The Gospel According to Luke holds the dubious honour of establishing a precedent for escaping chores. In it, Jesus of Nazareth comes to a village where he is welcomed to dinner at the home of a woman named Martha. While Martha prepares dinner, her sister Mary sits listening to their guest, a perceived indolence that leads the homeowner to appeal to Jesus. Jesus’ verdict is unlikely however to have offered her immediate relief. ‘Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things’, he responds, ‘but one thing is needful, and Mary has chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her’.
The plight of the aggrieved Martha is certain to elicit empathy from readers recalling memories of share houses, but the crux of drama is more communal still. The story is a metaphor for what Saint Augustine identified in Martha and Mary as a tension between the temporal life of work and activity (viva active) and the life spent searching for spiritual victual (viva contemplative).
This negotiation between nourishing the spiritual and the corporeal has been the cornerstone of still life painting since the Golden Age and its meeting place is the bodegone, a tradition famously translated into image by Diego Velazquez’s Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary 1618. Here Velazquez renders a still life of fish, garlic, eggs and chilli with such naturalism that not only can we read ourselves as participants in the scene, but understand that through these items he has in part recorded his birthplace, the port city of Seville.
Velazquez’s genius was in linking the contemporary to the historical. An ambiguous fracturing of pictorial space in the background (is it an opening in the wall, a painting, or a mirror?) connects this kitchen scene with the biblical story. This spatial illusion allows us to juggle contemporary and mythological time to read the sulking maid and her chastising superior as a contemplation of the transience of life.
Ricky Swallow’s remarkable sculpture Killing time 2003-4 inhabits the space between past and present opened by Velazquez. Like Velazquez’s still life, Killing time documents a certain time and place. Each of the objects is an element from Swallow’s childhood memory, reconstructed in the form of the sea creatures that he caught and ate growing up in the seaside town of San Remo, Victoria.
Though the work has a veneer of sterility, the presence of the artist and the record of his time and effort can also be read in marks left by the sculptor’s tools on the carved surfaces and cavities of the creatures. These traces evoke a partial narrative that allows the viewer to reconstruct Swallow’s first encounters with these creatures that are otherwise hidden by the final product: the hours spent in the act of baiting and entrapping his prey, perhaps a slow death by asphyxiation, the scraping of scales, the cleaning and gutting of fish, the ripping of shells from crustaceans.
Yet the astonishing naturalism Swallow achieves is not merely the product or record of his personal memory. Rather, it is in part an elaborate game played between artist and spectator. A specially designed lighting system forms part of the work, creating shadows in the cavities of creatures and the folds of the cloth, hinting at the painterly tradition Swallow references. In this artifice he recalls the mythological contest between the 5th century Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis’ trompe l’oeil painting of grapes was said to have lured birds, but he lost out to his rival after attempting to unveil a painted curtain. Here, the illuminated folds of Swallow’s tablecloth reveal that even the physical traces of personal experience can be elaborate constructions.
The triumph of Parrhasius was to show that it possible to be trapped by an illusion even in the process of uncovering one and just as Parrhasius tempted Zeuxis with a curtain, Swallow dares us in viewing his work to break the final barrier between the metaphysical and the real. A half-peeled orange and knife hang precariously on a table edge, almost teasing the viewer to draw them, Excalibur-like, from the sculpture.
It is this tension between reality and its record that allows us to move from Swallow’s personal memories to reflect on our own morality and mortality. Contemplating the work, we become aware that a larger cycle of life and death goes on both simultaneously with and unaware of our own; that societies and identities are constructed through a collection of remembered and re-presented experiences. Just as Luke borrowed from Mark for his chronology, Swallow’s memories and ours intertwine with ideas and traditions that extend through Velazquez to Zeuxis and Parrhasius before him.
Ultimately, to stand in front of Swallow’s table is to stand in the house of Martha and Mary. An encounter with the work is a sobering reminder that both Swallow, viva active working on the object and us, viva contemplative in admiration of it, are in some sense merely killing time. The enduring message that Swallow leaves us is that it is how memories are constructed that transforms personal experiences from the profane to the sacred.
Diego Velázquez, ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’, 1618
Publication: Look, July, 2012.