ZONES OF MUTE WITNESS

There is muteness imaged in Murray Zimiles new cycle of animal paintings, a silent witnessing of the fundamental dramas of survival that is charged with dilemmas of accountability and testimony. These are paintings that picture the tension between the unspeakable and the unsaid, in a place where images present a testimonial to conscience as well as sentience. They ask that their portents be read into legibility even while the ambiguity of their depictions escapes easy characterizations in narrative or moral terms. For the silence of these works is of a specific kind, laden with an engagement between events and their histories, at the mercy of forces that unfold a drama through the charged topoi of projected spaces.

The dark landscapes these roaming, restless animals inhabit are heavy with an emotional mood almost undreamt of in waking imagination. The brooding skies and windswept ridges are sites of emotional desolation, charged with existential longing and distance from the structures and strictures of civilized social order. But there is also a blushing heat, washing the horizon with the romantic colors of a sublime, spiritual, optimism. There are no evident laws in this primal landscape, no obvious borders, to limit the aggressive predators or packs of herd animals from their wanton acts, but there is an awe and wonder in the scale and scope of the spaces themselves. There is a threatening sense that what occurs outside the limits of the social order reminds us of the role of language as the Word and the Law- even while Images embody the difficulty of apprehending remote acts and sites in order to bring them back into the codified order of the human. But is there also a promise and a possibility manifest in these works, for a domain that escapes and resists such conformities, where a wild dog's furious solitude might determine its own existential relation to the order of things and renew the primal celebrations of existence.

Zimiles' paintings do not bespeak a moral code in a simplistic opposition of the wild and the tame, the savage and the civil, the barbaric and the social. Instead, they pose the dilemma of determining the limits at which human values are tested-not by easily identified acts of transgression, but by the more profound difficulty of determining whether a boundary exists against which a violation might meaningfully register. Shifting the ground back into a problem which is specific to painting and to picturing, Zimiles suggests that this liminal zone of moral ambiguity can be enacted in the place between image and language, where the legibility of pictures is suspended in the asymmetries between the seeing and the unsayable, the unrepresentable and the speakable. This is the danger zone of real muteness, a place where no word intervenes as a given, an absolute, or an invoked code. This is the zone in which behaviors cannot be subject to rules not yet made, and each act initiates that process of delineation of meaningful boundaries. These animals cast no shadows, no intangible double of their presence, and they leave no mark as they move unceasingly through the charged atmospheres of one terrain after another. On the constantly shifting waste, theirs is the line of wandering, between the possibly-allowed and the possibly-taboo, whose instability makes it impossibly difficult to maintain a boundary between what is to be permitted and what will be revealed as beyond the pale of all permission and in spite of that, still come to pass.

Wild beasts, predatory and prowling, organize themselves into a phalanx in this unknown territory, their intentions flickering through in unnatural regimentation of their ranks. A sense of purpose arises from that order, beyond any individual will, that raises the spectre of mass absorption into a cause outside of all bounds of reasonable behavior. Rational savagery underlies the threat of a collective spirit subsuming the individual capacity to determine, moment to moment, event to event, the ethics and tactics of existence. These dogs and pigs, goats and horses, camels and other mammals offer ready figures for anthropomorphic identification, though only at the cost of our giving up our privileged self-assured position of superiority. To identify is to admit to the possibility of complicit participation in what may be unpredictable acts. Romantic energy, breaking out of the bonds of simple order, finds itself in the dark night of a nihilistic atmosphere chilled by continual and portentous uncertainty-but fraught with possibilities for renewal and unexpected insight. Turning to the codes of language in which the Law might help resolve the moral dilemmas of these dramas, the eye that has borne witness finds itself unable to speak. Muteness is the condition of the Image before the Law of moral certainty, and the potency of these works is their capacity to charge the condition with the profound ambivalence of human accountability within events that may unfold beyond the limits of any intention or measured judgement into a sublime enlightenment.

Johanna Drucker
Professor, UCLA