August Mond, Vita Bona (from Book 63-3), 415 × 240 cm — a banquet on the Moon.
"No earthling has yet withstood the verdict of the Grand Jury." — from Book 63-3
I took longer over this painting than over anything else I have ever written about, and I confess it straight away, because it belongs to the matter. On first looking I disgraced myself. I took a round table for a long banquet board; I took a grown, very deliberately styled young woman for a child; I turned the cross-cut shark into a tart and the strawberries into caviar. A painting four metres fifteen wide takes its revenge on whoever is in a hurry. It admits only the one who stays, who goes back, who recants his first sentences. I had to learn that. And precisely that, it turned out, is the real subject of Vita Bona: looking — how hard it is, and how rarely it happens.
So let me first say what is there. Then what it means.
A banquet hall on the Moon. Through the arched windows to the left, small and blue, the Earth rises over a grey cratered land; to the right and behind, the black starry sky. The architecture is monumental, almost Gothic, pale arches opening onto space, great rose-glowing dome-lamps hanging from the ceiling. At a round table, on golden chairs, sits and stands a company that could not be more sumptuous.
At the centre, in front, very small, stands a young woman. Sigma. A short white dress, bare lavender-pale legs, a broad pink bow at her back, over her head a glass helm on a gold-studded collar. She is turned away from us. She is presenting her creation to the table: a whole shark, drenched in red sauce and whole strawberries that run down in threads, and on the plates the cross-cut sections of the animal, the orange flesh, the dark rind, garnished with white moon-lilies. "Shark in strawberry sauce." Beauty and rot on a single plate, and it knows it of itself.
The jury she serves are the Vieleiner — the Many-Egged — and now one must look closely, for here lies the painting's greatest invention. They are tall, Mannerist-elongated figures, and their faces are studded all over with eye-shaped spheres. In each of these spheres there floats, in fluid, a tiny being with streaming hair: an Einling, a Singling. A face made of dozens of smaller beings. The collective mind not asserted but painted — a seeing within a seeing within a seeing. This jury is, in the literal sense, full of eyes.
And all around, on the tiers, the audience. Clergy, officers, beauties, lovers. Most of them — and this is the key — do not look at Sigma at all. A lady checks herself in a pocket mirror. One yawns with his mouth wide open. A dignitary props his bored face in both hands. A couple laughs, lost in itself. A red-haired woman gazes longingly at an officer. And again and again they pass one another a glossy magazine: SIGMA, with her on the cover. She is famous and overlooked in the same instant — passed around as an image, unnoticed as a person.
Over all of it, behind, a golden mosaic frieze in the manner of Byzantine wall-pictures: the same frontal icon-face, repeated without end, between the figures heraldic signs and inset letters I could not decipher. And at the lower left, discreetly folded into a crease of cloth, the "M" — the signature.
Now the thing that has kept me from sleeping for days.
Somewhere in the background, almost swallowed, there hovers above the open hand of a Vieleiner a small, angular, translucent-golden figure: the hologram of the Jobot president. This, if one follows the book's story, is the decisive event of the whole picture — the moment in which two powers confront one another, in which an empire tips. Bgnar points with an emerald-ringed finger across the table to Zobinum, the Moon's president; horror runs through the faces. And yet: it is tiny. One overlooks it. I overlooked it myself on the third viewing and took something else entirely for it.
This is no oversight of the painter's. It is his sharpest point. For the painted figures overlook it too. While the empire falls, one eats shark in strawberry sauce and leafs through the gossip magazine.
Here my old trade speaks up. It is the lesson of Bruegel's Fall of Icarus, which W. H. Auden fixed forever in "Musée des Beaux Arts": the monstrous, the world-altering, happens in a corner, in passing, "while someone else is eating" — while another opens a window, walks on. The boy falls from the sky, and the ploughman ploughs on, and the expensive ship sails calmly by. Vita Bona is Auden on the Moon. The fall of the empire as a footnote in the banquet. And this is why the ornamental excess, which at first I took for a weakness, is in truth the argument itself: the decoration smothers the gaze — that of the figures and ours. Mond forces the audience's guilt upon the viewer. One stands before the picture and does not see the essential thing, exactly as they do not. The density is the statement.
And therein lies the bitterest irony. This jury consists, literally, of eyes. Hundreds of Singlings, hundreds of gazes in a single face. An apparatus of pure visibility, an assembly that is nothing but seeing. And yet not one of them sees what is happening under its nose. It is a society with infinitely many eyes and not one gaze. It surveils everything and notices nothing. It consumes the image of Sigma and does not see the woman; it devours the spectacle and misses the event.
Detail: the crest 'Vita Bona' — a common woodlouse raised to a sovereign sign.
