Anne Scheid: Art and the Search for Origin Amidst the Scent of Flowers

The idea of origin seems to be fundamental to the tradition of Western art and culture. It is usually located in signs of Nature and the sublime, and articulated in questions concerning art’s relationship to reality. In a homogeneous cultural environment, origin becomes an affirming construction. In a heterogeneous space, however (that of woman, of minorities, of cultural ethnicity), it is a paradoxical one.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe’s daughter Beloved emerged from the river reborn. She was killed by her mother in a desperate attempt to protect her from slavery. Beloved reappeared in the mystery of the filtered light breaking through the casually swaying leaves of the tall trees, amidst the insect sounds by the scent of flowers. The site of her rebirth is Nature, which for Morrison takes on the form of the palimpsest, a hopeful but desperate metaphor for origins, one that is realized within its hetergeneous layers.

Anselm Kiefer raised this issue to address the complex relationship German consciousnesshad in history. The extreme form of the concern for origin is fascism. This idea of homogeneity does not define origin as a transformational rebirth, as would be the case in a heterogeneous culture, but as an Ur, an authenticating foundation. Kiefer recognized that the question of authenticity, even for the German, was occluded by a paradox: Is German consciousness authorized by the homogenous space of autochtheny or the heterogeneous space of cultural constructions? Questions of origins are signified by this paradox, and Kiefer recognized that this is where we must direct our attention.

In part, origin is a function of a genealogical development, an unbroken chain originating in the bowels of Nature. Origin points to mythology of one’s beginning. The Western idea of Nature constitutes one of these mythologies. It exists in the macro-level of the world of objects and bodies. But it also exists in the microscopic level of the molecules of the body and their transformations. For African Americans, origin is a re-orgination, a palimpsest of aggregated times and spaces that form in society contradicting realities and fictions. The homogeneous space of Nature may not be the place to uncritically locate origin for a once enslaved population.

Anne Scheid, William Raines, Sunhee Kim and Manuel Vasure are each engaged in this search, but in different ways. Scheid’s large pastel drawings are of realistic nude female figures rendered over layers of pastel-colored scrims. For Scheid, the body is central. She relates to it in her work in the same way Kiefer relates to the landscape, as the site of origin. But there is a difference. Kiefer identifies origin in mythologies of the German landscape that collapse history and genealogy. Scheid locates origin as a real moment located in the body’s nervous system. For Scheid, this is where consciousness begins and, by locating consciousness in the body (the nervous system), Scheid establishes that our physical and emotional and intellectual selves are diachronically linked to the body, not just a part of it.

Scheid uses transparent gestural markings that are remindful of the 50’s abstractions of Richard Mayhew, Jack Tworkov and Norman Lewis. These scrim-like gestures articulate a poetic field of sensuality. The contour of the body carves itself over these areas of color, allowing them to occupy the territory of the skin, as well as the surrounding spaces. These scrims engulf the figures and sometimes partially obscure them; the overlapping veils of color and figures come together in these drawings in the form of a palimpsest. The overlaying of bodies and colors then becomes a metaphor for the collapsing of different times and spaces. But the arbitrary relationships between images normally identified with the palimpsest is in this work allegorically linked. Here notions of origin are located in the narrative relationship between drawing technique and image. A wash of color is turned into skin, for example. In this way, all images function as metaphors of the sensual and voluptuous body.

…….The efforts of these four artists to problematize the concept of origin in their works have revealed to us the true complexity of this task. Origin is an obscure idea that has no universal meaning or application. Ideas of it range from naturalist theories to social theories. But, above all, it reveals the myth that we have about ourselves, where we have been, where we are going. Ultimately, we are all struggling with these highly obscure questions. The variety of work in this exhibition is proof that these artists are dealing with an essential and ubiquitous issue. Although art is not the place to locate our origins, it is nevertheless driven by its exigent questions.

Charles Gaines
Fine Art Program Director
California Institute of the Arts
Professor of Art
California State University, Fresno

Opening Catalog Essay
Origins
By Charles Gaines
Fresno Art Museum
February 1999