Myth and Memory

By Eleanor Heartney in Andre Zarre Gallery, 1997

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In the past, Despo Magoni has explored the power plays that define the ever shifting balance of power in the gender wars. A series of works based on the game of chess, for instance, liberated the Queen from her secondary status as protector of the King. Free to pursue her own interests, she bounded freely across the game board. In other works, Magoni has focused on the conflicts that prick and tear the female psyche.

Expressionistically painted figures and faces give visual form to the blocked desires, sense of entrapment, and interrupted connections that mark the life of 20th century women.

With the set of collages that compose The Book of the Dead Dad, she moves from an archetypal battle with the Oedipal father to a poignant recollection of her relationship with her own father. In these works, the classic representative of patriarchal society—so formidable and oppressive when contemplated in the abstract—is brought back to human scale.

The individual collages here are based on an artist's book which Magoni created from family photographs and letters written to her by her father over a 23 year period. Greek born Magoni had come to the United States in 1968, while her father remained in Greece. After his death in 1991, she felt a need to create something from their long correspondence.

The Book of the Dead Dad is composed of 79 pages, one for each year of her father's life. Each page combines expressionistic drawings, xeroxed fragments of the letters, carefully composed in his native Greek, scrawled inscriptions and xeroxed pieces of photographs of her father and his large, extended family.

At once a diary for one who can no longer speak for himself, and an effort at communication with a loved one across the chasm of death, The Book of the Dead Dad is notable for its loving particularity. It records moments of tender-ness, as in a page that incorporates a photograph of her father teaching her son to swim. Another acknowledges her father's mid-life crisis through the use of a photograph he sent home to the family during the one vacation he felt compelled to take alone. Magoni examines her father's sense of dislocation from his own distant family in Crete.

The brook as a whole follows the path of raw memory, before the mind has been called in to restore order. As a result, the images have the quality of fading dreams. The father's handsome face and powerful form, carefully composed for the camera, mingles with other figures. The faces of parents, children, wife and grandchildren float up from the past and just as quickly disappear. One feels Magoni's frustration that memory is such an unreliable guide to the past.

Meanwhile, overlays of drawings and inscribed text provide the work's emotional con-tent. Over the staged cheer of the photographs; scrawled, scribbled and graffiti-like images tell the hidden story of interpersonal conflict, doubt, despair and hope. One page is dominated by block letters that spell out the ominous phase

"The Civil War." Another is inscribed with the message "And there was pain between the lines." A page that contains the date of her father's death is marked with the phrase "End of the confusion.”

The marks and images tell a similar story. One page contains photographic faces surrounded by a scribbled coil of barbed wire. In another, the photograph of a small girl is repeated several times, each time imprisoned in a penciled box.

Even the colors of the drawing—black, red and yellow—suggest a state of agitation and emotional distress.

In the end The Book of the Dead Dad attests to the enduring nature of the father-daughter bond. When they were separated by an ocean, photographs and letters tied Magoni to her father, across what must have seemed an immense geographical distance. Now faced with a more unfathomable chasm, memorabilia that once served as temporary substitutes for an absent loved one, have now become the only physical trace that remains behind.

The second series of works on exhibition here suggest how the artist has begun to work out the personal consequences of a parent's death. A child who has lost a father is often struck with a renewed realization of her own mortality. Magoni turns in The Thousand and One Nights to the mythic figure Scheherazade as her guide across the difficult terrain of mid-life.

In Magoni's hands, Scheherazade is no longer the young virgin who staves off the Sultan's revenge against her countrywomen by spinning a new tale every night. Now she is a mature woman whose promise of continued life is tempered by the knowledge that we must live day by day, or more accurately, night by night.

Magoni expresses this truth with a series of tempera on glassine drawings—10001 in all— of the night sky. In one set, representations of Scheherazade's face, depicted here as a mature woman with Magoni's own features, float in a band across the starry tapestry. In other sets, the night sky-dotted with pricks of light, flashes of nebulae, shooting stars and clouds illuminated by the moon—stands by itself.

Magoni's The Thousand and One Nights reminds us that the sky is a symbol of eternity.

For millennia, humans have gazed upward at night and understand that the stars above have long preceded and will long outlast them. It is a thought that is both threatening and oddly reassuring. The night sky urges us to cast off human concerns for a moment, and to enjoy the knowledge that our own existence is but an imperceptible dot in the unbounded line of time.

Moving from one body of work to another, Magoni presents us with a disconcerting shift of scale. The diaristic quality of The Book of the Dead Dad immerses us in minutia of life, bringing back her father by reconstructing a series of fleeting moments and emotions. The Thousand and One Nights hurls us to the other end of experience. It brings us in touch with a vast, unthinking nature that is unaware of our existence. The shift is at once exhilarating and unsettling.

