Difficult Images of Joy
Does art bring us joy more often than it gives us images of joy? This is one of the questions raised by Paul Ardenne’s book, L’Art en joie. Esthétiques de l’humanité joyeuse (La Muette/BDL, 336 p., 49 euros). This lavishly illustrated book looks at the artistic representation of joy, from ancient Western and non-Western art to the present day: images of smiling faces, figures of celebrating bodies, of love, well-being, harmony and victory, right through to tactical, political, propaganda and commercial messages. Drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, artists’ performances and forms of charitable art, in the spirit of “care,” or joy prefabricated by the media. Here, the author talks to Catherine Millet.
The first question is: why this unexpected, almost incongruous theme of joy? From the very first pages, you state that “the image of joy is a challenge.” I didn’t exactly choose this theme. It built up from a discussion with Bruno Wajskop, a writer and editor, about religious festivals where joy is ever-present, a profuse and unrestrained joy. Holi and Diwali for Hindus, Purim for Jews, ancient bacchanals... What are the representations of religious joy? And, one thing leading to another, what are the specific representations of joy in its many meanings? In the case of artistic images, we note the parsimony with which joy has been portrayed since the dawn of time. Joy was experienced intensely in dances, trances, drinking bouts and orgies, but something was inhibited as soon as it became a question of fixing an image of it, at least in the West until the Enlightenment.The effect of repression? Controlling joy, and even more so its images, has always been an issue for civilisation.This is still true of the “feel-good” culture that is in vogue today— having to smile all the time, taking selfies displaying the stereotypical image of happiness. The image of joy is a constructed and oriented one. Authoritarian political regimes were well-aware of this. The Fascist Dopolavoro, the Nazi Kraft durch Freude, propaganda from the Communist era... joy is everywhere, its multiplied image is the symbolic double of the ideology of cheerful power and happiness fulfilled that were the stock-in-trade of these political regimes, which were nevertheless the most sinister of all.
Your undertaking is all the more astonishing in that it is almost paradoxical. Your first chapter is entitled “The image of joy, a slow affirmation” and shows that this image was very slow to emerge throughout Antiquity. Why is that? The affirmation of the joyful image was slow, to say the least. There was no shortage of ostensibly joyous scenes to represent: banquets, dances, concerts, jubilant victories, banter... Visually transcribed on the frescoes or decorated crockery of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, on the richly sculpted decor of Hindu temples or on the prints and decorated screens of Japanese houses of pleasure, the expression of restraint was nevertheless the order of the day. The Apollonian impulse, as Nietzsche would say, prevailed over Dionysian excess. Nicolas Poussin depicted the worshippers of the Golden Calf: the people rendered hysterical by their new cult in the Bible became well-behaved dancers in the classical painter’s work... This restraint was metaphysical in essence. Expressing too much joy was thought to attract misfortune, opening your mouth to smile might let evil spirits in... When it comes to joy, most religions are castrating, or codify its expression in the sense of a minor expression. As late as the eighteenth century, the Venetian painter Tiepolo composed a minuet scene in which no one is smiling. And what about Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana (1563)? A huge, sad feast in which the central figure, Christ, is overlooked by a butcher cutting up meat, a metaphorical announcement of His sacrifice... The Amerindian civilisation, in all its representations, frescoes and sculptures, features virtually no joyful figures. This is obviously no accident.
When the image of joy emerges, it does so suddenly, through the grotesque and obscene display of the figure of Baubo. What meaning can we give to this myth? You are right to mention the particular case of Baubo, the obscene woman. When Demeter was despairing over the abduction of his daughter Persephone, she made him laugh by showing him her vulva, her “mythical” vulva, to use the title of a book by Georges Devereux. This indecent exposure (the ἀνάσυρμα, anasyrma), which was a ritual at votive festivals dedicated to Demeter, justifies the burst of laughter, the new-found good humour. But it can only be exceptional, socially speaking. Does exhibiting oneself guarantee universal laughter? Of course not. Baubo, the exception that proves the rule, was just passing through. Her joy could be represented because it is out of the ordinary. A fleeting occurrence, not a figure to be inscribed in continuity, heaven forbid!
I wondered whether the idea for L'Art en joie was a follow-up to your novel published in 2020, L’Ami du Bien... L’Ami du Bien is something else, although it does hark back to it. In this novel, fanatical “Care” enthusiasts destroy everything they can, to the point of mass murder, to then enjoy repairing
it by healing.Their joy is reminiscent of Schadenfreude (“harm-joy,” the “joy of damage”), in which people rejoice in the misfortune of others, but in reverse. It’s no longer the evil that makes them joyful, but the happiness that comes from treating the effects of evil, even if they themselves are at the origin of it.
Your title makes it hard not to think of Georges Bernanos’ fine novel La Joie (1929). Inspired by the figure of Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus, the character of Chantal de Clergerie preserves the spirit of childhood, an innocence that doesn’t make her blind to the world—on the contrary! But her lucidity is matched only by her “naive ignorance of her own inner life.” I thought of this phrase when I read your pages in which you show that the representation of children’s games expresses the purest representations of joy. You say that joy rejects complexity, the background.Yet images are almost always ambiguous... There is much to be said about the representation of Christian joy, whether in literature, the visual arts or music—Bach BWV 147, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring... Christian joys, I should say. In this (complex) register, the epiphanies are different, and they too are coded. The joy of Chantal, the heroine of La Joie, is that of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Sulpician by nature: the joy we derive from benevolence, from the sincere love of our neighbour, in the image of the Buddhist mudita. A joy born of the possibility of abolishing human misfortune. “Whoever seeks the truth of man must understand his pain,” wrote Bernanos. He could have said: must understand his joy, but no.
