Breughel

All around the surface of the world, a total moment of frenzy is taking place, the dead join with themselves in death, and for evermore new bodies are falling, emptying as the skeleton’s dance goes on. It comes: The Triumph of Death.

Breughel’s painting, part of a larger series of meditations upon the teeming landscapes of Hieronymous Bosch, is free of location and of story. A tree stands upon the horizon, a body hangs from it; death’s soldiers of steel and bone march across from far to near, but nothing is being told to us, no anticipation of a movement that alters things trembles outwards to bring the viewer within its cage. The dead and dying littered along the floor do not look at us, the skeletons that slay so many do not come our way. When we look in it is only to see and not to join, and, as with the silent figures who haunt the pages of literature, Pericles, Timon, Bartelby, the Hunger Artist, Breughel’s great picture will not join with us. But whilst those men of literature have cast off language to find a quiet that wants for nothing, this scene marks only the victory of catastrophe and the subsuming of all relations into a univocal speaking of death, at which we watch wide-eyed in a vain attempt to hear the screams that have never been spoken, and where the liberation of breaking away, of escaping the message seen all about us, is denied.

Foucault’s valorization of the rupture falls down when it comes into contact with Breughel’s painting, which is a work whose saturation with catastrophe is complete. The quest for a total critique remains beyond philosophy, from Kant to now, but just occasionally in art, against the odds, and against the doctrine of incompleteness to which thinking after Hegel has too-often assigned it, artworks fill every space available to them- such a work is Breughel’s.

:: interactive :: next>>