Sally Smart: Flaubert's Puppets

Exhibition Essay by Jack Smart Coventry

 

In Fantasia of the Library, Foucault speaks of an inversion in the relationship between St. Anthony and the ‘Book’ he carries with him into the desert: “Far from being a protection, it has liberated an obscure swarm of creatures and created a suspicious shadow through the mingling of images and knowledge.” Here, Foucault fails to identify these visions of temptation as the “hallucinatory mechanism” which is, in fact, a protection in and of itself. The realities of the desert, a cruel cold night, memories of a family left behind and the lingering doubt inherent to faith are all obscured through their transformation into text, performance and personages. It is this limitless reconstitution of experience, occurring in Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony as literary invention, which tempts Foucault to create a multitude of “platforms” that can hold the potentiality of new rememberings at the foot of a disintegrated library. 

 

Foucault’s structure appears: a linear enclosure which beckons history to proceed in step with an archival choreography. With the movement of a page, this enclosure arrives from the curtain - at first, a single horizontal line following the stage directions of a reading eye. Right, left, right, left, left, right, right, left. A second, vertical line forms to make a level of this horizon and the process is repeated like rungs on a ladder, up or down; a book, a stage, a vision, a vision of a vision - all built upon each other. Platformed across each of these layers, or gridded intervals, is another narrative, another play, another monster, another interpretation of that monster. However, the need for more and more “volume”, generated from the promise of an infinitely mappable intertextual tapestry, is marred by the frantic lineation of its magnitude: “every painting now belongs within the squared and massive surface of painting and all literary works are confined to the indefinite murmur of writing.” Where will we find all the linen for this boundless painting and why read a book that only ends with the death of the reader? As Foucault revels in the prospect of an analysis that is “indefinitely extended,” the means for mapping this extension reinforce the temptations of fragile knowledge; to define, to store, to bind within the written word and to keep writing and writing and writing till the forest becomes desert. 

 

In 2011, Sally Smart produced the first variation of her exhibition Flaubert's Puppets which was shown at Postmasters Gallery in New York. The axial structure of Foucault’s immaterial archive is broken by Smart, as the axiomatic lines which once delineated definition are repurposed as twisted puppet strings and the architectural markings of a notional stage. Smart posits the act of movement as a temptation, the continued psychological reconstitutions that start with single acts - a zigzag across the floor, a hand on your thigh, a snapped twig. Through assemblage, Smart performs a mind of delicate cuts, the choice of what to pin up and what to ignore, a curation of the psychic elements which construct desire and its shadowy equal. The emphasis for Smart is not only on a structural complexity in which a web of conflicting and harmonious influences shape temptation, but the material concerns that come with cutting temptation’s shape: ran Ink, ripped fabric, torn paper, frayed edges, cut offs, scars, scratches and stains. 

 

 

Smart’s fascination with Saint Anthony began in 1989 when she saw a performance of Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony in New York by the Wooster Group. The play pushed Anthony’s visions into the realm of active installation in which painting, sound, video, performance, costume and dance could all cacophonously sermonize. Flaubert insisted that he was inspired to write his three editioned novel/play by a painting, formerly attributed to Brugel the Elder, which depicts Saint Anthony in the desert pouring over ‘the book,’ surrounded by demons. In monastic similitude, Flaubert read on a vast range of historical, astrological, theological and scientific topics before attending the desert of the empty page. However, according to Athanasius of Alexandria, Saint Anthony was illiterate. Of every sermon he heard read aloud, “none of the things that were once written fell from him to the ground, but he remembered all, and afterwards his memory served him for books.” If Anthony did travel the desert with a book, it was merely a prop. Therefore, what monsters he did encounter were a product of his memory, the collapse of a once pedagogical structure, and its attempted re-imaging.  

