A version of the following appeared in ArtUS magazine, December 2003

The Devil's Bridge

From at least the 12th to the latter part of the 19th Century, the principal route from Northern Europe to Italy was through the precarious St. Gotthard's pass, in what is today modern Switzerland. The Reuss River, which runs through this section of the Alps, was initially only passable via a series of hanging bridges, made mostly of wood, which seemed all too often to be the target of the frequent avalanches the area is known for. A sturdier stone bridge replaced these in 1198 and in turn was replaced by a another in the 19th Century. A modern concrete bridge replaced that, and finally, a tunnel replaced them all in the 1980s.

St. Gotthard, for whom the pass is named, was a Benedictine monk who was known for his strictness in religious orders and his tender care of the poor. He was bishop of Hildesheim from 1022 until his death in 1038 and canonized by Pope Innocent II in 1131. St. Gotthard is often depicted hanging his cloak on a sunbeam and is invoked against gallstones.

Building bridges is a notoriously difficult business. A legend surrounding the one of St. Gotthard's Pass, known as the "Devil's Bridge," goes something like this:

A Swiss herdsman with a sweetheart on the other side of the pass had either to make his way across the Reuss with great difficulty or to take a long detour around it every time he went to see her. Irritated and impatient with the treacherous paths his love required, he shouted, "I wish that the Devil were here to make me a bridge!" Not one to ignore the cries of suffering mortals, the Devil appeared beside him and said, "If you promise me the first being that walks across, I will build you your bridge." The herdsman agreed and the bridge materialized instantly. However, the clever herdsman, knowing full well the Evil One's thirst for Christian souls, drove a chamois across the bridge ahead of himself, thereby being the second one across. The Devil, enraged at being thus deceived, ripped the hapless animal apart and threw the bloody pieces from the precipice before departing petulantly for Hell.

While giving a gallery talk about my most recent exhibition last fall, I was asked about my reluctance to include obvious signifiers of contemporary life in my paintings. A rather perceptive student pointed out that other young artists whose work could be deemed similar to my own went to great pains to assure the viewer they were presenting 21st Century productions while I seemed indifferent to foregrounding my date mark. Acknowledging the truth of his observation, I replied, "Well, what's time?!" This defensive response, though flippant, really did go right to the heart of a question that seems to have plagued me with persistence. It's a sort of genre question, really. What subject matter is appropriate for so-called "contemporary" art? Better yet, if a work fails to deliver the requisite signs of the times, how could it, regardless of its author's place in a consensual reality of our own space-time continuum, lay any claim to being within the category of contemporary art at all?

For an artist like myself, a painter fond of ruined architecture, twisted flora and crepuscular skies (all of which still exist, by the way), the quick and painful answer to this question seems to be that contemporary art is by necessity a pop art. Unfortunately for many of us, we seem to be enmired in a condition in which there is no other culture than pop culture. Not only that, pop culture can only be reasonably represented, it seems, by its most conspicuous and dramatic manifestations - disasters, violence, technology, fashion, celebrity, consumerism, etc.

While physicists seem able not only to think in but also to act in dozens of dimensions, we worried solipsists of the art fiefdom seem to be having a lot of trouble with the fourth, namely time. While our science brethren tour wormholes and talk string theory, art school students are deluged with questions like, "What does this mean after 9/11?" or, "But what about the Internet?" Asked to deal posthumously with things like television or nuclear warfare, previously vaunted thinkers like Walter Benjamin or Friedrich Nietzsche become bumbling and naive. How will we in turn deal with future generations who dwell on Mars or for whom the inter-dimensional is a yawn?

What better role can there be for the Devil than as the intermediary between what we want and where we are? What better bridge builder than the one for whom time has no meaning?

For the 19th Century German painter Carl Blechen, the contemporary condition was one of progression, or rather, that "progress" is by necessity coterminous with the pasts that surround it. In his 1833 painting, "The Building of Devil's Bridge", we see not only the construction of the new in the shadow of the old, but, like light and shade, work and sleep continue along the same route. In the cool shadows of the latest engineering feat, the workmen nap, surrounded by boards, tools, and the like, mute and idle to their purpose of construction, arrested in a moment of technological stasis. What thus is sleep devoid of dreams than a hole punched in time? A momentary redaction in the convention of the forward, whatever "now" is supposed to be? Is not the loss of consciousness a most obvious point at which our observation of the movement of the sun, moon and stars is rendered moot? Perhaps the Devil's Bridge only completes itself in a long blink of an eye, in the out-of-time space when the electric brains of men hum nearly silently, regulating, waiting, suspended.

Like most artists of his era, indeed like most European artists from the Renaissance on, Blechen made at least one trip to Italy, the land of light and masterpieces, early in his career. He, too, then, traversed the Devil's Bridge. Perhaps he was on his way back to the chilly North, oil sketches of the harshly illumined South (his critics referred to his use of light in the Italianate paintings as "scalping") in tow. This former scene painter for the Königstadter Theater, a sort of Heinrich Heine of the brush, had little more than a decade as an artist until he was plunged into incurable madness and institutionalization at the age of 35.

Perhaps it is mad to find the contemporary in sleep, in out-of-time, in those spaces where the hubris of moving forward is bled through with the ruins of the never-quite-past. Dreamings, sidereal shifts, isn't the light of the stars above already millions of years old before we can even see it? The lifetime of an art object far exceeds that of a house cat or the largest slow moving tortoise. In the 171 years between myself and Blechen's painting, generations of eyes have let their glances permeate its surface. Eyes like mine, bombarded by cathode rays and tungsten glare, cannot see the same things as eyes that strained in candlelight over ink and quill. Does a surface reflect these things? Do its pigments, swaddled in varnish like flies in amber, register the glitches and shifts of thoughts and seens and beens? What of this skin, this membrane so much like our own, a product of a consciousness extending through the ether, does it breathe back our gaze? Surely it must. What of this Devil's bridge, forever under construction, between our thoughts and the things that absorb them?

I would be the last person to argue that the nouveau-pop objets of so much contemporary art are inappropriate for our little moment of corporate authoritarianism. It is, no doubt, the most obvious route to take in the age of Pope Andy. But what of experiences outside the supermarket? What of the mall's dark twin, that vast necropolis of museums, libraries, thoughts and words past and passing, oozing through the membrane of the present? Are not these things with us still?

Maybe the Devil's Bridge passes over the torrent of things we no longer know, or perhaps haven't yet thought. This Reuss of consciousness, forever running to the sea, as all rivers eventually must, into the briny unknowing of the transpersonal, the out of mind, is always treacherous. We, the sleeping workers of Blechen's canvas, arrested in a shade soon to be passing, wait. Not yet dreaming, no longer working, we are suspended. The present, past and possible futures, all are forgettings, triggers of orientation to start up again with the prick of the mid-day sun. I'll hazard a bet that the Devil oft cozies up to us sleepers, whispering sulfurously in the no-time, between what we want and where we are. Building bridges is a difficult business.