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Art Papers March/April
1988
Michael Aurbach
Berry College, Austin Peay State University, Tennessee Arts Commision
Reviewed by Dorothy Joiner
"Modern tombs," says Henry James, "are a skeptical affair.... The ancient
sculptors have left us nothing to say in regard to the great final contrast."
Citing this dispraise from the American expatriate, Erwin Panofsky closes
Tomb Sculpture, his survey of funerary sculpture, with Bernini,
dismissing for the most part anything produced after the seventeenth century.
Were Panofsky to have seen Michael Aurbach's "coffins," however, he would
surely have laughed out loud at the witty, ironical parody of that tradition
which he had surveyed. In his late twentieth-century funerary sculpture,
Aurbach diverts into laughter the ponderous emotions more frequently elicited
by death and the art it has inspired in the past.
Dog Unit (1982; 4'x2'x4'), an intriguing plexus of what seems
initially to be disparate images, reveals Aurbach's delight in word play,
particularly puns, as well as his predilection for transposing words into
images. The piece first crystallized in the artist's mind with the expression
"executing a work of art," suggested by a physiologist friend's sacrificing
a Labrador retriever, whose severed parts were then stored in the freezer
for scientific study. Looking up the word "dog" in the dictionary, Aurbach
began to translate certain promising "dog-terms" into concrete things.
From a book atop Dog Unit's lectern, for example, the viewer might
read a shaggy dog story, dog-earing his page at a stopping point with
a part of the Labrador' s now preserved ear. On the unit's table-like
surface are other marvels: an arch of "bark" springing from Ionic columns
of dog biscuits; caryatid paws with nails of the non-organic sort; a second
arch of steak bones (which, in life, were repeatedly buried by the animal,
and a spade for removing canine caca from the sidewalk. A "dog-legged
staircase," that is, one without a well-hole, in which the successive
flights form a zig-zag connects this surface to the floor below. From
the floor rise the two columnar legs of the unit, each decorated with
fringes of the retriever's black hair and little metal flags which trace
the outline of a golf course, illustrating "dog-leg left" and "dog-leg
right."
Continuing the canine theme, Aurbach creates a reliquary for the bones
of several revered dogs, Lassius Maximus, Benji Minunus, and Rintintinius.
In the form of a miniature Roman triumphal arch, this reliquary is appropriately
titled Archis Barkis (1985; 20"x5"x20"). A flap at the top lifts
up to reveal the canine relic, a dog bone carved from vermilion. Silhouettes
of the beatified canines decorate octagonal dog-tag tondos on both sides
of the arch (eight the number of the resurrection?). Below each tondo
is a fire hydrant, that most necessary comfort station along a dog's promenade.
In a larger series titled "Final Portraits," Aurbach groups the "caskets"
he has made for an electrician, a carpenter, a mail carrier, and a truck
driver, among others. These generic "portraits" synthesize the two basic
kinds of sarcophagi which Panofsky distinguishes in Western funerary sculpture:
the "domatomorphic," that is, a kind of dwelling for the dead person in
his postmortal existence, sometimes a miniature house, a couch, or a chest;
and the "anthropomorphic," that is, a likeness of the deceased, such as
a statue or, as in Egypt, the several cartonnage cases enclosing a mummy.
Instead of delineating the dead person's appearance, however, Aurbach's
"portaits" juxtapose telling objects associated with that life, a technique
which is, as we shall see later, analogous to that of both wit and dreams
as described by Freud.
For the sarcophagus of an electrician (1983, 3'x2'x6'), one who works
on buildings, Aurbach makes use of a prototypical structure in Western
architecture, the Athenian Parthenon, lining it with rubber and adorning
the exterior with electrical hardware. The sloping roof of the lid creates
a pediment at both ends in imitation of the sacred triangular space on
the Greek temple. Along the base of the lid, triads of electrical pipe
form triglyphs, punctuating the undecorated rectangular spaces, which,
though left bare, suggest metopes. Longer segments of pipe arranged vertically
serve as columns. Enlivened by diagonal striations, the temple walls recall
Antiquity's many strigilated tombs. On the long sides of the templebox,
a screw driver and a pair of pliers are affixed to Neo-Gothic projections,
these anachronistic shapes adjusted to the tools' verticality. Placed
where the portal of a temple would be expected is a circuit box with a
prominent padlock. The juice has been cut off for good.
The carpenter's casket (1983; S'x2'x6') is a carefully crated wooden
tool box resting on sawhorses. Because it is much larger than a typical
container for tools, this pine box when closed convinces the viewer at
least subliminally that it could in fact be holding the carpenter' s mortal
remains. Handles near the lower edge provide a grasp for each potential
pallbearer, accenting even further the coffin's quasi-verisimilitude.
But when the cover is raised, the viewer sees an expanse of hardwood floor
and stud walls, a little dwelling appropriately constructed in wood. In
a comer as though to amplify his skewed scale, the artist has placed miniature
sawhorses holding a single board, after the fashion of the Egyptians and
the Etruscans, who provided replicas for the deceased of what they would
need in the afterlife.