Beneath this first layer lies a second, which electrified me as a medievalist, because the whole work plays two theologies of the image off against one another.
Behind, the golden frieze: always the same face, frontal, flat, eternal, anonymous, with its riddling letters. That is Byzantium. That is Ravenna, San Vitale, the mosaics in which emperor and saint freeze for eternity. The icon: one countenance forever, authoritative, immortal, without an individual. Before it, in the foreground, the exact opposite: modelled, single, mortal, vain, distracted beings of flesh. The portrait, the Renaissance, the perishable now. The dead golden wall of the state cult at one's back, the living, fidgeting, lustful life in front. The painter sets official eternity and the real now into one picture and lets them grind against each other.
The ancestors crowd in regardless. Veronese, The Wedding at Cana, in which the miracle hides in the throng of the feast until barely anyone can find it — Mond hides his coup the same way. The colour comes from Florence, from the Mannerists, from Pontormo and Bronzino: those acidic, perfumed flesh-tones, the artificial yellow-green and magenta painted onto the body of a decadent court. And the ornament, the skin that becomes surface, the gold that coats everything — that is Klimt, the pleasure and the danger of the decorative. Whoever claims this picture stands outside art history, somewhere in the colourful no-man's-land of digital images, has not looked at it. It reckons with its forebears, move by move.
And then there is the animal that gives me, quite unscientifically, gooseflesh.
Onto the back of a spectator, in gold, a coat of arms is embroidered: VITA on the left, BONA on the right, and at the centre, where elsewhere the lion is enthroned or the eagle, a woodlouse. A common cellar louse. The good life, and its heraldic beast is a scavenger, a creature of the damp, of decay, of that which falls apart. And it does not stop at the crest. The woodlouse is everywhere: as a living animal crawling across the table toward the bloody sauce; as a pampered lapdog on a golden leash in the hand of a clergyman; as embroidery on robes, on the tablecloth, on a whole blue mantle that is a stitched garden of leaves, star-blossoms and woodlice. An entire civilisation that has raised the parasite to its ideal.
The shark says the same thing, only larger: rot, dressed as dessert, garnished with a lily. And Sigma — now that I see she is no innocent child-figure but a styled, marketed young woman with her own cover — Sigma is the Trojan horse of this logic. The beautiful thing one lets in because the story is too pleasant to examine. I may say it this plainly because I know this mechanism from my own life better than I would wish: authenticity was never a property of the thing. It was always the story one wants to believe. One lets the beautiful in and gets the rot served with it, and nobody wanted it otherwise, because the beautiful was so beautiful. That, of all creatures, a crawling thing hovers over this entire hall as its sovereign sign — call it my private sensitivity. I let it stand.
August Mond has, and this belongs to him, no interest in my praise, and I show him the greater respect by saying where it grows tight.
Vita Bona has the problem of all great indictments of decadence: it is itself of overwhelming, almost obscene splendour. It indicts the wallowing and wallows without restraint. Four metres fifteen of seduction-machine. Does the painter really stand above what he shows — or secretly on its side, the indictment merely the alibi that lets him feast unpunished? Veronese was made to answer exactly that before the Inquisition. I believe Vita Bona earns its freedom — but narrowly. And I mistrust anyone who is wholly sure here, myself included.
The second, more uncomfortable question concerns the hologram. Is it mastery to paint the world-altering thing so small, so swallowed, that one overlooks it — or is it simply a compositional failure, a picture in which the eye cannot find its centre? On some days I waver. But I decide, with deliberation, for the first reading. For the overlooking is the subject. A painter who wanted us to recognise the coup at once would not have understood what he is painting. The incidentalness of the event is the truth about the event. That is how empires really fall: in a corner, while someone is eating.
Beneath this picture, in the book, stands a sentence: "No earthling has yet withstood the verdict of the Grand Jury." I stood before it a long time, and in the end the sentence turns around for me and becomes a question. Can a jury that consists of nothing but eyes and yet sees nothing — that surveils everything and overlooks the one thing, that devours the image of the star and does not notice the human being, that crowns the parasite and takes carrion for the good life — can such a jury judge at all? Anything?
That is what Vita Bona negotiates beneath all its gold and its blood. It is no picture about the Moon and no fantasy about beings with many eggs and a collective mind. It is a picture about us, about the seeing we have unlearned, because we have too many images and too few gazes. A banquet of the eye that no longer sees.
I did not see it at first. That is my most honest recommendation to you: stay longer than is polite. Go back. Recant your first sentence. It is the only thing this picture asks — and the only thing almost no one gives it.
— B. F.
Bibliography. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus; W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938); Paolo Veronese, The Wedding at Cana (1563); the mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna; Jacopo Pontormo and Agnolo Bronzino; Gustav Klimt, the Stoclet Frieze.