International“The boy who fell from the sky” or paternal parables for a new age
Published: Thursday January 22, 2009
Go die, come back, I'll love you, 2007, chromogenic print, 28" x 24".
New York - Aram Jibilian's new, six-part series, "The boy who fell from the sky," cleverly transposes the Greek myth of Icarus to the contemporary greenery of the Vermont countryside. In one image we see a nearby pond from behind a window inside a house. Then another image of the pond and one of a woman lying on her back, which recreates the famous picture of Susan Sontag taken by Peter Hujar. In another photograph, we see a boy's legs flailing in the air - he's already fallen to earth and hit the water, so to speak. In a fifth picture, he is almost completely submerged. A sixth and final photograph shows the girl/Sontag from farther back than in the previous Sontag picture.
Jibilian's take on the Icarus myth speaks to the viewer more than the photographs' formalistic or aesthetic properties, although the eerie quietude of the scenery lends an almost Gothic quality to the work. Jibilian associates Icarus - the young man who flew too close to the sun and a symbol of human hubris - with Sontag, the intellectual, a symbol of knowledge. He also associates them both with death: Sontag's death, Icarus' death, and the suicide of his fellow artist James McMackin in 2006.
Jibilian pairs these photographs with another series of pictures, "On Photography and Death and Dying" - shots of himself and friends facing McMackin's drawings, back turned to the viewer. McMackin's paintings (one of which resembles a gory jet of blood sprayed onto the canvas) are partly occulted, as if they are being posthumously protected from outside commentary or intrusion. Jibilian thus creates a memorial to the young departed artist. Both these sets of photographs are accompanied by W. H. Auden's famous poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," excerpted below:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position...
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance; how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to do on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Auden not only captures the pathos of Icarus' death, but also people's sad disregard and lack of caring ("the expensive delicate ship . . . sailed calmly on"): even a boy falling out of the sky doesn't hold our attention.
The association of knowledge, danger, and death is an ancient one that goes back not only to the Greeks but to early Mesopotamian and Hebraic civilizations as well - the apple in the Garden of Eden being the most obvious and well-known example. Sontag, who died of a long illness lovingly documented and photographed by her partner Annie Leibovitz, seems an odd if interesting choice to be aligned with such theories, since she was in fact intimately tied to the world of politics and art, someone who cared deeply about the objects and people that surrounded her. If anyone would have noticed a boy falling out of the sky, it would have been Sontag. But why not? It lends an extra air of Gothic interest to the series.
In two other series, "Autoexaminations" and "Be My Patient," the novel topic of twinning takes center stage in the playfully homoerotic pictures of the photographer with his twin brother Arek and friends. In "Be My Patient," Arek and Aram, both in patient frocks, are seen from behind and from the side in a staged confrontation. In "Autoexamations," exhibited in 2005 at the 80 Washington Square East Gallery, the photographer, dressed as a doctor, examines different naked men. The photos subtitled Autoexamination #16 (gland), Autoexamination #34 (lung auscultation), and Autoexamination #32 (spinal deviation) indicate the particular exam in question.
That both Jibilian's twin and their father alike are doctors is no accident. The series depicts Jibilian with seven different naked men, each one being examined in a different position. Sexuality intersects here with the desire to either understand or oedipally supersede the father and perhaps replace him. Jibilian again plays dress-up with his twin brother Arek in a 2008 photograph, Freedom Fighters Vietnam to Yerevan, where the two don officers' uniforms. Jibilian then photoshopped a picture of his father - who served as an American physician in Vietnam - onto the hotel bed behind them.
As with Cindy Sherman's more elaborate morphing into different identities, there is an added layer to Jibilian's attempt to take the pater familias' place, symbolically killing him in the process. This agonistic and antagonistic struggle with the father, an attempt to understand what came before (and, in the case of his twin, what arrived concurrently) winds itself through Jibilian's oeuvre. In a Lacanian sense, Jibilian's twin functions like a mirror image to refract or reflect back an incomplete image, both simultaneously deconstructing and completing the self.
Along with Atom Egoyan, Jibilian has been at the forefront in visually re-interpreting the Arshile Gorky myth. In the 2008 triptych Gorky, a Life in Three Acts, Jibilian places a mask of Gorky's face on his brother-in-law and one of Gorky's mother on his sister's and poses them as respectively: Mary with the Christ child; Gorky and his wife Mougouch (or perhaps Christ playfully married to Mary Magdalene); and finally Gorky as Christ ascending, here seen climbing up a telephone pole, which also refers to Gorky's climb upward before he hung himself. The logic of the middle photograph is difficult to understand, and the analogy between Gorky and Christ problematic - every being who suffers is not Christ; every mother who suffers not Mary.