 

Anointing Anthony the Great as the patron saint of experimentation, Flaubert proclaims, “Saint-Antoine is relegated, as far as I am concerned, to the condition of a memory!” His eyes, stigmatized with the cuts of slow forgetting, bestow upon him blessed improvisations, rearrangements, assemblages and failures in the form of active images. Flaubert carves these demons for Anthony with the terrible urgency of forgetting, as every read line is replaced with a newly written one, “I spend my afternoons with the shutters closed, the curtains drawn, and without a shirt, dressed as a carpenter.” The temptation to transform ten thousand words into one hundred monsters that haunt a single night are ushered in by the scrambling hands that seek to keep bright knowledge, to stay its wilt, to heed the call of posterity. As Saint Anthony himself says, “without temptation no one can be saved,” and so, from the kindling root of the library, preserved temptations desiccate the world as it becomes the stage of an infinite desert.

 

While Flaubert insisted that the Bruegel painting was his inspiration for writing The Temptation, he first encountered the imagery of St Anthony as a child during Marionette plays. These childhood ‘rehearsals’ shaped the organizational logic in which Flabuert stored knowledge as temptation. My mum rehearsed puppet shows in front of me as a child; drawing, skirting, constructing figures around her stage. The arc of arms asking to be fixed upon a wall, turned and turned again, a wave, a hammer, a dance - an incalculable position in movement. And all the while, she said to me, “you can be anything you want,” as if she wasn’t rearranging the world in front of my eyes. 

 

 

In her latest exhibition, Smart returns to the desert, tempted by recollection, to trial memory through a fractured performance, to meet with everything again. Although, the element of isolation is not provided by the desert of Smart’s childhood, it is ushered in by the disembodying colonial illusion that the desert must be empty, that the stage be clean before the introduction of history. In Sidney Nolan’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, painted after a pilgrimage from the outback to Italy, we can see the transplantation of this uneasy European figure to the Australian landscape. A confusion appears above the goanna’s head, a dim halo, a temptation to reify the holy spirit or remove the self entirely, and so it sits as a blur imposing itself on the landscape as the trace of attempted forgetting. It is in this landscape that Smart meets her own history as she returns to painting; the bees, the lizards, the dragonflies come to see their old friend in the landscape but these characters aren’t singularly born. They are strung up by invention, each string a vision of a different time but the methodology isn’t typical of a puppeteering logic, for the arm string of the marionette controls the leg of another. Pulling on the tail of a table moves the antennae of a wasp and again pulling from the earth, a photograph, a wooden board, my apron strings. The ground comes up, too much, the nerve endings on the skin of the world - disinhibited and rearranged.

 

Before writing the final versions of The Temptation, Flaubert’s Salammbô was met with a middling reception. Coming to his defence, the writer George Sand wrote a review for La Presse, for which Flaubert thanked her, to which Sand responded and so began a 13 year epistolary friendship between 400 letters. Over this time Flaubert would write to Sand about his ‘Saint-Antoine,’ and she would respond that she was making “costumes for the marionettes, cutting out scenery,” and “writing another play” as Sand was staging theatrical productions with her son Maurice. Together they created over 100 puppets and Sand wrote 31 plays that were performed at their house in Nohant by both actors and marionettes on two separate stages.

 

Flaubert writes to Sand: ”I feel no longer the need of writing, for I used to write especially for one person alone, who is no more. That is the truth! And yet I shall continue to write.” After this he and Sand would see a marionette version of St Anthony, and Flaubert would go on to finish The Temptation in the structural form of a play. George Sand wrote to Flaubert on the 30th of August, 1873:

 

“Ah! what lovely places I have seen and what strange volcanic combinations, where we ought to have heard your Saint-Antoine in a SETTING worthy of the subject! Of what use are these pleasures of vision, and how are these impressions transformed later? One does not know ahead, and, with time and the easy ways of life, everything is met with again and preserved.”

 

Perhaps Flaubert found in Sand that one person for whom he could write again, to have a stage for St Anthony at her home.