Edwin Humphreys( Coll:, 24-) can’ t stop looking and looking again
The Wykehamist
The Kenneth Clark Prize Final
Edwin Humphreys( Coll:, 24-) can’ t stop looking and looking again
An electric fervour pulsates through the crowd, the buzz of conversation shimmering in rhythm with Sophie Meng’ s( from Perfect Pitch) dancing arpeggios and the second man’ s effervescing laugh. It is a crescendo that expresses an excitement poised on the brink of discovery; to be shocked, to be stimulated, and beckoning the final cadence of a year’ s wait. The finalists shuffle in. EACR takes the lectern. The projector bursts to life, a kaleidoscope of Rome and Florence wheeling under Clark’ s crisp voice. The pantheon spins into a statue of Marcus Aurelius.‘ Clark makes us think, and he makes us look.’ He presents us with these reeling images that will go on to haunt the art of the next thousands of years, as tonight’ s six candidates present the interlocked veins and deltas of different forms and ages that converge to create a piece of art.
Freddie Spearing( I, 21-) opens with an image that is‘ neither the one we want, nor expect’. Dalí’ s 1937 masterwork Metamorphosis of Narcissus shows Narcissus weeping— a figure we can easily recognise from his classical images of beauty and youth. But here, his face is hidden. The first echo emerges; a hand with the same architecture as the body, yet cradling not a head, but an egg from which the narcissus flower grows. Freddie brilliantly welcomes us into Dalí’ s world, illustrating how the cliffs of his native Catalonia make up the landscape of his mind, and how he expresses himself through Narcissus’ frame— his narcissism that saved him from an obliteration of self-identity. Laced throughout with Ovid’ s language from his recounting of the tale, we feel a unique intimacy with the story and with Narcissus, and every confluence that the canvas presents us with. Other images are compared with the original text, as we begin to get a sense for how Dalí might have felt reading it. It is tapping into an ancient story, making it ever more alive.
Xander Sharrocks( Coll:, 22-) then takes the stage to show us the 1983 painting Sulamith by Anselm Kiefer. But where is it? We are not given the image, but a simple line of poetry from the 1945 poem Todesfuge, or Death Fugue, by Paul Celan. Each word fires like a bullet, grappling with how we can cope with collective trauma. We are shown how the name traces back to Solomon’ s lover Shulammite from the Song of Songs, and Todesfuge’ s Margarete is based on Faust. Then we see the image. A vast black hall, aching with the scars of Fascist architecture, rolling off into the distance.‘ It is not inviting, nor is it meant to be.’ We are once more given something that is difficult, something we cannot quite comprehend but whose sombreness is infectious. Xander eloquently compares it to the trauma paradox— if you haven’ t experienced it, you can’ t really understand it; if you
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