Fruiting Bodies
By Ari Messer
Living on dead things, as mushrooms do, seems intelligent, and hiding just outside of human perception is smarter still. So when I'm asked about Joshua Hagler's work and I say that he makes smart pictures, what I mean is that in his exquisite constellations of consumption, love eats death. Although 72 Virgins to Die For, his first show to include installations, deals explicitly with humans and moths, obsessive virginity and the loss of flight, its ecology swarms with secret fruiting bodies.
In his East Bay studio a few months ago, Hagler explained that he wanted to draw out the religious and political implications of virginity, basing his explorations on Imam al-Tirmidhi's conception of paradise as a palace with 72 "virgins" for each faithful resident, and on the Sufi story of a moth that flies into fire to be completely consumed by God. "Three moths fly close to a flame," he laughed. "It sounds like the beginning of a joke." In each painting and installation, we see a different view of virginity as oblivion, knowledge of the divine as self-destruction.
As with his previous paintings of unexpected prayer circles and Leviathan panoramas, Hagler's pictures here offer a perspective just a dragonfly wing beyond reality, somehow more achingly human that the real thing. The gaping Golgotha blends Carnival imagery with a masked and embryonic Christ figure. It looks as if the swirl of the crowd, not Christ or God, has brought Christ back to earth. And those are tomatoes, not bloody organs, flying across the canvas, so it's a harvest festival of sorts. Prophets Wife 1 and 2 - and the starched Mormon pioneer dress, The Satanic Verses-evoking moths, and reversed shadow of the installation between them - seem more human than their inspirations. For Prophets Wife I, after Edvard Munch's Puberty (1895), Hagler combines the sinister angles and shadows of the original with an image of his own wife. Prophets Wife II, after Egon Schiele's Akt Gegen Strahlend Gefaerbtest Tuch, casts anonymity on the original's aura of absolute vulnerability.
Hagler's religious imagery doesn't run rampant. It is cool and focused, even when raging. He grew up in a complex array of Christian communities in America and, having left those situations, is now tracing the trails carved by conversations with hidden agendas, messianic iconography, and "contracts" like the one displayed in Purity Ball, a coming-of-age affair where a daughter must pledge to defend her virginity until marriage. In Hagler's rendering, the "contract" becomes a "contrast," between a girl's inner world and the untenable demands of patriarchy. Setting up a dialogue between the birds in Just One More Tiny Sacrifice for the Greater Good, and then We Can All Rest Easy Knowing and Ascent of the Blessed, Hagler juxtaposes a barren sacredness of birth with the greed and gastronomical purity surrounding the ortolan, a rare delicacy but also a creature brutally eaten whole, after it has been left in a dark box to gorge itself, its bones crushed like fennel. With S&M 1 and S&M2, he turns scenes of wrangling into moments of communion, placing them in the historical tradition of Temple sacrifices. An attention to the texture of the paint makes these images appear to be taken from aging frescoes, rubbed from the walls of time.
When the center cannot hold, when we think we might have chosen poison and wonder if it is too late, when virginity breaks down, we turn to prayer or private language. Hagler's figurative expressionism has much in common with a Continental tradition that blends historicism with madness, from Goya to Dix. But he works in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the end of our own continent, touching overlooked parts of the American imagination. So perhaps it is best to think of him as a poet, one who puts images to what, in Allen Ginsberg's words, we are "thinking in secret heart." Contemporary poet Dan Chiasson, in Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (A Story for Children), writes of this type of relationship:
as the child is to the book, a watcher, a dabbler,
so he is, I think, to my own life, that he may know
or not (his being, in the sky, in a position
that looked at in a certain light affords omniscience
but looked at in another light is blindness pure)
The figures in Hagler's Sparkle Girls and Virgin Queen are not melting, they are simply becoming aware of the vortex they inhabit. We die while we migrate, and there is no end to how we constellate desire, no clear answer to questions of virginity. Yet it's clear in 72 Virgins to Die For that Josh Hagler, in his own, big way, knows a number of good places to start.
