Looking, Imagining, Growing: Engaging with Tom de Freston’s Boxer Shorts

That red boxer shorts and socks do just as well as fig leaves for concealing
modesty in Tom de Freston’s recent work demonstrates that
modesty can also be a source of comedy. Monumental figures and
poses, which might otherwise inspire awe, instead elicit a grimace. Perhaps
this humour is not strictly an aesthetic virtue of his work. Even so, there
are many genuinely aesthetically relevant features that we might attend to:
representational properties, expressive properties, formal properties, and
art-historical properties. In this essay, however, I wish to draw attention
not to the aesthetic value of his work, but to its moral value. Whilst these
works might be experienced as part of a tradition that seeks to appreciate
art independently of our practical lives, I believe that there is a particular
way of reading some of the paintings which could offer the basis for moral
growth. This involves understanding the relationship between looking and
imagining in our experience of de Freston’s work – and not just in the experience
of an individual work, but in the experience of one work in light of
the earlier experience of other of his works.

De Freston’s interest in the history of art is never far below the painted
surface, and so it is appropriate that we begin by thinking about how artists
working in de Freston’s tradition have invited us to look at their paintings.
It does not take much imagination to work out how we are usually meant to
look at a picture. We are often meant to experience the depicted scene as if
we were looking through a window; as it would unfold around one standing
in our position, but within the depicted scene; as someone standing in my
shoes in the picture would perceive the scene around him.

In de Freston’s painting, The Last Romantic, we are confronted by a scene
which is dominated by the back of the male figure in the centre of the page.
The figure stands on some sort of platform or alter with arms outstretched
and head upraised as he gazes into – or beyond – the dark heavens at the
top of the page. There are some seven figures beneath him who face him
and us. They are all of different sizes, although their heads are all roughly
aligned near the horizon at the middle of the page. These heads are the key
to the picture. All are depicted with one side black, the other side white.
Some are looking up towards the head of the large figure on the platform,
who does not meet their gaze, but looks yet further up into heaven. Others
look away from him, either preoccupied with their own activities, or, in one
case, pointing to the large figure’s head without actually looking at him.
Wherever the figures are looking, we cannot help but to feel that
they are either looking at the central figure or that they are deliberately
avoiding him. The fractured black and white faces seem to be painfully and
purposefully craning their neck towards, or away from, him. But this does
not necessarily induce the spectator to crane his neck towards or away from
the central figure. Rather, the spectator feels inclined to try to raise himself
on tiptoe; to elevate himself up to the level of the central figure towards or
away from whom the other figures seem to orientate themselves. Indeed,
I suggest that the picture invites the spectator to identify with the central
figure; to imagine that he is that figure; and then to experience the drawing
from that figure’s perspective. Now we have the simultaneous experiences
of trying to gaze beyond into the elusive heavens whilst also being aware
that the ground beneath us is occupied by figures who are striving to engage
or avoid us. This reading of the picture demonstrates that the internal
spectator is a device which we might suppose that de Freston employs in
some of his pictures to good effect. He explicitly invites us to identify with
a figure in the picture and then experience it from that figure’s perspective.
In The Last of the Seducer, de Freston presents us with an image that is a
pared down version of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. The raft at sea con19
tains a single figure in the bottom left hand portion of the page. He has the
half-white, half-back face of the figures in The Last Romantic. The figure
maintains a mournful – albeit strangely stoical – look as he nurses a corpse
clad in red socks. The raft is also shared by another corpse whose head is
cut off by the right hand edge of the page. The raft is adrift and seemingly
drifts towards the horizon and away from the spectator. The figure’s gaze is
fixed towards us and away from the horizon towards which he is heading.
With whom or what is he fixated? Perhaps it is someone stranded in the
receding distance whom he drifts away from; someone who has no reason
to feel stoical as well as mournful, as he does, not have the possibility of
survival to entertain.

