THE JUDGEMENT OF HISTORY

Before I move onto my discussion of Trevor Jones’ intriguingly complex work Titanium Angel, I would like to place the significant content of the painting within a meaningful art historical context. For instance, within the academic generic system Titanium Angel would be classified as a “history painting”. Therefore, I feel it is necessary to examine briefly the debates surrounding the nature and concept of what is meant by history and its most revered pictorial witness, history painting.

There are many who think that history and the past are synonymous- that is, one and the same thing. If that were the case, then history would be in Professor H.A.L. Fisher’s famous words, “one damned thing after another”. Being an historian himself, he knew that history should not be seen as the catastrophic “wreckage” suggested by Walter Benjamin, but in fact the narrative that historians deploy to present and represent the past to their fellow contemporaries. Thus, if history is an act of representation, this must also involve the art of history painting. Furthermore, if history is representative then there must be as many representations of history as historians - or history painters. From this plethora of narratives imposed on the past, the successful representations of history that are most accepted by the present are, to use Picasso’s blunt words “those that convince”.

Although history draws its raw material from the evidence and events of the past there has always been a tendency to examine the past with an attending eschatological eye. This means that the historian not only wants to know what happened in the past but also, for what purpose and to what end. This of course, then involves speculation on where and to what history is leading, through its future projection, and ultimately to its final conclusion.

Almost every civilisation - religious or secular - has had built into its ideology the concept of the end of history. A few random examples would be the Jewish coming of the Messiah, the Marxist eventual classless society and of course the Christian Second Coming and Last Judgement. The latter is most famously represented by Michelangelo’s awe-inspiring fresco above the high altar in the Sistine Chapel at the heart of Christendom. It is with this monumental work from art history that Trevor Jones - through his Titanium Angel - has chosen to engage in creative dialogue on the nature of the historical process from a 21st century point of view.

There is another context however, which needs to be addressed before analysing and discussing Titanium Angel. That is the theoretical nature and purpose of history painting. In the history of art this particular genre of painting, was regarded as the highest form of artistic expression. The reasons for that high vaunting opinion were many and complex, but ultimately the aim was to demonstrate that painting could produce practicing artists who were as cultured and learned as poets and philosophers. Therefore, the European academies laid down that the subject-matter of history painting could only be drawn from classical literature and the sacred texts - clearly demonstrating that history painters were as knowledgeable and appreciative of the finest literature as their literary and philosophical counterparts. These universally revered subjects would then have to be treated with the highest sense of decorum so that their worthy viewers would be inspired and instructed by the monumental events and heroic deeds that were presented to them, and thus guided into being more dedicated and useful citizens of the realm.

For the artist, history painting did present a particular challenge with the visual translation of literary text into pictorial image. Literature, like most other art forms - music, drama, etc. - follows an unfolding chronological narrative format; whereas, by contrast, painting presents its whole subject immediately and simultaneously - there is no beginning, middle and end when looking at a picture. This ontological contrast between painting and literature created much critical discourse on how pictorial art could best serve its prescribed literary subject-matter. This certainly was the case in the 18th century when the status of history painting was at its highest. In Britain the most influential voice on this demanding issue was the Earl of Shaftesbury. Through his extensive writing on visual aesthetics, he evolved a pictorial solution with the concept of the "pregnant moment". This necessitated the painter to select a telling image from the literary narrative which would contain a clear indication as to what led up to the event depicted and would also indicate the future consequences of that event. In that way, the past, present and future would be contained within one single multi-layered image.

If we look at Michelangelo's two epic fresco schemes for the Sistine Chapel, on the ceiling and above the high altar - separated by three decades - we can see, not only a notable difference in painterly techniques, but also a marked change in the manner he presents the two narratives from the first and last books of the Bible. On the ceiling he presents a strip-cartoon format depicting selected individual scenes from the Book of Genesis - from the divine Creation of the World to the Fall of Man in the form of The Drunkenness of Noah. In striking contrast, the Last Judgement from the Book of Revelation is one self-contained monumental image of the most awesome and terrifying "pregnant moment" in the history of art. The past is expressed by the rising and falling intertwining bodies of the Saved and the Lost, the present is contained in the towering judgemental figure of Christ and the future is divided between the heavenly blessings awarded to the Blessed and the eternal damnation meted out to the Damned.

