Jake Attree
Architects of Harm
2010/11, Oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5cm
Architects of Harm
The fierce intensity of narrative contained in Euripides ’s “Medea” might
seem to some a contentious source of inspiration for a body of work:
Medea was the initial impetus for these new paintings and oil pastels
but that impetus arose out of chance more than any sense of conscious
choice on my part.
The winter of 2010 was so cold (I’m sure you remember), that simply
being in my studio was something of a challenge – quite apart from
any attempt to be in there long enough to make work! I knew that the
theatre company, Northern Broadsides (based at Dean Clough in Halifax,
as I am) were rehearsing a new play, I didn’t know what play but
I asked Barrie Rutter, their Artistic Director, if I could draw
them, in the hope that their rehearsal space would be a little warmer
than my studio. Barrie kindly consented, as he has done before, and so
it was arranged that I would sit in unobtrusively on rehearsals and make
drawings of the company working through Tom Paulin’s new translation
of “Medea”; Barrie was directing and playing the parts of
King Creon and the messenger. .And, so, this new body of work began,
as it so often does, in a small sketchbook. After perhaps two weeks’ of
drawing, I began to make paintings in the aforesaid, freezing studio,
which speaks of a kind of commitment, or a kind of stupidity, depending
on one’s point of view.
As the rehearsals progressed, so did my drawings – in terms of
quantity at least – and I felt I was gaining some insights into
the play. Medea is brought to Corinth by her husband, Jason, from her
remote homeland (probably what we now know as Georgia). She is then abandoned
by the opportunistic Jason, as he is seduced by the offer of royal patronage
and the hand of the Corinthian princess in marriage. Medea’s frighteningly,
if understandably, extreme reactions to these events lead to her banishment;
so we have the concepts of a foreign woman abandoned, and then banished,
left homeless and stateless – all concepts that have a significant
level of pertinence today.
We then come to the pivotal idea behind the play, Medea’s decision
to wreak revenge on Jason for her humiliation and hurt through the killing
by her of their two sons, making Medea the template for all subsequent
murder tragedies: we see the protagonist deciding, after long internal
debate, to kill and then following through and carrying out that decision.
Is Medea mad, or bad, or both? Has she been driven to these actions by
the deceit and disloyalty of Jason? (And what of Raskolnikov and Hamlet
and their actions?)
I was also struck by the Nietzschean concept of the will to power that
is evident in the play: Medea conceives of this dreadful idea which is
abhorrent to the chorus, her nurse, and herself in her more lucid moments
but, having conceived of the plan, she is bound to carry it out. As in
all Greek tragedy, she is pursued by her destiny, hers being the ultimate
tragedy.
So, what comfort or redemption is there in art that visits a narrative
of such darkness upon us? Well, the audience are moved, shocked and horrified
all at once, and come out of the performance purged back into life, as
Francis Bacon put it. The beauty of the language may compensate,
one could argue, for the horror of that which it describes.
I did not want to make work that was a narrative illustration of the
play I had been making drawings of. I wanted, rather, the subject (Medea)
to be a pretext for making new paintings and drawings. I aspired to make
work that at least attempted to carry the emotional impact of the text
I had been hearing, expressed with the same kind of lyricism.
Hopelessly ambitious, I know, but the beauty of the language and the
relevance of the ideas held within the text to our own times seemed to
great an opportunity to dismiss, and creatively cowardly to avoid; it
also seemed pertinent, given the play’s origins, that the opportunity
should come about by chance.
Jake Attree 2011
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