The Empire-ical View

London in the summer of 1977 was one of those special places at a special time. The Queen's Silver Jubilee was being celebrated and contrasted by the Sex Pistols. The sight of English youth with pink spiked hair and safety pins through their noses was completely erased for a few hours one afternoon as I stood in line on Baker Street, humming Gerry Rafferty's hit song in my mind, while I waited in line to enter Madame Tussaud's.

For the following few hours the present ceased to exist. Only the past was on display. A past fraught with meaning, but presented from a thoroughly British point of view. From Nelson at Trafalgar to Christie and the Beatles. Beside Christie's ghoulish apartment, rendered in exact scale in the famous Chamber of Horrors was another room, also to scale, depicting the Death of Marat. Just as David had captured it, but in three dimensions and as perfectly lit as his painting.

I did not know who Marat was, but I read the placard on the wall. And there the lesson ended, and remained esconced in memory until a few weeks ago when I happened by chance upon Simon Schama's 'Power of Art' series on the work of Jacques Louis David.

At once a torrent of memories rushed to the fore. The sounds, the smells, and the sights of that dark and dim chamber were recalled in full. Schama called the painting "disturbing", with which I agree, but not for the same reasons as a British historian. For his view of the function, motivation, and place of Marat is the polar opposite of mine. (The British are very sensitive about the killing of kings after their own experience with the corruptive effects of replacing a king with a common dictator, though as always, it was the Irish who got the worst of both)

But his assessment of the power of David's work, and perhaps by extrapolation in context, Marie Tussaud's, was compelling even if his opinion of David's motivations missed the mark. Schama called David's work "a lie", but I disagree, for I believe that behind the mask of every killer is a saint, and behind the face of every saint lies a killer. And David captured that essence so well that society and it's political reactions debate it's consequences over the 200 years since.

Within the realm of the "power of art", I would argue that David's modern cinematic equivalence, if you consider 40 years ago 'modern', would be Arthur Penn's 'Bonnie & Clyde' in 1967, and George Roy Hill's 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' in 1969. For they too most certainly had the power to disturb and impress. And though not factually accurate, they proved once again that the 'real' truth can be conveyed more thoroughly through fictional 'art' than can be found in any history book.

That "TRUTH" is, everyone is a monster and a saint, at the same time. And any 'glamour shot' or 'damnation', whether on canvas, celluloid, or digital can only capture one essence at a time. Such are the limitations of any medium of 'recording' wherein the perceived 'truth' will always reside in the senses of the beholder. For the true "power of Art" is that it does not instruct, it reveals.

stephenhsmith
14August2007