Is there a pure representation of joy in the visual arts? No. Representing joy is never innocent. In doing so, we conjure up and stage the promised world as a liveable space in which the prospect of happiness is simultaneously implicit, legitimate and accessible. This hedonistic commitment is never self-evident in real life, which is dominated by existential preoccupations, counter-joy or non-joy. You mentioned the images of happy children. These are rare in the history of art, if you consider the energy of joy that children radiate. Marie Cassatt depicted children absorbed in their play—Michael Fried called this “absorption,” and Emmanuel Pernoud, “the obscure child” (1), the infans that adults cannot help but bring back into their orbit by equating them with their ego, their anxieties, their incompleteness. On this point, Francis Alÿs has swept everything else away with his video series Children’s Games, since 1999, devoted to children at play. Alÿs films the children as they are, at face value. They are playing. They are joyful. They are joy universally embodied, without concept, and everything else is literature. One of the greatest works about joy ever created.
When you look at representations of sexuality, it’s striking to see that they fall into two groups. There are images of pleasure whose protagonists show no joy, like the Pompeii frescoes, and others, often caricatures, that express euphoria. Might we say that representations of sexuality are joyful when they show sexual “games”? And serious when they depict orgasm or ecstasy? This is an intense and, at first glance, incomprehensible issue. The Pompeii frescoes and the illustrated Kama Sutra are staggering in their coldness. The bodies should be overheating, panting, exulting, but no, no! It’s either coitus semper tristus, sad fornication, or laborious horizontal refreshment, circus exercises, physical love reduced to acrobatic training on the carpet of the alcove. The same applies to the vast sculpted frescoes in Hindu temples dedicated to the divinities of love or reproduction: in these orgiastic scenes, making love does not seem to express anything other than a feeling of serious application, of accomplishment. We have to do it? We’ll do it. But without joy. For a long time, the most consummate figures of radiant sexual joy were to be found in scenes of solitary love. Bernini’s Ludovica Albertoni, Correggio’s Io... By analogue means, by masturbation, which does not involve others. What should we deduce from this? Ludovica and Io do reach orgasm, but with a partner who is obviously “special,” in their case superhuman—a god, a divinity. Can gods alone lead women to orgasm, that ultra-joy?
POWER OF THE SNAPSHOT
You talk about the possibility of joyful political art. You give the example of Claude Monet’s Rue de Montorgueil pavoisée (1878). What does this example reveal? The power of the snapshot, of the image painted at the very moment of the event. Monet was a sincere republican, and impatient! His painterly gesture captures a festive expression at the very moment when the Republic was finally being publicly celebrated, here in a Paris street, seven years after its proclamation and three years after the promulgation of the constitutional laws of 1875—the 3rd Republic was born in pain, as we remember, between the Franco-Prussian defeat, the occupation and the Paris Commune. Celebrations at last! Flags flapped in the early summer breeze, the sun shone and the air vibrated. Monet’s two paintings of this historic snapshot, which he experienced with passion, capture the real joy inherent in the event. David’s Le Serment du Jeu de paume, painted after the events of 1789 but with the benefit of hindsight, is by comparison a work that is more meditative than eruptive, the work of someone in the process of entering politics (David was to become a member of the Convention and a regicide). It embodies a joy that is constructed because it is weighed, dramatised, staged through the prism of a historical consciousness that uses representation as a thesis and not in proportion to euphoria or jubilation alone. A joy served cold.
Can we talk of joy in relation to the humorous forms taken by many contemporary works and actions that perpetuate the spirit of Dada? Can the critical distance they signify in their irony be assimilated to joy? Remember, though, that the joy is sometimes (often...) feigned in this case. In the form of irony, the darkly humorous stance that is adopted. Is the joy that comes from forced laughter or good humour still joy? Many Fluxus works, in particular, are poses. They counteract, or aim to counteract seriousness by being ironic. Joking irony is not joy, it contains too much bile, it is at best the nostalgia of joy.
Of course, there is an authentic “performative” joy, the kind that comes from unbridled collective play and genuine letting-go. Wolf Vostell’s caustic performances are affected, but Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), a group of laughing maenads playing with pieces of meat, is not. The success of the game lies in the very capacity for joy. Critical art will always miss the joy.
Since you say little about the subject of mystical joy, we are struck by your conclusion, which proposes to make “the image of joy a soteriology,” in other words a vector of salvation... This conclusion is dictated in particular by our contemporary reality. Never have images of joy been so widespread, especially on social networks—my wonderful life, my sublime cat, look, look at me, see my joy. This outburst of pathological narcissism is an inverted mirror of the contemporary human condition: unhappy, worried, preoccupied, and largely fuelled by the “shrink system.” The image of joy thus fabricated is not a figure of salvation but, on the contrary, the figure of its impossibility. Can the image of joy become a soteriology, the universal language of happiness? Yes, provided it expresses true, sincere joy. We viewers can therefore hope for a dialectic that is the opposite of the norm, we can imagine ourselves joyful in order to learn about joy, to tame it, to finally embody it, after the image. In this case, the image saves where reality destroys.
Translation: Juliet Powys
See Michael Fried, La Place du spectateur. Esthétique et origines de la peinture moderne (1990), Gallimard, “Folio Essais,” 2017, and Emmanuel Pernoud, L’Enfant obscur. Peinture, éducation, naturalisme, Hazan, 2007.
Paul Ardenne is a writer and art historian.