Crime Seen
by Cynthia Freeland
Ashley Hope’s paintings of murder victims are not easy to look at. How shall we regard this artist’s apparent obsession with revisiting the scene of the crime? Her works offer an uneasy beauty, a feast of riotous colors where the horror of sexual killing lies just beneath their glossy surfaces.
Crime scene photographs are the basis of these paintings. Despite their rhetorical function in court, if taken on their own crime scene photos are flat and impersonal. They record the real in exacting clinical detail, without commentary or pity. Forensic photos are the antithesis of the sensationalist newspaper pictures captured by original “Naked City” photographer Weegee (Arthur Felig). The aim of his crime-beat press photography was to capture the human interest element, the “drama of life and death”. Conversely, the detachment of the crime scene photographer is at odds with the demands of subjectivity we expect of an artist’s vision— all the more so in this case when the imagery is so fraught and when we know that the artist is a woman. Hope alludes to personal reasons for undertaking to re-create the grim, all-too-vivid scene of death, stemming from memories of sitting beside the bed in her suburban home while her mother wasted away from cancer. Emotional resonance can be added to the flat scene of bodies-become-objects by altering the original photograph in sometimes subtle, sometimes extreme, ways. As a painter Hope works with the artistic tools of point of view, focus, and composition, intensifying atmosphere through her handling of space and colors. The women are generically young and beautiful, even in death elegantly if awkwardly posed in banal domestic interiors of bed or bath. There is a sexual element to all the killings. The murderer stabbed a thigh, sliced away at a breast, or viciously raped a woman whose panties now ooze telltale blood. In these paintings the women remain present yet absent, at peace yet violated. They glow with an inner light, but not the light of a martyr’s halo.
These days we see lots of corpses in movies and on TV, often in graphic and magnified detail. We stoop down close with the forensic scientists of CSI to extract fibers from a bloody head wound. Victims have no privacy; the investigators scrape and clean under their fingernails and extract DNA samples from orifices. Watching, we participate in what Foucault would call an elaborate disciplinary practice that creates meaning and sense through the rituals of murder. Crime shows, like murder mysteries, show how violated bodies are fed into an apparatus of power that will preserve our faith and sanity: the CSI team or the Special Victims Unit outwits the criminals in the end.
The women Ashley Hope shows do not fit into this reassuring disciplinary apparatus. What happened to them is all aftermath, with no buildup of motivation and no search for resolution. They lie there on their own, without narrative context. We don’t know who these women were; the only clues to their identities are the minimal locations mentioned in their titles, Bodega, Texas, Laundry. There is no comforting story of what became of their killers. Hope has said that her work is about the randomness and meaninglessness of life and death. It would have been an insult to the artist as a twelve-year-old girl to tell her that her mother was being ravaged by a grim disease for a reason, sacrificed for a higher purpose. At any rate, if someone said that to this girl, she didn’t buy it.
Art and art history are littered with corpses, many of them inserted into some sort of narrative of redemption, lesson-learning, or historical progress. Damien Hirst’s obsession with death shows up in his twenty-first century versions of Dutch memento mori pieces, whether he uses animal corpses or, more recently, a diamond-encrusted human skull. Corpses feature luridly in the record-breaking Body World exhibits of German scientist-artist Gunther von Hagens. His ‘plastinization’ process enables dual-purpose art-and-science shows, all remarkably popular and successful. In past centuries of art history, a majority of corpses belonged to beautiful and about-to-be resurrected saints and holy figures. For female martyrs the torture was often sexual, giving rise to bizarre semi-erotic representations—just think of St. Agatha carrying her sliced-off breasts on a platter. Feminists like Luce Irigaray have gone so far as to suggest that body of Christ on the cross becomes feminized by his bleeding wounds, an interpretation that seems less far-fetched if we recall numerous Renaissance paintings of believers holding up golden cups to catch the Savior’s gushing, revitalizing blood.
