ISSN: 1705-6411
                                   
Volume 6, Number 2 (July, 2009)

Passings – Betty Goodwin’s Monstrous Art

1. Goodwin. Eaux Forte [High Waters] (2001)

Only painting which itself succeeds in being a monstrous act succeeds in resolving and in reabsorbing the monstrosity of our lives, only painting that succeeds in becoming a mythic operator also succeeds in resolving the monstrosity of the social and of the social order (Baudrillard, 2001:142).

In her early twenties Betty Goodwin learned about the NAZI death camps and became conscious that history, understood as progress, ended somewhere between Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For her the work of history was over and the work of mourning would take its place. As a person who had lost her father at a very young age she had her own experience of dealing with loss. As a gifted artist in a very complex time Goodwin learned to express ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity concerning her species in her visual art where words often fail.

Some in the promotional culture of the art world attempted to fit her into postmodernism in the 1980s as a neo-expressionist but Goodwin’s work aroused more than the apathy which the neo-expressionists radiate. Her works often go so far as to haunt even Death who I imagine grows weary at the repetitive tortures we continue to force upon our own kind. There was something of the Manichean in Goodwin’s approach as she recognized the power of evil to win out over the good. This insight placed her among the front rank of cerebral artists in the late 20th century. Those who have called her works melancholy miss their force and the depth of their problematization of the human condition. Those who project only their own hopes for humanity onto her art also do Goodwin a great disservice and ignore at least one-half of her significance. Goodwin’s art shows not only a strained compassion for the human but an effort to resolve the inhuman which is also a very important part of who we are as a species. Her art was Goodwin’s way of dealing with the monsters which operate just beneath the surface of any social formation. Goodwin’s gift to us was her refusal to allow us to avoid the inhuman.

2. Goodwin. Cleaver – to erase a great chunk of reality (1989)

The tormented figures which occupy Goodwin’s bleak backdrops point to non-specified (politically) harms done to people by other people. The lack of identifiable geographic location serves to suggest that these things happen anywhere where there are people. Goodwin tread a fine line between the real and the surreal making works that appeared to work as alternatives to a reality that can surface anywhere at any moment. Her figurative works make us uneasy precisely because they are so recognizable as images our mind has conjured behind news stories from around the world which we hear every week.

3. Goodwin. Figure Lying on a Bench (1987)
Art Gallery of Ontario

Among her inspirations were Käthe Kollwitz and Joseph Beuys both of whom were concerned with the emotions of trauma and memory regarding war and the camps. Kollwitz’s Misery (1896) was typical of her work concerning what our technocratic age has come to refer to a “collateral deaths” (in this case an emaciated child) during wartime. Beuys’s Abandoned sleep of Me and My Loves haunts us with a work that appears for all the world like an old set of shelves until we realize that it is a reenactment, in miniature, of the sleeping conditions of the death camps. Somewhere in between the poles of fascination and anger that appealed to Kollwitz and Beuys we find much of Goodwin’s art.

4. Käthe Kollwitz. Misery (1896)

5. Beuys. The Abandoned Sleep of Me and My Loves (1965)

After WWII Goodwin collected prints by Kollwitz while she attempted to make sense of everything that had happened as the centuries old centres of humanism reduced themselves to death factories, rubble, and barbed wire. Later, this daughter of a men’s clothing manufacturer, made several works representing vests. One of these was made for Joseph Beuys who frequently appeared in a vest (1972).

Among her more underappreciated works, (which have a Beuysean quality), are the tarpaulins which I envision him creating (in felt) if she had already made them. It is not difficult to imagine Beuys hanging a large piece of felt in place of a screen but to absorb emotion rather than announce. Goodwin’s tarpaulins have a screen-like effect although they challenge the activity and noise of our screens with a silence that long ago was among the first fatalities of the cinematic screen. The tarpaulins emanate a silence that Beuys often deployed in his works (such as The Abandoned Sleep…) to pry open emotions which words have difficulty speaking. Goodwin’s tarpaulins are like silent screens of dried skin.

6. Goodwin Tarpaulin, No. 8 (1976)
National Gallery of Canada

Goodwin’s art is about the generalized form of terror and operate alongside of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil. Violence here is both random and expected. We are, after all, the homo-sapiens-sapiens with the weapon in our hand which survived by murdering our less violent evolutionary cousins. The less war-like hominids have all, long ago, disappeared.

7. Goodwin. Without Cease The Earth Faintly Trembles (1988)
Art Gallery of Ontario

In Goodwin’s work with human forms there is no clear space which separates good from evil. We do not know if the tormented human forms are themselves being punished for evil and, unlike Leon Golub’s works, there is no line dividing victim and tormentor. Perhaps Goodwin assumes we will sympathize with the broken human form and in this she attempts to use art to evoke a pity which is a central aspect of our humanity. This is however only one side of her art.

8. Leon Golub. Interrogation II (1981)

Goodwin’s images provoked pain, sympathy, anger, and frustration at our powerlessness to do anything. Our impotence mirrors that of Western governments who often ignore such activities in friendly countries and arbitrate the performance of atrocities in our interest. Goodwin focused our guilt by association through the image. Her figurative works insist that we enquire into the catastrophe of the social which has led to the event she portrays.

In her art the human form becomes a pure object inhabiting a dimension that is no longer quite human – an excentric dimension corresponding to the evaporation of the social around the scene. Quite often her figures endure their fate alone in conditions where the mind of the victim actively aids the terror of the event. The social (the monstrosity lurking just outside the frame), is conspicuous in her works by its absence, which are also works of sadness and loss, the disappearance of civility, and the monsters which occupy all periods of human time. Goodwin’s work presents humanity in its most radical forms – tortured, dead or dying, suffering, or in grave danger. These works inspire our deepest primordial fears of capture and torture which go back to the times when all proto humans were cannibals. Such things are usually not the concern of art and Goodwin is part of a significant effort to introduce them into the art of the latter half of the twentieth century. It is not surprising to find an artist of her vision in a century which was as violent as any other in the millennium but more disappointing due to the failure of its most precious humanist ideologies. Goodwin worked with this understanding until the end of her life.

After 2001 when even liberal experts on jurisprudence entered into the discussion of how the United States (the self-appointed world guardian of good, human rights, and freedom), could “legally” torture those it captured around the world, Goodwin’s art took on an added poignancy. Goodwin does not celebrate and her works both show a love for, and a loathing of, humanity. Her images were one artists means of expelling her own anguish, fear and anger.
 
At once Goodwin produces works of sympathy and then contempt for the humans behind the activities depicted. Her “swimmers” [such as Moving Towards Fire (1983)], sum up this enigmatic aspect of her work the best. Is this a person bleeding, drowning, searching, escaping, about to be caught? Her swimmer’s nakedness emphasizes not an autonomy but exposure. All at once this is a kind of womb image and very primeval drawing about the struggle for life which begins in the violence of being born. Whatever else it is, this is a work concerning our vulnerability.

9. Goodwin. Moving Towards Fire (1983)
Art Gallery of Ontario

Goodwin’s work is overwhelmingly about memory – memories of the body, what is done to it, what it does – a species which persists despite (and because of) what we do to each other. Her works open a crack and allow a narrow slip of light to shine in on what many would like to remain hidden and many others choose to ignore. We are a long way from the ideals we hold high and Goodwin’s work is not only about human survival but also human failing. No solution is proffered by Goodwin because there is none. She has, with her art, taken on the great challenge of how we speak to things like the holocaust, death camps, and torture, and her work tells us that while it is difficult, art can speak to these things in its own way. On her darker days the swimmers appear like something God has vomited out [see Untitled, Moving Toward Fire (1985)].

10. Goodwin. Untitled, Moving Toward Fire (1985)
Art Gallery of Ontario

Goodwin’s art like that of Golub, Goya, or dramatists such as Pinter and Beckett, thrives on uncertainty and an unspecified fear. Violence pervades the lives of women even if they do not experience it personally and we cannot forget that Goodwin was a woman. An interviewer once asked Goodwin if she was after chaos in her work. Goodwin replied: “I’m not after chaos, it’s after me”. Her works serve to both keep chaos at bay in her own life and allow her to resolve her conflicted emotions toward her own species.  

Goodwin had only one year of formal training as an artist and that was in printmaking. She (from Montreal) came to the art world on her own terms and they eventually found her irresistible. A generous gift from the artist in the mid 1990s saw the Art Gallery of Ontario come into possession of over 150 of her works. Matthew Teitelbaum (AGO), Canada’s leading curator for several years, said on her passing: “It would be impossible to think about Canadian art of the last 25 years without accounting for her achievement” (CBC.ca, accessed December 12, 2008). Some of her Canadian obituarists have tried to reclaim her for our country but she was an artist who defied possession by anything or anyone. Her work is a challenge to art beyond the confines of country and time – it is an art about what is shared. Art was Goodwin’s life long refuge and in it, this woman of few words, found a voice with which to speak back to the world.

11. Goodwin. Untitled (1985)

Betty Goodwin’s uncertain art did not attempt to mirror the real but to force open the monstrosity of the social order that has long depended, more than we care to acknowledge, upon the “realities” her work points toward (the cruelties we do not often see). Her works are a kind of remembrance. They concern mourning in their own way and mourning is always for that which is beyond our ability to recoup, to repair, make right, as violence is often beyond our ability to stop. Goodwin chose to gather, mark, and observe.

Death and mourning, never very far from the art of Betty Goodwin, have finally caught up to her. Her works, among the very best of our time by any artist, from any country, represent the violent and uncertain century she inhabited in a way that was truly monstrous. The inhuman occupies a vast territory in our history and our present and will no doubt continue to do so into the future. It was to this underside of humanity that Goodwin turned her sharp eyes and her work. Despite its being seized upon by the apologists of humanism her art shows us that the inhuman is integral to the human. She did not like this aspect of her species but her works record her devoted attempts to resolve it. Her art is monstrous because it had to be in its effort to resolve the monstrosity of the social order. This aspect of Goodwin’s work has long been undervalued by even her most admiring critics. The art of Betty Goodwin is a valuable chapter in the book of human suffering.

12. Betty Goodwin. (March 19, 1923 – December 1, 2008)

References

Jean Baudrillard (2001). The Uncollected Baudrillard (Edited by Gary Genosko). London: SAGE.

Jessica Bradley and Matthew Teitelbaum (1998). The Art of Betty Goodwin. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre.

Gabor Szilasi (1998). “Secrets and Lies” Journal of Canadian Art (Fall).