I have suggested that sometimes we are meant to experience a picture by
identifying with an internal spectator. Are we meant to do so in this case?
As there is only one figure in the painting, it would have to be that figure.
But I cannot see how we could identify with him. He confronts us too
directly for us to imagine being him looking at ourselves. However, as with
Wollheim’s reading of Manet, our imaginative capacity is not exhausted
by the depicted figures. Perhaps in this case, we are meant to imagine the
figure whom the raft is drifting away from. This figure is not represented,
but we might still locate him somewhere out of sight but within the scene,
perhaps somewhere behind where we stand when we look at the drawing.
We might then identify with this unrepresented internal spectator and
engage with the depicted figure’s mournful stoicism in the way in which the
internal spectator would engage with it as he watches the raft – and his own
hope for salvation in this life – drift away from him. Again we can make
use of the device of an internal spectator when engaging with de Freston’s
work, but in this case it requires the imagination to work harder: it has to
imagine the internal spectator who is not represented before it can imaginatively
identify with him.

Again we should ask why it is necessary to imagine a figure with whom
we identify when experiencing this picture, when it is perfectly possible to
experience the picture just in terms of what is in the picture. I am not going
to say that de Freston demands that we engage with his painting in this
way, and that a failure to do so is a failure to engage with the painting in
the way that he wants us to engage with it. But I am going to say that it is
a possible way of engaging with the picture; that this possibility is a legitimate
possibility; and that its legitimacy stems from the fact that de Freston
makes the possibility legitimate. The source of the legitimacy lies not so
much in what de Freston achieves in this picture, but in how our experience
of this picture relates to our experience of other pictures by him. And it is
at this point that I return to The Last Romantic. In that picture, I suggested
that we are presented with an internal spectator with whom we imaginatively
identify. What I now want to suggest is that when we experience The
Last of the Seducer, we might bring the experience of The Last Romantic to
the experience of The Last of the Seducer. Once we have found it rewarding
to identify imaginatively with the internal spectator in the first picture, we
are now ready to see the potential for imagining an internal spectator with
whom we can identify in the second picture. Just as we felt compelled to
identify imaginatively with the figure that the black and white faces were
looking at or away from in The Last Romantic, so we now feel compelled to
imagine the figure that the black and white face is drifting away from in The
Last of the Seducer, and imaginatively identify with this imagined internal
spectator.

The Last Romantic provide us with a basis for experiencing The Last of the
Seducer with the aid of an imagined internal spectator. With de Freston, as
with Manet, new visual experiences are possible when we attend not merely
to an individual work, but to the works as an oeuvre. New possibilities for
how we can experience an artist’s work arise when we appreciate it not on
its own, but in the broader context of our experience of more of the artist’s
work to which it relates.

I have suggested that, at least when I engage with some of de Freston’s
pictures, I can either experience them from my own point of view, or I can
imaginatively identify with a spectator in the picture – be that a represented
or unrepresented internal spectator. I have also suggested that at least in
the case of the unrepresented spectator, this possibility is only disclosed to
me when I engage with the picture in light of other pictures by de Freston
which I have previously experienced, and which open up a new possibility
for my experience of this picture.

This possibility might more readily be noticed as a possibility of another
art form: the novel. Just as we can experience Home, by Marilynne Robinson,
as a stand alone piece or a companion to Gilead, so we can experience
de Freston’s paintings individually or in light of his oeuvre. The experience
of de Freston’s picture with a depicted internal spectator can prepare
us to experience the later picture by imagining an unrepresented internal
spectator. That we have these alternatives in both cases is morally, as well as
aesthetically, important because we have similar alternatives in the personal
relationships of our practical life. This is the key to a further value of
art. Engaging with some works of art might offer a special sort of moral
education. It offers us the possibility for personal growth; for learning that
imagination and context can enable us to see things in new ways. If we can
then translate this awareness into our personal relationships, we find that
the looking and imagining in our experience of pictures can enable us to
grow in our experience of other people. In this way, art can provide a preparation
for life. It can make us aware that we can use imagination to engage
with people in new ways, and to appreciate that sometimes the broader
context commends our doing this. So one important value of de Freston’s
art is the possibility that he offers us for exercising our visual and imaginative
capacities in a way that can be redeployed to promote our moral growth
in practical life.

Damien Freeman has recently completed a PhD thesis, “On the Emotional
Experience of Art”, a philosophical study of the nature and value
of the special emotional experience that art offers, at Magdalene College,
Cambridge.