For a non-Catholic, such imagery strikes a rather bizarre anthropological note, like the belief system of some tribal group one cannot quite “get”. Secular tradition offers an alternative iconography of ravaged female bodies. Here, instead of religious redemption in death, what is foregrounded is rape as an element of foundational histories. What art historian Diane Wolfthal has dubbed “Heroic Rape” was required for progress, as shown for example in Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women. The Roman theft or “raptus” of the Sabine women in this case was necessary in order to originate a great city. In Poussin’s frieze-like painting, babies are tossed aside and women struggle to fend off abductors, but still the scene is oddly quiet, as if the participants acknowledge the inevitability of history and their higher destiny.
Not all rape scenes are as calm as Poussin’s. In erotic rape there is more frenzy and excitement, as male artists illustrate mythological themes while displaying (or should I say “splaying’) delights of naked or partially unclothed female flesh. Arms flail, legs are bent backwards, and mouths cry wide open for help that will never arrive. No matter the horror, here once more the male artist sides with the seducer who will get to enjoy these spoils. Erotic rape in art reached its apogee in the “Lustmord” or “sex murder” paintings of Weimar Germany. It was at about this time in history that the criminal category of the serial sex murderer was defined, beginning with the highly publicized example of London’s Jack the Ripper. Such killers, then as now, have been objects of both public fear and fascination. German artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix who endured the horrors of trench warfare re-enacted their traumas in art by painting atrocious scenes of murder and dismemberment. Even a graphic recent horror film like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer would not top some of Dix’s Lustmord paintings and etchings for gore. The most frightening thing is that both Dix and Grosz show themselves as the sex-killers. Their view of the scene becomes our view, just as in Henry; we are presumed to be implicated in the murderer’s rage and lust. Artistic and sexual frenzy are equated.
Unlike the Lustmord painters, Ashley Hope does not depict herself as the murderer. Nevertheless she has been required to sustain, for torturous lengths of time, the clinical gaze of the killer at the moment when he steps back to behold his handiwork. Such an identification must be blistering. One wants to avert one’s eyes, but it seems important to look so as to be a witness. These things happened. This real woman suffered and died for no reason at all other than, what shall we say—her beauty? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time? The randomness and disorder of the scene is emphasized by the riot of patterns crowding in upon the lifeless body, in the ephemera of daily life. Objects blithely go on just as they were before—the opened umbrella on the sidewalk, spilled groceries, fallen cigarettes. Colors dance in oscillating combinations of aqua against fuchsia, lavender dappled by hibiscus orange, fussy red and blue embroidery resting on neat rows of hexagonal white bath tiles. Most striking are the ways in which these inert objects acquire movement and life through their juxtapositions. In the complicated purple folds of Horse Hair we gather intimations of the strangled woman’s frightened writhing; the twisted polka-dot underpants on the woman’s abdomen in Can Opener hint at the obscene insertion of a sharp weapon into her soft belly. The lunatic gold-and-blue patterns on the sofa of Fedora seem to mock the woman who now lolls there lifeless, still senselessly clutching her bag of hair curlers. In many of these images we are subject to what the artist calls a “vertigo effect”, an unnerving disorientation that occurs when foreground and background push and pull against each other. In Slip, for example, the iron bedstead and blue striped mattress stretch from the side across and against the pressure exerted from above right by the maroon patterned wallpaper that threatens to close in on us as well as the victim.
Ashley Hope’s images would carry their realism on their face even if we were not told that they were derived from crime scene photos. Realism is a style, but it is also a claim to knowledge and authority. No sort of image carries more weight in our society than the crime scene photo, which can quite literally be used as evidence in court. (Of course it wasn’t always so; in the early days of photography, their positioning, lighting, and composition had to be structured or ‘disciplined’ before they could be accepted as proof; John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation shows how complex this process really was.) A painting, it is alleged, can never carry the same weight of proof or testimony as a photograph. Nobody will be convicted (perhaps sadly) on the basis of these paintings. One response to this might be to say that the victims of such crimes would be treated with more kindness if they were discreetly covered up. “Women all live in objectification,” says Catharine MacKinnon, “like fish live in water,” and perhaps we need no further reminders of our condition.