Each era in the history of the West has produced its own concept of the “Last Judgement” and that is notably visualised by history painting. In the Medieval and Renaissance periods there were innumerable biblical depictions of the end of history. Subsequently in the following eras however, artists had to draw on the endemic fears and horrors of their own secular times to express their own Benjaminesque sense of terminal moral and social decay and threating ultimate oblivion. This can clearly be seen for example in art of Gericault and Goya, and in the modern era the most outstanding example is of course Picasso’s Guernica. This brings us up to our contemporary post-modern times and Trevor Jones’ Titanium Angel. This work is the most recent in a series of paintings that Jones has created over the past few years, where he has pictorially interrogated iconic masterpieces from the Western canon-such as Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa and the Picasso-inspired Bitcoin Bull. With Titanium Angel he has however, switched up a gear in his quest to bring the past, through the authority of art history, to bear on the present and speculate on the future.

This plundering of readymade imagery - whether from high or popular culture - is a favoured post-modern strategy in contemporary art, where originality is replaced with recycling. This practice of re-presentation can create fertile ground for pastiche and satire through historical perspective and critical comparison, and with Titanium Angel, viewers are obliged to hold up and examine Jones’ work against his source of inspiration.

The first point of comparison must be the striking differences in scale. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement is conceived in epic proportions and must be one of the largest single image artworks ever painted. By contrast, Titanium Angel only focusses on the central mandorla area of Michelangelo’s multi-figure composition. Furthermore, Jones has made his easel-size painting into a triptych format. This drastic reduction in scale and the concentration on the most renowned imagery from the Last Judgement is symptomatic of our times, where images from any source are obliged to be easily recognised, instantly consumed and readily acquired. Turning now to the iconographic nature of these two works, again there are striking and revealing differences. The mass figure composition of Michelangelo’s fresco is appropriately populated by a multitude of saints, angels and devils all in agitated and contorted poses. To aid identification of the three hundred or so figures, the painting is riddled with symbolic holy objects and the saints’ attributes of their martyrdoms - St Catherine with her wheel for example.

Broadly speaking Jones also follows the same method of iconographic infusion into his Titanium Angel but, instead of drawing from sacred texts, his symbolic imagery comes from contemporary sources - drawn from technological innovation, social media, cryptocurrency and stock market exchange culture. One other notable difference between these two works is the anatomical treatment of the figures. In the Last Judgement, Michelangelo has shed the idealism he employed on the Sistine Ceiling thirty years earlier. He has replaced classical elegance and restrained decorum with pictorial high drama through perspectival and anatomical distortion. Jones has retained a similar pictorial theatricality in Titanium Angel, but his figures have now literally been taken over by their contemporary technological age and become robotic in nature and appearance - hence the title Jones has given his painting.

Nevertheless, for all the foreboding that might be read into Titanium Angel, this imaginatively conceived and skilfully rendered work is not in any way visually depressing. Quite the contrary, it is full of vigorous energy and stimulating issues of social and philosophical debate. In that respect Titanium Angel has the same feel as Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. Both works are not as terminally pessimistic about the immediate end of mankind and its civilisation in the way Walter Benjamin seems to be in my opening quotation. In fact, the Benjamin quote finishes, “This storm is what we call progress.” Thus, the full quotation is not a dead sentence, but more a warning against regarding history as a yellow brick road progressively leading to the fulfilment of all our heavenly dreams, rather than the primrose path to hell. This warning is also at the heart of the work of Michelangelo and of Trevor Jones with Titanium Angel. They both, in their different ways, demonstrate with intelligent insight and visual imagination that through their thought-provoking art they are able to “brush history against the grain.” – to quote Walter Benjamin again.

Bill Hare