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Skyline

© 2002 Ginger Henry Geyer
glazed porcelain with gold and white gold
11 ¼” x 14 ¼” x 10 ¼”

Adaptation of Picasso’s Guernica

     For me, it took a trip to Ground Zero for the full impact of Sept. 11th to sink in.  And that was five months later, when all had been leveled.  Back home, while dressing one morning, my bathroom tray jammed full of toiletries suddenly resembled the skyline of Manhattan, sans twin towers.
     The tarnished oval tray also reminded me of that ubiquitous Edward Keating photograph taken on September 11th of a very still life-- a tea set in a shop window, its cups and teapot covered in gray ash.  It bespeaks the stillness that is a consequence of utter chaos. I hoped to capture a similar stillness with the tray of toiletries, borrowing from art history to allude to that fact that violence is rooted in our past.  Initially, I thought I'd paint grief on one side of the tray and hope on the other…but 9/11 cried out to be lamented before a premature cry to “let the healing begin” rang out.  Greg Wolfe's editorial in Issue #32 of Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion, “In the aftermath of September 11, some have called for an end to irony.  Others have stressed our need for comedy.  But the urgent need of the moment is a deeper embrace of tragedy.”

     Picasso’s Guernica, the icon of 20th c. political art, just seemed too easy and obvious to go onto the toiletry tray.  But this was overridden by the fact that it is a Cubist work—it is inherently fragmented, and well suited to being blasted upon scattered facades. On the toiletry tray, Guernica becomes the ash, all black, white and gray.  Further fractured, it wraps around the buildings; only their tops and unexposed surfaces have escaped it.
     Guernica was painted in 1937, a few months after the town of Guernica in Northern Spain was systematically bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.  It was the first massive destruction of a civilian target from the air, an “experiment” for World War II, and a “trade-off” to please Franco during Spanish civil war.  The town was decimated. Picasso was not an eyewitness, but like most of us, he got the news through the media.  Like newsprint, Picasso’s outrage came out in black and white, in a huge mural.  Picasso said of it, “Painting is not done to decorate apartments.  It is an instrument of war.” Guernica is prophetic in that it tells it like it is, and it is in-your-face.  Even now Picasso’s masterpiece cuts through the complacency of a culture numb with violence, a society that defies the reality of injustice and death.
     The painting of Guernica did not change Franco's murderous regime at the time.  There is no hard evidence that it provokes social change.  So what is art's role in times of tragedy?  The painting is transformative, or it wouldn't remain so compelling decades later. Perhaps its tragic beauty helps us see grace, to acknowledge that hope is rooted in reality where pain, grief and tragedy mingle.  Guernica and other works of lament help us to name our pain and contrast it to the value of life. Acknowledging the pain can help keep those in grief from losing their mind.
     For me, painting Guernica at this very time was tough.  While constructing the piece, my family experienced tragedy when my 13-year-old niece, Amanda, was killed in a bus crash. I have seen Picasso's keening mother holding her dead child.  It is a pieta straight out of the Northern Renaissance, a Massacre of the Innocents from the Baroque period.  We knew the harsh flash of Picasso's light bulb that offers no illumination, his smug bull of brutality & darkness, the screeching horse that reeks of broken people.  In copying the mural, these key elements each landed upon a prominent façade of a toiletry container.
     Toiletries are for personal hygiene, grooming, intimacy. Faces in grief are contorted; cosmetics can't pretty it up. There is a stench to death that perfumes can’t obliterate.  Trivial grooming becomes irrelevant, almost comically so.  Suffering hits us all, unless we are very lucky, wealthy enough to buy it off, and apathetic enough to avoid it.  Our goodness is no shield, as some religions like to promote.  So all people are affected on this tray: there are both male and female products (Right Guard Sport deodorant vs. High Dimension Hair Color).  There's both high fashion and lowbrow--Gucci perfume (selected because the container resembles the Chrysler building) vs. generic petroleum jelly.  Stuff for young and old (Johnson’s Baby Powder vs. Old Spice).  There's the sexy and the mundane (Big Sexy Hair Mousse vs. Head & Shoulders), the exotic foreign vs. the pragmatic (Pevonia Botanica lotion vs. Fiber Choice tablets).
     Like the Guernica bombing, the September 11th attacks aimed to incite terror among ordinary folks like you and me.  You know it is terror when your most intimate surroundings are threatened…those places at home, your small islands of autonomy, where you feel secure and private.  John Donne says it well: