Songs of Innocence and Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul
Edward Rubin
Joel-Peter Witkin, "Man with Dog"
As John Wood so forcefully states in his introductory essay to Songs of Innocence and Experience, a newly published book which pairs William Blake’s poems with Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs, "No visual artist since Blake himself is better suited to illustrate Blake’s Songs than Joel-Peter Witkin." While this statement is both bold and blunt, Professor Woods posits, in the most beautiful prose, a near irrefutable argument: that William Blake and the 65-year-old Witkin, in thought and belief, though separated by some two centuries, is a marriage made in heaven. Woods? assessment of the project was supported by Witkin himself, who used words that could of as easily fall from Blake’s own tongue, "Christ is my life. My work is prayer. I live to create images of the souls redemption."
Originally published in two parts, Songs of Innocence and Experience was written, illustrated and first printed by William Blake (1757-1828), the great English engraver, artist, mystic and social critic, in 1789 and 1794, respectively. These are among Blake’s most accessible and popular writings. As a social critic and a religious dissenter, Blake railed against state and church. The government, he wrote, "reduces man to want and then gives with pomp and ceremony." The church was no better; it "thwarts Christ" at every turn." England, he liked to say "is not interested in whether man has talent and genius but whether he is passive and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen’s opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved." Having experienced extreme poverty himself, Blake knew what he was talking about. The poems in Songs contain the seeds if not the kernels of Blake’s most trenchant ideas, ones that he was to return to again and again in his work.
Blake’s writings, indeed, his worldview was shaped in a large part by religion, and more specifically, by Swedenborg’s ideas. Both Blake and Swedenborg believed in direct mystical communication between the world and the spiritual realm and the affirmation of Christ as the true God. Blake?s world was also shaped by the Industrial and French Revolutions, which brought to the continent, war, poverty, riots and hangings, child abuse, suppression and government censorship, the latter, at times, forcing the artist to temper his tongue, recant his rantings and to write in code. Considered a genius by some and crazy by others, Blake was a believer in miracles, claiming at age four to have seen God, at eight, a tree filled with angel, and later, a funeral of fairies. As he told his friends freely, he conversed with spirits, communed with the Archangel Gabriel and spoke with Michelangelo. For Blake, imagination was everything. He asserted, the man who never in his mind and thoughts traveled to Heaven was no artist.
The 19 poems found in Songs of Innocence, the first part of this book, as some scholars suggest, written first for children and actually sung by the artist, evoke a predominantly pastoral world, a world free from the dualisms of adult consciousness. The speakers of these poems?babies, children and adults, birds, insects and animals?speak from a sense of protection, of safety, of being in an ordered universe. The second section of the book, the 26 poems in Experience, published six years after Innocence, with particular attention paid to corruption and social injustice, take a much darker view of life. Here we find Songs of the unprotected, songs of betrayal or at least a sense of betrayal and laments of victims. They are cries of honest indignation and social protest. The voice is that of the Bard, the God-touched prophet poet himself.
The genesis of Joel-Peter Witkin?s project to illustrate Blake’s Songs originated in a conversation between the publisher and Mark Dimunation, the Head of Rare Book & Special Collections at the Library of Congress. The result is a double-edged sword. On the aye side, Blake and Witkin, iconoclasts and superb technicians in their field, do share similar visions. As Professor Wood points out, both highly imaginative artists consecrated their life to changing matter into spirit. Their art is a dialogue with the infinite and the basis of their work, as Witkin readily acknowledges, is ultimately "the despair of the soul."
On the neigh side, their visual images, often, literally the difference between night and day, could not be more oppositional. Blake?s illustrations of his own Song poems, particularly in his Innocence poems, tend to be gentle, framed with flowery, fanciful vines surrounded poems and drawings. Even when Blake is more darkly serious, even chilling?as in his Experience poems, when all innocence is lost?illustration and text support each other naturally.
Witkin’s photographic tableaus are of a different fancy. Often fevered and overwrought with Baroque excess, they are fraught with hermaphrodites, fetuses (in and out of jars), dead bodies, parts of bodies, amputees and tortured bodies being. Nearly half of the photographs in this book are of this ilk. Perhaps Witkin is saying, in the strongest terms that he can muster, that we are no longer innocent. Look how far we have come. More to the point, however beautifully composed, Witkin’s images do little to illuminate the poetry of Blake. And Blake’s poetry does nothing to enhance our appreciation of Witkin’s work. Since this book, at $275, is geared primarily towards serious Witkin collectors, few will notice, less will care.
The very first Witkin photograph in the Innocence section of the book, is Still Life, Mexico. Here we see a simple table laden with a fish, grapes, bread, a peach and a severed leg. It is, however odd the juxtaposition, a classically beautiful image. It is also a harbinger of things to come. In The Lamb, one of Blake’s most tender poems, the closing line is "Little Lamb God Bless thee." Blake’s illustration shows a shepherd peacefully tending his flock. Witkin gives us the The Kiss, the head of a dead man, which, having been sawed in half, is made to kiss the other half of its own face. It is a painful and difficult picture. One critic called it immoral.
In The Chimney Sweeper, a child whose parents have apprenticed him to a chimney sweeper, a brutal profession that brought about cause lung disease and cancer, is left alone to lament his fate. Blake’s image is that of a dark, beaten figure, slinking about the page. Witkin’s take on the poem?an S & M sensibility??features a nude man whose testicles are tied by a rope and attached to a heavy weight that is hovering above his face. The photo’s title reads Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a Chrushed Face. What they have in common according to Woods, is "the romance of pain." Quite an interpretive stretch. In A Little Girl Lost, written for "Children of the Future Age" so that they know that in Blake’s time "Love! sweet Love!" was "thought a crime", a young maiden, whose "parents were afar," gives herself freely to a youth in an open field. The photo to represent this? A masked naked woman about to be straddled by a horse. She is holding his long, large and fully erect penis. The title, A Day in the County, is both ironic and funny. The photo is indeed deliciously salacious, however, I would venture a guess, that Witkin’s reading, is not exactly what Blake, who was something of an early champion of sexual freedom, had in mind.
The last section of the book, 11 free-standing photographs without any poems?many of which were recently on view at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Chelsea?appear something of an afterthought, like a tacked on ending of a book or movie. However, this section does contain one of Witkin?s most beautiful and complex photographs, Eve Knighting Daguerre. It is a wondrous tableau of uncommon beauty. Peopled with a live, fully limbed, nude woman and man, countless intriguing images that keep the eye both glued and searching, and a nineteenth century camera that appears to be recording the scene along with the viewer, is reminiscent of a princely Cabinet of Wonders. The photographer, who does all of his own printing, has further embellished the photograph, a signature of his, by manipulating the negative with scratchings and markings. One could almost swear that the photograph is a vintage Daguerre. It is no mistake that Eve is the photo chosen to grace the book’s cover. It is a lovely way to both start and end this book.
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Photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin
Edited and with Introduction by John Wood
21ST:Publishers of Fine Art Photography Books
ISBN 1-892733-11-0
