Saint Sebastian
Contents
1. The Embodiment of Pain
2. Deterritorialized Meme
3. Details
1. The Embodiment of Pain
Saint Sebastian is a very infrequent visitor. The last time he made an appearance was eleven years ago, when the artist was at the end of an obsessive line of exploration. For years the artist had been almost possessed by the symbol of Don Quixote.
"I didn't interpret Cervantes. I interpreted the symbol of Don Quixote"
After 35 paintings devoted entirely to Don Quixote, in number 36 - the last in the series - Don Quixote becomes Saint Sebastian. The painting captures Don Quixote - with his immediately recognizable code: the broad-rimmed helmet, the twirly, sculpted Spanish beard, the battered shield, the sword, the obligatory spear and the elusive windmills on the horizon - on the point of mutating into Saint Sebastian, who is also instantly readable from his stake, arrows and nudity (barring the mandatory loincloth, of course).
Don Quixote as Saint Sebastian, oil on canvas, 130 x 99 cm, 1995, Private Collection in Moscow
This, however, is not some facile remix of time-worn iconography. Saint Sebastian is absolutely necessary for the artist's continuing existence as an artist. There come critical points at which events in the artist's personal life threaten the artist's commitment to his art. The arrows sunk into Saint Sebastian's flesh are intensely unpleasant private experiences which could all too easily pry open, tamper with and destroy the jealous artistic program at the core of the artist's being.
"I shot Don Quixote"
Saint Sebastian is a symbol that kills off the dreamy, surrealistic romanticism of Don Quixote. Saint Sebastian is the embodiment of the artist's pain when Quixote's dream of Dulcinea comes to an end.
Eleven years after his first appearance, Saint Sebastian once again becomes a necessary symbol in the artist's life. Once again there are conflicts which threaten to throw the artist off his path. Eleven years later, the arrows have hit the same spots, and Sebastian still has his Quixotic weapon kit. But this time the revolutions are more tumultuous and excruciating, and so Saint Sebastian takes an additional arrow in the neck and surrenders his seriously pissed off attitude to a more delicate demeanour more befitting a martyr.
There are two aspects of the Saint Sebastian legend that the artist finds particularly appealing: firstly, he is described as being shot with so many arrows that he 'looked like a porcupine', and secondly, that having survived his execution he returned to taunt the emperor Diocletian, who lost his temper and, exasperated, had Sebastian beaten or stoned to death.
Life of Saint Sebastian (from the Golden Legend)
With these words Diocletian was much angry and wroth, and commanded him to be led to the field and there to be bounden to a stake for to be shot at. And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks, and thus left him there for dead. The night after came a christian woman for to take his body and to bury it, but she found him alive and brought him to her house, and took charge of him till he was all whole. Many christian men came to him which counselled him to void the place, but he was comforted and stood upon a step where the emperor should pass by, and said to him: The bishops of the idols deceive you evilly which accuse the christian men to be contrary to the common profit of the city, that pray for your estate and for the health of Rome. Diocletian said: Art thou not Sebastian whom we commanded to be shot to death. And S. Sebastian said: Therefore our Lord hath rendered to me life to the end that I should tell you that evilly and cruelly ye do persecutions unto christian men. Then Diocletian made him to be brought into prison into his palace, and to beat him so sore with stones till he died.
As well as being a symbol of the artist under attack from the private tragedies of life, Saint Sebastian is also a symbol of indestructibility - of the human organism's ability to transcend pain through a mixture of will and chemicals, and to persist doggedly and defiantly until it is beaten to a lifeless, bloody pulp; and of the artist's iron will, which will not suffer anything to come between it's all-consuming demands and artistic production.
Vahan Bego's Sebastian is tied firmly to the ground, the lower half of his body solid and well defined.
In contrast, Sebastian's head is far less distinct. He seems to be melting into the background, engulfed by sunlight. And rather than being dead or dying passively, the life seems to be flowing out of him, almost blissfully.
[While wrestling with his Sebastian Vahan Bego came across this gruesome photograph of the Chinese 'Death by a Thousand Cuts' - George Bataille famously described the victim as rolling "his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss"]
2. Deterritorialized Meme
Saint Sebastian is a visual icon or meme that has been ripped from Christianity and had its context deleted from its source code. Sebastian as a captain of the Praetorian Guard and closet Christian does not figure in the core Sebastian code that has been obsessively redesigned and replicated over the centuries. (To get an idea of how obsessively, look here.) All the Sebastian code requires to keep being replicated is a young, preferably handsome man with his hands tied behind his back and some arrows. Sebastian can even be stripped of his martyrdom: the essence is that a figure be restrained and penetrated with flying objects - he doesn't have to die (or at least get pierced) for a cause.
Hence Keith Haring's prophetic genius:
Keith Haring St. Sebastian, 1984
Liberated from the piety, rigid replication and monopoly of the cross, Sebastian's bondage has obvious (and now cliched) homoerotic potency.
Saint Sebastian 1988
As Bego will point out, grabbing a weighty tome and thrusting a paragraph under your nose, this homoerotic potential in Sebastian's code was activated in the Renaissance:
Saint Sebastian, as a beautiful young man pierced with arrows is a favourite theme in religious art, worked on over and over again by, for example, Renaissance artists.
Bego's work is populated with numerous sculptures and painted figures which are hard to classify as either male or female. He prefers to call them 'she-males'.
She-males3, Vahan Bego
His latest Sebastian is noticeably more feminine than the Sebastian of 1995, suggesting that Bego has incorporated the latest iconographic mutations into his symbolism. However, it has to be said that he finds the gay icon mutation of Saint Sebastian somewhat shallow because the pain symbolized or represented in such iconography is trivial. For Bego, pain and a life and death struggle are non-disposable elements of Sebastian's visitations.
In terms of style, Bego cites Antonello da Messina's St. Sebastian as a great inspiration for his pastel. In particular, Bego is in awe of the perspective.
Bego has also constructed remarkable depth for his Sebastian.
3. Details
[click to enlarge]