Critic and musician Ari Messer is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
By Ari Messer
Living on dead things, as mushrooms do, seems intelligent, and hiding just outside of human perception is smarter still. So when I'm asked about Joshua Hagler's work and I say that he makes smart pictures, what I mean is that in his exquisite constellations of consumption, love eats death. Although 72 Virgins to Die For, his first show to include installations, deals explicitly with humans and moths, obsessive virginity and the loss of flight, its ecology swarms with secret fruiting bodies.
In his East Bay studio a few months ago, Hagler explained that he wanted to draw out the religious and political implications of virginity, basing his explorations on Imam al-Tirmidhi's conception of paradise as a palace with 72 "virgins" for each faithful resident, and on the Sufi story of a moth that flies into fire to be completely consumed by God. "Three moths fly close to a flame," he laughed. "It sounds like the beginning of a joke." In each painting and installation, we see a different view of virginity as oblivion, knowledge of the divine as self-destruction.
As with his previous paintings of unexpected prayer circles and Leviathan panoramas, Hagler's pictures here offer a perspective just a dragonfly wing beyond reality, somehow more achingly human that the real thing. The gaping Golgotha blends Carnival imagery with a masked and embryonic Christ figure. It looks as if the swirl of the crowd, not Christ or God, has brought Christ back to earth. And those are tomatoes, not bloody organs, flying across the canvas, so it's a harvest festival of sorts. Prophets Wife 1 and 2 - and the starched Mormon pioneer dress, The Satanic Verses-evoking moths, and reversed shadow of the installation between them - seem more human than their inspirations. For Prophets Wife I, after Edvard Munch's Puberty (1895), Hagler combines the sinister angles and shadows of the original with an image of his own wife. Prophets Wife II, after Egon Schiele's Akt Gegen Strahlend Gefaerbtest Tuch, casts anonymity on the original's aura of absolute vulnerability.
Hagler's religious imagery doesn't run rampant. It is cool and focused, even when raging. He grew up in a complex array of Christian communities in America and, having left those situations, is now tracing the trails carved by conversations with hidden agendas, messianic iconography, and "contracts" like the one displayed in Purity Ball, a coming-of-age affair where a daughter must pledge to defend her virginity until marriage. In Hagler's rendering, the "contract" becomes a "contrast," between a girl's inner world and the untenable demands of patriarchy. Setting up a dialogue between the birds in Just One More Tiny Sacrifice for the Greater Good, and then We Can All Rest Easy Knowing and Ascent of the Blessed, Hagler juxtaposes a barren sacredness of birth with the greed and gastronomical purity surrounding the ortolan, a rare delicacy but also a creature brutally eaten whole, after it has been left in a dark box to gorge itself, its bones crushed like fennel. With S&M 1 and S&M2, he turns scenes of wrangling into moments of communion, placing them in the historical tradition of Temple sacrifices. An attention to the texture of the paint makes these images appear to be taken from aging frescoes, rubbed from the walls of time.
When the center cannot hold, when we think we might have chosen poison and wonder if it is too late, when virginity breaks down, we turn to prayer or private language. Hagler's figurative expressionism has much in common with a Continental tradition that blends historicism with madness, from Goya to Dix. But he works in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the end of our own continent, touching overlooked parts of the American imagination. So perhaps it is best to think of him as a poet, one who puts images to what, in Allen Ginsberg's words, we are "thinking in secret heart." Contemporary poet Dan Chiasson, in Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (A Story for Children), writes of this type of relationship:
as the child is to the book, a watcher, a dabbler,
so he is, I think, to my own life, that he may know
or not (his being, in the sky, in a position
that looked at in a certain light affords omniscience
but looked at in another light is blindness pure)
The figures in Hagler's Sparkle Girls and Virgin Queen are not melting, they are simply becoming aware of the vortex they inhabit. We die while we migrate, and there is no end to how we constellate desire, no clear answer to questions of virginity. Yet it's clear in 72 Virgins to Die For that Josh Hagler, in his own, big way, knows a number of good places to start.
Critic and musician Ari Messer is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
