Jesse Darling. Institutional Care
Through sculptures, drawings and objects, Jesse Darling (b. 1981, UK) addresses topics such as the body’s vulnerability, sexuality, identity and resistance to social and political constraints. At Tate Britain in London through February 24, 2019, the artist’s latest project revisits the legend of Saint Jerome and the lion. Interviewed by Thomas Butler, Darling discusses the relationship between institutions and power structures, patriarchy and otherness.
“ART NOW: JESSE DARLING. THE BALLAD OF SAINT JEROME,” TATE BRITAIN, LONDON. THROUGH FEBRUARY 24, 2019.
THOMAS BUTLER:
Can you speak about your current show at Tate Britain, which revisits the legend of Saint Jerome and the lion? JESSE DARLING:
Saint Jerome mainstreamed the Bible, basically; it’s his translation that gives us all the versions we have now. He made decisions about the gender of certain words, which set some things in stone, and perhaps put us on the road to where we are now. So Jerome is a problem. He’s a problematic figure. He was a sick man, probably a gay man, but surrounded and patronized by a circle of women who paid for his lifestyle.
According to the myth, Jerome and his brothers were studying when a lion showed up, acting aggressive. The monks went for the crossbow but Jerome said, “No wait, this lion is just wounded,” and he fixed up the lion with his medical kit. In some versions of the story he baptizes or washes the lion’s foot; in some accounts there was a thorn in its paw; in others the lion’s leg was broken. The lion then stayed with Jerome in the monastery for the rest of his days. In art history Jerome and the lion are always depicted together, either in the study or “in the wilderness.”
And how did this relationship inform your thinking for this show?
Originally I thought about Jerome and the lion as a really beautiful love story, in the sense that everyone wants to be seen in their woundedness, or incompleteness, or brokenness, and for someone to say: “This person is not bad, they are just hurt. I see you. I’ll fix you up. You can stay with me.” I thought, that’s what everyone wants, don’t they? But then I thought: what is a lion doing in a library? And I thought: what does a lion lose by going home with Saint Jerome? And then I started to think about the lion as the wildness in everything, both inherent and projected. Jerome is the patriarch, so the lion becomes feminized or queered. The lion is the Other. There is a thread going through the work about the medical industrial complex; or the institution of the museum; the institution as habitus of care. That’s what they were doing when they set up museums: there was this idea of preserving and looking after things as though they wouldn’t be cared for properly where they came from. That they would be better cared for in some glass box in the west than they would be in use elsewhere. This is some epistemological bullshit of course. And I’ve got to acknowledge that I’m also Jerome in this context, I’m a white European artist having my institutional show, but I also identify politically with the lion. I wanted to talk about this story from the lion’s perspective.
Can you tell me about the figures of Batman and Icarus and why they feature in this exhibition?
They are my latter day saints. For me Batman and Icarus were both modern figures in that they believed that they were able, through the technology of the superhero – or the technology of wings – to somehow escape their own vulnerability. But the point is that they couldn’t, and they are quite similar in that way.
Foucault’s formulation of the care of the self has been interpreted to be about an individual’s ethical relationship to the truth. Care of the self was first developed by Socrates; it was then emptied of moral obligation by Descartes, who believed knowing oneself becomes merely an epistemic and not a moral condition for attaining truth. In The Nation Bruce Robbins recently wrote: “It’s as though (Foucault) were proposing his ‘care of the self’ as the one sure way not to tyrannize over others. Not to tyrannize – call it democracy – suddenly becomes the operative premise.”
Yes, I started to think that Jerome’s care of the lion is a form of tyranny, but then that’s something Foucault might have had something to say about. Even though he doesn’t exist, we have to take the lion seriously as a figure. At least in the story he stayed willingly. He’s still a wild animal and he could have just eaten Saint Jerome, but he didn’t. He stuck around and he guarded him in the wilderness. You could argue that the lion did have some agency to break out of that situation, but he didn’t. So then we get into the complexity, the inextricability of these situations. There’s an ambivalence to the love story. There is something to gain from getting into bed with the institution, or from colluding with power in that way. Or let’s say that, having being partially subjugated you go along with something because it’s the path of least resistance, and let’s say there’s nothing inherently ignoble about that, and that within such a situation there would be forms of resistance and there would be forms of complicity.
Purgatory is a theme that you have touched on in your work, and it’s this liminal temporal/spatial zone that made me think of the temporal label of the contemporary. Peter Osborne writes in The Post-Conceptual
Condition: “The contemporary is not to be conquered, even paradoxically, via self-dissolution (Baudelaire’s solution); it can only be engaged.”
My understanding of the contemporary is that it feels like everything is moving so fast, and also moving so far. Mainly I think this is a question of perception. I don’t believe in the accelerationist ideologies at all and I’m not interested in their ideas of what happens at the end because that also seems weirdly eschatological, as though there were an end to anything at all instead of just lots of cycles. It seems analogous to what I would call the modernist phallic progression of history, which is a linear progression. I find that fucking weird and very Christological. It’s really weird that it’s taken as hard philosophy or even science. Nonetheless, I believe there’s definitely something about the analysis of the present where everything is speeding forward at a rate too fast for anyone to get a handle on. In this sense I feel like the Enlightenment is over: this idea that you can have an ultimate empirical truth; that there could be anything inherently sovereign, any form of real supremacy; all of those ideas that are now very patently false. All the old sovereignties are starting to break down, thank god. It’s about time, they had their run. And in the fallout of these I feel there is a lot of magical thinking and various forms of syncretism, the scientific syncretism of data, ideas and theories. That’s basically the moment I’m working in and that I’m working in my own way to address.
This brings me to Terre Thaemlitz’s project Soulnessness at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau last March, where there were two quite dualistic spaces. One meditative space, where a composition was played continuously on a piano for 30 hours and the other where she showed two video works documenting her experience growing up as a Catholic in the United States. The artist presented evidence of the institution at work, which is quite oppressive, and yet the spiritual side was emancipatory and very important for her. So there were both of these things present.
Yes! As an institution it may have been oppressive, but as an apparatus faith has always been about how we do. Universalism is problematic but one thing the human species seems to have in common is its practices of faith. You know, for me this show is also about epistemologies. I’m trying to say that certain forms of institutional study are just as unwieldy as faith objects and that they also do violence.
Do they inform the power structures?
Yes, they do. But this is the interesting thing; if you read the letters of Saint Jerome, or the poems of Catullus, or further back to Chinese love poems from the 1st century, it’s all the same shit: people gossiping, people tearing people down. Suffering; and living; and regenerating. This is basically what we do as a species. That’s not very deep or a great revelation, but it’s something I feel I have to say over and over again, especially at this time when this technologist or futurist conversation, which like all futurism is vaguely fascistic, is so dominant as a theology. I’ve been called upon at various points to lend my voice to that conversation and I’ve always said that fundamentally, though the apparatus may change, we are doing the same shit we do and have always done. History shows how terrible people can be, but also how resilient, creative and fundamentally subversive.