There is an element of indiscretion to this work. Like some other young painters who work in figural painting (Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin come to mind), Ashley Hope seems to be confronting issues of deep personal preoccupation. Among these is the universal female fear of rape and violent attack, but our phobias need not focus on have the violence of a crazed stranger. Illness, like murder, removes a person’s very humanity and turns a loved one into a thing. The impossibility of comprehending such a fact can deflect our attention onto strange substitutes: the patterns on the comforter, the absurd noodly texture of the carpet, the pompon on the slipper.
As for that person who has become now just a thing, a body, who was she and what did she endure? There is relief that it is over for her. Yet her personhood has not altogether vanished. We can see it in the delicacy of a fingernail, the pathos of a smashed tomato, or the oddly charming twist of elbows and knees. Seeking the subjectivity of the dead person becomes especially hard when the woman returns our gaze but can’t ever see us again, as in Slip. Her eyes are open but as unseeing as those of any marble Greek goddess.
It may seem maudlin and mistaken to personify the women in these paintings and to speak of empathy with them, whether the artist’s or the viewer’s. After all, these are not women at all, just colors and shapes conjured out of compositions on canvas. The color of the picture may represent a red bedspread in Slip, but is really just a “V” of bold energy moving forcibly downward and outward toward us. The mottled gray of Shelter is both the marble stoop where a woman died and also a long tall shape that divides the picture plane vertically and anchors the diagonal of the woman’s oddly thrust out right leg. Hope’s paintings manifest a highly refined sense of color and space. A painter they recall is Bonnard, who, like Matisse, showed domestic interiors through repeated and juxtaposed patterns that collapsed the three dimensions of space into the picture plane. Textures of wallpaper can be read as both vertical and horizontal, three dimensional and flat. Bonnard did this in part by including multiple edges and rectangles within the frame of the picture itself, often placing significant elements of the scene way off to the side. Bonnard’s many paintings of his wife in the bathtub evoke the same feeling of claustrophobia that we get from Ashley Hope’s images. Marthe in these bathtub pictures exists in a world unto herself. The bathtub’s sides wobble and sway to wrap around her naked body, which blurs with the blue-green water within. Outside the tub, no surfaces stay constant. The tiles on the wall lean down into the tub, as do the yellow stripes in the wallpaper of Ashley Hope’s Horse Hair. Marthe inert in the tub might as well be dead—in fact, Bonnard continued to paint her in the tub long after she was dead.
Female viewers may enjoy the beauty of Ashley Hope’s paintings, their colors and figural details, their elegance of line and compositional strategies, but I don’t see how we can blot out the content: these women are real, I am witness to their death. For a woman artist to assume the murderer’s viewpoint in order to see these despoiled bodies does not rule out empathy and identification with their female victims. Philosopher Susan Brison in her harrowing account of the traumatic rape and strangling attempt on her life, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self, talks about how women live all of the time with the fear of rape. She also remarks on how strange it was that people who heard of the vicious attempt on her life were somehow satisfied when told that it followed a rape—as if two crimes were easier to understand than one! Her experience made plain what abstract thinkers have always wanted to deny, our vulnerability as embodied beings. The murder victims here have submitted not to sexual seduction but to a fate we all confront.
The paradox of the reality/non-reality of these paintings based on actual crime scene photos is echoed by the paradox of the remote presence/absence of the women seen here. They are both subjects and objects. They are safe now although the room continues to echo with their screams of fear and horror; their blood has not yet congealed. These are not martyrs or saints, nor rape victims sacrificed to historical goals. Whatever reaction people have to these women’s images will not contribute to solving the mystery of their death. Their lives ended too soon, too horribly. There is no redemption for them. Nobody can give them their meaning through some arrogance of art, and yet brute randomness has not taken everything away from us, the ones still living. Someone is still here deciding to put colors together in a meaningful way, which, when we stop to consider it, is a celebration of life. Ashley Hope sees that these women do not need anything from her or from us. They are beyond rescue; at most they can be recognized. “I suffered, I existed, I was here.”
- Cynthia Freeland
Cynthia Freeland is chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Houston.
She is author of The Naked and the Undead (1999) and of But Is It Art? (2001).
Her website is http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan
This essay originally published in an exhibition catalog for Ashley Hope, 2007