Blaise Pascal once confessed, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." Magoni reminds us that there is freedom, as well as terror, in the unknown.

Magoni’s startling group portraits—People in the News, 1977, In the Valley of Silence, 1979, Echoes from the Past Are Always Present, Self-Portrait, both 1980, and Valor No. 1 and No. 7, both 1982—are perhaps her most dramatic, intense, damning social expressionistic portraits.  Head follows head, all in various states of disintegration, some marked by blood, other crossed by lines that seem to signal anonymous external powers.  Indeed, the anonymity of the power that persecutes these tortured heads is the secret behind their own anonymity.

Magoni has said that the People in the News series refers to a New York Times column about “glamorous people who had power.”  She wants “to give faces to those other, the anonymous people, faceless people who also made the news.”  Clearly she has done so, and shown that their unglamorous, tormented faces—and perhaps the whole point of glamor is to deny the reality of inner torment and the social crimes of the powerful—are much more human than the faces of the glamorous people who had power.  These powerful people hide their suffering and inner face, as Michael Eigen calls it, behind their glamor, in effect the aura of their power.  But Magoni in effect strips their glamor from them, showing their inner faces, their tormented vulnerability: the anonymity of her unglamorous, powerless “faceless faces” ironically mirrors the inner anonymity of glamorous, powerful people.  The secret of Magoni’s portraits is that they are the portraits of the inner faces of the powerful.  She has shown us the portrait that Dorian Gray kept hidden in the attic.

In her second group of portraits, Magoni enlists cubist fragmentation and expressionistic fury in the service of poignant social statement.  News photographs are transformed into powerful expressionistic images.  Her visionary portraits are harsh, but also empathic-enraged, yet also strangely sublime, for the figures are like prickly cacti in the desert of history, holding their own and offering some human nourishment even as they reflect its inhumanity.  In the third group of portraits, begun in the mid - 1980’s and continuing to the present day, Magoni produces a more conspicuously socially situated or resonant portraiture.  Social situation is implicit in the second group of portraits, but it is subsumed, to my mind, by expressionistic urgency.  In the second group, faces register more as emotional physiognomies than social physiologies.

In the third group of portraits a kind of balance is struck between social relevance and expressionistic dynamics.  Each Is given its due, confirming the validity of the other.  If Portrait in Panic and The Knife Thrower’s Assistant, both 1984, as well as the Screaming Box No.4 and No. 10, both 1985, are the climax of Magoni’s “pure” expressionistic portraiture, then the various works that deal with Pandora, the Sphinx and Scheherazade are explicitly social in import.  They may not exactly be feminist, but they clearly deal with traditional problems associated with women as the archaic mythological characters involved suggest.  Pandora’s Box, 1987 clearly refers to the evils that woman released into the world (however much hope was left at the bottom of the box).  The snake that wraps itself around the men—it is the same from the Garden of Eden as well as the snake that strangled Laocoon and his sons—seems to symbolize these evils. The Sphinx also is an ominous symbol of woman’s power for the worse, as the story of Oedipus’s relationship with her indicates.   (Psychoanalysis interprets the Sphinx as the seductive, destructive mother).  And of course Scheherazade kept herself alive by telling stories for a thousand and one nights, which is perhaps the way Magoni thinks of her artistic self and her narrative imagery.  All these works deal with difficult relationships in which men have physical power over women, but women have emotional power over men.  In Pawn No. 7, and No. 8, both 1992 woman in effect turns the table on man.  The male figures are in physical as well as emotional agony—the latter two are particularly troubled—implicitly as a result of woman’s power over them.  Men’s Power Talk, which Magoni mocks in a 1997-98 work (part of The Thousand and One Nights series)—one of her strongest group portraits—is no match for Scheherazade’s Guises, 1996, a very subtle group portrait, suggesting the hidden strength of women, in contrast to men’s overt display of power.

Magoni’s portraits have a mythological dimension, which gives them an added resonance.  They are mythological statements about victimization and survival.  In the Valley of Silence, for example, she deals with the Mexican version of the Icarus myth, involving ten Icaruses, all conceived of as warriors of creativity who were captured and not allowed to dream.  That is, their imaginations would be silenced—they would not be allowed to fly.  They were victims, if also survivors, however ambiguously.  (One recalls Magoni’s description of her son as a “dreamer.”)  Magoni’s female heroines are also clearly mythological.  Virtually all her portraits, however lifelike, are clearly larger than life and dreamlike—mythological embodiments of the primordial instincts, involving the unresolvable, enigmatic tension between life and death instincts.  Indeed, it is the instructiveness as well as social conscience of Magoni’s portraits that give them a unique mythopoetic presence.