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Lot Essay
Blending nostalgia, allegory, intellectual concerns and a sardonically deadpan painting style, Mark Tansey's pictures present the viewer with strange new visions of our world. Judgment of Paris I, painted in 1982, is a contemporary reprisal of the myth of Paris. However, where Paris is usually presented selecting one of three goddesses, each of whom is trying to use their wiles and appearances to convince him of their qualities, here the scene has been given a peculiarly contemporary twist. On a twentieth-century assault course, three respectable young men, straight out of the Ivy League or Happy Days, clamber across a wall under the watchful eye of a woman, the new Paris.
Tansey has tackled the subject of the Judgment of Paris several times. As well as the present work, there is another in which a woman waiting for a light for her cigarette is offered three different "lights," some too literal to be useful: a flashlight, a burning torch, and the far more apt lighter. In another painting, a French officer of a century ago stands in a glorious interior reminiscent of Versailles, contemplating his own reflection in a mirror-- or perhaps that of the city of Paris, or perhaps the mirror itself-- while in the detailed frescos one can see a miniaturised depiction of Rubens' own treatment of the Judgment. In the original story, Paris was selected to judge which of three goddesses-- Athena, Hera and Aphrodite -- was the most beautiful following a carefully engineered ploy by Eros, who had sent an apple as a gift for, "the most beautiful." Each of the three claimants to the title and apple tried to persuade Paris with bribes, offering respectively wisdom, wealth, or Helen of Troy, the most beautiful mortal woman of the age.
Paris' choice of Aphrodite-- and therefore Helen-- can be seen as an indictment of man's susceptibility to lust. The consequence of his decision, and of the abduction of Helen, was the Trojan War. In Judgment of Paris I, this military theme is vaguely evoked by the assault course. However, these men are not presented as soldiers, but as suitors, as well-dressed crisp young men in shirts, slacks, and shoes that were not made for running. The inclusion of these clothes implies that these are not people used to demonstrations of physical strength. Despite this, their show of virility is being used in order to secure, one assumes, the affections of the woman judging them; the emphasis on this virility is increased by the fact that the men's heads are almost entirely "out of shot" the merest fraction of the right-hand man's head is alone evident. This, then, is an exhibition of brawn, not brains. It is the male body and each man's stamina that appears to be of interest to the woman judging them, a fact made all the more absurd by the consideration that these competitors could well be, as in many of Tansey's works, intellectuals, thinkers, academics, Lacans, Baudrillards, Derridas. This helps to highlight the extent to which Tansey has concisely presented the viewer with an image of the games that some men will play in order to secure the affection of a woman.
Judgment of Paris I is a gender-inverted version of the original myth. Tansey has placed feminism and gender politics under the strange, even surreal microscope, through which he has explored the implications of so many forms and schools of critical thought. The objectification of the female body and the inequality between the sexes-- against which many feminist thinkers were reacting-- has here been turned on its head. These preppy men are jumping through hoops for the attentions of the woman, who watches on hopeful, enthralled-- amused? The clothing that she wears is from an era that would appear to predate much of the age in which feminism came to the fore, and the fact that she appears, like the men, to have walked into Tansey's painting straight from a Rockwell or a Hopper adds to the deliberate muddying that the artist has conjured in this post-modern enigma. Is Tansey undermining the feminist claims that society is phallocentric by showing how often men are under the sway of women? Is this a criticism of the ridicule to which men are willing to submit themselves in order to satiate primal yearnings, and therefore a criticism of sexual, not merely gender, politics? Are her implied apple-pie good looks casting a Circe-like spell over the men, who are reduced to brainless brawn? Or is this revenge for millennia of injustice and inequality?
Certainly, one aspect of Judgment of Paris I that adds an extra dimension to the complication of the issues within the work is the fact that it has been rendered by Tansey himself, by a man with a brush. His own personal involvement in the creation of the picture is integral to his exploration of its theme and contents. For not only is this scene the product of his own imagination, the characters his own puppets, but the fact that a man has created this image disrupts the play of gender politics within the work. For despite what has erroneously been described as his "realist" style of painting, a misnomer that refers to the intricate and meticulous figuration of the image itself, this is very much a product of Tansey, the result of the work carried out by his hands. The monochrome presentation, combined with the Rockwell-like "realism" of the scene, combine to create an image that has the weight of photographic factuality while the clothing and the simple, restricted palette introduce an atmosphere that is almost nostalgic. Judgment of Paris I highjacks the visual idiom of old photos and illustrations both in content and in style, and in so doing, lays claim to a visual language of authority that it in fact both undermines and even mocks in the gentle surrealism of its content. In the painstakingly-worked paint surface and literal figuration of the image, Judgment of Paris I also appears to provide a wry contrast to the Neo-Expressionism that was so prevalent at the time that it was painted. But in terms of its content, it appears to owe more to Max Ernst and Magritte, to collage and surrealism. While there is nothing impossible within the scene in Judgment of Paris I, the atmosphere and content have a strong though far from overpowering dose of the absurd. A trope of the Old Masters has been reversed in a modestly surreal manner, given a gentle twist that is enough to unravel whole new worlds of meaning and implication.
