Art – Page 3 – Ash Clifton, Writer

Of all the categories of genre fiction that I’ve consumed over my lifetime, fantasy has probably best the least represented. Sure, I love The Lord of the Rings, and The Narnia Chronicles, and the works of Ray Bradbury that I consider to be dark fantasy (see Something Wicked this Way Comes). But I don’t keep up with many modern fantasy writers nor read many contemporary fantasy novels.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I took a chance on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a fantasy novel that made quite a splash when it came out in 2020, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a fascinating story of a man trapped in a labyrinth that he calls The House, and which is composed of endless Greco-Roman halls lined with innumerable statues and vestibules. There is a sky above and ocean tides below, which often flood the lower levels. The man is called Piranesi by the only other person (i.e., “the Other”) in The House, an older man who seems able to leave somehow, only to return with key supplies like vitamins and batteries, which he shares with Piranesi.

It’s a fascinating book, and unexpectedly suspenseful, too, especially when Piranesi begins having flashbacks of who he is and how he came to be in the House. This happens about the same time as the sudden appearance of mysterious, written messages that are scattered throughout the House. They seem to have been left by another, recent intruder (one who seems interested in helping Piranesi escape).

For me, at least half of the appeal of Piranesi lies in this whodunnit factor. Like the protagonist himself, I was caught up in the mystery of how he came to be there, who he is, and how he might get out. But the other half lay in the dizzying, intricate nature of the setting—the endless labyrinth that Piranesi inhabits. Such dreamlike settings are more common in literature than one might think, and their appeal is very much like that of a vivid, fabulously detailed diorama, of the sort that all children love to gaze into (and imagine themselves inside).

Capriccio Illustration by Giovanni Piranesi

I don’t know what it is, exactly, about mazes, labyrinths, and castles that evokes the power of imagination, But I think it has to do with their endless novelty, the promise of infinite rooms and corridors that we, like children, would love to explore. More to the point, such structures also symbolize the power of imagination—especially the child-like imagination that each of us still harbors. That’s why there is such a grand tradition of castles and mazes in fantasy literature and mythology, from the Minotaur’s labyrinth to the vast, rambling ruins of the Gormenghast trilogy.

Clarke herself acknowledges this tradition in her main character, Piranesi, who is named after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the 18th Century illustrator who was famous for his drawings of impossibly grand and complicated imaginary buildings. His most famous works are a series of etchings titled Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), and these are, themselves, part of a much older tradition of so-called capricci, drawings that depict architectural fantasy.

Back in the 1980s, I took a Humanities class during my freshman year of college. The professor was really good, and she supplemented her lectures by showing up a few episodes of Robert Hughes‘s BBC series Shock of the New, which covered the history of Modern Art as seen through Hughes’s own discerning, sardonic lens.

I remember being struck by how witty and intelligent Hughes seemed as he talked about numerous examples of iconic modern art and architecture. He did exactly what a good critic is supposed to do: open your eyes to meaning and resonance in art that you might have missed, and connections you never would have thought of.

I liked the series so much that I’ve watched it a couple of times since on YouTube, and I recently bought the book that Hughes wrote to accompany it. Hughes really was one the smartest and most interesting art critics of his generation, and he could really write. Take this passage, for instance, about Pablo Picasso’s most famous and disturbing work, Guernica,

Seen detached from its social context, if such a way of seeing were either possible or desirable (in Picasso’s view it would not have been, but there are still formalists who disagree), it is a general meditation on suffering, and its symbols are archaic, not historical: the gored and speared horse (the Spanish Republic), the bull (Franco) louring over the bereaved, shrieking woman, the paraphernalia of pre-modernist images like the broken sword, the surviving flower, and the dove. Apart from the late Cubist style, the only specifically modern elements in Guernica are the Mithraic eye of the electric light, and the suggestion that the horse’s body is made of parallel lines of newsprint, like the newspaper in Picasso’s collages a quarter-century earlier. [emphasis mine]

As I read this passage, I thought to myself: wow. Then I thought to myself: Mithraic? WTF is that? So, naturally, I googled it and discovered that Mithraism was a religious cult in 4th Century C.E. Rome that directly opposed Christianity and was popular with Roman soldiers. I don’t know exactly what sense Hughes was employing the word, but I think he was getting at the idolatrous aspect of Fascism—literally, an ideology opposed to Christ and Christian values—as manifested in the mid-Twentieth Century love of technology and machines. Reading Hughes’s moving and trenchant prose, I was reminded of how Picasso, eighty-seven years before Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Picasso painted the most powerful and grotesque indictment of war, and especially high-tech war, ever conceived. (Sadly, it is as relevant now as it was in 1937.)

If you have a chance, you should watch Shock of the New, or any of Hughes’s other series if you can find them. If nothing else, you’ll probably be smitten by his fascinating and highly idiosyncratic rhetorical style, with his strange (theoretically Australian) accent and tendency to punch words harder than Mike Tyson. My wife and I still joke lovingly about the way he pronounced various famous artists: i.e., Pehblo Pehkesso.

He was a treasure, and I miss him.

Category: Art

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