“I BUY these tuxedoes 30 and 40 at a time in Lower Manhattan, impregnate them with plastic, shape them, they usually grow to be hard and everlasting. Five or six tuxedoes could also be utilized in a single work. Some I exploit just about as is; others I rip apart and shred in order that they grow to be almost unrecognisable. . . This informality and casualness relates it to folk sculpture — to the dummy, the effigy, the scarecrow.”
The abstract expressionist artists of Nineteen Fifties and ’60s New York were renowned for seeking out latest (often, in reality, old, discarded) materials, from which to create an art of the unexpected, which might hit the viewer with a heightened emotional kick. Few were more adventurous in these quests for the unconventional than Robert Mallary who, one Wednesday in May 1962, turned 5 – 6 ripped-apart and shredded dinner jackets into this monumental (nearly nine-foot-high) cloth and polyester Crucifixion.
THE immediate stimulus for its making was Mallary’s response to the funeral service of a fellow artist, Franz Kline. He had been moved by the High Episcopalian ceremony, and was especially struck by its impersonality: the incontrovertible fact that, in the middle of it, Kline’s name had been barely mentioned; the nice ritual — articulating sin, death, life, hope — had been on a plane far above any individual existence. It gave the impression to be about all humanity. Leaving the church, he returned to the studio and set to work.
The wider context for Mallary’s Crucifixion was also on a cosmic plane: the true, growing threat of nuclear war between the United States and the USSR, which was to come back to a head just a couple of months later within the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Like many others, Mallary saw this because the supreme ethical challenge of the day, distilling because it did into one immediate, all-embracing danger the issues of evil, greed, violence, and the incorrect use of power.
Crucifixion is the culmination of a series of cloth sculptures on which Mallary had been working, to explore this aspect of our human predicament. As he put it, “There is on this work no specific ideological position . . . slightly, a conception of the character of man. The focus is on evil . . . because there’s the basis of our difficulties.” It will not be entirely a coincidence that, also in October 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened.
IF AT first sight surprising, the alternative of fabric seems to be wealthy in meaning. In the Jewish tradition of mourning, rending garments is a ritual act of lament, grief, or anger, and a tear over the center is particularly powerful. At the foot of the cross, lots are solid over the seamless tunic that must not be torn. Finally, within the tomb, it’s the garments and not using a body that talk of the resurrection.
Marble and bronze — materials of the wealthy — are ill-fitted to point out us squalor. Used from antiquity to rejoice the great thing about the human form, they often struggle to hold the pain and humiliation of a felon’s public death. Cloth, then again. . . Once ripped apart, the dinner jackets lose all promise of worldly status or pleasure. When dipped in liquid polyester, the fabric will fall, or will be shaped, into drapery of great visual power and emotional intensity. Torn, stretched rags are transformed into flayed skin and taut, aching sinews; they will even look like liquid. Mallary himself was conscious of echoes of Grünewald and Goya.
We involuntarily read these shreds as clothes; so we all know that this can be a story about human motion and bodily pain, although there is no such thing as a specific human presence. And there’s an additional, disconcerting appropriateness in all this for a meditation on the crucifixion. As Mallary observed within the opening quotation, bits of old clothes assembled in this fashion have unavoidable connotations of the effigy and the dummy — figures of mockery and abuse, the butt of jokes, designed to ask derision, even violence, from people who pass by. Like Christ on the cross.
THIS is a rare type of image: a cross with clothes but not a body; a crucifixion without the figure of Christ. That, I feel, makes it particularly rewarding to contemplate today, in our post-Christian British society, since it raises a fundamental query. If, like most of our fellow residents, we see Jesus not as divine, but merely a terrific teacher put to death by religious and political authorities for propounding ideas that threatened their power, what might his crucifixion mean to us now? Beyond deploring an(other) instance of past oppression, why should anybody outside the Church, or from one other faith tradition, still care?
It was an issue much within the air even in secular circles in 1962, a part of the capacious interfaith (and never just inter-Church) debates concerning the role and meaning of the Holy Spirit which led as much as the Second Vatican Council. Prominent in those conversations were the Texas-based John and Dominique de Menil, then constructing their outstanding collection of art reflecting the spiritual traditions of various world cultures. Now housed within the Menil Foundation, Houston, in Texas, it will eventually contain Mediterranean, African, and Oceanian masterpieces from the past, alongside works by leading modern artists with no specific faith affiliation — most famously, the meditative abstract paintings of Mark Rothko. The Rothko chapel, erected just yards from the Foundation, is a monument to their quest for spiritual truths which may speak to the world. It was the de Menils who bought Mallary’s Crucifixion.
AND to me that is sensible, because I feel Mallary here has elevated Jesus’s death from historical fact to universal mythic truth. This piece will not be just concerning the death of 1 person, once. It is about something that was, is, and possibly ever shall be: the struggle for the fantastic freedom of the youngsters of God being defeated by the powers of the world, and the leader of that struggle put to death — defeated, but, emphatically, not destroyed, because the perfect of that glorious liberty can’t be killed, but will continue to exist, to be embodied and eliminated many times. It is a reading of the crucifixion which supplies a intending to Easter far beyond the confines of the religion.
In Mallary’s words, “The tattered and shredded fabrics actually suggest decay and disintegration. The folds hang within the quiet suspension of death. But working against these are the energetic diagonals, the taut contours and fast-moving surfaces. For me, at the least, these suggest a quickening of recent life — the Resurrection.”
The cycle of ideals crushed in death, reborn in hope: the recurrent tragedy of humanity. Outside the Rothko chapel, the Menil Foundation later erected Barnett Newman’s memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr, murdered in 1968. Later still, it established an award to honour Óscar Romero, gunned down on the altar in 1980. Mallary’s Crucifixion of torn tuxedos, accomplished years earlier, is a meditation on those deaths, too.
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the creator of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