Tansey's own working methods add to the fog of meaning that surrounds his works. For in his pictures, the paint that he has so painstakingly worked has in fact been applied initially as a monochrome surface on a prepared canvas, and is subsequently removed bit by bit by the artist using various methods in order to create various textures and impressions. This act of un-painting a picture reflects Tansey's unique participation in its literal deconstruction, making Judgment of Paris I a microcosm, mini-parody and refutation of the critical technique of the same name; the fact that the final image produced through this anti-painting is so resolutely figurative results in a fascinating conceptual tension between what is and is not, expressly undermining both the purpose of painting and the criticism that surrounds it. Tansey often heightens this invisible conceptual backdrop by deliberately using an array of objects in order to work the paint surface, objects that have nothing to do with the traditional act of painting or with the images that they are used to conjure, introducing yet another oblique and tangential aspect of his continuing assault on systems, on meanings, on references and their interplay. This in itself recalls some of Max Ernst's frottage works, which would transform the grain of a piece of wood into a landscape or seascape, smears of oil into shells and cities. As an actual object, Judgment of Paris I is therefore the result of a series of disassociations, an attack on the post-scructuralists and their theories of meaning. In its never-ending complications, in the levels of meaning and un-meaning, construction and deconstruction, reality and representation, Tansey plays endless games with the viewer. We are placed in the position of the woman, watching the scene unfold from a distance within the pictorial universe; yet we are also placed in the position of the men, clambering over the blank flat surface and realising that it is in fact not merely flat, but in fact three-dimensional. We are looking on the other side for meaning while also being made uncomfortably aware of the conceit, of the objecthood of the work, of the fact that it is, empirically, merely a combination of wood, oil and canvas stuck on a wall. In the riveting intellectual arena of which Tansey is the maestro, the medium and the message are at each other's throats, meaning is fragmented and disrupted, nothing and everything is exactly as it seems.
Tansey has tackled the subject of the Judgment of Paris several times. As well as the present work, there is another in which a woman waiting for a light for her cigarette is offered three different "lights," some too literal to be useful: a flashlight, a burning torch, and the far more apt lighter. In another painting, a French officer of a century ago stands in a glorious interior reminiscent of Versailles, contemplating his own reflection in a mirror-- or perhaps that of the city of Paris, or perhaps the mirror itself-- while in the detailed frescos one can see a miniaturised depiction of Rubens' own treatment of the Judgment. In the original story, Paris was selected to judge which of three goddesses-- Athena, Hera and Aphrodite -- was the most beautiful following a carefully engineered ploy by Eros, who had sent an apple as a gift for, "the most beautiful." Each of the three claimants to the title and apple tried to persuade Paris with bribes, offering respectively wisdom, wealth, or Helen of Troy, the most beautiful mortal woman of the age.
Paris' choice of Aphrodite-- and therefore Helen-- can be seen as an indictment of man's susceptibility to lust. The consequence of his decision, and of the abduction of Helen, was the Trojan War. In Judgment of Paris I, this military theme is vaguely evoked by the assault course. However, these men are not presented as soldiers, but as suitors, as well-dressed crisp young men in shirts, slacks, and shoes that were not made for running. The inclusion of these clothes implies that these are not people used to demonstrations of physical strength. Despite this, their show of virility is being used in order to secure, one assumes, the affections of the woman judging them; the emphasis on this virility is increased by the fact that the men's heads are almost entirely "out of shot" the merest fraction of the right-hand man's head is alone evident. This, then, is an exhibition of brawn, not brains. It is the male body and each man's stamina that appears to be of interest to the woman judging them, a fact made all the more absurd by the consideration that these competitors could well be, as in many of Tansey's works, intellectuals, thinkers, academics, Lacans, Baudrillards, Derridas. This helps to highlight the extent to which Tansey has concisely presented the viewer with an image of the games that some men will play in order to secure the affection of a woman.
