An Absence of Noise

The absence of noise is different from silence.  It is something that is particular to visual material, it is present in painting and in the silent films of the early 20th century.  Perhaps the most suitable example in moving image is the Eisenstein film which famously influenced Francis Bacon, The Battleship Potemkin, in which occurred the scream, significant in many of Bacon’s images.  The absence of noise is a powerful apparatus for purely visual imagery because when skillfully managed, it creates an imbalance that adds to the impact of a work.  Harmony is a strange word to use in the description of a painting and it is often misrepresented.  The greatest of compositions find their harmony in a series of carefully manipulated inbalances, creating tension as the eye (or, significantly, the eyes mind) is unable to rest and an energy is realised.  This imbalance does not only have to be developed through the direction of shapes and lines and the positioning of colours, it can also be found in the understanding of how an image can manipulate the psychology of a viewer.

Bacon was always a painter of psychological states, the scream is one example of how he accessed the mind of the post-war nation.  Its power lies in the expectancy of a noise to follow, which never does.  We see the scream and we tense up in the wait of some horrible primal yelp, when this doesn’t arrive an imbalance is provoked that is never resolved and so the eye’s mind attempts  to fill the space by taking closer account of this particular muscle spasm, by scanning the flesh/paint, the horror of the paint matter and the morbid fascination with the materiality of the flesh are both revealed.  It is almost like the viewer is put in place of the surgeon-painter, objectively prodding and peeling the matter, but we are not surgeons and the process is not objective for us, we see the horror of the moment in the result of the reaction (the scream). 

Jan Vermeers ouevre is in stark contrast to the volume of Bacons, however, the absence of noise plays a similarly important role.  Before we even take into account the role sound plays in his work, it is clear Vermeer was a master of light and the art of considered composition.  However, it is the role of sound (or lack of) which is where we find he rises above his contemporaries.  If I use one of his greatest works, The Milkmaid, as an example to best illustrate my point.  It has great power within the silence of the act and revels in the considered observation of watching a woman concentrating intently on pouring milk into a bowl.  Its success comes from drawing the viewer into the act, by painting the milkmaid within the isolation of her surroundings, the viewer is made aware of how silent the room must be, and by becoming aware of the silence in the image we notice the absence of the only sound that should be present, which is the sound of the milk pouring into the bowl.  This is how the necessary inbalance is created.  The only word one can use to describe the painting is that it is a meditation on a single act and everything within the painters arsenal is used to describe the act, this, added to the fact that the highlights on the pouring liquid seem to dance with the musicality of the sound, make the abscence of noise all the more pertinent.