Some things belong to all of us. Mine was not the only heart breaking
when the ISIS hammers fell on the statues at Nineveh and Palmyra. All
theft is violation. Stealing the past is a deeper harm. It strikes at the
core. In a world where change is constant the permanent matters.
Insofar as anything human achieves permanence those statutes came
close. Their destruction stole something from my past though I had
never, nor was ever likely, to see them.
We live more of our lives than we think in our imagination. Or, more
precisely, in that strange and wonderful space where imagination and
memory play together. The present is always more than just the
moment. It is suffused with what we remember and what we desire. This
intricate richness is easily mislaid in the daily uproar.
Paintings invoke a pause in that uproar. They permit imagination and
memory to catch up with the present. As we stop to look, the mislaid
wealth of our experience is recovered. Hearts and minds are recalled
from their daily distractions. The artist’s opportunity has arrived. Now is
the time to put the question.
Not all questions are, or need to be, big. They are allowed to amuse,
provoke, puzzle, delight, divert or distract. Rankle’s paintings, however,
put a big question. They ask about our place on this transforming planet:
a planet belonging to all of us. It is being stolen. Rankle’s brush, as it
transforms lovingly remembered landscapes into somewhere alien, is
the hammer in all our hands.
Everything we make begins in our imagination. This is true of the ugly or
the beautiful; the useful or the useless; the sweet or the bitter. Without
imagination stones would never have begun their astonishing
transformation into satellites; caves would not have become the
Alhambra.
We are makers. We transform. But first we are dreamers. What we make
first we dream. Some of our dreams are transcendent. From them
comes the thin film of order we throw around the chaos of events and
call civilisation. Others are nightmares. From them we make the horrors
of the Holocaust or ISIS. The creative and the destructive: both are born
in the imagination.
Venice is the product of transcendent dreaming. It is an outcome of the
deep impulse to create that can be found somewhere in every heart.
Fugitives a millennium and a half ago imagined a place of safety in the
midst of a swamp. From that safe place they imagined and built a great
trading empire. With the wealth from that trade they imagined and
created a city which has remained a place of enchantment for a
thousand years.
Rilke urges us to have faith, to ‘become in the gathering outleap
something more than itself’: to follow where our imagination leads.
Venice retains to this day its greatest power – the power to inspire.
Witness its mark on a legion of giants of literature: Dante and Goethe;
Wordsworth and Shelley; Dickens and Proust. Painters too: Turner and
Durer; Corot and Monet; Renoir and Whistler. A gondolier’s song was
assimilated into Wagner’s Tristan. Elisabeth Barrett Browning wrote
‘nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, not a second Venice in the world’.
But, there is something else about Venice: an elusiveness; an
ephemeral quality depicted so often by painters, Rankle included,
captivated by its light. It occupies an indefinite place between land, sea
and sky into which all of its substantial presence can often appear to
evaporate. Its magnificent monuments have feet of mud. The mud is
relentless in its effort to reclaim the magnificence. Only a constant battle
with the tides of the Adriatic keeps the mud at bay.
The travel writer, Jan Morris, wrote about Venice, ‘Her past is enigmatic,
her present contradictory, her future hazed in uncertainties’. Venice’s
uncertain future is also ours. As we continue to transform our climate,
the seas will rise and the mud will absorb Venice. The forces
compounding its uncertainties are also turning more of our dreams into
nightmares.
Mushroom clouds are the most potent expression of dreams transmuted
into nightmares. In August 1945 they rose for the first time in the
universe’s history over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dreams that begat
them were as old as mankind: to know more; to uncover nature’s
secrets; to enrich humanity with that knowledge.
To become a god, to seek arcane powers to transform, is the most
universal of such dreams. Robert Oppenheimer was the architect of the
Manhattan Project. He fully understood what had been accomplished.
Witnessing the success of the first atomic weapon test he spoke the line
from the Bagavad Gita uttered by the Hindu god, Krishna, ‘Now I am
become death, the destroyer of worlds’.
The material from which that bomb was made, plutonium, was first
created in 1941 at Berkeley in California in minute amounts. It does not
occur naturally on earth. It is distinctively a product of our imagination.
Now there are hundreds of tonnes stockpiled around the planet. We
have yet to find something productive to do with it.
Plutonium is aptly named after the god of the underworld. It opens a
door into hell for all of us. This is not a door we can close. The plutonium
we make is made for eternity. It is possible that there is now more here
on earth than in the rest of the universe. One day Venice will be gone.
That day will not come for plutonium.
There is something profoundly disturbing about the conjunction two
such different products of our imagination. Venice, which embodies our
highest hopes and plutonium which reflects our deepest fears. This
tension is within us all: hope and despair; selfless and selfish; good and
evil. Our creative and the destructive impulses are coupled by
imagination.
It is an uneasy coupling. We are never entirely sure which will win out in
ourselves let alone others. The psychologist, Erich Fromm captures this
stress in his magisterial ‘Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’. He fully
grasped the constancy of the struggle between the creative and
destructive impulses that occur in all of us.
He wrote, ‘Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get
satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of
destruction.’ Rankle’s landscapes are permeated with the ‘drama of
destruction’. He first appeals to Abraham Lincoln’s ‘mystic chords of
memory’; to familiar, comforting prospects and then disfigures them with
violent eruptions of industrial colour.
The shock is visceral, compelling attention. His Venice is both familiar
and alien. Its past, present and future are invoked simultaneously. The
tension between creation and destruction is brought before our eyes. A
visual discord is unresolved; harmony is disrupted; a big question left
hanging.
Is there hope for Venice or should we despair? The true enemy of hope
is not despair. Hope and despair both move hearts and argue for action.
The real enemy is indifference. Fromm saw indifference as the entrance
through which destruction enters our hearts, ‘The attitude of the majority
is neither that of faith nor that of despair, but, unfortunately, that of
complete indifference to the future of man.’ Cold hearts do nothing.
Thoreau famously thought that ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation.’ I wish that this were so. I see the mass of men leading
lives of small satisfactions, preoccupied with familiar sensations. In the
Duino Elegies Rilke asks, ’But who, just for that, could presume to
exist?’
Our existence was once an unquestioned assumption. It is no longer.
Humanity has eaten too well of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good
and evil. This has permitted us to build Venice and create plutonium: the
one transient, the other permanent. In this world we can no longer afford
indifference. We must choose between our dreams and our nightmares.
Rankle’s paintings of Venice put a big question about our creative and
destructive impulses. He does not answer it. It is not for him to do so.
That is our task. It requires that ‘the better angels of our nature’ triumph
in the battle for our hearts and minds. Lincoln believed that those better
angels are there in each one of us. It is the job of our leaders not our
artists to invoke them.
Tom Burke
July 4 th 2015
London
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