Judgment of Paris I is a gender-inverted version of the original myth. Tansey has placed feminism and gender politics under the strange, even surreal microscope, through which he has explored the implications of so many forms and schools of critical thought. The objectification of the female body and the inequality between the sexes-- against which many feminist thinkers were reacting-- has here been turned on its head. These preppy men are jumping through hoops for the attentions of the woman, who watches on hopeful, enthralled-- amused? The clothing that she wears is from an era that would appear to predate much of the age in which feminism came to the fore, and the fact that she appears, like the men, to have walked into Tansey's painting straight from a Rockwell or a Hopper adds to the deliberate muddying that the artist has conjured in this post-modern enigma. Is Tansey undermining the feminist claims that society is phallocentric by showing how often men are under the sway of women? Is this a criticism of the ridicule to which men are willing to submit themselves in order to satiate primal yearnings, and therefore a criticism of sexual, not merely gender, politics? Are her implied apple-pie good looks casting a Circe-like spell over the men, who are reduced to brainless brawn? Or is this revenge for millennia of injustice and inequality?
Certainly, one aspect of Judgment of Paris I that adds an extra dimension to the complication of the issues within the work is the fact that it has been rendered by Tansey himself, by a man with a brush. His own personal involvement in the creation of the picture is integral to his exploration of its theme and contents. For not only is this scene the product of his own imagination, the characters his own puppets, but the fact that a man has created this image disrupts the play of gender politics within the work. For despite what has erroneously been described as his "realist" style of painting, a misnomer that refers to the intricate and meticulous figuration of the image itself, this is very much a product of Tansey, the result of the work carried out by his hands. The monochrome presentation, combined with the Rockwell-like "realism" of the scene, combine to create an image that has the weight of photographic factuality while the clothing and the simple, restricted palette introduce an atmosphere that is almost nostalgic. Judgment of Paris I highjacks the visual idiom of old photos and illustrations both in content and in style, and in so doing, lays claim to a visual language of authority that it in fact both undermines and even mocks in the gentle surrealism of its content. In the painstakingly-worked paint surface and literal figuration of the image, Judgment of Paris I also appears to provide a wry contrast to the Neo-Expressionism that was so prevalent at the time that it was painted. But in terms of its content, it appears to owe more to Max Ernst and Magritte, to collage and surrealism. While there is nothing impossible within the scene in Judgment of Paris I, the atmosphere and content have a strong though far from overpowering dose of the absurd. A trope of the Old Masters has been reversed in a modestly surreal manner, given a gentle twist that is enough to unravel whole new worlds of meaning and implication.
Tansey's own working methods add to the fog of meaning that surrounds his works. For in his pictures, the paint that he has so painstakingly worked has in fact been applied initially as a monochrome surface on a prepared canvas, and is subsequently removed bit by bit by the artist using various methods in order to create various textures and impressions. This act of un-painting a picture reflects Tansey's unique participation in its literal deconstruction, making Judgment of Paris I a microcosm, mini-parody and refutation of the critical technique of the same name; the fact that the final image produced through this anti-painting is so resolutely figurative results in a fascinating conceptual tension between what is and is not, expressly undermining both the purpose of painting and the criticism that surrounds it. Tansey often heightens this invisible conceptual backdrop by deliberately using an array of objects in order to work the paint surface, objects that have nothing to do with the traditional act of painting or with the images that they are used to conjure, introducing yet another oblique and tangential aspect of his continuing assault on systems, on meanings, on references and their interplay. This in itself recalls some of Max Ernst's frottage works, which would transform the grain of a piece of wood into a landscape or seascape, smears of oil into shells and cities. As an actual object, Judgment of Paris I is therefore the result of a series of disassociations, an attack on the post-scructuralists and their theories of meaning. In its never-ending complications, in the levels of meaning and un-meaning, construction and deconstruction, reality and representation, Tansey plays endless games with the viewer. We are placed in the position of the woman, watching the scene unfold from a distance within the pictorial universe; yet we are also placed in the position of the men, clambering over the blank flat surface and realising that it is in fact not merely flat, but in fact three-dimensional. We are looking on the other side for meaning while also being made uncomfortably aware of the conceit, of the objecthood of the work, of the fact that it is, empirically, merely a combination of wood, oil and canvas stuck on a wall. In the riveting intellectual arena of which Tansey is the maestro, the medium and the message are at each other's throats, meaning is fragmented and disrupted, nothing and everything is exactly as it seems.