Leon Golub: Bite Your Tongue (VAULT Magazine, 2015)

 

 

 

 Leon Golub, Bite Your Tongue
Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London, 2015.

I first discovered Leon Golub’s paintings as an art student in the late 1970s, when I saw some of his pictures reproduced in a magazine. At that time his images of soldiers and other figures interested me but I felt somehow detached from them. After all, what experience did I yet have of other people’s inhumanity – or even my own? Television news reports of wars and invasions were still a fairly abstract background hum to my life at that early stage. It is only in the past few years, now that I am middle-aged, that I have had the opportunity to see Golub’s paintings in the flesh.  With the added benefit of life experience, they now appear rich and significant, terrible and deeply tragic. They move me.

This survey exhibition, Bite Your Tongue, at the Serpentine Gallery, is the first time that the artist’s work has been shown in London since 2000. The early works deal with mythological subject matter, beginning with the creepy ‘The Bug (Shaman)’ (1952), in which an abstracted arachnoid creature lurches towards us out of the dark, goggle-eyed, with many flailing arms. The canvas is not stretched but pinned onto its support board - an anti-technique that Golub utilised over his entire career. It gives the pictures an immediacy and urgency which works to great effect – particularly in the later, huge, unstretched works. Likewise, ‘Poised Sphinx’ (1954) is painted on a rough slab of board, nailed onto a support. This mythological creature crouches like a dog, its human head, lost in sleep, reminiscent of a dreamy Odilon Redon creation. Its prominent erection portends its carnal desires should it ever awaken. The scumbled paint is abrasive, but oddly beautiful.

In the next room one is confronted by two of a series that Golub produced in the late ‘60s. In the first of these, ‘Gigantomachy II’ (1966), eleven naked Titans are engaged in a brutal battle across an enormous unstretched canvas. They are set in some kind of empty, muddy wasteland and they claw and grapple with each other. They appear spectral and ‘transparent’ as they disintegrate into the very brush marks that daub them. The companion-piece is ‘Gigantomachy IV’ (1967), in which just three of the giants do battle: one is on his knees, about to receive a smashing blow to his head from the central figure’s fist, which is as massive as a rock. This is bare-bones painting, which makes no concession to gracefulness of touch or lusciousness of paint. It is raw, ugly and uncompromising, and appropriately so.

 At the end of the 1960s Golub switched from the mythological to the actual in a series of large works he made about the Vietnam War. In ‘Napalm IV’ (1969) we are presented with a fractured narrative about that most inhumane tool of war, the barbaric flaming gel of the title. A naked man runs into the picture from the right towards a figure writhing in agony in the lower-left corner. The canvas has been roughly hacked and its ragged bottom edge conveys violence just as powerfully as the imagery. Another section of canvas has been cut away from across the dying figure, making invisible whatever appalling suffering is surely going on underneath. The empty, black/red landscape is burnt and sore. It is the colour of a picked scab. It is a hellish, deeply affecting painting.  

                                Leon Golub, Mercenaries lV, 1980
 

Golub’s works from the 1970s and ‘80s continued to depict scenes based on actual trouble spots around the world. The figures became more ‘realistic’, to the degree that his suitably awkward drawing can be called so. In ‘Mercenaries IV’ (1980), five men are arranged across a blood-red ground. The canvas is enormous so the figures are larger than life-size. Two of the men hold military weapons. One beefy lug in a flak-jacket yells across at another man. There is something heated going down. The men appear to be on the same side but there is a sense of imminent dissolution for this band of ‘brothers’. It is an intimidating, testosterone-soaked image that suggests marauding, and killing, and rampaging sexual ‘entitlement’. 

 

                               Leon Golub, Interrogation lll, 1981.
 

One of the most uncompromising images in the exhibition is ‘Interrogation III’, (1981), in which two uniformed men are interrogating a woman in some unspecified setting.  She is naked and seated in the most vulnerable position conceivable. Duct tape covers her eyes and mouth and her hands are bound. Her clothing hangs beside her on a kind of work bench. The image assaults the viewer, not just because of its literal horror but because we have somehow become implicated in the hideous scene being enacted. We watch. We gaze. We are there with them in that blank room, and we speculate what will happen next as the dreadful scene plays itself out to its inevitable, horrible conclusion. 

Leon Golub, White Squad lV (El Salvador), 1983.

‘White Squad IV (El Salvador)’ (1983) also implicates the viewer. Here, a uniformed man in shiny military boots, pistol gripped in his right hand, turns to look at us as he inspects the placement of a man’s corpse in the trunk of a car. Are we part of the man’s team, or have we stumbled across this scene by accident? Will we be the next dead body in a car boot?

Golub’s work seems just as relevant now as when he made it. It horribly reflects our current situation. In a world where innocent refugees are imprisoned and denied their human rights; where police forces are becoming militarised and unaccountable; where the powerful are becoming more brutal, how readily we accept the injustices being dealt out to ourselves and others on a daily basis. How willingly we roll over with blind eyes. Orwell wrote in 1984: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." In this exhibition Golub shows us that we have been living that very future for some time. And that is something in which we are all implicated.