ABSTRACT
In the MOMA, Esther finds herself entranced by Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Its scenic depiction draws her in. It calms yet excites her, pleases yet disturbs, reassures yet troubles. Gazing upon its strange beauty, Esther is seduced by the painting and becomes its subject. She finds herself standing on the hill, looking out at the landscape, contemplating life and meditating upon death. Visual images have long served to link life and death. Both painting and photo-
graphy have been used to document both the most life-affirming moments-the birth of children and marriages-and the greatest instances of pain and destructiondeaths and wars. Photographs are used on government-issued identification and in official medical files to document who we are. Likewise, they are essential in documenting major incidents and events, whether for posterity or legal proceedings.
Personally, we often keep photographs of lost loved ones as reminders that they once lived and as a connection to them (for instance, see: Barthes 1980/1981). In art, most especially, the memento mori has been used since antiquity to encourage its viewers to consider the course of their lives by thinking about their eventual death. Within the context of these long-standing practices, van Gogh’s Starry Night
appears an ideal object for contemplating life and death. The dark and mysterious painting was created by an artist who would eventually commit suicide. Painted while van Gogh was hospitalized at the Saint-Rémy asylum, Starry Night marks the beginning of the final and most existential stage of his practice. The painting is particularly famous for being the first image that van Gogh painted directly from memory and imagination. It would, therefore, seem natural that this particular image would lead a viewer to consider van Gogh’s life and death and, by extension, his or her own. This association, however, does not seem to be the case for Esther. Although she
does think about van Gogh’s death, her encounter with the painting seems less abstract and far more personal than that of most viewers. While she recognizes the painting’s fame and artistic importance, these facts seem to be secondary to her experience. What the painting suggests to her instead-what it evokes in herappears to be of a highly personal nature. Esther describes feeling that the image’s sublime beauty was created solely for her. She ceases to perceive the painting as an object and instead experiences it as a view of a landscape, a unique and singular moment of perception in a dark and strangely illuminated world. Although surrounded by other gallery visitors, in this instance, this painting becomes hers alone. Yet what, exactly, is happening? Quite simply, the image seems to speak to Esther
in a deep and passionate way. It seems to address itself to Esther, not as a famous work of art, but as a simple, stunning image. In this moment, the highly recognized picture transcends its infamy and returns to its most intimate, original state: as a personal encounter-almost a conversation-between an image and its viewer. In this moment of transcendence, the image has become its converse, the opposite of its common mode of being. The word “converse,” the root of conversation, originates from the Latin conversare, meaning “to turn oneself about, to move to and fro, pass one’s life, dwell, abide, live somewhere, keep company with” (converse, n., Oxford English Dictionary, 2014). The image does not merely speak to Esther, showing her something of the world; something passes in between them that changes her. No longer a matter of viewer and viewed, the image infuses her, crawls into her. The painting becomes part of Esther as she becomes part of it. Esther dwells with the image and it dwells in Esther. It becomes intimately bound up with her and her life. And in that moment of dwelling, the image reveals its darkness and its light, its harshness and its subtlety, its tranquility and its torment, and it makes them hers. It shows her life and its shows her death. And it makes Esther realize that, on a night like this, she would like to die. Rather than the grand, universal gestures toward human finitude that artworks
easily provoke, the painting seems to draw forth an intimate awareness of Esther’s own personal existence. But while many of us have acknowledged the possibility
of our death at one point or another in the course of our lives, Esther’s realization is unlike most. It is not the case that she realizes that “I would die if [this or this] happened.” It is not a recognition of what would kill her or be too much to bear. In these cases, our recognition is marked by a giving up on life because of its terrible conditions; life beats us. Instead, Esther’s realization seems much quieter, kinder, gentler, and more profound. On this night, she would like to die. Dying becomes her wish. Esther sees in this painting a fulfilling death on a beautiful night of a wonderful life. Rather than a giving up on life, this type of recognition is a giving over of oneself. The ideal conditions of death seem met because the conditions of life have been fully realized. As Esther dwells with and within the painting, she encounters the perfect identity of life and death. She encounters the sublime.