For the sarcophagus of a mail carrier, Aurbach chooses an oversized rural
mailbox (1985; 6 1/2' x6'). Letter slots at the lower edge are handles
for the pallbearers. One opens the mailbox door to find the simulated
nave of a Iongitudinal Christian church, somewhat reminiscent of St. Apollinaris
in Ravenna, complete with columns lining the walls and apse space for
an altar. Visual puns transform this Italo-Byzantine space into an appropriate
resting place for the postman. The capitals are actual rubber stamps turned
upside down, and the clerestory windows resemble those sometimes found
in an old-fashioned post office. Real one cent postage stamps carpet the
floor and cover the walls, each of the 10,000 repeating the image of Dorothy
Dix (double verbal pun intended) A niche above the squared-off opening
holds a postal scale which gives the clue as to why the artist chose a
church interior for his postman. His image suggests the centuries-old
weighing of the souls, a motif borrowed by the Christian tradition from
antiquity. Is the red flag raised on the side to signal the mail carrier
to stop for pick-up? One is reminded of the ironic reversal of movement
into stasis in Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for Death
/ He kindly ostopped for me,"
The truck driver's final portrait is the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler
(1987; 5'x2'x6 1/2') separated from its cab as if at a terminal rest stop
The truck-coffin sits on a bier surrounded by tire tread and supported
by a truck scale, recalling the mail carrier's casket and the weighing
of souls motif. The rear doors of the trailer open to reveal the teamster
equivalent of the reliquary's fire hydrant a full-sized urinal.
Aurbach's Final Self-Portrait: Artist (1984; 5'x2'x12'), a simulated
museum crate with a U-Haul trailer in tow, might have been subtitled "You
can take it with you, after all" Taillights on both the crate and the
trailer suggest a journey. Vertical arrows on the crate indicate not only
the top of the box but also a trip to "somewhere up there." Although the
contents of the U- Haul trailer remain a mystery, inside the crate is
a gallery space whose white walls display reproductions of the best-known
masterpieces in Western art: The Mona Lisa, The Gleaners, Arrangement
in Gray and Black, The Scream, American Gothic, among others. The
pictures are black and white, seeming to say that familiarity has deadened
these, too. Allocating the walls to the painters, Aurbach reserves the
floor space for himself. It is his coffin.
The impact of Aurbach's work derives in large measure from his manipulation
of scale he plays with the viewer' s innate sense of what is too small,
too large, and just right. It is significant that most of his coffins
are fully large enough to be adult caskets. But as the other half of the
aesthetic equation, they deviate from what is expected as a mailbox, the
postman's final portrait is Gargantuan, whereas the eighteen-wheeler is
a mere toy of a truck, albeit a large, carefully proportioned plaything.
Similarly, the museum crate is believable as a container, but the gallery
inside is dwarfed. The electrician's temple-box, moreover, though fully
adequate as a coffin, is only an architectural mock-up. Especially effective
is the artist's use of real objects against this juggling of scale.
The appeal of these pieces stems also from the artist's economy of means,
a pivotal characteristic of wit signaled by Shakespeare in his well-known
affirmation of "brevity" as its "soul." Freud, too, emphasized the tendency
of wit to economize in expression" and pointed out two of its basic techniques
condensation and displacement. These, he says, the "wit-work" shares with
dreams. "Condensation" refers to wit's preference for fusing two or more
thoughts into a single term or expression, creating compressed, laconic
images Aurbach's sculptural amalgamations seem to employ an analogous
technique electrician's coffin/Parthenon; mailbox/church; eighteen-wheeler/porta-john.
Considered as "ponraits," Aurbach's works parallel even more wit's tendency
to condense. For each portrait, the artist selects only a few, seemingly
incidental details, which take on a fortuitous aptness in the context
of the whole."
Displacement" relates to wit's deviation from normal rational thought,
its preference for shifting the "psychical emphasis." Such a transfer
of mental energies results in the familiar pleasure derived from jokes.
In simple tems, a large measure of the psychical energy that is normally
devoted to repressing what is painful or "forbidden" by the rational mind
is displaced to something else and released in laughter. The pleasure
of wit, Freud maintains, derives from an "economy in expenditure upon
feeling."
Psychologists affirm that the painful emotions triggered by the idea
of death are most frequently experienced subliminally, because they are
too anguishing for the conscious mind to entertain for very long. In the
past, typical funerary sculpture focused on sublimating man's realization
of this mortality. In Egypt and Eruria, artists furnished practical replicas
of useful and pleasurable objects for the convenience of the dead in the
next life. During certain periods of Roman history, funerary depictions
conveyed a vague but sublime apotheosis. And during the Christian era,
tomb sculpture pointed to the joys of Paradise. But for many today, almost
none of these "prospective" options--to borrow Panofsky's term--is any
longer believable. To this largely skeptical audience, Aurbach offers
the release of laughter, shifting the psychic accent and substituting
pleasure for anxiety. As Suzanne Langer says, "Art releases tensions in
the mind."
--Dorothy Joiner
Dorothy Joiner is a professor of art history at West Georgia College,
Carrollton.
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