pieces, no piece carries a moral burden on its own. And when the result comes out, no place can be found to look for responsibility, because everyone is responsible only for his own desk. It is not even necessary to say I was given an order any more; it is enough to say the procedure is thus. The word procedure is a terrible comfort to a person, it implies that the decision belongs to someone other than himself. And yet that procedure too was written by someone somewhere, and in writing it they asked no one.
The small figures' eyes have been closed. They do not see, but they stand. Not seeing takes effort too, in fact; a person spends a good deal of effort not to see something, changes the subject, turns off the news, does not ask. These three, although they are holding hands, do not look at one another, all of them turned to the front. Standing side by side is not solidarity here, it is being in the same line. Most people who stand in the same line do not even know one another. They exchange greetings in the lift, scan the same card, join the same queue in the canteen and do not say a single word to each other. For them to realise that they have a common interest they would first have to speak, and as long as they do not speak they remain only a row looking in the same direction.
The arms of the body above are opened to either side and have overflowed the surface. How far they reach cannot be seen. It has leaned its size not on its surroundings but on those beneath it. And the one who bears an institution's weight is always the lowest rank; the topmost signature arrives nowhere without hundreds of small approvals beneath it. The upper tier, knowing this, wants the lower tier to hold hands so that it does not scatter. The more the joined hands carry that mass, the more the mass widens.
At the top right a separate head stands, broken off from the body, again two crosses in its eyes. Attached to no one, in the air. The face of the decision-maker is always like this in any case, it looks from a place not part of the scene. The feet of the three figures below, meanwhile, are on the black ground, and on that ground nothing else has been drawn.
Art History and Comparison
In the predella the small row below is charged with explaining the holy figure above; the lower row here explains nothing, three red babies hold hands. In caricature the cross-marked eye takes a character temporarily out of play; here all four figures have been cancelled with a cross, but the next frame does not come.
At the lower edge three red babies have joined hands; their eyes closed with a cross-mark, two small teeth coming out of their mouths. Above there is a dead-white, large, tangled mass; where an arm is, where a leg, how many people there are, is unclear. At the upper right there is also an egg-shaped white head, its eyes too crossed out. The way the small figures in the lower row are arranged in a band and settle beneath the large mass above recalls the predella arrangement of the altarpiece. There too, below there are small scenes arranged in sequence, above stands the large and holy figure; the lower row is charged with explaining the one above. Here the lower row explains nothing, it merely holds hands and stands there.
Within the white mass above, two or three bodies seem to have passed into one another. Arms come out of one and enter another, a back connects to a hip. Interlocking groups of bodies are most often seen in the history of painting in a scene of carrying; in Deposition compositions the hands and arms holding the dead body are woven exactly like this. The rule of that tradition is that the tangle should be resolvable; which arm belongs to whom is understood on careful looking. In this mass there is no resolution. The act of help the title speaks of has turned, at the level of form, into a sticking-together; the helper and the helped cannot be told apart, and indeed the title confesses this itself.
The ground being black paper connects the work to a separate vein. To work with a light colour on a dark surface requires the figure to emerge not through light but directly through paint; the painter adds not shadow but brightness. In painters who work on found, cheap material, for instance on Bill Traylor's pieces of cardboard, there is a similar necessity. Traylor's figures are for that reason as sharp as a silhouette, standing as though cut out in a single stroke. Here the opposite has happened; the white mass enters the black by blurring its edges, and where it ends is undecided.
The eye closed with a cross-mark has a small history of its own. In newspaper caricature and in cartoons this mark is the shorthand writing of death or of fainting; two lines announce that the narrative has taken a character out of play. The mark has also spread because it is cheap. On this paper the cross is repeated in four separate figures, that is, almost everyone in the painting is out of play. In caricature this mark is temporary, in the next frame the character gets back up; here there is no next frame.
In the series' 2019 group made on black paper, this work shows a freer hand than the canvas works. The paint is more fluid, the edges less deliberated. While in those made on canvas within the same year there is still an effort to set up a scene, here the scene has been removed; the black ground is not a room, nor a sky, but the paper itself. The three babies in the lower row are the crowded version of the small onlookers that appear one by one at the edges in other works of the series. Here the onlooker has turned into a chorus, but the chorus is silent; apart from their holding of hands they have no action.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The darkness here is not laid on but left; the dark area around the figure is untouched paper, so the figure looks as if it came not onto the surface but out of it. The paper's absorbency swallowed the black, and where the white stayed thin the colour fell to a bluish grey while in the thick places it was returned to a third time and stayed pure white.
The black here is not paint but the paper itself. The whole dark area around the figure is untouched ground, and this changes everything in a picture; because the darkness is not laid on but left. Paper is a surface that drinks acrylic, and moreover its black swallows every thin layer over it. Where the white stayed thin I see the result of this: in some regions at the centre of the body the white is no longer white but a bluish grey. There the paint dried before it could cover the black. In the thick places right beside it, on the other hand, the white is pure white, because it was passed over a second, even a third time.
The way the white is laid on also changes from region to region. At the top, where the shoulders are, there are broad and full strokes; the brush was pressed, the paint swelled, faint ridges left at the edges. Going down, the same white began to dry and passed into dragging; around the hip there are broken, jagged marks, and from between them the black of the paper comes back up again. This transition does not look as if it was done on purpose, it happened of its own accord as the paint on the brush ran low.
The orange lines are flung over the white after it had dried. Thin, fluid, in a single pull; in none of them is there a blurring that pulls up the white beneath. The orange on the left arm crosses the whole length of the arm unbroken. At the end of that same orange, where the hand is, there are short red nicks and these are pressed separately. The two greenish yellow short lines above the breasts are the smallest intervention in the picture; both are a single touch and were placed while the white beneath was still damp, their edges slightly scattered.
The three small red figures below are built directly over the black. Red acrylic lifts black with difficulty; on the middle figure, because the paint is thick, it stands bright, on the figure on the right it stayed thin and fell to brown. The white crosses on their eyes are the last and the thickest; each is two separate short strokes, one over the other. The white teeth in their mouths are flung one by one with flicks. The orange rings that draw the arms are fast too; as the brush completed a circle it passed over its own mark and thickened there. All three of the figures are three repetitions of the same hand movement, but the pressure is different in all three and that difference reads in the thickness of the paint.
A seventy by one hundred paper, lighter than canvas and prone to rippling; because acrylic pulls the paper as it dries, I guess that the surface will not stand entirely flat but will hump up in places. Hung on a wall without the protection of glass, these humps make their own shadows in a light coming from the side. The egg-shaped head in the upper right corner is the place of this rippling that carries the thinnest paint; the white there is left in a single coat and the grain of the paper reads through it. Looked at from two metres the white body hangs within the darkness. Looked at from half a metre, meanwhile, it becomes clear that this darkness carries no paint at all, that it was left untouched, and the figure looks as if it came not onto the paper but out of it.
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